The Saint Closes the Case by Leslie Charteris

his lips, the Saint caught him about the waist and lifted him
from his feet, and heaved him bodily across the pavement, so that he
actually fell into Conway’s anus.
    “Home, James,” said the Saint, and
turned again on his heel.
    On the lips of the second man there was that
awakening of a shout, and in his eyes was the awakening of something
that might have been taken for fear, or suspicion, or a kind of vague and
startled perplexity; but these expressions were nebulous and half-formed, and
they never came to maturity, for the Saint spun the man round by one
shoulder and locked an arm about his neck in such a way that it was
impossible for him to shout or register any other expression than that of
a man about to
suffocate.
    And in the same hold the Saint lifted him off
the ground, mostly by the neck, so that the man might well have thought that
his neck was about to be broken; but the only thing that was broken was the
spring of one of the cushions at the back of the car when the
Saint heaved him on to it.
    The Saint followed him into the back seat;
and, when the man seemed ready to try another shout, Simon seized his
wrists in a grip that might have changed the shout to a scream if the Saint had
not uttered a warning.
    “Don’t scream, sweetheart,” said the
Saint coldly. “It might break both your arms.”
    The man did not scream. Nor did he shout. And
on the floor of the car, at the Saint’s feet, his companion lay like one dead.
    In the cold light of sanity that came long
afterwards, Simon Templar was to wonder how on earth they got away with it. Roger Conway, who was even then far too coldly sane for his own comfort,
was wondering all the time how on earth they were getting away with
it. But for the moment Simon Templar was mad—and the fact remained that they
had got away with it.
    The Saint’s resourceful speed, and the
entirely fortuitous desertedness of the street, had made it possible to carry
out the abduction without a sound being made that might have at tracted
attention. And the few people there were whose atten tion might have been
attracted had passed on, undisturbed, unconscious of the swift seconds of hectic melodrama that
had whirled through George Street, Hanover
Square, behind their peaceful backs.
    That the Saint would have acted in exactly
the same way if the street had been crowded with an equal mixture of
panicky population, plain-clothes men, and uniformed policemen, was nothing
whatever to do with anything at all. Once again the Saint had proved, to his own sufficient
satisfaction, as he had proved many times in
his life before, that desperate dilemmas are usually best solved by desperate measures, and that in telligent foolhardiness will often get by where
too much dis cretion betrays valour
into the mulligatawny. And the thought of
the notice that must have been taken of the Hirondel dur ing the first part of that wild chase (it was not
an inconspicu ous car at the best of
times, even when sedately driven, that long,
lean, silver-grey King of the Road) detracted nothing from the Saint’s estimate of his success. One
could not have one’s cake and eat it.
And certainly he had obtained the cake to
eat. Two cakes. Ugly ones… .
    Even then there might have been trouble in
Brook Street when they returned with the cargo, but the Saint did not
allow any trouble.
    There were two men to be taken across the
strip of pavement to the door of the flat. One man was long and lean, and
the other man was short and fat; and the lean man slept. The Saint kept his
grip on one wrist of the fat man, and half supported the lean man with his
other arm. Roger placed himself on the other side of the lean man.
    “Sing,” commanded the Saint; and
they crossed the pave ment discordantly and drunkenly.
    A man in evening dress passed them with a
supercilious nose. A man in rags passed them with an envious nose. A
pa trolling policeman peered at them with an officious nose; but the Saint
had opened the door, and