Free The Saint in Persuit by Leslie Charteris Page B

any elaboration of the details with which he would regale his embassy, they ordered him to wait where he was while they chased his attackers. He was only too glad to oblige, and as soon as the cops had taken off around the corner after their rapidly limping quarry he pulled out his fountain-pen flashlight and hurried to the spot where he had thrown Vicky Kinian’s letter.
    He expected to see the envelope immediately, and it took him only a few seconds to realize that it was nowhere in the section of the alley where he had thrown it. And yet there was no chance that one of his sparring partners could have grabbed it; he was certain that he had kept them too occupied during the whole melee.
    Simon whirled quickly and sprinted after the two policemen. Now that the rainstorm had passed there was no wind to have blown the envelope away, and the only other obvious possibility was that one of the cops had noticed it and snatched it up on the run.
    In the narrow street beyond the alley, down to the left, the sounds of the chase were still near, and took the form of sharp shouts and a confused skidding of feet, at least some of them flat.
    “In there! He can’t get out!”
    “That way! The other one!”
    As Simon raced on to the dimly lit scene it became clear that the two fugitives had split up, and that only one of them had had the foresight—or good luck—to pick a route which might conceivably lead to a prolongation of his malodorous career. The second one had made the error of getting himself cornered in a cul de sac full of garbage bins. The Saint arrived in time to see him—the little roach-like entity with the moustache—caught in the powerful beam of one of his pursuers’ electric torches, struggling with the closed rear door of an apartment building which formed the end of the architectural trap. He was shielding his face with one hand and clutching his long knife in the other.
    The policemen immediately showed signs of recognition, if not of joy.
    “Halt, you unprintable unspeakable!” yelled one of them.
    “Halt or I’ll shoot!” shouted the other, snatching out an automatic, but still keeping a respectful distance.
    The prodigal obviously anticipated that the Lisbon police force would stop depressingly short of barbequing a fatted calf in honor of his return to the land of the Godly, and in fact were more likely to barbeque him, and this no doubt caused him to panic. Instead of obeying the commands of his pursuers, he took the ungentlemanly and imprudent step of throwing his knife at them, hoping to make his getaway through the apartment building’s back entrance before they could recover their balance.
    But there are days in everybody’s life when little things seem continually to go wrong, and it was such a day in the life of Pedro the Population-Adjuster. Little things like a wrong turning and a tightly locked door added up to a moment of acute inconvenience as a cop’s finger squeezed a trigger twice and caused two notable perforations in Pedro’s anatomy just above his hammered-silver belt buckle.
    Pedro writhed to the ground and twitched to grotesquely sprawled stillness as the policemen strode to his side to pronounce their benediction.
    “Misbegotten swine!”
    “He should have had it long ago.”
    The Saint intervened.
    “I hate to intrude on your sorrow, boys,” he said, “but I wonder if either of you picked up a letter I dropped in the alley back there?”
    The two officers became aware of his presence once again.
    “Senhor!” one of them hailed him in congratulatory tones. “You were quite right. There is no blame on you. This pig is known to us, and we have finally caught him in one of his crimes!”
    “To say the least,” Simon concurred, looking down at the bloodsoaked body at their feet. “I wonder why he was after me?”
    “Oh, senhor, he would do anything—stick you up in a back street, kidnap your children, kill! Anything it would pay him to do, he would do. He has been in