Trust the Saint (9 page)

But Dr Javers was not to be diverted. As a medico, he may have been extremely competent and conscientious, sympathetic and indefatigable in affliction, dedicated to his profession and his patients; but as an individual he was one of those opinionated and aggressive types that can only assert themselves by reducing somebody else.

There are physical specimens of the same mentality who, with a certain reinforcement of alcohol, upon spotting a former or even current boxing champion in a bar, are impelled to try their best to pick a fight with him—an occupational hazard of which every career pugilist is acutely aware. What can they lose? If he declines the challenge, he is yellow. If the loud mouth can score with a sneak punch, he can boast about it for ever. But if the pro gives him the beating that he deserves, then the champ is nothing but a big bully picking on a poor helpless amateur. Even actors who portray tough-guy parts before movie or TV cameras, merely to support their wives and children, are the recurrent targets of hopped-up heroes who feel inspired to prove that these actors are not as tough as the script makes them.

The Saint was exposed to this psychosis on two planes— not merely the physical, but also the intellectual, which in several ways was harder to cope with, requiring more patience than muscular prowess. But he had learned to roll with the abstract punches as well as the other kind.

“Here’s the situation,” said Dr Javers. “The subject is a man thirty-eight years old, married, two children, more than averagely successful in business. Never had a serious illness in his life, but is somewhat overweight. His business calls for a lot of expense-account wining and dining. His only trouble is that the wining is often too much for him. He isn’t an alcoholic, and he holds it like a gentleman, but he goes to bed drunk two or three nights a week, regularly. I mean, when he lies down, it’s a fine question whether he falls asleep or passes out.”

“So?”

“One night, after taking a foreign buyer out to dinner and a couple of night clubs, he comes home and goes to bed in his dressing-room, as he always does when he’s out late. His wife is an understanding soul, and she doesn’t wait up for him. The next day, he has the usual hangover, only it’s much worse than usual.”

“Must have been an extra big night.”

“He has the splitting headache and the nausea, of course, but much worse than he can ever remember having them. And a bad cough, though he can’t remember whether he smoked a lot more than his normal quota of cigarettes. Naturally, he has no appetite for breakfast. But he doesn’t improve during the day. He feels worse all the time, he can’t eat, and his eyeballs turn yellow. The following day, his wife thinks he must have an attack of jaundice, and calls me in. By that time he has stopped passing urine. I do what I can, but in two days he is dead.”

“Another casualty to the expense-account system,” said the Saint. “His wife ought to sue the Government for instituting a tax system that forces business men to entertain each other to death just so they can have a little fun with their own profits before the tax collectors grab for them.”

Dr Javers frowned. It was evident that on top of everything else he disapproved of flippancy, at least when it detracted from the importance he attributed to his own conversation.

“I’d given him a complete check-up only three weeks before. His social-business drinking hadn’t been going on long enough to do any irreparable damage. His liver and kidneys were still in good shape. He showed no signs of any cardiac condition. In fact, I would have testified anywhere that there was nothing organically wrong with him.”

“Anyone can make a mistake, I suppose.”

“Not me, Mr Templar. Not that bad a mistake. In fact, to protect my own reputation, it was I who urged that there should be a post-mortem. The subject’s wife agreed, and I was completely vindicated. He had absolutely no chronic lesion or disease. If he had watched his diet, cut down his drinking, and taken a little exercise, there was no reason why he couldn’t have lived as long as any of us. But he died, actually, of acute kidney failure.”

“So he was poisoned.”

“Obviously. But what with?”

“I don’t know. I didn’t do it.”

“I’ll give you a little help. It was done with something that anyone can buy without any restriction, which you’d be likely to find in almost any house, and which isn’t generally considered poisonous at all. And generally speaking, it isn’t. This poisoning was a freakish accident. It depended on an entirely separate circumstance which I included in my summary, if you were paying close enough attention.”

Simon made a heroic effort to mute a sigh.

“I’m no toxicologist, doctor,” he said. “You tell me.”

“I’ll give you one more clue,” Javers said, with visibly expanding egocentric glee. “There was a heavy smear of lipstick on the collar of the coat he had worn on his last night out. But he insisted, and I believe him, that this was merely a souvenir of the floor show at one of the clubs to which he had taken his customer, which had one of those numbers where the chorus girls make fools of some of the men at the ringside tables.”

The Saint shrugged.

“I give up.”

Javers shook his head, and his round smug face shone with delight. In any sensibly ordered world, no further justification should have been needed for punching him in the nose.

“Oh, no, you don’t,” he said. “You still haven’t really tried. I want to find out how good you are. Think it over for a while.”

He moved away, chortling to himself, leaving Simon unexpectedly unhooked and joyfully free to set a course towards a prettily molded blonde in another corner whom he had been wistfully watching for some time.

Needless to say, the Saint did not think about Dr Javers’ conundrum for a moment; but Dr Javers was not so easily dismissed. An hour later he came all the way across the room to buttonhole Simon relentlessly again.

“Have you found the answer yet?”

“No,” Simon said patiently. “What is it?”

The doctor beamed at him gloatingly.

“You haven’t concentrated on it yet. I know, I’ve been watching you. Unfortunately I have to leave now, but I’m not letting you off so lightly. I’m going to leave you with the problem. It’ll torment you later, when you’re trying to go to sleep or waking up in the morning. And when you can’t stand it any longer, you can call me.” He handed Simon a card. “We’ll have a spot of dinner together and I’ll explain it to you. Or if you happen to have hit on that solution, I’ve got a few other scientific puzzles for you to sharpen your wits on. I expect I’ll hear from you one of these days.”

He departed again, chuckling fatly; and Simon put the card in his pocket and took a mental pledge never to look at it again or to waste another instant wondering what chemical coincidence Dr Javers’ patient could have succumbed to.

Experience should long since have taught him the intrinsic danger of such rash resolutions, but he felt that in this case at least there was nothing he could obtain from such an odious bore that would be worth the tedium and irritation of getting it. He held firmly to this erroneous assumption for several weeks, during which he was fully occupied with other matters that are recorded elsewhere in these annals, which left him no spare time to fret over tricky puzzles that did not immediately concern him.

The nudge of Destiny was still far from perceptible at first, one night in Paris when he came home very late to his suite at the George V, giving a perfunctory bonsoir to the anonymous cleaning woman whom he passed on her knees in the corridor. But he had hardly taken off his coat and tie when there was a timid touch on the buzzer at the outer door, and he opened it and recognized her more by her drab fatigue uniform than anything else.

“May I speak with Monsieur a moment?” she asked nervously.

“But certainly, Madame,” he replied cordially, in the same French, giving her the ceremonious title which Gallic gallantry may accord even to the humblest servant.

She came in, a gray woman toil-worn to nothing but skin and bones and indefatigable persistence, yet with a great dignity in her large deep-set eyes.

“I know who you are, Monsieur Templar,” she said, when she had shut the door. “Everyone talks about le Saint staying here. I have waited many nights for the chance to catch you at a good moment.”

“What is your trouble?” he asked.

“It is a long story, but I will try to make it short. My name is Yvonne Norval. I had a husband once, and his name was Norval, so that is also the name of my daughter Denise. But he died long ago, in Algeria, after the Liberation, which did not settle everything for the professional soldiers. Denise is almost sixteen now, and she was born the day after I was notified of his death.”

“A small consolation, perhaps. But it must have been hard for you to bring her up alone.”

“Very hard, Monsieur. The pay of a French sergeant is not much, at the best, and the pension of his widow is even less. But we had waited a long time for a child, always promising ourselves that if ever we were blessed with one it should have the best upbringing that we could give it, at any sacrifice. For neither of us had had much, but there must always be a time when any family can improve itself, if the parents are determined to pass on to their children a little more than they received. And after I had lost my husband, this hope became an obsession. I was already twenty-seven years old when Denise was born: I had had the best of my own life. But I still had a good figure and a pretty face, though you would not believe it now.”

It was hard to realize that simple arithmetic made her no more than forty-three. Anyone’s guess would have pegged her at least twelve years older. But the Saint said: “On the contrary, Madame, one sees that you must once have had great beauty, and now it has only matured, like a good wine.”

“I had, at any rate, something that men still wanted, for a little while,” she said calmly. “And since I no longer had any use for it, I gave the benefit to Denise.”

“Je vous ecoute,” said the Saint. “Please sit down. At an hour like this, I have nothing but time.”

This was a poetic exaggeration, but on this occasion he did not feel that the time was wasted.

The tale that he heard might have sounded to a cynic like the plot for a soap opera that no soap manufacturer would dare to sponsor, but it was told with a stoical dispassionateness that gave it a quality of classic tragedy.

Yvonne Norval had chosen the oldest profession with no illusions, solely on her coldblooded estimate that there was no other in which she was qualified to earn so much money so quickly. But unlike most of her sisters in it, she had hoarded every franc that she could. She spent nothing on personal luxuries, and no more than the essential minimum on such decorative vanities as were necessary to attract her clientele; her spartan willpower and singleness of purpose substituted for the expensive stimulus of drink and drugs which many others depended on to numb their self-disgust; and with the cunning and ferocity of a tigress she evaded or fought off the approaches of the pimps who would have helped themselves to the largest share of her income. She did not say it all in those words, but the facts were implicit in her own austere way of telling it.

In seven years of this rigorous dedication, she had expended the last saleable vestige of her original stock-in-trade, but she had accumulated a fund that would guarantee her daughter’s care and education for the next ten, on a much higher level even than she could have hoped for if a fellagha sniper’s aim had been a little less deadly.

She placed the child in a convent school of excellent standing, representing herself as the widow of an Army officer whose snobbish family had sternly refused to recognize their marriage or its offspring. Too proud to plead for the charity of these intransigent in-laws, she was depositing everything he had left her to prepay the raising of their daughter in the style to which she should be entitled: the fact that she herself would thus be forced to take any menial job for her own subsistence was not to cloud the childhood of Denise. When the little girl became aware enough to ask why Yvonne visited her so seldom and never took her home, she would be told that her mother was married again, to a man who was so intensely jealous of the past that he refused ever to see the fruit of it; perhaps one day he would relent, her mother was working on him constantly, but the day had not dawned yet. The sympathetic nuns had agreed to lend their silence to the deception.

“They would have needed a very tolerant confessor themselves,” said the Saint, “if they had not been moved by such a sacrifice as yours. But after this, did you still have more trouble?”

“Like you, Monsieur, I thought it was ended. But if it had been, I should not be talking to you. Instead, it was only beginning. After all, there was a maquereau I did not escape.”

His given name was Pierre, and in the half-world where he belonged he was known as Pierrot-le-Fut—a gross arrogant beast of the type that are loosely called Apaches, but not because there is anything noble in their savagery. Of surnames he had a variety; but once when he was picked up in a police dragnet it had amused him to call himself Pierre Norval—that same day, Yvonne had refused his “protection” for the nineteenth time, in particularly graphic phrases, and under the influence of a stolen bottle of Calvados it had struck him as a brilliantly subtle retaliation. Even afterwards, he was still entranced with his own malicious genius, and continued to use the name, grumbling obscure crudities about his unfaithful “wife.”

In a psychological reaction that has afflicted many better men, rejection had not quenched his interest but had inflamed it. He did not think for an instant that she was irresistible or irreplaceable, he knew a dozen girls who were prettier or better built or more entertaining, but that abstract estimate made it an even more intolerable affront to his vanity that Yvonne should turn him down. It had become a point of honor that he must subjugate her, so that in his own time he could humiliate her as she had humiliated him. And to this objective he had devoted more tenacity and ingenuity than he would ever have squandered on any legitimate enterprise.