The Saint vs Scotland Yard (The Holy Terror)

'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. . . .'

He stood there as powerless to move as a man in a night­mare, and watched the infinitely slow distention of the tiny crimson sphere under his eyes, his face going ashen with the knowledge of inescapable doom. The drop of blood hypno­tised him, filled his vision till he could see nothing else but the microscopic reflections glistening over the surface of it—until all at once it seemed to grow magically into a coruscating red vesicle of enormous size, thrusting in upon him, bearing him down, filling the whole universe with the menace of its smothering scarlet magnitude. A roaring of mighty waters seethed up about his ears. . . .