The Saint Closes the Case

Carena and an over­grown gorilla, but not too agile with the trigger finger—other­wise I mightn't be here. But which country he's working for is yet to be discovered.'

Roger Conway frowned.

'You think——'

'Frequently,' said the Saint. 'But that was one think I didn't need a cold towel round my head for. Vargan may have thought he got a raw deal when they missed him off the front page, but he got enough publicity to make any wideawake foreign agent curious.'

He tapped a cigarette gently on his thumb-nail and lighted it with slow and exaggerated deliberation. In such pregnant silences of irrelevant pantomime he always waited for the seeds he had sown to germinate spontaneously in the brains of his audience.

Conway spoke first.

'If there should be another war——'

'Who is waiting for a chance to make war?' asked Norman Kent.

The Saint picked up a selection of the papers he had been reading before they came, and passed them over. Page after page was scarred with blue pencillings. He had marked many strangely separated things—a proclamation of Mussolini, the speech of a French delegate before the League of Nations, the story of a break in the Oil Trust involving the rearrangement of two hundred million pounds of capital, the announcement of a colossal merger of chemical interests, the latest move­ments of warships, the story of an outbreak of rioting in India, the story of an inspired bull raid on the steel market, and much else that he had found of amazing significance, even down to the arrest of an English tourist hailing from Man­chester and rejoicing in the name of Pinheedle, for punching the nose of a policeman in Wiesbaden. Roger Conway and Norman Kent read, and were incredulous.

'But people would never stand for another war so soon,' said Conway. 'Every country is disarming——'

'Bluffing with everything they know, and hoping that one day somebody'll be taken in,' said the Saint. 'And every na­tion scared stiff of the rest, and ready to arm again at any notice. The people never make or want a war— it's sprung on them by the statesmen with the business interests behind them, and somebody writes a 'We-Don't- Want-to-Lose-You-but-We-Think-you-Ought-to-Go' song for the brass bands to play, and millions of poor fools go out and die like heroes without ever being quite sure what it's all about. It's happened before. Why shouldn't it happen again?'

'People,' said Norman Kent, 'may have learnt their les­son.'

Simon swept an impatient gesture.

'Do people learn lessons like that so easily? The men who could teach them are a past generation now. How many are left who are young enough to convince our generation? And even if we are on the crest of a wave of literature about the horrors of war, do you think that cuts any ice? I tell you, I've listened till I'm tired to people of our own age discussing those books and plays—and I know they cut no ice at all. It'd be a miracle if they did. The mind of a healthy young man is too optimistic. It leaps to the faintest hint of glory, and finds it so easy to forget whole seas of ghastliness. And I'll tell you more. ...'

And he told them of what he had heard from Barney Malone.

'I've given you the facts,' he said. 'Now, suppose you saw a man rushing down the street with a contorted face, scream­ing his head off, foaming at the mouth, and brandishing a large knife dripping with blood. If you like to be a fool, you can tell yourself that it's conceivable that his face is contorted because he's trying to swallow a bad egg, he's screaming be­cause someone has trodden on his pet corn, he's foaming at the mouth because he's just eaten a cake of soap, and he's just killed a chicken for dinner and is tearing off to tell his aunt all about it. On the other hand, it's simpler and safer to as­sume that he's a homicidal maniac. In the same way, if you like to be fools, and refuse to see a complete story in what spells a complete story to me, you can go home.'

Roger Conway swung one leg over the arm of his chair and rubbed his chin reflectively.

'I suppose,' he said, 'our job is to find Tiny Tim and see that he doesn't pinch the invention while the Cabinet are still deciding what they're going to do about it?'

The Saint shook his head.

For once, Roger Conway, who had always been nearest to the Saint in all things, had failed to divine his leader's train of thought; and it was Norman Kent, that aloof and silent man, who voiced the inspiration of breath- taking genius—or mad­ness—that had been born in Simon Templar's brain eight hours before.

'The Cabinet,'' said Norman Kent, from behind a screen of cigarette smoke, 'might find the decision taken out of their hands . . . without the intervention of Tiny Tim. ...'

Simon Templar looked from face to face.

For a moment he had an odd feeling that it was like meet­ing the other three again for the first time, as strangers. Patri­cia Holm was gazing through the window at the blue sky above the roofs of Brook Street, and who is to say what vision she saw there? Roger Conway, the cheerful and breezy, waited in silence, the smoke of his neglected cigarette staining his fingers. Norman Kent waited also, serious and absorbed.

The Saint turned his eyes to the painting over the mantel­piece, and did not see it.

'If we do nothing but suppress Tiny Tim,' he said, 'Eng­land will possess a weapon of war immeasurably more power­ful than all the armaments of any other nation. If we stole that away, you may argue that sooner or later some other na­tion will probably discover something just as deadly, and then England will be at a disadvantage.'

He hesitated, and then continued in the same quiet tone.

'But there are hundreds of Tiny Tims, and we can't sup­press them all. No secret like that has ever been kept for long; and when the war came we might very well find the enemy prepared to use our own weapon against us.'

Once again he paused.

'I'm thinking of all the men who'll fight in that next war, and the women who love them. If you saw a man drowning, would you refuse to rescue him because, for all you know, you might only be saving him for a more terrible death years later?'

There was another silence; and in it the Saint seemed to straighten and strengthen and grow, imperceptibly and yet tremendously, as if something gathered about him which actu­ally filled every corner of the room and made him bulk like a preposterously normal giant. And, when he resumed, his voice was as soft and even as ever; but it seemed to ring like a blast of trumpets.

'There are gathered here,' he said, 'three somewhat shop-soiled musketeers—and a blessed angel. Barring the blessed angel, we have all of us, in the course of our young lives, bro­ken half the Commandments and most of the private laws of several countries. And yet, somehow, we've contrived to keep intact certain ridiculous ideals, which to our perverted minds are a justification for our sins. And fighting is one of those ideals. Battle and sudden death. In fact, we must be about the last three men in the wide world who ought to be interfering with the makings of a perfectly good war. Personally, I sup­pose we should welcome it—for our own private amusement. But there aren't many like us. There are too many—far too many—who are utterly different. Men and boys who don't want war. Who don't live for battle, murder, and sudden death. Who wouldn't be happy warriors, going shouting and singing and swaggering into the battle. Who'd just be herded into it like dumb cattle to the slaughter, drunk with a miser­able and futile heroism, to struggle blindly through a few days of squalid agony and die in the dirt. Fine young lives that don't belong to our own barbarous god of battles. . . . And we've tripped over the plans for the next sacrifice, partly by luck and partly by our own brilliance. And here we are. We don't give a damn for any odds or any laws. Will you think me quite mad if I put it to you that three shabby, hell-busting outlaws might, by the grace of God . . .'

He left the sentence unfinished; and for a few seconds no one spoke.

Then Roger Conway stirred intently.

'What do you say?' he asked.

The Saint looked at him.

'I say,' he answered, 'that this is our picnic. We've always known—haven't we?—at the back of our minds, dimly, that one day we were bound to get our big show. I say that this is the cue. It might have come in any one of a dozen different ways; but it just happens to have chosen this one. I'll sum­marise. . . .'

He lighted a fresh cigarette and hitched himself further on to the table, leaning forward with his forearms on his knees and the fine, rake-hell, fighting face that they all, knew and loved made almost supernaturally beautiful with such a light of debonair daredevilry as they had never seen before.