The Saint Closes the Case by Leslie Charteris Page A

they were reeling cacophonously into the house. So the
officious nose went stolidly upon its way,
after taking the number of the car from which they had disembarked, for the law has as yet no power to
prevent men being as drunk and
disorderly as they choose in their own homes.
And, certainly, the performance, extempore as it was, had been most convincing.
The lean man had clearly failed to last the course; the two tall and
well-dressed young men who supported him
between them were giving most circumstantial evidence of the thoroughness with which they had lubricated their withins; and if the sounds emitted by the
fat man were too wild and shrill to be
easily classified as song, and if he seemed
somewhat unwilling to proceed with his companions into further dissipations, and if there was a
strange, strained look in his
eye—well, the state which he had apparently reached was regrettable, but nobody’s business… .
    And before the suspicious nose had reached the
next corner, the
men who had passed beneath it were in the first-floor apart ment above it, and the lean one was being
carelessly dropped spread-eagle on the sitting-room carpet.
    “Fasten the door, Roger,” said the
Saint shortly.
    Then he released his agonising hold on the
fat man’s wrist, and the fat man stopped yelping and began to talk.
    “Son of a pig,” began the fat man,
rubbing his wrist ten derly; and then he stopped, appalled at what
he saw.
    There was a little knife in the Saint’s
hand—a toy with a six- inch leaf-shaped blade and a delicately chased
ivory hilt. It appeared to have come from nowhere, but actually it had come from
the neat leather sheath strapped to the Saint’s fore arm under the sleeve,
where it always lived; and the name of the knife was Anna.
There was a story to Anna, a savage and flamboyant story of
the godless lands, which may be told one day: she had taken
many lives. To the Saint she was almost human, that beautifully fashioned,
beautifully balanced little creature of death; he could do tricks with
her that would have made most circus knife-throwers look like amateurs. But
at that moment he was not thinking of tricks.
    As Roger switched on the light, the light
glinted on the blade; but the light in the Saint’s eyes was no less cold
and inclement than the light on the steel.

7. How Simon Templar was Saintly,
    and received another visitor
     
    Simon Templar, in all his years of wandering
and adventure, had only fallen for one woman, and that was Patricia Holm. Therefore, as might have been expected, he fell heavily. And yet—he was
realising it dimly, as one might realise an un thinkable heresy—in
the eighteen months that they had been together he had started to get used to
her. He had, he realised, been growing out of the first ecstatic
wonder; and the thing that had taken its place had been so quiet
and insidious that it had enchanted him while he was still unaware of it. It
had had to await
this shock to be revealed.
    And the revelation, when it came, carried with
it a wonder that infinitely eclipsed the more blatant brilliance of
the won der that had slipped away. This was the kind of wild and aw ful wonder
that might overtake a man who, having walked in the sunshine all
the days of his life, sees the sun itself for the first time, with a
dreadful and tremendous understanding, and sees at once a
vision of the darkness that would lie over the world if the sun ceased from shining.
    The Saint said, very softly, to file fat man:
“Son of a pig to
you, sweetheart. And now listen. I’m going to ask you some questions. You can either answer them, or die
slowly and painfully, just as you
like—but you’ll do one or the other be fore you leave this room.”
    The fat man was in a different class from
that of the wretched little weed in the pot hat from whom Simon
Templar had extracted information before. There was a certain brute resolution
in the fat man’s beady eyes, a certain snarling defi ance in the twist of
the