The Saint in Europe (5 page)

That this peaceful project was to be short-lived, was not his fault-he himself would have added, with a perfectly straight face, “as usual.”

He dined at the Lido, on a rijstafel of heroic conception- the taste for, and the art of preparing, a true Indonesian curry being one of the few legacies left to the Netherlands from their former East Indian empire-and it was not until his appetite was on the verge of admitting defeat that he had time to become aware that he was the object of more than ordinary attention from a table across the room.

There were two people at it, a middle-aged couple whose accents, as he had unconsciously overheard them speaking to the waiter, identified them as English, and whose clothes had a dull neatness that was worn like a proud insigne of respectability. The man had a square shape, with thinning hair, rimless spectacles, and a face moulded in the lines of stolid responsibility. The woman was plump and motherly, and looked as if she would be equally at home in a kitchen or a church bazaar. They looked most obviously like a senior employee of a prosperous business house, who had worked his way up from the bottom during a lifetime of loyal service, and his competent and comfortable wife. The only untypical thing about them was that instead of eating in the bored or companionable silence normally practised by such couples, they had been talking busily throughout the meal in low voices of which not a sound had reached the Saint’s sensitive ears-except, as has been said, when they spoke to the waiter. Simon Templar, whose favorite study was the mechanism of his fellow creatures, had begun to theorize about what gave them so much material for conversation, as approaching satiety released his interest from food. It was not, he concluded, an affair of connubial recriminations, which might typically have disrupted a typical taciturnity; and yet the conversation did not seem to be made up of pleasant trivialties, for the man’s air of perнmanent anxiety deepened as it went on, and once or twice he ran a hand over his sparse hair in a gesture almost of desperation.

It was about the same time that Simon realized, from the frequent glances in his direction, that he was somehow being made a major factor in the discussion.

He gazed out of the window at the twinkling lights reнflected in the ornamental lakes of the Vondel Park and hoped that his impression was mistaken, or that they would soon find something else to argue about.

A voice at his elbow said: “Excuse me, Mr Templar- you are the Saint, aren’t you?”

He turned resignedly. It was the woman, of course.

“I suppose somebody told you at the Hollandia,” he said. “But they should have told you not to worry. I’ve promised not to murder anyone or steal their jewels while I’m here.”

“My name’s Upwater,” she said. “And I did want to talk to you about jewels. But not about your stealing them. I’ve heard that you’re really a good man, and you help people in trouble, and we’re in terrible trouble. I told my husband it seemed like Providence, your being here, just when this awful thing has happened. I said, the Saint’s the only person who might be able to help us, and he said, why should you bother, and we had quite an argument, but I had to speak to you anyway. At least you’ll listen, won’t you? May I call him over?”

She had already dumped herself in a vacant chair, and the Saint did not see any way short of outright churlishness to dislodge her. In the mellow aftermath of a good meal, such violent measures were unthinkable. And he had nothing else in particular to do. That was so often what got him into things …

He grinned philosophically, and nodded.

“What’s the matter with these jewels?” he inquired.

She turned and beckoned to her husband, who started to get up from their table, looking more worried than ever.

“As a matter of fact,” she said, “it’s only one jewel. A diamond.”

“Oh.”

“We’ve lost it. And it doesn’t belong to us.”

“That could be embarrassing,” Simon admitted. “But why should I know where to look for it?”

“It’s been stolen.”

“Not by me.”

“This is a perfect blue stone,” said Mr Upwater, sitting down heavily, “as big as the Hope diamond. It’s worth half a million dollars in your money.”

2

“I work for a very exclusive firm of jewelers in Bond Street, in London,” Mr Upwater explained, in a ponderous and painstaking way. “I’ve been with them myself for thirty years. The stone belongs to one of our clients. It is a magнnificent gem, with a rather romantic name-the Angel’s Eye. But being an old stone, it isn’t too well cut. Our client decided to have it re-cut, which would improve its appearнance and even enhance its value. As the oldest employee of the firm, it was entrusted to me to bring here, to one of the best cutters in Amsterdam, to have the work done.”

“And somebody swiped it from you on the way?” Simon hazarded.

“Oh, no. I delivered it to the cutter, Hendrik Jonkheer, yesterday. Today I went back to watch the start of the cutting. Mrs Upwater went with me. I’d brought her along, for a little holiday. And-tell Mr Templar what happened, Mabel.”

“Mr Jonkheer looked Mr Upwater straight in the eye,” said Mrs Upwater, “and told him he’d never seen him before and he certainly hadn’t brought him any diamond.”

Something like a phantom feather trailed up the Saint’s spine, riffling his skin with ghostly goose-pimples. And on the heels of that psychic chill came a warm pervasive glow of utter beatitude that crowned his recent feast more perfectly than the coffee and Napoleon brandy which he had not yet touched would ever do. His interest was no longer polite or even perfunctory. It had the vast receptive serenity of a cathedral.

For just as a musician would be electrified by a cadence of divine harmonies, so could the Saint respond to the tones of new and fabulous adventure. And about this one, he knew, there could be nothing commonplace. Suddenly he was humbly grateful for his ambiguous reputation, for the little difficulty at the hotel, for the resultant gossip, for the extravagant bonus which it had brought him. Because in a few simple unmistakable words the prosaic Mr and Mrs Upwater had placed in his hands the string to a kite of such superlatively crooked design that its flight, wherever it led, could bring only joy to his perversely artistic soul-a swinнdle of such originality and impudence that he contemplated it with an emotion bordering upon awe.

“That,” said the Saint at length, with transcendent underнstatement after so long a pause, “is a lulu.”

“I can’t get used to it yet,” Mr Upwater said dazedly. “He stood there, Mr Jonkheer did, looking straight at me just like I’m looking at you, only as if he thought I was a lunatic, and said he’d never set eyes en me before in his life. He almost had me believing I’d gone out of my mind. Only I knew I hadn’t.”

“It’s just like that story,” Mrs Upwater said. “You must know the one. About the girl and her mother who go to a hotel in Paris, and the mother’s sick, so the daughter goes out to get her some medicine, and when she gets back everybody in the hotel says they’ve never seen her before, or her mother, and when she goes to the room where she left her mother it’s a different room, and there’s nobody there.”

Simon nodded, almost in a trance himself.

“I know the story,” he said. “It turns out that the mother had the plague, or something, doesn’t it? And they got rid of her and tried to cover it up because they didn’t want to scare away the tourists … But this is a new twist!”

“That it is,” said Mr Upwater gloomily. “Only diamonds don’t get any disease. But they’re worth a lot of money.”

At last the Saint was able to control the palpitating gremнlins inside him enough to reach for a cigarette.

“You’re sure you went to the right place?” he asked.

“I couldn’t go wrong. The name’s on the door.”

“And you’re sure it was Jonkheer you saw?”

“Of course I’m sure. It was the same man both times. The police knew him, too.”

“You’ve been to the police already?”

“Of course I have. First thing I did, when I saw I wasn’t getting anywhere with Jonkheer. They went with me to the shop. But it was his word against mine, and they preferred his. Said he was a well-known respectable citizen, but they didn’t know the same about me. I almost got locked up myself. They as good as said I was either off my nut or trying to blackmail him.”

“Didn’t anyone else see you give him the stone?”

“No. It was just him and me. I didn’t take Mrs Upwater with me yesterday-she wanted to stay at the hotel and do our unpacking.”

“But if you say you gave it to him, Tom,” said Mrs Upwater loyally, “I know you did.”

Simon picked up his balloon glass and rolled the golden liquid around in it.

“Didn’t you get a receipt or anything?”

“Indeed I did. But this Dutchman swears it isn’t even in his writing.”

“Could someone else have disguised himself as Jonkнheer?”

“If you saw him, Mr Templar, you’d know that couldn’t be done, except in a story.”

“How about a black-sheep twin brother?”

“I thought of that, too,” Mr Upwater said dourly. “I’m not a fool, and I’ve read books. He just doesn’t have one. The police vouch for that.”

The Saint sipped his cognac reverently. Everything was getting better and better.

“And you would have vouched for Jonkheer.”

“I never met him before,” Mr Upwater said carefully, “but I’ve known about him for years. Everyone knows him in the trade.”

“So you’ve no idea what would turn a man like that into a thief.”

Mr Upwater moved his hands hopelessly.

“Who knows what makes anyone go wrong? They say that every man has his price, so I suppose every man can be tempted. And that stone was big enough to tempt anyone.”

“Then,” said the Saint, “the same could be said about you.”

“That’s what he’s afraid of,” Mrs Upwater said gently.

Simon sniffed his brandy again, watching the man.

“What does your firm think about it?”

“I havent’ told them yet,” Upwater said dully. “I haven’t had the courage. You see-“

“You see,” Mrs Upwater put in, and her voice began to break, “they know Mr Jonkheer, too. They’ve done business with him for a long time. My husband’s been with them for a long time too, but he’s only an employee. Someone’s got to be guilty … They can’t prove that Tom’s lying, because he isn’t; but that’s not enough. If he can’t prove absolutely that he’s telling the truth-“

“There’d always be a doubt,” her husband finished for her. “And with a firm like I work for, in that kind of business, that’s the end. They’d let me out, and I’d never get another job. I might as well put my head in a gas oven, or jump in one of these canals.”

He pulled off his spectacles abruptly and put a trembling hand over his eyes.

Mrs Upwater patted his shoulder as if he had been a little boy. “There, there,” she said meaninglessly, and looked at the Saint with tears brimming in her eyes. “Mr Templar, you’re the only man in the world who might be able to do something about a thing like this. You must help us!”

She really didn’t have to plead. For Simon Templar to have walked away from a story like that would have been as improbable a phenomenon as a terrier ignoring the presнence of a rat waltzing under his nose. There were people who thought that the Saint was a coldblooded nemesis of crime; but altogether aside from the irresistible abstract beauty of the situation that the Upwaters had set before him, he felt genuinely sorry for them.

His human sympathy, however, detracted nothing from the delight with which he viewed the immediate future. It was true that only a few hours ago he had promised to be good; but there were limits. His evening, and in fact his whole visit to Amsterdam, was made.

He signaled to a waiter.

“I think we should all have a drink on this,” he said.

The half-incredulous joy in Mrs Upwater’s tear-dimmed eyes, to anyone else, would have been enough reward.

“You will help us?” she said breathlessly.

“There’s nothing I can do tonight. So we might as well just celebrate. But tomorrow,” Simon promised, “I will pay a call on your Mr Jonkheer.”

3

The name was on the door, as Mr Upwater had said, of a narrow-fronted three-storied brick building in a narrow street of similar buildings behind the Rijksmuseum: HENнDRIK JONKHEER, and in smaller letters under it, Diamantslijter. From the weathered stone of the doorstep to the weathered tile of the peaked roof, the house had a solid air of permanence and tradition. The only feature that disнtinguished it from its equally solid neighbors was the prison-like arrangement of iron bars over the two muslin-curtained ground floor windows. Definitely it bore no stigma of a potentially flashy or fly-by-night operation.

Simon tugged at the oldfashioned bell-pull, and heard it clang somewhere in the depths of the building. Presently the door opened, no more than a foot, to the limit of a chain fastened inside, and a thin young man in a knee-length gray overall coat looked out.

“May I see Mr. Jonkheer?” Simon said.

“Your business, sir?”

“I’m a magazine writer, doing an article on the diamond business. I thought a man of Mr Jonkheer’s standing could give me some valuable information.”

The young man unfastened the chain and let him in to a bare narrow hall. There were doors on one side and another at the back, and a flight of uncarpeted wooden stairs led upwards. On a hard chair beside the stairs, with a newsнpaper on his lap and one hand under the paper, sat a burly man with blond close-cropped hair who stared at the Saint woodenly.

“One moment, please,” said the young man.

He disappeared through the door at the end of the hall. The burly man continued to stare motionlessly at the Saint, as if he were stuffed. In a little while the young man came back.

“This way, please.”

The back room was a homely sort of office, the only posнsible sanctum of an individualistic old-world craftsman who needed no front for his skill. It contained an ancient roll-top desk with dusty papers overflowing from its pigeon-holes and littered over its surfaces, a battered swivel chair at the desk, and two overstuffed armchairs whose leather upholstery was dark and shiny with age. There were china figures and family photographs in gilt frames on the marble mantelpiece over a black iron coal fireplace. The safe stood under another barred window; and massive though it was, it would not have offered much more resistance than a matchbox to a modern cracksman.