Over the uncertain flame the workman was ogling him with the most horrifying squint that he had ever seen. The round, goggling eyes swivelled over him with a repulsive significance that was as nauseating as the leer of a bloated harpy in a lecher's delirium. Herr Pelz recoiled from it in an involuntary convulsion of disgust. He felt the hairs rising on the nape of his neck, as if those odiously astigmatic eyes had stretched out of their orbits and laid their slimy contact on his flesh. But the workman seemed utterly unconscious of the repugnance which he aroused. He muttered his thanks, and turned away with a final hideous wink that warped his whole face into one ghastly deformity of innuendo.
Herr Pelz's head revolved in a perfect mesmerism of loath-ing to watch him hobbling down the street. He couldn't even tear his gaze away from the man's back while his memory was still crawling with the impressions of that repellent stare. And thus it came about that Herr Pelz saw what he might not otherwise have noticed: that as the workman passed under the next street lamp he pulled a filthy handkerchief out of his pocket, and a scrap of paper was dragged out with it and fluttered down to the pavement.
Herr Pelz could no more have resisted that scrap of paper than he could have vowed himself into a monastery. He started towards it without a second thought, impelled solely by the degenerate curiosity which the experience had aroused. Then as he came nearer, he saw that the scrap of paper was a hundred-mark note.
He picked it up, and turned it over suspiciously in the lamplight. It was unquestionably genuine.
Curiosity gave way to an even more deeply rooted cupidity. Herr Pelz flashed a furtive glance around him to see if anyone else had observed the accident. But no one seemed to be paying any attention to him, and the other workman was hammering away at his pipes with uninterrupted vigour. Herr Pelz returned his gaze with a little less revulsion to the beneficent ogre's retreating figure. And as Herr Pelz looked, the ogre replaced the handkerchief in his pocket—and a second hundred-mark note drifted down on to the pavement. If there was any manifestation of Providence at which Herr Bruno Pelz had ever prayed to be a witness, it was the phenomenon of an endless flood of hundred-mark notes pouring down at his feet; and at that moment he seemed to be spectating the nearest approach to such a prodigy that he was ever likely to see. While he stared up the street with bulging eyes, a third scrap of paper fell from the workman's pocket and floated down into the gutter—closely followed by a fourth. A fifth, a sixth, and a seventh joined them with incredible rapidity. The workman was shedding money all over the road like a perambulating mint. And then he turned off into a dark side alley with the eighth hundred marks flopping down to the paving stones behind him.
Herr Pelz didn't even hesitate. He plunged on to his doom with his mouth hanging open, as fast as his legs would carry him. Prince Rudolf was still inside the police station, and even if he came out unexpectedly, an excuse should be easy to find. And meanwhile Fortune was opening her cornucopia and decanting largesse with a liberality which it would have been a sin to ignore. Whether the workman was a thief, an escaped lunatic, or an eccentric millionaire—if he could be caught in that dark alley . . . Herr Pelz's black eyes gleamed like marbles. There had been days when he had ruled a minor underworld as master of the precarious trade of the garotte, and his hand had not lost its cunning. It would be over and finished in ten seconds, without a sound.
He hurried down the pavement, snatching up hundred-mark notes as he went. His fingers grasped the last one as he turned into the alley, and a few yards down the lane he saw another. He stooped to pick it up. . . .
And then a massive lump of metal wielded with masterly precision crashed into the back of his head. For one blissful second he gaped at a complete free fireworks display that would have been the making of any Fourth of July; and then a hospitable darkness came down and folded him in his dreams.
Monty Hayward returned like a paladin from the wars.
He lowered himself to the cobbles beside the hole in the road, and looked at the Saint with eyes that were no longer squinting. There was the seed of a smile in them—a seed such as can only be sown by the force of a doughty blow struck for the honour of lawlessness. And the Saint smiled back.
"Oke?" he drawled.
"Oke," said Monty Hayward. "I hid in a doorway and dotted him a peach. There was a sort of van close by, and a bloke was just starting it up. I heard him say they'd have to hustle to get to Nürnberg by dinner time, so I picked up your pal and heaved him in with the greens." He looked round as an antique Ford swung into the street and clattered past. "And there he goes!"
Simon Templar nodded, and the nod spoke volumes.
He stood up and stretched his legs.
"Then he won't bother us for some time," he said. "I guess we can begin."
"Suits me, Saint."
The Saint gazed down at him steadily. In fewer years than the other man had lived, he had come to know the game from every angle, and grown used to its insidious allurements. Its seductive charms held him no less than they had always done; but he knew their treachery. Even then, he hesitated to take advantage of Monty's surrender.
"There's no need for you to come inside," he said. "This isn't quite like anything we've done before. We may be running into a trap. If you'd like to hang on here for a bit——"
"Why not get on with it?" said Monty Hayward shortly. "I wouldn't miss a show like this for a thousand pounds."
The Saint smiled ruefully.
"On your own head be it," he said; but his hand rested on Monty's shoulder for a moment.
And then he turned and walked across the road.
He had no illusions about what he was trying to do. Before it was finished there might easily be a miniature war storming in that peaceful street. He had to take the risk. And if necessary, he'd have to fight the war. It was the only way. Patricia Holm was inside that police station, irreparably meshed in the ponderous dragnet of the Law; and even if he had been a free man, that would have seemed hopeless enough—to sit scheming with lawyers, pulling the sticky threads of bail and remand, pitting miserable atoms of truth against the massed batteries of intrigue and influence that Rudolf could command, knowing that the scales were weighted against him from the beginning. With the police offering rewards for his own capture it couldn't be thought of. He was taking the one chance that the fall of the cards gave him—a clean fighting chance to win the game as he had fought it from the start, as he had won such games before, with the honest steel of a gun butt in his hands, clearing the tangled chess board with a challenge of death.
He ran up the station steps and entered the bare vestibule. On his left was a corridor; farther down he came to a pair of glass doors opening into a microscopic space where the common citizen could stand and lean over a counter to hold converse with the Law. Beyond the counter was an untidy sort of office, in which he could see one bald-headed policeman writing laboriously at a desk and another thoughtfully picking his teeth.
Simon burst in unceremoniously, with one quick glance backwards to make sure that Monty was following. The game had to be played fast—taken at a rush that would allow the enemy no time to ponder over details or gaze too closely at his own charming features. He fell breathlessly on the counter with his face a mask of agitation under the grime.
"Machen Sie schnell!" he panted. "Ein Kind ist von einem Motorrad angefahren worden!"
The toothpicking officer might not have been sentimentally moved by the thought of a child being knocked down by a motor-bicycle, but he had a commendable devotion to duty.