Simon felt as if an arctic wind had blown through him, turning his stomach to ice. He sat with his fists clenched in a spasm that ached up his arms, with his eyes fixed on nothing, tasting the dregs of humiliation.
And then he saw a new shaft of luminance swimming round into the street. It fanned out along the line of houses, lifting them in turn into a garish oval of illumination and dropping them back into the dark. For a moment the Saint was caught squarely in the beam, but he had bent his head instinctively and commenced to play with the wires. Then the beam went past him, settling into a long, low stream of light that swept straight down the road and turned the cobblestones into gleaming mountains with black pits behind them. The car sped down the opposite side of the road with the soft hiss of a perfectly balanced engine, and braked to an effortless stop outside the police station.
Then a wave of gloom rolled back on it as the headlights were switched off; and the Saint looked at it over his shoulder in a throb of incredulous expectation. The chauffeur was running round to open the door, and as the passenger stood up Simon saw his profile clean-cut against the light in the station doorway. It was the Crown Prince Rudolf.
XI. HOW MONTY HAYWARD RECITED POETRY,
AND SIMON TEMPLAR TREATED HIMSELF TO
A WASH
THE Crown Prince dusted his sleeve and walked up the steps of the police station, exquisite and inscrutable as ever. He disappeared into the gaunt building. Simon watched him go.
And then something seemed to crack in the Saint's brain. Something had to give way under the tearing impact of the desperation that had engulfed him, and the thing that gave way was the desperation itself. A great weight lilted off his shoulders, and his lungs opened to a mighty breath of life. The heaving earth steadied itself under him. He felt like a strong swimmer who has been trapped in a clinging entanglement of weed, who has fought back out of the choking darkness into a blaze of sunlight and blessed air. The horrible constriction of helplessness broke away from his head, and he felt the wheels of his mind spinning sweet and true again, unhindered even by the disorder which had been throwing them out of gear before the bomb burst. He could have given no reason for that strange reawakening: he only knew that the old fighting courage had come back, sending the blood racing warm along his veins and filling his muscles with the old unconquerable sense of power. He stretched himself like a cat in the exultant gathering of that flame of indomitable strength. And already he knew how the story was going to end.
Monty Hayward looked at him, and was amazed. The bleakness was still in the Saint's eyes, but suddenly there was a twinkle with it as if the sun had glinted over two chips of blue ice. There was the phantom of a smile on the Saint's lips—a smile that had still to reach the careless glory of pure Saintliness, but yet a smile that had not been there before. And the Saint spoke in a voice that shared his smile.
"Could anything be better?"
Monty shied away from that voice as if a thunderbolt had hit the ground in front of him. He could hardly believe that it came from the man whom he had seen reaching for his gun a few seconds earlier. It was lilting—positively lilting. "I don't see what you mean, old chap," he said awkwardly. "Don't you see what's happened?" The lilt in the Saint's voice was stronger—and the Saint was still smiling at him. "Marcovitch was waiting for Rudolf in Treuchtlingen! He saw Pat somewhere, we don't. know where, and put the cop onto her. Then when he came along here with her he had to leave a message at the rendezvous to say where he'd gone. Rudolf must have arrived a couple of minutes later, and he naturally followed straight on. And here they are!"
Again Monty Hayward felt as he had done in the hotel in Munich—that the Saint must have gone bughouse under the strain. Only this time the feeling verged on an awful certainty.
"What about it?" he said quietly.
The Saint laughed under his breath.
"This about it! They're here—Pat, Rudolf, Marcovitch—the whole all-star cast of unparagoned palukas! And the crown jewels are with them somewhere—I'll bet you a million dollars. Marcovitch would never dare to let them out of his sight. The whole bag of tricks, Monty, packed up and sealed for delivery in that futurist abomination of a Polizeiamt! Just as if we'd fetched 'em together on purpose for the reunion. And only a skeleton staff inside. Every able-bodied man they can lay their hands on is out in the wide county chasing our trail through the cowslips. And here we are as well—wearing out our sterns on this goddam field of bricks while the ungodly are collected for us twenty feet away. We've got 'em cold!"
Monty stared at him.
"What's your idea?" he articulated slowly; and the Saint answered with five syllables that leapt back at him like bullets.
"Go in and get "em!"
A couple of working girls went past them, giggling over the cryptic gossip that working girls giggle over in every country in the world; and Monty Hayward looked into the twinkling icicles of the Saint's eyes, and knew what he would find there before he looked. The Saint meant every crackling consonant of it. Monty had the dubious consolation of knowing that his diagnosis was a bull's-eye. The Saint was as mad as a hatter's March hare. But it was not the red, homicidal ferocity of a moment ago—it was the madness of the bridge in Innsbruck and the ride into Treuchtlingen, a thing against which Monty couldn't argue any more.
"I'll go with you," he said.
It never occurred to him to question why he said it. Hell!— he was damned anyway. Why worry? There was still a good scrap waiting, and retribution would follow soon enough. He hadn't discovered his new self such a short while ago only to throw it away unused.
He heard the quick rippling voice of the tempter in his ear. Simon was leaning over towards him, scraping a chisel about somewhere among the pipes.
"It's the only thing we can do, Monty. We'll never get a chance like this again. And it's got to be done right now, while they're all busy. Death or glory, Mont!"
"Lead on, son and brother."
The Saint grinned.
He inspected the road sideways under his arm. The chauffeur was patrolling comatosely up and down the road beside the cream-coloured Rolls, with the mystic neutrality of chauffeurs; but Simon recognized him as the man whose nose he had been privileged to pull a few hours before.
"We shall have to remove the grease ball," he said. "I may want his car. And you'll have to remove him, Monty, because he knows me."
He gave further instructions.
And thereupon a number of remarkable experiences began to enliven the daily round of Herr Bruno Pelz, chauffeur extraordinary to His Indescribable Pulchritude the Crown Prince Rudolf.
They initiated themselves harmlessly enough with the deceptively commonplace incident of an overalled workman levering himself out of the hole in the road where he had been engaged in his own abstruse travail, and walking across towards him. They continued in the same deceptively commonplace manner with the workman approaching Herr Pelz and politely requesting the loan of a match for his cigarette. And they went on with Herr Pelz providing the required light; which was also a very commonplace event in itself, for Herr Pelz was not yet submerged in such abysses of indiscriminate churlishness as to revolt against the custom of a country where fire is as free as air. But at that point in Herr Pelz's history the ordinariness of the affair ended for ever.
He struck a match and held it to the workman's cigarette, glancing at him casually as he did so. And that casual glance gave him the shock of his life.