"Gimme that file," he grunted.
Monty pasted it over; and the Saint bowed his head and began to saw furiously at the angles of a joint that he had spotted lower down in the pit.
If there had been any genuine experts in the vicinity that performance would never have got by for ten seconds; but no one seemed sufficiently inquisitive to make a lengthy study of the Saint's original methods. Hardly anyone gave them a second glance. Planted right out there in the naked expanse of the highway, they were hidden as effectively as if they had buried themselves under the ground. And the necks of Treuchtlingen were innocent of the taint of rubber. An occasional automobile honked round them, and a dray backed up close to Monty's posterior and parked there while the driver went into a good pull-up for carmen. Apart from the infrequent sounds of plodding boots or grinding machinery going past them, they might have been a couple of ancient lights for all the sensation they provoked. So long as he didn't electrocute himself or carve into a gas main and blow the windows out of the street, the Saint figured that he was on velvet
And if he had wanted to be near the scene of action, he couldn't have got much closer without walking in and introducing himself. As he bent down over his improvised program of free services to the Treuchtlingen municipality, he could study the whole architecture of the police station under his left arm—a drab, two-storied building to which not even the kindly shades of the evening could lend any mystery. It stood up as squat and unimaginative as the laws behind it, a monument of prosaic modernity wedged in among the random houses of a more leisurely age. Simon looked up at the regular squares of window that divided the stark façade in geometric symmetry, and saw the first of them light up.
"Six-thirty," he said to Monty. "Nina must be getting them warmed."
Monty fiddled with a spanner.
"There's no chance that she left before we arrived, is there? She might have got what she wanted quicker than we expected."
"Not here or anywhere else, in a blockhouse like that. There isn't a government official anywhere in the world who could get anything done in less than seventy-nine times as long as it'd take you or me to do it. They're all born with moss under their feet—it's one of the qualifications."
The Saint lugged out another line of cable and battered it ferociously with a chisel. Underneath the triviality of his words ran a thin, taut thread of strain. Monty heard it then for the first time, hardening the edges of Simon's voice. There was no weakness about it, no trace of fear: it was the strain of a man whose faculties were strung up to a singing intensity of alertness, the cold expectancy of a boxer waiting to enter the ring. It showed up something that Monty alone had overlooked during those fourteen hours of his adventure. The Saint's own optimism had made it all seem so easy, even in its craziest gyrations; and yet that very smoothness had derived itself from nothing but the steel core of inflexible purpose behind the whimsical blue eyes that had unconsciously slitted themselves down for a moment into two splinters of the same steel. And the story had still to be brought to the only possible end. ...
Simon snapped his cable in the middle, tied the pieces together again, wrapped a strip of insulating tape round the connection, and hammered it out flat. His movements had the gritty restraint of fettered impatience. Inside that cubist's bellyache of a fortress the real work was being done for him by a girl; and as the time went on he knew that he would rather have done it himself—shot up the police station in person and extracted his information at the snout of a Webley. Anything would have been better than that period of nerve-rasping inaction. He knew that he was thinking like a fool— that any such course would have been nothing short of a high road to suicide—but he couldn't help thinking it. The suspense had started to tug at the muscles of his stomach in an intermittent discharge of hampered energy. Somehow it shook up the cool flow of his mind, when he should have been focusing solely on the task that was coming to him as soon as the information was obtained. It was as if he had been trying to see down into a pool of clear water, and every now and then something in the depths stirred up a cloud of silt and swallowed up his objective in a turbid fog. Somewhere in that fog Marcovitch was sneering at him, capering farther and farther beyond his reach. ...
A chilled drop of moisture trickled clammily down his side, and the Saint shook himself in the sudden astonishment of finding that he was sweating. The pale eyes of Josef Krauss loomed up before him again, glazed with that unforgettable film of bitter mockery. Simon set his lips. He couldn't understand himself. In everything physical he was the same as he had always required himself to be: his hand was steady, his sight was clear, his heart beat normally. The rhythm of his aimless hammering still gave him the joy of perfect bodily fitness, trained to the last ounce. And there he was behaving like a frightened schoolboy, losing control of his mind just at the point where it should have been tuning itself up to concert pitch for the showdown.
He forced himself back into the train of thought that kept slipping away from him. How much ground had Marcovitch been able to put between them during those three hours since the carnival in the brake van? Simon tried to work it out again. Half an hour to get to Treuchdingen; at least another half hour to get through to the local police chief; then an hour of romancing and circumstantial fiction. Leaving another hour in which anything might have happened. And meanwhile, what had become of Rudolf? The stolen Rolls would have been recovered before long, once the theft had been notified—certainly before the departure of the next northbound express at five-thirty—and Rudolf would probably elect to follow up by road. He would have to make contact with Marcovitch again somewhere, and Marcovitch was an unstable quantity. The Saint made an effort to put himself in the enemy's place. What would he do if he were Rudolf? He'd have every possible route out of Munich measured out, with points of communication arranged for on all of them. If Marcovitch had succeeded in getting a message back from the station before the train left, which seemed very probable, he would know what road to take as soon as he could find a conveyance; and the rest would simply be a matter of making inquiries at the pre-arranged points along the route to which news might be telephoned. Sooner or later that system would link them up again; and in view of the spare hour with which Simon had to credit Marcovitch, the vote went to sooner. Marcovitch would have made the wires sizzle with the narrative of his accomplishment at the earliest opportunity, and the panegyric would already be waiting for Rudolf to catch it up. Ingolstadt seemed a likely junction. . . . Which meant that Rudolf might even then be speeding on into Treuchtlingen to take over the command. ... And if Marcovitch and his aviary of jailbirds were actually holding on in Treuchtlingen, waiting for Rudolf to meet them there . . .
The Saint took a grim hold on himself. Once again the thread had slipped through a loophole in his mind at that point, as it had done every time before. The fog swirled up again, blotting it out in a maddening haze. He wrestled against it in a moment of frozen savagery, but the mists only swelled thicker. The thread had gone back on him for good, and his own efforts to recapture it only seemed to drive the loose end into a more infuriating obscurity. He felt as if his brain had chosen that moment to fall into a sluggish conflict of cross-purposes with itself—as if one part of it had mutinied and disordered the clean running of the rest, jarring through insubordinately with a shapeless idea of its own. And it was not until many weeks afterwards, when he recalled that span of unaccountable impotence, that he could see in it the interference of some psychic power which was beyond understanding.