The Saint in the Sun (3 page)

“Thank you,” murmured the Saint, with a trace of irony. “I should have had you with me when I was trying to convince that inspector.”

“The only other reason that Tench would have to be on your balcony, except for your theory that he meant to try to frame you, would be if he was on his way somewhere else. To my room, perhaps.”

Simon gazed at her for quite a long time.

“Did you figure all that out in your own little head?”

“You don’t need to be sarcastic. Of course Bertha and I talked about-everything. And I feel rather ashamed of some of the things we said last night. She was just having a bad spell; but she isn’t a bad person.”

“Good. Then you don’t want me to steal her jewels, after all?”

“Or mine either. I’ll take all the blame, I’ve loved every minute of it, but Bertha reminded me of an old saying-‘Lead us not into temptation’. One can ask too much even of a Saint, can’t one?” She put out her hand suddenly. “Let’s just say goodbye now, and nothing else.”

“If that’s how you want it, darling. It’s your script.”

He raised her fingers to his lips, in a gesture that added a uniquely cavalier insolence to a Latin flourish, and watched her force her own way through the endlessly crawling cross-streams of traffic.

If that was how she wanted it, so be it.

He couldn’t remember when he had last felt so recklessly resentful. It had become almost a standing joke, for him, to protest that he was always being driven back towards the old bad ways by the people who refused to believe that he had ever forsaken them. But seldom had his admittedly equivocal past been raised to slap him in the face as unfairly as this.

Natalie Sheridan deserved to lose her bloody diamonds.

So did Mrs Noversham, for helping to put that bee in her bonnet. Simon would have bet anything that Natalie would never have reached the same conclusion by herself. But put two women together, and the ultimate outcome of their mutual catalysis can be predicted by no laws of chemistry or logic.

Simon scowled up again at the front of the hotel into which Natalie had already disappeared, imprinting a certain pattern on his mind.

Then he went up to his room and scowled vaguely out the other way, over the blue bay where speedboats towing aimless but tireless water-skiers cut random patterns between lazily graceful sailing skiffs and mechanically crawling pedalos; but in his mind he saw the same pattern, reversed, in which his window was still a kind of focal center.

Eventually it was the telephone which interrupted his brooding, with a strident abruptness that left him with what he recognized at once as a purely wishful flutter of hope. The uncompromisingly materialistic voice that greeted his response quickly reduced that pipe-dream to its basic fatuity.

“This is Bertha Noversham, Mr Templar. I’d like you to have a cocktail with me.”

“Well, thank you, but I’m not sure that I-“

“Don’t tell me that you’ve got another engagement, because I’m fairly sure you haven’t. Anyhow, this needn’t take long, and if you’ll come to my room you can be sure you won’t be embarrassed in public. Just tell me what you like to drink, and I’ll order it while you’re getting here.”

“I remember that you liked champagne cocktails,” said the Saint slowly. “Get in a bottle of Bollinger, and I’ll help you with it.”

The Bollinger was on ice when he arrived, but it was no frostier than the self-assurance of her welcome.

“I’m quite sure you didn’t think for a moment that this was just a social invitation,” she said, “so I’ll come to the point as soon as you’ve done the pouring. Please use only half a lump of sugar, and scrape it well on the lemon peel-don’t put the lemon in. That small glass is cognac, in case you have the common American idea that that improves the taste.”

Simon performed the dispensing with imperturbable good humor.

“All right,” he said. “Start shooting.”

“Very well. I find you quite a likeable person, Mr Templar, in spite of some things that everyone knows about you. So I’d like to save you from making a serious mistake.”

“What about?”

“I understand that until yesterday Natalie was amusing herself by letting you think you were showing her the Côte d’Azur. I don’t know how often she’s done it before, but she certainly told the same tale to the man who gave her some of her diamonds. That was last year, when I first met her. I knew him from one of the garden parties at Camford Castle-a nice old duffer, but quite senile of course.”

The Saint’s eyebrows did not go up through his hair-line like rockets through the ionosphere, but that was only because he had it spent more time with poker hands than ballistic missiles.

“Now I know why you thought you had to offer me a drink, anyway,” he remarked.

“Bernie Kovar was at Eden Roc today-you remember, I was talking to him at the Casino last night. We had lunch together. His wife left for Rome this morning, to do the shops and the museums for a week or two, while he’s supposed to be reading scripts. Of course she knows perfectly well what the old goat will be up to most of the time-the gossip columns would tell her if nobody else did-but she only brings it up if he dares to say a word about the money she spends. He didn’t waste a minute inviting Natalie to dinner and asking why no one had ever offered her a screen test. It may make you feel a bit better to know that that’s the real reason why she has to shake you off in such a hurry-not because she seriously thinks you might rob her.”

“That does sound considerate.”

“I don’t know what Natalie has told you about her background, but I’ve heard enough contradictory fragments to believe none of them. I think of her simply as an ambitious girl who is determined to get the most out of her undoubted attractions while they last. That is what every woman does who isn’t a ‘career woman’, God help her. That’s what I was like at her age, and I’m sure you think I haven’t outgrown it. The difference is that Natalie wants to get away with murder and still have everyone loving her. She’s a dear girl, and I’ve done a lot for her, and I may go on doing it.”

“Then why are you telling me all this?”

Mrs Noversham took a very healthy, unequivocal swig at her champagne cocktail, and indicated that Simon should replenish the glass.

“Because I’m just selfish enough to want to protect myself. It’s all very well for Natalie to spare your vanity by pretending she just thinks it’d be safer not to see you again. But she doesn’t even want to take the responsibility for that idea. She had to make you think I put the idea into her head, I didn’t care at first; until it dawned on me how dangerous that could be, with a man like you. You’d be perfectly capable of stealing my jewels, if you could, just to pay me back for a thing like that-wouldn’t you, Mr Templar?”

Simon brought the refill back to her, and lighted a cigarette.

“When you phoned, I was thinking along those lines,” he said candidly.

“I was sure of it. I don’t like being disloyal to Natalie, but there’s a limit to how far I can go to cover up for her. My jewels mean a lot to me, and I don’t want to worry about your intentions for the rest of the season.”

“It’s nice of you not to put it that I’d be the first person you’d remind the police about if anything happened to you again like last night.”

“I’d prefer to keep this conversation entirely on a pleasant plane. And in any case, I can assure you that nobody, including Natalie, would have much chance of persuading me to take another sleeping pill unless my jewels were in a strong-room.”

The Saint released smoke in a very careful ring. He had thought himself beyond being jolted by any magnitude of female duplicity, but he had never personally encountered anything as transcendent as this.

“This makes life rather difficult,” he said. “Because now I’m liable to think about unkind things I might do to Natalie, rather than to you. Perhaps that hadn’t occurred to you when you decided to save me from myself.”

“I thought I’d made it clear that I was only trying to save myself. Or my possessions. To me, you, Natalie Sheridan, Bernie Kovar, and a lot of other people I meet, are all birds of a feather. I think you all deserve anything you do to each other. That’s why I can still be amused by Natalie, in spite of what I know about her. But she shouldn’t have thrown me to the wolves-or wolf, if I may call you that. If she suffers for it, she has only herself to blame.”

“I’d like to put it more bluntly. Suppose she did get robbed- would you feel obliged to tell the police about this conversation?”

She looked him straight in the eye.

“Mr Templar, if I were sure that as of now you had no grudge against me, I should think it much wiser to mind my own business. It isn’t as if Natalie’s loss would be irreparable. Bernie will give her plenty more jewels, if she plays her cards right.”

“I wish I met more people who were so broadminded.”

“However, it won’t be easy,” Mrs Noversham said briskly. “Since what happened last night, she swears she’ll put all her valuables in the hotel safe the minute she walks into the lobby, each and every time she comes home. There’d have to be a hold-up outside, or somewhere like Bernie’s suite AA1 in the new wing of the Hôtel du Cap, where he’s sure to have her reading scenes after dinner.”

“It would be a rather dramatic interruption.”

“I didn’t hear you, Mr Templar. But since you were obviously going to dine alone, you can take me with you to this Chez Francis place, where I have heard the chef turns himself inside out for you. Afterwards we can come back here and play Bézique for as long or as short a time as you can stand it.”

“I’ll make myself a little more presentable,” said the Saint, “and pick you up at eight.”

When he returned he was very presentable indeed, by conventional standards, having changed into a double-breasted dinner jacket of impeccably inconspicuous style and blackness, and she looked him over with visible surprise.

“Don’t think I’m overdoing it,” he said. “This just happens to be the most anonymous costume I know, in a place like this, for stick-ups and such jobs. With an old nylon stocking over the head, it gives nobody anything worth a damn to describe.”

“You needn’t have told me that,” she retorted. “You almost had me believing that there could be some basis for the legend of the gentleman crook.”

Otherwise they spent quite a civilized and sometimes even amusing two and a half hours, and nothing so crude as crime was mentioned again even when the Saint returned her to her sitting-room, played one hand of Bézique with her, and then asked with deliberate expressionlessness if he might call it a night.

“I shall be up for a long time yet,” she said flatly. “Probably playing Patience, since you won’t finish this game.”

Simon took shameless advantage of this when he returned to his own room some time after midnight and found the unfriendly inspector of the Police Judiciaire already ensconced proprietorially in the most comfortable armchair, and polluting the atmosphere with a cigar which some countries would have classified as a secret weapon.

“Alors, Monsieur Templar. Let us continue. There is a holdup reported from Cap d’Antibes. The man is tall, slender but well-built, his features disguised with a stocking, but wearing a smoking like yourself-“

“And like a few thousand other dopes who’ve settled for the idea that women must change their styles every season, but men have now achieved the ultimate costume which they must expect to wear from here to eternity, or until civilization comes to its glorious radioactive end.”

“I am not here to discuss the philosophy of clothing,” said the inspector. “I would like to finish this business and go to bed.”

He was a small dark man with beady eyes and an impatient manner, as if he was perpetually exasperated by people who gratuitously wasted his time by pretending to be innocent.

“I understand your eagerness,” said the Saint mildly. “But isn’t it stretching things a bit for you to be waiting here even before I get home from this alleged caper?”

“That is very easy to explain. Your victims would not have waited two seconds to report the robbery. The gendarmerie at Cap d’Antibes immediately notified me, as is their duty. And electricity travels on telephone wires much faster than you could drive here, especially at this time of the season. While I only had three blocks to walk.”

“Okay,” said the Saint. “I’ll try to finish this even faster. If you’ll permit me …”

He picked up the telephone and asked for Mrs Noversham’s suite by number. She answered so promptly that she might have been waiting for the call.

“This is Simon Templar,” he said. “Would you be amused to hear that I’ve already got a policeman in my room accusing me of a stick-up out at Cap d’Antibes?”

“Does he have any evidence?”

“None that I know of. But it’s the same character who gave me such a bad time this morning. I think he’s just decided to blame me for everything that happens around here, on general principles.”

“How ridiculous,” she said. “Have you told him that you only left me a few minutes ago, after playing Bézique with me all evening?”

“I was wondering if you’d mind telling him yourself.”

She arrived in a few minutes, an overwhelming figure in her war-paint and jangling jewels, and gave Simon an alibi that was a classic of unblushing perjury, even adorning it with details of some of the hands they had played and waving a piece of paper which she said carried the complete scores for the session. In addition, her phraseology left no doubt of her majestic contempt for the intelligence of the police, and of one policeman in particular.

“Alors, mon vieux,” the Saint said to him finally. “You were anxious to get home, I believe. What else is keeping you?”

The inspector stood up, looking somewhat crushed.

“It is only my job,” he mumbled. “]e m’excuse-“

“Je vous en prie,” said the Saint, with exaggerated courtesy, accompanying him to the small vestibule. “Et dormez bien.”

He closed the outer door and returned to the room where Bertha Noversham still stood looking somewhat Wagnerian.

“I don’t know how I should thank you,” he began, and she cut him off unceremoniously.