The Saint in Europe (19 page)

The Saint smoked his cigarette. And in a little while he went quietly away, as he had come, and walked home empty-handed under the stars.

VII. ROME:
The Latin Touch

The city of Rome, according to legend, is built upon the spot where the twin sons of Mars, Romulus and Remus (By a Vestal who must have been somewhat less than virgin) were suckled by a maternally-minded she-wolf; and there were bitter men in the police departments of many countries who would have said that that made it a very appropriate city for Simon Templar to gravitate into, even today. But they would have been thinking of him as a wolf in terms of his predatory reputation, rather than in the more innocuous modern connotation of an eye for a pretty girl. He had both, it is true; but it was as a lone wolf in the waste lands of crime that his rather sensational publicity had mostly featured him.

Simon Templar himself would have said, with an impish twinkle, that his affinity for Rome would be better attributed to the traditional association of the place as a holy city; for who could more aptly visit there than one who was best known by the nickname of “The Saint”?

It troubled him not at all that the incongruity of that sobriquet was a perpetual irritant to the officers of the Law who from time to time had been called upon to try and cope with his forays: to revert to the wolf simile, it was enough for him that even his worst enemies had to concede that the sheep who had felt his fangs had always been black sheep.

But that morning, as he stood on the entirely modern sidewalk outside the ancient Colosseum, his interests were only those of the most ordinary sightseer, and any vulpine instincts he may have had were of the entirely modern kind just referred to-the kind which produces formalized whisнtles at the sight of a modern Vestal, virtuous or not.

The Saint was too well-mannered for such crude compliнments, but the girl he was watching could have been no stranger to them. From the top of her close-cropped curly golden head, down through her slim shapely figure and long slender legs to her thoroughbred ankles, she was fresh clean young America incarnate, the new type of goddess that can swim and ride and play tennis and laugh like a boy, to the horror of the conservatives on old Olympus.

Also, as happens all too seldom in real life, she was most providentially in trouble: Providentially from the point of view of any healthy footloose cavalier, that is. She was engaged in a losing argument with the driver of the carriage from which she had just alighted, a beetle-browed individual with all the assurance of a jovial brigand.

“But I made the same trip yesterday,” she was protesting indignantly, “and it was only two hundred lire!”

“One t’ousand lire,” insisted the driver. “You give-a me one t’ousand lire, please, signora. Dat-a da right-a fare.”

It was all the opening that Simon could have asked.

He strolled up beside the girl.

“Where did you take him from?” he asked.

A pair of level gray eyes sized him up and accepted him gratefully.

“From the Excelsior.”

Simon turned to the driver.

“Scusami,” he said pleasantly, “ma lei scherzo? The fare cannot be one thousand lire.”

“Mille lire,” said the driver obdurately. “It is the legal fare.” He waved his whip in the direction of three or four other unemployed carrozze parked expectantly in the shade of the Arch of Constantino. “Ask any other driver,” he sugнgested boldly.

“I prefer a more impartial witness,” said the Saint, with imperturbable good humor.

He reached out for the blanket that was neatly draped over the seat beside the driver, and nipped it back with a slight flourish, it disclosed a conventional taxi-meter which would have been in plain sight of the passenger seat if the blanket had not been so carefully arranged to hide it. Simon’s pointing finger drew the girl’s eyes to the figures on it.

“One hundred and ninety lire,” he said. “I’d give him exactly that, and forget the tip. It may teach him a lesson- although I doubt it.”

The coachman’s unblushing expostulations, accompanied by some scandalous reflections on their ancestry and probнable relationship, followed them as the Saint drew her tactнfully through the arches and out of earshot.

“All the carriages in Rome have meters, just like a taxi,” he explained easily. “But there isn’t one of them that doesn’t have a blanket artistically draped over it, so that you’d never think it was there unless you knew about it. The driver can’t lose, and with the average tourist he usually wins. It’s brought the country almost as many dollars as the Marshall Plan.”

“I’m the original innocent,” she said ruefully. “This is my first trip abroad. Do you live here? You speak Italian as if you did.”

“No, but I’ve been around.”

A seedy-looking character wearing the typical emblem of his fraternity, a two-days growth of beard, sidled up to them.

“You want a guide?” he suggested. “I tell you all about the Colosseum. This is where they had the circus. Lions and Christians.”

“I know all about it,” said the Saint. “In a previous inнcarnation, I was Nero’s favorite clown. My name was Emнmetus Kellius. Everybody used to laugh themselves sick when the lions bit me. So did I. I was smeared all over with hot mustard. Unfortunately, though, I was color-blind. One day, just for a laugh, Poppaea changed the mustard in my make-up pot for ketchup. Everyone said I gave the funniest performance of my life. It even killed me. However-“

The would-be guide stared at him disgustedly and went away.

The girl tried to stop giggling.

“Do you really know anything about it?” she asked. “It makes me wish I’d paid more attention to Latin when I was in school. But I never got much beyond Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est.”

” ‘De Gaulle is divided in three parties.’ ” he translated brightly. “I wonder if our State Department knows about that.”

She shot him a sudden sharp glance which he did not understand at the time. It made him think that he was overнdoing the flippancy, and he didn’t want to spoil such a Heaven-sent beginning.

He said, gazing across the arena: “I don’t care about knowing a lot of dull statistics about it. I just try to imagine it as it was before it began to fall apart. Those tiers with nothing but seats like rows of steps, right up to the top. The bleachers, full of excited bloodthirsty people. The arena baking in the same sun that’s on it now.”

“It’s so much smaller than I thought it would be.”

“It’s bigger than it looks. You could put a football field in the middle and have plenty of room to run around.”

“But the bottom-it’s all cut up into sort of dungeons.”

“They probably were. Locker rooms for the gladiators, cells for the Christians, dens for the wild beasts. They must have been roofed over with planks which rotted away long ago, which made the floor of the arena, with a layer of sand on top for easy cleaning. I expect you could hear everything that went on-from underneath. Until your turn was called … I wonder how many people have come up blinking into this same sunlight that we’re seeing, and these stones were the last thing they ever saw?”

She shuddered.

“You make it seem much too real.”

But there were no holiday crowds filling the amphitheater then. Just a handful of wandering tourists, a few self-appointed guides loafing in hopes of a generous audience, a few peddlers with trays of mass-produced cameos. Simon Templar was hardly aware of any of them. He was wholly enjoying the company of the refreshingly lovely girl whom a buccaneer’s luck had thrown into his life.

That is why he was completely astounded to realize, in the split second of pain and coruscating lights before unнconsciousness rolled over him, that someone had come up behind and hit him on the head.

2

He had to repeat the steps of realization, laboriously, as the blackness slowly dissolved again. His first impression was that he had simply passed out, and he thought hazily of sunstroke, but he couldn’t believe that a little sun could do that to him. Then, as a focal point in his skull began to assert itself with painful throbbing, that last instant of awareness came back to him in a flash. He struggled up and opened his eyes.

He was not on the ground, but on a wooden bunk that was almost as hard. There was stone around him, but not the moldering stones of the Colosseum: these were modern blocks, trimly morticed. A door made of iron bars. And the only evidence of sun was a little light that came through a barred window high above his head.

He could not recall exactly when he had last looked at his watch, but it told him that at least two hours must have passed since he was talking to a delightful young blonde whose name he had not even learned. If he needed anything more than the ache in his head to attest the efficacy of the blow he had taken, the measurement was there on the dial.

He felt his pockets, thinking stupidly of robbery. They were empty. Robbery might have had something to do with it, but it would not account for the stone walls and the bars.

He was in jail.

He dragged himself to his feet, mastering a desire to vomit, and stumbled to the door. Holding on to the bars, he called out: “Hey! Hullo there!”

It reminded him idiotically of an arty play he had once seen.

Ponderous footsteps clumped deliberately along the passнage, and a turnkey came in sight. The uniform clinched any lingering doubt about the jail.

“What am I doing here?” Simon demanded in Italian. The man surveyed him unfeelingly.

“Aspette,” he said, and went away again.

Simon sat down on the hard cot and held his head in his hands, fighting to clear the cobwebs out of it.

Presently there were footsteps again, brisker and more numerous. Simon looked up and found the jailer unlocking the door.

It opened to admit a small delegation. First, in a kind of inverted order of precedence, came a burly police sergeant in uniform. After him came a superior officer in plain clothes, who was slight and rather dapper, but just as obvious a police type in European terms. Those two the Saint might have expected, if he had thought about it, no matter why he was where he was. But it was the third man, for whom they made way only after they had apparently satisfied themselves that the Saint’s attitude was not violent, who was the stopper.

He was a tall iron-gray man with a scholarly stoop, most formally dressed in swallow-tail coat and striped trousers, even carrying white gloves and a silk hat; and Simon recogнnized him at once. Several million other people would have made the same startled recognition, for Mr Hudson Inverest was not exactly an international nonentity.

“Well,” said the Saint, somewhat incredulously, “this is certainly a new high in service. I know the Secretary of State is technically responsible for people who get themselves in trouble abroad, but I didn’t expect you to bail me out in person.”

“You know who I am?” Inverest said matter-of-factly.

The Saint smiled.

“I’ve seen you in enough news pictures, caricatures-and television. Now I remember reading about you being here on an official visit. It’s really very thoughtful of you to be around just at this moment.”

The Secretary stared at him grimly over the top of his glasses.

“Mr Templar, what do you know about my daughter?”

Simon Templar’s eyebrows rose a little and drew toнgether.

“Your daughter? I didn’t even know you had one.”

The uniformed sergeant started a threatening gesture, but the plainclothes man checked it with an almost imperceptible movement of his hand.

“My daughter, Sue,” Inverest said.

“A willowy blonde?” Simon said slowly. “With short curly hair and gray eyes?”

“You were with her at the Colosseum-just before she was kidnaped.”

It all clicked in the Saint’s recuperating mind, with a blind and devastating simplicity-even to a reaction of hers which had puzzled him at the time.

“I was talking to a girl like that,” he said. “I’d just made some silly crack about the State Department, and I noticed she took it in a rather funny way. But I hadn’t the faintest idea who she was. And then I got slugged over the head myself. If there were any witnesses, they must have seen that.”

“That was seen,” said the plainclothes man. “But it did not explain your presence there.”

“I was unable to leave,” said the Saint. “I was knocked cold, remember? Do you always arrest any innocent byнstander who gets hurt at the scene of a crime?”

“When your pockets were searched for identification,” said the plainclothes man suavely, “it was found out at once who you are. Therefore you were brought here. I am sure that being arrested is not such a new experience for you.”

Simon turned to the Secretary.

“Mr Inverest, I never saw your daughter before in my life. I didn’t have the faintest idea who she was. I just hapнpened to meet her outside the Colosseum. She was having an argument with a cab driver who was trying to overcharge her. I helped her out, and we went into the place together. We went on talking, naturally. And then I was conked on the head. That’s all I know.”

“There were two others,” said the superior policeman impartially. “After they knocked out Mr Templar, they grabbed Miss Inverest and rushed her out to a car which was waiting outside. I think, your Excellency, that if you give us a little time alone with Mr Templar, we may perнsuade him to tell us who they were and how he arranged to- as you say-put the finger on your daughter.”

Inverest waved him down impatiently.

“Mr Templar is to be released at once.”

“Your Excellency must be joking.”

“I demand it in the name of the Government of the United States. There is no reasonable charge that can be brought against him.”

“But a man of his reputation-“

Inverest’s level gray eyes, oddly reminiscent of his daughнter’s, searched the Saint’s face over his spectacle rims with the same detached appraisal that the girl had given it.

“Inspector Buono,” he said, “Mr Templar is rumored to have considerable disregard for the law, but there are no actual charges of lawbreaking pending against him in my country. His notoriety, as I understand it, comes from his reprehensible habit of taking the law into his own hands. But it is well known that he is a relentless enemy of crimiнnals. I cannot think of anyone who would be less likely to have any part of such a crime as this. O si sic omnes!”