Call for the Saint

had to confess to himself that so far he'd been working with mists, trying to assemble a concrete pattern, a design out of stuff that emanated almost entirely from his intuitive processes. The promise of hovering danger had dissolved in two unsatisfactory climaxes: the dressing-room brawl, and Fernack's visit. Un­satisfactory because they resolved nothing, answered no ques­tions, gave no reason for the ghostly centipedes he still felt parading up his spine. . . . The mystery of Connie Grady's disproportionate agitation, the Masked Angel's incredible victory, still stood as prime question marks.

But perhaps, he told himself, they weren't real question marks. Perhaps he'd been overdramatizing his perceptions.

Connie was young and in love. Her fear for Steve's safety could well have inspired her strangely distraught plea. And the Masked Angel might have initially stunned Smith with such a short swift jab that his eye had missed it entirely.

He told himself this and knew he was kidding himself. He knew he had missed nothing in the fight. Therefore there must have been something else-something that he still had to search for.

He stood up and stretched himself.

And once again the telephone rang.

'This is getting monotonous,' said the Saint.

He lifted the instrument from its cradle.

'Templar's Telephone Chums, Incorporated,' he said.

Silence.

It was a kind of receptive cylindrical silence, open at both ends.

'We're having a breakfast meeting at 9 a.m.,' Simon con­fided into the receiver. 'Would you like to come too?'

He heard a faint click-a sudden blank deadness.

The Saint hung up thoughtfully; and an airless draught prickled along his nerves like a spectral breeze. It was a well-remembered sensation, a wave length registered on the sensitive antenna of a sixth sense which selected and amplified it throughout his being into an unmistakable alarum. It had warned him before more times than he could remember of impending danger and sudden death-just as it whispered to him now.

Someone had hung up as soon as he'd recognized the Saint's voice. Someone who wanted to make sure whether he was there.

'Hoppy,' he said, 'something tells me we're going to have more visitors tonight.'

Mr. Uniatz's cogitative machinery ground to an excruciat­ing halt.

'What for, boss?'

'It's the price we pay for being so irresistibly attractive.'

He was taking a rapid mental inventory of the room, until his eyes settled on a table lamp with a fairly long cord. He pulled the plug out of the baseboard outlet and broke the lamp cord off close to the lamp, while Hoppy stared at him.

'What gives, boss? What's dat for?'

The Saint nodded at the empty whisky bottle still clutched in Hoppy's hand.

'Take that dead soldier, go to the bathroom, fill it with water, and bring it over here.'

Hoppy opened his mouth to speak, closed it, and lumbered off obediently, confident that on whatever path the Saint pointed for him to follow, devious though it might be, a goal would unfold somehow at the end.

From the chest of drawers in his bedroom the Saint took a slim leather case which, on being unzipped, revealed a highly specialized collection of peculiar articles. Skipping the more obviously illegal tools, he selected a small spool of copper wire, a roll of adhesive tape, and a razor-blade knife. Armed with these, he returned to the entrance hall, where Mr. Uniatz extended the whisky bottle to him as though it contained an unclean substance.

'Here's de water, boss. Whatcha gonna do wit' it?'

'Just hold it for me a minute,' said the Saint. He began to cut several inches of insulation from the broken end of the lamp cord. 'We are preparing a phylactery against zombies,' he explained.

Hoppy's jaw sagged.

'We're preparin' a what against who?'

'An apotropaion, so to speak,' the Saint elucidated.

Hoppy moved nervously aside as the Saint went to the front door and taped one of the two strands of the lamp cord against the metal doorknob. He watched in silent wonder as the Saint unrolled a length of cooper wire, wound the spool end a couple of times around the radiator pipe, and slipped the other end under the door until it projected a foot into the hall outside.

'All right, Hoppy, give me the bottle.'

Simon stepped outside and carefully poured the water on the tile floor in front of his door so that the protruding wire lay in a shallow puddle. He went a couple of paces down the corridor, turned and studied the approach to the living-room door, then came back.

'Boss,' Hoppy sighed, voicing his perennial complaint, 'I don't get it.'

'You will,' said the Saint.

He fastened the other bared end of the drop cord to the radiator with another strip of adhesive and carefully closed the door. Finally he pushed the plug into a nearby baseboard outlet and turned to Hoppy. 'Well,' he said, 'there it is.'

Hoppy stared at the closed door; and his lucubratory proc­esses, oozing like a glutinous stream between narrow banks, at last achieved a spreading delta of cognition. A slow enchanted grin dissolved his facial fog like sunlight on a jungle swamp.

'Chees, boss,' he said in awesome incredulity, 'I do get it!'

'Congratulations.'

'In case de zombies you're expectin' should touch de door­knob,' Hoppy deduced triumphantly. His eyes were worship­ful. 'Ya even got de water puddle grounded, huh?'

The Saint laid his hand on Hoppy's shoulder in an accolade.

'Nothing escapes your eagle eye, does it?'

'Oh, I got experience in dis line, boss,' Mr. Uniatz ac­knowledged deprecatingly. 'Once I do a job on a mug's car wit' a stick of dynamite wired to de starter. De whole mob says it's one of de biggest laughs I ever give dem.'

The Saint surveyed his work with an artist's satisfaction.

'That water grounded to the radiator should lend some authority even to 110 volts-especially if he's in his stockinged feet.' He turned, picking up the wire, knife, and tape, and headed back toward his bedroom. 'Let's grab some shut-eye while we can. It'll be daybreak in a few hours.

CHAPTER FIVE

It was two hours later when he opened his eyes, instantly and completely awake, with every nerve alive and singing. He lay motionless save for the silent closing of his fingers on the gun at his side, every sense toned to razor keen­ness, straining to receive consciously whatever it was that had alerted him. From the next bed Hoppy's snoring rose and fell in majestic rhythm, its pipe-organ vibrato accompanied by a piccolo phrase with every exhalation. . . .

Then he heard it-a faint scratching of metal-and recog­nized it instantly.

A skeleton key was probing the front door lock.

He was out of bed and on his feet in one smooth soundless motion, and laying a hand on Hoppy's mouth. The snoring ceased abruptly; Simon swiftly spoke in his ear, and Hoppy's groggy eruption died aborning. He relaxed, and the Saint re­moved his hand.

'Listen.'

The faint scratching of metal was barely audible.

Hoppy nodded, one hand scratching for the gun under his pillow, his anticipatory grin almost as luminous as the moon­light that poured into the window.

'De Zombies!' he hissed in a resounding whisper that brought Simon's hand back upon his mouth again.

'Quiet!' the Saint breathed savagely.