Trust the Saint (16 page)

Therefore he listened with guarded but lively interest, one evening when he was having a cocktail by himself in the bar of the Grand Hotel, and a tall and vaguely piratical-looking individual whose features were recently familiar came in with an older man who wore his dark suit and bifocals with the unmistakable patina of a high-priced attorney, and after ordering a couple of Peter Dawsons on the rocks they continued what must have been a lengthily waged discussion.

“What burns me,” said the Saint, “is that this harpy tells the court she needs all that alimony just to live on, in the style to which I’ve accustomed her. And she gets it. I have to pay her a company president’s income just to feed and clothe her, supposedly. And the next thing I know, she’s financing a season of Shakespeare. Well, if she can afford that, she obviously doesn’t need all that money to live on, and we ought to be able to get it reduced.”

“I know how you feel, Mr Hurley,” said the legal type. “But it’s her income now, and she can do what she likes with it.”

“If she wants to play at being a producer, she could cash in some of her jewels. Must be more than a quarter of a million dollars I spent on them—and of course she kept ‘em all. There was ninety thousand just for a string of little rocks to hang where she should have a rope. Why doesn’t she hock them for capital?”

“They were part of the divorce settlement, Mr Hurley. There’s no law that says she has to dig into her capital for anything she can pay for out of income.”

“Does that include gigolos? This big nance that she’s backing—with my money—nobody ever heard of him before. But she’s going to make him a star. Even a California divorce-court judge couldn’t be stupid enough not to see that she must have some other motive besides giving young genius a break.”

“But you yourself called him a ‘big nance’—and that’s pretty common gossip. You don’t seriously think you could convince anyone that they were having an affair.”

“Frankly, that part of it baffles me. Enid has always been queer for actors, but at least she only flipped for the virile kind. When the next one of those comes along, that queen is going to wonder what hit him.”

“Perhaps you should look forward to that, Mr Hurley. She might marry the next one, if he’s virile enough.”

“She’d never be stupid enough to do that unless he earned more than she’s getting from me. Not that that’d stop her having her fun … It still gripes me. Enid Hurley, the great impresario, preparing to stand Copenhagen on its ear, dazzling ‘em with my diamonds, taking over Kronborg Castle, yet, with my money!”

“Try not to think about it. Go down to Cannes and look at the bikinis.”

“That’s not what I interrupted your vacation for. I want you to try and do something.”

“I’ve told you-“

“But she doesn’t have a lawyer here, telling her. Go to Copenhagen and see her. Bluff her. Try to throw a scare into her. Tell her we’re going to court to ask for a revision of the settlement. Tell her this proves she doesn’t need so much alimony, which tell her the Court wouldn’t give her for immoral purposes like subsidizing this swishy ham. Dress it up in all the phony legal gobbledygook, and if you do it well enough you might worry the hell out of her. Then offer to call it off if she’ll agree to accept a nice fat cut.

“I don’t think you’ve got a chance.”

“Well, let me take that chance, will you? I can’t let it go without trying. You might be able to convince her that she stands a good chance of ending up with nothing, if she fights it. She might even be tried for perjury or promoting vice or something. The arguments are your business. You’ll be paid for it.”

“It’s not that I mind earning a fee, Mr Hurley, but I can’t conscientiously encourage you to spend your money with such a small prospect of getting anything in return.”

“I’d rather do that than give it all to Enid without a struggle. And if you do swing it, you can bill me for a twenty-thousand-dollar bonus.”

“Well,” said the lawyer, glancing at his watch, “let’s go to lunch and see if we can’t improve our case just a little.”

They paid their bill and departed, leaving Mr Moldys with his ears still tingling, but not from the traditional eavesdropper’s embarrassment. It was, rather, a warm glow of satisfaction that they had served him well, with a not inconsiderable assist from some possible guardian devil—a sensation that harmonized well with an equally symbolic itching of the fingers.

Mrs Enid Hurley, a rich divorcee with jewels and a weakness for actors—it was a situation that might have been made for him. The only thought that failed to occur to him was that it had.

About all that was left for him to find out for himself was the name of the hotel where this pre-cooked goose was laying its golden eggs, and in a city as small as Copenhagen this would normally have taken no more than a few phone calls after his arrival. For him, the catastrophic obstacle was in the word “arrival.” The cynical counsellor who had advised him to take a cure overseas had handed him, for a disproportionate fee, a list of countries warranted to be salubrious for his ailment; but Denmark was not one of them. And thus, after only a few minutes’ contemplation of this windfall that had been so extravagantly dumped in his lap, he found himself glaring at it with the obsessive acerbity of a shark which has discovered a succulent skin-diver cavorting in its dining depths, only to learn from an unpredicted bump on the nose that this mouth-watering morsel is protected inside a plastic bubble installed by the anti-shark experts of some camera crew shooting scenes for another submarine superscoop.

What this trauma might have done to the psyche of Ernest Moldys (he had tried to crash the marquees with more euphonious and star-sounding appellations, but had lately settled on the theory of honest down-to-earthiness: if Ernest Borgnine could win Academy Awards and Ernest Hemingway could cop Pulitzer Prizes, who could make cracks about Ernest Moldys?) is an interesting speculation, but it was not put to the final test, for after three days and nights of agonized frustration his sufferings were ended by precisely the kind of miracle he had been reduced to dreaming about.

As he entered his hotel and headed for the desk to ask for his key that auspicious afternoon, a woman hurried in front of him with a preoccupied flash of apology and commanded the attention of the uniformed incumbent with the bulldozing confidence of five generations of spoiled American wives behind her.

“I’m Mrs Hurley,” she proclaimed, with the clarity of royalty announcing itself. “Have you got me a driver yet?”

“A driver, Mrs Hurley?” The attendant looked blank. “What kind of driver did you want?”

“Do I have to go over all that again? I told you last night-“

“I was not on duty last night, madame.”

“Well, whoever was here on the desk. I told him I needed someone to drive my car to Halsingborg tomorrow, and he promised me he’d arrange it.”

The attendant thumbed through a large ledger of scrawled notes, and began a muttered consultation with an assistant; and the woman looked at Moldys again.

“I’m sorry—don’t let me hold you up. This is obviously going to take time!”

He gave her the most dazzlingly good-natured smile that he could achieve with his heart in his mouth, without letting it fall out. He was so staggered by his good fortune that he almost lost all the savoir-faire on which he prided himself.

“Please—I’m not in any hurry.”

“This is so aggravating. I thought I’d drive across from Halsingborg and see some of the country, instead of flying, so yesterday I have to slip in the bathtub and fall down and crack my wrist.” She raised a left hand which protruded from a small cast which had been hidden by the foulard sling in which she carried it. “Now I’ve got the* problem of taking my car back. I suppose I could get along by myself somehow, but I might get into trouble, and it seems foolish to take a chance.”

“I am sorry, madame,” said the man behind the desk, “but I can find nothing about a driver. Perhaps when the night porter comes on duty—”

“But if I’m going to leave at all, I’ve got to leave first thing in the morning. If he hasn’t done anything about it, somebody else had better get on the ball. Are you sure you looked under the right name? It’s H—U—R—L—E—Y. Mrs Enid Hurley.”

“Yes, madame. But there is nothing here. Would you like me to try to find you a driver?”

At long last, Ernest Moldys regained full possession of his wits, and simultaneously of his voice. Although he was still finding it hard to believe that this was not all a wonderful dream, he knew exactly what had to be done and how to do it.

“Mrs Hurley,” he said, “if you won’t think I’m being presumptuous, you have no problem. I’d be honored if you’d let me drive you to wherever you were going.”

“Oh, but I couldn’t possibly take up your time!”

Thus, after a little perfunctory argument and an interval of a few hours, she was seated with him at a window table on the Strand Hotel’s roof terrace, overlooking the lights of half the city, while they toasted each other in various experimental flavors of brannvin over the prawn pancakes and debated amiably on the merits of each. It was not even an ordeal for Mr Moldys, for although she was considerably older than his usual choice, she was in such a superbly groomed and pampered state of preservation that she did not look a day older than himself. She had classic features and a Vogue-model figure, and her personality would have made the local chick whom he had sidetracked for the occasion look insipid beside her.

The only fault he had to find was that the diamonds he had heard so much about were not in evidence. As if sensing something critical in the way he had studied her evening finery, she fingered the costume necklace and bracelet set she was wearing, and said: “I’m afraid I’m not very dressy, for a place like this. But I only came for a couple of days, and since I was driving alone it didn’t seem very smart to load all my baubles in the car, so I left them in the hotel safe in Copenhagen.”

Moldys gallantly concealed his disappointment, although it seemed as if the luck which he thought had changed was turning dangerously coy again.

“A woman like you doesn’t need jewels as much as they need her,” he said, omitting to credit the writer from whom he had swiped the line.

Later in the meal, he learned for the first time that Halsingborg, their destination on the west coast of Sweden, lay only two and a half miles across a narrow strait from the similarly named Danish town of Helsingor, which was practically a suburb of Copenhagen, a mere thirty miles from the Danish capital.

“Both sides used to be fortified,” explained Mrs Hurley, “and King Erik of Pomerania, who owned all the Scandinavian countries too, in those days, five or six hundred years ago, charged a toll on all the ships going through the Sound. It must have been quite a racket, because when Frederik II got to be King of Denmark he rebuilt the fort on his side into a fancy castle which he called Kronborg. It was finished about 1585, only fifteen years before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet and made it the scene of a practically prehistoric legend. That’s what they call poetic license, I guess.”

“You sound as if you’d made a real study of it,” he said admiringly.

“Well, naturally I’m interested. You see, I’m putting on a production of Hamlet there—of course, Helsingor is the place that Shakespeare called ‘Elsinore.’”

“What a wonderful idea, to do Hamlet right in the very place where it happened!”

“It probably never happened at all, and it certainly couldn’t have happened there, as I’ve told you. But even the Danes have probably convinced themselves by now that it did. It isn’t a new idea to put on the play there-people have been doing it since 1816. The challenge is to do it better.”

“You know, I’d never have taken you for a producer.”

“Because I’m not chewing a cigar? But I’m as tough as any of them, I hope.”

“I refuse to believe it. At least, not like most of the ones I came across.”

“Don’t tell me you’re an actor!”

“I used to be, sort of.” He was ad-libbing furiously now, not sure where he was going, but inspiredly sure that he was on the right track. “Nothing very important, you know. But some kind critics predicted a great future for me.”

“What did you do?”

“I quit while I was ahead. I was on the verge of getting somewhere, when I inherited quite a bit of money, and the incentive to keep struggling was gone. But even now I can feel what it would mean to speak those lines in the place that Shakespeare himself was actually thinking of.”

“Lots of ‘em have done it—from Sir Laurence Olivier, way back in 1937 with Vivien Leigh, to Sir John Gielgud in ‘39, Sir Michael Redgrave in 1950, and Richard Burton in ‘54. He doesn’t need to be knighted since they made him the King in Camelot. But I still see the part differently from any of them.”

Mr Moldys saluted her with another heartening measure of aromatic alcohol followed by the traditional beer chaser, and said:

“This above all: to thine own self be true,

And it must follow, as the night the day,

Thou canst not then be false to any man.”

She looked at him with thoughtful interest.

“That was a nice reading,” she said. “I’ve always thought Hamlet should be played something like you would naturally do it—as a real he-man trying to break out of a neurotic tradition, not a tormented introvert himself.”

“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,” he said.

“And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”

“Exactly,” she agreed. “Now, I’ve got a young actor who’s physically just the way I visualize a Hamlet type, but temperamentally I’m beginning to worry about him.”

Moldys was astute enough not to crowd his luck any harder at that moment, and in any case he wanted time to decide what to drive for. But he was exultantly certain that he had made a tremendous impression, and it was unthinkable that such a sequence of breaks could fail to climax somehow in a perfect pay-off.

The Saint had a privileged insight into that psychology, having been the subject of it on several occasions himself.

Moldys played it with creditable restraint for the rest of the evening and through the following day’s long drive, devoting as much time as possible to the role of intelligent listener, sympathetic but disinterested, agreeable but authoritative, which demanded a minimum of effort but gave him the maximum space in which to wait for the decisive opening.