16 The Saint Overboard

mounted close to his head sprang into life, flooding the foredeck and the sea ahead with its blazing beam. As they glided on over the black water, the danc­ing light which he had observed proved to be a lantern standing on one of the thwarts of a dinghy in which a solitary man was leaning over the gunnel fishing for a cork buoy. The helmsman came forward into the drench of light and took the mooring from him with a boathook, making it fast on one of the forward bollards; and the dinghy bumped along the side until the boat­man caught the short gangway and hauled himself dexterously on board, while the Falkenberg's engines roared for a moment in reverse. Then the engines stopped, and the searchlight went out again.

'Ah, mon cher Baudier!' Vogel greeted his visitor at the door of the wheelhouse. 'Ca va bien? Entrez, entrez——'

He turned to the helmsman.

'Tell Ivaloff to be ready to go down in a quarter of an hour. And tell Calvieri to have a dress ready for me. I shall be along in a few minutes.'

'Sofort.'

The seaman moved aft along the deck, and Vogel rejoined Baudier and Arnheim in the wheelhouse. And the Saint drew himself up on his toes and fingertips and shot after the helmsman like a great ghostly crab.

Only the Saint's own guardian angel could have said what was in the Saint's mind at that moment. The Saint himself had no very clear idea. And yet he had made one of the wildest and most desperate decisions of his life in an immeasurable fraction of a second—a decision that he probably would not have dared to make if he had stopped to think about it. He hadn't even got the vaguest idea of the intervening details between the first movement and the final result which he had visioned in that microscopical splinter of time. They could be filled in later. The irresistible surge of inspiration had taken all those petty triviali­ties in its stride, outdistancing logic and coherent planning . . . Without knowing very clearly why, the Saint found himself spreadeagled on the roof again in front of the unsuspectingly ambulating seaman; and as the man passed underneath him Si­mon's arm shot out and grasped him by the throat . . .

Before the cry which the man might have uttered could gain outlet it was choked back into his gullet by the merciless clutch of those steel fingers, and before he could tear the fingers away the Saint's weight had dropped silently on his shoulders and borne him down to the deck. Staring up with shocked and dilated eyes as he fought, the man saw the cold flash of a knife-blade in the dim light; and then the point of the knife pricked him under the chin.

The Saint's fierce whisper sizzled in his ear.

'Wenn du einen Laut von dir gibst, schneide ich dir den Kopf ab.'

The man made no sound, having no wish to feel the hot bite of that vicious blade searing through his neck. He lay still; and the Saint slowly released the grip on his throat and used his freed hand to take the automatic from the man's hip pocket. Then he took his knee out of the man's chest.

'Get up.'

The man worked himself slowly to his feet, with the muzzle of the gun grinding into his breastbone and the knife still under his eyes.

'Do you want to live to a ripe old age, Fritz?' asked the Saint gently.

The man nodded dumbly, licking his lips. And the Saint's white teeth flashed in a brief and cheerless smile.

'Then you'd better listen carefully to what I'm saying. You're not going to take all of that message to Ivaloff. You're going to take me along, and tell him that Vogel says I'm to go down. That's all. You won't see this gun any more, because it'll be in my pocket; but it'll be quite close enough to hit you. And if you make the slightest attempt to give me away, or speak one word out of your turn, I'll blow the front out of your stomach and let your dinner out for some air. Do you get my drift or shall I say it again?'

2

As they moved on, Simon amplified his instructions. He re­placed his knife in its sheath and put it inside his shirt; the gun he slipped into his trouser pocket, turning it up so that he could fire fairly easily across his body. He was still building up his plan while he was giving his orders. Crazy? Of course he was. But any man who was going to win a fight like that had to be crazy any­how.

And now he could fill in the steps of reasoning which the wild leap of his inspiration had ignored. The sight of those cases of bullion stacked around the after deck had started it; the grab not yet dismantled and lashed down had helped. Vogel's talk about unloading the gold had fitted in. And then, when he had heard Vogel