Simon moved to the knife and bent down to pick it up, but that frosty impaling gaze never left Lembick’s face.
And then the Saint came up off the floor like an uncoiling spring, and Lembick saw the upwards black and silver flash of the knife a fraction of a second too late.
Blood trickled from a gash in his left arm. And Simon Templar had already sprung back out of reach, after making that single well-judged slash.
“Was that closer to what you had in mind?” he queried coolly.
For a few seconds Lembick seemed uncomprehending as he stared at his bare arm with the trickle of blood running off it onto the canvas mat. And then something seemed to snap in him, and his eyes blazed with a sudden rage of realisation.
He flung himself at the wall and snatched down the second dirk, and whirled to face the Saint.
“You just made a bad mistake, Mister Gascott,” he said through clenched teeth. “The sgian dubh is my weapon. I’m on my home ground!”
9
There was total silence in the drill-hall except for the sound of quickened breathing from the two men circling each other warily, literally at daggers drawn. Another group who had been busy in the hall with a karate workout, chopping rhythmically away at planks of wood supported on bricks, stopped and joined the others as interested onlookers at the prospect of a fight.
At that moment the Saint was only dimly aware of them. For the present everything was blotted from the centre of his consciousness but his opponent and himself, circling grimly, each watching for an opening, a momentary relaxation of the other’s alertness, and weighing the likely instant for a successful feint or lunge or slash with the knife.
The others had seen the tension building up over the past few days between Lembick and the supposed Gascott; and now they were watching it explode in that slow and potentially deadly tarantella, and their attention was riveted.
At some point Simon became peripherally aware that Rockham had come quietly in and was standing behind them.
But then abruptly the pattern changed. Lembick came racing at him in a kind of weaving charge, with the blade of the dirk slicing the air in arcs of flashing silver. But the Saint’s anticipation was faster by a wafer-thin margin of milliseconds that allowed him to keep just a whisker beyond the reach of that blade, as he danced and swayed and bobbed — and waited.
That was the simple detached technique that he coolly and deliberately set out to apply. Lembick came after him, grunting and sweating and stabbing and slashing; and the Saint ducked and danced and sidestepped tirelessly, until there seemed to be an inescapable inevitability about the way that blade cleaved the air time after time, and never found its quicksilver target.
And then Lembick did what Simon was waiting for him to do. He overreached himself by the merest millimetre; but that was enough. Enough to create a momentary break in his balance which magnified the Saint’s advantage in reaction time, to the point where he could bring his left hand down in a sizzling chop that thudded into Lembick’s wrist joint.
The dirk went clattering and skittering off over the wood parquet floor beyond the edge of the mat, and with scarcely a pause Simon Templar sent his own weapon after it, to stick in the floor like a dart, so that both daggers came to rest blade to blade.
And then the Saint stood relaxed, with his arms at his sides, and smiled a smile in which there was no amusement but only a total fixedness of purpose. Yet even at that moment, when he was thinking of nothing except hitting Lembick as hard as he possibly could, his required habit ensured that he remembered to speak in Gascott’s unpleasant rasp. He said: “How good are you with bare knuckles, Lembick? I’ve been dying to find out. We’re on my home ground now!”
And then he switched back into that same weaving, ducking, swaying mode of action again. But this time he went forward instead of back. And there was every bit as much inevitability about his unstoppable attack as there had been in the elusiveness of his defence.
From Lembick’s point of view, among all the myriad intersections of events and substantivities in time and space that an omniscient metaphysician might have recorded, the next few seconds contained only two configurative incidents of any significance. The first was when something that might have been a lump of some incredibly hard metal, but was actually Simon Templar’s left fist, sank with pile-driving power into the area about three inches below his sternum; and the second was when a similarly metallic-seeming missile that was actually the Saint’s other fist came scorching over his guard in a curving trajectory that terminated with comparable force beside the point of his leathery chin.
The first blow would have been enough to keep an ordinary man writhing in winded agony for several minutes and hobbling thereafter. The second would have broken a jaw of less neanderthal solidity than Lembick’s. Even on him their combined effect was spectacular enough. He sank to the floor with a glazed look in his eyes which, if it didn’t quite mean unconsciousness, was at least indicative of a degree of incapacity that made it certain the brief encounter had come to a decisive conclusion.
There was a silence in which Lembick’s rough gasping breaths cut into the air like a coarse handsaw fighting through a tough log. Then Rockham stepped casually forward.
“I like your style, Gascott,” he said. “And I like to see Lembick put in his place for once. I dare say he asked for it just now.”
As he spoke — ignoring the writhing Lembick on the mat — he crossed to the plank the karate practisers had left in position, and he began pummelling it gently and rhythmically with the edges of his hands, gradually building up speed and power. “I know you’ve done well in getting back your old commando form. Tomorrow we’ll consider you graduated. After that you’ll have an assignment before long. Maybe very soon... But until then, you and Lembick are going to have to live together as best you can. I don’t want grudge fights carried on in The Squad.”
Simon nodded.
“Anthropologists have lived with apes,” he commented.
Rockham’s two-handed tattoo on the thick plank was building up to a crescendo.
“Don’t get too carried away, will you?” he said; and his manner was all smoothness and smiles and charm.
And then he smashed through the plank with one single culminating axe-like blow from his right hand, and strolled out urbanely without another glance at Lembick’s still prostrate but now partly recovered form.
“Na sir ’s na seachainn an cath,” said the Saint. “Neither seek nor shun the fight.” And then for Lembick’s benefit he added: “A girl from the Western Isles taught me a bit of Gaelic once.”
He refrained from adding that that wasn’t all she had taught him, or that the proverb had a wider significance for him right then than the obvious one.
Somehow, as he knew he would, he got through the rest of that day. Cawber worked the whole crew of them harder than ever, but studiously avoided picking on the Saint for special attention. To Simon, it was worth every bit of personal discomfort that Cawber could dish out to have had the satisfaction of putting down the American’s co-tyrant, even at the cost of revealing perhaps too much of his own capabilities.
That night he had that incident to report, when he met Ruth, and one other thing.
“This evening,” he told her, “Rockham had some visitors. Chinese or Japs, I’d guess. Four of them. They got out of a black Daimler, registration number GRD 4711.”
Ruth delved into her bag for a notebook and jotted down the number. “Thanks. Pelton’ll be interested to hear that. Anything else?”