The old waiter came back with her Old Fashioned. She bypassed the vegetation and gulped down the whisky, gratefully feeling the warmth hit her stomach all at once and begin to filter through her bloodstream.
She looked out at the street again. Passing cars were using their lights and she could no longer think of any excuse to delay. She fumbled too much money on to the table and left the cafe without waiting for the waiter to express his appreciation. Within a few seconds she was able to hail a passing taxi. She had vaguely hoped that every means of public transport in Geneva might by some fortuitous circumstance be occupied or out of working order for the next twelve hours, thus depriving her of the opportunity of doing what she both longed to do and dreaded.
But the cab driver, against all the laws of cab drivers’ temperament, did not even twitch a querulous eyebrow when she asked him to take her to the Cimetiere Internationale, much less turn her down flat as she was secretly hoping he would. He phlegmatically pushed his meter and his engine into gear, and took off towards the desired location with distressing speed by the most efficient possible route.
All Vicky’s hopes for blowouts or mechanical disasters came to naught, and within an incredibly short time she was being ferried along the almost unpopulated road on the edge of the city which led to the entrance of the cemetery.
“Cimetiere Internationale?” the driver called over his shoulder, as if giving her a last chance to change her mind.
“Yes,” she answered.
A few minutes later the automobile came to a stop in front of the open gates which she had passed through earlier in the day. The area had no artificial lights, and the only illumination came from an almost full moon rising above the steep hills to the east. The many-shaped monuments in the graveyard beyond its barred fence looked like grotesque emerging creatures from an infernal world frozen in position for a moment by the sound of the car.
Again she almost changed her mind. She could simply sit where she was and tell the driver to take her back to the easy safety of the Hotel Portal. But that would also be going back to the easy dull safety of eight hours a day at the telephone office—and admitting that when her one big chance had come to make her life something more than a digit in the bottomless arithmetic of the Welfare State she had flubbed because she had the heebie-jeebies.
She got out of the taxi. She wanted desperately to ask the driver to wait, but she had already decided that that would be too risky. He could not see the shrine to German exiles from where he was parked, but the sound of breaking glass might easily carry to his ears through the quiet night, and in any case he could be a possible source of all sorts of complications. Besides he was pretending not to understand English as she questioned him about the fare, though he had understood her perfectly well when he had picked her up, which probably meant that he would have refused to comprehend that she wanted him to wait, even if she had asked him.
He took her money and drove away after giving her a final look which she was sure could only be described as pitying. She watched the red taillights disappear and then turned to face the cemetery gate. There was no sign of another living human being in any direction. On the road which circled the boundary of the graveyard there was not even the sound of an automobile to replace the frightening emptiness in her brain left by the departed taxi. Her only company was the lopsided ball of the moon which silvered the jumble of tombstones ahead of her.
Much as she disliked being alone in such a place, for strictly practical reasons she was far more worried about running into human than into ghostly interference. She thought she could safely assume that the Swiss, like most other people, had no taste for strolling in cemeteries at night.
Vicky took a deep breath and walked through the gate. She continued decisively and quickly down the gravel path towards the location of the German memorial. Something cautioned her, however, to avoid making too much noise, and as she got closer to the monument she slowed her pace and moved so quietly that she could scarcely hear her own footsteps.
Then she stopped.
She was almost within sight of the monument, and she thought that a faint scratching or scraping noise had come from its direction. Poised without breathing, she listened. The only sounds now were the background chirping and semi-musical sawing of nocturnal insects. It wouldn’t have been surprising if her imagination had tended to embellish nature a bit.
She walked on, however, more cautiously than ever. Turning a corner in the path she came within sight of the memorial silhouetted against the brilliantly moonlit sky. Its face was in deep shadow, but as she moved on towards it, approaching to within fifty yards, she saw a shadow stir. Something like true petrifaction seized her, so that she could not move even a finger. The dim shape by the monument moved again, but she could only make out that it was big enough to be human and was not a stray dog or cat.
Self-preservation almost screamed at her, urging her to run, calling in nightmare panic to set her feet moving. But Vicky Kinian had come a long way from her last schoolgirl Halloween, and once having straddled life and gotten the reins in her hands she felt an even stronger instinct to hold on and not be thrown.
Suddenly anger began to replace fright. Somebody was meddling with her shrine, and she was not about to leave before she had at least seen who it was and what he was doing. She suspected that Simon Templar, true to his mystical nickname, had somehow found out the secret of the monument and was busily in the process of trying to steal her inheritance. If so, she would have no hesitation about walking up and bashing him on the head with her purse.
Her very readiness to attack the Saint in a lonely graveyard with nothing more deadly than a handbag showed a certain faith in his gallantry which she did not recognize in herself until later. But that trust did make her careless. She did not take quite the extremes of care in sneaking up for a closer look at the memorial that she might have otherwise. She tiptoed from tombstone to tombstone, working her way towards the great stone eagle that brooded on top of the exile’s monument, trying to make out what the figure at the base of the edifice was doing.
When she was within fifty feet she could make out the man’s back. The scraping noise she had heard had apparently been the sound of a glasscutter. Now, using some kind of suction device with a short handle, he was removing the whole curved sheet of glass from the memorial’s door and setting it on the ground beside him. She noticed that he did not then reach immediately for one of the metal boxes on the shelves inside, but stood there as if undecided what to do next.
Vicky decided to move nearer, and as she did the toe of her high-heeled shoe caught on a stone ridge surrounding one of the burial plots, and she almost fell. A pebble clattered. The man at the monument pivoted, stared about into the darkness, and slunk quickly away among the tombstones and scattered trees to her right.
She waited, surprised that the poacher had given up so quickly, and disturbed by a new realization: she had seen enough to know that the man beside the monument had not been the Saint. Who he was she had no idea. Nothing about him had been familiar, and though she had not seen his face as more than a shadowy blur she was sure she did not know him. Had he followed her earlier in the day, or did he have some other source of information? Crouched in the shadow of a gravestone, she turned over the possibilities in her mind while she wavered between running away as fast as she could, and waiting, as still as a terrified rabbit, until she felt the danger had passed.
The way of the rabbit seemed safer. The man had, after all, not seen her, and he might decide that the rattling stone signalled no danger to him. In that case he would come back soon and begin his work again. If he had been really frightened, though, he might leave the cemetery and give her a chance at the urns. Either way, there was no point in revealing her presence.
She waited a long time. The moon rose a short but quite perceptible distance further above the big memorial’s stone eagle than it had been when she had first stooped and hidden in the shadows. There was still no sou
nd or other trace of her rival’s whereabouts. She decided finally, after many minutes, and when one of her legs had gone completely to sleep, that the man had done just what he had seemed to be doing: hurried away from the monument and fled as inconspicuously as possible out of the cemetery.
The thought that he had been so easily discomfited gave Vicky a new sense of her own powers. She stood up, got some circulation restored to her numbed leg, and walked with as much confidence as she could summon to the opened shrine. A musty smell came from the shelves, which were having their first exposure to fresh air for twenty-five years or more. Her eyes were becoming more and more accustomed to the darkness, and the moon was distributing more light as it rose higher, but even so she could just barely make out the name-plates on the metal funerary boxes. Luckily the position of the reputed remains of Josef Meier at the left end of the upper shelf had remained fixed in her mind since that afternoon.
Gingerly she raised her arms and touched the box with just the tips of her fingers. Finding herself still undemolished by divinely hurled thunderbolts, she took the full weight of the box in her hands and carried it into the moonlight. There was no lock holding the lid closed, only a sliding catch made of chrome, but the catch was hard to move after so many years and for several seconds she exerted all her strength in an effort to budge it.
She was so intently occupied that she did not hear the very slight rustling in the shrubs just behind her, or if she did, it remained in the periphery of her consciousness, automatically interpreted as the brushing of a wind-gust through the leaves. When the rustle suddenly became the crashing plunge of a heavy body through foliage not ten feet away from her, she was too shocked and horrified even to scream.
She whirled, and leaping at her was a shadowed figure whose face—limp-featured and grotesque like a rubber mask—was as grey as death itself in the moonlight.
Stumbling back, she would have screamed then, but the man’s hands were on her. Fingers clamped across her windpipe and closed off her nose and mouth. No trace of oxygen could get to her lungs and no cry could escape from her throat.
The man dodged behind her, pulling her back against him as he kept up his relentless deadly pressure. The small resting-place of Josef Meier fell to the ground. All she wanted now was air, but there was none for her in the whole universe.
As her sight dimmed, the moon, emotionless and cold, having seen many such things in its time, seemed to fill her whole brain like a painfully gigantic glowing bubble ready to burst.
3
The Saint walked inconspicuously out of the Hotel Portal, past a preoccupied desk clerk, and then past the swarm of excited gawkers who surrounded the broken body of Curt Jaeger which lay on the sidewalk just a few paces beyond the entrance doors. A lack of curiosity would have seemed particularly noteworthy under the circumstances, so Simon dutifully paid a last homage to his would-be murderer by momentarily craning his neck on the edge of the crowd in a mock effort to see the crumpled remains.
Then he hurried on to his rented car with as much urgency as he dared to show, and a few minutes later was speeding towards the Cimetiere Internationale. He had intended to be there long before this. Now the sky was completely dark, and as he moved from traffic light to traffic light away from the center of the city he could catch glimpses of the not quite full moon above the tops of houses and between apartment blocks. If he had wasted too much time in his last waltz with Jaeger he might very well find that Vicky Kinian—or some less deserving party, such as a lieutenant of Jaeger’s—might already have scooped whatever riches lay in the multiple tomb of the German exiles.
He could not afford to stop his car too near the cemetery gate. He cut its lights and coasted to a stop as near the entrance as he dared. Running the rest of the way to the memorial would have been the most efficient but not the safest course. He could risk a sprint only as far as the gate. Then, avoiding the noisy gravel paths in favor of the damp grass, he walked unerringly through the dark maze of tombstones towards the German shrine.
When he came within sight of it he saw something that brought him to an abrupt halt. Bent low in the darkness, he could make out the form of a woman on the ground and a man getting to his feet from beside her. The man was turning his attention to something else on the ground nearby, and the Saint, as stealthily silent as a Mohican, raced forward across the uneven turf.
A few yards behind the man he stopped, and then moved forward more slowly. When he was within striking distance, he cupped his hands to his mouth and gave a shout that might conceivably have caused some alarm even six feet below the graveyard’s surface.
“Boo!”
The object of his salutation gave an unrehearsed standing high jump that would have won the admiration of an Olympic coach. Simon made no move to attack. He stood with his hands on his hips as his victim scrambled for new footing that would let him see and face the threat that had suddenly appeared out of nowhere. The metal box the man had been holding when he was surprised had clattered to the ground. Now he was fumbling a weighted leather bludgeon out of his pocket as he stared around frantically for a way of escape. But the Saint, tall and confident in the darkness, had him with his back to the center of the concave memorial.
“Come now,” Simon said, “don’t you believe in ghosts? You can’t hurt me with that little bean-bag or anything else.”
His opponent was apparently the skeptical type. He squared off, raising his leather cosh threateningly.
“You’ll give yourself a heart attack if you don’t calm down,” the Saint cautioned. “Why don’t you put that thing away and tell me a few true ghost stories—such as how a zombie like you managed to get out of his crypt before Halloween.”
In reply, the bludgeon lashed out, hissing in the air as its owner swung it at Simon’s head. The Saint, with an almost imperceptible leaning back and to one side, avoided the blow and let it whistle harmlessly past his chin.
“I warned you about ghosts,” he said.
The other man had thrown all his weight into the swing, and it was ridiculously easy for Simon to reach out, help his opponent to continue the motion beyond its intended limit, and hurl him off balance across an outstretched leg. The forced pirouette came to an abrupt and ungraceful conclusion when Simon’s flat stiffened hand chopped down like a guillotine on the back of his enemy’s neck and sent him sprawling unconscious on the paved path.
In the vacuum of silence that followed, Simon strode to the woman on the ground, knowing before he knelt and turned her face to the moonlight that it would be Vicky Kinian. His only immediate worry was whether she would be alive or not. With an eye out for any other night owls who might decide to crash the party, he turned the girl on to her back and reached for her wrist.
At first he could not find her pulse, and she was horribly white in the moonlight. Then, as he took a tentative new searching grip on her limp wrist she heaved a deep sigh and exhaled with the moan of a child having a bad dream.
“I guess you’ll live,” Simon murmured. “Though I can’t say you really deserve to.”
She could not have heard him, and he saw no need to rush her into consciousness. He lowered her head gently to the ground again and moved back to the man he had laid to temporary rest a short while before. Inside his jacket pocket was a Soviet passport, which Simon examined by the cupped light of a pencil flashlight.
“Mischa Ruspine,” the Saint read, and failed to fit either the name or the face into his private rogues gallery. “Mischa Ruspine of euphonious name, how do you fit into this Bald Mountain lawn-fete?”
Mischa, instead of answering, gave every indication of having sacked out for the night. Simon left him to go to the metal box that the other had flung to the ground in his moment of sudden terror. It had landed upside down and open. When the Saint lifted it, a single thin packet wrapped in oilcloth fell to the cement. There was nothing else in the container—not even a dust-particle of the chemical constituents of one Josef Meier whom the box’s name-pla
te advertised as resting therein.
Before the Saint could unfold the oilcloth, however, there were new signs of life from Vicky Kinian. She took several quick breaths, gave a little cry, and tried to sit up. Then she saw Simon’s face clearly in the moonlight.
“You!”
“Well, good evening,” he said soothingly. “Don’t look so scared. I’m not the guy who mugged you.”
She answered groggily.
“I…guess you weren’t. I saw him…” She suddenly was frightened. “Is he—”
“He’s still with us,” Simon told her, “but he’s had a visit from the Sandman and is now relaxing in relative peace. His name is Mischa Ruspine. Do you know him?”
With a helping arm from the Saint, Vicky sat up, propping herself with one hand.
“No,” she said. “Who is he?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea, except that he hails from Moscow. You’re lucky to be alive, you know, playing around in dark places with characters like him. You must be more lucky than clever.”
As dazed as she was, she managed to put some fire into her voice.
“And you’re the most aggravating man I’ve ever had butting into my business. I’d be a lot luckier if I’d never seen you!”
“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” Simon returned calmly. “If I hadn’t surprised Mischa while he was glomming on to this, you might have been short one clue in your treasure hunt. Or is this the summum bonum we’ve all been cracking heads to get at?”
He held up the thin package that had fallen from the metal box.
“You give me that!” cried the girl.
Simon held it out of her reach, and when she tried to get to her feet dizziness overcame her and he had to help her back to the ground again.
“Easy, now,” he said. “Wait till you’re a bit stronger before you start getting rambunctious.”
The Saint in Pursuit Page 11
