The Saint in Action by Leslie Charteris, Robert Hilbert; Read Free Book Online

numbers and opening his mind impartially to the free influx of inspiration. Number 319, he discovered, stood in the very southeast corner of the square at the right-angle junction of the two streets that entered the square at that point. It was a broad two-storied house of vaguely Georgian architecture, flanked by the wings of wall common to that type of facade which apparently screened a small surrounding garden. Across the front an entrance driveway ran in past the front door under a pillared portico. And as the Saint stood on the corner, lighting a cigarette and taking in every detail of the building with the trained eye of a veteran, a taxi turned into the drive and coughed itself to a standstill under the porch. Simon moved a little so that he could see between the pillars, and for one moment only he saw the passenger who got out of the cab, as he paid off the driver before he turned and went up the steps through the front door, which had been opened for him as soon as the taxi pulled up.
    For one moment only—but that was enough to make the Saint catch his breath so quickly that the lighter in his hand went out. For the man who had gone in, the man whose face he had seen for that paralyzing instant, was Ladek Urivetzky, the supreme forger of the twentieth century, the man who was reported to have been eliminated by a firing squad in Oviedo four weeks ago.
    VI
    Simon had no doubt of it. He had never met Urivetzky in person, but his memory for faces was as accurate as a card index, and his private collection of photographs and descriptions of outstanding members of the international underworld contained items that would have been envied by more than one official bureau of records. And that sallow, thick-lipped, skull-like face with the curved scar under the left eye was as unmistakable as any face could be without previous firsthand examination.
    For some seconds the Saint stood motionless, while the door closed and the empty taxi rattled on out of the driveway and departed into the night. Then he moved on with a tremor of exquisite excitement tugging at his nerves.
    He made a complete circuit of the block in which the house stood. It was quite a small block, and the rest of the buildings in it consisted of the ordinary, monotonously identical, tall narrow houses common to that part of London. Built in an unbroken row one against the other, they formed a solid three-sided wall with no openings other than a couple of narrow alleys in one side which led into little courtyards of mews garages buried in the heart of the block. Nowhere did the place seem less effectively protected than it did at the front.
    Standing once more on the corner from which he had started off, the Saint drew his cigarette to brightness and studied the fagade again with that tingle of reckless ecstasy working its way deep into the pro-foundest recesses of his being.
    Somehow or other he had to get into Quintana’s house, and if the only way to get in was at the front then he would get in at the front. Not that the front door entered into his plans. Any vague idea he might have set out with of brazenly bluffing his way into the owner’s presence had been annihilated beyond resurrection by that one breath-stopping glimpse of Uri-vetzky’s arrival. The brazenness and the bluff might come later, and probably would; but before that the Saint wanted to know what a man who was supposed to be dead was doing at the house of a man whose friend really was dead, and why a man who was admitted to have been the greatest forger of his time was visiting the friend of a man who had had an unaccountable collection of bonds which might have been forged, and why one thread in the lives of all these strangely assorted people linked them together when that thread had its roots in a country where death had lately become a commonplace—and the Saint wanted to know all these things without announcing his intrusion. Wherefore he stood and dissected the possibilities with