The Saint's Getaway

pointing them out one by one in a dumb-show that registered a Wagnerian crescendo of distress and disapproval. Monty knelt down beside the hole and shook his head in manifest sympathy. Rousing himself from his grief, the Saint picked up a hammer and launched a frenzied as­sault on the nearest length of lead pipe. It lasted for the best part of a minute; and then the Saint sat back and surveyed the dents he had made with an air of professional satisfac­tion.

'Gimme that file,' he grunted.

Monty pasted it over; and the Saint bowed his head and began to saw furiously at the angles of a joint that he had spotted lower down in the pit.

If there had been any genuine experts in the vicinity that performance would never have got by for ten seconds; but no one seemed sufficiently inquisitive to make a lengthy study of the Saint's original methods. Hardly anyone gave them a second glance. Planted right out there in the naked expanse of the highway, they were hidden as effectively as if they had buried themselves under the ground. And the necks of Treucht­lingen were innocent of the taint of rubber. An occasional automobile honked round them, and a dray backed up close to Monty's posterior and parked there while the driver went into a good pull-up for carmen. Apart from the infrequent sounds of plodding boots or grinding machinery going past them, they might have been a couple of ancient lights for all the sensation they provoked. So long as he didn't electrocute himself or carve into a gas main and blow the windows out of the street, the Saint figured that he was on velvet

And if he had wanted to be near the scene of action, he couldn't have got much closer without walking in and intro­ducing himself. As he bent down over his improvised program of free services to the Treuchtlingen municipality, he could study the whole architecture of the police station under his left arm—a drab, two-storied building to which not even the kindly shades of the evening could lend any mystery. It stood up as squat and unimaginative as the laws behind it, a monument of prosaic modernity wedged in among the random houses of a more leisurely age. Simon looked up at the regular squares of window that divided the stark facade in geometric sym­metry, and saw the first of them light up.

'Six-thirty,' he said to Monty. 'Nina must be getting them warmed.'

Monty fiddled with a spanner.

'There's no chance that she left before we arrived, is there? She might have got what she wanted quicker than we expected.'

'Not here or anywhere else, in a blockhouse like that. There isn't a government official anywhere in the world who could get anything done in less than seventy-nine times as long as it'd take you or me to do it. They're all born with moss under their feet—it's one of the qualifications.'

The Saint lugged out another line of cable and battered it ferociously with a chisel. Underneath the triviality of his words ran a thin, taut thread of strain. Monty heard it then for the first time, hardening the edges of Simon's voice. There was no weakness about it, no trace of fear: it was the strain of a man whose faculties were strung up to a singing intensity of alertness, the cold expectancy of a boxer waiting to enter the ring. It showed up something that Monty alone had overlooked dur­ing those fourteen hours of his adventure. The Saint's own op­timism had made it all seem so easy, even in its craziest gyra­tions; and yet that very smoothness had derived itself from nothing but the steel core of inflexible purpose behind the whimsical blue eyes that had unconsciously slitted themselves down for a moment into two splinters of the same steel. And the story had still to be brought to the only possible end. ...

Simon snapped his cable in the middle, tied the pieces to­gether again, wrapped a strip of insulating tape round the connection, and hammered it out flat. His movements had the gritty restraint of fettered impatience. Inside that cubist's bellyache of a fortress the real work was being done for him by a girl; and as the time went on he knew that he would rather have done it himself—shot up the police station in per­son and extracted his information at the snout of a Webley. Anything would have been better than that period of nerve-rasping inaction. He knew that he was thinking like a fool— that any such course would have been nothing short of a high road to suicide—but he couldn't help thinking it. The suspense had started to tug at the muscles of his stomach in an inter­mittent discharge of hampered energy. Somehow it shook up the cool flow of his mind, when he should have been focusing solely on the task that was coming to him as soon as the infor­mation was obtained. It was as if he had been trying to see down into a pool of clear water, and every now and then something in the depths stirred up a cloud of silt and swal­lowed up his objective in a turbid fog. Somewhere in that fog Marcovitch was sneering at him, capering farther and farther beyond his reach. ...

A chilled drop of moisture trickled clammily down his side, and the Saint shook himself in the sudden astonishment of finding that he was sweating. The pale eyes of Josef Krauss loomed up before him