Salvage for the Saint (14 page)

Suddenly there was a crash from within. The Saint wrenched open the door—and almost tripped over an empty bottle.

It was a bottle that had held Irish whiskey.

And on his knees, and held upright only by the counterweight of one arm slung across the galley stove, was a middle-aged, very Irish-looking, very drunk-looking, dishevelled and unshaven man, who had yet managed somehow, through all that, to keep his gold-braided cap on.

“… second thoughts, I think I’ll rest in me cabin,” he muttered; and the voice was instantly recognisable as that of the tipsy crooner from the night before. He was now, if anything, drunker than he had been then. Even as they watched, his eyes glazed and he toppled over on his face.

Arabella looked at Simon, then at the inert figure, which had begun to snore, then back at Simon.

“What are we going to do with him?”

“I suppose,” Simon mused, “we’d better have a shot at bringing him round, so that we can try to figure out who he is and what he’s doing here. Do you suppose there’s any coffee in the place that isn’t eighty proof?”

It took an hour of repeated cold-water treatments, after the Saint had heaved him into a chair, before the man recovered enough to make any semblance of sense. Now half-awake, he spluttered through the black coffee that Arabella was pouring determinedly into his unwilling mouth.

“Every drop of it, Captain,” said the Saint, who had been thumbing through the ship’s log. “I take it you are what’s left of Captain William Finnegan?”

“Wha—. . ? How … ? Who … ? Where … ?” He glowered at Simon. “None of your damn business. Get off me ship, the pair of yous.”

He grimaced at the taste of the coffee and clamped his jaws firmly shut against any further incursions of the vile non-alcoholic liquor.

To Arabella, the Saint said: “You can pour that coffee in or on him.” And to Finnegan. “Your choice, Cap’n. Now—we followed someone here last night driving a blue van. Do you drive a blue van?”

Finnegan tried unsteadily to rise to his feet. He was a big burly man, his dark hair flecked with grey, his eyes bloodshot.

“I’ll drive you right over the side, you—”

He never completed the appellation, because at that moment Arabella calmly poured most of a cup of hot coffee over his head. Finnegan howled and spluttered in inebriate rage, then sank back in his seat and stared up at Arabella with a kind of awestruck respect. She returned the stare with innocent aplomb. Finnegan continued, with an intermittent half-fearful glance in her direction.

“A van? I couldn’ta navigated a pram last night. I was after goin’ to a little drinkin’ party along the harbour a way, d’ye see.”

“Whose party?” Simon queried.

“Old Michael—Michael Jardine, the chandler fella. He’s the one stocked me up for the cruise. Only …”

“What about the cruise?”

“Aw—it’s off now. The owner died, you know. Mr Charles. Mr Charles Tatenor.”

“Go on.”

“Well—sure and I’m jest waitin’ for me instructions now. The lawyers, y’know.” He shook his head. “Sad business it is. We had some good times, Mr Charles and me. Coupla times a year, sailing away south, cruisin’ and all.”

“And all?” The Saint’s interest had hardened and he came close to fix the still-groggy Finnegan with a firm cynical eye. “Cruising and what?”

Finnegan took on a dreamy look.

“Cruisin’ and fishin’—and kissin’ the girls. Great feller he was.”

“A couple of times a year, you say. Where did you go on these trips?”

“Kissing what girls?” Arabella put in before Finnegan could get focused on the Saint’s question.

“First stop was always Corsica. Same little bay, every time. Gem of an island, that.”

“What girls?” Arabella shouted; and Finnegan jumped up out of the chair in such alarm that he moved with almost sober alacrity.

“The woman’s mad, I tell you, mad. Get her off me ship this very minute!”

“Actually, Captain,” Simon told him, “it’s her ship. Captain Finnegan—Mrs Charles Tatenor.”

Finnegan digested this in stunned silence for a long minute. Then he got up, went close to her and inspected her at close quarters, with evident approval. Then he finally broke out with a broad grin, as if at a long-lost daughter.

“Well, if that isn’t … ! Well, now! Mrs Charles indeed! And a fine tough-minded woman you are, m’dear.” An even broader grin now split his stubbed face from ear to ear. He extended his hand and pumped hers warmly.

“Captain,” said the Saint. “The logbook says the drydock work’s completed. How soon can you have her in the water?”

Finnegan was still concentrating his attention on Arabella, now with a warm and admiring deference.

“Missus,” he said in reply to Simon’s question, “you gimme t’ree hours after you pay them bloodsucking drydock book accountants, and I’ll have her bobbin’ on the waves.

After I pay—” Arabella gasped.

“Dry-dock charges will be paid today, Captain,” Simon told him calmly.

“They will?” said Arabella.

“We want to be under way by late afternoon. On the same course you would have taken with Charles Tatenor.”

-4-

When the Saint got back to the hotel that afternoon, he found Arabella with her red leather suitcase and matching vanity bag packed and waiting alongside his own luggage which he had seen to earlier.

He brandished a receipted bill.

“The Phoenix’ll be ready when we are.”

She eyed the receipt, moved up close to take it from him—and pecked him on the cheek.

“Simon,” she said seriously, “it’s incredibly generous of you to—” Her eyes grew wide and round as she read the amount. “Good Lord! Did they fix it or line it with— bullion? You paid this?”

Simon submitted to another kiss without protest.

“Be careful,” he told her. “I might get a taste for it … Your solicitor told you that Charles paid his bills after walking in with great lumps of money twice a year. Well, twice a year he took the Phoenix out with Finnegan. So, we go where they went.”

Arabella looked again at the bill.

“But at these prices—why, you have to be either very rich or … hoping to get very rich.”

“I was hoping for a little sea air, actually,” Simon told her innocently. And that light of Saintly mockery she had seen before glinted in his eyes again as he reached down for her luggage.

Arabella stopped him, and searched his features for a few moments with an intent seriousness.

“Simon, were you that sixth man? You could have been.”

“I could,” said the Saint. “But I wasn’t.”

“But it’s the way you live, the way you’ve lived for a long time, isn’t it? A gold bullion robbery—it’s something you easily could have been involved with. And don’t tell me you never worked with others. You used to have—a sort of gang, once, so I read.”

Simon laughed gently.

“Yes, but those were other days, and that was another Simon Templar.” For a moment the eyes of the maturer Simon Templar were clouded with recollections of those vanished years. “That was a long time ago,” he told her.

“Well, if you’re not the sixth man, why can’t you take me, and Inspector Lebec for that matter, into your confidence … ? Well, okay, I guess I can see why you hold out on him. But I have a feeling you’re holding out on me too, damn it. You held out on me back on the island. Simon, I’ve trusted you. I am trusting you, or trying to.” She looked levelly at him. “Why can’t you trust me?”

“Because,” said the Saint, leaning closer and closer as she finished speaking, “you have … very … shifty eyes.”

And being now well within the accepted distance for such things, he kissed her gently.

Flippancy was the response that arose in him most immediately and automatically in the face of a question he was instinctively reluctant to explore in any serious depth. Had he been analytically inclined in these matters, Simon Templar might have had to confess to himself that perhaps he had needed to maintain some space between the two of them, figuratively speaking, because the simple fact was that she had affected him more than any other woman he had met in a long time; and the Saint was, by established professional habit, wary of any involvement that might carry even a hint of jeopardising the “free” in his freebootery.

He had not worked it out in so many words in the case of Arabella, but the fact was that freedom was an inseparable element of his life and character. He had been his own unique globetrotting blend of pirate and adventurer for enough years now to know that he would go on in the same freewheeling ways as long as there was still strength in his body and a new vista of ungodliness over the next hill.

That was how it was with the Saint, just as for others life might be inconceivable except as a doctor or chartered accountant or in any of a thousand other worthy and stable roles. The Saint saw the necessity for these, and was grateful that others wanted to occupy themselves thus, and to lead conventional and settled lives, leaving him to live out his own notions of buccaneering chivalry and justice for as long as it pleased him; to ride the high winds of adventure, changing little with the seasons or the years; here and there dipping into new valleys, fighting new battles, or fighting again the old ones under new skies; but always, and above all, remaining free.

He had the potential to settle to a humdrum existence like any other man; but it remained a potential, like that of a winged seed staying always aloft.

Those who had worked with him, that select handful of men, and one woman, who had shared his ideals all those long years ago—his “gang” as Arabella had called them—they had once been the same, and had floated as free. But one by one, when their time had come, they had ceased to float, and had dropped to the ground, and put down roots, and settled.

Once, such a precarious and fateful time of choice had come for Simon Templar also, when he found himself poised in the air, becalmed; and it was with a great emptiness, at the time, that he had chosen as he knew he had been fated to choose from the beginning, and had watched as the person for whom he would have given up anything but his destiny, and who understood that as well as he did himself, went on her golden way.

And so he had continued to follow his own star as the years had rolled on; and if he had his way he would be doing so still in as many more years hence. It seemed as likely that the earth might stop, as that there would one day cease to be villains abroad and booty to be won—or, as in the present case, bullion to be grabbed, if the gods were willing, from under the noses of the villains.

And it was because of all this, which was unspoken, that the Saint had covered a hiatus with a flippant comment, and had kissed Arabella Tatenor before picking up her luggage and taking it out of the hotel with his own.

They were met by Finnegan as they boarded the Phoenix. But this was a very different Finnegan from the one they had seen before. Here was a tough old sea-dog— flinty-eyed, observant, exuding competence from the peaked cap down. His expression was serious and businesslike.

“Welcome aboard to you both.” He shook hands warmly with them. “Got no other hands for you, though.”

The Saint nodded. At such short notice, they could hardly have expected otherwise.

“We’ll have to crew her between us, then. As you and Mr Tatenor used to do. Start her up, Cap’n. I’ll be your deckhand, and let’s hope Mrs Tatenor is a good cook.”

As Finnegan headed for the wheelhouse, Simon left the suitcases on deck and moved to the anchor winch.

In a few minutes they were under way, and he rejoined Arabella and picked up the bags.

“Right. Let’s get settled in.”

They were too far from Finnegan, at his station in the wheelhouse, to see his grim and unsmiling face as he watched them head for the yacht’s main saloon. But as soon as they opened the door of the saloon, they met the cause of that grim expression.

They stopped short in the doorway.

There in front of them, sitting comfortably with iced drinks at their elbows, were Jacques Descartes and Enrico Bernadotti.

V: How Jacques Descartes played a Game, and Simon Templar went Under.

-1-

“Ah! On se revolt, Madame. Welcome! And the knight errant, eh? Bonjour aussi, Monsieur Templar. Come in, come in. Make yourselves comfortable, please!”

Descartes beamed at them over his mountainous midriff, gold dental work gleaming, and beckoned them in as if they were long-lost friends.

“Surprise, surprise,” said the Saint. “And I suppose the third member of the boarding party is right behind us?”

Descartes beamed still more broadly, but Bernadotti’s attempted smile came out as more of a sneer.

“You got it, Mister,” he said silkily, making a fractional movement of the barrel of the automatic he was holding loosely in his lap. “And Pancho is, you know, a hotheaded kind of guy. The slightest thing scares him, he tends to let fly with that knife of his.”

“And if you was-a me, you’d be pretty damned careful, huh?” said the Saint, parodying Bernadotti’s Italo-American accent as he glanced behind to confirm the presence of Pancho. And to him, he said: “Now you won’t be a silly boy with that thing, will you?”

At a nod from Descartes, Pancho slid forward and frisked Simon expertly. Having found nothing, he was preparing to turn his attention to a still-incredulous Arabella, but Descartes signalled him to stop.

“If Monsieur Templar has no gun, I think we can assume the lady is also unarmed.” He inclined his head in a half-bow to Arabella. “Madame, we regret the intrusion upon your boat. But you must remember, our claim is older than yours. Your Charles, he owed us a great deal, which he had not paid at the time of his death. This boat, indeed, would not have been bought, I think, except for the gold which your Charles—our Karl—kept entirely for himself.”

“The lady told you before,” Simon said with steel in his voice. “She doesn’t know about any gold.”

Descartes nodded.

“It is another regret that we did not accept her statement. Perhaps, after all, he did not share with her the secret … the secret which lies, does it not Monsieur Templar, in the voyages of the Phoenix?”

“And what did you threaten Captain Finnegan with?” Simon enquired evenly.