The Saint and the People Importers

1

When Tam Rowan had gone back into her flat and returned to the Saint properly shod, the two of them walked quietly downstairs to the entrance hall.

“Much more practical,” Simon said with a glance at her low-heeled brown shoes. “And I congratulate you on your presence of mind: they’re both the same colour.”

She compressed her lips and did not say anything. He stopped her with a touch on her arm as she headed for the door.

“Is there a back way out of this place?” he asked. “Just in case some of your fans are watching in front.”

“Of course,” she said haughtily. “This way.”

She led him down the hall into its dark nether regions and disengaged the bolt which held the rear door shut. They stepped out into a tiny fenced yard where the apartment building’s wastepaper and orange peels overflowed several containers.

“Through here,” she pointed.

They went through an opening in the wooden fence and were standing in a narrow cul-de-sac just wide enough to allow a row of cars to park along one side and still leave access for driving in and out.

“We can walk around and catch a taxi,” Simon said. “My car’s at my flat.”

“Mine’s right here,” Tammy said. “Let’s take it. There’s no point in wasting time.”

“Okay.”

She took him to a long, low, scarlet sports car with gleaming wire-spoke wheels.

“Very nice,” the Saint said.

“Thank you. It’ll be mine in another eight hundred and forty-five payments — assuming I can come up with enough dirt on this immigration racket to keep my boss doling out the wherewithal.”

Simon opened her door for her and went around to jackknife himself into the low bucket seat on the other side.

“I wonder if you couldn’t have bought something a little more roomy for eight hundred and forty-six payments,” he commented.

“The littler they are the more fun they are to scoot around in,” she said. “You obviously weren’t designed for overpopulated areas.”

“I’m strictly designed for wide open spaces,” he agreed. “Shall we try the ignition and see what happens?”

She reached for the key, then hesitated, looking at him in the dim greenish light of the instrument panel.

“What do you mean, see what happens?”

“See if it blows up in our faces,” he elucidated.

“Are you insulting my car or are you implying there might be a bomb planted in the engine?” she asked uncertainly,

“The latter; but I don’t think your sparring partners are that technologically advanced. You’re much more likely to get a knife between your charmingly upholstered ribs, or a piano-wire collar around your neck.

She swallowed audibly.

“I’m going to start it,” she threatened, as if hoping that he would stop her.

“Go ahead. Take a chance.”

She turned the key with stabbing determination. The engine coughed and burbled to a steady rumble. There was, as Simon had expected, no explosion. Tammy took a deep breath and presented him with a triumphant look.

“So there,” she said. “Satisfied?”

“Alive,” he said. “And that’s good enough for me. Let’s go.”

She backed the car out of the cul-de-sac and he directed her to circle the block to avoid passing in front of the building.

“If the subjects of your biographical essays happen to be watching your front door, this may help us to give them the slip,” Simon explained. “On the other hand, unless they’re totally incompetent, they could be watching the back too, but there’s no harm in trying.”

“Do you really think somebody might follow us?”

Simon meditated on her snub-nosed, tense-lipped profile for a few seconds.

“You always sound so surprised at these things,” he remarked. “Don’t you have any idea at all of what you’ve gotten yourself into?”

“Of course I do!” she retorted. “Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.” She slowed down and then continued irritably. “What’s the best way to Datchet?”

“The shortest way you know from here to the M4, for a start.”

He kept a sharp lookout while she steered them southwards through a minimum of traffic to join the major westward motorway. The suburban commuters and shoppers were safely home, and it would be some time before the theatre goers started back.

“At this hour, we should make it comfortably in thirty minutes,” he said.

“There’s one thing neither one of us has mentioned,” Tammy said.

She seemed less tense now that they were putting a good distance between themselves and her flat. The Saint, finally satisfied that nobody was following the red sports car, settled more comfortably in his own incapacious seat.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“The police,” she said in fateful tones.

“There are lots of other things we haven’t mentioned either,” Simon said, stretching out his long arm across the back-rest behind her shoulders. “Popcorn, Mount Fujiyama, Ivan the Terrible...”

“Oh you’re impossible!”

He was smiling at her.

“It’s true, I am,” he said modestly. “And I apologise for not mentioning the police. What would you like me to mention about them? Their social usefulness, their handsome uniforms, their unfailing graciousness, their marytrdom at the hands of bearded baboons breaking up park benches for holy causes?”

“Why can’t you be serious? People are getting their arms broken and all you can do is make jokes.”

“That’s not all I’m doing. I’m putting my life in the hands of a woman driver. Greater love hath no man. What about the police?”

“Shouldn’t we tell them what’s going on?”

“It’s their job to know what’s going on,” Simon said. “They have nothing else to do for twenty-four hours a day but poke around finding out what’s going on. If we know more than they do, it hardly makes me feel they’re deserving of our help. Besides, what could we tell them? We’ve got nothing they could take action on.”

“But we might get in trouble.”

The Saint nodded complacently.

“We undoubtedly will.”

“With the police, I mean.”

“That too,” he concurred. “Especially considering how much they already love me for my past services.”

He watched her face in the irregular play of lights that swept continuously through the car. She looked as if she was beginning to have doubts about the bargain she had made.

“You’ve been in trouble with them before, haven’t you?” she asked.

“Oh, yes.”

“You’ve stolen things, haven’t you... and killed people.”

“I have been known to supplement the efforts of the State to balance the distribution of wealth and do justice as it should be done.”

“And I had to get myself mixed up with you!”

“I shall try to prove that I’m not a total liability. Love, of course, may take a little longer to burgeon.”

That silenced her until they were past the exit to Heathrow Airport, and may have added some helpful weight to the pressure of her foot on the accelerator. The Saint was not alarmed, for by that time he had been able to rate her as a fast and proficient driver, and for a while he was satisfied to let her concentrate on that.

After he estimated that her blood-pressure should be close to normal again, he said: “Just to pass the time, I’d like to hear more about this Kalki the Kook who does the bone-breaking bit.”

“Kalki? What about him?”

“That’s my question. What else do you know?”

Tammy made a perceptible effort to meet him on the same impersonal plane.

“He came to England about ten years ago, before there were many restrictions on commonwealth immigration. He has no police record, but they say he used to pad his income as a wrestler and lorry driver by meeting new arrivals from Pakistan at the airport, offering to help them, and then charging them a small fortune for a ride to their destination, where he dumped them and disappeared.”

“Charming fellow,” said Simon. “And now he’s fishing in more troubled waters. Anything else?”

“That’s about it on Kalki.” Tammy pulled out to pass a convoy of three lumbering trucks. “Do you really know where we’re going?” she asked.

“Yes. We take the next exit — it’s marked ‘A331 Slough-Colnbrook.’ Meanwhile, what’s the dossier on Kalki’s sidekick? American, ex-jockey, what else?”

“Crazy as a loon, for a start,” Tammy replied. “He fell off a horse years ago and cracked his skull. The doctors took a piece of bone out of his cranium and roofed him over with a stainless steel plate. Ever since then he claims he can pick up wireless broadcasts, and that’s why they call him Shortwave.” She laughed. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

“Oh, I do. Fascinating. A human radio.”

“So he says, and it may even be true. I had a close-up look at him at a pub one afternoon when I first started prowling around Soho, and he was giving everybody the latest odds from Ascot.”

“Right off the top of his head, so to speak,” mused Simon. “A mobile betting shop. If we can bring him back alive maybe we can sell him to Ladbrooke’s. What are his other distinctions besides access to the radio waves?”

“He likes hurting people,” Tammy said flatly. “And he’ll do anything for money. But as far as I know, he’s just a tool.”

“I wonder if he needs to be plugged in before he operates,” Simon ruminated.

“Considering the kind of operations he’s supposed to perform on people, I’d just as soon not find out,” Tammy said. “In fact, I’m beginning to wonder if I won’t ask the editor to transfer me to the cookery page.”

The Saint chuckled.

“Don’t chicken out now,” he told her. “We’ve got some three-star thrills to look forward to. Just think of it: Super-thug and his marvellous electronic midget. That combination beats steak-and-kidney pie any day. Here’s our turn-off, coming up now.”

“I saw it,” Tammy said in a grim voice.

“You’re welcome to hitch a ride back to town if you feel a little nervous,” Simon said maliciously. “Just let me borrow your baby hot-rod, and I’ll give you an exclusive interview when the rough stuff’s over.”

The lights of an approaching car flared across the girl’s face as she came down to the roundabout at the bottom of the exit ramp. Her face was tense with the determination of a novice high-wire walker about to give her first performance without benefit of net.

“Never mind,” she said, between what Simon imagined were clenched teeth. “Just never mind the comical comments! I’ll be right with you through the Hallelujah Chorus.” She slowed the car. “What next?”

“Bear that way, where the little sign says Datchet. Then look out for another side marker that says Wraysbury... From here on, if you won’t let me take over, you’ll have to let me side-seat drive...”

He continued his coolly confident pilotage, even when an unlikely turning into which he had ordered her became a narrow track which dipped, twisted, and writhed through a thick coppice as if its original course had been charted by a drink-crazed Hottentot on the trail of a devious wart hog.

It bored its tortuous way under a tunnel-like covering of trees for a quarter of a mile before the tenuous strip of mud and gravel shook itself, straightened, and took off like an arrow between two open fields.

“I hope you really do know this road,” Tammy said sceptically, and pressed the accelerator almost to the floor.

Simon heard one rifle shot over the steepening roar of the engine, and then the explosion of the left front tyre. Tammy screamed as her car tried to leap from under them like a shying horse.

2

At the instant of its skid the red sports car became a hurtling missile instead of a vehicle. All the Saint could do was to grab the steering wheel and keep Tammy from giving it a hysterical overcorrection that would have launched the car into a series of flips and turned its occupants into little more than unsightly stains on the upholstery.

The infuriating sense of powerlessness that overwhelmed him was at least shortlived. The buck and swerve of the car, the squeal of the tyres, the crazy Cossack dance of a hedge in the sweeping headlights, were all over in a jagged lightning-flash of time that ended in a strangely anticlimactic muffled thud, and total darkness.

The darkness, too, lasted a very short time. Even while the Saint was half stunned, every cell in his brain was struggling for life, clawing back to full consciousness. The distant sound of the rifle shot that had made the car veer off the road still echoed in his skull like a shouted word of warning bouncing down and down through a nerve-net of subterranean chambers. A less experienced, less finely tuned mind would not even have separated out and identified the gunshot for what it was; it would have been merely a meaningless part of the panic-fused sensation of what would later have been recognised as an automobile accident.

But for Simon the explosive crack still resounding in his head was a call to arms as clear as the blast of a trumpet. Unfortunately even his perfectly conditioned body was not immune to the effects of being thrown, encapsuled in steel, into a ditch at seventy miles an hour. It took him a few seconds to come fully back to awareness, and by that time the most prominent thing he became aware of was the long slender black snout of a rifle poking down through the car’s open window at the side of his head.

The lights had gone out, but the moon was bright, and when Simon’s eyes travelled up the barrel of the rifle to focus on the man who held it he had no trouble at all in recognising the face of none other than Mahmud the waiter, whose right arm was conspicuously free of splints, white bandages, or a sling.

“Are they d-d-d-dead?” inquired a rather thin male voice from offstage.

“No,” Mahmud answered with frank dissatisfaction.

“And the lame shall take up their guns and walk,” Simon said biblically.

The voice from the darkness of the car startled Mahmud, who jerked back, aiming the rifle more tensely.

“Go ahead — shoot them,” came the thin voice.

“No. Pull the girl out. And you come out, Mr. Templar, with your hands in front of you.”

The car had run into the shallow ditch at an angle, and it had come to rest with its right side higher than its left side. Simon was on the lower side. When he turned to look at Tammy she was already being half dragged, half helped out of the driver’s seat. Too dazed to comprehend what was happening, she put up no resistance. Simon might have tried some resistance of his own except for the fact that she was in the hands of the opposition before he had been able to fully collect his own resources.

“Out!” Mahmud repeated.

His voice was more frightened than menacing which Simon took to be a dangerous state of affairs. He would much rather have faced a calm professional killer than a scared amateur who might pull the trigger without even knowing it.

The Saint, accordingly, opened his door the short distance that the car’s inclined position allowed and squeezed himself out on to the soft damp cushion of leaves that filled the ditch. Mahmud moved back above the rim of the ditch, keeping the rifle pointed straight at Simon’s chest. Around the front of the car came Tammy, pushed by a man almost a head shorter than she was — the same man Simon had seen in the alley behind the Golden Crescent with the giant wrestler.

“What’s happening?” she asked groggily.

“Our friend Mahmud here has experienced a miraculous recovery and couldn’t wait for us to share his joy with him — so he shot out one of your front tyres and precipitated us into this pleasant glen.” He smiled at the tense Pakistani. “Good shooting, Mahmud, and how about introducing me to your faith healer?”

“Well, go on and do something!” squeaked the little man who was holding Tammy in accents that had more of Chicago than London in them. “They didn’t get killed, so you gotta kill ’em!”

“If I shoot, the police will know why it was done,” Mahmud said. “It must look like an accident, Kalki said.”

“Beat ’em on the head, then!” his partner pleaded. “Do something! Bash ’em with your gun butt! Just hurry up. I see lights! I see lights coming!”

“Through the hedge, quick!” Mahmud said. “Everybody, or I do shoot. This way.”

Tammy gave a faint yelp as her captor doubled one of her arms behind her back and shoved her stumbling up the side of the ditch. Simon followed at a more leisurely pace, looking over his shoulder to confirm for himself that the headlights of a car were flickering through the trees from a nearby bend in the road. If it had not been for Tammy he would have pitted his own speed and agility against Mahmud’s nervous marksmanship, but as it was all he could do was follow her through a gap in the straggly quickset and reflect on the instinctive wisdom which had led sailors through the centuries to regard a woman on shipboard as an infallible omen of disaster.

“Get your hands off me, you ape!” the female herself was protesting dizzily. “Where do you think we’re going?”

Nobody, including the Saint, bothered to answer her. They had hurried some distance into the field when Mahmud had ordered them all down on their knees. On the road, the lights of the approaching car zipped past without slowing. Mahmud started to stand up and then he squatted again as the sound of suddenly applied brakes squealed through the trees.

“They’ve seen it,” said Tammy’s diminutive escort. “Let’s beat it out of here!”

Mahmud did not argue.

“Hurry!” he said. “Run! That way.”

The Pakistani brought up the rear of the unevenly hasty procession, urging them on until Tammy almost collapsed for lack of breath.

“Over there,” Mahmud said. “Do not stop.”

Nowhere in that area is it possible to walk very far without coming to a road of some sort, and they soon reached the local limit of trackless wilderness. They came to a gate which let them out on to an unpaved lane. In a bay by the gate was a parked car. In the field opposite loomed the black shape of a barn. A gust of wind rattled branches overhead as the group stopped, and Mahmud peered anxiously through the darkness behind them. There were no sounds except the wind and Tammy’s almost sobbing gasps for breath.

“We’re okay now,” said the diminutive American. “Let’s finish with these characters and get out of here.”

Simon studied the man in the dim light of the moon. His face was skeletally thin, crowned with hair about an inch long which stood rigidly straight up on end.

“You must be Shortwave,” the Saint said cordially.

“You heard of me?” asked the little man with pleased surprise.

Simon nodded.

“What’s the latest from Radio Three?”

Shortwave grinned.

“You wanta know what I heard while we was running across here?”

He began to whistle.

“Quiet!” Mahmud snapped at him. “Everyone get into the car.”

“The finale of Beethoven’s Ninth,” Simon reflected on Shortwave’s performance.

“Yeah?” said Shortwave happily. “I been picking up a lot of stuff from the Heathrow control tower lately too.”

With his rifle, Mahmud was urging them into the parked Ford a few yards away. Shortwave produced a pistol from his baggy jacket.

“What’s the idea?” he objected. “Shoot ’em here, an’ we don’t make a mess of the car.”

“Now that it cannot look like an accident,” Mahmud said impatiently, “it should be done where their bodies will not be found.”

“So don’t talk stupid,” Simon amplified, for Shortwave’s benefit.

A sharp stinging blow on the back of his neck knocked him forward. He blinked back the moisture that automatically flooded his eyes and turned to see Shortwave holding his pistol clublike and threatening on a level with his shoulder.

“We’re gonna kill you,” Shortwave said. “With pleasure.”

“That’s the method I’d prefer,” Simon said evenly. “I’m going to kill you with anything I can get my hands on.”

“Big deal!” said Shortwave scornfully. “You and what army?”

Mahmud prodded Simon into the front passenger seat, Tammy into the back, and directed Shortwave in beside her. It was a very different performance from anything he had ever put on at the Golden Crescent. He was still a nervous amateur, but he was finding reserves of competence which indicated a surprising affinity for his new vocation. He put the rifle in on the floor at Shortwave’s feet, went around and got in behind the wheel, swung and reversed the car around, and took off at a bouncing speed down the uneven road.

“Stop talking so much,” he said. “And believe me, Mr. Templar, if you try to interfere with what we do your woman will suffer.”

“I am not his woman,” Tammy protested weakly.

“You’ll be nothing if he starts acting up,” said Shortwave. His next words were aimed at Mahmud. “Where are you going?”

“To the boathouse — it is the only thing,” Mahmud answered. “But they should not be let to know where it is. Perhaps you will tie something across their eyes?”

Shortwave settled back comfortably in his corner of the back seat, cradling his pistol in both hands.

“Who cares if they know how to get to the boathouse?” he asked softly. “Once they get in there, they ain’t never coming out.”

3

Tammy Rowan, who had seemed partly dazed since her car had spun off the road, began to wake up completely to what was happening around her as Mahmud drove on a twisting route through the night.

“This is crazy!” she protested. “First somebody’s got a smashed arm and then he doesn’t. My car has a blowout and two goons with guns just happen to be waiting by the side of the road...”

Simon had contrived to turn sideways with his back to the door so that he could see Mahmud, Shortwave, and — without unduly twisting his neck — Tammy, who was directly behind him.

“I’m sure your feminine intuition and/or your nose for news can set you on the path to figuring it all out,” he said unindulgently.

She paused sullenly to think things over.

“Right,” she sighed. “And I suppose they were responsible for wrecking my car somehow too.”

“Mahmud did it with his little popgun,” Simon said. “Didn’t you, Mahmud? I heard the shot just as the tyre went. Did you develop your aim in the Khyber Pass or a shooting gallery in Blackpool, comrade?”

Mahmud stared silently ahead.

“Talkative lad,” the Saint commented. He regarded Mahmud with scientific interest as he continued. “I have a feeling that the bigger fish in his scummy little pond have got something on him, otherwise he’d be peacefully pushing brinjal pickle for Mr. Haroon. He doesn’t look like a criminal type to me. No nerve.”

“Be quiet,” Mahmud said ineffectually.

Shortwave, relaxed and confident with his gun clasped between his hands, giggled from the back seat.

“So this guy really is the Saint?” he chortled. “What a laugh. It was all too easy.”

“As easy as falling off a log,” Simon agreed. “But don’t laugh too much till after you’ve landed.”

Shortwave giggled appreciatively again and fondled his pistol. Tammy could not share the surface geniality.

“Mahmud!” she interrupted. “Or whatever your name is. Listen — if this lot is forcing you into something, we can help you. Take us back to town and we’ll see that you’re protected.” She glanced at Shortwave. “Both of you. You don’t run this gang. If you’ll help us catch them, we’ll back you up when the thing goes to court.”

Mahmud shook his head and told her again to stop talking. Shortwave merely tittered.

“There just one thing I’m curious about,” Simon said to Mahmud. “Why did you decide to stage that faked broken arm while I was at the Golden Crescent? Don’t tell me; let me guess. Because you panicked when I started asking questions and thought I was on to you — so you decided nothing could be more certain to throw me off the trail than making it look as if you were getting broken to bits for going against the gang. With you in the clear, the bigger boys could use you to steer Miss Rowan — or me — just where they wanted us. And a neat little ambush you made of it, for a rush job. There’s only one road we could take to the Grey Goose, and you had enough of a start to be there waiting for us.”

“He’s real bright, ain’t he?” Shortwave remarked. “So bright he’s about to get a hole blown in his head.”

Simon regarded him indulgently.

“What fun!” he drawled. “And when it’s been repaired like yours, we’ll be able to communicate, like satellites.”

As they cut across the town centre of Staines, Mahmud reiterated a warning.

“Please don’t try anything foolish, Mr. Templar, or Miss Rowan will receive the consequences from Shortwave.”

Simon did not need the reminder. A lively awareness of the risk to Tammy was what had forced him to let this pair of bush-league bandits get away with some manoeuvres which, if he had been on his own, might have brought an abrupt end to their careers.

They left Staines by the Laleham road, and continued on to Shepperton, but a mile or two beyond that Mahumud took a sharp fork into a complex of winding lanes that soon had the Saint straining his directional memory. It was an area which he might not have recognised even in daylight, for it had the unfinished air or recent development: still unpaved roads cut between glimpses of old houses abandoned before the spread of raw excavations. The mention of a “boathouse” meant the river, and this seemed to be one of those sections where the gravel pits which had not long destroyed it were being painfully salvaged as new residential waterfront and small-boat marinas.

The boathouse which they came to eventually, after bumping over a rutted track across a grassy field, had obviously once been an appendage of some gracious estate of which the main building was not to be seen, if it still stood. The boathouse, naturally, stood on the very edge of the river, and was big enough to contain an apartment on the upper floor, where lights showed in the windows.

“We’re here,” Mahmud said superfluously. “No one must move until I tell you.”

He steered the car around to the far side of the building, the headlights sweeping over dark bricks which could easily have been a hundred years old, and brought them on to the old driveway which had once served it, which now lost itself in weeds and bushes a few yards inland.

Another vehicle was already there: the van that Simon had seen in the alley behind the Golden Crescent that afternoon.

“What do you think — is this the headquarters of the whole Koo-Koo Klan?” Simon said to Tammy. “Or just a substation?”

Mahmud cut off the engine of the car and then the headlights. The light that came from the windows above was weak and yellow.

“Now,” he said. “Do what I tell you. Sit here and wait. I will go inside for a minute.”

“Let’s take ’em on in,” Shortwave said. “What the hell do we need to wait for?”

“Scared of the dark?” the Saint sympathised. “We’ll be here to keep you company.”

“I must ask,” Mahmud told his accomplice. He jerked his head towards the house. “He does not know we bring them here.”

Shortwave looked slightly apprehensive.

“Yeah. It’s your fault. I told you we oughta conk ’em and leave ’em there like it was an accident.”

“We couldn’t,” Mahmud said almost desperately. “There were cars coming. This was all we could do!”

“Tell it to him, not me,” Shortwave replied, indicating the house once again. “It’s your show. I’m just riding shotgun.”

“Loyalty to the end,” commented Simon. “Doesn’t it grab you, Tammy?”

Mahmud opened his door and got out. Shortwave was no longer slouching relaxed in his corner of the back seat as he had been during the ride. He sat up straight and alert, holding the pistol on Tammy with his right hand while he steadied his right forearm with the other.

“There’s just about one spider web between this dame and the Great Beyond,” he said to Simon, “so sit tight and don’t try nothing.”

“Why should I try anything?” the Saint asked languidly. “What more could I ask? Free transportation, fresh country air, brilliant conversation...”

Shortwave grunted, keeping on his guard, his eyes narrowed. Then he began to hum a nervous mournful gipsy tune.

“And thou beside me singing in the wilderness,” Simon added. “Our very own portable radio.”

Tammy Rowan, who was so busy trying to look brave that she could hardly move, glanced at Shortwave, who appeared to have sunk into a state of trance. His thin reedy humming went on. His eyelids drooped, but Simon could see that the dilated black pupils peered out of his skeletal face with undiminished watchfulness.

Tammy spoke very softly and hesitantly, as if she thought Shortwave were asleep and might not hear if she kept her voice down.

“What are we going to do?”

Shortwave, as motionless as a coiled snake, went on with his humming.

“We’ll do just as we’re told,” the Saint replied. “Don’t be fooled by Shortwave’s gentle manner and wholesome demeanour: I have a feeling he can be pretty nasty if he gets riled.”

Shortwave chuckled suddenly.

“You’re damn right.”

“I didn’t mean to interrupt the programme,” Simon told him.

“I was gettin’ Radio Luxembourg,” Shortwave informed him in return. “It comes in real clear about this time.”

There had not been any sounds from inside the boat-house, but now a door apparently opened, letting out into the night a babble of at least two excited and irritated non-English voices. Feet crunched along the drive towards the car, and Mahmud opened the door beside Shortwave.

“Bring them into the house,” he ordered. “Hurry!”

“Okay,” Shortwave said. “You guys cool it now and do like I say. I’m gonna back out of here, and you follow me out this door, girlie. Saint, you hold it right where you are till I give you the word to move — unless you want her to get hurt.”

He kept his pistol in thoroughly professional readiness while he slipped out of the car and Mahmud retrieved his rifle from the vacated floor. The Saint had decided as soon as he was captured that unless a really good chance presented itself he would not try to escape or otherwise turn the tables until he had been taken to the group’s headquarters. Mahmud, in deciding to drive him straight to the boathouse, might have been saving him a good bit of work — while a minor slip could have cost Tammy Rowan’s life.

Now one objective seemed to have been reached, and the next few moments could very well give him the best chance to make his move. Mahmud, in his jittery state, had not even thought to search the Saint for weapons, but even if he had made the conventional search, he would quite likely have failed to find Anna, the slim beautifully balanced throwing knife in the sheath strapped to his left forearm. It was a card up the Saint’s sleeve that more professional friskers had overlooked before, and the fingertips of Simon’s right hand casually located the hilt of it while he considered how long he could most effectively wait before bringing it into play.

But then, as Mahmud took a step back and waited for the girl to follow as reluctantly as it would have been natural to expect, the Saint’s carefully cultivated restraint was nullified by another factor over which he had no control. Tammy Rowan, in some excess of reckless bravery, or some frantic irrational panic brought on by the prospect of rapidly approaching doom, hurled herself from her seat and dived for the rifle. The effort might have made more sense if the trigger end had not been in Mahmud’s hands, leaving Tammy in unpromising possession of the barrel.

Even in the first second of the grim tug-of-war Simon knew what the outcome would be, but he felt he had no choice but to go on the offensive himself. Mahmud was shouting, and Shortwave started around the car to try to cut off any escape attempt from the other side. Expecting at any moment to hear the crack of the rifle as it was fired point-blank in the scuffle, Simon shouted at Tammy to let go and give up. Then he vigorously opened his door just in time for it to catch Shortwave full in the face as he came scampering around the front of the car.

As Shortwave crashed to a standstill, Simon rolled out and grabbed him. Mahmud was screeching at Tammy in his native tongue, and a thudding of heavy footsteps from the boathouse hinted that reinforcements were on the way. Either Mahmud had orders to keep Tammy alive, or he did not want to put holes in his car, or his rifle had jammed: for some reason the shot Simon kept expecting still did not come. On his own battle-front he disarmed Shortwave by chopping his wrist with the edge of one hand and knocking the pistol to the ground. Shortwave yowled and kicked and flailed like a human buzzsaw, trying to counter the Saint’s superior strength and skill with sheer wild motion. The Saint calculated carefully for a split second and then sent his fist shooting into the human blur at just the proper instant to crack him hard on the point of his jaw.

Shortwave sagged against the side of the car. And then the Saint had a peculiar dreamlike sensation experienced, it is almost certain, by few people besides Elijah and a handful of other mortals thought worthy by the Higher Powers of being borne bodily away to heaven without suffering the usual preliminaries. He felt himself lifted straight into the air, where he dangled for a moment before the less inspiring portion of his journey began. Then whatever had elevated him put him down. Threw him down would be a more accurate way of saying what was done to him — and what followed was even more unpleasant. He had just been jarred to the earth flat on his back when he got his first glimpse of the human colossus to whom he owed his experience, and whose gallon-capacity left shoe which introduced itself by crunching into his side between his ribs and his pelvis. At the same instant he heard the rifle finally fire.

4

For a few seconds of blinding pain he was completely incapacitated, and when he began to suck in breath again his hands were already being tied behind him. In the process, Anna was discovered and snatched from her sheath.

His first full awareness was the sight of Mahmud hurling Tammy to the ground with a whip-jerk of her arm. He was not sure whether she had been shot or not. The waiter’s rifle lay in the dust, and for a second Simon thought the Pakistani was stooping to retrieve it. But when Mahmud pivoted and turned to Tammy again it was a supple green branch torn from a nearby shrub that he held in his hand. Apparently unwounded, she tried to scramble to her feet to get away but he slashed the three-foot switch down across her shoulders. She screamed and fell back to the ground.

“Simon! Please! Do something!”

The Saint could only curse his helplessness. His wrists were now tightly bound, and he was hauled to his feet by the giant who had lifted him into the air and thrown him down again. He knew without looking who that was — and how completely useless it would be to put up any struggle at this point. Tammy screamed as Mahmud raised his slender stick again and swept it in a whistling arc across the girl’s back. She screamed again and writhed, face down, her skirt twisted up around her legs, trying to protect her head with both arms. Mahmud’s next lash was aimed at the bare legs.

“Stop!” commanded the huge wrestler who was holding the Saint. “Somebody might hear. Get her in the house, idiot!”

Mahmud looked furiously confused and frustrated as he hesitated, and then tossed his stick aside. Simon felt that Mahmud’s violence was not so much due to sadism or even loss of temper as it was to the feeling that he had lost face in front of Shortwave and Kalki and had taken the only way he could think of to reassert his masculinity.

“Stupid woman!” he spat at Tammy as he dragged her sobbing to her feet.

Shortwave had been sitting on the ground with his back propped against one of the car’s front wheels without evincing any interest in anything that was happening.

“Come on!” Kalki yelled at him in a voice which was strangely lacking in depth considering the vast dimensions of the man who produced it. He looked like a bull fiddle and sounded like a scratchy viola. “Get up and get in the ruddy house!”

Shortwave looked up at him with glazed eyes, comprehended, and pulled himself to his feet. He was still too fuzzy from the Saint’s punch to do anything more ambitious than perform a wobbling march behind Mahmud and Tammy to a side door of the boathouse. Simon brought up the rear, pushed by his Gargantuan captor.

The ground level of the building, into which medium-sized boats might have been hauled out from the river through full-width roller doors, was apparently being converted to additional living accommodation. A newly built brick unpainted wall in it closed off a large part of it, and another wall had been started where a stairway led to the floor above. Kalki kicked aside a cement-encrusted hoe as he shoved the Saint towards a bare trestle table with a number of cheap wooden chairs around it.

“Sit!” Kalki said to Simon, pushing him into one of the chairs in the middle of the room. “Tie his feet!” he ordered Shortwave.

For the first time Simon could take a good look at the wrestler at close range, and in these cramped quarters he seemed, even more impressive than he had in the alley or on television. His costume was more impressive, too. He had changed his workman’s outfit for a charcoal-grey Edwardian suit with orange waistcoat and burgundy silk tie. His shoes were brightly polished and he smelled of Yardley’s. The suit was too small for him, and a good deal of thick wrist dangled below the jacket cuffs, but the effect he created was no less awe-inspiring because of a few sartorial defects. He looked a bit like a gorilla in formal dress.

“I can’t say I’m pleased to meet you, but I am surprised,” Simon remarked. “We were just watching you smash up somebody on television. How did you get dressed and down here so quickly?”

Kalki’s reaction immediately made it plain that he had at least one weakness commensurate with his size. He puffed up visibly with pride, glanced at Tammy to make sure that she was paying attention, and looked back down at the Saint.

“It was me you saw on the television,” he said self-importantly. “On tape. I made that show last week.”

“How about that?” Simon commented to Tammy. “We’re house guests of a celebrity. Look where ambition and hard work will get you.”

“It’s gonna get you a fancy funeral,” Shortwave said viciously. He planted himself in front of the Saint with a piece of rope in his hand. “When I get through with you, you’ll wish you’d never seen me except on television.”

“Talking of television,” Simon said with impeccable good humour, “how does that come through on your chromium plate? Do you receive the picture as well, or only the sound effects?”

Shortwave glared at him with red eyes and raised the rope, but Kalki stopped him magisterially, taking pride in his own massive self-control.

“Not now,” he said magnanimously. “I do not like the lady to see you hit a man who cannot fight back. Wait until Fowler comes, and if he says so, you can do what you like — for as long as you like.”

The fairly efficient trussing to which Simon had been subjected was not enough to suppress the raising of an eyebrow.

“Fowler?” he echoed. “Who he? — if I may use the idiom.”

“You will find out,” Mahmud said, pushing Tammy into another chair.

“Let me do some more guessing,” Simon said. “He’s the great White Wizard who’s doing so much for you poor benighted victims of race prejudice — and making a nice profit for himself, of course. He also has a useful-sized pleasure boat registered with the Thames Conservancy, but also perfectly capable of running downriver and out to sea to make pick-ups. There can only be two or three locks between here and tidewater... And this is where the immigrant cargo can be landed and wait to be tidily dispersed. Not exactly Ritz accommodation, but I can see you’re working on that... I didn’t notice the boat, though. Could it be somewhere down the Thames Estuary right now, picking up more passengers?”

Mahmud impassively finished tying Tammy’s hands together in front of her. Stubbornly pretending not to listen, he betrayed his tortured anxiety about what he was hearing.

“Not like that,” Shortwave said irritably. “Behind her.”

Kalki intervened, happy to display his authority again.

“Do as you are,” he said to Mahmud. “The lady will be very well.”

“Oh yes, the lady will be very well,” Tammy sighed. She looked utterly defeated, too disheartened even to be frightened any more. “What are you going to do with us?”

“You wanna hear?” Shortwave asked as he got up from tying the Saint’s feet. “It might take me a couple of hours to tell you.”

Kalki gave a leviathan shrug.

“Do not worry about it,” he pontificated to Tammy. “You were expected to be dead now, so no matter what happens this is all extra time. Enjoy it.”

“Thanks so much,” Tammy sighed. Then she suddenly stared at Simon. “They wouldn’t really do it, would they?” she asked in a tone of horrified realisation. “I mean kill us? I didn’t mean anything like that. I just wanted a story.”

“You wanted to see us in prison,” Kalki said without any overt hostility. “You wrote bad things. We warned you.” He twitched his jaw to one side in a c’est-la-vie mannerism that produced a quivering of his black whiskers and a sound of lightly grating teeth. “So.”

The abrupt, formally regretful “so” was self-explanatory enough for Tammy, who shivered as if she had suddenly been touched by a ghost, and dropped her gaze to the floor. For the first time she looked desperately, hopelessly terrified. Then, without any pause for a transition of mood, Kalki wheeled around and moved on Mahmud like a towering thunderstorm.

“And you!” he bellowed. “You bloody fool! I tell you to kill these people and you bring them here! I should have really broken your arm!”

Mahmud cowered before his massive accuser, and Shortwave, blinking rapidly, attempted to blend with the naked walls.

“I did as well as I could,” Mahmud protested. He looked ready to burst into tears. “I told them where to come — the only road they could use, so there would be no mistake. Then we waited behind the hedge, and I hit the tyre with the first shot! How can you blame me if the car did not crash in a way to kill them?”

That part of Kalki’s face visible above his home-grown Black Forest had turned dark purple.

“But why did you not kill them there?”

“I told him, I told him!” Shortwave blurted. “I said bash ’em in the head and make it look like they was killed in the wreck, but he wouldn’t d-d-d-d-do it!”

“Lights were coming,” Mahmud cried. “There was no chance!”

“Lights?” Kalki keened unreasonably. “Lights?”

He seemed about to reach down and break Mahmud in half, but when that happy prospect failed to materialise Simon entered the conversation.

“I must say you boys have all bungled this thing beautifully,” he said, in a tone of great good cheer. “You should have stuck to beating up kids for pennies, because as it is you’re getting in way out of your depth. You obviously aren’t up to handling the situation, and the next thing you know you’ll be permanently enjoying England’s hospitality in a granite guesthouse. But let me insert a note of optimism: it’s not too late. If you repent now you can still save your skins.”

“Big deal!” was Shortwave’s scornful response.

“Shut up!” Kalki said to Shortwave, and Shortwave shut up.

The giant turned to Simon.

“You can talk all you want to but it will be no use,” he said to his prisoner. “I do not want to listen to you.” He spoke to Mahmud and Shortwave. “We will put them in the back room — there.”

He opened the door in the new partition wall. Since the Saint’s ankles as well as his wrists were now tied he had to be carried by Mahmud and Shortwave. One took his arms and the other his legs, and together they staggered with their burden into an unfurnished, unlighted room that may have been intended to serve as a dormitory. Kalki, who might more logically have shared the load, escorted Tammy — whose legs were still free — along the same route. When he came with her into the room he turned on the light, saw Simon deposited on his back by the wall, and ordered Mahmud to bring the lady a chair.

“You will not have to wait long,” he said ominously, “but you may as well be comfortable.”

Simon inch-wormed himself into a sitting position. He had already tested the efficiency of the knots and windings Shortwave had put around his wrists and had found them unfortunately beyond reproach.

“When is Abdul Haroon joining the party?” he asked as Mahmud brought in a chair from the kitchen.

Kalki’s jutting brow contracted above the deep hollows of his eye sockets.

“Haroon?” he asked, obviously puzzled.

“When I was at the woman’s flat I told them Haroon was one of your chiefs,” Mahmud explained. “It helped make them not suspicious about me.”

The Saint had doubted that part of Mahmud’s story as soon as he had heard it, but had wanted to check and be sure.

“Haroon!” Kalki said contemptuously. “That ball of pig fat! The only things he wants are more customers and cheaper meat. The day he has the courage to break a fly’s wing I will jump over the Thames.”

“It might do the world more good if you jumped in,” Simon opined.

Kalki pointed a cudgel-sized finger at him — a theatrical gesture of warning accompanied by tilted head which the Saint had seen him use against his opponent in the televised wrestling match.

“And you might enjoy your short time of life more if you kept your mouth shut,” the giant said.

He bent down and with a deliberate, almost stiffly performed movement, struck Simon a stinging blow across the face with the back of his hand. The Saint knew how to soften the effect with a subtly timed yielding of his head, but Kalki’s hand was as big as an encyclopedia and the walnut-sized knuckles which adorned the back of it were a face-full to be reckoned with. As the Saint sat, steadily meeting the Pakistani’s eyes and refusing to show the slightest sign of discomfort, he tasted the salty blood that oozed from the corner of his mouth where the blow had smashed the inner tissue against his teeth.

“Be sure there is nothing more in his pockets,” Kalki told Mahmud. “Then leave them here until I have talked to Captain Fowler.”

He stalked haughtily from the room, followed by Shortwave, while Mahmud carried out a perfunctory and ungentle search. Then Simon and Tammy were left alone.

“He’s hurt you!” Tammy said, staring aghast at the Saint’s face. “Why do you insist on making them angry? You scared me half to death.”

The Saint looked around at the bare room, the stained plaster of three of its walls, the one window so thick with ancient grime and cobwebs that a curtain would have made it no more opaque. He looked at it as a stranded traveller accustomed to comfort might have looked at the last available room in some remote shanty town. Tammy’s face, as she followed the direction of his eyes, reflected a more appalled sense of the awful novelty of the situation.

“I just thought I’d have a little fun with them,” Simon said casually.

“A little fun?” his companion exclaimed. “They might have killed you.”

“They intend to kill me anyway.” He looked at her sharply. “And what about you, Miss Prudence? Jumping for that rifle in the car wasn’t exactly the most discreet move I’ve ever seen. In fact it was downright stupid. How is it you aren’t sporting a powder-lined perforation in your pinafore right now?”

“I thought maybe it wasn’t loaded,” she said, “and I kept away from the hole in the front while I was pulling on it...”

“The hole in the front?” the Saint repeated incredulously.

“The hole in the front of the gun,” Tammy explained. “You know.”

“Sometimes known as the barrel?” Simon said.

“Right. Where the shell comes out. And when he did shoot he didn’t hit me, but it scared me so much I lost my grip.”

“I’m thinking you lost your grip a little earlier, about the time you decided you were a crime reporter. But let’s not worry about the past when we’ve got so little of the future ahead of us. Here we are, all bundled up, waiting for Fowler to view us before the coup de grâce. Thus endeth verse, page, chapter, and book, unless we can think of something to do.”

“Who is this Captain Fowler?” Tammy asked.

“I don’t know,” said Simon. “Next question?”

“We could start yelling and screaming,” Tammy suggested thoughtfully. “There might be a constable in the neighbourhood.”

“Which vocal performance would last about five seconds, till our hosts got back and gagged us. Besides, I’m pretty sure there’s nobody around these parts to hear us.”

The girl lowered her voice almost to the point of inaudibility.

“I’ve still got my tear gas ring, and I reloaded it before we left my flat.”

“That’s good news,” the Saint said. “Let the hostile legions tremble.”

“Don’t be sarcastic,” she retorted. “It might work this time.”

“It might be better than nothing,” Simon admitted, without conviction, “and nothing is just about what we have to work with now...” He paused thoughtfully. “Unless it’s that big ladykiller’s swelled head.”

“What do you mean?”

“I think Goliath may have an Achilles’ heel, if you’ll pardon the mixed mythology.”

He did not go on. Tammy stared at him suddenly. A car was pulling into the drive and stopping outside the boathouse.