He sat down in the police chief's chair behind the desk and laid his automatic on the papers in front of him.
"As you say, it was unfortunate that I should have been the victim," he murmured, as if nothing had happened. "I've never been a very successful victim, and I suppose habits are hard to break. But there were others who weren't so lucky. It was all the same to you."
"My dear young friend, we are not playing a game for children——"
"No. We're playing a game for savages. We've come down in the world. Once upon a time it was a game for soldiers—in the old days. I liked you because you were a patriot—and a sportsman—even though we were fighting on opposite sides. Now it's only a game of hunting for sacrifices to put on the altar of your bank account." The Saint's eyes were cold splinters of blue light across the table. "Two men died because they stood between you and these jewels. An agent of yours—didn't you refer to him as 'the egregious Emilio?'—murdered Heinrich Weissmann in my hotel bedroom in Innsbruck after I rescued him from three detectives whom we mistook for bandits. He was taking the jewels to Josef Krauss, whom you had allowed to pull the chestnuts out of the fire for you. You tortured Krauss last night; and today, when he had escaped, Marcovitch murdered him on the train between Munich and here. And Marcovitch would also have murdered all three of us if we'd given him the chance."
"My dear Mr. Templar——"
"I haven't quite finished yet," said the Saint quietly. "Marcovitch was the man who raided the brake van on that train, with four more of your hired thugs, to regain those jewels after I'd taken them off you. And when we had to jump off to save our lives, he told the officials that it was I who stole the mail. That also meant nothing to you. You were ready to have all your crimes charged against us—just as you were ready to have them actually committed by your dirty hirelings. You hadn't even the courage to do any of the work yourself, before it was framed onto me. But only a few minutes ago you were ready to apply your torturing methods to a girl, to make certain that there would be more blood on those jewels before you'd done with them. The methods of a patriot and a gentleman!"
For the first time Simon saw a flush of passion come into the pale face opposite him. The taunt had gone to its mark like a barbed arrow.
"My dear Mr. Templar!" The prince still controlled his voice, but a little of the suavity had gone from it "Since when have your own methods been above reproach?"
"I'm not thinking of only myself," answered the Saint coldly. "I'm only alleged to have robbed a train. Monty Hay-ward here is accused of murdering Weissmann as well, and he's the most innocent one of us all. The only thing he ever did was to help me rescue Weissmann in the first place, through a mistake which anyone might have made. And since then, of course, he's helped me to hold up this police station in order to see justice done, for which no one could blame him. But you know as well as I do that he isn't a criminal."
"His character fails to interest me."
"But you know that what I've said is the truth."
"Have I denied it?"
The Saint leaned forward over the desk.
"Will you deny that Weissmann was murdered by an agent of yours and by your orders; that Josef Krauss died in the same way; and that it was Marcovitch and other agents of yours who robbed the mail?"
The prince lifted one eyebrow. He was recovering his self-control again. His face was calm and satirical.
"I believe you once headed an organization which purported to administer a justice above the law," he said. "Do I understand that I am assisting at its renaissance?"
"Do you deny the charge?"
"And supposing I admit it?"
"I'm asking a question," said the Saint, with a face of stone. "Do you deny the charge?"
A long, tense silence came down on the room. Marcovitch moved again, and Monty's hand caught him round the neck. The significance of it all was beyond Monty Hayward's understanding, but the drama of the scene held him spellbound. He also had begun to fall into the error that was deluding the Crown Prince. The Saint's face was as inexorable as a judge's. The humour and humanity had frozen out of it, leaving the rakish lines graven into a grim pitilessness in which the eyes were mere glints of steel. They stared over the table into the depths of the prince's soul, holding him impaled on their merciless gaze like a butterfly on a pin. The tension piled up between them till the very air seemed to grow hot and heavy with it.
"Do you deny the charge?'
Again those five words dropped through the room like separate particles of white-hot metal, driving one after another with ruthless precision into the same cell of the prince's brain. They had about them the adamantine patience of doom itself. And the prince must have known that that question was going to receive a direct answer if it waited till the end of the world. He had come up against a force that he could no more fight against than he could fight against the changing of the tides, a force that would wear through his resistance as the continual dripping of water wears through a rock.
And then the Saint moved one hand, and quietly picked up his gun.
"Do you deny the charge?"
The prince stirred slightly.
"No."
He answered unemotionally, without turning his eyes a fraction from the relentless gaze that went on boring into them. There was the stoical defiance of a Chinese mandarin in the almost imperceptible lift of his head.
"Does your worship propose to pronounce sentence?" he inquired mockingly,
The Saint's mouth relaxed in a hard little smile.
Every word had been registered on the ears of the two captive police officers whom he had hidden in the corner cabinet. The gods fought on his side, and the star of the Crown Prince had fallen at last. Otherwise such an old snare as that could never have caught its bird. Marcovitch had smelt it—but Marcovitch was silenced, and now he had gone white and still. The prince had been a little too clever. And Monty Hayward was free. ...
"Your punishment is not in my hands," said the Saint. "It will overtake you in the course of legal justice, and I see no need to interfere."
He ran his fingers again through the heap of jewels, letting them trickle through his fingers in rivulets of coloured splendour that caught the light on a hundred cunning facets.
"Pretty toys," said the Saint, "but they tempted you. And you could have bought them. You could have had them all for no more trouble than it would have taken you to write a cheque. I shall often wonder why you did it. Was it a kink of yours, Rudolf, that told you you couldn't enjoy them unless they were christened in blood? The Maloresco emeralds—the Ullsteinbach blue diamond——"
"What did you say?"
It was Nina Walden who spoke, starting forward suddenly from her place in the background.
Simon looked at her curiously. He picked up the great blue stone and held it in the light.
"The Ullsteinbach blue diamond," he said. "Wedding gift of the late Franz Josef to the Archduke Michel of Presc—according to information in The Times. Josef Krauss tried to tell me something about it before he died, but he didn't get far. Do you know anything about it?"
The American girl took the stone from his fingers and turned it over and over. Then she looked at the Saint again.
"I know this much," she said. "It's a——"
"Look out!" yelled Monty.
He had seen the prince's hand move casually to his sleeve, as if in search of a handkerchief, and had thought nothing of it. Then the hand came out again with a jerk, and the knife that came with it went spinning across the desk in a vicious streak of silver. The Saint hurled himself sideways, and it skimmed past his neck and clattered against the wall. The prince flung himself after it like a madman, clawing at the Saint's gun.