The Saint in Europe

THE SAINT IN EUROPE
LESLIE CHARTERIS

CONTENTS
IPARIS:
The Covetous Headsman
IIAMSTERDAM:
The Angel’s Eye
IIITHE RHINE:
The Rhine Maiden
IVTIROL:
The Golden Journey
VLUCERNE:
The Loaded Tourist
VIJUAN-LES-PINS:
The Spanish Cow
VIIROME:
The Latin Touch

I. PARIS:
The Covetous Headsman

“I hope, Monsieur Templar,” said Inspecнtor Archimede Quercy, of the Paris Police Judiciaire, in passable English, “that you will not think this meeting is unfriendly.”

“Nevertheless,” Simon replied, in perfect French, “to be summoned here on my very first day in Paris seems at least an unusual distinction.”

“The Saint is an unusual personage,” said Inspector Quercy, reverting gratefully to his native tongue.

He was a long thin man with a long thin nose, and even with rather long thin hair. He had a solemn anxious face and wistful eyes like a questioning spaniel. Simon knew that that appearance was deceptive. It was the Saint’s business, in the cause of outlawry, to know the reputations of many police officers in many places; and he knew that on the record Inspector Quercy’s instincts, if the canine parнallel must be continued, learned more towards those of the bloodhound, the retriever, and the bulldog.

“If you come here as a simple tourist,” Quercy said, “France welcomes you. We have, as you well know, a beautiful country, good food, good wine, and pretty girls. They are all at your disposal-for you, no doubt, have plenty of those good American dollars which France so badly needs. But as the Saint-that would be altogether different.”

“Monsieur the Inspector is, perhaps, anti-clerical?” Simon suggested gravely.

“I refer, Monsieur, to the nom de guerre under which you are so widely known. I have not, it is true, been informed of any charges pending against you anywhere, nor have the police of any other country requested me to arrest you for extradition; but I have read about your exploits. Your motives are popularly believed to be idealistic, in a peculiar way. That is not for me to judge. I only tell you that we want none of them here.”

“What, no ideals-in the Palais de Justice?”

Quercy sighed.

He gazed across his littered desk into the dancing blue eyes under quizzically tilted brows, and for a moment the lugubriousness in his own gaze was very deep and real. The sight of the tall broad-shouldered figure sprawled with such impudent grace in his shabby armchair made a mockery of the conventional stiffness of the room, just as the casual elegance of its clothing affronted the hard-worn dilapidation of the furniture; the warm bronze of the preposterously handsome face seemed to bring its own sun into the dingy room, whispering outlandish heresies of open skies and wide places where the wind blew; and because of this man the office seemed more cramped and drab and dustier than ever, and the gloom of it touched the soul of its proper occupant. It was a sensation that many other policemen had had when they came face to face with that last amazing heir to the mantle of Robin Hood, when they knew it was their turn to try to tame him and realized the immensity of the task …

“I mean,” said Inspector Quercy patiently, “that there are servants of the Republic, of whom I am one, employed here to concern themselves with crime. If you, as an inнdividual, acquire knowledge of any crime or criminals, we shall be glad to receive your information, but we do not allow private persons to take over the duties of the police. Still less do we permit anyone to administer his own interнpretation of justice, as I hear you have sometimes claimed to do. Furthermore I must warn you that here, under the Code Napoleon, you would not have the same advantage that you have enjoyed in England and America. There, you are legally innocent until you are proved guilty: here, with sufficient grounds, you may be placed on trial and required to prove yourself innocent.”

The Saint smiled.

“I appreciate the warning,” he murmured. “But the truth is, I did come here for the food, the wine, and the pretty girls. I hadn’t thought of giving you any trouble.” The devil in him couldn’t resist adding,”-so far.”

“Let it remain that way, Monsieur. A vacation does everyone good.”

Simon offered a cigarette, and struck a light for them both.

“Now that I knew how you feel about me,” he remarked, “I suppose I ought to thank you for not trying to pin that Rosepierre murder on me. It must have taken great reнstraint not to grab such a readymade scapegoat.”

He had been reading the story in a newspaper at breakнfast. The body of a young man identified as Charles Rosepierre had been found murdered in the Bois de Boulogne, the spacious park adjacent to the most fashionable residenнtial quarter of Paris. There appeared to be no clue to the murderer, or even to the motive, for he was a respectable clerk in a shipping office, vouched for by his employers as honest and hard-working and by his friends and associates as being sober and amiable and impossible to connect with any shady acquaintances. He carried very little money, but he had not been robbed. He had left the office at the usual time on the day he died, apparently with no apprehensions, and it was understood that he was going to have dinner and call later on the girl he was courting; but he had not been seen since until his body was found a few yards from one of the roads through the park. There was no hint of a jealous rival, nor did anything in his open commonplace life give any grounds to believe in a crime of passion; yet a passion of some weird kind must have been involved. For what lent the crime the eerie touch of horror that justified the space allotted to it in the press was the fact that although he had died almost instantly from a knife stab in the heart, his head had been severed from his body after he was dead, and was found where it had presumably rolled a few feet away.

“I might have thought of you,” Quercy said, without the ghost of a smile, “if Rosepierre’s body had not been found two hours before your plane landed at Orly. When he was killed and his head was being cut off, there is no doubt that you were halfway over the Atlantic.”

“It was clever of me to arrive with a cast-iron alibi. You really have no ideas about how I could have faked it?”

“I am satisfied, Monsieur, that that would be beyond even your powers.”

“One day I must figure out how it could be done,” said the Saint; and in some incredible way he made it sound possible.

The Inspector grunted.

“You have not, perhaps, any more constructive suggesнtions about the mystery?”

“I read a detective story once with a decapitated body in it, in which the head was actually taken from an entirely different body, the object being to confuse the police and no doubt the readers too.”

“The medical examination, in this case, proves positively that the head which was found did indeed belong to the body.”

“A big part of your problem, then, seems to be to find an answer to why anyone who had already killed someone, for whatever reason, should afterwords take the trouble to cut off his head. It was not done to prevent identification, because the head was left there.”

“Exactly.”

Simon gazed at the ceiling.

“Perhaps,” he said slowly, “the name of the victim is a clue. Is it possible that you have in Paris some demented aristocrat who is still nursing a grudge for the treatment given to his ancestors during the Revolution? He has made descendants of the revolutionary leaders who gave his foreнbears the radical haircut. Mistaking the name of this unнfortunate young man for Robespierre, and having no guilloнtine handy, he-“

There came, perhaps providentially, a knock on the door, and an agent entered.

“Mademoiselle North est id, Monsieur l’Inspecteur.”

“Good. I will see her at once. It is the sister of the murнdered man,” he explained to the Saint.

“Then why is her name North?”

“She was adopted as a child by an American family. It is quite a story.” Quercy stood up. “But I must not detain you any longer.” He held out his hand. “Amuse yourself well, Monsieur Templar, and remember what I have told you.”

“I will do my best,” said the Saint, and wondered even to himself just what he meant.

2

He took a long look at the girl who was entering as he went out. She was American, obviously, in every outward particular, stamped unmistakably with all the details of dress and grooming that label the American product to a sophisнticated glance anywhere. And since a pretty face is a pretty face in any country within the same broad ethnic limits, there was nothing about her features to mark her as conнspicuously French by birth. She had softly waved black hair and clear brown eyes and a wide mouth which in happier circumstances, the Saint’s instinct told him, could be generous in many ways.

Simon carried the image of her vividly in his mind as he retraced his way through the musty labyrinth of the upper floors and down the ancient winding stairway to the street. He stood at the gates of the courtyard for a few moments, indulging himself in indecision, and knowing all the time that his decision was already made. There was a sidewalk cafe on the other side of the boulevard. He crossed it and sat down at a table from which he could watch the entrance of the building he had just left.

And so, he reflected cheerfully, it was going to happen to him again.

It was true, as he had told Quercy, that he hadn’t come to Paris with any intention of getting into trouble. But trouble had that disastrous propensity for getting into him. It was, of course, originally Quercy’s fault for ordering him to report at the Prefecture. The summons had been most courteously phrased, but it had been an order, just the same. The Saint had an unpardonably rebellious attitude towards all orders, especially police orders. That had prepared the ground. And then, the Inspector had rashly proceeded to plant a seed. It was not that Simon could legitimately resent his warning, which had been most discreetly and even benevolently phrased; but nevertheless it had the ingredients of a challenge. The Saint had never found it easy to leave a challenge alone. And unfortunately, there was an intriguing murder mystery immediately to hand for fertilizer. Even so, he might have been able to resist; but then he had seen the girl. It was harder still for him to leave a pretty girl alone. And hadn’t Quercy himself invited him to enjoy the pretty girls? And so upon fertilizer and seed and cultivated ground, to conclude the metaphor, had fallen the warm rain of her presence; and the result was inevitable, as it had always been …

The Saint ordered a Suze, paid for it at once so that he could leave at any moment, and waited.

An hour passed before she came out, and he got up and threaded his way nonchalantly through the traffic. She stood outside the Palais, looking hopefully up and down the street for a taxi, and Simon timed his crossing so that he arrived beside her as one came by, and their hands met on the door handle.

They looked at each other with the surprise, confusion, and incipient hostility normal to any two people caught in such a deadlock, the Saint playing his part exactly as if the accident was none of his making; and then he smiled.

“A photo finish,” he said. “Shall we flip for it, or are we lucky enough to be going the same way?”

She smiled back-he had counted on the sound of a familiar accent to earn that.

“I’m going to my hotel-the Georges Cinq.”

“Mine too,” said the Saint, truthfully, although his anнswer would have been the same whatever she had said.

As the cab turned along the Quais des Grands Augustins he knew that she was looking at him more closely.

“Didn’t I just see you in that detective’s office?” she asked.

“I didn’t think you noticed,” he said. “But I saw you.”

“Are you a reporter?” He considered the possibilities or the role for an instant.

“No.”

“Are you connected with the police?”

Intuition, which had been whispering to him, raised its voice to a sure command. At this moment, in this situation, with this girl, the truth would gain him more than any fiction.

“My name is Simon Templar.”

“The Saint.”

She was one of those people whom he met all too seldom, who could hear his name and recognize its connotation without gasping, swooning, or recoiling; and at first, he was glad to see, she received it even without fear. “The Saint,” she said, looking at him with no more than ordinary curiosity; and then the fear barely began to stir in her eyes.

“No, darling,” he said quickly. “I didn’t kill your brother. Even Quercy will vouch for that. He knows I was in an airplane over the Atlantic at the time.”

“Do you suspect me?”

“Did you do it?”

“I was on the Atlantic, too. On a boat. I landed at Cherнbourg this morning. A policeman was waiting for me at the Georges Cinq.”

“Don’t let anyone tell you these cops aren’t efficient. They sent for me almost as quickly.”

Simon lighted a cigarette and gave his hunch one last retrospective survey, for the duration of a long inhalation. His mind was made up.

He said: “This is on the level. Quercy had me in his office, giving me a solemn warning to keep my nose clean while I’m here. So I just naturally have an unholy desire to make a monkey out of him. I like you. And your brother’s case is the hottest thing on Quercy’s blotter right now. If I could break it and hand him the pieces on a platter, it’d be a magnificent moment. And I’m sure you want the case solved, whoever does it. So will you let me help-if I can?”

Her straightforward dark eyes studied him for many seconds.

She said: “Thank you. I like you, too. But what can you do?”

“I may think of something. First, I’ve got to know everyнthing you can tell me. May I take you to lunch?”

“Yes. But I’ve got to stop at the hotel first. They didn’t even give me time to see my room.”

3

In the lobby, while she was asking for her key, a man stepped up beside her at the desk, removed a rich black homburg with a slight flourish, and said: “Pardon, Miss North.” He extended a card. Looking over her shoulder, Simon saw that it said “M Georges Olivant,” with an adнdress in St Cloud.

“I ‘ave waited for you all zis morning,” Olivant said. “I am an old friend of your fahzer. I would ‘ave met you at ze boat, but I was unable to leave Paris because of business.”