The Saint, feeling it safe to assume that the clockwork man has not happened along at just that moment by sheer accident, watched its progress as it passed him by and walked straight off the curb, falling on its face in the gutter. From that unmilitary position it continued its stiff movements, going nowhere, until finally, with some sporadic dying ticks, it lay still and totally silent.
Only after that did Simon venture a close approach to the thing. He rolled it over with his foot, then knelt to pick it up. For a second or two after he took it into his hands, searching it for a sign of its purpose — it seemed more the vehicle for a joke than for anything serious — nothing happened. Then it almost soundlessly emitted, from the barrel of its rifle, a single puff of black smoke.
The Saint flung it away from him and backed off, covering his mouth and nose with his handkerchief. But even though a little of the smoke had found its way into his nostrils he was suffering no ill effects beyond a mild and easily satisfied urge to sneeze.
The next event, however, was less harmless. There was a swift hiss over his head, and he turned to see an arrow, shaft fractured by its impact with the brick side of the building, clatter to the sidewalk at his feet.
The angle of the arrow’s flight told him the approximate place of its source and at the same time the location where he would be most safe. Out in the open, taking pot shots into the fog, he might very well receive, during the next few seconds, an unwelcome steel-tipped addition to his already quite adequately equipped anatomy.
In three strides he achieved the shelter of the nearest doorway and waited, automatic in hand, for some further charming manifestation from his rendezvous. It was not long in coming. A car barely poked its nose around the next corner, a red MG convertible with the top up, and from its blacked-out interior came a quick drum-roll of faint popping noises that matched the closer thudding of lead slugs pocking the brickwork on either side of the entranceway.
Flattening himself as deep into the alcove as possible while he was trying to decide where he could aim back most effectively against an invisible sniper with some kind of silenced automatic rifle who had to be in the rear part of the MG that was still mostly shielded by the corner building, Simon felt the door that he had his back to yield slackly to his pressure. His change of purpose was faster than thought; he was outgunned, and he knew it, and anything was better than his present exposed position. In a flash he was inside, slamming the door behind him.
The shooting stopped. There was no further sound.
The Saint took advantage of the lull and his new temporary security to survey what he could of his surroundings. His pocket flashlight, combined with the glow of streetlamps filtered through the transom from outside, showed that he was in the entrance hall of an obviously vacant building. Ahead of him was a staircase whose landing had been appropriated by spiders. The target shapes of their webs, stretching from bannister to wall, had an unpleasant association for him: he did not like being a target himself, a tin duck in somebody’s shooting gallery — especially a somebody who was probably insane as well as an incompetent marksman.
There was a closed door near the base of the stairs, facing the street entrance, and on the right was an open door, leading into a room which had to overlook the street. Since the Saint did not want to signal his position with the beam of his torch, he put it back into his pocket before leaving the hall.
The front room showed even more signs of decrepitude and neglect than had the staircase. Its only furnishings, aside from the marbleized bowl which covered its ceiling bulb, were a sagging table and a three-legged chair. The naked windows gave a full view of the street, but Simon could not see the MG, or any other assailant. The toy soldier lay dented where it had fallen in line of duty. Fog veiled everything else.
Then Simon’s fantastic reactions, in the blinding fragment of time which followed, sent him to his knees by the wall even before his conscious mind had been able to register what was happening. Only then did he realize that the overhead light in the center of the room had flashed on, though no one stood by the wall switch. Immediately afterward there had been a sound like that of a firecracker exploding.
Now, down from the light fixture drifted a long black rectangle of silk, attached at the top to the marbleized bowl, unfurling to its full length of a yard or more, so that its vivid scarlet lettering became perfectly legible.
BOOM, it said.
Simon, preferring invisibility to the continued opportunity of admiring the artful banner, shot out the light. He did not even care if the report of his gun brought Chief Inspector Claud Teal himself scurrying over from Scotland Yard. Indeed for once he might have welcomed Inspector Teal’s presence, if for no other reason than to have an independent witness corroborate the nightmarish ballet macabre in which he had been caught up.
A click and a humming noise came from the part of the room where the chair lay near the rickety table. Then a muffled voice began speaking.
“You have been gassed by a toy soldier, been shot through the head with an arrow, been mowed down with a submachine gun, and been blown up by a plastic bomb hidden in a light fixture. This is your killer speaking. You, the once famous Mr Simon Templar, are dead.”
Another click signaled the end of what was obviously a recording, and the Saint, feeling unamused but somewhat more at ease, decided that he was simply the victim of one of the most extreme practical jokes ever perpetrated. That realization, however, did not diminish by one erg his earnest desire to discover the identity of his persecutor. Using his pocket light again, he went to the table, opened the drawer, and looked in at a small battery-operated tape recorder which by means of some clever Japanese mechanism had turned itself on and then turned itself off again.
He closed the drawer. The recorder might carry fingerprints, or the comedian might come back to get it. And then Simon realized that there might be no need on his part for the tracing of identities or the setting of traps: a most faint sound had just reached his ears — a sound which, if noted at all by an ordinary man, would have been passed off as the inevitable creaking of antique lumber. But if the Saint had not possessed senses discriminating enough to prevent him from assuming such things, he would never have survived so long to enjoy the material rewards of his adventures.
What he was hearing, after the creak, was the stealthy approach of stockinged feet from behind him. Either his assailant had not been content with four types of mayhem and was about to attempt to add a fifth, or some new character was taking the stage.
The Saint waited for him, his back turned as bait, reasonably certain that any violent move would be presaged by a warning noise beyond that of foot-filled woolen material padding on old boards. Besides, any really serious killer would not have passed up his chance with a goodly proportion of the weapons in the human arsenal only to engage Simon Templar, of all people, in face-to-face combat.
So the Saint waited those few breathless seconds — breathless at least on the part of the stalking individual behind him. Simon’s lungs continued operating at the same easy pace they would have kept during the annual radio reading of Dickens’ Christmas Carol. And then, when the moment was exactly right, and he could somehow feel the presence of another body at just the proper position, he moved.
For the stalker turned victim, it must have been an astonishing sensation. At one moment his cautious feet were on the floor; an instant later he was in the air, experiencing the delightful but short-lived astronautical sensation of weightlessness without any effort at all on his part; and then he was forcibly reminded of the persistence of those natural laws which make apples fall and keep pigs out of the paths of soaring hawks. Then he knew nothing. He was flat on his back, unconscious.