Catch the Saint (5 page)

So a few minutes later
they were sitting in the cool dimness of a
saloon
bar now largely deserted by the lunch-hour crowd of busi
nessmen, salesclerks, and shoppers. Simon Templar raised
his
pint of bitter and toasted Teal: “To the
continued success of our joint endeavours!”

He said it without
detectable sarcasm, but Teal sipped his
small
lime-and-water suspiciously, somehow making it clear that
he was merely drinking and not solemnising the Saint’s sentiment
with a ceremonial libation.

“Templar,” he
said, “word has come to me that you’ve been
taking
a lot of interest in the Leonardo Galleries.”

“I like that,”
Simon mused.
“Word has come to me …”
He
rolled it round his tongue like a vintage port:
“Word
has come
to me , . .”

“I’d like to know
just why you’re looking into that particular
place,
and what you expect to gain by it.”

“I should think it’d
be your business to know the answer to the
first part of that
question without having to ask me,” said the
Saint. “The fact that you have to ask shows why your career
has been, shall we say, a little halting. Fairly
steady, but un
spectacular. A little
like a dung-ball being rolled up a hill by in
dustrious but clumsy beetles. I’m sure you won’t take offence at
this constructive criticism, Claud, but your
failure to know any
thing about the
Leonardo Galleries also shows why you still, even
at your advanced age,
have to depend on me, a mere amateur,
for so
much of your information.”

Mr Teal had turned the
colour of a ripe radish, and might have
damaged
his teeth if his chewing gum had not been between them
to
cushion their impact.

“I probably know a
great deal more about the Leonardo Gal
leries
than you do,” he rumbled, keeping the volume of his voice very low in
spite of his anger. “The owner specialises in selling questionable works
of art to rich clients who don’t know any bet
ter.
Of course he sells some good stuff too, but he makes his big
profits touting so-called undiscovered geniuses—”

“Who never quite get
discovered,” Simon supplied. “He also
likes
convincing nouveau-riche English clients that some Ameri
can artist
is going great guns on the other side of the Atlantic,
and that they just barely have time to invest in him before he
catches on over here. His mark-up runs in the neighbourhood
of
8,000 per cent in some cases. And
he has other little tricks, like putting ‘attributed to’ or ‘attributed to the
school of ‘ on some old
canvas, or even on some imitation-old canvas,
and running up
the price.”

“But you can’t
arrest a man for that,” Teal stated.

The Saint smiled.

“Exactly,” he
said, and the smile continued to be transmitted
to
Teal through the unearthly blue eyes as Simon raised his beer
mug to his lips again.

“Now see here,
Templar,” Teal said trenchantly. “That’s what
I’m getting at: If I can’t arrest a man for what Cyril Pargit is do
ing, you’ve no right to do anything else to him either.
He’s not committing any crime.”

“Caveat emptor?”
murmured the Saint. “Well, I know of a
case where Pargit got his hooks into a gullible old lady of
seventy-
three soon after her husband died. When Pargit met
this widow,
she had some fine paintings and a reasonable amount of
cash.
She needed to invest. Cyril Pargit
told her her paintings were
practically
junk, generously bought them at junk prices, and sold
her some real junk for most of her cash. So now
she has had to sell her car to pay the rent, and God knows what she’ll have to
live on in another couple of years.”

“So you
are
after
Pargit!” Teal challenged triumphantly.

“I didn’t say that,”
Simon replied calmly. “I’m aiding the ordained authorities by supplying
information.”

“Well, I hope you
aren’t going to put me in the position of de
fending
a rascal like Pargit against you—which is exactly what
will
happen if you try to give him what you think he deserves.”

The Saint drained the
last of his bitter and stood up.

“Just to show you
how honorable my intentions are, would you
like
to accompany me on a tour of brother Pargit’s emporium? I apologise for my
earlier slurs on your cultural status. You’re ob
viously more
knowledgeable about the local art scene than I
thought you were.”

Teal gulped the last dregs
of his watered lime-juice and fol
lowed Simon out of
the pub and down the street. The Saint suddenly drew up short, about twenty
paces from the entrance to the
Leonardo Galleries.

“Now there,” he
said to Teal in a low, admiring voice, “is a
genuine
Gainsborough.”

Teal blinked.

“Where?”

“Right there. Take a
good look. You’ll probably see only one
in
a lifetime.”

“That young
lady?” Teal asked.

“That young
lady,” the Saint affirmed reverently.

She was standing outside
the window of the gallery, looking in.
She
was slender but gracefully curved, her blond hair so fine that in the sunshine
it seemed a flowing condensation of light rather than a material substance. Her
pale skin seemed almost translucent, and although she had none of the obvious
prettiness of a magazine cover girl, her features had an almost flowerlike inno
cence that made the elegantly outfitted women passing her seem
as homely as cabbages.

“Very nice,”
Teal said. “Do you know her?”

“Only in visions,
unfortunately.”

“I always knew you
must be truly balmy!” Teal said. “Do you
really
have visions?”

“Oh, Claud,” the
Saint sighed. “Let’s go on and have a look
at
Cyril’s sucker trap.”

He herded the detective
ahead of him through the gallery
door. The display rooms
were rich in thick carpeting and velvet
drapery.
The acoustics of the place were such that sound van
ished
almost before it could be perceived; moving there was like
walking through puddles of silence. At the opposite end of
the
first large room a distinguished-looking man was
speaking to a
thirtyish woman who appeared
completely mesmerised by his
words. She herself looked
as if a whole stable of grooms had
been occupied for
half the morning putting every platinum hair and dark eyelash and crimson
fingernail in perfect order before she had allowed herself to be seen in the
streets. Wealth seemed
to have expanded her girth
more than her mind, if her stature
and blank facial
expression were any indices. He walked her
back
towards the entrance door, his gestures spiralling softly like the smoke of
incense. Her wide eyes and half-open mouth made
her
look for all the world like a fish that has already been hooked and landed, and
is simply waiting to expire completely while the
cook
prepares the sauce.

“That’s Pargit,”
Teal whispered in Simon’s ear.

The Saint nodded to
acknowledge this unnecessary informa
tion, and moved so
that he could unobtrusively observe the
dealer
as he urged his enthralled client to admire a peculiarly bulbous lump of bronze
near the window. Mr Teal was inspecting a large surrealist canvas in which
snakes and elongated females writhed through a large Swiss cheese, and he was
only vaguely aware that the gallery’s entrance door had opened for a
moment and closed, then opened again.

“Templar,” he
muttered, peering at the strangely inhabited Gruyere, “what do you make of
this?”

When he got no reply, he
looked round, and Simon Templar
was no longer there.

CHAPTER 4

By the time Chief
Inspector Teal noticed that the Saint was no
longer
beside him, Simon Templar was fifty yards down the street outside. Mr Teal’s
first thought was that he had moved
into one of the
other exhibition rooms. Pargit was still talking to his client not far away.
Teal had heard nothing that suggested a
hasty departure. He
wandered, somewhat disagreeably mysti
fied,
farther back along the pathways of paintings.

Simon had left Pargit’s
establishment so hastily because of something only he had seen. When the door
from the street had opened, letting in a sudden glare of sunlight not admitted
by the
tinted glass, Teal’s back had been turned, and Pargit
and his
client had been in such an intent huddle that they
did not even
look round. Only the Saint had seen the
Gainsborough girl
open the door and start to step a
little hesitantly into the gallery.
Only he was placed
so that the brilliance of the back-lighting
from
the afternoon sun did not dissolve the girl’s features, and only he witnessed
the swift and total transformation that came
over
her as soon as she had crossed Cyril Pargit’s threshold. As
she started in from the street she had been tentative but
poised. Then, as her eyes fell on Pargit and his client, her body froze, she
gasped, and Simon saw her pale face flush to a deeper shade. He might
not have been observing her so interestedly if she had not
been the same girl he had pointed out to Teal outside the shop a few
minutes before. As it was, he had very little time to observe
her now. Something had shocked her so acutely, or frightened her
so badly, that she backed out the doorway before ever letting go
of the knob, and hurried away without looking back.

The Saint had no idea
what had caused her agitation, but he
was drawn to
mysteries as naturally as a shark is drawn to a stir on the surface of the sea.
If he had been an ordinary person he
could have
explained her reaction in several theoretical ways that would have made it
unnecessary for him to concern himself any
further.
If he had been an ordinary person who felt that her reac
tion was
extraordinary enough to warrant some attention, he
would still have run up against that great protective barrier reef
of the human psyche that bears the marker
“It’s none of my busi
ness.”

But Simon Templar was not
an ordinary person. He felt that
her behaviour virtually screamed for
investigation, and that it
was very much his
own peculiar, individualistic kind of business.

So before anyone in the
gallery area was aware of what he was
doing, he had
moved across the thick carpet with a casualness
that
belied his speed, and was once more out in the bright sun
shine and heat of the street. There were quite a few people
mov
ing in and out of the shops all along the way, and
many more just
standing looking in the windows. It
was the height of the tourist
season; American accents
at moments outnumbered British. In spite of the crowds, Simon caught a glimpse
of that unmistakable blond hair a hundred feet or more away from him. The girl
must have been walking very fast, almost running at
times. She disappeared round a corner before Simon had come anywhere
near her, but when he rounded it she was not ten paces away,
just standing with her back to a brick wall beneath a
red-and-
white-striped awning. Her cupped right hand was pressed
to her
mouth, and her eyes, if they were seeing anything, must have
been focussed on something far beneath the
surface of the earth
which only she
could see.

The Saint slowed his pace
as he approached her.

“I can help
you,” he said in the kind of voice he might have
used
to calm a nervous filly.

It took her a few seconds to accept the notion
that he was speaking to her, and to realise that his words held something
more meaningful for her than the general hubbub
of the street.
Her head turned so
that her large green eyes could meet his, and
for a moment he thought she was going to run again. But he
could tell that she was more confused and
overwrought than really frightened of him, especially out here in the open,
where a single cry could have brought a dozen people to her aid.