The Saint and the Hapsburg Necklace by Leslie Charteris, Christopher Short Read Free Book Online Page A

can report it stolen, and in due course the police
will re turn it to him.”
    The Saint drew a long decisive breath.
    “Okay, Maximilian,” he said.
“Let’s get the show on the road.”
    With a brief wave of temporary farewell to
Frankie and Leopold, he followed Max out of the room.
    Max led him down a different stairway, which
nevertheless brought them to another angle of the central courtyard.
The place was probably a warren of such private staircases, de signed in a more spacious age
so that guests and servants could move
about without unnecessarily encountering each other. And it was only to be expected that a man like Max Annellatt
would have provided himself with at least as many bolt-holes as a prudent rabbit.
    After making sure that the courtyard was
deserted, An nellatt beckoned the Saint out and led him across to the
back, where
another door admitted them to a dimly lit grey-walled passage which zigzagged
past a few other unpainted doors and a couple of square black caves stacked
with unidentifiable shrouded relics, to bring them into an equally dim-lit
architectural cavern where the damp air still seemed to incorporate
ineradicable nuances of its former equine occupants.
    In one of the converted stalls, Max
introduced him to a gleaming Mercedes-Benz 540 supercharged coup é and handed him a key.
    “Do you know how to drive it?”
    “I could hardly miss,” said the
Saint. “As I recall it, the gear box is synchro-mesh, and semi-automatic between third and fourth. To be very exact, the engine is
actually 54O1 cc—”
    “Good,” Annellatt said approvingly.
He went over to a large
sliding door across from the stall, unbolted it and hauled it aside. It opened on to a dark rain-washed
alley, where he in dicated a turn to
the right. “That will bring you back to the street in front of the building, but if you turn left there you will
not have to pass the entrance again and anyone who is watching it, and you will
be going towards the Mariahilferstrasse. Will you remember the rest of the
way?”
    “Some of my ancestors,” the Saint
reassured him, “were homing pigeons.”
    “Then you should be back here within
ninety minutes. Tap on this door and I shall be waiting for you.”
    Simon had only slightly exaggerated his sense of direction and his talent for noting and memorising routes.
He found his way unerringly back to
the Hotel Hofer, where it took him only a few minutes to pack the
minimal travel bag which was all he had with
him.
    A bored night clerk seemed unsurprised at his checking out at such an hour, which might not have been so
extraordinary for a commercial hotel, and gave him vague directions to
the main roads towards Italy. It was not
until much later that he noticed that “Mr Taylor” had filled in his
forwarding address on the conventional
form as “The Vatican, Rome.”
    He found his way just as efficiently back to
the building which housed Annellatt’s apartment, but parked the Mer cedes short of the back alley
and walked in to the sliding garage door.
It was a few minutes less than the ninety that Max allowed him, and there was no response when he tapped on the door.
    After a brief wait, he tried pulling the
door aside, and it moved with no more resistance than its own ponderous sus pension.
But all was now darkness in the garage.
    Simon stepped inside, reaching into a pocket
for the pencil flashlight that he carried as automatically as a fountain pen. There had
to be a light switch somewhere near by, if he could find it, to turn on
the illuminations for late-homing tenants, otherwise some
benighted elderly reveller returning from his favourite Weinstube might trip over a Volkswagen and get hurt.
    Simon Templar was not exactly an elderly
reveller, but he still got hurt. His whole world suddenly exploded and
left him falling into blackness.
     
     
    3
     
    When he came to, he was in pitch darkness. For
a few moments because of the discomforts of his accommodation he thought he was in his