Trust the Saint (7 page)

This was the moment of truth—to borrow a phrase from the cliches of tauromachy. The inevitable preliminary chit-chat had run its course, perhaps rather rapidly, in spite of the convenient restaurant punctuations for sampling and savoring. But now he was going to be cut off from the easier evasions. It was imminent in the velvet glow of her faintly Mongolian eyes.

He took a carefully copious sip of the rose which he had ordered for their accompaniment—it was a Chateau Ste Roseline, delicately fruity, and an uncommon find in England, where the warm weather which fosters the appreciation of such summery wines is normally rarer yet.

“Tell me the worst,” he said.

“I’d like to have an affair with you.”

Simon Templar put down his glass with extreme caution.

“Does Russell Vail know about this?” he inquired.

“Yesterday I might have cared. Today I don’t.”

“But he kills lions. Even elephants.”

“But you’ve killed men, haven’t you?”

“Not for fun.”

“But you have. And you will again—if someone doesn’t do it to you first. That makes you bigger than either of them.”

“I’m glad you brought in that ‘either,’” said the Saint. “Let’s not forget your husband. Sometimes there’s another angle on the ‘till death do us part’ bit, especially among Latins. Sometimes the husband provides the necessary death—and it isn’t his own.”

“Don’t try to pretend that frightens you.”

“Some things do. Like the idea that you must be serious.”

“Because I don’t make any bones about it? Life is too short. This is something I want, and I hoped you might like it too. Why not make it easy for you?”

It is of course well known to all readers of noble and uplifting fiction, if there still are any, that any self-respecting hero’s response to such a proposition is to smack the tramp sharply on the rump and tell her to go peddle her assets elsewhere. But how much saintliness can be reasonably asked of anyone, when the tramp happens to be an Iantha Lamb?

“May I think it over?” said the Saint.

She nodded calmly.

“But don’t think too long—I’m leaving for Rome next week to start a picture. Unless you’re in a travelling mood.”

He wondered long afterwards what decision he might eventually have come to—he was not hidebound by any of the usual conventions, but there was something about the manner of her offer which reminded him uncomfortably of a decadent empress requesting the services of a vassal, a request that was almost a command and at the same time a favor. The impediment to reacting with proper indignation was that she actually was a kind of empress in the echelons of the twentieth century in which he was a kind of buccaneer, and her favor was an impossible pipe dream for which millions of men would have deliriously given everything that they owned. In all honesty, he sometimes thought that the only thing that stopped him from capitulating on the spot might have been an absurd reluctance to be the pushover which she had so many good reasons to expect.

More fortunately than he probably deserved, the dilemma was resolved for him that time at what could have been the last moment before it became crucial.

Two evenings later when he returned to Grosvenor House from the movie where he had finished the afternoon —it was a recent Iantha Lamb picture for which a billboard had caught his eye after lunch, and the curiosity of seeing it in this peculiar context had been too much for him—he found three telephone messages in his box recording attempts by Russell Vail to reach him during the day. The latest was time-stamped only minutes before, and Simon yielded to another curiosity and called the number it asked him to directly he got to his room.

“Glad I got you at last,” boomed the hunter. “It’s a bit late, I know, but I was hoping you could have dinner with us tonight. I mean, with Iantha and Elias. We all thought you’d make a good fourth.”

Simon reserved the observation that only an Iantha Lamb would consider herself and three men a good foursome. The breezy tone of Vail’s voice seemed to dispose of a possibility which he had been half prepared for when he returned the call, that Vail might have had the phantasmagoric notion of warning him that trespassing rights on Ellas Usebio’s marital property were already bespoke. He had nothing else planned; and seeing Iantha again under the maximum conceivable chaperonage might help, somehow, to produce a solution to the problem which he had been trying to ignore.

“That’s nice of you,” he said.

“Fine. Suppose we pick you up at seven.”

“I’ll be downstairs.”

“Don’t dress up. We thought we’d drive out to a place in the country.”

“Suits me.”

“And one other thing. Could you bring along some of your professional gear—I mean, something to pick a lock with?”

The Saint’s eyebrows edged upwards.

“There’s something funny about this telephone,” he said. “It sounded exactly as if you said you wanted me to bring something to pick a lock with.”

“I did.”

“What sort of lock?”

“On a big iron gate. Don’t worry—we’re not going to steal anything. We’ll explain it all later. But bring something. See you at seven.”

Simon was waiting in the lobby when Vail came in, shook hands heartily, and looked around as if in search of some luggage that the Saint should have had with him.

“You didn’t think I was joking about that lock, did you, old boy?”

Simon touched his breast pocket.

“If this gate isn’t on a bank vault, I can probably handle it. If you’ve got a good reason.”

“Later. I think it might appeal to you. But first, dinner.”

In the back courtyard there was a shiny new Jaguar with Iantha Lamb at the wheel and a vacant seat beside her. As Simon approached it, he saw that Elias Usebio was already sitting in the back. The commissionaire opened the off-side front door with a flourish, and Vail nudged the Saint forward.

“The place of honor for the guest of honor,” he said. “No argument, old boy. That’s the drill.”

Simon had no desire to argue. He made himself comfortable beside Iantha, and hoped that her husband and Vail were equally relaxed in the back seat.

“Are you afraid of women drivers?” she asked, as they ploughed into the traffic complex of Marble Arch.

“Not so much when I’m on their side,” he replied. “And when there’s nothing to worry about but their own car— this is your own, I hope?”

“Elias just gave it to me the other day, to take to Rome. You notice it’s built for driving on the right.”

“I’m glad you’ve noticed that they drive on the left here,” he said. “Elias might have to put off his retirement to buy you another if you broke it up.”

“He wouldn’t, but I would. He’s the rich one. He’s earned a lot more than I have, and hardly spent a peseta.”

“I was not brought up to treat money like old newspapers,” said Usebio gently.

“Or to pay ninety per cent income taxes,” retorted his wife.

They were heading north, and the car moved as if it held the road only because it was perfectly disciplined, not because it didn’t have the power to lift up and fly if it wanted to.

“Where are we going?” Simon inquired presently.

“St Albans, first,” said Iantha.

He thought that over.

“They’ve got some Roman ruins there,” he said, “but you’ll see much better ones when you get to Rome.”

“They’ve got a good pub, too, Russell says.”

“Is it so exclusive that we have to break into it?”

“We’ll tell you about the lock business afterwards,” said Vail. “We’ll give you a good dinner first, and then see if you feel like tackling it.”

The pub was quaintly named The Noke, but it had the air of substantial serenity which the connoisseur of English hostelries recognizes at once. They had cold dry martinis in the pleasantly timbered bar, except for Usebio, who would take nothing stronger than St Raphael. They ordered smoked salmon and roast grouse, which were excellent, as was the Chateau Smith Haut Lafitte which the proprietor suggested.

The conversation was brightly enjoyable but totally unimportant; only Usebio seemed a little apart and preoccupied with serious private thoughts, though his rare responses were unfailingly courteous. It would have been a perfectly pleasant and unquoteworthy dinner party except for the enigma that went with it, the motivation under which Simon had been included, which nobody would refer to any more. He had to reach back deliberately for the first psychic hunch he had had, and remind himself that both the other men were dealers in death by training and vocation.

For Russell Vail, in the ultimate analysis, was only a kind of professional butcher glamorized by the fact that he used a rifle instead of an ax; and the word matador, in Spanish, most literally means simply “killer” …

Simon could only wait; and at last Vail paid the bill and they went outside. It was one of those cloudless summer nights that England can produce sometimes, in spite of her inclement reputation and the bad luck that dogs her meteorologists on the rare occasions when they venture to predict one, with a full moon that hung overhead like a stage lantern. Vail looked up at it with satisfaction, and said: “It couldn’t be brighter in Kenya. Let’s make the most of it.”

As they approached the car, Iantha said to the Saint: “Would you like to drive?”

Without waiting for an answer, she slipped into the other front seat. Simon got in behind the wheel, and moved his seat back. . “Where to?”

I’ll have to look at the map.”

She directed him out on A5, the highway historically known by the oddly prosaic name of Watling Street, which runs northwestwards across the countryside almost as straight as the proverbial crow’s flight all the way to Shrewsbury, on foundations laid out by Roman surveyors in the days when Caesar’s legions knew St Albans by the name of Verulam. Simon bore down with his right foot, and the Jaguar responded in a way that reminded him of the mighty Hirondel which had been his beloved chariot in the young days of more uncomplicated adventure. But he was only able to enjoy that reminiscent exhilaration for a few minutes and half again as many miles before Iantha was warning him to slow down for a turning on the left. He saw the signpost as they swung into the secondary road, and had a wild preposterous presentiment that every sober habit of thought tried to reject. But after a couple more turnings in a couple of more crooked miles taken at more sedate speed, he knew that this was going to be a bad night for sober thinking when Russell Vail leaned forward behind him and said: “I think you’d better stop about here, old boy, wherever you can find a good place to park.”

Simon brought the car to a stop, and said: “Is this where you want me to pick a lock?”

“We’re close enough. We’d better walk the rest of the way.”

“To Whipsnade?”

“You guessed it.”

Whipsnade, it must be explained here for the benefit of readers who are not familiar with the British scene, is the pride of England’s zoos—a park in which an assortment of animals acclimated from every continent on the globe roam in their suitably landscaped enclosures, behind bars and moats as tidily camouflaged as possible, from which sanctuaries they are privileged to study human beings in a semi-natural habitat.

The Saint did not move.

“I suppose it might be fun to steal a giraffe,” he said. “But it’ll be hard work getting it in this car.”

“We aren’t going to steal anything.”

“Then you’ll have to tell me what the game is, before we go any farther.”

Elias Usebio stirred and said: “We are going to settle an argument—the argument we began the other night. He has challenged me to try my cape against an animal with horns that he will choose.”

“And what does he do to prove anything?”

“I’ll tackle anything with claws that Elias chooses, just using a native spear,” answered Vail.

“And I thought there ought to be an impartial umpire, like when we picked you at the White Elephant,” said Iantha. “Besides, we couldn’t think of anyone else who could get us in.”

For a few seconds Simon Templar was silent. The idea was as outrageous as anything he had ever heard, but that was not enough to take his breath away. Contemplated as a pure spectacle, it was an invitation that no epicure of thrills could have refused. The impudence of the assumption that he would be a party to its illicit procurement he could shrug off. He hesitated only while he thought of the reasons why it might be an honest and Saintly duty to put a stop to the whole project; and in the same space of time he realized absolutely that the contest would be decided sometime, somewhere, with or without him, and that the best thing he could do was to be there.

“All right,” he said. “But we can’t do it by the front gates.”

“You mean you can’t?” said Vail, in the jovially disparaging tone which he used so masterfully, which almost dared you to reveal yourself such a lout as to take offense. “And I’d heard you were the greatest cracksman since Raffles.”

“I’m better,” Simon said calmly. “But the main entrance would just be stupid. There are keepers’ cottages all around there. The only animals we’d be likely to get near would be watchdogs.”

“There speaks the expert. But I’m sure he’d know how to cope with the problem.”

“I was there once, years ago,” said the Saint slowly. “I remember that on the far side of the grounds, that would be to the northeast, there were some enclosures that ran downhill, and you could walk around them, and then you were outside on a long slope with a fine view but only fields and pastures between you and a road I could see at the bottom. I think, since we’ve got to walk anyhow, if we found that road, there wouldn’t be much to stop us hiking up the hill and into the back of the park.”

Iantha handed him the map, and he studied it under the dashboard light.

Then he drove on again.

Nobody spoke another word before he stopped a second time. He got out and studied the skyline over a gate.

“This ought to do it,” he said.

Usebio opened the trunk of the car and took out a folded bundle of cloth, and a short leaf-bladed spear which he handed to Vail. Simon unlatched the gate, and they followed Iantha through.

It was a steady climb of about three-quarters of a mile over rough grass. Simon set a pace which was intentionally geared to his estimate of the legs of Usebio, whom he didn’t want to exhaust before his trial; he figured that no exertion of that kind should bother Vail. Iantha Lamb, who had worn a loose peasant skirt and flat-heeled shoes which he now realized must have been chosen less for modest simplicity than in shrewd preparedness for any eventuality, kept up without complaining. They negotiated three wire fences on the way, without much difficulty: after the first fifty yards, the moonlight seemed bright enough for a night football game.