16 The Saint Overboard

Vogel held her for a second, staring at her; and then he put her down in a chair. She lay there with her head lolling sideways and her red lips open, all the warm golden life of her tempting and unconscious; and he gazed at her in hungry triumph for a moment longer before he rang the bell again for the steward.

'We will dine at eight,' he said; and the man nodded wood­enly. 'There will be smoked salmon, langoustine Grand Duc, Supreme de volatile Bergerette, fraises Mimosa.'

'Yes, sir.'

'And let us have some of that Chateau Lafitte 1906.'

He dismissed the man with a wave of his hand, and carefully pierced the end of a cigar. On his way out on to the deck he stopped by Loretta's chair and stroked her cheek . . .

All the late afternoon Simon Templar heard the occasional drone of the winch, the heavy tramp of feet on the deck over his head and the mutter of hoarse voices, the thuds and gratings of the incredible cargo coming aboard and being manhandled into place; and he also thought of Peter and Roger and Orace and the Corsair, back in St Peter Port, as Loretta had done. But most of all he was thinking of her, and tormenting himself with unanswerable questions. It was nearly eight o'clock when at last all the noises ceased, and the low-pitched thrum of the engines quivered again under his feet. He looked out of the port-hole, over the sheen of the oily seas streaming by, and saw that they were heading directly away from the purple wall of cloud rimmed with scarlet where the sun was dipping to its rest. A seaman guarded by two others who carried revolvers brought him a tray of food and a glass of wine; and half an hour later the same cortege came back for the tray and removed it without speaking. Simon lighted a cigarette and heard the key turn in the lock after them. For the best part of another hour he sat on the bunk with his knees propped up, leaning against the bulkhead, smoking and thinking, while the shadows spread through the cabin and deepened towards darkness, before he ventured to take out the instrument which Fortune had placed in his hands so strangely while he was opening the strong-room of the Chalfont Castle in the green depths of the sea.

VIII.    HOW SIMON TEMPLAR USED HIS KNIFE,

            AND KURT VOGEL WENT DOWN TO HIS TREASURE

THE lock surrendered after only five minutes of the Saint's silent and scientific attack.

Not that it had ever had much chance to put up a fight. It was quite a good reliable lock by ordinary domestic standards, a sound and solid piece of mechanism that would have been more than adequate for any conventional purpose, but it had never been constructed to resist an expert probing with the sort of tool which Simon Templar was using.

Simon kissed the shining steel implement ecstatically before he put it away again in his pocket. It was much more than a scrap of cunningly fashioned metal. At that moment it represented the consummation of Vogel's first and only and most staggering mis­take—a mistake that might yet change the places of victory and defeat. By sending him down to open the strong-room, Vogel had given him the chance to select the instrument from the burglar's kit with which he had been provided, and to slip it under the rubber wristbands into the sleeve of his diving dress; by letting him come up alive, Vogel had given him the chance to use it; by giving him the chance to use it, Vogel had violated the first canon of the jungle in which they both lived—that the only enemy from whom you have nothing to fear is a dead enemy ... It was all perfectly coherent and logical, as coherent and logical as any of Vogel's own tactical exercises, lacking only the first cause which set the rest in motion. For two hours Simon had been trying to discover that first cause, and even then he had only a fantastic theory to which he trembled to give credence. But he would find out . . .

A mood of grim and terrible exhilaration settled on him as he grasped the handle of the door and turned it slowly and without sound. At least, whatever the first cause, he had his chance; and it was unlikely that he would have another. Within the next hour or so, however long he could remain at large, his duel with Kurt Vogel must be settled one way or the other, and with it all the questions that were involved. Against him he had all Vogel's generalship, the unknown intellectual quantity of Otto Arnheim, and a crew of at least ten of the toughest twentieth-century pirates who ever sailed the sea; for him he had only his own strength of arm and speed of wit and eye, and the advantage of surprise. The odds were enough to set his mouth in a hard fight­ing line, and yet there was a glimmer of reckless laughter in his eyes that would have flung defiance at ten times the odds. He had spent his life going up against impossible hazards, and he had the knowledge that he could have nothing worse to face than he had faced already.

The latch turned back to its limit, and he drew the door stealth­ily towards him. It came back without a creak; and he peered out into the alleyway through the widening aperture. Opposite him were other doors, all of them closed. He put his head cau­tiously out and looked left and right. Nothing. The crew must