He picked up his cap and came through a flap in the counter, buttoning the neck of his tunic. Simon stood aside to let him pass. As the policeman stepped out of sight of his colleague in the office, Simon hit him twice on the back of the neck—two slaughterous ju-jitsu blows delivered with the edge of his hand. The policeman slumped forward soundlessly— straight into Monty's arms.
"Hold him up and talk to him!" rapped the Saint. "You can be seen from outside. I'll just get the other one. . . ."
Monty propped the policeman against the wall and clung to him dazedly. He had never been called upon to do anything like that, even in his wildest dreams of buccaneering. But the daylight lamps in the vestibule were beating down on him like a battery of limes, and he knew that to anyone glancing in from outside he was as conspicuous as the central figure on a lighted stage. In a kind of stage fright he began to recite "The Wreck of the Hesperus," with violent gesticulations. . . .
Simon raced back into the office, and the clerkly constable looked up. The Saint gave him no more time to think than he had given the first man.
"Wollen Sie hinauskommen, bitte? Der andere Schupo bedarf Hilfe——"
The scribe rose from his chair grumbling. Simon caught him with the same blow as he came through the counter, and left him where he fell.
He went back and found Monty returning hoarsely to the first stanza, having lost his memory after three verses.
"And the skipper had taken his little daughter to bear
"All clear," said the Saint.
He closed in on the other side of Monty's vis-à-vis. Together they bore the unconscious man into the office and laid him on the floor, dragging the clerkly one farther in to join him. Simon rummaged round and discovered handcuffs with which they fastened the two policemen's wrists and ankles; then he improvised gags with their handkerchiefs and screwed-up balls of blotting paper. It was all done with amazing speed and in perfect silence.
The Saint jerked his head towards a door on the far side of the office, through which came the murmur of voices.
"I think that must be the charge room," he whispered, in Monty's ear. "Don't make a sound—we aren't ready for the alarm yet——"
A subdued clicking noise blurred into his speech, and he looked round swiftly. It came from a private telephone exchange in one corner, where a tiny red bulb was blinking its impatient summons.
The Saint dropped into the operator's stool and plugged in on the calling circuit. Monty listened tensely, trying to make out the brief words which were clacking through the receiver diaphragm. Only a couple of sentences were spoken; and then he saw the Saint smile and clip out a single word of reply.
"Sofort!"
Simon came out of the stool and searched round for the main lead-in wire. He found it and broke it loose with one jerk. Then he spoke a second time in Monty's ear.
"The Big Cheese is somewhere upstairs. That was him—asking for Pat and the witnesses to be taken up to his office. Keep things quiet while I look after him—there are guns on those stiffs which you can take, and there's sure to be another way out of the charge room which you'll have to watch for. Don't shoot if you can possibly help it. I'll be right back."
He vanished into the vestibule and turned into the corridor which he had already observed. A short way down it there was a door on the right, through which he heard the same voices talking—the second entrance to the charge room which he had already guessed of. Simon would have given much to listen there for a while, but the ticking seconds were vital. The dusk was now well advanced, and at any moment the squad cars which had depleted the station staff to a negligible fraction would be snoring up the street again with the reports of their fruitiest chase. And when that happened the slugs would be fairly spawning in the salad. . . . The Saint closed his lips grimly and tiptoed past the door without a backward glance.
He came through to a flight of stone stairs and went up them. On the landing above there were doors all around him. He sank on one knee and scanned the floor for a sign of the room from which the telephone call had come. Only one door showed a tell-tale streak of light dose to the ground. His luck was holding magnificently. He walked up to the door and knocked, instantly receiving the curt command to enter.
A white-haired man with a square jaw and military shoulders, and a middle-aged man with a typical bullet head, both in plain clothes, looked up from a desk littered with maps and papers as the Saint came in.
Simon let them see his gun and his smile, and reverted to his very best German.
"I believe you were looking for me," he said.
2
The two men coagulated where they stood, staring at him whitely in the dumb startlement of his arrival. If the door had opened to admit a herd of emerald-green hippopotami they could scarcely have been more flabbergasted. But beyond the involuntary swelling of their eyes and the limp fall of their chins they made no movement. Whatever they may have lacked as shining lights of the Law, they were not deficient in human courage.
Several seconds went by before the elder of the two spoke.
"What do you want?" he asked calmly.
"A little talk," said the Saint. He gestured with his automatic towards the chief's right hand, which was sliding stealthily across the desk towards a row of bell pushes. "You can save yourself the trouble of ringing—all the wires are disconnected, and in any case no one would answer."
Perhaps he was guilty of stretching the truth, but the chief did not know it. And the warning was spoken with such an air of quiet conviction that it went home as effectively as a shot from the Saint's steady gun. The chief's hand relaxed.
"How did you get in?"
"I walked in. The door was open."
The two men remained motionless, continuing to stare. It was the Saint's gun and the Saintly smile that had paralyzed them at first—their first thought had been that they were dealing with a maniac, and the Saint knew that after the initial shock of his appearance had worn off they were both weighing the chances of his touching off the trigger if either of them made an incautious movement. Against that they were balancing the alternative potentialities of a tactful submission until they could distract the attention of those unwavering blue eyes.
Then Simon observed that the younger man was studying his face intently; he sensed the incredulous understanding before it was fully formed in the man's own mind and forestalled it cheerfully:
"I am Simon Templar—the Saint."
The two men remained motionless—and now the reason for their stillness was concentrated entirely in his gun hand. He could feel every phase of the struggle that went on in their minds. The most wanted man in Europe—the man for whom the whole German police force was scouring the country—the man on whose head extravagant rewards had been placed— was standing coolly before them in that room. The prize that every man in the force would have given his right hand to win was tempting them from a range of four yards. And the automatic in his hand was held in the tremorless grip of a steel robot The terse information they had received had magnified itself in their imaginations to something almost fabulous. Whichever of them made the first threatening move would be doomed—the other might possibly survive to win the glory. The atmosphere stifled with the terrific pressure of their inward battle.
"I shall have to handcuff you," said the Saint quietly. "You will turn your backs and put your hands behind you—and keep them well away from your bodies." He saw their limbs go tense as the full meaning of his order became plain to them, and went on swiftly, with his voice tightened up in a crisp urgency of menace: "You think that any risk would be preferable to the disgrace of having been made prisoners in your own stronghold. You would be wrong. Both of you would die before you could take a step towards me. You have heard of me—you can estimate your own prospects. I give you my word that no harm will come to you."