Simon stood up and met him with a straight left that smashed blood out of the contorted face and set the man staggering back against his chair.
"Keep your gun in his ribs, Monty," ordered the Saint crisply. "This is getting interesting. What were you going to tell me, Miss Walden?"
The girl gave him back the stone.
"It's a piece of coloured glass," she said.
2
Simon Templar subsided on to the desk as if his legs had given out under him. The room danced round him in a drunken tango. And once again he heard the dying jest of Josef Krauss ringing in his ears: "Sehen Sie gut nach . . . dem blauen Diamant. . . . Er ist . ... wirklich . . . preislos. . . ." And the bitter derisive eyes of the man. . . .
"The Ullsteinbach diamond is in America." Nina Walden went on speaking without a glance at the prince. "It was sold to Wilbur G. Tully, the straw hat millionaire, just before the war. The owners were hard up, and they had to raise money somehow: their treasurers wouldn't give them any more, so they raided the crown jewels. This imitation was made, and the real stone was sold to Tully under a vow of secrecy. He keeps it in his private collection. I don't think any living person knows the story besides Tully and myself. But my grandfather made the imitation. I've known about it for years, and I've been saving the scoop for a good occasion. The Archduke Michel did that when he was sowing wild oats in his fifties—and he's Prince Rudolf's father, at present the King of——"
"Great God in Heaven!"
The Saint leapt up again. He understood. The mystery was solved in a flash that almost blinded him. He cursed himself for not having thought of it before. And he was half laughing at the same time, shaking with the sublime perfection of the truth.
"Let me get this straight!" he gasped. "It wasn't the other crown jewels that Rudolf gave a damn about. They just happened to be among the spoils. What he wanted was the Ullsteinbach blue diamond. And he didn't want it because it was valuable, but because it wasn't—because it was literally priceless! He couldn't let the jewels come into any ordinary market, because someone would certainly have discovered the fraud, and the whole deception would have been shown up from the beginning. The old Archduke would probably have been booted off the throne, and Rudolf would have gone with him. He had to let Josef Krauss pinch the jewels, and then take them off Josef. Josef had discovered the secret when he handled the stones, so he had to go. And then I got hold of them by a fluke, and I might have discovered it—so I was a marked man. And everyone with me was in the same boat. Hell! ..."
The Saint flung out his arms.
"I said it wasn't ordinary boodle—and it isn't! It's the most priceless collection of boodle that's ever been knocked off! There were men dying and being tortured for it—mail vans broken—policemen sweating—thrones tottering—and all because the star turn of it wasn't worth more than an empty beer bottle! My God—why didn't I know that joke hours ago? Why wasn't I told till now?"
He hugged Nina Walden weakly.
Monty swallowed. He didn't know what to say. He realized dimly that he had just heard the unravelling of the most amazing story he was ever likely to hear, but it was all too crushingly simple. For the moment his brain refused to absorb the elementary enormity of it.
In the same daze he saw Simon Templar pick up the glittering blue crystal from the carpet where he had dropped it and advance solemnly towards the Crown Prince. And the Saint's voice spoke uncertainly.
"Rudolf—my cherub—you may have it as the souvenir I promised you."
Monty saw the prince's livid face. . . .
And then a new sound broke into the room—faint and distant at first, swelling gradually until it seemed to pierce the eardrums like a rusty needle. The Saint stiffened up and stood still. And he heard it again—the mournful rising and falling wail of a police siren. It shrilled into his brain eerily, mounting up to its climax like the shriek of a lost soul, moaning round the room at its height like the scream of a tormented ghost. It was so clear that it might have been actually under his feet.
Simon sprang to the window and flung it up. Down in the street below he saw two squad cars pulling in to the curb, spilling their loads of uniformed men. Among them, under a street lamp, he could recognize the officer whom he had misdirected on the road. The pursuit squadron had come home.
The Saint turned and faced the room. In his heart he had expected no less. He was quite calm.
"Will you hold the fort again, Monty?" he said.
He ran quickly down the stairs and the corridor leading to the vestibule. As he came out of the corridor he saw the officer mounting the steps. For an instant they stared at each other across the doorway.
Then Simon slammed the great doors in the officer's face, and dropped the bar across them.
He heard a muffled shout from outside, and then the thumping of fists and gun butts on the massive woodwork; but he was dashing into the nearest room with a window on the street. He looked out and saw a third squad car driving up; then a bullet slapped through the glass beside him and combed his hair with flying splinters. He ducked, and grappled with the heavy steel shuttering that was rolled away on one side of the window. He unfolded it and slammed it into place, and went to the next window. A hail of shots wiped the glass out of existence as he reached it, but the next volley spattered against the plates of armour steel. He had been right about that police station—it was built like a fortress. Simon sprinted from room to room like a demon, barricading one window after another until the whole of the ground floor on the street side was as solid as the walls in which the windows were set.
Then he went through to the back of the building. A section of armed men detached from the main body nearly forestalled him there: there was a back door opening onto a small square courtyard, and one of them had his foot over the threshold when the Saint came to it. Simon swerved round the levelled Luger: the shot singed his arm before he thrust the man backwards and banged the door after him.
The other windows at the back were barred, and Simon could tell at a glance that the bars would withstand any assault for at least half an hour. A face loomed up in one of the windows while the Saint was making his reconnaissance, and he was barely in time to throw himself to the floor before the man's automatic was spitting lead at him like a machine gun.
Rat-tat-tat-tat-tat!
Simon lay flat on his belly and watched the bullets stringing a ruled line of pock-marks along the plaster of the wall over his head. He crawled out on his stomach and went upstairs again, and when he reached the police chief's office he had a Luger automatic rifle under each arm.
He pushed one of them into Patricia's hands.
"Over the landing, and take any of the rooms opposite. Some of 'em are trying to break in at the back. Keep "em away from the door. Don't hit anyone if you can help it—and don't get hit yourself!"
He flung himself across to the window which he had opened before. Some of the policemen were keeping back the crowd of civilians who had materialized from nowhere; others were standing in groups watching the police station, and the Saint's appearance was the signal for a scattered fusillade. Another man was running across the street with an axe.
Bullets chipped the window frame and scraped showers of plaster from the ceiling as the Saint took aim. He dropped the man with the axe with a flesh wound in the fleshy part of his leg; another man picked up the axe and rushed for the main doors. Simon spread a curtain of clattering steel along the cobbles in front of the man's feet and checked the rush. It was certain suicide to take a step further into that rain of spattering death. The officer shouted a command, and the man ran back with the Saint slamming bullets round his feet.