Trust the Saint (4 page)

“If that’s Klaus Stortebeker’s own original goblet,” Simon persisted, “why is it still there? Why hasn’t someone else seen it and bought it before this? If it comes to that, why is the pawnbroker selling it?”

“Perhaps he hasn’t heard the story,” Eva responded. “Why should a little pawnbroker know everything? Why should everyone who passes know it? If we had passed last night instead of tonight, before you read that book, would we have known? At least I am not going to laugh at it and go away!”

She released his arm with a movement that was almost like throwing away something that had become distasteful, and turned to the door of the shop. It opened for her with a loud jangling of bells; the lights had always been on inside, and through the window Simon could see the presumable proprietor shuffle out through the curtains behind the counter at the back—an old man whose trade had plainly left him no illusions and even less patience with anybody who expected him to harbor one. The shop was apparently still open, ready to finance anyone who came by with acceptable security.

By the time Simon caught up with Eva inside, she already had the proprietor at a disadvantage in the less familiar aspect of buyer-seller relations, for such places.

“Are you crazy?” she was saying in German. “Three hundred marks—for a battered old thing like that?”

“It is very old,” said the shopkeeper, like a recitation. “Perhaps of the fifteenth century.”

“Then it is so much more secondhand. I will pay two hundred.”

“That is absurd, gracious lady. Perhaps two hundred and ninety …”

Simon picked up the goblet and examined it more closely. Judging by its weight, the stem and base seemed to be hollow, but they were solidly plugged at the bottom. He studied the construction and the sealing while the haggling ran its predestined course.

“Two hundred and forty, then. Not a pfennig more!”

“Very well.” The final despondent shrug. “But only because you are too beautiful, and I am too old and tired …”

Since the pawnbroker was an indigent, mildly alcoholic, pensioned-off uncle of Johann Uhrmeister, he knew when to cut the bargaining and clinch the sale.

Eva counted the money out of her own purse, quickly but precisely, and almost snatched the goblet out of Simon’s hands as she headed out of the shop.

He stayed with her patiently for a few yards along the Reeperbahn again, where she led him into a dazzlingly dreadful all-night restaurant. He followed her into a corner booth, where she ordered ham sandwiches and beer for both of them and put the goblet on the marble table-top and leered at it as if it had been a prize they had won in a fun fair.

“Let’s get it open,” she said.

“I’ll need some sort of tool for that,” he told her. “The base is filled with some sort of solder. I can’t dig it out with a fork.”

“You could break the stem off, couldn’t you?”

He raised his eyebrows.

“After you just paid sixty dollars for it?”

“It was not bought to keep on a mantelpiece. I am too excited to wait. Break it!”

“Okay, if you say so.”

He picked up the goblet endways in two hands, and bent and twisted. It came apart at the junction of cup and stem, without too much resistance from the soft metal. And within the hollow stem they saw the end of a scroll— which could be dug out with a fork.

It was a piece of parchment rolled to about the size of a panatela, and stained with what most people would have taken for age but Franz Kolben could have told them was cold tea. Simon loosened and spread it with reverent care. The ink on it had also aged, to the color of dark rust, with the help of another of Mr Kolben’s chemical tricks of the trade. The lettering at the top had involved more laborious research, but in convincingly medieval Gothic characters it announced:

Sier heff it mienen Gdjas inpurrt

Simon spelled it out with frowning difficulty which ended in irritated puzzlement.

“I thought I could get by in German,” he complained, “but what the hell does that mean?”

“It’s old German, of course,” she said, leaning close to his shoulder. “This was written more than five hundred years ago! In modern German it would be ‘Dies ist der Platz wo ich meinen Schatz vergrub’—‘This is where I buried my treasure.’”

“Can you read the rest?”

There was a crude map, or combination of map and drawing, as was the ancient custom. It showed a river at the bottom with ships on it, a recognizable church, and a narrow two-storey house, intricately half-timbered, and a distinctive high-peaked roof with gables surmounted by a conical-topped turret. So much the Saint saw, and was trying unsuccessfully to decipher the cramped and spiky script which filled the other half of the sheet when Eva snatched it out of his fingers and put it in her purse.

“I will read it later,” she said.

He showed his astonishment.

“Aren’t you too excited to wait any more?”

“Yes. But you’ve seen enough already—perhaps too much.”

“Are you afraid I might rush off and beat you to this treasure and take off with your share?”

“My share,” she said, “is all of it. Why should you have any? For breaking open the goblet? I bought it!”

“I thought this evening was supposed to be fifty-fifty,” he said slowly.

She shifted farther away from him, defensively.

“That was only for the food and drink and the shows, nothing else. The goblet was my own. Let anyone ask the man in the shop who paid for it.”

“You didn’t need to do that. I thought you only did it because you’d done all the talking.”

“I didn’t ask you to buy it. I decided for myself. And who saw it first? I did. You would have walked past and never seen it if I had not stopped you. And even then you said it couldn’t be the one. It was I who went in the shop!”

To record that this was one of the rare occasions when Simon Templar was totally flabbergasted would be an understatement of laconic grandeur. But there was no doubt that she meant it all.

He tried one more appeal to higher ethics: “And why would you have been interested if I hadn’t shown you that bit in my guide-book?”

“All the thousands of people who must have read it could say that,” she scoffed. “And then the man who wrote the book would say that he had the best claim.”

Franz Kolben would have been proud of her.

The Saint might almost have merited official sanctifica-tion if he had not had to subdue an unhallowed masculine impulse to remodel her pretty but obnoxiously self-satisfied face with one eloquent set of knuckles, but he was catatonically immobilized by an insuperable reluctance to sink to the level of some of his latter-day imitators. But he still had a tattered sense of humor.

“All right,” he said. “Here’s your change.” He made a rough calculation, counted out money, and pushed it towards her. “Have fun—and don’t buy any more mugs.”

She took the change without demur, like a God-given right, and put it away where she had put the parchment. She had no sense of humor that vibrated with his.

“Now let me out,” she said, and the clutch on her handbag was no tighter than the set of her mouth. “If you try to stop me, or follow me, I call the police.”

The Saint could usually rise to an occasion, but this was one that had been immutably taken out of his hands. He was caught at a disadvantage that would have baffled anyone. If she had been a man, there might have been a remedy, even if it involved physical violence; but to start anything so drastic with her, in such a crowded place or the equally bright and busy street outside, would have only been inviting certain arrest on the most ignominious charges.

He moved aside, and she picked up the two broken pieces of the goblet and stepped past him.

“Thank you,” she said stiffly, “for taking me out.”

“Thank you,” he murmured, with a subtlety that surely went over her head, “for taking me,”

He watched her exit, reflecting wryly that it was sometimes hard to maintain the attitude of a knight-errant towards womankind in the light of such revelations of what cupidity could do to their rectitude.

He paid the bill and went out, but by the time he reached the street she was nowhere to be seen. This was nothing like any conclusion that he had anticipated from their brief encounter, but he was philosopher enough to find some compensation in the discovery that after all life still had some surprises left. And the night had not been completely wasted, for in the course of their peregrinations he had found one other thing which he had come to Hamburg to look for.

He walked back to the Silbersack, and ordered a beer, and caught the eye of the roving silhouette-cutter. The man came over, beaming, with scissors already twinkling. Simon let him proceed, but took from his pocket another silhouette—not one of those he had recently seen cut, but identical in style and mounting. He showed it.

“Is this one of yours?”

“Yes, that is my work.”

“Do you remember the man?”

The artist’s friendliness seemed to begin to dwindle fractionally.

“That is difficult. Man sieht so viele Leute. Is he a friend of yours?”

“He sent this picture to a friend of mine, and I wondered where he had it made. Was he here with anyone that you know?”

The other’s face became finally blank.

“Man kann sich nicht an jeden erinnern. I am sorry, I have quite forgotten.”

Simon laid a hundred-mark note on the table.

“Couldn’t you remember if you tried?”

The silhouettist swiftly separated the black profiles he had cut, pasted them on cards, and pushed back the money.

“Danke schon,” he said. “You already paid me too much. I am sorry that I can do no more for you, but neither do I want to make trouble for anyone. In this quarter I have learned to mind my own business.”

His smile flashed again as he moved away.

Simon decided that he had had all he wanted for one night, and went home.

At breakfast the next morning he opened his guide-book again, turning this time to the section on “Old Hamburg.” The day was chilly and drizzly, more inducive to armchair exploration than to outdoor sightseeing, but he finally put on a trench coat and drove himself out nevertheless to take the recommended ramble. Following the suggested route with the aid of a map, he walked by way of the Rathausmarkt to the St Katharinen chapel, and thence to inspect the old mansions on the Deichstrasse overlooking the Nikolaifleet canal. Picturesque as they were, none of them came within range of matching the sketch he had seen on the parchment.

After a decent break for lunch, he went on up by the St Nikolai across to the Kleine Michaeliskirche and on to the great St Michaelis church, “Der Michael” as it is called by the citizens, which is still one of the landmarks of the town. But most of the other original buildings in that area had been razed by the bombings, and where there were not still empty spaces there were mostly modernistic shops and apartments. At the end of another long block to the west he found another church in the Zeughausmarkt, but it was a very obviously post-war restoration. Then he started back along Hiitten, and had a hesitant resurgence of hope as he came to a few old timber-frame houses there, and more on the Peterstrasse which branched off it. But nothing, corresponded even remotely with what he had seen on the map that came from the goblet, though he zigzagged and crisscrossed through every side street and alley in the precinct.

Of course, it would have been fairly fantastic if the result had been any different. Without benefit of the hieroglyphics which he had been unable to read, he might have tramped aimlessly around the city for days without finding a church and a house something like a primitive drawing which he had only seen for a few seconds. In fact, the instructions might have eliminated Hamburg altogether. They might have referred to any village in North Germany, anywhere along the Elbe. He had simply treated himself to some fairly fresh air and moderate exercise, while time went by that might have been spent more usefully. After all, he had come there to look for a man, not to be wild-goosed into a fanciful treasure hunt.

He had concentrated on only two clues: that the man was harmlessly nutty on antiques, and that the last communication from him had been a cut-out silhouette pasted on a blank card and mailed back to his daughter with scrawled greetings and the bare announcement that he was enjoying himself. Simon Templar had merely tried to weave a similar course in the hope that he might trip over a trail.

“I never promised to go straight after the War,” he had protested to the man who telephoned him from Washington, who was known only as Hamilton. “And anyhow I’m enjoying my retirement. Why don’t you nurse your own babies?”

“Just this once,” Hamilton wheedled. “This chap is very important. As a matter of fact, we haven’t even let out a word that he’s missing. If he’s actually gone over to the Other Side, it’s not going to be funny. We can’t write him off till we know there’s no chance of getting him back.”

And that was as stale a bait as any game fish ever rose to, Simon retrospected as he achieved his weary return at cocktail time to the embalming basement of the Vier Jahreszeiten.

And there, already sitting at the corner table which they had occupied some twenty-four hours earlier, was Eva.

She looked up and saw him, and smiled with a tremulous invitation which was a disintegrative switch from the atmosphere in which they had parted. But the Saint was not petty enough to turn that into a barrier.

He veered towards her as if they had had a date all the time, and he had only just seen her, and said: “Are we going Dutch again, or are you buying?”

“Please have a drink,” she said.

He ordered a double Peter Dawson, and left her to continue.

“I hoped you would come back here,” she said. “I was so ashamed of myself after last night. It’s terrible what money will do to your thinking. Can you ever forgive me?”

“That depends,” he said calmly. “How much am I offered?”

“I found the house,” she said. ‘“With the directions, it wasn’t so hard.”

He sat down.

“Where?”

“In St Pauli. I asked questions, and found out it was the oldest part of Hamburg. So I looked there, and I found it. But it was not for sale.”