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now he was as smooth and cool as a hand-trued machine, and his pulses were as
light as the ripples on a landlocked bay at sunset. Now he backed noiselessly
out of his neutral corner and flattened himself easily along the wall, towards
the front door and away from the rooms, so that the visitor would have to step
clear into the living-room before he could see the Saint at all.
The Saint's ears followed the movements in the bedroom step by step. He heard
the occasional scuff of exploring feet, and a hoarse "For Christ's sake, hurry
up!" There was the clicking of the blind again, and more movement. It was
surprising how you could hear sounds, after all, in spite of the radio: when
it came to the point, these sounds had a totally different texture, so that
there was no confusion, just as you could have heard a hiccup in the next seat
in a movie in spite of the sound effects of a newsreel bombardment. He could
even hear the thin strained sound of consciously controlled breathing.
In addition, he became ethereally aware of a new richness in the atmosphere
which he could still identify in spite of his recent bludgeoning by the
assorted smells of Mrs Ourley, and he knew that he was perceiving the
particularly obnoxious pomade of Mr Varetti even before the sleek head that
wore it slid into his sidelong field of vision.
Varetti stood looking down at the rawhide bag as Cokey Walsh followed him out
of the bedroom.
"Here it is," he said, with superfluous but deep satisfaction.
"If only that sonofabitch Templar was here too," said Mr Walsh, "I'd like to
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. . ."
He enumerated a few things he would have liked to do which it would be
useless to repeat here, since the elevated minds of the readers of this
reportage would never believe that any person could have such depraved
ambitions.
Varetti, a more practical man, cut him off in the middle of a fine phrase
with the kind of question which from time immemorial has nipped the poet's
prettier fancies in the bud.
""Why don't you shut your trap?"
He picked up the heavy bag with an effort.
"We'll walk down the stairs and walk straight out the front," he said.
"Suppose he's in the lobby," Cokey suggested.
"You go ahead and make sure he isn't."
"I wanna see that sonofabitch again."
"You'll have plenty of time."
Varetti turned towards the door. And there the Saint faced him, elegant and
graceful and smiling, with his gun level and tremor less at his waist and blue
lights of devilish mockery dancing in his eyes.
It seemed quite unfortunate at that moment that the Algonquin Hotel had
omitted to provide two vats of soft plaster of paris among the otherwise
well-planned furnishings of the joint. If it had not been for that almost
incredible lack of foresight, the cataleptic rigidity of the two men might
easily have allowed the Saint to immerse them and withdraw them again without
the slightest disturbance of their articulation, thereby creating a pair! of
moulds for which any wax museum would have been glad to bid. But such sad
wastes are an inevitable symptom of our un-planned economy, and Simon Templar
had learned to exercise his philosophy on them.
He said, without undue gloom: "The hands up and clasped behind the back of
the head, gentlemen if you don't mind my borrowing your own fancy formula,
Ricco. Although to be quite' candid it just struck me that your vocabulary had
slipped a bit. Or is it because you save your party dialogue for the cash
customers?"
Varetti put the bag down gradually and deliberately, and raised his hands in
the same way, so that his movements were rather like those of a trained snake;
and his eyes were a snake's eyes, bright and beady and unblinking.
"How the hell did you get here?" demanded Mr "Walsh, almost indignantly.
"I heard you wanted me," said the Saint, "so I came a-running. A little
faster with the hands, if you don't mind, Cokey. . . . Thank you. . . . Now if
you'll both turn your backs I'll see whether you've picked up any new weapons
since we last met, and if you are very polite I may refrain from goosing you."
Apparently they had been rushed out of either the time or the opportunity to
replenish their armory, or else they had anticipated no such disconcerting
need for one, for the only trophy which rewarded his excavations was a
six-inch jackknife from the pocket of Comrade Varetti with a trick spring that
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whipped the blade open when you pressed a button.
The Saint was not too disappointed. He had discovered before then that it is
only in the less conscientious crime stories that the ungodly are endowed with
inexhaustible reserves of artillery from which they can rebound on a few
minutes' notice from any setback, armed to the teeth again and spitting [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]