The Kindness of the Tiger
“Here we are again,” murmured the Saint. “Seeing quite a lot of each
other to-night, aren’t we? And how’s the occiput? Not dented beyond
repair, I hope.”
Bittle inclined his head.
“A trifle primitive,” he said urbanely, “but very effective. I have
views of my own, however, on the subject of physical violence, which I
shall present you with in due course.”
“Splendid,” said Templar.
He looked around for the man who had been covering him, and bowed to
that gentleman with a smile.
“Dear old bloomin’ Bloem, of course,” remarked the Saint sociably. “I
knew we’d find you in the thick of the fun. Quite one of the dogs of
the _dorp_, or village, aren’t you? And, just in case of accidents,
would you rather be blipped on the jaw or in the solar plexus? A jolt
in the tum-tum is more painful; but, on the other hand the cove who
stops one just where his face changes its mind is liable to carry a
scar around with him for some time. Just as you like, of course—I
always try to oblige my customers in these little details.”
“That will do, Mr. Templar,” Bittle’s voice broke in curtly. “I think
you’ve talked quite enough for one evening.”
“But I haven’t started yet,” complained the Saint. “I was just going
to tell one of my favourite stories. Old Bloem’s heard it before, but
it might be a new one on you. The one about an Italian gentleman
called Fernando, who double-crossed some of the band-o. They got even
for this with the aid of a kris—and that was the end of Fernando. Any
applause?”
The Saint looked about him in his mild way, as though he literally
expected an outburst of clapping. Nobody moved. Bloem still had his
automatic accurately trained on the Saint, and the Boer’s leathery
face betrayed nothing. Bittle had gone ashy pale. The butler and a
couple of other hard nuts who had followed the party into the library
stood like graven images.
“I told you—he knows too much,” said Bloem. “Better not take any
chances this time.”
“I’m very upset about this,” said Simon earnestly. “That one usually
gets a rousing reception. Poor old Fernando—he used up so much energy
cursing Tigers and things that he didn’t live quite long enough to
tell me where the spondulicks were. ‘Baycombe, in England,
Devonshire,’ gasps Fernando, with the haft of the kris sticking out of
him, and the blood choking his throat. ‘The old house . . .’ And then
he died. Just like in a story-book, and deuced awkward, with so many
old and oldish houses lying about. But Fernando certainly hated
Tigers, and you can’t blame him.”
Bloem raised the gun a trifle, and his knuckles whitened under the
brown skin of his hand.
“It is easily settled,” he muttered, and the Saint saw death staring
him in the face.
“No!” shouted Bittle.
The millionaire flung himself forward, knocking up the pistol. Bittle
was trembling. He mopped his brow with a large white handkerchief,
breathing heavily.
“You fool!” he jerked. “The girl’s been here—he helped her get away.
If anything happens to him she’ll talk. D’you want to put a rope round
all our necks?”
“You always did argue soundly, Bittle darling,” said the Saint
appreciatively.
He seated himself on the table, swinging his legs, and the proverbial
cucumber would have looked smoking hot beside him.
“It must be arranged so as to look like an accident,” said Bittle.
“That damned girl will have the police buzzing about our ears unless
the circumstances are above suspicion.”
Bloem shrugged.
“The girl can be silenced,” he stated dispassionately.
“You’ll leave the girl alone,” snarled Bittle. “Where’s the Chief?”
The Saint saw Bloem’s face convulse with a warning scowl.
“He will return later.”
“Now, that’s good news,” said Simon. “Am I really going to meet the
celebrated Tiger at last? You’ve no idea how much I want to see him.
But he’s such an elusive cove—always incog.”
“You need have no fear, Mr. Templar,” said Bittle, “that the Tiger
will show himself to you unless he is quite certain that you will
never be able to use your knowledge against him. I think,” added the
millionaire suavely, “that you may expect to meet the Tiger to-night.”
The Saint realised that Bittle’s panic of a few moments past had been
caused by the fear of being involved in a police enquiry rather than
by the horror of witnessing a cold-blooded murder. Bittle was quite
calm again, but there was no trace of human pity in his faded eyes,
and the level tone in which his significant after-thought was
delivered would have struck terror into the soul of most men. But the
Saint’s nerves were like chilled steel and his optimism was
unshakeable. He met Bittle’s eyes steadily, and smiled.
“Don’t gamble on it,” advised the Saint. “I’ve lived pretty
dangerously for eight years, and nobody’s ever killed me yet. Even the
Tiger mightn’t break the record.”
“I hope,” said Bittle, “that the Tiger will prove to be as clever as
you are.”
“Hope on, sonnikins,” said the Saint cheerfully.
They had searched him from crown to toe when he came in from the
garden, but they had left him his cigarette-case, and for this he was
duly thankful. The case was a large one, and carried a double bank of
cigarettes. There were some peculiarities about the cigarettes on one
side of the case which the Saint had not felt bound to explain to
Bittle when he returned it; for several of the victories which Templar
had scored against apparently impossible odds in the course of his
hectic career as a gentleman adventurer had been due to his habit of
invariably keeping at least one card up his sleeve—even when he had
not got aces parked in his belt, under his hat, and in the soles of
his shoes. Meanwhile, it had not yet come to the showdown, and the
Saint did not believe in performing his particular brand of parlour
tricks simply to amuse the assembled company. He selected a cigarette
from the other side of the case (which in itself was not quite an
ordinary case, for one of the edges, which was guarded when the case
was shut, was as sharp as a razor) and began to smoke with a sublime
indifference to the awkwardness of his predicament.
Bittle and Bloem were arguing in low tones at the other end of the
room, and both were armed. The pugilistic butler was posted at the
door, and it was unlikely that he would be caught napping a second
time. The Saint could probably have beaten him in a straight fight,
but it would not have been an easy job, and the audience in this case
would most certainly interfere. The other two men stood by the french
windows, to prevent a repetition of the Saint’s earlier unceremonious
exit: they were both hard and husky specimens, and the Saint, weighing
up the prospects with a fighter’s eye, decided that that retreat was
effectually barred for the time being. There were few men that the
Saint, in splendid training, would have hesitated to tackle
single-handed, and few men that he would not have backed himself to
tie in knots and lay out all neat and tidy inside five minutes, into
the bargain; but he had to admit that a team of three heavyweights and
a couple of automatics totalled up to something a bit above his form.
Wherefore the Saint stayed sitting on the table and placidly smoked
his cigarette, for he had never believed in getting worked up before
the fireworks started.
He looked at his watch, and found that there was a clear half-hour to
go before he could expect any help from outside. He blessed his
foresight in telling Patricia to go to Carn if anything went wrong,
but that was a last resource which the Saint hoped he would not have
to call upon. Simon wanted nothing less than to be under any sort of
obligation to the detective, and he certainly did not want to give
Carn a better hand than the deal had given him. Nevertheless, it was
comforting to know that Carn was at hand in case of a hitch—not to
mention the admirable Orace, who would shortly be getting restive,
even if he had not started to move already. And it was satisfying to
find that a similar reflection was cramping the style of the ungodly
considerably.
The Saint’s meditations were interrupted by the sound of a bell
ringing somewhere in the depths of the house. The sound was very
faint, but the Saint’s hearing was abnormally keen, and he caught what
most other men would have missed—the eccentric rhythm of the ringing.
He had noted this down and pigeon-holed it in his mind when a knock
came on the door and a man entered. He muttered something to Bittle,
and the millionaire left the room. Bloem strolled over to the Saint,
who welcomed him with a smile.
“Our one and only Tiger at last?”
Bloem nodded, and looked curiously at the Saint.
“You have given us more trouble than you know,” he said. “You have
been extraordinarily lucky—but even the most astounding luck comes to
an end.”
“Just what they told me at Monte,” agreed the Saint, “They say the
Bank always wins in the long run.”
Watching closely, Simon could just note the least flicker of Bloem’s
eyelids.
“Fernando, of course,” said Bloem, half to himself.
“Even so,” murmured the Saint. “I know everything but the answer to
the two most important questions of all—Who is the Tiger? and Where
has he cached the loot? And I’ve a feeling that it won’t be so long
now before I get next to even those secrets.”
“You’re very confident,” said Bloem.
The man’s self-control was not far from perfection, but the Saint also
played poker, and he had summed up Bloem to the last full stop in the
course of that brief conversation. Bloem’s nerves were none too
good—no man who was reasonably sure of himself would have been made to
feel vaguely uneasy by such a slender bluff. That put the Saint one up
on Bloem, but the Saint did not disclose his knowledge of the state of
the score. His smile did not vary its quiet assurance one iota.
“I’m an odds-on chance,” said the Saint lightly. “Which reminds me—how
are T. T. Deeps?”
Bloem did not answer, and the Saint prattled on:
“Now, I must say you had me thinking very hard over that dud gold
mine. Why should any sane man—you observe, Mynheer, that I credit you
with being sane—why should any sane man want to get control of a gold
mine that hasn’t turned up any gold for two years? That’s what I said
to my broker, and he sent a cable out to the Transvaal especially to
find out. Back comes the reply: We Don’t Know. The mine hasn’t been
worked for ages, and only the greenhorn prospectors bother to look
over the district—the old hands know that there isn’t enough pay dirt
for a hundred square miles around the T. T. borings to stop a snail’s
tooth. And yet our one and only Hans is raking in all the shares he
can find, reminding ’Change of a stock they’d all forgotten existed,
and every poor little rabbit of a mug investor is hunting up his scrip
and wondering whether to unload while the unloading’s good or chance
his arm for a fortune. All of which, to a nasty, suspicious mind like
mine, is distinctly odd.”
“I’m glad to see that the worry hasn’t prematurely aged you, Mr.
Templar,” said Bloem.
“Oh, not at all,” said the Saint. “You see, just when I was on the
point of going off my rocker with the strain, and my relatives were
booking a room for me in a nice quiet asylum, along comes a flash of
inspiration. Just suppose, Bloem—only suppose—that a bunch of bad hats
had brought off one of the biggest bank breaks in history. Suppose
they’d got away with something over a cool million in gold. Suppose
they’d humped the stuff all the way over the Atlantic, and fetched up
and settled down and stowed the body away in an English village so far
off the beaten track that it’d be lost for good if it wasn’t for the
railway timetables. And then suppose—mind you, this is only a
theory—suppose they felt quite happy that the dicks weren’t on the
trail, and began to puzzle out how they were going to cash the
proceeds of the dirty work. First of all, melt it down—there aren’t so
many warriors hawking golden American Eagles around that the
moneychangers don’t look twice at you when you try to pass off a sack
of ’em. Right. But now you aren’t so much better off, because a golden
million tots up to a hairy great ingot, and people would start asking
where the stuff came from—whether you grow it in the kitchen garden or
make it in the bathroom before breakfast. What then?”
“What, indeed?” prompted Bloem in a tired voice.
“Why,” exclaimed the Saint delightedly, as though he had caught Bloem
with a conundrum, “what’s wrong with getting hold of a dead-as-mutton
gold mine, losing a lot of gold in it, and then finding it again?”
“Quite,” said Bloem with purely perfunctory interest.
Simon shook his head.
“It won’t wash, Angel Face,” he said. “It won’t wash. Really it won’t.
And you know it. They may have christened me Simon, but I’ve got a lot
less simple since then.”
Bloem turned away very wearily, as if he found the Saint’s monologues
so boring that he had great difficulty in keeping awake, but that did
not stop him hearing the Saint’s soft chuckle of sheer merriment.
Bloem was good, but he was not quite good enough. There had been few
doubts in the Saint’s mind about the accuracy of his diagnosis, and
those that had existed were now gloriously dispelled. Nearly all the
threads were in his hands, and the tangle was gradually straightening
out.
But who was the Tiger? That was the most important question of all,
barring only the whereabouts of the spoil. Who in all Baycombe kept
under his modest hat the brain that had conceived and organised that
stupendous coup? Bloem, Bittle, and Carn could be ruled out. That left
the highly respected Sir Michael Lapping, the pleasant but brainless
Mr. Lomas-Coper, the masculine Miss Girton, and the two retired and
retiring I.C.S. men, Messrs. Shaw and Smith. Five runners, and a
darned sight too little help from the form book. The Saint frowned.
Tackling the problem in the light of the law of probability, every one
of the possibles had to be ruled out, which was manifestly absurd.
Wiring into it with any mystery story as a textbook, it at once
appeared that Lapping was too far above suspicion to escape it, Algy
was too frankly brainless to be anything but the possessor of the
Great Brain, Agatha Girton was quite certain to turn out to be a man
masquerading as a woman, and Shaw and Smith kept too much in the
background to avoid the limelight. Which once again was manifestly
absurd. And the order of seniority was of little assistance, for
Bloem, Algy, Agatha Girton, and Bittle had all been living in Baycombe
for some time before the Tiger smashed the strong-room of the
Confederate Bank of Chicago—on a general estimate, Simon reckoned that
the Tiger had spent at least five years over that crime. And that was
a deduction that confirmed the Saint’s respect for the Tiger’s
brilliance without going any distance to aid the solution of the
mystery of the Tiger’s identity.
The Saint had got no further when Bittle returned and drew Bloem to
one side. Simon could only hear a word here and there. He gathered
that the Tiger was furious with Bittle for taking so long and making
so much noise over capturing the prisoner; that Bittle would have
liked to see the Tiger do better himself; that the Tiger had an Idea.
There followed some mutterings that the Saint did not catch, and then
came one sentence quite distinctly:
“The Tiger says we must let him go.”
Bloem gave an exclamation, and Bittle talked further. The Saint’s
brain was whirring like a buzz-saw. Let him go, with so much given
away and most of the court cards in their hands? Simon wondered if he
had heard aright, but in a moment Bittle left Bloem and came over to
confirm the sensitiveness of the Saint’s auditory nerves.
“It is getting late, Mr. Templar,” said the millionaire, “and we all
feel that the festivities have been kept up long enough. Pray do not
let us detain you any longer.”
“Meaning?” suggested Simon, with as much levelness as he could
command.
“Meaning that you are free to go as soon as you like.”
Bittle looked hard at the Saint as he spoke, and the malevolence that
glittered in his eyes belied the geniality of his speech. Bittle was
clearly upset at having to carry out such a command. He barked an
order, and the escort of roughnecks sidled out of the room, closing
the door behind them. Bloem was fidgeting with his tie, and he kept
one hand in a pocket that bulged heavily.
“That’s nice of you,” drawled the Saint. “You won’t mind if I take
Anna, will you?”
He strolled coolly over to the secretaire, jerked open a drawer, and
retrieved the knife that they had taken from him, slipping it back
into the sheath under his sleeve. Then he faced the two men again.
“Really,” he remarked in a tone of polite inquiry, “your kindness
overwhelms me. And I never put you down for a brace of birds too
gravely burdened with faith, hope and charity. Is Miss Holm such an
insuperable obstacle—to Supermen like yourselves?”
“I think,” said Bittle smoothly, “that you would be wise not to ask
too many questions. It is quite enough for you to know, Mr. Templar,
that your phenomenal luck has held—perhaps for the last time. You had
better say good-night before we change our minds.”
The Saint smiled.
“You have no minds,” he said. “The Tiger says ‘Hop!’ and you blinkin’
well hop. . . . I wonder, now, is it because you’re scared of Orace?
Orace is a devil when he’s roused, and if you’d bumped me off and he’d
got to know about it there’d’ve been hell to pay. Possibly you’re
wise.”
“Possibly,” snarled Bloem, as though he did not believe it, and the
Saint nodded.
“There is always the chance that I might go and talk to the police,
isn’t there?”
Bittle was lighting a cigar, and he looked up with a twisted mouth.
“You are not a man who loses his nerve and goes yelping to Scotland
Yard, Mr. Templar,” he answered. “Also, there is quite a big prize at
stake. I think we can rely on you.”
The Saint stared back with a kind of reluctant admiration.
“Almost I see in you the makings of sportsmen,” he said.
“I can only hope,” returned Bittle impassively, “that you will find
the sport to your liking.”
Simon shook his head.
“You won’t disappoint me, Beautiful One,” he murmured. “I feel it in
my bones. . . . And so to bed. . . . Give the Tiger my love, and tell
him I’m sorry I wasn’t able to meet him.” And the Saint paused, struck
by a sudden thought. “By the way—about Fernando. You know somebody’s
going to swing for him, don’t you? I mean, if things start to go
badly, make sure the Tiger gets all the blame to himself, or else you
might swing with him.”
“We shall be careful,” Bittle assured him.
“Splendid,” said the Saint. “Well, cheerio, souls. Sleep tight, and
pleasant dreams.”
He sauntered to the french windows and opened them.
“If you don’t mind. . . . I have a rooted dislike for dark corridors.
One never knows, does one?”
“Mr. Templar.” The millionaire stopped him. “Before you go——”
The Saint turned on the terrace and looked back into the room. He was
still debonair and smiling, and although the shrubbery had given the
_coup de grace_ to his ancient and disreputably comfortable clothes,
he contrived by some subtle gift of personality to look immaculate
enough to wander into Claridge’s without the commissionaire spotting
him and shooing him round to the tradesman’s entrance. Only the Saint
knew what an effort that air of careless ease cost him. The atmosphere
was positively dripping with the smell of rats, but Simon Templar
never twitched a nostril.
“Comrade?”
“It might save you spending a sleepless night, and catching your death
of cold,” observed Bittle, “if I told you that the Tiger has already
left. So you needn’t bother to hang about outside.”
“Thanks,” said the Saint. “I won’t. And it might save you a longish
walk and a lot of trouble if I told you that Orace and I sleep in
watches, turn and turn about, so that any of your pals who call round
in the hope of being able to catch us napping will have to be very
fly. . . . S’long!”
He vanished into the darkness like a wraith, almost before the men in
the library could have realised that he was gone. He went scraping
through the shrubbery again to the wall, got his coat over the top as
before, and was over like a cat.
He dropped lightly to the ground, pulled on the tattered coat, and
struck off away from the wall after no more than a couple of seconds’
pause to listen and scan the blackness in every direction. Guided by
an innate bump of locality, he established his bearings at once and
set off on a wide detour that would bring him eventually into the
grounds at the back of the Manor. He advanced in short rushes,
stopping and crouching in cover every twenty yards or so, straining
eyes and ears for sign of stalkers behind or an ambush before. Nothing
happened. The night was quiet and peaceful. He saw a light go on in an
upper window of Bittle’s house, and the distant hiss of the surf
mingled with the rustle of grasses brushed by the breeze, but there
was neither sight nor sound of any human being.
“Damned odd!” said Templar to himself, scratching his head, as he lay
under a hedge, watching and listening like a frontiersman, after at
least a dozen of these rushes. “Flaming odd! Or did I slip them by
going over the wall?”
He had fully expected to find some spicy parting gift waiting for him
as soon as he had got far enough away from Bittle’s vicinity, when
they would be hoping to take him off his guard, but nothing had
interfered with his departure, and there had been no trace of even the
feeblest attempt to create trouble for him when he arrived in the
narrow lane that ran between the Manor and Carn’s house.
“Hell!” said the Saint, almost indignantly. “Now, why in blazes did
they want to let me go?”
He had seen no lights in any of the Manor windows, and with a sudden
apprehension he looked at the luminous dial of his watch. He was
already a couple of minutes overdue. He swung round and sprinted up
the path to Carn’s cottage. The Saint literally fell on the bell.