It was all over in a few seconds. And Kuzela was lying limply spread-eagled across the desk, and Simon Templar was fitting his key into the lock of the safe.
The plungers pistoned smoothly back, and the heavy door swung open. And the Saint sat back on his heels and gazed in rapture at what he saw.
Five small leather attaché cases stood in a neat row before his eyes. It was superb—splendiferous—it was just five times infinitely more than he had ever seriously dared to hope. That one hundred million lire were lying around somewhere in London he had been as sure as a man can be of anything— Kuzela would never have wasted time transporting his booty from the departure centre to the country house where the Duke of Fortezza had been kept—but that the most extempore bluff should have led him promptly and faultlessly to the hiding-place of all that merry mazuma was almost too good to be true. And for a few precious seconds the Saint stared entranced at the vision that his everlasting preposterous luck had ladled out for his delight. ...
And then he was swiftly hauling the valises out on to the floor.
He did not even have to attempt to open one of them. He knew. . . .
Rapidly he ranged the bags in a happy little line across the carpet. He picked up his stick; and he was adjusting his hat at its most effective angle when the two men who had pursued him returned through the door. But there was a wicked little automatic pivoting round in his free hand, and the two men noticed it in time.
"Restrain your enthusiasm, boys," said the Saint. "We're going on a journey. Pick up your luggage, and let's be moving."
He transferred one of the bags to his left hand, and his gun continued to conduct the orchestra. And under its gentle supervision the two men obeyed his orders. The delirious progress of events during the past couple of minutes had been a shade too much for their ivorine uptakes: their faces wore two uniformly blank expressions of pained bewilderment, vaguely reminiscent of the registers of a pair of precocious goldfish photographed immediately after signing their first talking-picture contract. Even the power of protest had temporarily drained out their vocal organs. They picked up two bags apiece and suffered themselves to be shepherded out of the room in the same bovine vacuity of acquiescence.
In the hall, Simon halted the fatigue party for a moment.
"Before we pass out into the night," he said, "I want you to be quite clear about one thing. Those bags you're carrying, as you may or may not know, are each supposed to contain the equivalent of two hundred thousand pounds in ready money; and I want you to know anything that you may be prepared to do to keep all those spondulix for yourselves is just so much tadpole-gizzard beside what I'm prepared to do to prise it off you. So you should think a long while before you do anything rash. I am the greatest gun artist in the world," said the Saint persuasively, but with a singular lack of honesty, "and I'm warning you here and now that at the first sign I see of any undue enterprise, I shall shoot each of you through the middle of the eleventh spinal vertebra, counting from the bottom. Move on, my children."
The procession moved on.
It went down the porch steps and through the iron wicket gate to the road; and the Saint brought up the rear with his right hand in his pocket. The comedy was played without witnesses: at that hour Vandermeer Avenue, a quiet backwater even at the height of the day, was absolutely deserted. A sum total of four lighted windows was visible along the whole length of the thoroughfare, and those were too far away to provide the slightest inconvenience in any conceivable circumstances. Hampstead was being good that night. . . .
The car which Simon had observed on his prowl round the exterior of the house was parked right opposite the gate— which was where he had expected it to be. As the two men paused outside the gate, waiting for further instructions, a door of the car opened, and a slim supple figure decanted itself lightly on to the sidewalk. Patricia. . . . She came forward with her swinging long-limbed stride.
"O.K., Simon?"
"O.K., lass."
"Gee, boy, I'm glad to see you."
"And I you. And the whole Wild West show was just a sitting rabbit, believe it or believe it not." The Saint's hand touched her arm. "Get back behind the wheel, Pat, start her up, and be ready to pull out as soon as the boodle's on board. It isn't every day we ferry a cool million across London, and I don't see why the honour of being the pilot shouldn't be your share of the act."
"Right-ho. ..."
The girl disappeared, and Simon opened another door.
He watched the cases being stowed one by one in the back of the car, and the forefinger of his right hand curled tensely over the trigger of his gun. He had meant every word of his threat to the two men who were doing the job; and they must have known it, for they carried out his orders with commendable alacrity.
And yet Simon felt a faint electric tingle of uneasiness fanning up his back and into the roots of his hair like the march of a thousand ghostly needle-points. He could not have described it in any other way, and he was as much at a loss to account for it as if the simile had been the actual fact. It was sheer blind instinct, a seventh sense born of a hundred breathless adventures, that touched him with single thrill of insufficient warning—and left it at that. And for once in his life he ignored the danger-sign. He heard the whine of the self-starter, followed by the low-pitched powerful pulsing of the eight cleanly balanced cylinders, and saw the door closed upon the last of the bags: and he turned smiling to the two bruisers. He pointed.
"If you keep straight on down that road," he said, "it ought to land you somewhere near Birmingham—if you travel far enough. You might make that your next stop."
One of the men took a pace towards him.
"You just listen a minute——"
"To what?" asked the Saint politely.
"I'm telling yer——"
"A bad habit," said the Saint disapprovingly. "You must try and break yourself of that. And now I'm sorry, but I can't stop. I hope you'll wash the back of your neck, see that your socks are aired, say your prayers every night, and get your face lifted at the first opportunity. . . . Now push your ears back, my cherubs, and let your feet chase each other."
His right hand moved significantly in his pocket, and there was an instant's perilous silence. And then the man who had spoken jerked his head at the other.
"Come on," he said.
The two men turned and lurched slowly away, looking back over their shoulders.
And the Saint put one foot on the running-board.
And somewhere, far away, he heard the sound of his own head being hit. It was as extraordinary an experience as any that had ever happened to him. Patricia was looking ahead down the road, while her hand eased the gears quietly into mesh; and the Saint himself had not heard the slightest movement that might have put him on his guard. And the premonitory crawling of his nerves which he had felt a few seconds earlier had performed what it considered to be its duty, and had subsided. . . . He could have believed that the whole thing was an incredibly vivid hallucination—but for the sickening sharp stab of sudden agony that plunged through his brain like a spurt of molten metal and paralysed every milligram of strength in his body.
A great white light swelled up and exploded before his eyes; and after it came a wave of whirling blackness shot with rocketing flashes of dizzy, dazzling colour, and the blackness was filled with a thin high singing note that drilled into his eardrums. His knees seemed to melt away beneath him. . . .
And then, from somewhere above the vast dark gulf into which he was sinking, he heard Patricia's voice cry out.
"Simon!"
The word seemed to spell itself into his dulled brain letter by letter, as if his mind read it off a slowly uncoiling scroll. But it touched a nerve centre that roused him for one fractional instant of time to fight back titanically against the numbing oblivion that was swallowing him up.