Trust the Saint (10 page)

And when he finally found the key, it fitted more perfectly than he could have hoped for in his most vindictive imaginings.

“Somehow, he found out what I had done with Denise, and how I had paid the school so that she would be safe no matter what became of me. Naturally, I had let no one know about the money I was saving. And now there was no way for him to touch it. But he had armed himself with the one weapon that I could not fight. He told me that unless I became his slave, he would wait until Denise was old enough to be destroyed, and then tell her all the truth about herself and about me.”

For a few seconds the Saint was utterly at a loss for words, and in that silence he realized that no comment he could have made would have been adequate. In a lifetime that had been lived as close as possible to every form of evil, he had never heard a blackmail threat of such callous enormity.

Finally he said: “You should have killed him.”

“You are right. But that is easier for most people to say than to do, especially for a woman. And if I had done that, even the nuns might have turned against me. The whole scandal might have come out. And even if I escaped the guillotine, I could no longer have hoped to help Denise a little more, perhaps, after she left the school—to see her sometimes and perhaps not have her hate me altogether for giving her up to satisfy the new jealous husband I had invented.”

“So you had to accept Pierrot-le-Fut.”

“Yes. I accepted him. I had a little time left in which men of a lower class, or drunk enough, would still pay for me. And even after that, he would not let me go. He had not yet satisfied his hate. He kept me as his cook, his servant, to wait on his friends and their girls and to clean up after them. And to bring home enough money to pay for this privilege, I could go out and work as a scrub woman also, as you saw me tonight.”

Simon thought this must be the end of the story.

“You have my sympathy and my homage, Madame,” he said. “But that cannot be all you wanted of me. Tell me what you think I could do.”

“I would not have troubled you, Monsieur Templar, if only what I have been doing was enough. I am used to the work now, and to the beatings when he is drunk, and I am still able to hold back a little money which he does not know about, which I am saving for when Denise will need it. But now, Pierrot threatens something much worse than before.”

“Can there be such a thing?” asked the Saint incredulously.

“Yes. Now this filthiness says that what I do is no longer enough. He has been watching Denise. She is old enough and pretty enough, he says, to profit him much more than I can, in the one trade that he understands.”

Simon Templar would never again claim that he had heard everything.

“But what threat could he use to make that possible?”

“He may not need one. He can find some way to shame her at the school, by telling the truth about me to her, or to her friends, or to their parents. Then, when she is an outcast, by them or by her own shame, he will take over, by force if necessary. He and his kind know only one art, but they know it well. And because I tried so hard to have her gently brought up, she will have none of the defenses that I had. Pierrot-le-Fut is not stupid, you must understand, but he is utterly ruthless, and he is obsessed with one idea which has become a mania. For him to reduce and ruin Denise would be his last and greatest triumph.”

“And, of course, there is no bribe left to offer him. He has had the satisfaction of making you suffer the last possible indignity. Now he can only look forward to the sadistic climax of proving that all your sacrifice was in vain.”

“C’est ca. One believes, now, that the Saint understands everything.”

“That’s one thing I’ll never do,” said the Saint. “But I’ll keep trying.”

He lighted a cigarette and stared out of the elaborately lace-curtained windows through which he could see practically nothing, listening to the vague rumbles and beeps and blended voices and sporadic clatters of the city without hearing them, and wondered if some miracle would ever earn him a reprieve from the reputation to which he had dedicated himself.

He could no longer have been flippant about soap operas, but he was beginning to think that a magnificent soap opera could have been built around him, except that hardly anyone would have believed the plot material except himself.

“Tell me some more about this charmer, Pierrot-le-Fut,” he said.

The details he was mainly interested in were the haunts and habits of the specimen. He wrote down certain addresses that Yvonne Norval gave him, and when he had finished asking questions she stood up with quiet dignity.

“I apologize for taking so much of your time, Monsieur,” she said. “But since you have heard it all, may I dare to hope a little?”

“I will try to think of something,” he said. “But whatever happens, when you leave this room, you must forget that you ever spoke to me, or told me anything. This may be our last meeting; but in any case, we never met.”

“C’est entendu, Monsieur le Saint.”

It was the most natural thing for him to offer his hand as he opened the door for her, but he was somewhat stunned and embarrassed when she bent over it and touched it to her lips. Then, before he could protest, she was gone.

It was quite a while since the Saint had tackled such a relatively basic and elementary problem as this. Regardless of the visions of starry-eyed spiritual or psychological idealists, he had never believed in the redemption or rehabilitation of such creatures as Pierrot-le-Fut: he believed in one fast, thrifty, and final cure for what ailed them, a treatment which eliminated all risk of a relapse. The fact that he had not administered this remedy so often of late was not due to any loss of faith in the efficacy of death as a disinfectant, but to the distracting pressure of too many more intriguing and more profitable claims on his attention. He realized now how much he had missed some of the old simple pleasures. But it had taken a pustule of such almost incredible stature as Pierrot-le-Fut to remind him of them.

The next evening he headed for the area near Mont-martre which was frequented by the self-baptized Pierre Norval and his ilk, not to sample any of the garish boites clustered around the Place Pigalle where pilgrims from all over the world pay their traditional respects to the symbols of mammalian reproduction, but to sift through some of the unglamorous outlying cafes where the parasites on the by-products of this activity met to scheme, drink, boast, connive, gamble, and trade every kind of illicit merchandise—vegetable, mineral, and human. And without any elaborate disguise, using only a few of those subtle shifts of dress and demeanor which were his own inimitable masterpieces of camouflage, he was able to do it without ever incurring the kind of attention that would have greeted an ordinary tourist who had strayed so far from the time-honored tourist trap-line.

He found Pierrot-le-Fut quite quickly, at the third of the addresses he had jotted down, an unattractive bistro off the Boulevard Clichy, and without evident nausea he sipped some extraordinarily foul and bitter coffee while he browsed slowly and exhaustively through the same edition of Match that he had mauled through each of the other stops he had made.

His purpose at that time was no more vital than to satisfy a student’s curiosity to observe this excrescence with his own eyes, to verify certain aspects which Yvonne Norval’s prejudice might have distorted, and to make a few observations of his own, in much the same way as a professional executioner discreetly assesses the weight and musculature of the man he is to hang.

Pierrot-le-Fut was a big man, built somewhat along the lines of the barrel which was only one of the possible meanings of his sobriquet; but in spite of his tubby shape he also looked hard as a cask is hard. He had small piggy eyes and a sadistic mouth from which a loud voice blustered mechanical obscenities. He had a flushed face and an equally ruddy nose which bespoke other habitual intemperances. He drank cognac from a large glass which was frequently refilled, and although it did not seem to be having any devastating effect on him at the time, this was still early in the night’s probable span for him.

From what he saw and overheard, Simon Templar decided that the picture that had been drawn for him was not exaggerated, and he paid for his noxious coffee and folded his magazine and went out. The entire excursion would hardly have been worth mentioning in this anecdote at all, if it had not been for the totally unexpected complication which it unluckily led to.

The Saint had only walked a block or so along the Boulevard Clichy, and caught the attention of a prowling taxi, and discussed his destination with the chauffeur according to the protocol established by modem Paris taxi drivers (who must first be assured that the travel plans of a potential passenger fit in with their own, which they almost never do, which calls for a special bonus above the metered fare to be agreed on to compensate the driver for the inconvenience) when there was a nudge at his elbow and he turned, with a standard formula of polite but firm rebuff ready on the tip of his tongue. But instead of the painted or the pandering nonentity that he expected, he looked into a mournful emaciated-spaniel face that he knew only too well, for it belonged to Inspector Archimede Quercy of the Police Judiciaire.

“You will permit me to ride with you?” said the Inspector, making the question mark barely perceptible. “The George Cinq is not far out of my way, and it would be agreeable to rest my feet.”

“But of course,” said the Saint, with a delighted geniality which he did not feel. “After all the jokes I’ve made about that occupational malady of policemen, it’s about time I did something to alleviate it.”

In the cab, he closed the glass partition that separated them from the driver.

“And which of the nude spectacles have you been checking on?” he continued quizzically. “I had no idea it was one of the duties of the Police Judiciaire to go around making surprise examinations of show girls’ costumes, to catch anyone trying to chisel a millimeter off the legal minimum of eight centimeters tapering to four.”

“And I,” said Quercy, with the utmost composure, “had no idea that the Saint was interested in such canaille as Pierrot-le-Fut.”

Simon’s bantering gaze did not waver, in spite of the leaden feeling that sagged within him as his premonition was so bluntly confirmed.

“Then how did you acquire this extraordinary notion?”

“Purely by observation. I give you my word, I have not been having you watched. By accident, I happened to see you in a cafe as I passed. I was about to cross the street to speak to you, when I noticed that in certain small ways you were not comporting yourself as I am used to seeing you. These were not things that would have caught the eye of anyone else—indeed, they were things that would help you to escape attention. It was clear, then, that you did not want to be seen.”

“Which naturally made you want to see.”

“It is a professional instinct,” said the other calmly. “You soon left this first cafe and went to another, which was equally unlike the kind of place where one is accustomed to find the elegant Simon Templar. But again, you were trying not to appear elegant. And since you did not trail anyone there, it became evident that you were looking for someone. This was substantiated when, after a while, you walked to the third bistro, again not following anyone, again trying to efface yourself, and again devoting yourself to a magazine which I had already seen you read twice.”

“It’s a pity it was so absorbing, or I might have felt you breathing down my neck.”

“Obviously it had not occurred to you that anyone might be following you: therefore you must believe that in this affair, whatever it is, you have all the initiative.”

“Did Emile Gaboriau get any of his inspiration from you?”

“He could have, but I was not so old then… . Eh bien, at last you discover Pierrot-le-Fut. He does not recognize you, and you are not wearing a false beard, so one deduces easily that he is not aware of your interest in him. But although you hardly exist for anyone else, you can be so skilful at submerging yourself on the rare occasions when you choose to, it is you I am watching from my concealment outside. I suspect you identify him from a picture or a description that has been given you, since it is manifest that you have never met, and the identification is ratified for you when his friends call him Pierrot. I see you studying him closely from behind your magazine, for a long time, until you seem to be satisfied and you leave.”

“And what makes you think I was looking for this Pierrot character, out of all the others I must have looked at while you were spying on me?”

“You did not look at any others in the same way. And after you had finished studying him, you left, and you did not try any more bars. You hailed this taxi and asked to be taken to your hotel. When I heard that, I knew that you had accomplished your object, at least for the present, and I allowed myself to intrude on you.”

Simon threw back his head and laughed almost in-audibly.

“If you don’t qualify for some sort of award, I’ll have to institute one for you,” he said. “What would you think of calling it the Prix Poulet? … Now, let me tell you. I’ve had such a bellyful of some of these elegant places where one is accustomed to find me, as you put it, that I had an overwhelming urge tonight to go slumming. I wanted to sit in some dull dives and look at some drab characters of the type that I sometimes ran into in the bad old days. Obviously I had to try to make myself inconspicuous, or at least not too much like an American tourist. But things don’t seem the same as they used to seem. Or maybe it’s me who is getting old. But I sat in a couple of joints without finding anything to be nostalgic about, and then in the last one there was this Pierrot, a survival from what seems like another era. I watched him for a while, and concluded that he was no longer amusing, only a gross bullying pig. I decided to stop trying to recapture the past and return to the soporific civilization of the Champs Elysees.”

Quercy nodded sympathetically.

“I understand you perfectly,” he said. “And therefore I have to warn you that although Pierrot-le-Fut is without doubt a pig of outstanding swinishness, the responsibility for slaughtering him must be left to a French court and the authorized machinery of the State.”