Knight Templar, or The Avenging Saint

'Have we the right to risk failure?' Simon asked.

'Have you the right to turn back?' the girl answered him. 'Have you the right to turn back and start all over again—when you might go forward?'

The Saint nodded.

'I just meant to ask you, Sonia. And you've given your answer. More—you've taken the words out of my mouth, and the objections I'm making are the ones you ought to have made.'

'I've thought of them all.'

'Then—we go forward.'

The Saint spoke evenly, quite softly; yet Roger seemed to hear a blast of bugles. And the Saint went on:

'We've had enough of war. Fighting is for the strong—for those who know what they're fighting for, and love the fight for its own sake. We were like that, my friends and I—and yet we swore that it should not happen again. Not this new fighting—not this cold-blooded scientific maiming and slaughter of school-boys and poor grown-up fools herded to squalid death to make money for a bunch of slimy financiers. We saw it coming again. The flags flying, and the bands playing, and the politicians yaddering about a land fit for heroes to live in, and the poor fools cheering and being cheered, and another madness, worse than the last. Just another war to end war. . . . But we know that you can't end war by war. You can't end war by any means at all, thank God, while men believe in right and wrong, and some of them have the courage to fight for their belief. It has always been so. And it's my own creed. I hope I never live to see the day when the miserable quibbling hair-splitters have won the earth, and there's no more black and white, but everything's just a dreary relative gray, and everyone has a right to his own damned heresies, and it's more noble to be broadminded about your disgusting neighbours than to push their faces in as a preliminary to yanking them back into the straight and narrow way. . . . But this is different. There's no crusading about it. It's just mass murder — for the benefit of the men with the big bank balances. That's what we saw — and we were three blistered outlaws who'd made scrap-iron of every law in Europe, on one quixotic excuse or another, just to make life tolerable for ourselves in this half­hearted civilization. And when we saw that, we knew that we'd come to the end of our quest. We'd found the thing worth fighting for — really worth fighting for — so much more worth fighting for than any of the little things we'd fought for before. One of us has already died for it. But the work will go on. ...'

And suddenly the Saint stood up.

And all at once, in that swift movement, with the old gay devil-may-care smile awakening again on his lips, Simon Templar seemed to sweep the room clear of all doubts and shadows, leaving only the sunlight and the smile and the far cry of impos­sible fanfares.

'Let's go!'

'Where?' demanded Roger helplessly; and the Saint laughed.

'On the job, sweetheart,' he said—'on the job! Here—shunt yourself and let me get at that telephone.'

Roger shunted dazedly, and watched the Saint dial a number. The Saint's face was alight with a new laughter; and, as he waited, he began to hum a little tune. For the wondering and wavering was over, the speculating and the scheming, the space for physical inaction and sober counsel—those negative things at which the Saint's flaming vital­ity would always fret impatiently. And once again he was on the move—swift, smiling, cavalier, with a laugh and a flourish for battle and sudden death and all good things, playing the old game with all the magnificent zest that only he could bring to it.

'Hullo. Can I speak to Dr. Marius, please? . . . Templar—Simon Templar.. . .Thank you.'

Roger Conway said, suddenly, sharply: 'Saint—you're crazy! You can't do it! The game's too big—'

'Who wants to play for brickdust and bird­seed?' Simon required to know.

And then, before Roger could think of an ade­quate retort to such an arrogance, he had lost any audience he might have had. For the Saint was speaking to the man he hated more than anyone else in the world.

'Is that you, Marius, my little lamb?' Genially, almost caressingly, the Saint spoke. 'And how's Heinrich? . . . Yes, I thought you'd have heard I was back. I'd have rung you up before, only I've been so busy. As a medical man, I can't call my time my own. Only last night I had an extraordi­nary case. Did Heinrich tell you? . . . Yes, I expected he would. I think he was very struck with my methods. Quiet—er—dazzled, in fact. . . . No, nothing in particular. It just occurred to me to soothe my ears with the sound of your sweet voice. It's such a long time since we had our last heart-to-heart talk. . . . The invalid? . . . Oh, getting on as well as can be expected. She ought to be fit to go back to the Embassy to-morrow. . . . No, not to­day. That dope you used on her seems to have a pretty potent follow-through, and I never send my patients home till they've got a bounce on them that's a free advertisement for the cure. . . . Well, you can remember me to Rudolf. I may drop in at the Ritz and have a cocktail with him before lunch. Bye-bye, Angel Face. ...'

He hung up the receiver.

'Beautiful,' he murmured ecstatically. 'Too, too beautiful! When it comes to low cunning, I guess that little cameo makes Machiavelli look like Little Red Riding Hood. Angel Face was great—he kept his end up right through the round—but I heard him take the bait. Distinctly. It fairly whis­tled through his epiglottis. . . . D'you get the idea, my Roger?'

'I don't,' Conway admitted.

Simon looked at the girl.

'Do you, Sonia?'

She also shook her head; and the Saint laughed and helped himself to another cigarette.

'Marius knows I've got you,' he said. 'He thinks he knows that you're still laid out by his dope. And he knows that I wouldn't tell the world I've got you—things being as they are. On that reckoning, then, he's got a new lease of life. He's got a day in which to find me and take you away.

And he thinks I haven't realized that—and he's wrong!'

'Very lucid,' observed Roger sarcastically. 'But I gather he's supposed to find out where we are.'

'I've told him.'

'How?'

'At this moment, he's finding out my telephone number from the exchange.'

'What good will that do him? The exchange won't give him your address.'

The Saint grinned.

'Roger,' he remarked dispassionately, 'you have fully half as much brain as a small boll-weevil. A very small boll-weevil. Your genius for intrigue would probably make you one of the most successful glue-boilers that ever lived.'

'Possibly. But if you'd condescend to ex­plain—'

'But it's so easy!' cried the Saint. 'I had to do it tactfully, of course. I couldn't say anything that would let him smell the hook. Thanks to our recent encounter, he knows we're not solid bone from the gargle upwards; and if I'd dropped a truckload of bricks on his Waukeezis, he'd've stopped and thought for a long time before he picked one up. But I didn't. I only dropped that one little bricklet—just big enough for him to feel the im­pact, and just small enough for him to be able to believe I hadn't seen it go. And Angel Face is so clever. . . . What d'you think he's doing now?'

'Boiling glue,' suggested Roger.

'He's got his whole general staff skidding through the telephone directory like so many hun­gry stockbrokers humming down the latest Wall Street prices during a slump. The exchange will have told him that the call didn't come from a public call box, and that alone will have made him shift his ears back two inches. The only other thing that could put salt horse in his souffle would be if the call turned out to have been put through from a hotel or a restaurant; but he'd have to take his chance on that. And he'd know there was a shade of odds in his favour. No, Roger—you can bet your last set of Aertex that the entire personnel of the ungodly is at this moment engaged in whiffling through every telephone number in the book as they've never whiffled before; and in anything from one to thirty minutes from now, according to how they split up the comic annuaire between them, one of them will be letting out a shrill squawk of triumph and starting to improvise a carol about 7, Upper Berkeley Mews.'

'And how does that help us?' asked Roger.

'Like this,' said the Saint, and proceeded to ex­plain thus and thus.