The Saint's Getaway

Europe who doesn't know our horrid histories by lunch-time; and if our pals among the ungodly can't raise a fleet of cars with the legs of this one you may call me Archi­bald. You were thinking we'd finished—and we've only just begun!' All at once the Saint laughed. 'But shall I tell you?'

Monty nodded.

'I'll give you a new angle on the life of crime,' said the Saint lavishly. 'I'll hand it you for nothing, Mont—the angle that your bunch of footling authors never get. Every one of 'em makes the same mistake, just like you made yourself. Take this: Any fool can biff a policeman on the jaw. Every other fool can swipe a can of assorted bijouterie that's simply dropped into his lap. And any amount of mutts can throw a bluff that'll get by—once, for a ten-minute session. Believe it or not. And then you think it's all over bar the anthem. But it isn't. It's only just started on its way.'

Monty accepted the proposition without comment. After a moment's consideration, the uncompromising accuracy of it was self-evident.

He drove on in silence, squeezing the last possible kilometer per hour out of the powerful engine. From time to time he stole a glimpse at the driving mirror, momentarily expecting to see the darkness of the road behind bleached with the first fault nimbus of pursuing headlights. It was strange how the intoxication of the chase, following on the turbulent course of that night's unsought adventure, had sapped his better judg­ment—stranger still, perhaps, how the foundations of his cau­tious common sense had been undermined by so much event­ful proximity to a man whom in normal times he had always regarded as slightly, if quite pleasantly, bugs. The rush of the wind stroked his face with a hypnotic gentleness; the hum of the machine and the lifting sense of speed soothed his con­science like an insidious drug. For one dizzy moment it seemed to him that there must be worse ways of spending a night and the day after it—that there were more soul-destroying things in a disordered world than biffing policemen on the jaw and flying from multiple vengeance on the hundred horses of a modern highwayman's Mercedes Benz. He thought like that for one moment of incredible insanity; and then he thought it again, and decided that he must be very ill.

But a tincture of that demoralized elation stayed with him and lent an indefinable zest to the drive, while the sky paled for the dawn and the stolen car slid swiftly down the long slopes of the Bavarian hills toward Munich. Beside him, Si­mon Templar calmly went to sleep. ...

The rim of the sun was just topping the horizon, and the air was full of the unforgettable sweet dampness of the morning, when the first angular suburbs of the city swam towards them out of the bare plain; and the Saint roused and stretched him­self and felt for the inevitable cigarette. As the streets narrowed and grew gloomier, he picked up his bearings and began to direct the edging of their route eastward. It was full daylight when they pulled up before the Ostbahnhof, and an early street car was disgorging its load of sleepy workmen towards the portals of the station. Simon swung himself over the side and piled their light luggage out on the pavement. He touched Monty on the shoulder.

'I think we're a bit conspicuous as a trio,' he said. 'But if you hopped that street car it'd take you to the Hauptbahnhof, and the Metropole is almost opposite. We'll see you there.'

And once again Monty Hayward found himself alone. He made his way to the hotel as he had been instructed, and found Patricia and the Saint waiting for him. Monty felt a little bit too tired to argue. Left to himself, he would have kept moving till he dropped, with the one idea of setting as many miles as possible between his own rudder and the wrath to come. And yet, when he rolled into bed half an hour later, he had a com­fortable feeling that he had earned his rest. There is something about the lethargy of healthy physical fatigue, allied with the appreciation of dangers faced and survived, a sense of omnipo­tence and recklessness, which awakes the springs of an unfathomable primitive contentment; something that can stupefy all present questions along with all past philosophic doubts; something that can wipe away the strains of civilized complex­ity from a man's mind, and give him the peace of an animal and the sleep of a child.

Monty Hayward would have slept like a child if it had not been for the endless stream of street cars, which thundered beneath his window, rattling in every joint, clanging enor­mous bells, blowing hooters, torturing their brakes, crashing, colliding, spraying their spare parts onto large sheets of tin, and generally straining every bolt to uphold the standard of nerve-shattering din of which, the continent of Europe is so justly proud.

He surrendered the unequal contest towards midday and went in search of a bathroom. Shaved and dressed, and feeling a little better, he descended on the dining room in the hope of finding some relics of breakfast with which to complete the restoration of his tissues; and his apologetic order had scarcely been executed when the Saint sauntered in and joined him, looking so intolerably fresh and fit that Monty could have as­saulted him.

'Get those Spiegeleier inside