Naturally his appearance with Cassie set off a storm of shouted questions. The mob surged up around them.
“What’s in the bag?”
“Who’s your boy friend, Cassie?”
“How’re we going to get to this uncle’s pad?”
The last question, put by Robinson Crusoe, seemed the most relevant and practical.
“Somebody go in the house and call some taxis,” Simon suggested. “Cassie’s uncle is paying for everything.”
That precipitated a minor rush for Robinson Crusoe’s flat. A couple of the boys who had not been quite able to weed out every trace of a genteel bourgeois upbringing were polite enough to help Simon get his burden into the trunk of his car.
“Feels like a body,” joked one of them.
“One of Cassie’s dummies,” said the Saint. “A present for her uncle.”
A minute or so later the first cab arrived and was immediately engulfed in a sea of screaming bohemians.
“Hold it here,” Simon shouted to the driver over the babble and the guitar music. “Wait till we’re all ready, and I’ll lead the way.”
Soon another cab arrived, and then another. A bottle smashed in the gutter. All the party-goers were not waiting for the free liquor promised by Cassie’s uncle. A few had arrived staggering drunk in the first place. The uproar was becoming deafening, and several uninvited individuals, attracted by the noise, stumbled from their houses and piled into the fifth and final taxi.
Simon saw that all the drivers had the proper address, and then he started his car. Cassie was in the front seat with him. In back was a blank-faced girl and a pair of boys who were discussing Swedenborgianism. Then up the street, shouting for them to wait, came the possessor of the wolfhound who had been mentioned earlier. The owner in vaguely Edwardian costume, was at least seven feet tall, and the leashed wolfhound, had he been on his hind legs, would not have been much less. Both of them scrambled into the back of the Saint’s car, completely crushing out any lingering thoughts of Swedenborg. The entire ride became a grim battle for survival of the fittest — and there seemed no doubt that the wolfhound would ultimately prove the fittest.
Luckily, though, the drive was not long enough to bring the principles of natural selection into really fatal play, and when they pulled up in front of their destination — the apartment house in which Timonaides had his penthouse — the only dead body in the automobile was still that of Perry Loudon. The blank-faced girl seemed anesthetized against all experience, both pleasant and painful. The two Swedenborgians were only slightly damaged, and Simon had escaped with nothing worse than having his ear repeatedly rasped by the wolfhound’s tongue.
“We’re here,” Simon could say at last. “Everybody out.”
The taxis had kept close behind, and soon the sidewalk in front of the apartment building resembled an assembly point for war refugees. Some of them, curious to inspect the sumptuous lobby, started to move in without waiting for further leadership, and the influx began.
The doorman would certainly have stopped the flood if he could have, but he was almost smothered by two mini-skirted dolls who showed their admiration for his gold-braided scarlet uniform by trying to tear it off him.
Simon held Cassie back for a moment to remind her of her instructions.
“The penthouse elevator won’t come down unless somebody up there lets it go. When I release it you’ll be able to tell by the red indicator. Until then, keep stalling — say you don’t want to start up until you’re sure the whole gang is there, and double-talk any of the staff who want to know who you’ve come to see. I’m counting on you like the cavalry in those old movies.”
Simon opened the trunk of his car and took out Loudon’s burlap wrapped body, now wound and tied with the rope that Cassie had brought him from the studio, and carried it through the mob that was straggling into the building. Some of them were singing, with unwitting aptness, “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
The desk clerk’s first reaction was to fall back in panic like a weaponless hunter in front of a herd of charging elephants. Then, gathering courage, he ran around his desk and tried to plead with the throng, who could not hear a word he was saying. The uproar was augmented by the taxi drivers following some of the crowd in to demand their fares.
Using all his fantastic strength, the Saint contrived to swing his burden airily in one hand, so that no one could have imagined it to have the weight of anything like a body — it might as well have been some kind of standard lamp that he was bringing in. And with his Immaculately groomed good looks and unobtrusively expensive elegance of dress, and his air of easy aristocratic assurance, no one could possibly have associated him with the disheveled and hirsute rabble through which he passed — an impression which he took pains to underline by avoiding their proximity with the same kind of pained and shocked regard that any rightful occupant of such a building would have bestowed on them.
He headed straight for the general elevator, and started it up before anyone else could shove in after him. The clamor was quickly cut off as the elevator ascended, leaving only the hiss of its passage up the shaft.
Once more the Saint was on his own.
9
He stopped at the sixth floor and threw the switch which would lock the elevator doors in open position. In that way he not only advertised his presence on a floor where he would not remain, but he also delayed pursuit — probably until somebody could climb six flights of stairs and close the doors again.
The corridor was as beautifully carpeted and elegantly simple as the foyer on the ground floor. The Saint’s footsteps produced no sound as he passed swiftly along the hallway to the marked entrance to the fire-escape stairwell. He climbed the stone steps to the seventh floor, and there further ascent was blocked by a steel-faced door which was locked. No doubt it could be easily opened from the penthouse side, giving access to the escape from upstairs, but was intended to prevent unwelcome entrance from below. For Simon’s purposes, the set-up could not have been more ideal if he had designed it himself.
It took him literally only a few seconds to release the lock by a technique which it would not be in the public interest to describe in detail. He deposited Loudon’s body on the other side and removed the rope, leaving the sackcloth wrapping.
At the top of the last flight of stairs there was another door, this one with a wire-reinforced and frosted glass panel in it through which light came, but the possibility was too high that such a door would be protected by some kind of burglar alarm, and Simon regretfully decided not to chance it. After everything had panned out so miraculously well up to that point, it would be absurd to risk blowing the situation that had been so beautifully created.
He went out through the steel-faced door again, pulling the spring lock shut behind him, and leaving no trace of his visit except the sack-swathed corpse which any investigation would naturally conclude could only have been brought there from the penthouse itself.
He had previously noticed that there was a window for daytime illumination at each end of the carpeted landing corridor, and he walked quickly to the nearest one and opened it on to the cool night air. The lights of London were spread below him as he leaned out, but his interest was directed upwards.
As he had observed before driving away from the building earlier that night, the penthouse was set back several feet from the main profile of the building, so that it was surrounded by terraces with a railing of some kind around their edge.
The Saint uncoiled the rope he was carrying, folded his handkerchief diagonally and wrapped it around the steel hook, securing it with a knot at each end. He let the hook dangle out of the window and lowered it down the side of the building until enough length was available for the next step, which would be the most difficult of alclass="underline" to swing the hook up through the air so that it would catch on the railing eight feet above. He started it swinging like a pendulum, and then using a strong jerk of his wrist he hurled it upward with a whiplash motion. The hook flew out of sight and clunked softly against metal overhead, the noise of its impact muffled by the handkerchief binding. It did not bounce away and fall down again towards the puddles of light on the street far below, and when he tested the rope, drawing in all the slack, it seemed securely held. As long as the railing itself did not give way, he had it made. If it did, of course, it would provide a crucial test of his ability to bounce off a pavement from a height of about 100 feet...