The inspiration had come to Simon while he was listening to Patricia's story on the telephone, and he had put it into effect without a second's hesitation. Sprawling tenaciously on his unstable perch, he reviewed the dazzling casualness with which he had scattered all the necessary bait—the mythical car which he had waiting for him, and the rendezvous on the road to Jenbach—and marvelled at his own astounding brilliance. And after that had been done the elopement of Prince Rudolf mattered not at all. In fact, it saved a certain amount of trouble. The Saint had scarcely reached his point of vantage over the archway of the castle when he saw the prince's car pulling out for the pursuit; and one minute later he was being bowled along on the most hilarious getaway of his eventful life.
It was the very first time in his tempestuous career that he had ever tacked himself to the lid of an unfriendly limousine and helped enthusiastically to chase himself; and the overpowering Saintliness of the idea made him so weak with laughter that he was barely able to save himself from being bucked off into the surrounding panorama when the car jolted over the ridge that placed it on the mountain road.
If the voyage to the castle had been hectic, the return journey was the most delirious peregrination in which the Saint ever wanted to take part. How the car itself managed to hold the road at all was more than the Saint could account for by any natural laws. The only conclusion he could come to was that it had been born and bred in a circus and had subsequently been fitted with tires manufactured from a hitherto unknown form of everlasting glue. Half the time, it seemed to be running with two of its wheels skating about on the loose scree and the other two gyrating airily over the unfathomable abyss. The fact that it would probably have done the very same thing if the Saint had been driving it himself was a consolation that could be ignored. The difference between one's own masterly manoeuvres at the wheel and the hare-brained antics of a total stranger is one which no practical motorist has ever been able to misunderstand. Besides which, a comfortably upholstered seat inside a vehicle, however suicidally driven, is not and never can be quite so awe-inspiring as a smooth and slippery roof on which you have to maintain your crucified posture largely by the adhesive qualities of your eyelids. For Simon Templar there ensued an interval of fifteen or twenty minutes in which he had no further leisure to enjoy the gorgonzolan ripeness of the jest.
The only merit he could see in that breakneck pace was that it approximately halved the duration of the agony. And by some miracle he found himself still breathing and alive when the precipitous track began to level itself out for the run down to Schwaz.
With a wry grin of triumph, the Saint moistened his dry lips and eased the tension on his crippled thews.
The car was slowing up doubtfully. Simon squeezed his ear against the roof, and heard the prince speaking impatiently.
"Go on further, blockhead! He drives like the devil, but we must be close behind him. The road to Jenbach——"
Simon crooked his toes and fingers and clung on, and the car lurched round a corner and raced on towards the east.
On another furlong of straight road he convoluted himself round again to peep in at the prince, and what he saw made him flop limply down in a renewed paroxysm of mirth.
The prince was sitting tensely forward in his seat, staring fixedly along the road ahead. One hand was clutching something in his pocket, while the other beat a monotonous tattoo on his left knee. Apart from that regular tapping of his fingers he was as motionless as a painted statue, and his pale, finely modelled face was as expressionless as ever; and yet the contrast between him as he was sitting then, and the inscrutable exquisite whom the Saint knew so well, was as inconsistent a transfiguration as the Saint had ever seen. It was not really funny—it was perhaps the most ominous possible reminder of the dour realities that had been glossed over so smoothly with the sheen of airy badinage—but it was only the fantastic bathos of the whole performance which appealed to him.
"Oh, go down, Moses!" he hallooed. "That's the stuff to give 'em. Stamp on the gas, Adolphus—don't let him get away! Yoicks!"
He restrained himself with difficulty from thumping the roof in his excitement, and turned his mind to the amazing awakening of Monty Hayward.
Monty had acquitted himself like an old stager, but the breaks had been against him. In spite of everything he had done, a malicious fluke had dented the polish of their alibi. Their reputations were tarnished beyond repair. The thwarted spleen of the entire Austrian police force would be thrown into the international ill will that trailed behind them. The righteous wrath of one more country would be thirsting for their blood. . . . And strangely enough the Saint laughed again.
He took the time from his watch and made a rapid mental calculation. If Monty had wasted no unnecessary minutes, he should be less than a quarter of an hour behind them—so long as the car he had chosen hadn't elected to break down. Given luck and a warm engine, he might be even closer than that; and it was essential for the Saint to be waiting for him when he caught up. Simon looked at the road on either side hurtling beneath him at sixty miles an hour, and decided against any attempt to step quietly off and send the prince his compliments by post. But he glimpsed a milestone skimming by which indicated only two kilometers more to Jenbach; and he realized that, much as he was still enjoying his little joke, the time had come to share its beauties with the prince.
He drew the gun from his pocket, wriggled to the edge of the roof, and took leisurely aim at the centre of the near-side rear mudguard. The rap of his gun was drowned in the explosive flattening of the tire, and the car listed over and lost speed bumpily.
Simon dropped lightly off behind it just before it stopped. He coiled himself down in the shadow of the hedge two yards away, and watched the chauffeur run round and peer at the pancaked wheel. The chauffeur felt it and prodded it, and went back to describe its devastating flatness to the prince. The prince climbed out. He also peered at the wheel and prodded it. It was indubitably flat.
"It must have been a nail in the road, Hoheit," said the chauffeur.
The prince stood absolutely still, looking down the road along the bright beam of the headlights. For a time he made no answer. It was in that time that a lesser man would have been fuming and cursing impotently, but the prince might have been a man carved in stone. There was something terrifying in his inhuman immobility.
When he spoke, his voice was perfectly level—as level and measured a flow of molten lava.
"Change the wheel."
The words fell through the air like glistening globules of acid; and then the Saint judged that a few lines of cheery chatter might relieve the tenseness of the dialogue.
He stepped out into the dim glow of the tail light, with his automatic ostentatiously displayed, and cleared his throat.
The two men by the car whirled round as if they had been stabbed with electric needles. And the Saint smiled his most winning smile.
"Dear me!" he murmured. "Isn't it odd how we keep running up against each other? You know, if we go on like this, you'll begin to think I'm following you about."
Slowly the prince relaxed. For the moment even his tempered nerves must have been shaken by the uncanny promptness of the Saint's return. But even while he relaxed, his face remained set in a stony mask in which only the eyes seemed alive.