Trust the Saint (5 page)

“Very likely.”

“But I rang the doorbell. The man was most unpleasant. He said he was happy there, and he didn’t want to sell his house to anyone. Then I had a wonderful idea. I said I was from a movie company, and we would like to rent it for a little while, just for a few shots … Then he began to be a little interested.”

Simon’s drink came, and he raised the glass to her and sipped.

“And you made a deal?”

“Well, yes and no. He talked a lot about what a nuisance it would be for him to move out, and the personal things he’d have to pack up, and the damage that might be done, and his invalid mother who would be so upset at being moved, and why should he have so much inconvenience when he was not hard up for a few marks. But at last he said that we could rent it for two weeks for fifty thousand marks.”

Simon’s lips shaped a whistle.

“Twelve thousand five hundred dollars—that’s probably half what the house is worth.”

“At least a quarter. But he said it would be as much trouble for him as if he was renting it for two years, and he would not do it for anything less. And he said for a movie company it was a bargain, it would cost them twice as much to build a reproduction, and there was something wrong with them if they couldn’t spend such a small amount. I could see that nothing would change him. I know how stubborn a German can be.”

“And I know you’re a good bargainer,” he said. “So that’s what you’re going to have to pay?”

“I told him I would have to talk to the producer. I shall have to talk to somebody. I told you, I am only a girl who works in an office. Perhaps with all my savings I can find ten thousand marks. I don’t have rich friends. I was such a fool to think I could do this all by myself.”

He gazed at her thoughtfully.

“So you’d like to go back to our old deal, and go Dutch again?”

“If you could forgive me. And you have the best right to share the treasure.”

He shook his head callously.

“We still haven’t found any treasure. But if you want to start again now, with me putting up four marks to your one, we’re not fifty-fifty any more. We’re eighty-twenty.”

Her eyes swam before she covered them.

“All right,” she said. “It’s my own fault. But I can’t come as close as this and give it all up. I accept.”

“And I hope it’s a lesson to you,” he said virtuously. “But before I put up this dough, I’d like to see the house and be sure you’ve found the right one. That is, if you think you can trust me now not to burgle it on my own.”

“I will show it to you whenever you like.”

“Why not now?” said the Saint. “Pay for the drinks, and let’s go.”

They went out and took a taxi. She gave the driver directions in which he heard “St Pauli Hafenstrasse”; the route seemed at first to be heading towards the Reeper-bahn again, but turned down towards the river and the docks. When they stopped and got out, he could see the spire of a small church, but it was not at all individual: almost any church with a steeple would have had some resemblance to the one in the map-drawing.

“It is just along here, on the Pinnasberg,” Eva said.

There was no question about the house when he saw it. Although it was wedged into a single facade by its neighbors on either side, instead of standing alone, the complicated woodwork and the steep gabled roof capped with the unique round tower were exactly as he recalled them from the crude sketch he had seen the night before, even before Eva produced the parchment and unrolled it for him again under a street lamp.

“It certainly seems to fit,” he admitted to her, and had to admit to himself a way-down temblor of excitement that was no longer such a frequent symptom to him as it had been in less hardened days.

“It does—even the distance and direction from the church. I measured them.”

“What does all the writing say?”

“The first part tells where the house is. It seems easy to you now, of course, but it was not easy for me the first time to know where he was talking about. In five hundred years, there are many changes … Then it tells what to look for inside the house. The treasure is in one of the cellars which lead towards the river, in a closed-up tunnel. He gives all the measurements and the marks to follow.”

Simon surveyed the edifice broodingly.

“I still say the rent is inflated,” he remarked. “It might be much cheaper to burgle the joint.”

“But then we would still have to dig. It would take more than just a few minutes, and suppose we were caught? The other way, we have plenty of time, two weeks, and nothing to worry about.”

“Except fifty thousand marks,” said the Saint. “Before we put our shirts on this, let’s be certain there isn’t any other way to swing it.”

Without waiting for her compliance, he crossed the street and mounted the steps and hammered on the door of the house they had been looking at. She caught up with him before it opened.

“What are you going to do?”

“See if we can’t make a better deal. Just introduce me as your boss the movie producer.”

It was Franz Kolben himself who opened the door, for that was where he lived, and he had made it a most profitable residence since he took over the management from his father-in-law, with the help of such intermittent interruptions. Although he had not expected a visit at precisely that moment, he was quick to put on the curmudgeonly expression which it called for.

“Excuse me for disturbing you at such an hour,” said the Saint, when Eva had made the necessary presentation, “but I must call Hollywood tonight and give them all the information.”

“Come in,” Kolben said grudgingly.

“You might be interested to know that the new star we’re introducing in this picture is a German,” Simon chattered on, once they were all inside the hallway and the street door was closed again. “I wonder if you’d recognize him.”

He took from his pocket the card with a silhouette on it which was not his own, and showed it. Kolben scarcely batted an eyelid—but to Simon Templar a much more infinitesimal flicker of reaction than that would have been enough. Without an instant’s hesitation, without even waiting for any verbal rejoinder, he brought his fist up under Kolben’s helpfully extended chin in the shortest and wickedest uppercut in the business.

“Have you gone mad?” Eva gasped, as Kolben descended to the floor with the precipitate docility which the standard cliche compares with being poleaxed.

“That’s what I’ll have to try to sell the jury, darling, if I’m wrong about this,” Simon answered; and as she suddenly flew at him he hit her reluctantly but accurately on the back of the neck with the minimum of essential force.

That gave him a few minutes with nothing to worry about except the chance that they might have other friends in the house; but as he sped swiftly and softly from room to room he found no one except, at last, trussed to an iron cot in an attic, the one man he had been seeking.

“Herr Roeding,” he said reproachfully, as he was removing the cords and adhesive tape, “it’s all right for you to poke around in antique shops and accept free guide-books, but a research chemist of your age shouldn’t escort young women to the hot spots of the Reeperbahn.”

“They are all in it together,” spluttered the victim. “Uhrmeister who gives out the books, his daughter who wants to see all the shows, the uncle who is a pawnbroker, and her husband who owns this house. And that story about Stortebeker’s goblet—”

“I’ve heard it,” said the Saint. “It’s very well done. And if you’d been the ordinary sucker it would only have cost you a few thousand marks. But Kolben recognized you or your name, or both, and he must have realized that you were worth more on the hoof than as just another disappointed treasure-hunter. If a pal of ours in Washington hadn’t asked me to give it a whirl before it was officially reported that you were missing and might have defected under the Wall, you would probably have been smuggled out on the next freighter to Russia.”

Ernst Roeding massaged some color back into his hands, but his face was still gray.

“Who are you?” he asked.

BIGGER

GAME

THE BIGGER GAME

Copyright Š 1961 by Fiction Publishing Company

Because I once translated the autobiography of Juan Belmonte, one of the historically greatest bullfighters of them all, with what I hoped was an authoritative introduction, Simon Templar has by association been assumed by some readers to be an aficionado himself, or even a graduate practitioner of the art. In one interview an English reporter, who had received disappointing replies to a few leading questions designed to show up the Saint’s devotion to bullfighting, which could in print be either pilloried or ridiculed according to the delightful convention of most English interviewing, complained peevishly: “You sound so lukewarm about it—have you lost your aficion?”

“I just haven’t been in any of the countries where they do it, lately,” said the Saint.

“And you don’t miss it? I’d have expected a man like you to want to try it himself, like other people take up golf. Haven’t you ever tried to stand up to a bull with a cape?”

“If I told you about my greatest moment in that line,” said the Saint equably, “you’d either splash it all over your paper, which would be a breach of confidence, or you wouldn’t believe me, which would hurt my pride. So let’s save us both embarrassment by trying some other subject. After all, burglars can make just as big headlines as bullfighters.”

In simple fact, Simon had tried his cape-work against very young bulls at round-up time on the fincas of a couple of breeders whom he had known in Spain, and his natural grace and superb reflexes had caused some of the privileged observers to proclaim perhaps extravagantly that he was a born phenomenon whose refusal to make it a career would be a disaster through which tauromachy would continue irreparably impoverished. But he had never taken any but a spectator’s part in any formal corrida, and in spite of the acidulous journalist’s imputation he had never felt any ambition to.

Nevertheless the Saint’s last answer, like many of his smoothest evasions, was only a bald truth which it privately amused him to veil and confuse.

He did actually, once, make a quite such as no matador up to and including Belmonte ever dreamed of, or is likely to dream of since, except in nightmares.

(I must intrude myself again here to mention that what I have just italicized has no connection with the English word “quite,” meaning “moderately,” as in a phrase like “quite nice,” often pronounced “quaite naice”: this one is pronounced in Spain something like key-tay, and in a formal bullfight refers to the work of luring the bull away from a fallen picador, the lancer on the horse which the bull has felled, despite the squeals of Anglo-Saxon tourists in the stands, who as charter members of some SPCA do not regard human beings as animals that should not be cruelly treated. Aficionados, who may be more sentimental, rate the quite as a rather valiant job, sometimes almost heroic.)

Simon Templar really did think of the hunting of criminals sometimes as a sport, and infinitely more exciting than the pursuit of the much less cunning and dangerous quarry which satisfies other self-designated sportsmen. But just as devotees of the more generally accepted versions of the chase rate some forms as more challenging than others, to the Saint one of the supreme refinements was to spot the villain before he became the answer to a whodunit, or to anticipate the crime before the perpetrators had finally decided to commit it.

Sometimes, Simon maintained, a man is ineluctably marked for murder. He may be the political candidate with the reform platform in a town that doesn’t want to be reformed, the crook who has decided to squeal on a powerful racket, the inconvenient husband who stands in the way of somebody’s hot ideas for a reshuffle—there are many obvious possibilities. But since murders, like marriages, require at least two participants, the consummation requires an inexorable aggressor as well as a predestined victim.

There was an evening in London when the Saint felt sure he had met both together. This was at the bar of the White Elephant, which was a supper club where in those days you might run into anyone that you read about in the papers, and frequently did.

The slight swarthy man with the burning black eyes and the ugly scar on one temple he recognized instantly as Elias Usebio, who had been called the greatest matador since Manolete: Simon had never seen him in the ring, but that scimitar profile had been widely caricatured, especially since his sensational wedding and equally publicized retirement a year ago.

Iantha Lamb, whom he had married, or who had married him, would have been ecstatically recognized by many millions more to whom he was only a name which they were still very vague about, such being the more international scope of motion pictures and their attendant publicity. Iantha Lamb was a movie star, if not of the first magnitude, at least a luminary to gladden the box office. Although there were sourpouts who sneered that she acted better in bedrooms than before cameras, except for certain films which her first husband had spent a small fortune buying up, anything that she did was news and she had worked hard at making it newsworthy. Her assiduously advertised weakness was for men who lived with death at their elbow—racing drivers, lion tamers, deep-sea divers, test pilots, soldiers of fortune, young men on a flying trapeze, anyone whose luck had more chances to run out than that of most people. Her wild romances with these statistical bad bets had filled more columns of print than her thespian achievements ever earned, culminating with her marriage to Usebio, the torero who until he cut his pigtail had been generally rated most likely to become an obituary.

“You were sensational then, Elias,” she said almost wistfully. “Nobody who hasn’t seen you in a corrida can imagine how wonderful you were. Every time you stepped out into the ring, I died. But you always lived, and that was more wonderful still.”

“And now I expect to go on living,” Usebio said indulgently, “until I am knocked down on the sidewalk by a runaway bus.”

“Does that mean that you lost your nerve?” asked the other man who was with them.