He had waited in his room at the Tagus after coming back from dinner with Vicky, expecting his telephone to bestir him at any minute with a ring from Pedro reporting on his search for her letter. A great many minutes had passed—one hundred and forty-eight, by Jaeger’s own count—before the telephone did ring, and then the breathless voice which blabbered ungrammatical Portuguese over the wire did not belong to Pedro.
“This is Fano, the driver. I know where you at so I call. Pedro, he’s dead—shot by the cops!”
A moment of panic had threatened to shatter Jaeger’s usual self-control, but recalling the necessity for superior races to maintain a firm facade when dealing with such low forms of life as Portuguese cab drivers, he had managed to keep his voice completely steady.
“Do they know about me?” he asked.
“They do not know nothing,” replied the driver emphatically. “I hear Pedro was dead the minute they plugged him. So it’s all right if you pay me.”
“What did you find in the girl’s room?” Jaeger asked without optimism. Vicky’s revelation during dinner that she had memorized and destroyed the vital part of her father’s letter had already made Pedro’s search of her room seem hardly necessary.
“We didn’t go in,” was the answer. “A man come out—had a letter on him.”
“Came out?” Jaeger asked impatiently, straining to understand the difficult accent. “Out of what?”
“This man, he come out of the girl’s room. We followed him to an alley. Pedro took him and there was a big fight. Then the cops come and we run—”
“Without the letter?”
“We couldn’t get it,” the thug said excitedly. “Like I tell you, the cops come, shoot Pedro. I beat it out of there.”
“This man who came out of her room—do you know him? Who was he?”
“Don’t know. Very tall, black hair, eyes blue…”
“Thin? Fat?”
“More thin—like a matador. Strong as hell—and quick!”
The Latin began appealing to his gods and their female relatives to witness the inhuman power and swiftness of his foe in the alley fight. Jaeger interrupted him again.
“And you found out nothing else?”
“No, but we done as you told us, so you can pay me. You can pay me for Pedro too. I give to his widow.”
Jaeger had needed all his powers of self-restraint to prevent himself from screeching hysterically.
“You are a stupid idiotic oaf,” he had said coldly. “If I ever see you again or hear from you again, it will be your fortunate widow who needs a donation.”
He had slammed down the receiver and spent many feverish hours during the wakeful night raking his brain for some clue as to who the stranger might be who was threatening to interrupt his long, long climb just before he reached the pinnacle.
In the taxi with Vicky in Geneva, he tried once more. Surely, he told himself for the hundredth time, if someone had broken into her room and taken something, she would be aware of it—and eventually admit it to him. He was, after all, her only friend in a foreign land.
“I am worried about you,” he insisted. “Perhaps I can ask one question that will not seem like prying into your secrets…”
“Worried about me?” Vicky asked.
She had spent most of the flight, as well as the drive between airport and city center, in a pensive, quiet, apparently almost depressed mood.
“Yes. Is it possible that anybody else could be looking for the same thing as you may be?”
Vicky’s reaction was not at all sophisticated. She glanced at him sharply.
“What made you ask that?”
“A simple logic,” Jaeger said offhandedly, raising a cigarette to his lips. “There are few secrets of which rumours do not reach the wrong people. Luckily you need not worry about the little you have told me. I said I was a salesman of watches, but to be less modest, I am owner of the agencies which distribute them, and frankly I have too much money to be tempted by your story.”
“I’m not very experienced about anything like this,” Vicky began, but Jaeger went on.
“I only want to warn you to look out for some adventurer or other who may try to steal your secret or talk you out of it. If anything like that happens, would you tell me?”
Vicky stared at him for a few seconds before she answered.
“I think you’re a mind reader, Curt. As a matter of fact something did happen.”
She looked out of the window rather than at him as she went on, but her entry into Geneva carried none of the glamorous charge that had excited her when she had first arrived in Portugal. She was too preoccupied with worry and indecision about what she was doing to experience any very happy sensations.
“It happened last night while you and I were out for dinner. Somebody broke into my room.”
Jaeger’s eyes narrowed.
“I was afraid of just that sort of thing,” he said gravely. “Did he—the burglar—did he take anything?”
“He took the letter my father wrote me, and—”
Jaeger allowed himself to become agitated.
“Well, did you not report this? Did the police—”
“I have to tell you the rest,” Vicky said evenly. “In the first place, you’ll remember that I’d already cut out the part that mattered from the letter. But the most fantastic thing is, the man who took it came back to see me!”
This time Jaeger did not need to squander any theatrical talents on looking astonished.
“To see you? And you never said a word?”
“He was waiting in my room when you took me home,” she explained. “And he had the nerve to offer to help me.”
“Well, naturally!” Jaeger exploded. “He stole your letter, confirmed that you were after something valuable, and since you had cut out the important part of the letter he had to come back and find out more.”
“Don’t worry. I didn’t tell him anything.”
“Don’t worry?” Jaeger exclaimed incredulously. “You’re lucky to be alive! And you let this criminal go?”
“He wasn’t a criminal,” Vicky retorted with a sudden heat that surprised even her. “In fact, he almost convinced me…”
“You sound as if you’re defending him,” said Jaeger. “Who was he? Or I should say, who did he claim to be?”
“I probably shouldn’t tell anybody—just in case I have to change my mind about him. If I’m going to be an adventuress I’ll have to learn to think like one.”
Jaeger almost glowed visibly with elder-brotherly exasperation.
“How could there be any doubt? If the man had had good intentions of any kind he would scarcely have broken into your room!” He turned in his seat to plead with her earnestly. “Vicky, have I not been a good friend to you? A new one, but one who has not given you the slightest reason to distrust his motives?”
“That’s true,” she said.
“Then you must—you absolutely must tell me who this man is! I know officials here in Geneva who can investigate him. It is utterly foolish for you to expose yourself to this kind of risk, and I won’t stand by and allow it.”
She looked at him with a new kind of fear in her eyes—one related to her own unconventional intentions.
“I don’t want any officials poking their noses into my business,” she said.
“All right,” Jaeger replied more calmly. “They won’t—if you’ll tell me who this man was.”
Vicky thought for a moment and then gave a defeated sigh.
“His name was Simon Templar—the Saint…”
4
Although the Saint’s formidable reputation was strongly in the minds of both Vicky Kinian and Curt Jaeger when their taxi stopped in front of the Portal Hotel, they would probably have experienced something like the supremely invigorating shock of a bucket of ice water on the nape of the neck if they had been aware of his actual physical proximity. Mercifully for their adrenal equilibrium, they were not subjected to this brusque exhila
ration; although when they walked into the hotel, Simon was watching from his car only a hundred feet away, and when Curt Jaeger came out alone a few minutes later the Saint was able to take a long unobstructed look at his face before he got into another cab and rode away.
Simon was less impressed by Vicky Kinian’s sharp-featured boyfriend than he was by the hotel she had chosen. Apparently the prospect of future riches had completely subverted her ingrained standards, for from a one-horse elevatorless hostelry in an unpretentious quarter of Lisbon she had seen fit to remove herself to one of the finest examples of solid understated elegance in Geneva. The Portal was directly on the lake, and beyond the braid-draped doorman who stood beneath its crested marquee the Saint could watch the course of sails and speedboats across the calm water.
He did not watch for long, however. Once Curt Jaeger had been carried well out of sight by his taxi, and once Vicky Kinian had had ample time to get herself and her luggage to her room, Simon himself let the doorman usher him into the quiet bronze and gold of the lobby. Within three minutes he had signed for a room and seen his bags carried away to it. Without bothering to inspect his new lodgings more thoroughly, he used a lobby telephone to notify the car-hire agency of his whereabouts, and then went back to the Volkswagen he had rented from them, unfolded a newspaper, and prepared to wait as long as necessary for Vicky Kinian to make her next move. He could only hope that whatever she had to do next involved an actual excursion of some kind on her part, and not some such less detectable form of communication as a phone call. He was also gambling on the probability that she would be too anxious to get on with her quest to sit around the hotel for the remaining few hours of summer daylight.
While Simon waited, and while Vicky unpacked and changed her clothes, a new member of the Kinian caravan was going into underhanded action back at the Geneva airport. The Saint had, in fact, seen him not many minutes before, but he had been no more than a rather ugly face among a great many other unimpressive faces in the terminal building. The only thing which might in any way have made him memorable was his nearness to the bald man with the white Vandyke whiskers just before that dawdling character had made his abrupt departure from the airport, but there had been a host of other people in the same area too, and it would have taken a full-time paranoid to suspect them all.
The new character’s name, for the convenience of our own record, was Mischa Ruspine, and his dour countenance seemed to be suspended limply between two protrusive ears which resembled a pair of not quite identical outsized teacup handles. Sheltering that wholesome and inviting physiognomy was a display of unwashed brown hair that started thin on top, gathered momentum behind his ears, and ended in a thick climactic heap on his coat collar. He was indeed an associate of the persistent eavesdropper in the white Vandyke, and just before that latter party had forsaken the airport terminal he had muttered out of the corner of his mouth, “The tall man with black hair down by the photograph machine.”
“Hm,” Mischa had confirmed identification.
He had received his instructions earlier, so no further dialogue was necessary. He watched his assignment stroll to the booth of a car rental agency, and managed to stand inconspicuously near enough to overhear most of his conversation with the uniformed counter girl. What he heard convinced him that he could combine pleasure with business by relaxing in the terminal bar and returning to the U-Drive agency later. There was no point in wasting energy and running the risk of losing the Saint in traffic as he followed him, when he could instead wait in comfort and then follow with perfect certainty about where he was going.
So Mischa had sipped his way through two cold lagers, stretching them over thirty minutes, and then had shuffled back to the car rental booth. His normal gait was somehow as dour as his countenance.
“I have something to deliver to a Mr Templar,” he told the girl. “He said you would know what hotel he had gone to.”
The girl looked at him with ingenuous surprise.
“Your timing is very good,” she said. “He just telephoned. He is staying at the Hotel Portal.”
“Merci, mademoiselle.”
“Do you know where that is?”
“Oui, mademoiselle. I do.”
His next stop was at a telephone kiosk near the terminal exit. He dialed a local number and within a few moments heard the voice of the man in the white Vandyke.
“Realite Foto.”
“This is Mischa. I have the information. He hired a car at the airport to drive himself, and then followed the other two when they left.”
His revelation failed to spark enthusiasm at the other end of the line.
“I could have predicted that without leaving you there to watch. But where did they go?”
“Templar has registered at the Portal,” Mischa answered. “Obviously the girl stays there too.”
“Are you sure he did not see you following?”
“I was too smart to follow. He said he would let the car renters know which hotel he chose, so I waited until he phoned them.”
In spite of Mischa’s smug self-satisfaction, the reaction of his superior was still anything but congratulatory.
“Then you can be still smarter and go there prepared to begin following—and at once! What if Templar has already left the hotel? You may never pick him up again. And the girl…”
“Do not worry,” said Mischa. “I am on my way.”
“The thought that you are on your way is most unlikely to relieve my worry. Hurry, and report back when you have something worthwhile to tell me!”
The phone connection clicked abruptly dead, and Mischa turned sulkily from the kiosk and ambled with deliberate slowness out to the airport’s public parking area, then panicked at the thought of possible failure in his assignment and exceeded the speed limit all the way to the Hotel Portal. There, to his immense relief, he saw Simon Templar sitting by the curb in his rented Volkswagen reading a newspaper.
Smugness returned. Mischa parked his car at a safe distance behind the Saint’s and began his own share of what he correctly assumed to be the wait for Vicky Kinian.
It was almost half an hour later when she came out of the hotel and had the doorman call her a taxi. The Saint’s car spat smoke for an instant as its engine caught. Mischa turned the key in his own ignition. The procession set off along some of the less-travelled streets of Geneva, away from the central city.
Mischa, who knew the town well, speculated with each new turn about their ultimate destination. Even so, he was completely surprised when the rear lights of the Saint’s car flashed red as he approached the entrance gate of the International Cemetery. The cab carrying Vicky Kinian pulled over to the curb. The Volkswagen’s brake-lights went off and it whipped on past. For an instant Mischa was undecided, but his orders gave priority to following Simon Templar. As he zipped past the taxi, Vicky Kinian was getting out and walking towards a flower vendor beside the cemetery gate.
The Saint’s car moved on beyond the graveyard, made a U-turn, and stopped just out of sight of the entrance gate. Mischa’s car flew past, made a U-turn, and stopped just out of sight of the Volkswagen’s occupant.
The cemetery was set in a locale which permitted such automotive acrobatics to take place without much danger either of smashups or police intervention. The road was almost unused, and the countryside immediately around the graveyard’s perimeter was a preserve of rocky slopes and evergreens which might have been fifty miles into the Alps instead of on the outskirts of a bustling city.
The cemetery itself was an uncrowded community of quiet stone whose streets were deserted pebbled walks and whose houses were marble sepulchres. Scattered yew trees and ranks of solemn monuments cast long shadows across the grass in the red light of the sinking sun. Following on foot behind the Saint, Mischa could see Vicky Kinian walking uneasily among those shadows, a spray of white flowers clutched like a protective talisman in one of her hands.
She seemed unsure of her course, but after each hesitation s
he would start out with an air of fresh confidence, as if she had satisfied herself that she was heading in the right direction. It was easy for Mischa to saunter, hands clasped behind him, in the distant background, appearing to admire the herbaceous borders which lined the footpaths. It was obviously less easy for the Saint to make himself inconspicuous, since he, unlike Mischa, was known to the girl. He kept well away from her, using trees and the massive walls of mausoleums as cover for his apparently innocent movements.
Suddenly the girl stopped and then walked forward rapidly until she came to a very large monument set back in a semicircle of shrubs and trees. Mischa, from his faraway vantage point, could not make out the letters carved into the stone above Vicky Kinian’s head, but he could tell that the monument was no ordinary one. It was like a semicircular wall of granite ten feet high and twenty feet or so wide, topped by a great stone eagle with wide drooping wings. The concave front of the structure was faced with a bronze-framed glass door behind which there seemed to be several shelves.
Mischa could observe nothing more from where he had to wait his turn for a closer view. Vicky Kinian stood close against the glass door and studied whatever lay behind it for almost twenty minutes. Several times she looked around to make sure nobody was watching her, and she seemed to be having trouble making some sort of decision. Finally she hastily stooped and dropped her bouquet on to the semicircular stone step that formed a low platform in front of the monument. Then she turned and walked away through the cemetery at a much faster pace than she had used when she had come in.
The Saint did not follow her, so Mischa waited, now moving closer to the big monument, concealing himself behind a conventional tombstone more notable for lavishness of proportion than good taste. Simon Templar, once the girl was completely out of sight, went and stood in front of the glass-fronted memorial himself. In less than two minutes he turned away and strode back towards the cemetery’s gate.
The Saint in Pursuit Page 9
