The Saint's Getaway

you quickly, old lad,' he said, 'and we'll be on our way again.'

'Have you pinched another car?' asked Monty resignedly. 'And if so, what was wrong with the last one?'

Simon laughed.

'Nothing. Only stolen cars are notified, and that never makes things easier. Besides which, it isn't every day that you knock off a car complete with its tryptique and general docu­ments of identity, and if you hadn't pulled off that fluke yes­terday we should have had a long walk from the frontier. No —I've been over to the station and unearthed a pretty good train, and I don't see why we should turn it down.'

Monty carved an egg.

'Where's Pat?'

'Having breakfast in bed. She was asleep when I went out.'

'She must be stone deaf,' said Monty, glumly. 'No one who wasn't could sleep here in the daytime. There were four thou­sand trams outside my room, and they took every one of them to pieces. I think they used several large hammers and a buzz-saw. Then they threw all the bits through the window of a china-shop and laughed like hell.' Monty Hayward sliced a rasher of bacon with meditative brutality and finished the dish in silence. 'Where do we go to-day?' he inquired.

'Cologne,' said the Saint. 'Where they make the Eau.' He was lighting a cigarette and gazing into the mirror on the wall above Monty's head, watching the two men who had just en­tered the room. They were, in their way, a brace of the most flabbergasting phenomena that he had seen for a long while; and yet they oiled into the inexorable scheme of things with a smoothness that was almost wicked. And the Saint's face was utterly sterile of emotion as he tacked onto his opening an­nouncement the one sweeping qualification that the arrival of those two men implied. 'If we get away at all,' he said.

2

With the cigarette slanting between bis lips and a slow drift of smoke sinking thoughtfully down into his lungs, Simon Templar lounged back in his chair and watched the two detec­tives coming up behind him.

The convex surface of the ornamental glass condensed their imposing figures into the vague semblance of two trousered sausages seen through the wrong end of a telescope; but even so, the grisly secret of their calling was blazoned across their bosoms in letters that the Saint could read five hundred yards away with his eyes closed. That was the one disastrous certainty which emerged unchallenged from the chaotic fact of their arrival. Not once since the first instant when they had bulked ponderously through the doors of the deserted Speisezimmer had the Saint allowed himself to luxuriate in any sedative de­lusions about that. When one has played ducks and drakes with the Law for ten hectic years, and, moreover, when one has been fully occupied for the last three of those years with the business of being the most coveted fox in the whole western hemisphere, one's nose becomes almost tediously fa­miliar with the scent of hounds. And if ever the Saint had sniffed that piquant odour, he could smell it then—one breast-high wave of it, which spumed aromatically past his nostrils with enough pungency to make a salamander sneeze.

How those detectives had got there was still an inch or two beyond him. Granted that in the last twelve hours the purlieus of Innsbruck had been the location of no small excitement, in the course of which a quite unnecessary little man had been violently shoved on out of this world of woe, and an unfortu­nate misunderstanding had caused the three policemen who should have arrested him to be dumped painfully into the cold waters of the Inn—granted, even, that the estimable Monty Hayward was most unjustly suspected of having personally shoved on the aforesaid little man, and was most accurately known to have taken part in the assault and bathing of the po­lice, to have subsequently assaulted one of them a second time, to have appropriated his uniform, and to have stolen a large car—well, a few minor disturbances like these were a small price to pay for the quarter of a million pounds' worth of gen­uine crown jewels. And the Saint had most emphatically done his best to avoid any superfluous unpleasantness. His mind flashed back over the details of the getaway; and at the end of the flash he had to admit that the Law was playing a fast ball. Their passing had been reported from the frontier, of course, as soon as the alarm was raised: that was inevitable; but after that the trail should have petered out—for several hours, anyway. A police organization which, in the short time that had been at its disposal, could discover an abandoned car, and then, by an essentially wearisome system of exhaustive inquir­ies, could trace its fugitive passengers through the separate and devious routes which they had taken to the hotel, argued that somewhere in Munich there were a few devoted souls with no little energy left over from the more important busi­ness of assimilating large quantities of Lowenbrau. It argued a strenuous efficiency that was as upsetting as anything the Saint had seen for many years.

Across the table, Monty Hayward was staring at him puz­zledly, with the last fork-load of egg and bacon poised blankly in midair. And then, for a second, his gaze veered over the Saint's