Salvage for the Saint

1

Simon Templar opened his eyes again in tentative incredulity, to regard the back of Inspector Gerard Lebec’s head. Objectively speaking it was nothing remarkable, as the backs of heads went; but to the Saint it was indubitably one of the most beautiful sights he had ever seen.

He shifted his glance, and met the blue gaze and concerned expression of Arabella Tatenor. He was lying across two of the seats in the cabin of the launch, with his head resting in her lap; and the Saint had never before felt so utterly amazed and overwhelmed to be alive.

The gold on the deck of the fleeing Phoenix was for that moment a dream forgotten as completely as if it had never been. Even the world that impinged directly on his senses had the lambent quality of a fantasy; and he looked around him with a fresh-eyed wonderment. It was the unbelievable fantasy of a world which he had just given up as irrevocably lost. Never before had life seemed so overflowing with the sensory riches of the moving present that was now, and never before had the seed of that present seemed to hold such an infinite burgeoning of promise for the future. Just to be alive was a fabulous wine of contentment, and at that moment he wanted nothing more than to remain utterly immersed in it.

He hooked an arm up slowly behind Arabella’s red-gold head and drew her down gently for a kiss. And this too was an astonishment and a fantasy — this woman, ripe and beautiful and tender, who gave herself willingly to his kiss, and returned it...

And then abruptly, almost with an audible click, he was fully back in life again. The sky and the sea and Arabella and Lebec and the man at the helm of the launch somersaulted dizzily back into their familiar perspective in the real world; and now it was the last place he had been to, on the murky margins of annihilation that was the fantasy, fading into a blurred and receding memory of life surrendering to death.

Then, with that return of his normal mind, he thought of the man who had locked him up under the sea — the man who had slammed down and secured the hatch and left him down there alone to suffocate and die in the darkness. And if ever iron entered into a man’s soul, it entered into the soul of Simon Templar then.

There was no justice he could imagine subscribing to which would not make the perpetrator of that action pay for it in the very same coin — the coin of life. For the Saint, there could be no other possible price, and no other acceptable executioner but himself; and he knew that, whatever else might happen, he would do everything in his power to carry out the sentence, and that when the time came he would do it unflinchingly and without compunction.

Now he gazed forward across the sea, and saw the Phoenix ahead against the pink glow on the western horizon where the sun had gone down not long before. The Phoenix had perhaps four hundred yards on them, and the launch was closing the gap fast.

Lebec turned to him.

“So you have recovered, Monsieur Templar. Are you able to tell us — who is the diver? Who is that man driving the Phoenix?”

Simon’s eyes were chips of frozen sapphire as he thought of that driver — that man.

“I don’t know,” he said quietly. “But I mean to find out, just as soon as you can catch up and get this tub close enough for me to jump on board.”

While the launch steadily ate up the Phoenix’s lead, Simon sketched in the bare essentials of what had happened in those final few minutes on the sea bed. Lebec listened attentively, his pale green eyes appraising the Saint’s lean and dangerous form; and he must have drawn his own conclusions from what he saw.

Perhaps the hard-set fighting line of the Saint’s mouth and the flinty resolution in his eyes made his intentions only too plain. Not that he had made any special attempt to conceal them. But at any rate, Lebec abruptly drew his automatic with the air of a man who had made up his mind about a point which had been worrying him.

“Monsieur Templar,” he said, “you will not be permitted to step on to the Phoenix until after I have dealt with this man. You will remain here — and Madame also, for her own safety.”

At a word from Lebec the crewman drew his own gun and pointed it at the Saint. And Simon was glumly obliged to admit its controlling power, and to remain where he was while the launch drew level with the Phoenix’s port quarter.

The crewman manoeuvred the launch close in, and Lebec stood up on the rail to make the short jump across the after deck. And in that instant the Saint knew that, come what might, this was one party he couldn’t bear to miss.

There was no way that he could sit there among the charred cushions in the cabin of the coastguard launch while Lebec followed formal police procedure to bring the man at the helm of the Phoenix into the custody and protection of the law, with all the asininely bureaucratic due processes which that implied. As soon as he saw Lebec on board the Phoenix, with automatic in hand, he realised that he had to take action immediately if he was to have any hope of substituting Saintly retributive justice for those due processes.

There was only one thing to be done, and he did it. It involved elements of risk; but what was that after what he had already come through?

He took the two easy unhurried strides that were needed to bring him within easy range of the crewman at the helm, and he took them as if it had been the most natural thing in the world to approach for a chat; and that was the first risk taken. The crewman might have had a twitchy trigger finger, easily set off by any threatening movement on the Saint’s part; but Simon had studied his lugubrious features and his generally slow and deliberate behaviour, and gambled that the man was the opposite of twitchy; and the gamble had come off.

The next stage of the operation demanded a quick burst of the brilliant acting which the Saint could turn on like a tap when the need arose. As he reached the armed crewman, after those two relaxed strides across the cabin, he began to speak, in French, in a friendly conversational tone that exactly fitted the pace of his casual steps.

“Il a beaucoup de courage, votre chef,” he began; but he interrupted himself abruptly by turning his head sharply towards the Phoenix as if he had suddenly seen something that took his breath away.

“Mon Dieu!” he gasped; and the crewman looked off in the same direction.

He would hardly have been human if he had not turned his own head in response to Simon’s totally convincing diversion; and the Saint truly regretted that the exigencies of the situation called for the crewman to suffer a little bodily harm. That regret, however, could not be allowed to weaken his resolve. His left hand shot out like a greased piston, and his fingers closed over the man’s gun wrist; and almost at the same instant his right fist, travelling about eighteen inches through the air in a scorching uppercut, impacted with bone-jarring force under the man’s mournful jaw.

The crewman crumpled with scarcely a sound, and Simon caught him and let him gently down. Then he picked up the gun and toyed with it in momentary hesitation.

“Another old trick?” Arabella enquired; and Simon nodded.

The old light of battle was in his eyes as he handed her the gun. What he had to do, he would do with his bare hands.

“Wave it at him if he wakes up,” he said. “Tell him you’ll shoot if he comes closer than five feet — and sound as if you mean it!”

And then he was gone, his feet taking him noiselessly on to the rail and then across to the Phoenix through the gathering dusk; and Arabella sat looking from the gun in her hand to the unconscious crewman, and back to the gun.

Lebec had perhaps a minute’s start on him; and the Saint had no very clear plan of what to do next. It was one of those situations where, as so often before, he simply followed his impulse and instinct. All he knew was that he was back in the game, with Lebec ahead of him, and the man in the wheelhouse an unknown quantity — though the Saint had his suspicions on that score...

He had been over his speculations about Tranchier’s survival often enough by this time; and he was not unprepared for the sound that reached his ears as he glided along the deck of the Phoenix towards the wheelhouse like a liquid shadow.

He heard two voices speaking in rapid French, one of them Lebec’s; and he flattened himself against a bulkhead where he could not be seen from the door of the wheelhouse or its companionway. And as he listened, his eyes widened with steadily growing comprehension.

“Will you or will you not surrender?” Lebec’s voice demanded from what the Saint judged to be somewhere near the foot of the companionway.

“You’ll have to shoot me first,” said the other man, from higher up.

There was a pause; then Lebec said:

“If I must, I will shoot you. There will be no witnesses. Templar and the woman are on the launch with the coastguard man. I will say it was self-defence, that you resisted arrest. And so after all the gold will be mine alone, and you will have gained nothing by your death.”

“But you will still have the problem of those three — and Finnegan — to deal with, alone.” A faintly crafty note crept into the other voice. “Gerard — why don’t we make a deal? There’s more than enough for two. We could throw the four bodies overboard, set the launch adrift, and get clean away.”

There was another pause; and while Lebec was thinking, so was the Saint. For the dialogue he had overheard gave him all he needed to think about.

First, there was Lebec’s clear and unpolicemanlike desire to grab the gold for himself. Second, there was the fact that the other man had called him “Gerard” in a way that implied an intimate acquaintance. Thirdly, there was the man’s voice.

Simon had never, that he could remember, heard Tranchier-Fournier speak; and yet there was something in the tone of that other Frenchman in the Phoenix’s wheel-house, a confidence and authority, even an arrogance, which didn’t fit the impression he had formed of Tranchier.

Then it hit him like a sudden blast of arctic air; and in that instant of amazed realisation, as the pieces of the puzzle began to click into precise place, he stepped out from behind the bulkhead and into view.

He saw Inspector Gerard Lebec, standing only part-way up the companionway, swinging around in alarm. And in the doorway at the top, facing him, he saw the other man — a man with a big square head, grey-white hair, and suntanned features.

It could only be Karl Schwarzkopf, also known as Charles Tatenor.

2

“Salut Karl!” said the Saint in a voice of steel-lined velvet.

Even though he had come out into the open without premeditation, simply because he had had to confirm Schwarzkopf as the owner of the second voice as soon as the fantastic conviction had come to him, Simon’s reflexes were immediately balanced on a razor edge. He was acutely aware of being unarmed, and that the reaction of Lebec, with his automatic, was unpredictable.

Lebec was certainly taken by surprise; and his adjustment to the Saint’s abrupt arrival on the scene was perhaps half a second slower than Schwarzkopf’s.

Which was unfortunate for Lebec.

As the French detective swung his head, followed by his gun arm, away from Schwarzkopf and towards Simon, Schwarzkopf moved — and with amazing speed. He launched himself down the companionway at Lebec feet-first, with a force that should have sent him cannoning into the Saint. But Simon’s reactions were also fast, and he sidestepped. Lebec made the close and violent acquaintance of a bulkhead, and sank to the deck with all the wind knocked out of him. Somehow he managed to hold on to the automatic, but it was two or three seconds before he could collect his breath and his wits to use it.

Two or three seconds was all Schwarzkopf needed. He must have summed up the situation to himself — including Simon’s own lack of a visible weapon — in the instant of launching himself at Lebec; and now, as Lebec lay gasping on the deck, Schwarzkopf leapt back up the companionway, snatched up a Very pistol in the wheelhouse, and reappeared in the doorway.

And as Lebec brought his automatic up again, Schwarzkopf fired.

The Saint had seen weird deaths before, but this was a sight to persist in his memory for many long years. That brilliant dazzling flare was like a photographic flashbulb fixing the image in the mind. In its vivid and garish light, Lebec’s amazed expression was thrown into stark and unforgettable relief. The flare hit him, so to speak, amidships, sank deeply into his torso, and continued to blaze brilliantly as the stricken Lebec emitted a bloodcurdling scream, staggered backward to the rail, and crashed over it and into the sea.

Both Schwarzkopf and the Saint watched Lebec’s final disappearance in frozen fascination for the few seconds it occupied. And then Schwarzkopf, still gripping the signal-pistol, whirled, and disappeared back into the wheelhouse. The Saint had to make an immediate choice, either to conceal himself — playing hide-and-seek with an armed man — or to go forward and try to get to Schwarzkopf before he could reload the pistol.

He went forward.

With one long stride he was at the foot of the companionway, and with two more coordinated thrusts of arms and legs he was at the top and into the wheelhouse doorway.

He had never climbed a companionway faster; but as he reached the doorway he knew he had not been fast enough. Schwarzkopf had just finished thrusting a new flare into the Very pistol. He levelled it at the Saint, and the Saint came to a slow halt in the doorway.

So this was how the game was to end, after all, he thought; and there was a certain inescapable bitterness in the reflection that he had survived, by one of those miracles he had thought impossible, this man’s earlier attempt to kill him, only to find himself now facing death once more at the same hand — the hand of Karl Schwarzkopf, the only survivor of a boat crash which had killed, not “Tatenor” and Tranchier, and not “Tatenor” alone, but Tranchier alone.

For it was “Tatenor”, the man Schwarzkopf, now standing before him and about to pull the trigger of the signal-pistol for the second time, who was the clever one. Why should the relatively stupid Tranchier have been able to worst him and escape to claim the gold for himself? Simon could see it all now; but he could also see why he had been backing the wrong horse as the survivor. Karl Schwarzkopf, whose attention to detail had been impeccable, was the survivor now...

Except that the expected shot had still not come.

Schwarzkopf motioned with the Very pistol.

“So— Templar. Where’s the rest of the gold, old chap?” he said in his measured and hauntingly overprecise English. “What did you do with it, eh?”

So that was it. Only the other man’s avarice had prolonged Simon’s life even that long.

“How do you mean — the rest of the gold?” the Saint queried, apparently in genuine puzzlement.

“Come, come now.” Schwarzkopf-Tate-nor made an impatient movement with the pistol. “You’ve already caused me more than enough trouble with your confounded interference. Let’s not waste time. You may have very little of it remaining. Let’s be sensible. You know I’m not a fool, and I pay you the compliment of acknowledging that you’re not weak in the head either. I’ve seen the tally of the gold on deck, I know how many bars were down there on the sea bed originally, and I know how many I’ve removed over the years. It’s a matter of simple arithmetic. Forty-one are left unaccounted for. You must have moved them. I want to know where they are.”

“They’re somewhere you’ll never find them,” the Saint said.

The other smiled mirthlessly.

“I’ll give you a minute or two to reconsider,” he said — and the Saint heard again that note of cunning which he had heard while he listened to Schwarzkopf’s conversation with Lebec. “Perhaps we can come to some arrangement. As matters stand at the moment, those forty-one bars of gold are lost to me. If you will tell me where they are or better, accompany me to recover them I’d be prepared to share them with you. So you would emerge with something for your pains, and also with your life.”

The Saint shook his head sadly.

“Karl, you’re beginning to disappoint me. Just now you were prepared to give me credit for being slightly less than an idiot. Now you’re throwing me a bait no self-respecting half-wit would take. No deal, Karl. You’re much too smart to leave me alive — now that I know you’re alive.”

Schwarzkopf gazed intently at him, but said nothing; and Simon continued.

“Yes, Karl, you always were a clever fellow, weren’t you? Ein geschickter Kerl. Brilliant scholar and linguist, high flyer with the bank in Paris. And when your partners in crime were unclever enough to get caught, you were bright enough to take off with the loot — and to get away with it.”

“Why should I pay for their stupidity?” Schwarzkopf said calmly. “They wanted their champagne, the imbeciles. Well, they had it. And I had the gold.”

“And then,” Simon went on, “you perfected your new identity — the upper-crust sporting Englishman. And you did it brilliantly enough to fool everyone... Until fish-features Tranchier turned up; and he wouldn’t go away, would he? What a pain he must have been to you, Karl! You couldn’t even have bought him off, because Descartes and the others would have been down on you before long. There was only one way out for you; and that was to die, or appear to die. And since Fish-face was sticking so close to you, it had to be done in a way that either convinced him or got rid of him permanently along with ‘Tatenor’.”

Schwarzkopf smiled that curiously mirthless smile again, but there was a hint of pride in his face too.

“It was a brilliant solution, wasn’t it? To kill the man Tatenor — so that the others would cease looking for him — for me.”

“Yes, Karl, it was a great idea,” the Saint agreed. “And who was the other man in the boat — the other body? Some poor down-and-out you clobbered? Or a solitary tourist on the island who wasn’t likely to be missed at home for a week or two? And next, I suppose, you’d have surfaced in France, or back in Switzerland, or somewhere else, with another new identity, leaving your widow with nothing. Yes, it was clever all right. As I said, you’re a brainy fellow.”

“So I’m brainy enough to know when I should make a deal,” Schwarzkopf said in level tones.

“And I know that your name is Schwarzkopf, not Dummkopf. Any deal with me would mean no more than the one you tried to make with Lebec. You had to try something there, because he had a gun on you. With me, you’re trying it on because you think I might be able to tell you where there’s more gold; and you’re greedy for it all. But eventually you’d kill me anyway, like you killed Lebec... By the way, he was the sixth man, I suppose? You called him ‘Gerard’.”

“He was our partner at the Moroccan end of the operation,” Schwarzkopf said. “I expect he joined the Marseille police in order to remain in the area where he presumed the gold might still be hidden. He seems to have been obsessed with it.”

“But he had to die, didn’t he — once he knew what you were up to? And the same applies to me, and the others. You can’t afford to leave anyone alive who knows about the gold. You’ll have to kill me, and you’ll have to kill the coastguard man.” The Saint paused, and then added with an inexorable finality in his voice: “And then, Karl, you’re going to have to kill your own wife. How easy will you find that? Wirdst du selbst deine eigene Frau umbringen konnen?”

Simon could see that the last thrust had gone home. The need to face the problem of Arabella must have been the only thing that could give a pang to Schwarzkopf’s case-hardened conscience. The Saint, as the person who had relentlessly brought him face to face with that last shocking question, became the object and the focus of the anger that now erupted through the surface of Schwarzkopf’s polished self-command; and with the final question fired at him in German, which was after all the language nearest to his own, the man’s linguistic control had been broken down too. He answered in a German rapidly devolving into his own guttural Swiss dialect.

“Jal Du hesch rdcht!” he snarled, holding the pistol pointed rigidly. “Meine Frau muss ich glekhfalls umbringen. Aber jetzt, Templar, itz Idngts mit dr Imischig. Itz lani di abe, du Soueheib!”

Simon Templar did not understand every word Tatenor had said in that peculiar honkingly guttural accent; but the sense was as clear as day, and more urgent. And now, as Schwarzkopf’s finger tightened visibly on the trigger of the Very pistol, Simon knew that evasive action was his only slim hope of escaping the spectacular fate of Lebec.

The timing had to be perfect, and the flare not too low; and all the Saint could do was to concentrate his profound and undeviating attention on the former, watching that trigger-knuckle as it whitened, for the fraction of a second during which it moved. He judged the distance, and then...

To say that he ducked would be absurdly inadequate. He dropped. Or perhaps he half-dropped and half-dived down on to the companionway; and the flare swooshed over his head and out to sea.

And then he felt an urgent tug at his ankle; and he looked down and saw Arabella, holding the crewman’s automatic out to him in mute and terrible decision.

He dropped vertically the remaining few feet down the side of the companionway. Their eyes met briefly in silence, and he took the gun. They could hear the sounds of reloading in the wheelhouse, and a second or two later Schwarzkopf reappeared in the doorway.

And before he could fire the signal-pistol for the third time, Simon Templar shot him through the heart.

3

“And then,” said the Saint the next morning, “there was a nice touch of detail, a little bit of special care on his part, that had me fooled and sniffing off on the wrong scent. You remember I said I’d made some enquiries at the station? Well, the sharp-eyed little stationmaster said the stranger who’d travelled without bags had a French accent. I was already thinking of Tranchier, and that about clinched it in my mind. But Charles — Karl — was so smart he’d anticipated the possibility that someone might be suspicious about the boat crash, and nosey enough to make enquiries — and he prepared the ground so that, if anyone was suspected of having survived it, that someone would be Tranchier. He was certainly thorough, your Charles.”

Arabella turned over on her towel and looked around at the gold that still lay stacked on the deck of the Phoenix.

“Thorough enough to have killed me too.” She turned to face Simon: “It’s lucky I heard him say so — lucky I could understand enough German for that. Otherwise I could never have given you the gun — you know that?”

“Yes,” said the Saint. “I know. And you know now that I wasn’t the sixth man. Lebec was. All those years in the police, he must have been waiting, and wondering if he’d ever hear of that gold. He must have known about Descartes and the others, of course. He’d probably been watching them since they first arrived in the village. And then we turned up, and led him straight to the hoard — and to his old accomplice Karl.”

“And it was Charles — Karl — who tried to kill you in the night club, and who drove the van. And later, he must have been hiding on the Phoenix all the time.”

Simon nodded.

“Except when Lebec and I searched the ship.”

“And where was he then?”

“He could have been underwater, lurking on the blind side of the launch. But my guess is that he headed for the shore at the nearest point. It was only about a hundred yards from where we were, and there are some big rocks there. He’d have kept behind them out of sight until it was time to move. He could probably hear what I shouted to Lebec from the water, or anyway enough of it to know when I was getting near the end of the job.”

Arabella pondered for a while longer. Then she said:

“What about all this gold, Simon?”

“We’re returning it to the authorities, of course,” he said virtuously. “And claiming the reward.”

The coastguard cutter was keeping level with the Phoenix, about fifty yards off the starboard beam, escorting them watchfully back to Marseille.

“And how about the coastguard — won’t he make a fuss about being slugged?”

Simon stretched lazily in the sun.

“I squared it with him. I apologised handsomely — and sincerely. I explained that Lebec was a rotten egg. The crewman’ll get a tenth of our ten percent — I mean a fifth of my five percent.”

“And if the Marseilles police aren’t satisfied about Lebec’s death?” she persisted.

“They will be — once they dig into his past in Morocco and find the connections with the bullion job.”

Arabella pondered a while longer.

“And Finnegan? He was always just what he seemed, then?” she said finally.

“Innocent as a tipsy lamb,” Simon agreed. “And he’s back in top form.” He indicated the ship’s wake stretching away to the southeast behind them in a series of broad zigzags. “However, if I were you, I’d think twice about keeping him on as captain.”

Something else occurred to Arabella.

“Simon,” she said slowly, as she traced the line of his tanned shoulder with a finger. “It looks as though you’re not going to be left with so much out of all this. Four percent. Isn’t that an awfully small commission — for the Saint?”

He grinned, and ruffled her hair where the sun glinted on the red and gold of it.

“Well, to tell you the truth,” he said. “I did manage to keep a bit of the gold back. Forty-one bars, to be precise. Somehow I just forgot to send them up.”

Arabella gazed at him in wonder, and then she threw back her head and chuckled with abandoned delight.

“So you’ve left half a million dollars down there!.. But wait a minute. We pulled up part of the boat, remember? The whole thing may have been moved, dragged along the sea bed. Will you be able to find it again?”

“I think so,” said the Saint. “At any rate, I’m going to have a lot of fun trying.”

“We certainly are,” said Arabella.