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Before dinner was over he had learned more. Things had been happening quickly
in London while he had been away, and behind them all he could see the guiding
hand of the man from St. Louis. After the fiasco of the Peabody raid it seemed
as if Goldman had gone all out for a restoration of confidence in his
followers. The work was rapid, ruthlessly thorough, a desperate bid for power
under the standards of sudden death. The day after the Peabody raid, another
jeweller's shop had been successfully smashed in Bond Street, and on the same
night a small safe deposit off the Tottenham Court Road had been blasted open
and half emptied while masked men with revolvers held a small crowd at bay and
covered the escape of the inside party before the police reached the scene. In
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those cases the victims were discreet rather than valorous.
It was different at the Battersea branch of the Metropolitan Bank, which the
same men held up the following midday. A cashier attempted to reach for a gun
under the counter, and was shot dead where he stood. The gang escaped with
over two thousand pounds in cash.
While officialdom was still humming with that out-rage, another bank in
Edmonton was similarly held up; but with the warning of the Metropolitan Bank
murder fresh in their memories, the staff showed no resistance.
Conferences were held, and special reserves of armed men in plain clothes were
called out to cover as many likely spots as possible. But the police were
again out-guessed. The next day, an excess of confidence on the part of the
management concerned allowed a private car bearing the week's pay envelopes
for half a dozen branches of a popular library to leave a bank in the City. It
was intercepted at its first stop, the messenger sandbagged, and fifteen
hundred pounds in cash stolen. A constable on point duty saw the incident and
tried to pursue the bandits' car on the running board of a commandeered taxi.
He was shot off it by the fugitives and seriously injured, but it was expected
that he would live.
The tale went through a sequence of barefaced brigandage that was staggering.
"We're getting 'em scared," Tex Goldman said. "That's the only way to do it.
Hit 'em, and keep on hitting. Don't give 'em time to think. In a month or two
they'll be begging for mercy."
"You bet," said Orping.
He had automatically become Goldman's aide-de-camp, and held his position by
his own audacity. It was he who had shot the Metropolitan Bank cashier in a
week he had become a confirmed killer, with two notches on his gun and the
bravado of experience. "Basher" Tope, who had shot the policeman, ran him a
fair second.
Ted Orping poured out a dose of brandy from a silver hip flask. He had learned
that trick too, and he used it often. Alcohol braced his recklessness up to a
point at which murder meant nothing.
"The guy I'm wantin' to see again is the Saint," he said.
"You'll get your chance," said Goldman. "We'll know about it the minute he
comes home. I'd like to see him myself."
He might or might not have been pleased to know that Simon Templar shared that
wish with him in no uncertain manner.
As far as the Saint was concerned, the desired opportunity came his way with a
promptness for which he had only a stretch of coincidence to thank. On the
night when some of the events already mentioned were told to Simon they had
dined at a favourite restaurant of theirs in Beak Street, a quiet little
Spanish eating-house where the food was good and cheap and the crowd neither
fashionable nor pseudo-Bohemian. It was some time after eleven o'clock when
they left, and wandered through side streets towards Shaftesbury Avenue with
the vague idea of having another cup of coffee some-where before going home.
They were just turning a corner when Simon saw the man from St. Louis
emerg-ing from a doorway. In a flash Simon had caught Patricia's arm and
jerked her back into the narrow lane from which they had just been turning. He
leaned against the wall, covering her with his body, with his broad back
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turned to the Yankee gunman.
"Tex himself!" he said. "Pretend to be powdering your nose get out a mirror."
His ambition to see Tex Goldman again included a time and place of his own
choosing, with the circum-stances carefully reviewed and his plan of campaign
completely polished not a chance encounter in a back street that would do
little more than advertise his return.
In the girl's mirror, he saw Goldman step into a taxi and drive off. Patricia
saw the gunman for the first time.
"That's the boy who's causing all the trouble. And I wonder what he's doing
around here tonight?"
They walked on, and Simon studied the doorway that had exhaled the new menace
to the peace of London. A small illuminated sign over the lintel announced it
as the Baytree Club. The door was open, but all that could be seen was a short
passage leading to a flight of stairs, from beyond which came subdued sounds
of music. It appeared to be one of those centres of furtive gaiety which one
passes almost without noticing in daylight, and which suddenly become
attractive when the neon signs wake up and the unprepossessing street outside
is hidden in a kindly gloom.
The Saint stood on the opposite pavement with a cigarette drooping from the
corner of his mouth and surveyed the premises in a contemplative silence. A
private car turned into the street and drew up outside the doorway to exude
two men who went down the passage and up the stairs.
"Feel like a spot of night life, Pat?" queried the Saint.
There was a promise of mischief in his gaze. It might have come to anything or
nothing, as the Fates decreed, but he felt that he would like to know more
about a place where Tex Goldman descended to common or garden frivolity.
She nodded.
"O.K., boy."
They were crossing the road when the Saint's keen ears became aware that the
music inside the club had stopped. There was nothing very remarkable in that,
for even the most energetic orchestras must rest for a few moments now and
then to expand their lungs and gargle. And yet it made the Saint hesitate.
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