This is the first of the very-good-read short stories. The Saint was a popular character series written by Leslie Charteris that ran from the late 1920s to the early 1960s. Several Hollywood movies were made of the character. Charteris was a great pulp science fiction fan and he donated this one story, the only Saint fantasy to Thrilling Wonder Stories in the mid 1950s. The last page of my copy went missing so I wrote the final page of the below version. The illustrations are by Virgil Finlay in his inimitable style.
The Darker Drink
(She came wearily into the cabin, her
dress torn provocatively.- Chap. II)
Chapter I
Cabin in the Pines
Simon Templar looked up from the frying pan in which
six mountain trout were developing a crisp golden tan. Above the gentle sputter
of grease the sound of feet on dry pine needles crackled thru the cabin window.
It didn’t
cross his mind that the sound carried menace, for it was twilight in the
Sierras and the dusky calm stirred only with the rustling of Nature at peace.
…
The footsteps came nearer with a kind of desperate
urgency. Simon moved the frying pan off the flames and flowed, rather than
walked, to where he could see thru windows in two directions.
A man came out
of the pines. He was traveling on the short side of a dead run but straining
with every gasping breath to step up his speed. He came, hatless and coatless,
across the pine-carpeted clearing toward the cabin door.
He burst thru
it – and in spite of his relaxation the Saint felt a simmer of anticipatory
approval. If his solitude had to be intruded on, this was the way it should
happen. Unannounced. At a dead run.
The visitor
slammed the door, shot the bolt, whirled around and seemed to fold in the
middle. He saw the Saint. His jaw sagged, swung adrift on its hinges for a
moment, then imitated a steel trap. After the sharp click of his teeth, he
said, “How did you get in here? Where’s Dawn?”
“Dawn?” Simon
echoed lazily. “If you’re referring to the rosy-fingered goddess who peels away
the darkness each morning, she’s on the twelve-hour shift, chum. She’ll be
around at the regular time.”
“I never
dreamed you here,” the man said. “Who are you?”
“You dropped a
word,” the Saint said. “‘I never dreamed you were here’ makes more sense.”
“Rats,
brother. You’re part of my dream, and I never saw you before. You don’t even
have a name. All the others have, complete with backgrounds. But I can’t place
you. Funny, I – Look here! You’re not real are you?”
“The last time
I pinched myself I yelped.”
“This is
crazy,” the man muttered.
He walked
across the pine floor to within a couple of feet of the Saint. He was breathing
easier now and the Saint examined him impassively.
He was big,
only a shade under the Saint’s six feet two, with sandy hair, a square jaw and
hard brown eyes.
“May I?” he
said, and pinched the Saint. He sighed. “I was afraid this was happening. When
I put my arms around Dawn Winter in my dreams she – “
“Please,” the
Saint broke in. “Gentlemen don’t go into lurid detail after the lady has a
name.”
“Oh, she’s
only part of my dream.” The stranger stared into space and an almost tangible
aura of desire formed about him. “Lord!” he whispered. “I really dreamed up
something in her.”
“We must swap
reminiscences some day,” the Saint said. “But at the moment the pine-scented
breeze is laden with threshings in the underbrush.”
“I’ve got to
hide. Quick! Where can I get out of sight?”
The Saint
waved expressively at the single room. In its 400 square feet (20 x 20) one
might hide a large bird if it were camouflaged as an atlas or something, but
that would be about the limit.
Furthermore, two bunk beds (top & bottom double)
were made with hospital precision, and even a marble would have bulged under
their tight covers. The deck chairs wouldn’t offer sanctuary for even an
undernourished mouse, the table was hi and wide-open beneath the rough top and
the small bookcase was made to display its contents.
“If we had
time,” the Saint mused. “I could candy stripe you – if I had some red paint –
and put on a barber’s smock. Or – er – you say you’re dreaming all this?”
“That’s right.”
“Then why don’t
you wake up – and vanish?”
The Saint’s
visitor unhappily gnawed his full underlip.
“I always have
before, when the going got tough, but – oh, heck, I don’t know what’s going on
but I don’t want to die – even in my dream. Death is so – so –“
“Permanent?”
“Mmm, I guess.
Listen, would you be a pal and try to steer these guys away? They’re after me.”
“Why should I?”
“Yeah,” the
man said. “You don’t owe me a thing but I’m trying to help Dawn. She –“
He broke off to fish an object out of his
watch pocket. This was a small chamois bag and out of it he took something that
pulsed with incredible fires. He handed it to the Saint.
“That’s Dawn.”
The circular
fire opal blazed with living beauty – blue, green, gold, cerise (deep pinkish
red), chartreuse (yellowish green) – and the Saint gasped with reverent wonder
as he looked at the cameo carved in the unbelievable gem.
There is
beauty to which one can put a name. There is beauty that inspires awe, bravery,
fear, lust, greed, passion. There is beauty that softens the savage blows of
fate. There is beauty that drives to hi adventure, to violence.
That stone,
and above all the face cut eternally on its incandescent surface was beauty
beyond definition. No man could look on that face and ever know complete peace
again.
She was the
lily maid of Astelot (Arthurean heroine in hi castle tower guarded by
Lancelot), the lost loveliness that all men seek and never find, the nameless
desire that haunts the ragged edge of sleep, that curls a lonely smile and
sends vacant eyes searching far spaces.
Her face was
made for – and of? The Saint asked himself – dreaming.
“Count me in,
old boy.”
He went
outside. Thru the dusky stillness the far off unseen feet pounded nearer.
The feet were
four; the men, with mathematical logic, two. One might be a jockey, the other a
weight lifter. They tore out of the forest, confronted the Saint.
“Did you see a
kind of big dopey-lookin’ lug?” the jockey asked.
The Saint
pointed to the other side of the clearing, where the hill pitched down.
“He went that
way – in a tremendous rush.”
“Thanks, pal.”
They were off,
hot on the imaginary trail, and the sounds of their passage soon faded. The
Saint went inside.
“They’ll be
back,” he said. “But meanwhile we can clear up a few points. Could you down a
brace of trout? They’ve probably cooled enough to eat.”
“What do you
mean, they’ll be back?”
“It’s
inevitable,” Simon pointed out as he put coffee on, set the table and gathered
cutlery. “They won’t find you. They want to find you. So they’ll be back with
questions. Since those questions will be directed at me I’d like to know what
not to answer.”
“Who are you?”
“Who are you?”
the Saint countered.
“I’m – oh,
blast! The guy you’re looking at is Big Bill Holbrook. But he’s only something
I dreamed up. I’m really Andrew Faulks, and I’m asleep in Glendale, California.”
“And I am the
queen of Romania.”
“Sure, I know.
You don’t believe it. Who would? But since you’ve got me out of a tight spot
for the time being I’d like to tell you what I’ve never told anybody. But who
am I telling?”
“I’m Simon
Templar,” said the Saint and waited for a reaction.
“No!”
Holbrook-Faulks breathed. “The Saint! What beautiful, wonderful luck. And isn’t
it just like a bank clerk to work the Saint into his dream?” He paused for
breath.
“Robin Hood of
modern crime, the twentieth century’s brightest buccaneer, the demon with
dames, the headache of cops and crooks alike. What a sixteen-cylinder dream
this is!”
“Your
alliterative encomia,” the Saint murmured, “leave me as awed as your inference.
Don’t you think you’d better give up this – er – bedtime story? Before that
unholy pair return with gun-lined question marks?”
Chapter II
Comes
the Dawn
The strange man rubbed his eyes in a dazed, helpless
way.
“I don’t know
where to begin,” he said conventionally.
But after a
while, haltingly, he tried.
Andrew Faulks
in the normal course of events, weathered the slingshots and arrows of
outrageous playmates and grew up to be a man,
As men will,
he fixed his heart and eyes on a girl and eventually married her. As women
will, she gave birth in due course to a boy, Andy Jr., and later a girl, Alexandria.
He became a
bank clerk and went to and from home on an immutable schedule. He got an
occasional raise, he was bawled out at times by the head teller; he became a
company man, a white collar worker and developed the habits that white-collared
flesh is heir to, one of which is the propensity to dream.
And he dreamed – literally.
This is what
Big Bill Holbrook told the Saint in the mountain cabin to which Simon had
retired to await the blowing over of a rather embarrassing situation which
involved items duly registered on police records.
“In the first
dream I was coming out of this hotel, see. And whammo! Bumping into her woke me
–. Oh, the heck with it. Whoever was dreaming woke up but it was me bumped into
her. And I was sorry as heck, because, brother, she was something.”
Some two weeks
later, Big Bill said, he bumped into her again.
The dream started exactly as its predecessor, progressed exactly to the
point of collision.
“But I didn’t
awaken, this time. We each apologized all over the place and somehow we were
walking along together. Just as I was about to ask her to have dinner I woke up
again.”
“Or Andy did,”
the Saint supplied.
“Yeah.
Whoever. Now this is what happened. Every ten days of two weeks I’d be back in
this dream, starting out of the hotel, crashing into her, walking along, having
dinner, getting to know her better each dream.
“All the
dreams started exactly the same, but each one went a little further into her
life. It was like reading the same book over and over, always starting back at
the beginning but getting one chapter further every time.
“I got so used
to it that I’d say to myself ‘This is where I woke up last time,’ and then ,
after the dream had gone on a bit further, I’d begin to think , ‘Well, I guess
this must be getting near the end of another installment,’ and sure enough
about that time I’d wake up again.”
The accidental
encounter began to develop sinister ramifications, picked up unsavory
characters and put Big Bill Holbrook in the role of a Robin Hood.
“Or a Saint,”
he amended, “rescuing a beautiful dame from a bunch of lugs.”
And there was,
of course, the jewel.
It had a
history. The fire opal, which seemed to be eternal yet living beauty, had
carved upon it the likeness of Dawn’s great-great-grandmother, of whom the girl
was the living image.
The talented
Oriental craftsman who had chiseled those features which were the essence of
beauty – that wily fellow had breathed upon the cameo gem a curse.
The curse – it
must not get out of the possession of the family or else.
Death,
deprivation and a myriad of other unpleasantries were predicted if the stone
fell into alien hands.
The name of
Selden Appopoulis slithered into the tale. This was a fat man, a lecherous fat
man, a greedy fat man, who wanted – not loved – Dawn; and who wanted – and
loved the cameo opal. In some fashion not exactly clear to the Saint
the fat man was in a position to put a financial squeeze on her.
In each succeeding dream of Andrew Faulks, Glendale
bank clerk, Dawn’s position becomes more and more untenable. In desperation she
finally agreed to turn the jewel over to Appopoulis. The fat man sent for the
jewel by the two henchmen whom the Saint had directed off into the
Holbrook-bare woods.
“Now in this
dream – this here now dream,”
Holbrook said, “I took it away from him, see? Andy Faulks went to sleep in Glendale Saturday night
and – say, what day is it now?”
“Tuesday.”
“Yeah, that’s
the way it seems to me too. And that’s funny. If you’re really part of this dream
you’d naturally think it was Tuesday, because your time and my time would be
the same. But you don’t seem like part of a dream. I pinched you and – oh nuts.
I’m all mixed up.”
“Let’s try and
be clear about this,” said the Saint patiently. “You know that it’s Tuesday
here but you think you’re dreaming all this in Glendale on Saturday night.”
“I don’t know,”
said the other wearily. “You see, I never dreamed more than one day at a
stretch before. But tonight it’s been going on and on. It’s gone past the time
when I ought to have woken up but I don’t seem to be able to wake up.”
“I’ve tried…. Suppose I don’t wake up! Suppose I never
wake up? Suppose I never can get back and I have to go on and on with this
being Big Bill Holbrooke….”
“You could
take a trip to Glendale.”
Simon suggested gravely, and try waking Faulks up.”
Holbrook-Faulks stared at him with oddly unfocussed eyes.
“I can’t,” he
said huskily. “I thought of that – once. But I couldn’t make myself do it. I –
I’m scared… of what I might find…. Suppose….”
He broke off,
his pupils dilated with the formless horror of a glimpse of something that no
mind could conceive.
Simon roused
him again, gently. “So you took the jewel….”
Holbrooke
snapped out of his reverie.
“Yeah, and I lammed
out for this cabin. Dawn was supposed to meet me here. But I guess I can’t
control all these characters. Say,” he asked suddenly, “who do you suppose I
am? Faulks or Holbrook?”
“I suggest you ask your mother, old boy.”
“This ain’t
funny. I mean who do you really
suppose I am? Andy Faulks is asleep dreaming me but I’ve got all his memories,
so am I a projection of Andy or am I me and him both? None of these other
characters have any more memories than they need.”
Simon wondered
if the two men chasing Holbrook were his keepers – he could use a few. In fact,
Simon reflected, keepers would fit into the life of Holbrook-Faulks like thread
in a needle. But he sipped his freshly poured brandy and urged the man to
continue.
“Well,
something’s happened,” Holbrook-Faulks said. “It never was like this before. I
never could smell things before. I never could really feel them. You know how
it is in a dream. But now it seems like as if you stuck a knife in me I’d bleed
real blood. You don’t suppose a – a reiterated dream could become reality?”
“I,” said the
Saint, “am a rank amateur in that department.”
“Well, I was
too – or Andy was, whichever of us is me – but I read everything I could get my
hands on about dreams – or Andy did – and it didn’t help a bit.”
Most men wouldn’t have heard the faint faroff stirring
in the forest. But the Saint’s ears, attuned by long practice to detect sound
that differed from what should be there, picked up evidence of movement toward
the cabin.
“Some one,” he
said suddenly, “and I mean one, is coming. Not your pursuers – it’s from the
opposite direction.”
Holbrook-Faulks
listened.
“I don’t hear
anything.”
“I didn’t
expect you to – yet. Now that it’s dark, perhaps you’d better slip outside,
brother, and wait. I don’t pretend to believe your yarn but that some game is
afoot is so obvious that even Sherlock Holmes could detect it. I suggest we
prepare for eventualities.”
The
eventuality that presently manifested itself was a girl. And it was a girl who
could have been no one but Dawn Winter.
She came wearily into the cabin, disheveled, her dress
torn provocatively so that sun browned flesh showed thru, her cloud of golden
hair swirled in fairy patterns, her dark eyes brooding, her mouth a parted
dream.
The Saint
caught his breath and began to wonder whether he could really make Big Bill
Holbrook wake up and vanish.
“Do you belong
to the coffee and/or brandy school of thought?” he asked.
“Please.” She
fell carelessly into a chair, and the Saint coined a word.
She was gamorous
beyond belief.
“Miss Winter,
pull down your dress or I’ll never get this drink poured. You’ve turned me into
an aspen. You’re the most beautiful hunk of flesh I’ve ever seen. Have your
drink and go, please.”
She looked at
him then and took in the steel-cable leanness of him, the height of him, the
crisp black hair, the debonair blue eyes. She smiled and a brazen gong tolled
in the Saint’s head.
“Must I?” she
said.
Her voice
caught at the core of desire and tangled itself forever there.
“Set me some task,” the Saint said uncertainly. “Name
me a mountain to build, a continent to sink, a star to fetch you in the
morning.”
The cabin door
crashed open. The spell splintered into shining shards. Holbrook-Faulks stood
stony-faced against the door.
“Hello, Bill,”
the girl said, her eyes still on the Saint. “I came, you see; but who’ll
conquer?”
Bill’s gaze
was an unwavering lance with the Saint pinioned on its blazing tip.
“Am I gonna
have trouble with you, too, Saint?”
The Saint
opened his mouth to answer and stiffened as another sound reached his ears.
Jockey and Weightlifter were returning.
“We’ll
postpone any jousting over the fair lady for the moment,” Simon said. “We’re
about to have more company.”
Holbrook
stared wildly around.
“Come on,
Dawn. Out the window! They’ll kill us.”
Many times
before in his checkered capers the Saint had had to make decisions in a
fragment of time – when a gun was leveled and a finger whitening on the
trigger, when a traffic accident roared toward consummation, when a ship was
sinking, when a knife flashed thru candlelight.
His decision
now was compounded of several factors, none a desire for self-preservation. The
Saint rarely gave thought-room to self-preservation – never when there was
something more important to preserve.
He did not
want this creation of tattered loveliness, this epitome of what men live for,
to get out of his sight. He must therefore keep her inside the cabin. And there
was no place to hide….
His eyes
narrowed as he looked at the two bunks. He was tearing out the mattresses
before his thought was fully formed. He tossed them in a corner then he
motioned to Holbrook.
“Climb up.
Make like a mattress.”
He boosted the
big man into the top bunk and his hands were like striking brown snakes as he
packed blankets around him and remade the bed so that it only looked untidily
put together.
“Now you,” he
said to the girl.
She got into
the lower bunk and lay flat on her back, her disturbing head in the far corner.
The Saint deposited a swift kiss on her full red lips. They were cool and soft
and the Saint was adrift for a second.
Then he
covered her. He emptied a box of pine cones on the mattresses and arranged the
whole to appear as a corner heap of cones.
He was busily
cleaning the dishes when the pounding came on the door.
Chapter III
Hands
on the Opal
As he examined the pair, Simon Templar was struck by
the fact that these men were types, such types as B pictures had imprinted upon
the consciousness of the world.
The small one
could be a jockey, one with whom you could make a deal. For a consideration, he
would pull a horse in the stretch or slip a Mickey into a rival rider’s
sarsaparilla. In the thin light that fanned out from the door, his eyes were
small and ratlike, his mouth a slit of cynicism, his nose a quivering button of
greed.
His heavier
companion was a different but equally familiar type. This man was Butch to a T.
He was large, placid, oafish and an order taker. His not to reason why, his but
to do – or cry. He’d be terribly hurt if he failed to do what he was ordered.
He’d apologize, he’d curse himself.
It crossed the
Saint’s mind that a bank clerk such as Andrew Faulks had been described would
dream such characters.
“So you lied
to us,” the little man snarled.
The Saint
arched an eyebrow. At the same time he reached out and twisted the little man’s
nose as if he were trying to unscrew it.
“When you
address me, Oswald, say ‘Sir’.”
The little man
sprang back in outraged fury. He clapped one hand to his injured proboscis, now
turning a deeper purple than the gathering night. The other hand slid under his
coat.
Simon waited
until he had the gun out of the holster, then leaped the intervening six feet
and twisted it from the little man’s hand. The Saint let the gun swing from his
finger by its trigger guard.
“Take him,
Mac!” grated the disarmed man.
Mac vented a
kind of low growl but did nothing but fidget as the Saint turned curious blue
eyes on him. The tableau hung frozen for a long moment before the little man
shattered the silence.
“Well? Ya
afraid of ‘im?”
“Yup,” Mac
said unhappily. “Criminy, Jimmy, ‘f he can get the best of uh you, well,
criminy, Jimmy.”
Jimmy moaned. “You
mean you’re gonna stand there and let just one guy take my gun away from me?
Cripes, he ain’t a army.”
“No,” Mac
agreed, growing more unhappy by the second, “but he kinda seems like one,
Jimmy. Didja see that jump? Criminy, Jimmy.”
The Saint
decided to break it up.
“Now, Oswald –.
“Dinn’ja hear
Mac? Name’s Jimmy.”
“Oswald,” the
Saint said firmly, “is how I hold you in my heart. Now, Oswald, perhaps you’ll
pour oil on these troubled waters before I take you limb from muscle and throw
you away.”
“We don’t want
no trouble,” Jimmy said. “We want Big Bill. You got him, but we got to take him
back with us.”
“And who is
Big Bill and why do you want him and why do you think I have him?”
“We know you
got him,” Jimmy said. This here’s Trailer Mac.”
The Saint
nodded at Mac.
“Charmed, I’m
sure.”
“Hey, Jimmy,”
Mac broke in, “this guy’s a phoney.”
Jimmy blinked.
“Owls,” Mac
explained, “can’t swim.”
“What the
damblasted hades has owls to do with it?” Jimmy demanded.
“He said pour
owls on the something waters. So that,” Mac said in triumph, “proves it.”
The Saint
changed the subject. “Why should the revelation of this gent’s identity be
regarded as even an intimation that I have – what was the name? – Big Bill?”
“Holbrook,”
Jimmy said. “Why, this is Trailer Mac. Ain’t you never heard of him? He
follered Loopie Louie for eighteen years and finally caught ‘im in the middle
of Lake Erie.”
“I never heard
of him,” Simon said and smiled at Mac’s hurt look. But then, there are lots of
people I’ve never heard of.”
This, he thought as he said it, was hardly true. He had
filed away in the indexes of his amazing memory the dossiers of almost every
crook in history. He was certain that he’d have heard of such a chase if it had
ever occurred.
“Anyway,”
Jimmy went on, “we didn’t go more’n a coupla miles till Mac he says Big Bill
ain’t here, neither. Well, he come this far, ‘n he didn’t go no farther. So you
got him. He’s inside.”
“The
cumulative logic in that series of statements is devastating,” the Saint said. “But
logicians veer. History will bear me out. Aristotle was a shining example.
Likewise all the boys who gave verisimilitude to idiocy by substituting
syllogisms (generalities) for thought processes (specific ideas), who evade
reality by using meaningless verbalisms for fact-finding.”
Mac appealed
to the superior intellect in his crowd.
“Whut’n heck’s
he talkin’ about, Jimmy?”
“I mean,” the
Saint said, “Big Bill ain’t here. Come in and case the joint.”
“Whyn’t cha
say so?” Mac snarled and pushed inside.
They searched
nook and cranny and Mac fingered a knothole hopefully once. They gave the bunk
beds a passing glance, and were incurious about the seeming pile of pine cones
in the corner. Mac boosted Jimmy up on the central beam to peer into ceiling
shadows, and they scanned the fireplace chimney.
Then they
stood and looked at the Saint with resentment.
“Sump’n’s
fishy,” Jimmy pronounced. “He’s got to be here. This here” – he pointed – “is
Trailer Mac.”
“Maybe we
better go get the boss, huh, Jimmy?”
“Yeah,” Jimmy
agreed. “He’ll find Big Bill.”
“Who,” the
Saint inquired, “is the boss?”
“You’ll see,”
Jimmy promised. “He won’t be scared of you. He’s just down the hill in town.
Stopped off to play a game of billiards. So we’ll be seein’ ya, bub.”
They went off
into the night and the Saint stood quite still for a moment in a little cloud
of perplexity.
Never before
had he been faced with a situation that was so full of holes.
He added up
known data – a man who had a fabulous jewel, who claimed to be the projected
dream of his alter ego; a girl of incredible beauty said to be another creation
of that dream; and two characters who were after the man and/or the jewel
and/or – perhaps – the girl.
Mac and Jimmy
had searched the cabin. They professed to have overlooked an object the size of
Big Bill Holbrook. Their proof that they had overlooked him – “This here’s
Trailer Mac.” They assumed he would remain here while they walked four miles to
the settlement and back with their boss, who was said to have stopped off to
shoot a game of billiards.
But would a
man on the trail of that fire opal stop off to play billiards? Would two
pseudo-tough guys go away and leave their quarry unguarded?
No, the Saint
decided. These were the observable facts but they were unimportant. They masked
a larger, more sinister pattern. Great forces must be underlying the surface
trivia. Undeniably, the jewel was a thing to drive men to madness. It could
motivate historical bloodshed. The girl, too, possessing the carven features of
the gem, could drive men to – anything.
But for the
life of him the Saint could not get beneath the surface pattern to what must be
the real issues. He could only cling to the conviction that they had to exist
and that they must be deadly.
He turned back
to the bunk beds.
“Come out,
kids,” he said. “The big bad wolves have temporarily woofed away.”
Fear lingered
in the dark depths of Dawn Winter’s eyes, making her even more hauntingly
beautiful. The Saint found strange words forming on his lips as if some other
being possessed them.
He seemed to
be saying. “Dawn … I’ve seen the likeness of every beauty in history or
imagination. Every one of them would be a drab shadow beside you. You are so
beautiful that the world would bow down and worship you – if the world knew of
your existence.
“Yet it’s
impossible that the world doesn’t know. If one single person looked at you, the
word would get out. Cameramen would beat a path to your door, artists would
dust off their palettes, agents would clamor with contracts. But somehow this
hasn’t happened. Why? Where, to be trite, have you been all my life?”
He couldn’t define the expression which now entered
her eyes. It might have been bewilderment, or worry, or fear, or an admixture.
“I – I….”She
put a hand as graceful as a calla lily against her forehead. “I – don’t know.”
“Oh, don’t
lets carry this too far.” It sounded more like himself again. “Where were you
born, where did you go to school, who are your parents?”
She worried at
him with wide, dark eyes.
“That’s just
the trouble. I – don’t remember any childhood. I remember only my
great-great-grandmother. I never saw her, of course, but she’s the only family
I know about.”
Big Bill’s
facial contortions finally caught the Saint’s eye. They were something to
watch. His mouth worked like a corkscrew, his eyebrows did a can-can.
“I gather,”
said the Saint mildly, “that you are giving me the hush-hush. I’m sorry,
comrade, but I’m curious. Suppose you put in your two cents.”
“I told you
once,” Big Bill said. “I told you the truth.”
“Pish,” Simon
said. “Also, tush.”
“It’s true,”
Big Bill insisted. “I wouldn’t lie to the Saint.”
The girl
echoed this in a voice of awe.
“The Saint?
The Robin Hood of modern crime, the twentieth century’s brightest buccaneer,
the – “ she blushed – “the demon with dames.”
It occurred
to Simon, with a shock of remembrance, that her phrases were exactly those of
Big Bill’s when he learned his host’s identity. And even then they had been far
from new. The Saint thought of this for a moment and rejected what it suggested.
He shook his head.
“Let’s
consider that fire opal then, children. It’s slightly fabulous, you know. Now,
I don’t think anybody knows more than I do about famous jewels. Besides such
well-known items as the Cullinan and the Hope diamonds, I am familiar with the
history of almost every noteworthy bauble that was ever dug up.
“There’s the
Waters diamond, for example. No more than a half dozen persons know of its
existence, its perfect golden flawless color. And the Chiang emerald, that
great and beautiful stone that has been seen by only three living people,
myself included.
“But this
cameo opal is the warp of history. It couldn’t be hidden for three generations
without word getting out. In the course of time, I couldn’t have helped hearing
about it. But I didn’t … So it doesn’t exist. But it does. I know it exists. I’ve
held it in my hand – “
“And put in
your pocket,” Big Bill said.
The Saint felt in his jacket.
“So I did.”
He pulled out the chamois bag with its precious contents and made as if to toss
it. “Here.”
Big Bill
stopped him with flared hands.
“Things
happen so quickly in dreams. This may seem
real, but it’ll still hold the screwy pattern you’d expect.”
The Saint
made a gesture of annoyance.
“Still
sticking to your story? Well, maybe you’re screwy or maybe you just think I am.
But I’d rather face facts. As a matter of fact, I insist on it.” He turned back
to the girl. “For instance, darling, I know that you exist. I’ve kissed you.”
Big Bill
growled but did nothing as the Saint waited calmly.
Simon continued,
“I have the evidence of my hands, lips and eyes that you have all the common
things in common with other women. In addition you have this incredible,
unbelievable loveliness. When I look at you I find it hard to believe that you’re
real. But that’s only a figure of speech. My senses convince me. You say you
don’t remember certain things that all people remember. Why?”
She repeated her gesture of confusion.
“I –don’t know. I can’t remember any past.”
“It would be a great privilege and a rare
pleasure,” the Saint said gently, “to provide you with a past to remember.”
Another low growl rumbled in Big Bill’s chest
and the Saint waited again for developments. None came and it struck the Saint
that all the characters in this muddled melodrama had one characteristic in
common – a certain cowardice in the clutch.
Even Dawn
Winter showed signs of fear, and nobody had yet made a move to harm her. It was
only another of the preposterous paradoxes that blended into the indefinable
unreality of the whole.
Simon gave
it up. If he couldn’t get what he thought was truth from either of these two he
could watch and wait and divine the truth. Conflict hung on the wind and
conflict drags truth out of her hiding place and casts her naked before
watching eyes.
“Well,
souls,” he said. “What now? The unholy three will be back sometime. You could
go now. There is the wide black night to wander in.”
“No,” Big
Bill said. “Now that you’re in this, give us your help, Saint. We need you.”
“Just what,
then,” Simon asked, “are we trying to prevent or accomplish?”
“Selden
Appopoulis must not get his hands on the opal or Dawn. He wants both. He’ll
stop at nothing to get them.”
“I believe
you mentioned a curse breathed on this gewgaw by some Oriental character.”
Dawn Winter’s
voice once more tangled itself in Simon’s heart. As long as he could remember
that quality – of faroff bells at dusk, of cellos on a midnight hill – time would never again pass
slowly enough.
“Death shall
swoop on him,” she chanted, “who holds the ancient gem from its true possessor,
but all manner of things shall plague him before that dark dread angel shall
come to rest at his shoulder. His nights shall be sleepless with terror and
hurts shall dog his accursed steps by day. Beauty shall bring an end to the vandal.”
Chapter IV
The
Nonplussed Saint
The mood of her strange incantation, far more than the
actual words, seemed to linger on the air after she had finished so that in
spite of all rationality the Saint felt spectral fingers on his spine. He shook
off the spell with conscious resolution.
“It
sounds very impressive,” he murmured, “in a gruesome sort of way. Reminds me of
one of those Zombie pictures.
But where, may I ask, does this place me in the scheme of dire events? I have
the jewel.”
“You,”
Big Bill Holbrook said, “will die, as I must, and as Trailer Mac and Jimmie
must. They stole it from Dawn. I stole it from them.”
The Saint smiled.
“Well,
if that’s settled, let’s pass on to more entertaining subjects bordering on the
carnal. Miss Winter, my car is just down the hill. If Bill is resigned to his
fate, suppose we leave him and his playmates to their own fantastic devices and
drift off into the night.”
Her face haloed with pleasure.;
“I’d
like it,” she said. “But – but I just can’t.”
“Why
not? You’re over three years old. Nobody is sitting on your chest.”
“I
can’t do what I like, somehow,” she said. I can only do what I must. It’s
always that way.”
“This,”
the Saint said to nobody in particular, “sounds like one of those stories that
fellow Charteris might write. And what’s the matter with you?” he demanded of
Holbrook. “A little earlier you were eager to get banged about because I
admired the lady. Now you sit with disgusting indifference to my indecent
proposal. I assure you it was indecent from your viewpoint.”
Big Bill grinned.
“It
just occurred to me. She can’t go with you. She must do what she must. She can’t
get out of my sight. Good old Andy.” he added.
The Saint turned his eyes away and stared into space, wondering. His
wandering gaze focused on a small wall mirror that reflected Dawn Winter. Her
features were blurred, rubbed together, an amorphous mass. Simon wondered what
could have happened to that mirror.
He swung back to face Bill Holbrook.
“I’m afraid,”
he said softly but with the iron will showing through his velvet tones, “that
we must have some truth in our little séance. Like the walrus I feel the time
has come to speak of many things. From this moment you are my prisoners. The
length of your durance vile depends
on you. Who are you, Miss Winter?”
The look she
turned on him made his hands tingle. Hers was a face for cupping between tender
palms. Dark and troubled her eyes pleaded for understanding, for sympathy.
“I told you
all I know,” she pleaded. “I’ve tried and tried, ever since I could remember
anything, to think of, well – all those things you think of at times.”
Again she passed a hand across her face, as if wiping
away veils.
“I don’t ever
remember snagging a stocking on the way to an important appointment,” she said.
“And I know that girls do. I never had to fight for my” – she colored – “my
honor, whatever that is.”
“And I know
that girls like me have fought for this something I don’t understand, by the
time they’ve reached my age. Whatever that is,” she added pensively. “I don’t
even know how old I am or where I’ve been.”
A pattern
suddenly clicked into place in the Saint’s brain, a pattern so monstrous, so
inhuman as to arouse his destructive instincts to the point of homicidal mania.
The look he turned on Big Bill Holbrook was ice and flame.
His voice was
pitched at conversational level, but each word fell from his lips like a
shining sword.
“Do you know,”
he said. “I’m beginning to get some new ideas. Not very nice ideas, chum. And
if I’m guessing right about what you and your fellow scum have done to this
innocent girl you are liable to cost your insurance company money.”
He moved
toward Holbrook with a liquid grace that had all the coordination of a panther’s
movement – and the menace. Big Bill Holbrook leaned back from it.
“Stop acting
the knight in armor,” he protested. “What are you talking about?”
“It should
have been obvious before,” Simon Templar said. “Up on your feet Holbrook.”
Holbrook
remained at ease.
“If you’ve got
an explanation for all this that doesn’t agree with mine I want to know it.”
The Saint
paused. There was honest curiosity in the man’s voice – no fear. That cowardice
which had characterized him before was replaced with what seemed an honest
desire to hear the Saint’s idea.
“This girl,”
the Saint said, “whoever she is, has breeding, grace and beauty out of this
world. She has been brought up amid expensive and sheltered surroundings. You
can see that, in her every gesture, every expression. She was bred to great
wealth, perhaps nobility, even royalty.”
Big Bill
leaned forward in almost an agony of concentration. Every word of Simon Templar’s
might have been a twenty-dollar gold piece the way he reached for it with every
sense.
The Saint
patted his jacket pocket.
“This jewel is
the symbol of her position – heiress, princess, queen or what have you. You and
your unsavory companions kidnapped her and are holding her for ransom. That
would be wicked enough but you’ve done worse.
“Somewhere in
the course of your nasty little scheme it seemed like a good idea to destroy a
part of her beauty that could be dangerous to you and your precious pals. So
you destroyed her mind. With drugs, I have no doubt – drugs that have dulled
her mind until she has no memory.
“Your reasons
are clear enough – it was just a second form of insurance. And now your gang
has split up, fighting over the spoils. I don’t know who would have come out on
top, if you hadn’t happened to run into me. But I know what the end is going to
be now – and you aren’t going to like it. Get on your feet!”
The command
was like a pistol shot and Big Bill Holbrook jumped. Then he leaned back again
and chuckled in admiration.
“Everything
that’s been said about you is true. There’s nobody like you. That’s so much
better than what Andy Faulks did that there’s no comparison. Say, that really
would have been something and, look, it’d have explained why she couldn’t
remember who she was. Saint, I gotta hand it to you. Too bad you’re not in bed
in Glendale.”
For one of the
very few times in his life the Saint was taken aback. The words were spoken
with such ease, such sincerity, that Simon’s deadly purpose cooled to a feeling
of confusion. Somewhere the sequence of logic had written a false corollary
diametrically opposed to the pattern.
While it is
true that a man who is accustomed to danger, to gambling for high stakes with
death as a forfeit could simulate feelings he did not actually feel, it is seldom
that man of Big Bill Holbrook’s obvious I.Q. can look annihilation in the face
with an admiring grin.
Something was
still wrong, wrong in the same way that everything in the whole episode was
wrong – wrong with that same unearthly off-key distortion that defeated logical
diagnosis.
The Saint took
out a cigarette and lighted it slowly – and over the hiss of the match he heard
other sounds, which resolved themselves into a blur of footsteps advancing on
the cabin.
Simon glanced
at his watch. Jimmy and Mac had been gone less than half an hour. It was
impossible for them to be returning from the village four miles away.
What had
Holbrook said? Something about everything happening faster in dreams? But that
was in the same vein of nonsense. Maybe they’d met the boss at the foot of the
hill.
Holbrook said.
“What is it? Did you hear something?”
“Only your
friends again.”
Fear came once
more to Holbrook and Dawn Winter. Their eyes were wide and dark with it,
turning instantly toward the bunk beds.
“No,” Simon
said. “Not this time. We’ll have this out in the open.”
“But he’ll
kill us!” Holbrook began to babble. “It’s awful the things he’ll do. You don’t
know him, Saint. You can’t imagine, you couldn’t – ”
“I can imagine
anything,” said the Saint coldly. “I’ve been doing that for some time and I’m
tired of it. Now I’d prefer to know.”
He crossed the
room as the footsteps outside turned into knuckles at the door. Templar jerked
the door inward.
“Welcome to
our study club,” the Saint said.
Trailer Mac
and Jimmy preceded an enormous hulk through the door and, when they saw
Holbrook and Dawn, charged like lions leaping on paralyzed gazelles in some
primeval jungle clearing.
The Saint
moved in a lightning blur. Two sharp cracks of fist on flesh piled Mac in one
corner, Jimmy in another. They lay still
Chapter V
The
Empty Pocket
A butterfly chuckle caused the Saint to turn. He was
looking into a small circular hole. A .38, he computed. He raised his eyes to
twins of the barrel but these were eyes. They lay deep in flesh that swelled in
yellowish brown rolls, flowing fatly downward to describe one of the fattest
men the Saint had ever seen. They could only have belonged to a man called
Selden Appopoulis.
“Mr. Sidney
Greenstreet, I presume?” Simon drawled.
The buttery
chuckle set a sea of flesh ebbing and flowing.
“A quick
action, sir, and an efficient direction of action. I compliment you and am
saddened that you must die.”
The Saint
shrugged. He knew that this fat man, though butter-voiced, had a heart of
iridium. His eyes were the pale expressionless orbs of a killer. His mouth was
thin with determination, his hand steady with purpose. But Simon had faced all
those indications before.
“I hate to
disappoint you comrade,” he said lightly, “but that line has a familiar ring.
And yet I’m still alive.”
Appopoulis
appraised and dismissed the Saint, though his eyes never wavered. He spoke to
Holbrook.
“The opal. Quickly!”
The butter
of his voice had frozen into oleaginous icicles – and Holbrook quailed under
the bite of their sharp edges.
“I haven’t got
it, Appopoulis. The Saint has it.”
Simon was
astonished at the change in the fat man. It was subtle, admittedly but it was
there none the less. Fear came into the pale gray eyes which had been calmly
contemplating murder as a climax to unspeakable inquisitions. Fear and respect.
The voice melted butter again.
“So,” he said
warmly. “Simon Templar, the Robin Hood of modern crime, the twentieth century’s
brightest buccaneer, the – ah – demon with dames. I had not anticipated this.”
Once more it
struck the Saint that the descriptive phrases were an exact repetition of
Holbrook’s. And once more it struck him that the quality of fear in this weird
quintet was not strained. And once more he wondered about Holbrook’s fantastic
tale….
“You are
expecting maybe Little Lord Feigenbaum?” Simon asked. “Or what do you want?”
“The cameo
opal for one thing.” Appopoulis said easily. “For the other the girl.”
“And what do
you intend to do with them?”
“Cherish them,
sir. Both of them.”
His voice had
encyclopedic lust and greed, and the Saint felt as if small things crawled on
him.
Before he
could make an answer, stirrings in their respective corners announced the
return of Mac and Jimmy to another common plane of existence. Without a word
they got groggily to their feet, shook their heads clear of trip hammers and
moved toward the Saint.
“Now, Mr.
Templar,” said Appopoulis, “you have a choice. Live and my desires are granted
without violence, die and they are spiced with emotions at fever heat.”
Mac and Jimmy
had halted – one small and thunderstruck, one large and paralyzed.
“Boss,”
quavered Jimmy, “did youse say Templar? Da Saint?”
“The same.”
Simon bowed.
“Chee!” Mac breathed. “Da Saint. Da Robin
Hood of modern crime, da –“
“Please,”
Simon groaned. “Another record, if you don’t mind.”
“Boss, we ain’t
got a chanct,” Jimmy said.
Appopoulis
turned his eyes on the little man.
“He,” the boss
said, “has the opal.”
This news
stiffened their gelatinous spines long enough to set them at the Saint in a
two-directional charge.
The Saint
swerved to meet it. He held Jimmy between himself and the unwavering gun of
Appopoulis with one hand. With the other he wrought havoc on the features of Mac.
It was like
dancing, like feathers on the breeze, the way the Saint moved. Even to himself,
it had the kind of exhilaration that a fighter may only experience once in the
lifetime. He had a sense of power, of supernatural coordination, of invincibility
beyond anything he had ever known.
He cared
nothing for the knowledge that Appopoulis was skipping around on the outskirts
of the fray, trying to find an angle from which he could terminate it with a
well placed shot.
Simon knew
that it was no fear of killing Jimmy that stayed the fat man’s finger on the
trigger – it was simply the knowledge that it would have wasted a shot, that
the Saint could have gone on using Jimmy as a shield alive or dead. The Saint
knew this coolly and detachedly, as if with a mind separate from his own, while
he battered Mac’s face into vari-colored pulp.
Then Mac’s
eyes glazed and he went down – and the Saint’s right hand snaked hipwards for
his own gun while his left flung Jimmy bodily at the paunch of Appopoulis .
And that was
when the amazing, the incredible, the impossible thing went wrong. For Jimmy
didn’t fly away from the Saint’s thrust, as he should have, like a marble from
a slingshot. Somehow he remained entangled with the Saint’s arm, clinging to it
as it bogged in some indissoluble birdlime with a writhing tenacity that was as
inescapable as a nightmare.
And Simon
looked down the barrel of Appopoulis’s gun and saw the fat man’s piggy eyes
brighten with something that might have been lust.
The Saint
tried to throw a shot at him, but he was off balance and the frenzied squirming
of his erstwhile shield made it like trying to shoot from the back of a bucking
horse. The bullet missed by a fraction of an inch and buried itself in the wall
beside the mirror. Then Appopoulis fired back.
The Saint felt
a jar and a flame reared inside his chest. Somehow he couldn’t pull the trigger
any more. The gun fell from his limp fingers. His incredulous eyes looked full
in the mirror and saw a neat black hole over his heart, saw it begin to spread
as his life’s blood gushed out.
It was strange
to realize that this was it, that it had happened to him at last, as it had
always been destined to happen some day, and in an instant he was going to
cheat, go to the back of the book for the answer to the greatest mystery of
all.
Yet his last
conscious thought was that his image was sharp and clear in the mirror. When he
had seen Dawn’s reflection, it had been like one seen in an agitated pool.
When he opened his eyes again he beheld the smiling
face of Dawn Winter but, instead of a provocatively torn dress and delightfully
disheveled hair, Dawn’s face appeared in a frame of a neat fashionable pillbox
hat on modestly coiled blonde hair and she was dressed in an attractive green
lace dress that without showing too much assured him that she possessed all of
Dawn’s bodily attributes plus a familiar fragrance.
“Oh, Leslie,
darling, you’ve awakened. Thank God!” The girl’s mouth was temptingly close but
he felt too weak to even speak. She said “I’ll get the intern!” and ran out the
door of his apparent hospital room.
As his mind
cleared, a memory returned: a memory of him, Leslie Charteris sitting at his
desk at home in Palm Springs typing a fantasy – the only fantasy ever – of the
Saint as part of a dream and not knowing how to end it. Then the room had
started to shake and everything went black.
And he also
remembered that the girl – Dawn in the story and now the one leaning over his
bed when he awakened – was Audrey his movie star fiancée. Audrey returned with
the doctor.
“What
happened?” Charteris asked.
The doc, who
seemed to Charteris a cross between the handsome movie actors Lew Ayres and Van
Johnson, checked his blood pressure and pulse. Then he chuckled. “Mr.
Charteris, you have the usual amnesia for a bang on the head. It was not a very
strong Earthquake but you just happened to be sitting under a shelf of your
heaviest books and you became a concussion casualty of the Encyclopedia
Britannica. It’s happened before and it will happen again.” The doctor patted Charteris
on the shoulder and with a slight smile and nod in Audrey’s direction he said. “You’re
a lucky man, Mr. Charteris, a very lucky man.” Then he turned and left, closing
the door quietly behind him.
“A lucky man”
repeated the author who created the Saint and then imagined the glory of Dawn
Winter. And he pulled Audrey down to his lips level. “I am, rather.”
The End (For next short-story gem click below)
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