The Saint's Getaway

TEMPLAR MADE  A  JOURNEY,

AND  PRINCE  RUDOLPH SPOKE  OF  HIS APPENDIX

 

THE Saint went through the sitting-room window in a flying leap that landed him on the turf beyond like a crouching puma.

He paused there for a moment with his eyes and ears alert, sifting the shadows for the tell-tale movement which he knew he would find somewhere. And while he paused he felt his spirits soaring upwards till they knocked their heads against the stars.

The bouncing of the gun artist had done him good—more good even than the initial encounter with the thugs who had been heaved in error into the river. On the whole, those three had only been common, or garden, thugs; whereas the gun artist had prodded his gun into the Saint's spinal purlieus, thereby occasioning him considerable discomfort, uneasiness, and inconvenience. Well, things had happened to the gun artist which ought to learn him. The Saint had picked him up by his ankles, bounced him halfway to the ceiling, and al­lowed him to return to earth under his own steam.

And after that, the temptation to repeat the performance with Prince Rudolf had been almost overwhelming. Only an epic triumph of brains over brawn, a positively prodigious magnificence of will, the Saint modestly believed, had made it possible to withstand the succulent allurements of the idea. But his better judgment, borne up on a wave of Saintly inspiration, told him that the time for playing ball with Rudolf was not yet.

Ten yards away, down by the sheer black walls of the hotel, a blurred glimpse of white showed for the twinkling of an eye, a glimpse that was there and gone again, like the pale belly of a shark turning fathoms deep in a midnight lagoon; and the Saint smiled contentedly. He slipped noiselessly into the murk beside the wall, and followed along on toes that hardly seemed to touch the grass.

The figure ahead was not so stealthy. Simon could hear the soft rustle and pad of thin shoes hurrying over the ground, and once he caught the dry rustling of leaves as the prince scraped past a laurel bush. To a man with the Saint's ears, those sounds were of more value than all the sun arcs in Hollywood: they told him everything he wanted to know, without making his own presence so obvious. Flitting inaudibly behind them, he closed in on his quarry until he could actually hear the prince's steady breathing.

A second later, the sudden squeak of a metal hinge fetched the Saint up all standing. Immediately in front of him he could make out an arched opening in the gloom, and for a moment the prince's silhouette was framed in the gap. Then the hinge squeaked its second protest, and the silhouette was gone.

Simon frowned. Laurel bushes he could cope with, dead twigs likewise, and similarly any of the other hazards of night stalking; but squeaking gates were a notch or two above his form. And the Saint knew that when once a gate has made up its mind to squeak it will surely get its squeak in somehow, even though the hand that shifts it has a touch like gossamer.

Thoughtfully he stepped back.

Seven feet up, the wall through which the arch was cut ended in a flat line of deeper blackness against the dense ob­scurity of the sky. That seemed to be the only hope; and the Saint went for it with a quick spring and a supple pull on his fingers that brought him to the top of the wall like an athletic phantom. He drew his feet up after him without a sound—and stopped there motionless.

Right underneath him a big limousine was parked with its lights out and its engine whispering, barely discernible in the faint luminance which filtered down the alley from an invis­ible street lamp somewhere in the road at the far end. A man in some sort of livery was closing the door, and Simon heard the prince murmur a curt order. The chauffeur hurried round and climbed in behind the wheel. There was a dull click as he engaged the gears; and the headlights cut a wide channel of radiance out of the darkness of the lane.

Without a moment's hesitation, the Saint stepped out into space and spreadeagled himself silently on the roof.

He was aware that he was doing the maddest of mad things. For all he knew, that car might be preparing to hustle to the other end of Europe. If it chose to do so, it could easily travel two hundred miles before it made its first stop; and every one of those miles would have its chance of hurling him off to cer­tain injury and possible death—apart from the ever present risk of discovery. And back in the Hotel Konigshof he had left Monty and Pat to keep their ends up with a corpse and a pris­oner, and not one clue between them to indicate what he ex­pected them to do.

But they would have to pull their own weights in the boat, even as the Saint was pulling his. Patricia he knew like his own hand; and Monty Hayward was a veritable tower of strength. They would find their own solution to the revised problem— even if that solution consisted of nothing more desperate than a policy of masterly inaction.