Trust the Saint

TRUST

the

SAINT

by LESLIE CHARTERIS

DAREDEVIL — THE BANDIT — THE WHITE RIDER — X ESQUIRE

THE SAINT SERIES IN ORDER OF SEQUENCE

MEET THE TIGER! — ENTER THE SAINT — THE LAST HERO — THE AVENGING SAINT — WANTED FOR MURDER — ANGELS OF DOOM — THE SAINT VS. SCOTLAND YARD — GETAWAY — THE SAINT AND MR TEAL — THE BRIGHTER BUCCANEER — SAINT IN NEW YORK — THE MISFORTUNES OF MB TEAL — THE SAINT INTERVENES — THE SAINT GOES ON — THE SAINT OVERBOARD — THE ACE OF KNAVES

— THIEVES’ PICNIC — THE HAPPY HIGHWAYMAN — PRELUDE FOR WAR — FOLLOW THE SAINT — THE FIRST SAINT OMNIBUS — THE SAINT IN MIAMI — THE SAINT GOES WEST — THE SAINT STEPS IN — THE SAINT ON GUARD — THE SAINT SEES IT THROUGH — CALL FOR THE SAINT — SAINT ERRANT — THE SECOND SAINT OMNIBUS — THE SAINT IN EUROPE — THE SAINT ON THE SPANISH MAIN — THE SAINT AROUND THE WORLD — THANKS TO THE SAINT — SENOR SAINT — THE SAINT TO THE RESCUE — TRUST THE SAINT

A CRIME CLUB SELECTION

In these stories, Simon Templar proves by his timely intervention that those on the side of the angels can trust The Saint to defend them.

The Helpful Pirate: The Saint searches for an antique glass and finds a most important old gentleman. Hamburg.

The Bigger Game: The Saint acts as referee for a dangerous bet between a former matador and an arrogant white hunter. London.

The Cleaner Cure: The Saint’s memory of a police-proof murder method helps a deserving victim of violence. Paris. The Intemperate Reformer: Simon revenges himself in beautifully apropos style against a hypocritical teetotaller. London.

The Uncured Ham: A miscreant actor is neatly caught when the Saint sets a trap for a ham, baited with a chance to play Hamlet. Sweden and Denmark. The Convenient Monster: The Loch Ness Monster may have been the agent whereby a murder plan backfires. Scotland.

All these stories have appeared in magazines prior to publication in this book.

Scene: Europe and the British Isles

Favorite Sleuth

TRUST

the

SAINT

LESLIE

CHARTERIS

PUBLISHED FOB THE CBIME CLUB BY

DOUBLEDAY & COMPANY, INC.

GABDEN CITY, NEW YORK, I962

ALL OF THE CHARACTERS IN THIS BOOK ARE FICTITIOUS, AND ANY RESEMBLANCE TO ACTUAL PERSONS, LIVING OR DEAD, IS PURELY COINCIDENTAL.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER 62-15866

COPYRIGHT Š 1962 BY LESLIE CHARTERIS

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

FIRST EDITION

To AUDREY

for ten wonderful years

CONTENTS

The Helpful Pirate 1

The Bigger Game 39

The Cleaner Cure 69

The Intemperate Reformer 92

The Uncured Ham 124

The Convenient Monster 145

TRUST

the

SAINT

THE

HELPFUL

PIRATE

THE HELPFUL PIRATE

Copyright Š 1962 by Fiction Publishing Company

There were a few people—a very few—within his tight circle of friends and almost astronomical orbit of acquaintances, for whom the Saint would do practically anything. Including even things which under any other auspices would have excited him to violent and voluble revolt.

One addiction that he especially despised was the fad for antiques. He could admire and love an old house for its own sake, but he was incapable of understanding anyone who would build a house today in good or bad imitation of the architecture of a bygone age. He could respect the furnishings of a genuine old house when they were its natural contemporaries, without necessarily wanting to live with them himself; but he could only wax sarcastic about dislocated decorators, professional or amateur, who put period furniture in a steel-and-glass skyscraper apartment.

“If the Georgians had been convinced that it wasn’t smart to build anything but fake Elizabethan, there wouldn’t have been any Georgian architecture for other monkeys to imitate. If Louis Seize had refused to park his ischial tuberosities on anything but an Henri Quatre chair, there wouldn’t be any Louis Seize furniture for the fake factories to make copies of. In fact, if everyone had spent his time gazing adoringly backwards, we’d still be sleeping on stone cots in nice cozy caves. I was born in the twentieth century, and I don’t see anything wrong with living with its better experiments.”

He might have added that although he had been called the Twentieth Century’s brightest buccaneer, he had not found it necessary to leap around in thigh boots and ear-rings, with a cutlass between his teeth; but he still had some quite unpredictable modesties.

The bitterest focus of his prejudice, however, centered on the proliferation of the smaller shops that deal in the smaller items, the merchants of bric-a-brac rather than furniture, and their patrons.

“There’s one on every other street in Europe, down to the smallest village,” he had said. “If the non-edible contents of every trash can and junk pile for the last five centuries had been hidden away by gnomes, I doubt if the hoard would be enough to stock them all. There must be secret production lines that would make Detroit look like a medieval handicraft studio, running day and night to pour out enough antiques to meet the demand. And everywhere you can get to by jet plane or jalopy there’s some beady-eyed tourist sniffing for a treasure that all his predecessors have overlooked. He wouldn’t know a genuine William and Mary silver sugar-bowl from an early Woolworth, but so long as he’s told it’s more than two hundred years old he wants it. And if he’s a she, which most of them are, she doesn’t even want it for a sugar-bowl. She can see just how it could be re-modeled into the most darling lamp. And when she finds the most darling old lamp, she knows just how it could be eviscerated to make the cutest sugar-bowl. If Aladdin had run into one of them, the Arabian Nights would have been full of screaming genies.”

Yet there he was, Simon Templar, in exactly that type of shop on the oddly-named ABC-Strasse in Hamburg, Germany, saying to the proprietor:

“I was looking for some of those old Rhine wine glasses, the kind that spread out from under the bowl to the base, so that they stand on a sort of inverted ice-cream cone instead of a stem.” He drew the shape in the air with both hands.

“Ah, yes, I know what you mean. They are called Romer glasses.”

“Do you have any?”

“I am sorry, not at the moment. The old ones are quite rare.”

“So I’ve heard. But I’m not worried about the price. Someone I want to do a special favor for is crazy about them, but he’s only got two or three. I’d like to be able to give him a set. And the rarer and more valuable they are, the more he’ll be impressed.”

While the Saint, when it was necessary to play the part, could assume an aspect of proud or unprincipled poverty that would evoke a responsive twang from any normal heartstring, his usual appearance, fortunately or unfortunately, suggested a person who was so far on the other side of having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth that he must have been seriously shocked when he first learned that gold spoons were not standard issue. It was not merely the over-all excellence of his tailoring and accessories, for they were too superlative to be ostentatious. It was perhaps primarily an air, an attitude, the easy assurance of a man who has had the best for so long that he no longer demands it: he simply expects it.

The dealer was a broad-beamed portly burgher whose name, according to the legend on the shop window, was Johann Uhrmeister. He had receding sandy-gray hair and pale blue eyes which appraised the Saint as expertly as they would have rated any marketable relic.

“I should be glad to look around for you, sir. If you will leave your name—”

“Templar,” Simon told him truthfully.

Germany was one country where he did not think he had earned much publicity, certainly not in recent years, and he did not expect his surname to elicit any reaction there, at least by itself. There was none from Uhrmeister as he wrote it down.

“And where are you staying?”

“At the Vier Jahreszeiten.”

“If I can find any, I will let you know. How long are you staying here?”

“A week, maybe.”

“It is your first time in Hamburg?”

“Yes.”

Herr Uhrmeister turned and picked up a booklet from a stack on an inlaid table which was mainly burdened with a large and horrible gilt clock. The cover described it concisely as An Introduction to Hamburg. He gave it to Simon.

“Please take one of these, with our compliments. It may help you to enjoy your stay. And I hope you will be lucky in your search.”

“Thank you,” said the Saint.

He continued his quest through the remainder of the afternoon, on the same street and others, patiently ticking off the names of the shops on a list he had made from a classified directory before he started on the undertaking after lunch the previous day, and by closing time he could conscientiously claim to have tried them all. After having been half destroyed by the saturation bombings of 1943, the city had not only rebuilt itself but had succeeded in re-stocking its antique emporia almost as completely as its newest department stores. But in spite of the surprising roster of the former, the supply of “Roman” glasses (which is the literal translation of the name, though it would be harder still to find a prototype in Italy) had apparently lagged far behind that of other venerabilia, or else their rarity was not exaggerated. At the end of his pilgrimage lie had seen two slightly chipped but probably authentic specimens, which did not match, and a line of crude souvenir reproductions emblazoned with corny colored decals of local scenery, and had a more empathic if not more respectful comprehension of those dedicated souls who did that sort of thing from their own enthusiasm and for their own pleasure.

It had been, he thought, an effort of extraordinary nobility, probably unprecedented and he devoutly hoped not soon to be called for again—a more profoundly heroic performance, for him, than taking on a half-dozen armed gorillas barehanded. But he was also a little footsore and extremely thirsty; and the alleviation of these conditions seemed more important for the moment than voting himself awards for altruism.

At the snug downstairs bar of the Vier Jahreszeiten— the Four Seasons Hotel, as the tourists prefer to render it —a long well-iced Peter Dawson and water soon began to assuage his most urgent aridity, an upholstered stool took the load off his metatarsals, and in a matter of minutes lie had revived to the extent of being accessible to the standard civilized distractions.

“Not very nice weather, is it?” he remarked to the aloofly efficient bartender.

“No, sir,” said the bartender pleasantly, but with the same aloof sufficiency, and left it at that.

It was evident that he either had been schooled against fraternizing with the customers or had no basic urge to do so beyond the fullest requirements of civility; and Simon felt no need to make a Herculean labor of changing that pattern of life. He pulled the Introduction to Hamburg from his pocket and began to read it.

It was much the same as any other guide-book of its type, except that it was free from any of the fractured English commonly found in such publications, which usually seem to have been prepared by some ambitious local school-teacher too jealous of his infallibility to submit to revision by a native-born Englishman or American. A note on the title-page said “Translated by Franz Kolben,” but Mr Kolben’s style sounded more like Milwaukee than Heidelberg. Otherwise its thirty-two pages contained the usual descriptions of churches, museums, and monuments, listings of restaurants and cabarets, and a brief history of the town from the settlement established by Charlemagne in 811 a.d.

Simon Templar was not much of an aficionado of pure historical history, as you might call it; but here there was one paragraph which caught his eye as inevitably as a white nylon jig hooks a mackerel:

Pirates controlled the Elbe until 1402, when Klaus Stortebeker, the greatest of them, was captured and beheaded on the Grasbrook. What happened to the treasure he extorted in gold and silver and jewels is still a mystery. He is said to have hidden a map of its whereabouts in the base of a pewter goblet on which he carved his initials suspended from a gallows, but it has never been found.

The Saint sighed invisibly.

Perhaps it was an encouraging symptom of inexhaustible youth that he could still feel a quickening of the pulse at such a romantic image. Yet there was a somber index of maturity in the fact that he was content to pigeonhole it as an amusing legend, instead of being inspired to set out on the trail of the clue.

Nevertheless, Franz Kolben, who had created the myth entirely out of his own head, would have felt highly complimented by the tribute to his invention.

Simon read through to the end of the brochure without finding anything else of comparable interest. In the meantime a young woman had come in and sat down at the other end of the short counter. He had glanced up automatically, and noted with pleasure that she was blonde and shapely of both face and figure: it would have been easier to label her “a girl,” but she had the confidence of the mid-twenties and her outfitting had been assembled with well-seasoned sophistication. He was too old a hand to stare any longer, but had heard her order a champagne cocktail in English that had an American intonation but still seemed to have a slight Germanic accent. He had philosophically refrained from speculating any further. No doubt she would soon be joined and abducted by some upper-echelon American salesman on the European circuit, or some equally crass Rhineland industrialist—or something similarly cut, dried, and pre-emptive. He was a long time past building day-dreams on her obvious foundations.

But now, as he put the pamphlet back in his pocket and gave her another studiously casual glance, he found her looking directly at him with a candor which disclaimed all such prior commitments.

“Would you help me?” she said.

He smiled with just the right degree of diffidence—not eagerly enough to look like a bumpkin, but not so distantly as to be discouraging.

“Tell me how.”