The Saint Goes On Read Online Free PDF Page B

Saint sighed.
    “I don’t know where you get these ideas from,” he said in a pained voice. “By the way, are you going anywhere in particular, or are we just sight-seeing?”
    “I’m waiting for you to tell me.”
    “Let’s go to Abbot’s Yard-it’s about the only hide-out we have left that isn’t in Teal’s address-book. And I don’t think Sunny Jim is going to be too keen on seeing callers for a while.”
    He relaxed at full length, with his eyes half closed against the smoke curling past them from his cigarette, while she circled Sloane Square and headed west along the King’s Road. The soft waves of her fair golden head rippled in the gentle stir of air that came through the windows; her face was as calmly beautiful as if she had been driving them on nothing less innocuous than the commonplace sightseeing tour which he had mentioned. Perhaps she was only calm because even the most adventurous girl, after some years of partnership with such a man, must achieve permanent nonchalance or perish of nervous exhaustion; but one never knew… . And in the back of the car, Mr. Uniatz and Mr. Fasson were both, in their respective ways, silently unconscious.
    The car threaded its way more slowly through the clotted congestion of trucks, omnibuses, vans, and drays with which the King’s Road is permanently constipated, and turned off abruptly into a narrow side street composed of cottage hovels with freshly painted and utterly dilapidated fronts in approximately equal proportions. It was one of those Chelsea backwaters which are undergoing a gloomy degradation from honest slumdom to synthetic Bohemianism, and the external symptoms of its decay gave it an air of almost pathetic indecision, like a suburban bank manager on a spree in the high spots, who is trying to make up his mind whether to be thoroughly folksy or very dignified, but who is quite certain that he is as sober and important as any of his co-revellers. But in spite of this uninviting aspect, it contained a comfortable studio which the Saint had found useful before; and Simon roused himself cheerfully to open the door beside him as the car stopped.
    “I think it’s a case for the wheel-chair and blanket,” he said, after a judicial survey of Sunny Jim.
    The transportation of an unconscious captive across a London pavement is not quite such an easy and automatic affair as the credulous reader of fiction may have been deluded to believe; but Simon Templar had had such problems to solve before. On one of the rare occasions on which Mr. Uniatz did not find it necessary to delay the proceedings with unnecessary questions, he hopped intelligently out of the car and opened the door of the studio with a key which the Saint threw at him. After a brief absence, he returned with an invalid chair. Simon took the folded blanket from the seat, and between them they wrapped the limp figure of Sunny Jim Fasson tenderly up in it-so tenderly that there was not enough of him left protruding for any stray passer-by to recognise. In this woolly cocoon they carried him to the chair, and in the chair wheeled him up the steps and into the house, with all the hushed solicitude of two expectant nephews handling a rich and moribund uncle. And, really, that was all about it.
    “There is beer in the pantry,” said the Saint, subsiding into a chair in the studio. “But don’t let Hoppy see it, or I never shall. Hoppy, you get a sponge of cold water and see if you can bring the patient round.”
    “He does wake up, once,” said Mr. Uniatz reminiscently. “In de car. But I club him wit’ de end of my Betsy and he goes to sleep again.”
    Simon gazed after him resignedly, and sipped the glass of Carlsberg which Patricia brought to him. A sense of tact and diplomacy could well be added to the other virtues in which Mr. Uniatz was so unfortunately deficient. Hoping to extract information from a man by presenting oneself to him as his saviour and honorary guardian angel, one