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murderer while it pigeonholed the sufferings of the victims who did not need
any excuse. It was against such injustices masquerading under the name of
Justice that the Saint had always waged his relentless battle; and now at this
time he was glad that Randolph March had to suffer even a fraction of what had
been suffered by the men and women and children who had been crushed under the
juggernaut to which he had freely given his aid.
And besides that, the Saint had something else to think about.
It was no more than a faint flickering star far down on a dark horizon; but
it was by such flickers that he had cheated death many times before, and once
again that one star had not gone out.
For once again, so ridiculously that it seemed like part of an interminable
routine, and yet just as logically as it had ever happened in any case before,
he still had his knife. The search that had been made would not have left any
of them any hidden weapons of the expected kind; and yet once again it had
failed to discover the slim sheath strapped to his left forearm. And it was
still possible, in spite of the knots that had been ruthlessly tightened in
the stiff new rope, that the long fingertips of his right hand might be able
to reach the hilt of that keen blade. Perhaps . . .
Simon held on to that attenuated hope. And at the same time yet another thing
was obtruding itself on his consciousness.
It was a peculiar acrid smell that was starting to creep into the room. It
had a sharpness that was quite distinctive, that fretted his nostrils in a
perplexed effort of recognition as the atmosphere grew heavier with it.
"It isn't quite so much fun as you thought it was going to be, is it, Randy,
old boy?" he was saying. "It's worrying about all sorts of things like that
that gave Heinrich his bald dome. You'd better take some March Hair Tonic
along with you if you want to save your own crop."
March glanced at him almost vacantly, and took another deep hot pull at his
cigarette.
And all at once Simon knew the meaning of that curious pungent odour in the
air. One sentence out of Peter Quentin's first report on Randolph March
drummed through his head in a monotonous rhythm. His eyes stayed fixed on the
burning cigarette with a kind of weird fascination.
"But-that can't be right." March turned back to Friede, and it seemed that
his voice was harsher and high pitched. "I can't lose everything. Everything!
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What am I going to live on? Where can I go?"
"You can be sure that the Party will take care of you," Friede said
dispassionately. "I can't tell you yet where we shall be going. I shall
communicate with Berlin after the submarine is at sea. But you would be wise
not to make too much of your own personal losses. Please remember that
Templar's interference has cost the Reich a much greater setback in
organisation and preparation than the loss of your private fortune. In this
service, as you should know, the individual is of no importance. I hope you
agree with me."
"I hope you do, too, Randy," said the Saint; and now his mockery had a finer
edge, a crystallising direction that was founded on that acrid-smelling
cigarette. "It's a bit different isn't it? You had a lot of fun being a
plutocrat of the Fifth Column, while you could enjoy your mansions and yachts
and aeroplanes, and plan your sabotage and propaganda over nice cold bottles
of champagne with a glamour girl at each elbow. Now I hope you're going to
enjoy doing a lot more hard work on beer and ersatz cheese, while a lot of big
shots like Heinrich crack the whip. It will be a very refining experience for
you, I think."
March gulped, a little dazedly, as the Saint's insinuatingly derisive voice
drove each of its points home with the leisured aim of a skilled surgeon
operating a probe, and the drawn lines around his mouth whitened and twitched
a little more. Captain Friede saw and heard the cause and effect also. His
eyes had narrowed on March while Simon spoke, and it was significant that he
had not tried to make the Saint stop talking. He had gone back into a
reptilian stillness from which he roused again with the same reptilian speed.
Simon saw the flare of his small nostrils that was the only warning. And then
the captain had taken three quick steps across to March, snatched the
cigarette from his mouth and thrown it on the floor, and stamped his heel on
it. "Dummkopf!" he snarled. "This is no time for that!" But he had moved too
late. March had already sucked enough marijuana into his lungs to make a
maneater out of a mouse. His eyes sparkled with a wide hollow brilliance.
"Damn you-"
His voice cracked, but not his muscular coordination. Like lightning he
whirled and snatched a carbine from the slack hands of the nearest
unsuspecting guard. He fanned the barrel across the captain's chest.
"It's not going to happen like that, do you see?" The words ran together in
shrill desperation. "I won't let it! I'm going to fool all of you. I'm going
to keep you here. I'll turn you over to the Navy myself. When they get here
I'll say you tried to fool me, but I was too smart for you. I captured you all
myself. They won't take anything away from me. I'll be a hero-"
Simon's heart sank again.
It was like watching a slow-motion nightmare, in which horror advanced with
infinite sluggishness and yet was preceded by a paralysis which prohibited
doing anything about it. March was crazy, of course-his threat could only have
been uttered by a man at a hop-headed height of hysteria that could eliminate
cold facts by forgetting them. But that same madness, combined with the
strange dislocation of the senses of time and space that was a unique property
of the drug, also destroyed itself.
March might have thought that he could cover anyone in the room in a split
second; but he was wrong. Friede only nodded, slightly unhurriedly, to another
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