Saint's Getaway by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online

thereby occasioning him considerable
discomfort, uneasiness, and inconvenience. Well, things had happened
to the gun artist which ought to learn him. The Saint had picked him up by his ankles, bounced him halfway to the ceiling, and al lowed him
to return to earth under his own steam.
    And after that, the temptation to repeat the
performance with Prince Rudolf had been almost overwhelming. Only an epic
triumph of brains over brawn, a positively prodigious magnificence of will,
the Saint modestly believed, had made it possible to withstand
the succulent allurements of the idea. But his better judgment,
borne up on a wave of Saintly inspiration, told him that the time for playing
ball with Rudolf was not yet.
    Ten yards away, down by the sheer black walls
of the hotel, a blurred glimpse of white showed for the twinkling of an eye, a glimpse
that was there and gone again, like the pale belly of a shark turning
fathoms deep in a midnight lagoon; and the Saint smiled
contentedly. He slipped noiselessly into the murk beside the wall,
and followed along on toes that hardly seemed to touch the grass.
    The figure ahead was not so stealthy. Simon
could hear the soft rustle and pad of thin shoes hurrying over the ground, and once he
caught the dry rustling of leaves as the prince scraped past a laurel bush. To
a man with the Saint’s ears, those sounds were of more value
than all the sun arcs in Hollywood: they told him everything he wanted to know,
without making his own presence so obvious. Flitting inaudibly behind them,
he closed in on his quarry until he could actually hear the prince’s steady
breathing.
    A second later, the sudden squeak of a metal
hinge fetched the Saint up all standing. Immediately in front of him he could make
out an arched opening in the gloom, and for a moment the prince’s silhouette
was framed in the gap. Then the hinge squeaked its second protest, and the
silhouette was gone.
    Simon frowned. Laurel bushes he could cope
with, dead twigs likewise, and similarly any of the other hazards of
night stalking; but squeaking gates were a notch or two above his form. And the
Saint knew that when once a gate has made up its mind to squeak it
will surely get its squeak in somehow, even though the hand that shifts it has
a touch like gossamer.
    Thoughtfully he stepped back.
    Seven feet up, the wall through which the
arch was cut ended in a flat line of deeper blackness against the dense
ob scurity of the sky. That seemed to be the only hope; and the Saint went
for it with a quick spring and a supple pull on his fingers that brought
him to the top of the wall like an athletic phantom. He drew his
feet up after him without a sound—and stopped there motionless.
    Right underneath him a big limousine was
parked with its lights out and its engine whispering, barely discernible in the faint luminance which filtered down the alley from an invis ible
street lamp somewhere in the road at the far end. A man in some
sort of livery was closing the door, and Simon heard the prince murmur a
curt order. The chauffeur hurried round and climbed in behind
the wheel. There was a dull click as he engaged the gears; and the
headlights cut a wide channel of radiance out of the darkness of the lane.
    Without a moment’s hesitation, the Saint
stepped out into space and spreadeagled himself silently on the roof.
    He was aware that he was doing the maddest of
mad things. For all he knew, that car might be preparing to hustle to
the other end of Europe. If it chose to do so, it could easily
travel two hundred miles before it made its first stop; and every one of those
miles would have its chance of hurling him off to cer tain injury and
possible death—apart from the ever present risk of discovery. And back in the Hotel K ö nigshof he had left Monty and Pat to keep their ends up with a corpse and a prisoner, and
not one clue between them to indicate what he ex pected them to do.
    But they would have to pull their own weights
in the boat,