Saint Errant

Dawn

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 through 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 rustlings of nature at peace.

The Saint also was at peace. In spite of everything his enemies would have said, there actually were times when peace was the main preoccupation of that fantastic freebooter; when hills and blue sky were high enough adventure, and baiting a hook was respite enough from baiting policemen or promoters. In such a mood he had jumped at the invitation to join a friend in a week of hunting and fishing in the High Sierras — a friend who had been recalled to town on urgent business almost as soon as they arrived, leaving the Saint in by no means melancholy solitude, for Simon Templar could always put up with his own company.

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 through 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 through it, and in spite of his relaxation the Saint felt a kind of simmer of anticipating 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 about 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.”

“Nuts, 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... 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. “God!” he whispered. “I really dreamed up something in her.”

“We must swap reminiscences someday,” 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 four hundred square feet, one might hide a large bird if it were camouflaged as an atlas or something, but that would be about the limit.

The two bunk beds 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 high 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, hell, 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 damn 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, chartreuse — and the Saint gasped with reverent wonder as he looked at the cameo head carved on 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 high adventure, to violence.

That stone, and above all the face cut eternally on its incandescent surface, was beauty beyond belief. No man could look on that face and ever know complete peace again.

She was the lily maid of Astolat, 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. Through 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 and 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 hell of a 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 it to hell and goddam. 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 Rumania.”

“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. “The Robin Hood of Modern Crime, the twentieth century’s brightest buccaneer, the devil 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 out with this — er — bedtime story? Before that unholy pair return with gun-lined question marks?”

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 woman 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 all the political ills that white-collared flesh is heir to. And he dreamed. Literally.

This was 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 hell with it. Whoever was dreaming woke up, but it was me bumped into her. And I was sorry as hell, 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 or 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. Each one 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 other unpleasantries were predicted if the stone fell into alien hands.

The name of Selden Appopoulis sort of 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 that was 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 became 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 way past the time when I ought to have woken up. But I don’t seem to be able to wake up. I’ve tried... My God, suppose I don’t wake up! Suppose I never can wake up? Suppose I never can get back, and I have to go on and on with this, being Big Bill Holbrook—”

“You could take a trip to Glendale,” Simon suggested gravely, “and try waking Faulks up.”

Holbrook-Faulks stared at him with oddly unfocused 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—”

Holbrook 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 and 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 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 far-off 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 that 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 through, 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 glamorous 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.”

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 weight lifter 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 career 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 through candlelight. His decision now was compounded of several factors, none of which was the 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 creature 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 the mattresses in a corner where shadows had retreated from the candle on the table. 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 upon 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 busy cleaning the dishes when the pounding came on the door.

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, but 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 dim light that fanned out from the door, his eyes were small and rat-like, 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 turned a deeper purple than the 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 c’n get the best 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? Gripes, he ain’t a army.”

“No,” Mac agreed, growing more unhappy by the second, “but he kind of seems like one, Jimmy. Didja see that jump? Criminy, Jimmy.”

The Saint decided to break it up.

“Now, Oswald—”

“Didn’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.

“Hey, Jimmy,” Mac broke in, “this guy’s a phony.”

“Charmed, I’m sure.” Jimmy blinked.

“Owls,” Mac explained, “can’t swim.”

“What the damblasted hell has owls to do with it?” Jimmy demanded.

“He said pour owls on the something waters. So that,” Mac said in triumph, “proves it.”

This, the Saint thought, wanders. He restrained Jimmy from assaulting Mac, and returned to 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 couple miles till Mac he says Big Bill ain’t here, ’n he ain’t been 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 for thought processes, who evaded reality by using unsemantic verbalisms for fact-facing and, God save the mark, fact-finding.”

Mac appealed to the superior intellect in his crowd.

“Whut’n hell’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 big 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 the 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 two men 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 historic 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 on 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 go 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 let’s 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 devil 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 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 jools. 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 damn warp of history. It couldn’t be hidden for three generations without word of it 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 it 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.

“Please keep it for me, Mr Templar. Things will get rather bad around here soon. I don’t want Appopoulis to get his fat hands on it.”

“Soon? Surely not for a couple of hours.”

Big Bill frowned.

“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, glared, 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. Yet 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 far-off 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 this 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.”

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 Jimmy 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 I... 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 rough with me because I admired the lady. Now you sit listening 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, run 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 co-ordination of a panther’s movement — and the menace. Big Bill Holbrook leaned back from it.

“Stop acting the knight in armor,” he protested. “What in hell 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 — and 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 under expensive and sheltered surroundings. You can see that in her every gesture, every expression. She was bred to great wealth, perhaps nobility, or 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 sound 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 Andy Faulks did 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 got to hand it to you. Too bad you’re not in bed in Glendale.”

For once of a 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. 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 a man of Big Bill Holbrook’s obvious IQ can look annihilation in the face with an admiring grin.

Something was still wrong, but 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.

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.

“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.

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.

A buttery 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 Sydney 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 nonetheless. 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... devil 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, or 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 chance,” 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 fight may only experience once in a lifetime. He had a sense of power, of supernatural co-ordination, 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 a 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, and 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 if bogged in some indissoluble bird-lime, 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 roared 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, and it had happened to him at last, as it had always been destined to happen someday, and in an instant he was going to cheat 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 it was broad daylight, and the intensity of the light told him that it must have been more than twelve hours since he had been shot.

He was lying on the floor of the cabin. He felt for his heart. It was beating strongly. His hand did not come away sticky with blood.

His eyes turned hesitantly down to his shirt. There was no hole in it. He jumped to his feet, felt himself all over, examined himself in the mirror. He was as whole as he’d ever been, and he felt fine.

He looked around the cabin. The mattresses were piled in the corner under the pine cones, the bunks unmade. Otherwise there were no signs of the brawl the night before. No trace of Jimmy and Mac, or Appopoulis. No Big Bill Holbrook. No Dawn...

And no hole in the wall beside the mirror where his hopeless shot at Appopoulis had buried itself.

The Saint shook his head. If it had all been a dream, he might have to seriously consider consulting a psychiatrist. Dreams reach only a certain point of vividness. What he remembered was too sharp of definition, too coherent, too consecutive. Yet if it wasn’t a dream, where were the evidences of reality, the bullet hole in his chest, in the wall?

He went to the door. There should be footprints. His cabin had rated with Grand Central Station for traffic last night.

There were no footprints, other than his own.

Simon reached for a cigarette, and suddenly sniffed it suspiciously before he put it in his mouth. If some joker, either in fun or malice, had adulterated his tobacco with some more exotic herb... But that, too, was absurd. A jag of those dimensions would surely bequeath a hangover to match, but his head was as clear as the mountain air.

He fumbled in his pockets for a match. Instead, his questing fingers touched something solid, a shape that was oddly familiar — yet impossibly alien. The tactile sensation lasted only for an instant, before his hand recoiled as if the thing had been red hot. He was afraid, actually afraid, to take it out.

The address of Andrew Faulks was in the Glendale directory. The house was a modest two-bedroom affair on a side street near Forest Lawn Memorial Park. A wreath hung on the door. A solemn gentleman who looked like, and undoubtedly was, an undertaker opened the door. He looked like Death rubbing white hands together.

“Mr Faulks passed on last night,” he said in answer to the Saint’s query. Unctuous sorrow overlaid the immediate landscape.

“Wasn’t it rather sudden?”

“Ah, not exactly, sir. He went to sleep last Saturday, passed into a coma, and never awakened.”

“At what time,” Simon asked, “did he die?”

“At ten-forty,” the man replied. “It was a sad death. He was in a delirium. He kept shouting about shooting someone, and talked about a saint.”

Simon had moved into the house while listening to the tale of death and found himself looking off the hallway into a well-lighted den. His keen eyes noted that while most of the shelves were gay with the lurid jackets of adventure fiction, one section was devoted to works on psychology and psychiatry.

Here were the tomes of Freud, Adler, Jung, Brill, Bergson, Krafft-Ebing, and lesser lights. A book lay open on a small reading table.

The Saint stepped inside the room to look at it. It was titled In Darkest Schizophrenia by William J Holbrook, Ph.D.

Simon wondered what the psychic-phenomena boys would do with this one. This, he thought, would certainly give them a shot in the aura.

“Mrs Faulks is upstairs, sir,” the professional mourner was saying. “Are you a friend of the family? I’ll be glad to ask whether she can see you.”

“I wish you’d just show her this.” Simon forced one hand into a pocket. “And ask her—”

He never finished the question. Never.

There was nothing in the pocket for his hand to find. Nothing to meet his fingertips but a memory that was even then darkening and dying out along his nerves.