The Saint in the Sun (19 page)

“That’s all,” said a voice behind him.

Simon turned.

It was Velma Yanstead, as his ears had already told him; but his ears could not have told him that she would be holding an automatic in her pudgy hand, levelled at him from a distance at which it would be difficult to miss.

“I thought you were too smooth and goodlooking to be a real reporter,” she said libellously. “But you don’t talk like a policeman, either. What’s your real name and what’s your business?”

“Madam,” Simon replied courteously, “I’m best known as The Saint. I’m a meddler.”

The name registered visibly on both of them, in different ways. Mr Prend seemed to wilt and deflate as if struck by a dreadful blight, but Mrs Yanstead seemed to swell and harden in the same proportion. There must have been something after all, Simon reflected with incurable philosophy, in that old adage about the female of the species.

“Well, you meddled once too often this rime,” she said. “I’ve read enough about you to know how you work. You’re on your own, and you keep everything to yourself till you think it’s all wrapped up. So you can just disappear, and it’ll be months before anyone even wonders where you went.”

“Such is fame,” sighed the Saint.

Mrs Yanstead was no more amused than Queen Victoria. She had come in from the hallway, as had the Saint, but now she indicated a door on the other side of Mr Prend.

“We got to get rid of him now,” she said sternly. “And you’ll be no worse off than you are already.”

She was now addressing Mr Prend, who gulped and swallowed his tonsils, his larynx, and possibly other things.

“But—”

“Go along with it, Al,” Simon advised him kindly. “Surely you can find room for me in there, in one of your king-sized caskets, alongside some scrawny stiff who’s paid for a cremation. And no one will ever know… Except you might have to marry her, and give up that bleached blonde you’ve been dating in Miami Beach-“

“That’s quite enough,” Mrs Yanstead said, and prodded the Saint with her gun.

This was one of the most foolish things she ever did. Not because Simon was unduly stuffy or ticklish about being prodded, but because the touch of the gun enabled him to locate its position exactly without telegraphing any hint of his intention by glancing at it. His hands moved together like striking snakes, his left hand catching her wrist, his right hand striking the gun and bending her hand backwards with it. The one shot she fired shook the room like a thunderclap, but the muzzle of the automatic was already deflected before she could react and pull the trigger.

Simon Templar sat down in Mr Aloysius Prend’s place at the desk, using the same gun to cover the two of them, and picked up the telephone.

“We can deny all of this,” Mrs Yanstead said to her accomplice, who was now visibly trembling with a subtle but definite vibration that might have started a new wave at the Peppermint Lounge if it could only have been demonstrated there. “It’s only his word against ours, and there are two of us-“

“I wouldn’t bet too much on that,” said the Saint dishearteningly. “I didn’t wear a jacket on a warm day like this just to look like the correct respectable costume for visiting Funeral Homes. I wanted a place to hang a microphone and carry a miniature tape recorder, because I know how skeptical some authorities are about my unsupported testimony.” He opened his coat and showed them. “Wonderful things, these transistors. I wonder what Sherlock Holmes would have done with them-I must ask a friend of mine. Now would you like to give me the police number or have I got to ask the operator?”

LUCERNE:THE RUSSIAN PRISONER

“Excuse me. You are the Saint. You must help me.”

By that time Simon Templar thought he must have heard all the approaches, all the elegant variations. Some were amusing, some were insulting, some were unusual, most were routine, a few tried self-consciously to be original and attention-getting. He had, regrettably, become as accustomed to them as any Arthurian knight-errant must eventually have become. After all, how many breeds of dragons were there? And how many different shapes and colorations of damsels in distress?

This one would have about chalked up her first quarter-century, and would have weighed in at about five pounds per annum-not the high-fashion model’s ratio, but more carnally interesting. She had prominent cheek-bones to build shadow frames around blindingly light blue eyes, and flax-white hair that really looked as if it had been born with her and not processed later. She was beautiful like some kind of mythological ice-maiden.

And she had the distinction of having condensed a sequence of inescapable cliches to a quintessence which could only have been surpassed by a chemical formula.

“Do sit down,” Simon said calmly. “I’m sure your problem is desperate, or you wouldn’t be bringing it to a perfect stranger- but have you heard of an old English duck called Drake? When they told him the Spanish Armada was coming, he insisted on finishing his game of bowls before he’d go out to cope with it. I’ve got a rather nice bowl here myself, and it would be a shame to leave it.”

He carefully fixed a cube of coarse farmhouse bread on the small tines of his long-shafted fork, and dipped it in the luscious goo that barely bubbled in the chafing dish before him. When it was soaked and coated to its maximum burthen, he transferred it neatly to his mouth. Far from being an ostentatious vulgarity, this was a display of epicurean technique and respect, for he was eating fondue-perhaps the most truly national of Swiss delectables, that ambrosial blend of melted cheese perfumed with kirsch and other things, which is made nowhere better than at the Old Swiss House in Lucerne, where he was lunching.

“I like that,” she said.

He pushed the bread plate towards her and offered a fork, hospitably.

“Have some.”

“No, thank you. I meant that I like the story about Drake. And I like it that you are the same-a man who is so sure of himself that he does not have to get excited. I have already had lunch. I was inside, and I could see you through the window. Some people at the next table recognized you and were talking about you. I heard the name, and it was like winning a big prize which I had not even hoped for.”

She spoke excellent English, quickly, but in a rather stilted way that seemed to have been learned from books or vocal drill rather than light conversation, with an accent which he could not place immediately.

“A glass of wine, then? Or a liqueur?”

“A Benedictine, if you like. And some coffee, may I?”

He beckoned a waitress who happened to come out, and gave the order.

“You seem to know something about me,” he said, spearing another piece of bread. “Is one supposed to know something about you, or are you a Mystery Woman?”

“I am Irma Jorovitch.”

“Good for you. It doesn’t have to be your real name, but at least it gives me something to call you.” He speared another chunk of bread. “Now, you tell me your trouble. It’s tedious, but we have to go through this in most of my stories, because I’m only a second-rate mind reader.”

“I am Russian, originally,” she said. “My family are from the part of Finland where the two countries meet, but since nineteen-forty it has been all Soviet. My father is Karel Jorovitch, and he was named for the district we came from. He is a scientist.”

“Any particular science, or just a genius?”

“I don’t’ know. He is a professor at the University of Leningrad. Of physics, I think. I do not remember seeing him except in pictures. During the war, my mother was separated from him, and she escaped with me to Sweden.”

“You don’t have a Swedish accent.”

“Perhaps because I learnt English first from her, and I suppose she had a Finnish or a Russian accent. Then there were all sorts of teachers in Swedish schools. I speak everything like a mixture. But I learnt enough languages to get a job in a travel agency in Stockholm. My father could not get permission to leave Russia after the war, and my mother had learned to prefer the capitalist life and would not go back to join him. I don’t think she was too much in love with him. At last there was a divorce, and she married a man with a small hotel in Göteborg, who adopted me so that I could have a passport and travel myself. But soon after, they were both killed in a car accident.”

“I see … or do I? Your problem is that you don’t know how to run a hotel?”

“No, that is for his own sons. But I thought that my father should be told that she was dead. I wrote to him, and somehow he received the letter-he was still at the University. He wrote back, wanting to know all about me. We began to write often. Now I didn’t even have a mother, I had nobody, it was exciting to discover a real father and try to find out all about him. But then, one day, I got another letter from him which had been smuggled out, which was different from all the others.”

The Saint sipped his wine. It was a native Johannisberg Rhônegold, light and bone-dry, the perfect punctuation for the glutinous goodness into which he was dunking.

“How different?”

“He said he could not stand it any more, the way he was living and what he was doing, and he wished he could escape to the West, He asked if I would be ready to help him. Of course I said yes. But how? We exchanged several letters, discussing possibilities, quite apart from the other letters which he went on writing for the censors to read.”

“How did you work that?”

“Through the travel agency, it was not so hard to find ways.

And at last the opportunity came. He was to be sent to Geneva, to a meeting of the disarmament conference-not to take part himself, but to be on hand to advise the Soviet delegate about scientific questions. It seemed as if everything was solved. He only had to get out of the Soviet embassy, here in Switzerland, and he would be free.”

The Saint’s gaze was no longer gently quizzical. His blue eyes, many southern shades darker than hers, had hardened as if sapphires were crystallizing in them. He was listening now with both ears and all his mind; but he went on eating with undimin-ished deference to the cuisine. “So what’s the score now?”

“I came here to meet him with some money, and to help him. When he escaped, of course, he would have nothing. And he speaks only Russian and Finnish … But something went wrong.”

“What, exactly?”

“I don’t know.”

Until then, she had been contained, precise, reciting a synopsis that she must have vowed to deliver without emotion, to acquit herself in advance of the charge of being just another hysterical female with helpful hallucinations. But now she was leaning across the table towards him, twisting her fingers together, and letting her cold lovely face be twisted into unbecoming lines of tortured anxiety.

“Someone betrayed us. We had to trust many people who carried our letters. Who knows which one? I only know that yesterday, when he was to do it, I waited all day up the street where I could watch the entrance, in a car which I had hired, and in the evening he came out. But not by himself, as we had planned. He was driven out in an embassy car, sitting between two men who looked like gangsters-the secret police! I could only just recognize him, from a recent photograph he had sent me, looking around desperately as if he hoped to see me, as if I could have rescued him.”

Her coffee and Benedictine arrived, and Simon said to the waitress: “You can bring me the same, in about five minutes.”

He harpooned a prize corner crust, and set about mopping the dish clean of the last traces of fondue. He said: “You should have got here sooner. There’s an old Swiss tradition which says that when fondue is being eaten, anyone who loses the bread off their fork has to kiss everyone else at the table. It must make for nice sociable eating … So what happened?”

“I followed them. It was all I could think of. If I lost him then, I knew I would lose him for ever. I thought at first they were taking him to the airport, to send him back to Russia, and I could make a fuss there. But no. They went to Lausanne, then on to here, and then still farther, to a house on the lake, with high walls and guards, and they took him in … Then I went to the police.”

“And?”

“They told me they could do nothing. It was part of the Soviet embassy, officially rented for diplomatic purposes, and it could not be touched. The Russians can do whatever they like there, as if they were in Russia. And I know what they are doing. They are keeping my father there until they can send him back to Moscow-and then to Siberia. Unless they kill him first.”

“Wouldn’t that have been easier from Geneva?”

“There is another airport at Zurich, almost as close from this house, and without the newspaper men who will be at Geneva for the conference.”

Letting his eyes wander around the quiet little square, Simon thought that you really had to have a paperback mind to believe tales like that in such a setting. The table where they sat outside the restaurant was under the shade of the awning, but he could have stretched a hand out into the sunshine which made it the kind of summer’s day that travel brochures are always photographed on. And gratefully enjoying their full advertised money’s worth, tourists of all shapes and sizes and nationalities were rambling back and forth, posing each other for snapshots, plodding in and out of the domed Panorama building opposite to peer (for reasons comprehensible only to tourists and the entrepreneurs who provide such attractions for them) at its depiction of the French general Bourbaki’s entry into Switzerland in 1871 on a scale that seems somewhat disproportionate to the historic importance of that event, or trudging up the hill to gawk at the Lion Memorial carved in the rock to commemorate the Swiss mercenaries who died in Paris with unprofitable heroism defending the Tuileries against the French Revolution, or to the Glacier Garden above that which preserves the strange natural sculpture of much more ancient turnings-all with their minds happily emptied of everything but the perennial vacation problem of paying for their extra extravagances and souvenirs. Not one of them, probably, would have believed in this plot unless they saw it at home on television. But the Saint knew perhaps better than any man living how thinly the crust of peace and normalcy covered volcanic lavas everywhere in the modern world.