Trust the Saint (15 page)

“I’ll do the dishes,” volunteered Selina, “while you and Papa wash your hands.”

Simon tidied the dining-living-room, thankful that there had been no smoking to add its problems of telltale ashes and odors, and joined Selina in the kitchen while Mr Thoat was completing the euphemistic lavage. He was glad to see that she had cleaned up as meticulously as her upbringing would have predicted—he only wanted to be sure that an inoffensive earl would find no trace of vandalism, and might even staunchly deny that anyone could have used his flat in the way that Mr Thoat might subsequently claim that it had been used.

Selina Thoat, however, was ruminating a different idea.

“If your servant has the day off,” she said, “would you like me to come back and cook dinner for you?”

“You’re very kind,” said the Saint. “But I’m having dinner with a business associate, who’s taking me to the airport.”

“When you come back, then. Any Sunday when you’re alone. Just call me.”

“Thank you,” said the Saint, and was able to sound more grateful because Mr Thoat returned at that moment. “But now you really must be going.”

He herded them to the door, picking up the deeds from the coffee-table on the way.

“You won’t want to have this stuff bulging out of your pockets in the parade,” he said. “Let me mail you your copy.”

“You are mos’ conshidrate, Mr Tombs,” Mr Thoat said portentously. He amplified the thought, with an air of inspiration: “You have cast your bread upon the warrers. It will come back to you in good measure, preshed down an’ run over.”

He essayed a courtly bow, lurched a little, and proceeded down the stairs with extreme precision.

The deputation of Angels of Abstinence was already marshalled in military formation when Mr Thoat and Selina located them in the irregular column of demonstrators which blocked half the old Carriage Road on the east of Park Lane. While they waited for the promenade to get under way, they were ringing the welkin with a song which Mr Thoat himself had authored, to an accompaniment of drums, bazookas, and harmonicas played by the more talented members of the party:

“The little lambs so frisky,

The birds who charm our ear,

Have never tasted whisky,

Or rum or gin or beer!”

Emotionally stirred to the depths of his soul by the familiar melody and the uplifting words, Mr Thoat was moved as he approached to adopt the role of conductor, waving his arms with an ecstatic exuberance that could only have been surpassed by Leonard Bernstein. The fact that this change of balance almost made him trip over his own feet he attributed to the unevenness of the ground.

“There he is,” said Constable Yelland excitedly, standing in the fringe of the spectators in his best Sunday suit, beside an older man in somewhat plainer clothes on which the brand of Sir Robert Peel was nevertheless almost legible.

“Him?” said the Scotland Yard man, half incredulously. “I thought he was one of the top teetotallers.”

Isaiah Thoat, suffused with a delirious sense of power which he attributed to the encouraging smiles of his flock, led them more vehemently into another stanza:

“Let’s raise no girls and boys on

Such filthy things to drink!

Let’s seize this cursed poison

And pour it down the sink!”

“Boom-boom-boo-rah,” added Mr Thoat, stamping his feet up and down in a martial manner; at which point the Scotland Yard man tapped him on the shoulder and presented himself with the time-honored introduction.

“And I have a warrant for your arrest on a charge of receiving stolen goods knowing the same to have been stolen. It is my duty to warn you—”

“Ridiclush,” said Mr Thoat, leaning on him heavily. “I’ll report you to your shuprir offcer. Why, do you know, I’ve jus’ bin incrusted with a trush fund… . lemme tell you …”

Simon Templar had followed at a very discreet distance, merely to make sure that nothing remediable went wrong with the situation on which he had toiled so honestly. But even at that range he was able to appreciate the extra bulge of Selina Thoat’s bovine eyes as she recognized Constable Yelland even in his horrible tailoring, and flung her arms around his neck.

“My dream man,” she moaned.

The standard-bearer of Scotland Yard was sniffing Isaiah Thoat at almost equally close quarters, and his verdict was fast and seasoned.

“He’s reeking of it—rum, whisky, and I don’t know what else. She must be the same. Probably celebrating the haul they made. We’d better take ‘em both in. Blow your whistle, stupid!”

THE

UNCURED

HAM

THE UNCURED HAM

Copyright Š 1961 by Sales Publications, Inc.

Once upon a time there was in Sweden a Stallmastar, a master of the royal stables, whose lodge and dependencies were situated at the edge of a wooded park and a pretty lake only two miles north of the center of Stockholm. But even as far back as the middle of the seventeenth century such a choice location could not escape the covetous attention of more mercenary enterprise, and he was abruptly dispossessed in favor of an inn which, while still commemorating him sentimentally by calling itself Stallmas-taregarden, today features the hors d’oeuvre table instead of the horse trough.

Once upon a much later time there was a thief in the United States who would have preferred to be an actor— or, if he had been giving his own version, an actor who was forced by lack of appreciation to become a thief. His name was Ernest Moldys, and it was the opinion of every producer for whom he had auditioned that he was a very bad actor indeed. It was, however, the consensus of many police departments that he was an excellent appraiser of jewels and a first-class burglar of houses, apartments, and hotel suites. These contradictory assessments had never convinced him, or discouraged him from declaiming long passages of Shakespeare whenever he could command an audience, which was usually in some tavern where he was buying drinks. Surmises were less unanimous as to whether he was obsessed with The Theatre for its own sake, or whether he was more lured by the putative fringe benefits of the profession—the international glamor queens whom he would professionally embrace and publicly escort, the swooning fans who would offer him their all for an autograph. He was certainly a dedicated dazzler of girls, the younger and more innocent the better; in fact, it was his too brilliant fascination, seduction, impregnation, and desertion of a teen-age beauty whom he found in a drama school which had achieved what a dozen detective bureaus had failed to do and put him to flight across the Atlantic to settle tentatively in Sweden, a country which will not extradite Americans on such locally incomprehensible complaints.

Once upon a yet more recent time, Simon Templar, who was known in many circles but fortunately for him not everywhere as “The Saint,” chanced to be dining at an adjacent table at Stallmdstaregdrden on the same night as Ernest Moldys had elected to take fodder at that hostelry.

“What I want,” said Mr Moldys aggressively, “is some of these ‘crayfters.’”

He was then still in his mid-thirties, and handsome enough in the pseudo-rugged way that appeals to advertising photographers commissioned to prove that even hairy-chested tattooed he-men can enjoy after-shave lotions. In lieu of personality he affected an aggressive manner developed from watching certain old television films and designed to impress his masculinity upon his consorts of the moment, whom he carefully selected for their youthful impressionability, like the round-faced flaxen-haired girl who accompanied him that evening.

“I am sorry,” said the head waiter, “but the kraftor season does not begin until tomorrow.”

Kraftor is the fresh-water crayfish which looks exactly like a four-inch miniature northern lobster, and which is one of the most prized delicacies of Swedish gastronomy.

“I told you that when I told you about them, Ernest,” said the girl, who looked as if she should have been doing her homework instead of going to dinner with such an obviously raffish date.

“I bet you can get them in America any time—if anyone wants ‘em,” said Mr Moldys, implying that few people would condescend to do so.

“In Sweden the season is very short,” said the head waiter apologetically. “It is only one month, beginning tomorrow, August the eighth.”

“So what? So I made a mistake in the date. But that’s only a few hours away. What’s the difference? Don’t tell me you haven’t got a stock in the kitchen right now, ready for opening day. So let’s have some.”

“I am sorry, but the law is very strict. We cannot serve krdftor before tomorrow.”

Mr Moldys glowered.

“That’s why you’ll be goddam squareheads all your lives,” he said loudly.

The head waiter bowed icily and moved away, but Mr Moldys continued to hold forth for some time on the shortcomings of Europe in general, Scandinavia in particular, and the Swedish nation especially, in a voice that was pitched for the attention not only of his companion but of half the other customers in the room. It went to the limits of embarrassment before he consented to let her soothe him, and switched on again the flashing smile for which too many foolish virgins had forgiven his tasteless tantrums.

Although Mr Moldys tirelessly dramatized himself to an extent which had caused his privileged associates to nickname him “The Ham,” it was one of his failings that he could not confine himself to the act of charm, but firmly believed that the paperback private-eye performance was even more important.

Simon Templar would have been glad to forget the foregoing exhibition as quickly as possible; but a hardly overstretched arm of coincidence encircling a comparatively small capital had him installed at a veranda table at lunch the very next day at the Restaurant Riche, which is one of the impeccably best in Stockholm, when it again scooped in Ernest Moldys, who was now bedazzling another potential juvenile delinquent with the same enticing figure and coloration as his admirer of the night before, but a slightly different facial arrangement.

By this time Mr Moldys had lost interest in kraftor and wanted smorgasbord, which he was told the restaurant was not serving that day.

“Are you nuts?” demanded Mr Moldys indignantly. “All Swedish restaurants have smorgasbord. They do in America, anyway.”

“In Sweden there was always smorgasbord in the old days,” said another head waiter politely. “But it is not so fashionable here any more. However, you are lucky. Today is the first day of the crayfish.”

“Oh, we must have those, Ernest,” said the nymphet. “They are wonderful—”

“I don’t want any. I heard all about them yesterday, when I couldn’t get any. Now I don’t care if I never have one. I want smorgasbord.”

“How about some herring, sir? We have several kinds, the same as you would find in a smorgasbord.”

“I had herring yesterday. I can’t eat it every day. For Chrissake, can’t you ever get anything you want, when you want it, in this broken-down country? I know back-street delicatessens in New York that’d make this joint look sick.”

Mr Moldys was talking in the same intentionally public-address voice which he had used the night before; and as he glanced around to observe what attention he was getting, he caught Simon Templar’s analytical eye on him, and was vain enough to honestly believe that he recruited himself an ally by turning on a brilliantly comradely smile.

“You know what I mean, don’t you?” he said. “I can see you’ve been around. All this olde-worlde tradition and doing everything by the book—they’re so far back, they don’t even know they’ve been left behind! Don’t you lose your mind sometimes?”

“Sometimes, I wonder why the natives don’t lose theirs,” said the Saint calmly. “Considering some of the things they have to put up with.”

Ernest Moldys stared at him for several seconds with a strangely increasing uncertainty, and finally threw down his napkin with thinly disguised petulance.

“Let’s get out of here, you beautiful Viking, and see if we can’t get what we want somewheres else.”

Simon saw the head waiter pick up the reservation slip that had been on their table, and beckoned him.

“What was that charming character’s name?”

“A Mr Moldys.” The man showed him the paper. “You did not know him?”

“I wouldn’t want to,” said the Saint.

But this became untrue an instant after he said it; for the name, combined with something that had been vaguely familiar about the face, suddenly rang a bell in the complex circuits of Simon Templar’s memory, which absorbed every item of criminal intelligence that touched it like a sponge, but had to be prodded in sometimes peculiar ways to squeeze the information back out again.

At this moment he recalled certain facts about Ernest Moldys which made him want very much to know more. There were, for instance, some details about the suicide of that sixteen-year-old starlet in Hollywood on which his recollection was hazy, to say nothing of the exact terms of a reward which had once been offered by the victims of one of Mr Moldys’ more remunerative depredations.

The Saint did not ordinarily feel that his mission required him to administer personal correctives to obnoxious American tourists whose misbehavior could supply gratuitous ammunition to the ever-watchful snipers at the free world, but this was a case where natural impulse and lofty objective combined irresistibly with sound business practise. Once upon an earlier time the consequent leg work might have seemed discouragingly long-drawn and complicated, but in the age of electronic communications and jet aircraft it was almost no effort at all to a man who could sleep at any hour and altitude in a reclining seat like a child in a cradle. The Saint, who had nothing else planned for the weekend, merely took an SAS plane over the North Pole from Copenhagen to Los Angeles and returned by the same route, with his errands accomplished, in less time than it took Lindbergh to hobble from New York to Paris.

Ernest Moldys had done very well out of the last exercises of his vocation, but he also had very expensive tastes. These, like his other fickle appetites, were only partly genuine, another large part being dictated by his own conception of the way a stage or movie star such as he should have been would live. But the resulting pattern had made alarmingly rapid inroads on the folios of American Express travellers’ checks into which he had contrived to convert most of his loot, and he only knew one trade that was likely to replenish them.