The Saint in the Sun (22 page)

“How wonderful!” she breathed. “I was afraid to believe you could really do it.”

“I wasn’t certain myself, but I had to find out.”

“But why-” She fingered the sleeve that reached only halfway between his elbow and his wrist.

“I’ll explain another time,” he said. “Come on-but be quiet, in case there are any more of them.”

She tiptoed with him back to the house. The hallway was deathly still, the silent emptiness of the ground floor emphasized by the metronome ticking of a clock. Simon touched her and pointed upwards, and she climbed the stairs behind him.

The upper landing was dark, so that a thin strip of light underlining one door helpfully indicated the only occupied room. The Saint took out his knife again and opened the longest blade, holding it ready for lightning use as a silent weapon if the door proved to be unlocked-which it did. He felt no resistance to a tentative fractional pressure after he had stealthily turned the door-knob. He balanced himself, flung it open, and went in.

The only occupant, a pale shock-headed man in trousers and shirtsleeves, shrank back in the chair where he sat, staring.

“Professor Jorovitch, I presume?” said the Saint unoriginally. Irma brushed past him.

“Papa!” she cried.

Jorovitch’s eyes dilated, fixed on the automatic which Simon had lent her, which waved in her hand as if she had forgotten she had it. Bewilderment and terror were the only expressions on his face.

Irma turned frantically to the Saint.

“You see, they have done it!” she wailed. “Just as I was afraid. We must get him away. Quick-do what you have to!”

Simon Templar shook his head slowly.

“No,” he said. “I can’t do that.”

She stared at him.

“Why? You promised-“

“No, I didn’t, exactly. But you did your best to plant the idea in my head. Unfortunately, that was after I’d decided there was something wrong with your story. I was bothered by the language you used, like ‘the capitalist life’, and always carefully saying ‘Soviet’ where most people say ‘Russian’, and saying that hearing my name was ‘like winning a big prize’ instead of calling it a miracle or an answer to prayer, as most people brought up on this side of the Curtain would do. And being so defensive about your hotel. And then when we came over this afternoon I noticed there was no Russian flag flying here, as there would be on diplomatic property.”

“You’re mad,” she whispered.

“I was, rather,” he admitted, “when I suspected you might be trying to con me into doing your dirty work for you. So I called an old acquaintance of mine in the local police, to check on some of the facts.”

The gun in her hand levelled and cracked.

The Saint blinked, but did not stagger. He reached out and grabbed her hand as she squeezed the trigger again, and twisted the automatic out of her fingers.

“It’s only loaded with blanks,” he explained apologetically. “I thought it was safer to plant that on you, rather than risk having you produce a gun of your own, with real bullets in it.”

“A very sensible precaution,” said a gentle new voice.

It belonged to a short rotund man in a pork-pie hat, with a round face and round-rimmed glasses, who emerged with as much dignity as possible from the partly-open door of the wardrobe.

Simon said: “May I introduce Inspector Oscar Kleinhaus? He was able to tell me the true story-that Karel Jorovitch had already defected, weeks ago, and had been given asylum without any publicity, and that he was living here with a guard of Swiss security officers until he completed all the information he could give about the Russian espionage apparatus in Switzerland. Oscar allowed me to go along with your gag for a while-partly to help you convict yourself beyond any hope of a legal quibble, and partly as an exercise to check the protection arrangements.”

“Which apparently leave something to be desired,” Kleinhaus observed mildly.

“But who would have thought it’d be me they had to keep out?” Simon consoled him magnanimously.

The two guards from the back and the front of the house came in from the landing, looking physically none the worse for wear but somewhat sheepish-especially the one who was clad only in his underthings.

“They weren’t told anything about my plan, only that they were going to be tested,” Simon explained, as he considerately shucked off and returned the borrowed garments. “But they were told that if I snuck close enough to grab them or slap them they were to assume they could just as well have been killed, and to fall down and play dead. We even thought of playing out the abduction all the way to Zurich.”

“That would have been going too far,” Kleinhaus said. “But I would like to know what was to happen if you got away from here.”

“She said she’d arrange for a car to pick us up at Brunnen, and there would be a light plane waiting for a supposed invalid at the Zürich airport-which would have taken him at least as far as East Germany.”

“They will be easy to pick up,” Kleinhaus sighed. “Take her away.”

She spat at the Saint as the guards went to her, and would have clawed out his eyes if they had not held her efficiently.

“I’m sorry, darling,” the Saint said to her. “I’m sorry it had to turn out like this. I liked your story much better.”

The irony was that he meant it. And that she would never believe him.

Copyright Š 1963 by fiction Publishing Company.

PROVENCE:THE HOPELESS HEIRESS

Simon Templar saw her again as he was sampling the Chausson du Roi at La Petite Auberge at Noves.

A chausson means, literally, a bedroom slipper; hence, in the vocabulary of French cuisine, it is also the word for a sort of apple turnover, which bears a superficial resemblance to a folded slipper with the heel tucked into the toe. The Chausson du Roi, however, as befits its royal distinction, is not a dessert, and contains nothing so commonplace as apples. It envelops sweetbreads liberally blended with the regal richness of truffles, and it is one of the specially famous entrees of the Petite Auberge, whose name so modestly means only “the little inn”, but which is one of the mere dozen restaurants in all France decorated by the canonical Guide Michelin with the three stars which are its highest accolade. Noves is in the south, not far from Avignon of the celebrated bridge, and is a very small village of absolutely no importance except to its nearest neighbors, which hardly anyone else would ever have heard of but for the procession of gourmets beating a path to a superior munch-trap. And she personified one rather prevalent concept of the type to be expected in such company.

She had truly brown hair, the rare and wonderful natural color of the finest leather, styled with careless simplicity, with large brown eyes to match, a small nose, a generous mouth, and exquisitely even teeth, all assembled with a symmetry that might have been breath-taking-if it had been seen in a slightly concave mirror.

Because she was fat.

Simon estimated that she probably scaled about 180 pounds bone dry, the same as himself. Except that his pounds were all muscle stretched over more than two yards of frame, whereas she had to carry too many of them horizontally, with a head less height, in billows of rotundity that might have delighted Rubens but would have appalled Vargas. It was a great pity, he thought, for without that excess weight even her figure might have been beautiful: her ankles were still trim and her calves not too enlarged, and her hands were small and shapely. But from the way she was tucking into the provender on her plate there seemed to be little prospect of her central sections being restored to proportion with her extremities.

She wore no ring on the third finger of her left hand, and the man with her was certainly old enough to be her father, but there was no physical similarity between them. He was gray-haired and gray-eyed, with a thin, meticulously sculptured, gray mustache; and the rest of him was also as thin as she was obese. But nothing else about him confirmed the ascetic promise of his slenderness. To mitigate the warmth of the summer evening, his dark gray suit had been custom tailored of some special fabric, perhaps even custom woven, which combined the conventionally imperative drabness of correct male attire with the obvious lightness of a tissue of feathers; his snowy shirt was just solid enough to be opaque without pretending to be as substantial as the least useful handkerchief; his cuff-links were cabochon emeralds no bigger than peanuts, and his wrist watch was merely one different link in a broad loose bracelet which anyone without Simon Templar’s assayer’s eye would have dismissed as Mexican silver instead of the solid platinum that it was. In every detail, examined closely enough, there was revealed a man who craved nothing but the best of everything-but with a discrimination refined to the ultimate snobbery of modesty.

Simon seized a chance to satisfy his curiosity when the dining-room hostess (he had noted an increasing number of personable and competent young women in such posts of recent years, and wondered if it would be correct to call them maîtresses d’hôtel) came by to inquire whether everything was to his pleasure.

“At the corner table?” she said, answering his return question. “That is Mr Saville Wakerose. I should have thought you would know him. Isn’t he one of your greatest gourmets?”

The Saint had never set eyes on Mr Wakerose before that summer, but the name was instantly familiar, and at once it became hardly a coincidence at all that they should have been eating in the same restaurants on three consecutive days-the Côte d’Or at Saulieu, the Pyramide at Vienne, and now the Petite Auberge at Noves. For each one was a three-starred shrine of culinary art, and they were spaced along the route from Paris to the Mediterranean at distances which could only suggest an irresistible schedule to any gastrophilic pilgrim with the time to spare. In which category Simon Templar was an enthusiastic amateur when other obligations and temptations permitted; but Saville Wakerose was a dean of professionals. In twenty years of magazine articles, newspaper columns, lecture tours, and general publicity, he had established his authority as a connoisseur of food and wine and an arbiter of general elegance at such an altitude that even princes and presidents were reported to cringe from his critiques of their hospitality. And he had not merely parlayed his avocation into a comfortable living in which the best things in life were free or deductible, but he had climaxed it some four years ago by marrying the former Adeline Inglis, the last scion of one of those pre-welfare-state fortunes, who in her debutante days had inspired ribald parodists to warble:
Sweet Adeline,
For you I pine;
Your dough divine
Should mate with mine …

Since then she had had five or six husbands, in spite of whom she still had plenty of dough left when Saville Wakerose added himself to the highly variegated roster. He was to be the last of the list; for a couple of years later, before the habitual rift could develop in their marital bliss, a simple case of influenza followed by common pneumonia suddenly retired her for all time from the matrimonial market, leaving him presumably well consoled in his bereavement.

“He has a very young wife,” Simon observed, with intentional discretion.

The hostess smiled.

“That is not his wife. She is his belle-fille, Miss Flane.”

Belle-fille does not mean what it might suggest to anyone with a mere smattering of French. The fat girl was Wakerose’s stepdaughter. And with that information another card spun out of the Saint’s mental index of trivial recollections from his catholic acquaintance with all forms of journalism. One of Adeline Inglis’ earliest husbands, and the father of her only experiment in maternity, had been Orlando Flane, a film star who had shone in the last fabulous days before Hollywood became only a suburb instead of the capital of the moving picture world.

That, then, would have to be the one-time photographers’ darling Rowena Flane, whose father had never had much talent and was rated nothing but an alcoholic problem after the divorce, and who blew out what was left of his brains soon afterwards, but who had left her those still discernible traits of the sheer impossible beauty which had made him the idol of millions of sex-starved females before their fickle frustrations transferred themselves to the school of scratching, mumbling, or jittering goons who had succeeded him.

Adeline Inglis, Simon seemed to recall, searching his memory for the imprint of some inconsequential news photo, had taken advantage of the best coiffeurs, courturiers, and cosmeticians that money could buy to succeed in looking like a nice well-groomed middle-class matron dolled up for a community bridge party. Her daughter, fortuitously endowed with a far better basic structure, had not given it a fraction of that break. But he wondered why somebody close to her hadn’t pointed out that even if she suffered from some glandular misfortune, there were better treatments for it than to indulge her appetite as she seemed inclined to do. Most especially somebody like Saville Wakerose, who through all his professional gourmandizing had taken obvious pride in preserving the figure of an esthete.

And from that not so casual speculation began an incident which brought the Saint to the brink of a fate worse than … But let us not be jumping the gun.

Although he had never been so crude as to even glance towards Rowena Flane and her step-father while making his inquiries, Simon knew that the recognition had been mutual; and when the hostess’s peregrinations took her to the corner table he had no doubt that some equally sophisticated inquiry was made about himself. But he would not have predicted that it would have the result it did.

It was one of those mild and ideal evenings in May, when summer often begins in Provence, and after succumbing to an exquisite miniature Soufflé au Grand Marnier he was happy to accede to the suggestion of having his coffee served outside under the trees. Wakerose and Rowena had started and finished before him, and were already at a table on the front terrace which Simon had to pass in search of one for himself; and Mr Wakerose stood up and said: “Excuse me, Mr Templar. We seem destined to keep crossing paths on this trip. Why not give in to it and join us?”