Mr. Teal was not amused.
Chapter X
How Simon Templar spoke of birds-nesting,
and Duodecimo Gugliemi also became amorous
1
IT MUST be admitted at once that Duodecimo Gugliemi had never been cited as an advertisement for his native land. A sublime disregard for the laws of property would alone have been enough to disqualify him in that respect; as it was, he was affected also with an amorous temperament which, combined with a sudden and jealous temper, had not taken long to make Italy too hot to hold him. Leaving Italy for the sake of his health, he had crossed the Alps into Austria; but the Austrian prisons did not agree with him, and, again for the sake of his health, he had taken another northward move into German territory. He had seen the insides of jails in Munich and Bonn, and had narrowly escaped even more unpleasant retribution in Leipzig. In Berlin he had led an unimpeachably respectable life for six weeks, during which time he was in hospital with double pneumonia. Recovering, he left Berlin with an unspotted escutcheon, and migrated into France; and from France, after some ups and downs, he came to England, from which country, but for the intervention of Mr. Assistant Commissioner Cullis, he would speedily have departed back to the land of his birth. Actually the thirteenth child of a family that had been christened in numerical order, he had been permitted to slip into the appellation of a brother who had died of a surfeit of pickled onions at the tender age of two; but that, according to his own story, was the only good fortune that had come to him in a world that had mercilessly persecuted his most innocent enterprises.
He was a small and dapper little man, very amusing company in his perky way, with a fascination for barmaids and an innate skill with the stiletto; and certainly he looked less like an English plain-clothes man than any thing in trousers. Which may account for the fact that Simon Templar, sallying forth one morning from Upper Berkeley Mews, and alert for waiting sleuths, observed two large men in very plain clothes on the other side of the road, and entirely overlooked Duodecimo Gugliemi.
These large men in very plain clothes were among the trials of his life which Simon Templar endured with the exemplary patience with which he faced all his tribulations. Ever since his first brush with the law, on and off, he had been favoured with these attentions; and the entertainment which he had at first derived from this silent persecution was beginning to lose its zest. It was not that the continual watching annoyed him, or even cramped his style to any noticeable extent; but he was starting to find it somewhat tiresome to have to shake off a couple of inquisitive shadowers every time he wanted to go about any really private business. If he made a private appointment for midday, for instance, at a point ten minutes away from home, he had to set out to keep it half an hour earlier than he need have done, simply to give himself time to ditch a couple of doggedly unsuccessful bloodhounds; and this waste of time pained his efficient soul. More than once he had contemplated addressing a complaint to the Chief Commissioner of Police for the Metropolis on the subject.
That day, he had a private appointment at noon; and, as has been explained, he allowed himself half an hour to dispose of the watchers. He disposed of them as a matter of fact, in twenty minutes, which was good going. He did not dispose of Duodecimo Gugliemi — partly because Gugliemi was rather more supple of intuition than the two detectives, and partly because he was unaware of Gugliemi's existence. So soon as he found that the two large men had fallen out of the procession, he went on to his appointment by a direct and normal route, in ignorance of the fact that Duodecimo was still on his heels.
The return from Reading had presented no serious difficulty to a man of the Saint's ingenuity and brass neck, although he had known quite well that by the following morning there would be patrols of hawk-eyed men watch ing for him at every entrance to London. In a suit which had not been improved by the previous night's soaking, and which he had deliberately made no effort to smarten up, he had interviewed the proprietor of a garage and spun his yarn. He was an ex-serviceman down on his luck; he had been a haulage contractor, and a run of unsuccessful speculations had forced him to sell up his business; now a windfall had come his way in the shape of a transport job that was worth twenty-five pounds to him if he could only find the means to carry it out. And he secured the truck that he wanted, and the loan of a suit of overalls as well, and so drove boldly into London under the very noses of the men who were waiting for him at the Chiswick end of the Great West Road, with Jill Trelawney under a tarpaulin in the back. And after that, it had been a childishly simple matter to smuggle her stealthily into the studio at dead of night; where he had indicated a cupboard plentifully stocked with unperishable foods, and marooned her. There he visited her frequently, to report news and replenish the larder — that morning, as a matter of fact, he carried a dozen kippers, a loaf of bread, half a pound of butter, and two dozen eggs with him in an attache case.