The Saint's Getaway

again, glazed with that unforgettable film of bitter mockery. Simon set his lips. He couldn't under­stand himself. In everything physical he was the same as he had always required himself to be: his hand was steady, his sight was clear, his heart beat normally. The rhythm of his aim­less hammering still gave him the joy of perfect bodily fitness, trained to the last ounce. And there he was behaving like a frightened schoolboy, losing control of his mind just at the point where it should have been tuning itself up to concert pitch for the showdown.

He forced himself back into the train of thought that kept slipping away from him. How much ground had Marcovitch been able to put between them during those three hours since the carnival in the brake van? Simon tried to work it out again. Half an hour to get to Treuchdingen; at least another half hour to get through to the local police chief; then an hour of romancing and circumstantial fiction. Leaving another hour in which anything might have happened. And meanwhile, what had become of Rudolf? The stolen Rolls would have been recovered before long, once the theft had been notified—cer­tainly before the departure of the next northbound express at five-thirty—and Rudolf would probably elect to follow up by road. He would have to make contact with Marcovitch again somewhere, and Marcovitch was an unstable quantity. The Saint made an effort to put himself in the enemy's place. What would he do if he were Rudolf? He'd have every possible route out of Munich measured out, with points of communication arranged for on all of them. If Marcovitch had succeeded in getting a message back from the station before the train left, which seemed very probable, he would know what road to take as soon as he could find a conveyance; and the rest would sim­ply be a matter of making inquiries at the pre-arranged points along the route to which news might be telephoned. Sooner or later that system would link them up again; and in view of the spare hour with which Simon had to credit Marcovitch, the vote went to sooner. Marcovitch would have made the wires sizzle with the narrative of his accomplishment at the earliest opportunity, and the panegyric would already be waiting for Rudolf to catch it up. Ingolstadt seemed a likely junction. . . . Which meant that Rudolf might even then be speeding on into Treuchtlingen to take over the command. ... And if Mar­covitch and his aviary of jailbirds were actually holding on in Treuchtlingen, waiting for Rudolf to meet them there . . .

The Saint took a grim hold on himself. Once again the thread had slipped through a loophole in his mind at that point, as it had done every time before. The fog swirled up again, blotting it out in a maddening haze. He wrestled against it in a moment of frozen savagery, but the mists only swelled thicker. The thread had gone back on him for good, and his own efforts to recapture it only seemed to drive the loose end into a more infuriating obscurity. He felt as if his brain had chosen that moment to fall into a sluggish conflict of cross-purposes with itself—as if one part of it had mutinied and dis­ordered the clean running of the rest, jarring through insubordinately with a shapeless idea of its own. And it was not until many weeks afterwards, when he recalled that span of unaccountable impotence, that he could see in it the inter­ference of some psychic power which was beyond understand­ing.

He looked up at the flat, concrete face of the police station. Other windows were lighting up as the dusk overtook them, slashing their mathematical squares of luminousness out of the grey blankness of the wall. The low rectangle of doorway was still dark, like a cuneiform rat's hole.

Simon passed a hand over his eyes.

'If we knew which of these things were telephone wires, we might cut 'em,' he said, without a change in the cool level of his voice. 'I'm not sure that we mayn't have disorganized some­thing already—those were two very classy-looking bits of wire before I repaired 'em.'

That was all he said. And he left off speaking so naturally that for several seconds Monty Hayward guessed nothing of what had happened.

And yet before the last words were out of his mouth Simon Templar had seen a thing which crushed every other thought out of his head; It burst in on his senses with the stupefying concussion of an exploded bomb, gripping his brain in an icy constriction of sheer paralysis, so that for one heart-stopping instant the whole world seemed to stand still all round him. And then the full torrent of comprehension weltered down on him like a landslide and shattered the fragile stillness as though it had been held in a gigantic bubble of glass, blasting the shredded fragments of his universe into a swimming vortex of incoherence that made the blood roar in his ears like a hun­dred dynamos.

It had started so very quietly and gently that he had watched its approach without the slightest flicker of suspicion. His eyes had taken it in exactly as they took in the details of the sur­rounding houses, or an individual cobblestone among the scores that lay all around him—merely as one uneventful item of the general street scene with no particular significance in itself. He sat there and spread himself wide open to it, wide open as a new-born babe crowing innocently at the distended hood of a cobra.

Three people were coming down the road.