And then Patricia spoke again, quite calmly, but with a lethal clearness that was hedged around on every side with the menace of every manner of murder.
"Where is the Saint?" she asked.
And upon those words Simon Templar figured that he had his cue.
He turned the handle soundlessly and pushed the door wide open.
Patricia's back was towards him. A little farther on to one side the second bruiser stood by with his hands high in the air. And behind the desk sat Kuzela, with his face still frozen in an expression of dumb, incredulous stupefaction. . . . And as the door swung back, and the Saint advanced gracefully into the limelight, the eyes of the two men revolved and centred on him, and dilated slowly into petrified staring orbs of something near to panic.
"Good morning," said the Saint.
Patricia half turned. She could not help herself—the expressions on the faces of the two men in front of her were far too transparently heartfelt to leave her with any mistrust that they were part of a ruse to put her off her guard.
But the result of her movement was the same; for as she turned her eyes away, the smallest part in the cast had his moment. He awoke out of his groping comatosity, saw his chance, and grabbed it with both fists.
The automatic was wrested violently out of the girl's hands, and she was thrown stumbling back into the Saint's arms. And the Saint's gentle smile never altered.
He passed Patricia to one side, and cocked a derisive eye at the gun that was turned against him. And with no more heed for it than that, he continued on towards the desk.
"So nice to see you again," he said.
Chapter IX
Kuzela rose lingeringly to his feet.
There was a perceptible pause before he gained control of the faculty of speech. The two consecutive smacks that had been jolted into the very roots of his being within the space of the last forty seconds would have tottered the equilibrium of any man—of any man except, perhaps, the Saint himself. . . . But the Saint was not at all disturbed. He waited in genteel silence, while the other schooled the flabby startlement out of his face and dragged up his mouth into an answering smile.
"My dear young friend!"
The voice, when Kuzela found it, had the same svelte timbre as before, and Simon bowed a mocking compliment to the other's nerve.
"My dear old comrade!" he murmured, open-armed.
"You have saved us the trouble of fetching you, Templar," Kuzela said blandly. "But where is Ngano?"
"The Negro Spiritual?" The Saint aligned his eyebrows banteringly. "I'm afraid he—er—met with a slight accident."
"Ah!"
"No—not exactly. I don't think he's quite dead yet, though he may easily have strangled himself by this time. But he hasn't enjoyed himself. I think if the circumstances had been reversed, he would have talked," said the Saint, with a glacial inclemency of quietness.
Kuzela stroked his chin.
"That is unfortunate," he said.
And then he smiled.
"But it is not fatal, my friend," he purred. "The lady has already solved one problem for us herself. And now that she is here, I am sure you would do anything rather than expose her to the slightest danger. So let us return to our previous conversation at once. Perhaps the lady will tell us herself where she went to when she drove away from here?"
Simon put his hands in his pockets.
"Why, yes," he said good-humouredly. "I should think she would."
The girl looked at him as if she could not quite believe her ears. And Simon met her puzzled gaze with blue eyes of such a blinding Saintly innocence that even she could read no enticement to deception in them.
"Do you mean that?" she asked.
"Of course," said the Saint. "There are one or two things I shouldn't mind knowing myself."
Patricia put a hand to her head.
"If you want to know—when I left here I drove straight to—"
"Buckingham Palace," drawled the Saint. "And then?"
"I had the bags taken up to Beppo's room, and I saw him myself. He was quite wide awake and sensible. I told him I was coming back here to get you out, and said that if I wasn't back by four o'clock, or one of us hadn't rung him up, he was to get in touch with Teal. I gave him Teal's private number. He didn't want me to go at all, but I insisted. That's all there is to tell. I picked up a puncture on the second trip out here, and that held me up a bit ——"
"But who cares about that?" said the Saint.
He turned back to the desk.
The man with the gun stood less than a yard away on his right front; but the Saint, ignoring his very existence, leaned a little forward and looked from the distance of another yard into the face of Kuzela. The loose poise of his body somehow centred attention even while it disarmed suspicion. But the mockery had gone out of his eyes.
"You heard?" he asked.
Kuzela nodded. His mouth went up at one corner. "But I still see no reason for alarm, my friend," he said, in that wheedling voice of slow malevolence. "After all, there is still time for much to happen. Before your friend Mr. Teal arrives——"
"Before my friend Chief Inspector Teal arrives with a squad of policemen in a plain van, I shall be a long way from here," said the Saint.
Kuzela started.
"So you have invoked the police?" he snapped. And then again he recovered himself. "But that is your affair. By the time they arrive, as you say, you will have left here. But where do you think you will have gone?"
"Home, James," said the Saint.
He took one hand out of his pocket to straighten his coat, and smiled without mirth.
"Fortunately, the argument between us can be settled tonight," he said, "which will save me having to stage any reunions. Your black torturer has been dealt with. I have given him a dose of his own medicine which will, I think, put him in hospital for several weeks. But you remain. You are, after all, the man who gave Ngano his orders. I have seen what you did to the Duke of Fortezza, and I know what you wanted to have done to me. ... I hope you will get on well with Wilfred."
"And what do you think you are going to do to me?" asked Kuzela throatily; and Simon held him with his eyes.
"I'm going to kill you, Kuzela," he said simply.
"Ah! And how will you do that?"
Simon's fingers dipped into his pocket. They came out with an ordinary match-box, and he laid it on the desk.
"That is the answer to all questions," he said.
Kuzela stared down at the box. It sat there in the middle of his clean white blotter, yellow and oblong and angular, as commonplace a thing as any man could see on his desk—and the mystery of it seemed to leer up at him malignantly. He picked it up and shook it: it weighed light in his hand, and his mind balked at the idea that it should conceal any engine of destruction. And the Saint's manner of presenting it had been void of the most minute scintilla of excitement—and still was.
He eyed Kuzela quizzically.
"Why not open it?" he suggested.
Kuzela looked at him blankly. And then, with a sudden impatience, he jabbed his thumb at the little sliding drawer. . . .
In a dead silence, the box fell through the air and flopped half-open on the desk.
"What does this mean?" asked Kuzela, almost in a whisper.
"It means that you have four minutes to live," said the Saint.
Kuzela held up his hand and stared at it.
In the centre of the ball of his right thumb a little globule of blood was swelling up in the pinky-white of the surrounding skin. He gazed stupidly from it to the match-box and back again. In imagination, he felt a second time the asp-like prick that had bitten into his thumb as he moved the drawer of the box—and understood. "The answer to all questions. . . ."