The Saint Around the World (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “It couldn’t be love, could it?”

  “It could be, I suppose. But he’s over sixty and she’s only twenty-five.”

  “I wouldn’t think a guy like that could be sold on anything so conventional as marriage.”

  “I know Free Love was another thing that he used to be steamed up about. But you never can tell,” Mr McGeorge said pessimistically. “Anyhow, that’s another reason why I thought I’d better go and look things over.”

  Simon needed no diagrams to visualize the threat that a belated romance could pose to a man in the position to which George McGeorge seemed so perfectly adapted, and he rather admired the other’s brazen candor.

  It was the first time that the Saint, whose years of adventure had taken him to some of the most outlandish reaches of the globe and whose fund of uncommon lore was sometimes astounding in its range, had ever heard of the Ile du Levant and its peculiar tradition; but even for him there could still be something new under the sun, and it was just as likely to be something so close to familiar settings that he might never have noticed it if he had not stubbed his toe on it. Now that he had stumbled on it, a closer look became almost mandatory. The idea of visiting such an informally accessible Eden intrigued him, not pruriently, but with a most human curiosity. The privilege of simultaneously watching the reactions to it of such a person as George McGeorge was an added spice, while the possibility of also observing the by-play between Mr McGeorge and his Uncle Waldo made it completely irresistible.

  Simon Templar gazed dreamily out at the island, still visible beyond the terrace where they sat, and said, “I wouldn’t miss that island if I had to swim there. Maybe we could go over together.”

  Which was how they came to be sitting side by side on a bench on the good ship Flèche d’Or, watching the rugged slopes of the island loom rapidly nearer over the intense blue water.

  The little ferry, which still had the sturdy lines of a converted fishing boat, was dressed with gay strings of flags from the masthead to the bow and stern, which gave it a very gallant and festive air. In the pilot house, the captain, who called himself on his own handbills Loulou the Corsair, was eating breakfast with his crew of two men and a boy, all of them stripped to the waist, barefooted, and with brightly colored bandannas knotted around their heads. This meal, Simon had noted with some awe, consisted of a long loaf of bread, a wedge of blue cheese, a cylinder of salami, and a large slab of raw beef, from all of which they alternately hacked off generous hunks with their clasp knives, nibbling whole cloves of garlic between mouthfuls and washing them down with swigs from a bottle of white wine—a heroic performance which would have been a grave shock to those who have been brought up to believe that the French working man embarks on a full morning’s toil with no more sustenance than a croissant and a cup of coffee. The entire combination, with the sunlight sparkling on harmless little waves, gave the voyage a play-acting zest that could not possibly attend a ferry trip, anywhere else in the world.

  The other passengers, some thirty of them on that early run, could mostly be separated without much difficulty into two broad groups. One, which could be distinguished by generally paler skins, a subtle tendency towards superfluities of apparel or ornament, and a state of ill-concealed trepidation or excitement, consisted of the inevitable sightseers and perhaps a few tentative recruits. The others, usually marked by a deep tan, a simpler carelessness of costume, and a more earnest or relaxed demeanour, could be picked out with relative certainty as habitués or at least full-fledged initiates. The Saint, with his bronzed skin, in the cotton shirt and old shorts and espadrilles which he had sensibly chosen to wear, could easily have passed for one of the latter. McGeorge, on the other hand, was easily the most conspicuous example of the first category. Anyone seeing them together would have assumed at once that it was the Saint who had business on the island, and that McGeorge was the one who had decided on the spur of the moment to come along for the ride—and was now vainly regretting the impulse. It was a switch that Simon found highly diverting.

  None of the passengers had yet disrobed to any unorthodox extent, but McGeorge did not seem to derive much solace from the delay. His eyes had become fixed on a flattish promontory of rock that stood out a little towards them from the body of the island. On it, tiny figures could be seen lying or strolling and sometimes plunging into the water like seals.

  “Would you,” McGeorge asked huskily, at last, “say that they had anything on?”

  Simon kept his eyes focused as the point drew steadily nearer.

  “No,” he said at last. “I wouldn’t.”

  “Oh, Lord,” said McGeorge, as if right up until that moment he had been clutching a wisp of hope that all the reports about the Ile du Levant might still somehow prove to be a myth.

  The ferry headed into the narrow gap between Levant and Port-Cros, and began to swing in towards the eastern island. Loulou personally took the wheel again and tooted a cheerful annunciatory blast on the ship’s horn, while his fellow Corsairs dispersed efficiently fore and after to make ready the mooring lines.

  From the water, dusky green slopes of brush and stunted pine rose steeply to a rounded summit some four hundred feet above. All over the hillside, the tile roofs and tinted walls of villas and more considerable buildings broke through the scrub at decent intervals, while near the peak, somewhat unexpectedly, stood out the unmistakable lines of a modern chapel. The ferry kept turning still more sharply in towards a little cove that opened suddenly ahead of it, with the rusty hull of an old ship sunk across part of the entrance for a breakwater, and the reassuringly normal-looking windows and terrace of a typical small restaurant overlooking it from a ledge just a short climb above the jetty. To the right of the port as they approached it, the lower slopes were dotted with white and orange glimpses of scores of little tents, and on the rocks below the outlines of basking campers could be made out in just enough detail to establish that they were letting no artificial obstructions come between them and the health-giving rays of the sun.

  “Does your uncle live in one of those?” Simon asked, indicating the canvas settlement.

  “I’m sure he’d prefer to,” said McGeorge glumly. “But he moved all his belongings here, most of them being books, so he had to break down and put a roof over them.”

  To make his aspect even more incongruous, he was clutching a large and sinister-looking weapon which resembled a cross between an ancient arquebus and something out of a science-fiction armoury. From one end of it protruded the sharp end of a wickedly barbed spear, which the rest of the contraption was apparently designed to propel.

  “What can you take for a present to a simple-life maniac?” he had explained plaintively, when he showed up with it at their embarcation. “It seems that about their only entertainment here is swimming around in diving masks and shooting at wretched little fish. So I went to a tackle shop and asked them what was the latest tool for it, and they sold me this beastly thing.”

  A sizeable and lively congregation stood waiting on the quay. Some of them who were more or less conventionally clothed, but sun-scorched, could be identified by their baggage as visitors who were waiting to end their stay with the return trip of the ferry. The rest were obviously residents or at least seasoned sojourners who had come to meet newly arriving friends, to collect packages from the mainland, or simply to inspect the latest specimens from the outside world. A few of those wore bikinis that would have satisfied the modest requirements of any ordinary French beach, but as the distance lessened from yards to feet and eventually to inches, it became eye-fillingly manifest that the majority were fully content with the minuscule G-string confection prescribed for wear within the city limits.

  “This is just like landing on one of those South Sea islands you used to read about,” Simon remarked, surveying the reception committee with interest. “Only these natives are a hell of a lot better-looking.”

  It was indeed hard to realize that they had voyaged less than an hour from Le
Lavandou, and already Loulou’s assistant Corsairs had jumped ashore and were pushing through the array of bare breasts and buttocks to make fast their lines with all the indifference of long familiarity. Mr McGeorge stood gripped in a kind of paralysis in which only his eyes moved, and they swiveled frantically as if torn between the compulsion to see everything and a terror of being caught staring at anything. But at last they found something that they seemed to feel they could safely rest on.

  “There’s Uncle Waldo,” he croaked.

  Simon followed him on to the dock without the slightest forboding of what that innocent visit was to lead to.

  3

  Mr Waldo Oddington was a rather tall wiry man whose age was not too evident even to the extremely complete scrutiny which his nominal garment permitted. His hair, which was scanty, was an indefinite gray, and although his nut-brown body might have been rated on the scrawny side by some esthetic standards, its muscles looked hard and his abdomen was as flat as a board. He wrung his nephew’s hand with a vigor that made Mr McGeorge wince.

  “Good to see you, my dear boy! And it’s about time. I thought you’d never run out of excuses.” His very bright hazel eyes examined McGeorge more closely. “What’s the matter with you? Have you just been sick?”

  “No, we had a perfectly smooth crossing.”

  “Then why are you so pale?”

  “London, you know,” said McGeorge vaguely. “And New York before that.”

  “Terrible places,” pronounced Mr Oddington. “Millions of imbeciles making themselves neurotic with the noise and bustle, and poisoning themselves with all the fumes they breathe. Why do you think their insanity rate and their lung cancer rate keep rising in almost parallel lines on a graph?”

  Not having any ready answer to this, McGeorge somewhat desperately proffered the spear gun he had been holding.

  “I brought this along for you, Uncle,” he said. “I hope you like it.”

  “Now that’s what I call using your head.” Mr Oddington hefted the weapon and beamed over it like a ten-year-old who has just been presented with the newest model Space Patrol disintegrator. “I really appreciate it, dear boy. We’ll try it out this afternoon…But I know you’ve been dying to meet Nadine.”

  He pushed forward a fair-haired golden-skinned girl who had been standing near him. She smiled, making dimples in a mischievous pretty face.

  “How do you do,” she said, with only a little accent.

  Mr McGeorge did not look as if he had been dying to meet her, but as if he might well die from doing it. His savoir faire, which probably no normal contretemps could have ruffled, was plainly unequal to the requirements of being presented to a shapely young woman who seemed quite unconscious of wearing nothing above the waist. A crimson flush swept over his face, and he groped blindly for her outstretched hand with his eyes fixed glazedly on a point just over the top of her head.

  As hastily as possible, he turned to grab the Saint’s arm, as if it had frantically occurred to him that Simon might escape.

  “I’d like you to meet a friend of mine—Mr Templar. I brought him with me. I hope you don’t mind.”

  “Delighted!” Mr Oddington surveyed the Saint’s lean broad-shouldered lines with undisguised approval. “You look very fit, sir. I’m sure we’ll have a lot in common. And you must meet Mademoiselle Zeult.”

  Simon shook hands with the girl, without especially restricting himself on where he looked. It seemed to him that she was no more displeased than any fully clothed woman would have been who sensed that her figure was being admired.

  “Well, we don’t have to stand around here,” Mr Oddington said briskly. “I expect you’re dying to get out of those clothes.”

  “Oh, no,” said McGeorge faintly. “I mean, we’re in no hurry. I mean, if there’s anything else you want to do…”

  “We have to pick up a few groceries in the village, but that’s on our way. And of course, you’ll want to buy your slips.”

  “Our what?”

  “These things.” Mr Oddington indicated his own peculiarly tailored kind of sporran.

  “We don’t really need those, do we?” McGeorge said.

  “I’m afraid you do. It’s strictly against the law to go around the village stark naked. Damned nonsense, I think, but there it is.”

  “I mean, I’ve already got trousers, and Templar’s got shorts—”

  “You don’t want to be taken for tourists and have everyone staring at you, do you?” asked Mr Oddington incredulously.

  He shepherded them away up a narrow deeply rutted road along which some of the crowd were already dispersing, while others were stringing out along a footpath that led along the shore in the direction of the clustered tents. The road curved up the hill without any serious attempt at easing its slant. A battered truck laden with miscellaneous cargo and with a half-dozen grinning riders perched on top slowly overtook them, and they had to step off the edge of the lane to let it by. It groaned past them in four-wheeled drive, leaving a fine haze of dust in its wake.

  “Our only piece of mechanical transportation,” Mr Oddington said. “It hauls heavy stuff up from the ferry—and people who are too lazy to walk.”

  “How far do we have to go?” McGeorge asked.

  “It’s only half a mile from the port to the village center, and my place is just a little further up.”

  Mr Oddington’s stringy legs maintained a remarkably youthful pace, and his bare feet did not even seem to notice the stony roughness of the slope on which McGeorge frequently stumbled in his elegant shoes. But when McGeorge fell behind, Nadine Zeult moved in front of him, looking from that angle as if she were wearing nothing whatever except a piece of string. The Saint saw McGeorge shudder and turn on a panicky burst of speed that took him safely ahead of the sight, and Simon found himself walking beside the girl.

  “How long have you been here?” he asked, to make conversation.

  “Since May, this year. Is it your first time here?”

  “Yes.”

  “I came first in August last year, only because a boy I was with wanted to see it, and I have been here ever since. Perhaps you will be the same.”

  “It’s a little early to think about that,” Simon murmured.

  “I think you will enjoy it.” She looked at McGeorge’s back, to which the shirt was already clinging sweatily. “But I do not think Mr Oddington’s nephew will. Do you know him well?”

  “As a matter of fact, I hardly know him at all.”

  “They are not a bit alike. I can tell. Already I’m wondering why Mr Oddington is so fond of him,” she said with astonishing frankness.

  Before Simon could decide on a suitable answer, Mr Oddington announced, “Here we are. This is Héliopolis!”

  A stranger might not have recognized it at once as the village center if he had not been told. Since leaving the shadow of the restaurant that overlooked the harbor, they had passed signs indicating other restaurants and hotels, and a shop, on other equally rough roads that branched off to their left to follow the contours of the hill and which doubtless served the villas which had been more visible from the sea. Now there was only a very slightly increased concentration of commercial activity: a few yards above another restaurant and bar which they had just passed there was a grocery store on the right, and opposite that a stall festooned with an indeterminate variety of merchandise ranging from pottery to postcards, while facing them was a hotel rather poetically named the Pomme d’Adam, with another shop a little above it on the hill to the right, and another hotel farther along in the same direction. The fact that all these enterprises were loosely grouped around a fairly large bare open space where three roads met still fell rather short of making it a kind of sun city’s Times Square.

  Mr Oddington led the way into the grocery store, where he and Nadine chatted and chaffered with sociable lengthiness over the purchase of a disproportionately small quantity of victuals. The proprietor and his wife, Simon noticed, were completely and con
ventionally clad, but entirely uninterested in the condition of their customers. When the goods had been collected in a string bag, and the total added up on the margin of an old newspaper, Mr Oddington opened a horizontal zipper near the upper margin of his cache-sexe. George McGeorge, who now had a rosy flush from no other cause than the exertion of the recent climb, at this point reversed his system of color changes and turned pale. Mr Oddington, unaware of having provoked any consternation, extracted from the unzippered pocket a tightly folded wad of paper money, counted out enough to cover his bill, replaced the remainder together with his change, and calmly zipped the pocket up again.

  “After all, George,” Simon observed reasonably, “even in this Garden of Eden they use money, and where else could he have a pocket?”

  Mr Oddington picked up the string bag and herded his party across the street. He waved an expansive hand towards a string of fragments of fancifully printed cotton hanging over the proscenium of the stall, which at first glance would have been taken for a row of ornamental pennants.

  “Now,” he said, with a twinkle that was faintly suggestive of a challenge, “you can choose your minimums.”

  The young woman behind the counter leaned forward to spread out a wider choice of patterns. She was herself modeling one of her own skeletal creations—apparently the working and trading personnel of the village were freely divided between those who took the maximum advantage of their legal liberty and those who preferred to ignore it. McGeorge grabbed blindly for the nearest piece of cloth, and the girl pointed out to him, giggling, that he had picked out a female model. With the air of a Greek philosopher accepting a cup of hemlock, he took the first alternative she offered and turned rapidly away.

  “You pay,” he said to the Saint. ‘I’ll settle up with you later.”