The Saint in Europe (18 page)

“I can’t stay here with my dress soaking,” she said abнruptly. “Take me home.”

Simon walked back with her to the Provencal. The sky was a blaze of star-dust, and a whisper of music came from the Casino terrace. Down by the water there were tiny ripples hissing and chattering on the firm sand, and a light breeze murmured in the fronds of the tall palms. Simon had a fleeting remembrance of the slim exquisite softness of Myra Campion; and, being very human, he sighed inaudibly. But business was business.

A few yards from the hotel entrance Mrs Nussberg stopped. Her ropes of diamonds flashed in the light of the rows of bulbs flaming the marquee over the doors.

“Thank you for helping me,” she said with a harsh effort. Simon’s teeth flashed. He knew that she was taking stock of his tanned keen-lined face, the set of his wide shoulders and the length of lean muscular limbs. He knew that he was interesting to look at-conquering a natural bashfulness that he always kept well under control, he admitted the fact frankly.

“Not at all,” he said.

She opened her bag and held something out to him. He took it and unfolded it-it was a ten-thousand-franc note.

He folded it again carefully, and handed it back with a smile.

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken.,” he said pleasantly. “You don’t owe me anything. Good night.”

3

There began for Mrs Porphyria Nussberg an interlude of peace that must have been strange to her. The glances that she encountered veiled their derision with perplexed uncerнtainty; the giggles when she unharnessed herself of her corsets before going in to bathe were more subdued. The impulse to weep with helpless mirth whenever she appeared was still there, human nature being what it was; but the story of the Casino episode had flown around the town and cast a damp sheet over the pristine hilarity of the jest. There was the sight of Maurice Walmar’s bruised and swollen mouth for reinforcement; and the other aspiring wits looked at it and at the Saint’s leathery torso, and merged themselves thoughtfully into the background. Even the waiters, who had been encouraged to curry favour with the sportive eleнment by smirking and winking at the audience whenever they were called upon to serve the woman, relapsed into the supercilious impersonality with which waiters in fashionable reports cloak their yearning for tumbrils and guillotines.

Myra Campion cornered the Saint the very next afterнnoon. He was paddling contentedly along in the general direction of Gibraltar, feeling himself safely insulated from the seethe of popular speculation by the half-mile of limpid water that separated him from the shore, when his head encountered a firm but yielding obstruction. He rolled over and looked into the wet face of Miss Campion.

“You’ll have to swim farther out than this if you want to dodge me,” she said.

Destiny having overtaken him, Simon reflected philoнsophically that it could have chosen many less agreeable vehicles.

“Darling,” he said blandly, “I’ve been searching the whole ocean for you.”

She trod water, the slow swell lifting her small brown face against the intense sky, her eyes fixed on him inexorably.

“What was the idea-lashing out at Maurice like that?”

“Did you see what he did?”

“I heard about it. But you didn’t have to paste him that way.”

“I just slapped him,” said the Saint calmly. “Isn’t he on the beach today? Well, if I’d really pasted him he’d ‘ve spent the next six weeks in a hospital-getting his face remodнelled.” The Saint steered himself neatly around a drifting jellyfish seeking for its mate. “My dear, if you’re really upset about my slapping a conceited daffodil like Walmar for carrying a joke to those lengths, you haven’t the good taste I thought you had.”

There was a certain chilliness about their parting that the Saint realized was unavoidable. He swam back alone, floatнing leisurely through the buoyant sea and meditating as he went. He knew well enough that a set of diamonds like those displayed by Mrs Porphyria Nussberg are rarely obtained without some kind, of inconvenience; but those incidental troubles were merely a part of the most enchanting game in the world.

Back on the sands, he stretched himself out beside Mrs Nussberg’s chair and chatted with no more than ordinary politeness. On the following morning he did the same thing. . There was no hint of a pressing advance about it: it was simply the way in which any normal holiday acquaintance would have been expected to behave: but the Spanish Cow’s soured belligerence had lost its sting. Sometimes she looked at him curiously, with the habitual suspicion hesitating in the background of her beady eyes, as if the impact of a more common courtesy was still too strange to be taken at its face value.

That evening he walked with her along the beach. It was well into cocktail time, and the young brown bodies had taken themselves off the sands to refresh themselves at the Casino or the Perroquet, or to dance before dinner at Maxim’s. The last survivor was a shabby mahogany-tanned old man with a rake, engaged in his daily task of scratching the harvest of cigarette-ends and scraps of paper and orange peel out of the sand to leave it smooth and clean for the morrow’s sacrifice - a sad and apocryphal figure on the deserted shore.

They went by the almost empty Fregate; and Simon reнcalled the caricature in the entrance. It was still there-a brutal, sadistically accurate burlesque. Mrs Nussberg stared fixedly ahead, as if she had forgotten it; but he knew that she had not.

The Saint stepped aside. A lounging waiter realized what was happening too late, and started forward with an outraged yap; but the picture was out of the frame and shredded into small fragments by that time.

Simon held them out on his open hand.

“Do these belong to you?” he inquired gently; and the man suddenly looked up and found the Saint’s blue eyes fastened levelly upon him, as hard and wintry as frosted sapphires. The eyes were quite calm, utterly devoid of open menace; but there was something in them that choked his instinctive retort in his throat. Something in the eyes, and the tuned softness of the voice that spoke past them.

He shook his head mutely, astounded at his own silence; and the Saint smiled genially and dropped the torn relics at his feet.

On the front of the Casino there were banners and posters proclaiming the regular weekly gala.

“Are you going?” asked Simon casually.

The bright defensive eyes switched to nun sidelong.

“Are you?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

They walked a few steps; and then she said, sharply: “Would you come with me?”

Simon did not hesitate for an instant.

“I’d love to,” he said easily; and she said nothing more until he left her at the Provencal.

Before climbing into white shirt and tuxedo, the Saint packed a bag. He was travelling very light; but he still preferred not to leave his preparations for a getaway to the last minute. And he had decided that the getaway should take place that night. He did not want to delay it any longer. He was a little tired of Juan-les-Pins; and, even in that brief time, more than a little tired of the part he had to play.

But when he collected Mrs Nussberg again there was no hint of that in his manner. Her dyed hair had been freshly waved into desperate undulations, and the powder was crusted thickly on her face and arms. Her hands and neck were a blaze of precious stones.

He saw her hard painted lips smile for the first time.

“You are very kind,” she said, as they walked down to the Casino.

The Saint shook his head.

“This gala business is a wonderful racket,” he murmured lightly. “The same place, the same food, the same music, the same floor show-but they charge you double and let out a few colored balloons, and everyone thinks they’re having a swell time.”

As a matter of strict fact, it went a little further than colнored balloons-Simon; who had attended these events beнfore, had expected it and balanced the factor into his plans. There were rag dolls, for instance-those long-legged sophisнticated puppets with which some women love to clutter up their most comfortable chairs. Simon was also able to add a large bouquet of flowers, an enormous box of chocolates, and three of the aforesaid colored balloons to the bag. When at last he escorted a supremely contented Mrs Nussberg home, he looked rather like an amateur Santa Claus.

Therefore he had a sound excuse for going into the hotel with her; and when she asked for her key at the desk he deftly added that also to his burden.

“You don’t want to lug all this stuff upstairs,” he said. “Let me take them for you.”

She was studying his face again, with that watchful half-suspicious wonderment, as they rode up in the elevator. The elevator boy thought his own cynical thoughts; and under cover of the trophies with which he was laden the Saint pressed Mrs Nussberg’s key carefully into a plaque of soft wax, and wrapped the wax delicately in his handkerchief before he put it away.

He went just inside the sitting-room of her suite, and decanted the souvenirs on a side table.

“Won’t you have a drink?” she asked.

“Thanks,” said the Saint, “but I think it’s past my bedнtime.”

She must have been pretty once, it occurred to him as she put down her bag with unaccustomed hesitancy. Pretty in a flashy common way that had turned only too easily into the obese overblown frowsiness that amused Walmar and his satellites so much.

She held out her hand.

“Thank you so much,” she said, with a queer simplicity that had to struggle through the brassy roughness of her voice.

He went back to his own hotel with the memory of that parting in his mind.

She was the Spanish Cow. So he had christened her, and so she would always be. A fat, repulsive, noisy, quarrelsome, imbecile vulgarian-with a two hundred thousand dollar collection of jewels. And it was a part of his career to take those jewels away and apply them to a better use than encircling her billowy neck. To make that possible he had had to play her like a fish on a line; and it had so happened that the fish had taken the line for a lifeline. It had ceased fighting-had brought itself to a wild, grotesque travesty of coyness. When it discovered how it had been hoodwinked, it would fight again-but with other anglers. It would be bitter, coarse, obstreperous again, pulling faces and putting out its tongue. And that also was in the game.

In his room, he took a small case of instruments from a drawer, and selected a key blank that matched the impression on his wax plaque. It took him a full hour and a half to file a duplicate to his rigorous satisfaction; and then he changed his clothes and picked up an ordinary crook-handle walking stick and went out again.

It was late enough for him to have the road to himself, and no inquisitive eye observed the course he steered for the fire escape of the Provencal. With the calm dexterity of a seasoned Londoner boarding a passing bus, he edged the crook of his stick over the lowest platform and swung himнself nimbly up. Then he flitted up the iron zigzag like a ghost on rubber-soled shoes. The lights were on behind the curtains of a room on the second floor, and a passionate declaration of eternal love wafted out into the balmy night as he went by. The Saint grinned faintly to himself and ascended to the third floor. The nearest window there was dark. He slid over the sill with no more noise than a ray of moonlight, and crossed as silently to the door. In another moment he was outside, the latch jammed back with a wedge of cardboard so that he could make his retreat by the same route, and the corridor stretching out before him like a broad highway to his Eldorado.

The key he had made fitted soundlessly into the lock of Mrs Nussberg’s suite, and he turned it without a scrape or a click and let himself into the sitting-room. He had closed the door again from the inside before he saw a thin strip of luminance splitting the darkness on his right, where the communicating door of the bedroom was and he realised, with a sudden settling of all his faculties into a taut-strong vigilance, that for some unaccountable reason the Spanish Cow had not yet sought the byre.

The Saint rested where he was, while he considered the diverse aspects of the misfortune. And then, with the effortнless silence of a cat, he glided on towards the bedroom door.

It was at that moment that he heard the incredible noise.

4

For a couple of seconds he thought that after all he must have been mistaken-that Mrs Nussberg had gone to sleep, leaving the light on as a protection against banshees and things that go bomp in the night, and was snoring with all the high buglelike power of which her metallic nasal cavities should have been capable. Then, as the cadence dropped, and he made out a half-dozen words, he considered whether she might be giving tongue in her sleep. And then, as the sound continued, the truth dawned upon him with an eerie shock.

Porphyria Nussberg was singing.

Simon tiptoed to the crack through which the light came. If there had been lions in the way, he could not have stopped himself. More words came out to him, and the semblance of a melody, that twisted the first tentacles of a slow and awful understanding into his brain.

She was sitting on the stool in front of her dressing-table, gazing into the mirror, with her hands spread out inertly before her. The song was one of those things that the band had played that night- a song like all the others, a sentimenнtal dirge to a flimsy tune, with a rhythm that was good to dance to and a refrain that was true enough for the theme song of a summer night’s illusion. But to Mrs Nussberg it might have been the Song of Songs. And a weird cold breath fanned, the Saint’s spine as it came to him that perhaps it was.

She was singing it with a terrible quiet passion, gazing at the reflected image of her own face as if in the singing she saw herself again as she had been when a man desired her. She sang it as if it carried her back to the young years, when it had not been so strange for a handsome cavalier to dance with her without a fee, before time mocked those things into the unthinkable depths of loneliness. Her jewels were heaped in a reluctant pile in front of her. For the first time Simon began to understand them; and he felt that he knew why other women wore them at her age. “I once was beauнtiful,” they spoke for her in their pitiful proud defiance. “I once was young and desired. These stones were given to me because I was beautiful, and a man loved me. Here is your proof.” But she could not have seen them while she sang. She could not have seen anything but the warm clear flesh on which that creased and painted mask of a face had built itself in the working out of life, to be jeered at and caricatured. She could not have seen anything but the years that go by and leave nothing behind but remembrance. She sang, in that cracked tuneless voice, because that night the remembrance had come back-because, for a day and a night, a man had been kind. And there were tears in her eyes.