"I suppose you know what you're doing, brother," said Monty Hayward, as quietly as he could, "but it seems pretty daft to me."
"You bet I knew," said the Saint, and to Monty's surprise he said it just as quietly. "It was simply a matter of taking a chance on the clock. If you hadn't hit that cop at the Königshof quite so hard, it wouldn't have been so easy; but we had to hope we were still a length or two in front of the hue and cry. There's no point in jumping your fences before you come to them. But, believe me, I had that patrol covered from my pocket the whole time, and what might have happened if we'd been unlucky is just nobody's business."
Monty Hayward readjusted his impressions slowly and reluctantly. And then suddenly he shot one of his extraordinarily keen glances at the sober face of the man beside him—a glance that was tempered with the ghost of a smile.
"If we kept straight ahead and drove in relays," he said, "we might make the Dutch frontier to-day. But one gathers that it wouldn't be quite so simple as that."
"Solomon said it first," assented the Saint bluntly. "We shan't take any more frontiers in our stride, and I don't think we shall enjoy much more friendly flapjaw with the constabulary. That was just our break. But there won't be a policeman in Central Europe who doesn't know our horrid histories by lunch-time; and if our pals among the ungodly can't raise a fleet of cars with the legs of this one you may call me Archibald. You were thinking we'd finished—and we've only just begun!" All at once the Saint laughed. "But shall I tell you?"
Monty nodded.
"I'll give you a new angle on the life of crime," said the Saint lavishly. "I'll hand it you for nothing, Mont—the angle that your bunch of footling authors never get. Every one of 'em makes the same mistake, just like you made yourself. Take this: Any fool can biff a policeman on the jaw. Every other fool can swipe a can of assorted bijouterie that's simply dropped into his lap. And any amount of mutts can throw a bluff that'll get by—once, for a ten-minute session. Believe it or not. And then you think it's all over bar the anthem. But it isn't. It's only just started on its way."
Monty accepted the proposition without comment. After a moment's consideration, the uncompromising accuracy of it was self-evident.
He drove on in silence, squeezing the last possible kilometer per hour out of the powerful engine. From time to time he stole a glimpse at the driving mirror, momentarily expecting to see the darkness of the road behind bleached with the first fault nimbus of pursuing headlights. It was strange how the intoxication of the chase, following on the turbulent course of that night's unsought adventure, had sapped his better judgment—stranger still, perhaps, how the foundations of his cautious common sense had been undermined by so much eventful proximity to a man whom in normal times he had always regarded as slightly, if quite pleasantly, bugs. The rush of the wind stroked his face with a hypnotic gentleness; the hum of the machine and the lifting sense of speed soothed his conscience like an insidious drug. For one dizzy moment it seemed to him that there must be worse ways of spending a night and the day after it—that there were more soul-destroying things in a disordered world than biffing policemen on the jaw and flying from multiple vengeance on the hundred horses of a modern highwayman's Mercedes Benz. He thought like that for one moment of incredible insanity; and then he thought it again, and decided that he must be very ill.
But a tincture of that demoralized elation stayed with him and lent an indefinable zest to the drive, while the sky paled for the dawn and the stolen car slid swiftly down the long slopes of the Bavarian hills toward Munich. Beside him, Simon Templar calmly went to sleep. ...
The rim of the sun was just topping the horizon, and the air was full of the unforgettable sweet dampness of the morning, when the first angular suburbs of the city swam towards them out of the bare plain; and the Saint roused and stretched himself and felt for the inevitable cigarette. As the streets narrowed and grew gloomier, he picked up his bearings and began to direct the edging of their route eastward. It was full daylight when they pulled up before the Ostbahnhof, and an early street car was disgorging its load of sleepy workmen towards the portals of the station. Simon swung himself over the side and piled their light luggage out on the pavement. He touched Monty on the shoulder.
"I think we're a bit conspicuous as a trio," he said. "But if you hopped that street car it'd take you to the Hauptbahnhof, and the Metropole is almost opposite. We'll see you there."
And once again Monty Hayward found himself alone. He made his way to the hotel as he had been instructed, and found Patricia and the Saint waiting for him. Monty felt a little bit too tired to argue. Left to himself, he would have kept moving till he dropped, with the one idea of setting as many miles as possible between his own rudder and the wrath to come. And yet, when he rolled into bed half an hour later, he had a comfortable feeling that he had earned his rest. There is something about the lethargy of healthy physical fatigue, allied with the appreciation of dangers faced and survived, a sense of omnipotence and recklessness, which awakes the springs of an unfathomable primitive contentment; something that can stupefy all present questions along with all past philosophic doubts; something that can wipe away the strains of civilized complexity from a man's mind, and give him the peace of an animal and the sleep of a child.
Monty Hayward would have slept like a child if it had not been for the endless stream of street cars, which thundered beneath his window, rattling in every joint, clanging enormous bells, blowing hooters, torturing their brakes, crashing, colliding, spraying their spare parts onto large sheets of tin, and generally straining every bolt to uphold the standard of nerve-shattering din of which, the continent of Europe is so justly proud.
He surrendered the unequal contest towards midday and went in search of a bathroom. Shaved and dressed, and feeling a little better, he descended on the dining room in the hope of finding some relics of breakfast with which to complete the restoration of his tissues; and his apologetic order had scarcely been executed when the Saint sauntered in and joined him, looking so intolerably fresh and fit that Monty could have assaulted him.
"Get those Spiegeleier inside you quickly, old lad," he said, "and we'll be on our way again."
"Have you pinched another car?" asked Monty resignedly. "And if so, what was wrong with the last one?"
Simon laughed.
"Nothing. Only stolen cars are notified, and that never makes things easier. Besides which, it isn't every day that you knock off a car complete with its tryptique and general documents of identity, and if you hadn't pulled off that fluke yesterday we should have had a long walk from the frontier. No —I've been over to the station and unearthed a pretty good train, and I don't see why we should turn it down."
Monty carved an egg.
"Where's Pat?"
"Having breakfast in bed. She was asleep when I went out."
"She must be stone deaf," said Monty, glumly. "No one who wasn't could sleep here in the daytime. There were four thousand trams outside my room, and they took every one of them to pieces. I think they used several large hammers and a buzz-saw. Then they threw all the bits through the window of a china-shop and laughed like hell." Monty Hayward sliced a rasher of bacon with meditative brutality and finished the dish in silence. "Where do we go to-day?" he inquired.
"Cologne," said the Saint. "Where they make the Eau." He was lighting a cigarette and gazing into the mirror on the wall above Monty's head, watching the two men who had just entered the room. They were, in their way, a brace of the most flabbergasting phenomena that he had seen for a long while; and yet they oiled into the inexorable scheme of things with a smoothness that was almost wicked. And the Saint's face was utterly sterile of emotion as he tacked onto his opening announcement the one sweeping qualification that the arrival of those two men implied. "If we get away at all," he said.