Simon leapt for the window.
A hand touched his arm, and his knife drew back again for a vicious thrust. And then, with a sudden effort, he checked it in mid-flight. . . .
For the hand did not tighten its grip. Halting in the black dark, with the shouts and blunderings of infuriated men roaring around him, his nostrils caught a faint breath of perfume. Something cold and metallic touched his hand, and instinctively his fingers closed round it and recognized it for the butt of an automatic. And then the light touch on his sleeve was gone; and with the trigger guard between his teeth he sprang to the windowsill and reached upwards and outwards into space.
Chapter 4
How Simon Templar Read Newspapers, and Mr. Papulos Hit the Skids
He lay out on the tiles at a perilous downward angle of forty-five degrees, as he had swung himself straight up from the windowsill, with his feet stretched towards the sky and only the grip of his hands in the gutter holding him. from an imminent nosedive to squishy death. Directly below him he could see the torsos and bullet heads of two gorillas illuminated in the light of a match held by a third, as they leaned out from the window and raked the dark ground below with straining, startled eyes. Their voices floated up to him like the music of checked hounds to a fox that has crossed its own scent.
"He must of gone that way."
"Better get down an' see he don't take the car."
"Take the car hell—I got the keys here."
The craning bodies heaved up again and vanished back into the room. He heard the quick thumping of their feet and the crash of the door; and then for a space another silence settled on the Long Island night.
Simon shifted the weight on his aching shoulders and grinned gently under the stars. In its unassuming way it had been a tense moment, but the advantage of the unexpected was still with him. The minds of most men run on well-charted rails, and perhaps the mind of the professional killer in times of sudden death has fewer sidetracks than any other. To the four raging and bewildered thugs who were even then pounding down the stairs to guard their precious car and comb the surrounding meadows, it was as inconceivable as it had been to Inspector Fernack that any man in the Saint's position, with the untrammelled use of his limbs, should be interested in any other diversion than that of boring a hole through the horizon with the utmost assiduousness and dispatch. But like Inspector Fernack, the four public enemies who fell into this grievous error were enjoying their first encounter with that dazzling recklessness which made Simon Templar an incalculable variant in any equation.
With infinite caution the Saint began to manoeuvre himself sideways along the roof.
It was a gymnastic exercise for which no rules had been devised in any manual of the art. He had circled up to the roof in that position because it was quicker than any other; and, once he was up there, it was practically impossible to reverse it. Nor would he have gained anything if he had by some incredible contortions managed to get his feet down to the gutter and his head up to its proper elevation, for his only means of telling when he had reached his destination was by peering down over the gutter at the windows underneath. And that destination was the room outside which the scrawny-necked individual had been lounging when he arrived.
Once a loose section of metal gave him the most nerve-racking two-yard journey of his life; more than once, when one of the men who were searching for him prowled under the house, he had to remain motionless, with all his weight on the heels of his hands, till the muscles of his arms and shoulders cracked under the strain. It was a task which should have taken the concentration of every fibre of his being, but the truth is that he was thinking about Fay Edwards for seven-eighths of the way.
What was she doing now? What was she doing at any time in that bloodthirsty half-world? Simon realized that even now he had not heard her speak—his assumption that she was the girl of Nather's telephone was purely intuitive. But he had seen her face an instant after his knife had laid Ualino open from groin to breastbone, and there had been neither fear nor horror in it. Just for that instant the amber eyes had seemed to blaze with a savage light which he could not understand; and then he had smashed the electric bulb and was on his way. He might have thought that the whole thing was a moment's hallucination, but there was the metal of the automatic still between his teeth to be explained. His brain tangled with that ultimate amazing mystery while he warped himself along the edge of yawning nothingness; and he was no nearer a solution when the window that he was aiming for came vertically under his eyes.
At least there was nothing intangible or mysterious about that; and he knew that there was no prospect of the general tempo of whoopee and carnival slackening off before he got home to bed. With one searching glance over the ground below to make sure that there was no lurking sentinel waiting to catch him in midair, the Saint slid himself forward head first into space, neatly reversed his hands, and curled over into the precarious dark.
He hung at the full stretch of his arms, facing the window of his objective. It was closed; but a stealthily inquiring pressure of one toe told him that it was fastened only by a single catch in the centre.
There was no further opportunity for caution. The rest of his evening had to be taken on the run, and he knew it. Taking a deep breath, he swung himself backwards and outwards; and as his body swung in again towards the house on the returning pendulum he raised his legs and drove his feet squarely into the junction of the casements.
The flimsy fastening tore away like tissue paper under the impact, and the casements burst inwards and smacked against the inside wall with a crash of breaking glass. A treble wail of fright came out to him as he swung back again; then he came forward a second time and arched his back with a supple twist as his hands let go the gutter. He went through the window neatly, skidded on a loose rug, and fetched up against the bed.
The room was in darkness, but his eyes were accustomed to the dark. A small white-clad shape with dark curly hair stared back at him, big eyes dilated with terror, whimpering softly. From the floor below came the thud of heavy feet and the sound of hoarse voices, but the Saint might have had all the time in the world. He took the gun from between his teeth and pushed down the safety catch with his right hand; his left hand patted the girl's shoulder.
"Poor kid," he said. "I've come to take you home."
There was a surprising tenderness in his voice, and all at once the child's whimpering died down.
"You want to go home, don't you?" asked the Saint.
She nodded violently; and with a soft comforting laugh he swung her up in the crook of his arm and crossed the room. The door was locked, as he had expected. Simon held her a little tighter.
"We're going to make some big bangs, Viola," he said. "You aren't frightened of big bangs, are you? Big bangs like fireworks? And every time we make a big bang we'll kill one of the wicked men who took you away." She shook her head.
"I like big bangs," she declared; and the Saint laughed again and put the muzzle of his gun against the lock.
The shot rocked the room like thunder, and a heavy thud sounded in the corridor. Simon flung open the door. It was the scrawny-necked individual on guard outside who had caused the thud: he was sprawled against the opposite wall in a grotesque huddle, and nothing was more certain than that he would never stand guard anywhere again. Apparently he had been peering through the keyhole, looking for an explanation of the disturbance, when the Saint shot out the lock; and what remained of his face was not pleasant to look at. The child in Simon's arms crowed gleefully.