Saint Overboard (5 page)

“Lovely morn’n, sir,” said the face, and limped
struttingly in to
plunk down a glass of orange
juice beside him. “Brekfuss narf a
minnit.”

The Saint grinned ruefully and hauled
himself up.

“Make it two minutes, Orace,” he
said. “I had company last
night.”

“Yessir,” said Orace
phlegmatically, gathering up cups; and he
had retired to the
galley again before Simon saw that he had left a second glass of orange juice
ostentatiously parked in the mid
dle of the table.

The mist had receded under the sun until it
was only a haze
on the horizon, and a sky of pale translucent azure
lofted over a
sea like glass. Simon went up on deck with a towel round
his middle and slipped adroitly into the water, leaving the towel
behind. He cut away across the
estuary in a straight line of hiss
ing
crawl, turned and rolled over on his back to wallow in the invigorating delight
of cold water sheathing his naked limbs, and
made his way back more leisurely to eat bacon and eggs in a
deck
chair in the spacious cockpit while the strengthening sun
warmed his shoulders.

All these things, then, were real—the
physical gusto of life,
quickened by unasked romance and laced with the wine of dan
ger. Even the privileged cynicism of Orace only
served as a
touchstone to prove
reality, rather than to destroy illusion. It
was like the old days—which as a matter of fact were by no
means so old. He lighted a cigarette and scanned
the other boats which he could see from his anchorage. A cable’s length away,
towards the Pointe de la Vicomt
é
, he picked a white rakish mo
tor cruiser of about a hundred tons, and knew that
this must be
the one even before he
went down to the saloon for a pair of
binoculars
and read the name from a lifebelt.
Falkenberg.
Si
mon’s lips twitched in a half-smile that was
entirely Saintly. The
name of the
legendary Flying Dutchman was a perfect baptism
for the pirate ship of that hawk-faced black-browed man who
called
himself Kurt Vogel, and the Saint mentally saluted the antarctic quality of
bravado that must have chosen it. Still using
his
binoculars from the prudent obscurity of the saloon, he took
in the high
outswept bows and the streamlined angles of the wheelhouse forward, the clean
lines of superstructure dipping to
the
unusually low flat counter, and credited her with twin racing
engines and a comfortable thirty knots. Abaft the
saloon there was a curious projection neatly shrouded in canvas—for the
moment he could not guess what it was.

He stropped his razor and ran water into a basin; and he was
finishing his shave when his man came through with the break
fast plates. Simon rounded his chin carefully and
said: “Orace,
have you still got
that blunderbuss of yours—the young howitzer
you bought once in mistake for a gun?”

“Yessir,” said Orace unemotionally.

“Good.” The Saint wiped his razor
and splashed water over his
face. “You’d better get out my automatic
as well and look it
over.”

“Yessir.”

“Put a spot of oil in the works and load
up a couple of spare magazines. And grease the cartridges—in case I take a swim
with
it.”

“Yessir.”

“We may be busy.”

Orace’s moustache stirred, like a field of
corn under a passing
zephyr. His limp was a souvenir of Zeebrugge
Mole and days of
authorised commotion as a sergeant of His Majesty’s
Marines,
but it is doubtful whether even in those years of
international
discord he had heard as many different calls to arms as
had come
his way since he first took service with the Saint.

” ‘Ave you bin gettin’ in trouble again?” he demanded
fiercely.

The Saint laughed behind his towel.

“Not trouble, Orace—just fun. I won’t try
to tell you how
beautiful she is, because you have no soul. But she came
out of
the sea
like a mermaid, and the standard of living went up again
like a rocket. And would you mind moving off that
bit of the
carpet, because the
comparison is too hideous. She stood there with the water on her, and she said
‘Will you let me out?’ And I
said
‘No!’ Just like that.”

“Didyer, sir?”

“And she pulled a gun on me.”

“Go on, did she?”

“She pulled a gun. Look, you pull a
gun. Hold your hand like
that. Right. Well, I said ‘Ha, ha,’—like that,
very sinister. I
switched out the lights! I leapt upon her! I grabbed her
wrist!
We fell on the bunk——
”

“Steady on, sir, yer ‘urting!”

“You shut up. She was crrrushed against
me. Her lips were an
inch from mine. For heaven’s sake stop
whiffling your moustache
like that. I felt her breath on my face. I
was on fire with passion.
I seized her in my arms … and …”
Simon planted a smack
ing kiss on his crew’s horrified brow.
“I said ‘Don’t you think
Strindberg is
too
sweet?’ Now go and
drown yourself.”

He picked himself up and erupted out of the
cabin, slinging
the towel round his neck, while Orace gaped goggle-eyed
after
him. In a few minutes he was back, tightening the belt of a pair of
swimming trunks, and stuffing cigarettes into a waterproof
metal
case.

“By the way,” he said, “we
aren’t full up on juice for the auxil
iary. As soon as you’ve cleared up,
you’d better take the dinghy
and fetch a couple of dozen
bidons.
Get
some oil, too, and see
that there’s plenty of food and drink.
There’s another bird mixed
up in this who’s less beautiful—a guy named
Kurt Vogel—and
we ought to be ready for traveling.”

He went up on deck and looked around. The sun
was flooding down on stucco villas and the rise of green behind, and cutting
innumerable
diamonds from the surface of the water. It was
going to be a hot
brilliant day. People were well awake on the
other yachts near by.
A gramophone opened up cheerfully on
one, and a loud splash and a shout
heralded another of the morn
ing’s bathers. The
Falkenberg
was too
far away for him to be
able to distinguish its signs of life: a
couple of seamen were
swabbing down the paint forward, but nothing
that resembled
the hooknosed man was visible. Simon noticed that besides
the outboard dinghy there was now a small speed tender also tied up
alongside
which had not been there when he made his first sur
vey—it had the air of being part of the
Falkenberg’s
equipment,
and probably it had been away
on a trip to the shore and re
turned
while he was below.

After a while he dived off the side and swam round the Pointe
du Moulinet to the beach. He strolled the length
of the plage
while the sun dried
him, and then chose a clear space to stretch
himself out opposite the Casino.

He had not seen Loretta Page during his walk,
but he knew
she would come. He lay basking in the voluptuous warmth,
and
knew with an exquisite certainty that the kind gods of adventure
would take
care of that. The story she had told him went
through his memory,
not in an exuberant riot of comprehension
as it had when he
first heard it, but in a steady flow, fact by
fact, a sequence of
fragments of accepted knowledge which
strung logically together to make a tale that was
breath-taking in
its colossal implications.
If it was something on a more grandiose
scale than anything he had ever
dreamed of even in his wildest
flights of
buccaneering, he was still ready to give it a run. He
blew smoke into
the sparkling air and considered the profile of
Kurt Vogel. Properly worked on by an octet of bunched knuc
kles… .

“Hullo, old timer.”

He dropped his gaze and saw her. She wore the
same ele
mentary swim suit, with a bathrobe that fitted her better
than
his had done, swept back by her hands on her hips and leaving
her long satiny legs to the
sun. The grey eyes were dark with
devilment.

He rolled up on one elbow.

“Hullo, pardner.”

“Did you sleep well?”

“I saw ghosts,” he said sepulchrally. “Ghosts of
the dead past
that can never be undone. They
rose up and wiggled their bony
fingers
at me, and said ‘You are not worthy of her!’ I woke up
and burst into
tears.”

She slipped out of the striped gown and sat
down beside him.

“Wasn’t there any hope?”

“Not unless you stretched out your
little hand and lifted me
out of the abyss. Couldn’t you take on the job
of saving a lost soul? Of course you might always get lost yourself, but that
wouldn’t
matter. We could always console each other.”

“I wonder why Ingerbeck’s didn’t think
of signing you up
years ago.”

He smiled.

“They might have tried, but I’m afraid I
haven’t got any sort of affinity for dotted lines. Besides, I’m not naturally
honest.
You try to recover stolen property for the insurance companies,
don’t
you?”

“That’s part of the job.”

“Well, I do the same thing, but not for
any insurance com
pany.”

“Not even on a ten per cent
commission?”

“I have worked on that basis, but it was a long time ago. My
tastes were a lot more innocent and simple in
those days.”

“It’s not a bad reward, when there are
millions to look for,”
she said temptingly.

He sighed.

“It’s so dull to be honest. Nobody else
but you could make it even bearable. But I know what you mean. I’m on a
holiday, and
I can always pick up a few millions some other time. It
was your
picnic originally, and you let me in on it——
”

“I needn’t have done that.”

There was a cool and rather sad finality in
her voice, so much in contrast to the wavering dance of her eyes, that he
looked at
her
keenly for a moment before replying. In that vivid and care
free surround of laughing swimmers and
brightly-clad sunbathers
he felt a
shadow round them, cutting them off in a dynamic
isolation of their own from all these thoughtless and ordinary
things.

“It was my charm,” he explained at
length. “My father-con
fessor touch. You just couldn’t resist
me.”

She shook her head. The gold flashed in her
hair, and her lips
smiled; but the light mockery of her eyes was subdued to
an
elfin seriousness.

“I mean I needn’t have given up hope and gone in for such
desperate measures so soon.”

“What’s happened?” he asked; and
the brown smooth-muscled
arm on which he was propped up turned so that his hand closed
over hers.

She looked down at him steadily, and the
shadow around them
failed to touch her enchanting face.

“I had a note this morning,” she said. “It was
delivered at the
hotel before I woke up.
I’ve got an invitation to have dinner
with
Vogel on the
Falkenberg.”

II.
     
HOW SIMON TEMPLAR ALSO
RECEIVED AN
INVITATION,

AND A PAIR OF PINK SOCKS
HOVE
UP ON THE HORIZON

A STOUT
gentleman ambled by, with a green eyeshade on his
brow and a diminutive slip clinging by some miracle of adhesion
to the reentrant curve of his abdomen, looking
like a debauched
Roman emperor on his
way to the bath; a Parisian sylph in a
startling
lace costume that left nothing except her birthday to
the imagination arranged her white limbs
artistically under a
gaudy sunshade
and waited for the rush of art students to gather
round; two children
disputing the ownership of a bucket opened up on a line of personalities that
would have left a couple of
bootleggers
listening in awe; but these were events that might
have been happening on another planet.