Saint Overboard (6 page)

He remembered the speedboat tied up alongside
the
Falk
enberg,
which had not been there before.

“You hadn’t got some crazy idea of
accepting, had you?” he
said mechanically.

“It’s what I’ve been waiting for.”

“I know, but— What do you think happened
last night?”

She took one of his cigarettes.

“I don’t think I could have been seen. I
didn’t see the man
who caught me—he came up behind. And it was pretty dark
where I was. He caught me round
the neck with his arm; then I
fired the
shot, he let go, and I dived.”

“He’d know it was a woman.”

“Not necessarily. Don’t you remember
that Vogel said he was
looking for a man?”

“An obvious lie.”

“A very stupid one—if it was. But what
could it gain him? If
you’d already seen a woman, it’d make you
think there was
something
queer going on. If you hadn’t, what did it matter?”

“He might have been trying to tempt me
to keep up the lie—
which would have given me away.”

She shrugged her intoxicating shoulders.

“Aren’t you rather looking for
trouble?” she said.

“That’s my job,” answered the Saint
evenly. “And inciden
tally, it happens to be one of the reasons
why I didn’t come to a
sticky end many years ago. I’ll give you
something else. Suppose
Vogel wasn’t quite happy about me last
night?”

“Well?”

“It was rather an unusual hour for
anyone to be up and about
—messing around with fenders. Not impossible,
but unusual.
And if Vogel’s the kind of man we think he is, he keeps
alive by sorting out unusual things—like I do. He couldn’t make any fuss,
because
that’d be letting himself in if he was wrong. But he
could puff away in
that outboard, stop the engine, and paddle back quietly on the oars. He
couldn’t have seen you—probably he couldn’t even have heard what you said—but
he could hear
that there was a girl on board.”

“Which isn’t impossible either,”
she said demurely.

Simon frowned.

“You forget my Saintly reputation. But still, maybe to Vogel,
with his low criminal mind, it isn’t
impossible either. But it’s still
unusual
enough to be worth looking at. And then there’s you.”

“Without a reputation.”

“And not deserving one. You’ve been
making a clear set at
him for several days—weeks—whatever it is.
That again may
not be impossible. It might be his money, or his beauty,
or be
cause he sings so nicely in his bath. But if it isn’t even unusual,
if I were
in his place I’d think it was—interesting. Interesting
enough, maybe, to try
and find out some more about you.”

She pressed his hand—she had been letting it
rest in his all
that
time, as if she hadn’t noticed.

“Dear man,” she said, “don’t you think I know all
this?”

“And if he only wants to see exactly where you stand in the
game?”

“I can pack a gun.”

“Like any other ordinary innocent
woman.”

“Then I’ll go without it.”

“You wouldn’t be much worse off.”

“All the same, I’ll go.”

“Three,” he quoted her, “didn’t come back.”

She nodded. The impish humour still played on
her lips and
the surface of her eyes, but the depths behind it were
clear and
still.

“When you join Ingerbeck’s, you don’t sign on for a cocktail
party. You join an army. You take an oath—to do
your job, to keep your mouth shut, and to take the consequences. Wouldn’t
you go?”

“Yes. But there are special
risks.”

“For a poor defenceless girl?”

“They
call it Worse than
Death.”

“I’ve
never believed it.”

He sat up and stared thoughtfully over the
water. There was a
quality of lightness in her decision that ended argument
more
finally than any dramatic protestations. She would go; because
whatever
the risk might be, it was not fact. It was her job to
find out, not to
guess.

“I take it you’ve already accepted,”
he said wryly.

“The messenger was going to call back
for my answer. I left a
letter when I came out. I said I’d be
delighted. Maybe Kurt
Vogel isn’t so bad as he’s painted,” she
said dreamily. “He left
some lovely flowers with the invitation.”

“I shouldn’t be surprised if you fell for him.”

“I might.”

“But now and then your conscience would
prick you. When
you were riding around in your Rolls, half strangled with
di
amonds, the memory of lost love would haunt you. I can see you
stifling a
sob, and pressing a penny into a poor beggar’s hand
before you hurry on,
because he reminds you of me.”

“Don’t say it,” she pleaded
tremulously. “I can’t bear it. How
was I to know you
cared
like that?”

The Saint scratched his head.

“I must have forgotten to tell you,”
he admitted. “Never
mind.” He turned to her with cavalier blue eyes sobered to a
thoughtful directness that she had seen before.
“But does it
leave me
out?”

“I don’t know,” she said steadily.
“Have you decided to break
off your holiday?”

“Let’s have a drink and talk about it.”

She shook her head.

“I can’t risk it. Vogel may be ashore
now—he may be any
where. I’ve risked enough to talk to you at all. If
you’ve changed your mind since last night, we’ll fight over it.”

“Did I tell you I’d made up my
mind?” Simon inquired
mildly.

“You let me think you had. I took a
chance when I told you
the story. I wanted you to know. I still
do.” She was facing him
without banter now, cool and possessed and momentarily
unpossessable
, and yet with a shadow of
wistfulness deepening in her gaze. “I think Ingerbeck himself would have
done the same. We
might get a long
way together; and if we came through there’d be plenty of commission to split.
Just once, it might be fun for
you
to look at a dotted line.”

His eyebrows slanted quizzically.

“Otherwise?”

“I suppose we can still be hung out to
dry.”

She stood up, dusting the sand from her robe. Simon picked
himself up after her, and the grey eyes came back
to his face.

“Where should we meet on this—dotted
line?” he asked re
signedly.

“I’ll be here to-morrow. No, not here—we can’t take this risk
again. Suppose I swam out and met you, off
the Pointe du Mou
linet. Halfway
house. At eleven.” She smiled, as he had seen her smile once before.
“Are you looking for your pen?”

“I can’t write, Loretta.”

“You can make a cross.”

“You know what that stands for?”

“If it does,” she said, “you
signed last night.”

He watched her walking up towards the white
spires of the
Casino Balneum, with all the maddening delight of
movement in
the swing of her brown body, and searched his vocabulary
for
words to describe the capriciousness of fortune. Admitted that all the
gifts of that immoral goddess had strings harnessed to
them—there were
strings and strings. There was no real need in
adventure for quite
such a disturbing complication. And the
Saint smiled in
spite of that. The beach was empty after she had
left it; that is to
say, there were about a thousand other people
on the Plage de l’Ecluse, but he found all
of them sickeningly bovine. Including the Parisian vamp, who by this time was
en
joying the devotion of three
muscle-conscious young men, the
debauched
Roman emperor, and a hungry-looking tourist from
Egg Harbor, New Jersey,
who should have been old enough to
know
better.

Simon turned away from the repulsive
spectacle, and was re
warded by the almost equally unwelcome vision
of Orace’s mous
tache, through which something more than the sea air was
filter
ing.

“You do break out at the most unromantic
moments, Orace,”
he complained; and then he saw that Orace’s
eyes were still fixed
glassily on the middle distance.

“Is that the lidy, sir?”

Orace’s martial voice was hushed with a sort of awe; and the
Saint frowned.

“She isn’t a lady,” he said
firmly. “No lady would use such
shameless eyes to try and seduce a
self-respecting buccaneer
from his duty. No lady would take such a
mean advantage of a
human being.” He perceived that his audience was
still scarcely
following him, and looked round. “Nor is that the
wench I’m
talking about, anyway. Come on away—you’ll be getting
off in a
minute.”

They walked over the sand towards the bend by
the swimming
pool, where the Promenade des Alli
é
s curves out towards the sea.

“If you arsk me,” Orace remarked,
recalling the grievance
which had been temporarily smoothed over by
his anatomical
studies,
“these Frogs are all barmy. First thing I arsks for petrol,
an’ they give me paraffin. Then when I says that
ain’t what I
want, they tell me
they’ve got some stuff called essence, wot’s just as good. I ‘as a smell of
this stuff, an’ blimey if it ain’t pet
rol.
‘Ow the thunderinell can they ‘elp goin’ barmy wiv a langwidge
like that?”

“I don’t suppose they can help it,”
said the Saint gravely.
“Did you buy some of this essence?”

“Yessir. Then I tried to get some ice.
They ‘adn’t got no ice,
but they tried to sell me some
glass.
I
gave it up an’ brought the
dinghy rahnd in case yer didn’t wanter swim
back.
Barmy?”
said O
race sizzlingly.

It was nearly one o’clock when the fuel tanks
had been replenished from the cans which Orace had acquired at the cost of so
much righteous indignation, and the Saint had cleaned him
self up and put a comb through
his hair. Orace produced a drink
—freshened,
in spite of gloomy prophecies, with ice—and re
quired to know whether he should get lunch.

“I don’t know,” said the Saint,
with unusual brusqueness.

He had no idea what he wanted to do. He felt
suddenly restless and dissatisfied. The day had gone flat in prospect.
They
might have lazed through the long afternoon, steeping themselves
in
sunlight and romping through the light play of words. They
might have plunged together
through the cool rapture of the sea, or drifted out under spread sails to
explore the Ile de C
é
zembre
and picnic under the cliffs of St Lunaire. They
might have en
joyed any of a dozen trivial things which he had half
planned in
his imagination, secure in a
communion of pagan understanding
that
made no demands and asked no promises. Instead of
. which …

Because gold rippled in a girl’s hair, and an
imp of sophisti
cated humour lurked Pan-like in the shadows of her eyes;
be
cause the same gaze could sometimes hold a serenity of purpose
beyond
measure—Simon Templar, at thirty-four, with odysseys
of adventure behind
him that would have made Ulysses look
like a small boy playing in a back
yard, found himself in the
beginning of that halcyon afternoon at a
loose end.

It wasn’t exactly the amount of money involved. Four million,
if that was a minimum estimate of the total
submerged wealth
which Vogel had
plundered from the sea bottoms, was certainly a
lot of pounds. So was ten per cent of it. Or even half that. The
Saint wasn’t greedy; and he had come out of each of
his past
sorties into the hazardous
hinterlands of adventure with a
lengthening
line of figures in his bank account which raised their
own monument to
his flair for boodle. He had no need to be
avaricious.
There were limits—lofty, vertiginous limits, but
limits nevertheless—to how much money one could spend; and
he had a sublime faith that the same extravagant
providence
which had held him up all
his life so far would keep him near
enough
to those limits to save him from feeling depressed. It
wasn’t exactly
that. It was a matter of principle.