Germany was one country where he did not think he had earned much publicity, certainly not in recent years, and he did not expect his surname to elicit any reaction there, at least by itself. There was none from Uhrmeister as he wrote it down.
“And where are you staying?”
“At the Vier Jahreszeiten.”
“If I can find any, I will let you know. How long are you staying here?”
“A week, maybe.”
“It is your first time in Hamburg?”
“Yes.”
Herr Uhrmeister turned and picked up a booklet from a stack on an inlaid table which was mainly burdened with a large and horrible gilt clock. The cover described it concisely as An Introduction to Hamburg. He gave it to Simon.
“Please take one of these, with our compliments. It may help you to enjoy your stay. And I hope you will be lucky in your search.”
“Thank you,” said the Saint.
He continued his quest through the remainder of the afternoon, on the same street and others, patiently ticking off the names of the shops on a list he had made from a classified directory before he started on the undertaking after lunch the previous day, and by closing time he could conscientiously claim to have tried them all. After having been half destroyed by the saturation bombings of 1943, the city had not only rebuilt itself but had succeeded in re-stocking its antique emporia almost as completely as its newest department stores. But in spite of the surprising roster of the former, the supply of “Roman” glasses (which is the literal translation of the name, though it would be harder still to find a prototype in Italy) had apparently lagged far behind that of other venerabilia, or else their rarity was not exaggerated. At the end of his pilgrimage he had seen two slightly chipped but probably authentic specimens, which did not match, and a line of crude souvenir reproductions emblazoned with corny colored decals of local scenery, and had a more empathic if not more respectful comprehension of those dedicated souls who did that sort of thing from their own enthusiasm and for their own pleasure.
It had been, he thought, an effort of extraordinary nobility, probably unprecedented and, he devoutly hoped, not soon to be called for again—a more profoundly heroic performance, for him, than taking on a half-dozen armed gorillas barehanded.
But he was also a little footsore and extremely thirsty, and the alleviation of these conditions seemed more important for the moment than voting himself awards for altruism.
At the snug downstairs bar of the Vier Jahreszeiten—the Four Seasons Hotel, as the tourists prefer to render it—a long well-iced Peter Dawson and water soon began to assuage his most urgent aridity, an upholstered stool took the load off his metatarsals, and in a matter of minutes he had revived to the extent of being accessible to the standard civilized distractions.
“Not very nice weather, is it?” he remarked to the aloofly efficient bartender.
“No, sir,” said the bartender pleasantly, but with the same aloof sufficiency, and left it at that.
It was evident that he either had been schooled against fraternizing with the customers or had no basic urge to do so beyond the fullest requirements of civility, and Simon felt no need to make a Herculean labor of changing that pattern of life. He pulled the Introduction to Hamburg from his pocket and began to read it.
It was much the same as any other guide-book of its type, except that it was free from any of the fractured English commonly found in such publications, which usually seem to have been prepared by some ambitious local school-teacher too jealous of his infallibility to submit to revision by a native-born Englishman or American. A note on the title-page said, “Translated by Franz Kolben,” but Mr. Kolben’s style sounded more like Milwaukee than Heidelberg. Otherwise its thirty-two pages contained the usual descriptions of churches, museums, and monuments, listings of restaurants and cabarets, and a brief history of the town from the settlement established by Charlemagne in 811 AD.
Simon Templar was not much of an aficionado of pure historical history, as you might call it, but here there was one paragraph which caught his eye as inevitably as a white nylon jig hooks a mackerel:
Pirates controlled the Elbe until 1402, when Klaus Störtebeker, the greatest, of them, was captured and beheaded on the Grasbrook. What happened to the treasure he extorted in gold and silver and jewes is still a mystery. He is said to have hidden a map of its whereabouts in the base of a pewter goblet on which he carved his initials suspended from a gallows, but it has never been found.
The Saint sighed invisibly. Perhaps it was an encouraging symptom of inexhaustible youth that he could still feel a quickening of the pulse at such a romantic image. Yet there was a somber index of maturity in the fact that he was content to pigeonhole it as an amusing legend, instead of being inspired to set out on the trail of the clue.
Nevertheless, Franz Kolben, who had created the myth entirely out of his own head, would have felt highly complimented by the tribute to his invention.
Simon read through to the end of the brochure without finding anything else of comparable interest. In the meantime a young woman had come in and sat down at the other end of the short counter. He had glanced up automatically, and noted with pleasure that she was blonde and shapely of both face and figure: it would have been easier to label her “a girl,” but she had the confidence of the mid-twenties and her outfitting had been assembled with well-seasoned sophistication. He was too old a hand to stare any longer, but had heard her order a champagne cocktail in English that had an American intonation but still seemed to have a slight Germanic accent. He had philosophically refrained from speculating any further. No doubt she would soon be joined and abducted by some upper-echelon American salesman on the European circuit, or some equally crass Rhineland industrialist—or something similarly cut, dried, and pre-emptive. He was a long time past building daydreams on her obvious foundations.
But now, as he put the pamphlet back in his pocket and gave her another studiously casual glance, he found her looking directly at him with a candor which disclaimed all such prior commitments.
“Would you help me?” she said.
He smiled with just the right degree of diffidence—not eagerly enough to look like a bumpkin, but not so distantly as to be discouraging.
“Tell me how.”
“Are you on your own here? I mean, do you have a wife with you, or anything?”
“Not even anything.”
“I only ask,” she explained, “because I don’t want to give you a problem because of mine.”
He was a trifle puzzled.
“You mean you have a husband—or something?”
“Oh, no. If I had, I wouldn’t have to do this. I have a problem because I want someone to go out with for the evening, and I don’t know anyone here. I don’t want you to take me out and pay for everything, because that would give you the wrong idea. But I can’t offer to pay, because that would insult you. Would it be all right if we went Dutch?”
If that was the local line, it at least had an element of novelty. Now that it was permissible to scrutinize her more thoroughly, however, he was able to observe that her dress was smartly but soberly tailored, and she wore none of the usual coloration of a professional lady of the evening. Perhaps that also was a local custom—but what could he lose by going along with it a little farther?
“Let me buy a drink, anyhow,” he said, “and we could sit down and talk it over.”
Until then they had been the only two customers, but now a trio of Italian salesmen had come in and were piling on to the intervening barstools, noisily debating their designs upon the Common Market. The Saint’s new acquaintance moved quietly to a table in a corner, where he joined her. The disinterested bartender brought the drinks, and Simon listened to her.
“I know this must all sound a little crazy, but I’m a tourist too, and I’ve heard that there’s a street here which is much wilder than Montmartre, and I wanted to see it, but I can’t go there alone.”
“Hardly, from
what I’ve been reading,” he agreed. “And you want someone to chaperone you on a sightseeing tour of the dens of iniquity.”
“Could you stand it? I’m curious, that’s all, and a woman is so handicapped in some ways, if she is a little respectable.”
“I shall treasure the implied compliment,” he murmured. “And I’d be delighted to see the sights with you. I must admit that I’m curious too, even if I’m not as respectable as I look.”
With his rakehell profile and impudent blue eyes, this was a statement of highly questionable validity, but she refrained from taking issue with it. Although her pink and white and flaxen allure was happily not built upon operatic proportions, she seemed to have a certain Wagnerian solemnity which was a piquant contrast to what she was proposing.
“And you are free tonight?” she asked. “Or would you prefer another time?”
“Tonight. If we put it off, you might lose your curiosity—or your nerve.” His gaze continued to analyze her shrewdly but not antagonistically. “But if you won’t mind my asking, what kind of tourist are you? You speak English perfectly, but you still have just a little accent, and a way of putting things—!”
“Of course. I’m half German. I was born in Munich. My mother was an American, but when the last war came she stayed here with my father. But she would talk only English to me, so I never forgot it. Sometimes when I come in a place like this I forget which language I should be talking.”
“But you said you were a tourist here.”
“You make me feel so foolish—like someone from Chicago who must admit she’s in New York for the first time. But in Europe everyone hasn’t always been everywhere.”
“Nor has everyone in America,” said the Saint consolingly. “In fact, there are several people in New York who’ve never been to Brooklyn.”
“I’d like to go to New York. And Brooklyn, too—I think I’d feel much more at home there than in Hamburg, with all I’ve heard about them and seen in American movies.”
“Do you still live in Munich?”
“Yes. I work there, for a shipping company. So I’m answering letters from America all the time.” It seemed to remind her of a formality that had so far been omitted from their informal acquaintance. “My name is Eva.”
He wondered whether this limited identification was another accepted local discretion or her own idea. But by falling in step without questioning it, he could conveniently by-pass his own perennial problem.
“Mine is Simon.”
She was a pleasant companion in spite of her incongruous seriousness, and the Saint was especially contented to have acquired her at that hour, for he hated to eat alone. His friend had recommended the new penthouse restaurant atop the Bavaria Brewery, overlooking the port, and presently they took a taxi there to lay a foundation for the night’s work.
“We must have eel soup,” she said as they considered the menus. “It’s one of the things Hamburg is famous for. Unless the idea shocks you?”
“What else goes into it—besides eels?”
“Vegetables, and herbs, and a sort of little dumpling, and prunes.”
“It sounds frightful,” he said, “But I’ll make the experiment, if you want to.”
Actually it turned out to be completely delectable, in an offbeat sweet-sour way. Afterwards they had the Vierländer Mastgeflügel, a tender broiled chicken, and a bottle of Dienhard’s Hanns Christof Wein of ’59—that greatest year of the decade for the vineyards of the Rhine. And under the combination of mellowing influences their acquaintance warmed and ripened. She didn’t become unexpectedly stimulating and exciting, but she was absorbently easy to be with.
They sat beside one of the long plate-glass windows commanding a panorama of docks and warehouses and their associated machinery to which night and artificial lights lent an obviously meretricious but seductive glamor, and once when an attentive head waiter came by, Eva gestured outwards and asked, “What is that?”
“It is all part of the harbor of Hamburg. Just over there it is called the Grasbrook Hafen.”
Simon sat up.
“Not the place where good old Klaus Störtebeker got it in the neck—if I may use the expression?”
“Yes, that is the same place. But it would have looked much different then.”
“What are you talking about?” Eva asked, as the head waiter moved on.
“An old-time pirate in these parts,” said the Saint. “I was reading about him in a guide-book just before we met. He left a buried treasure somewhere, too.”
“How romantic.” Her cornflower-blue eyes danced with more animation than they had previously revealed. “Tell me about it.”
He brought out the little book and read her the passage which had captivated him.
“But I’m afraid,” he concluded, “that if you want to get rich quick you’ll have to think of something faster than looking for a goblet with a gallows on it.”
“I suppose so.” She was almost crestfallen, as if the goblet had been on the table and a commis had whisked it away with the soup plates. “There are no adventures of that kind any more.”
Of all men alive, few could have produced better grounds to contest that assertion, but for the moment Simon Templar preferred not to cite them. Instead, he said, “We’ll have to do the best we can with our own adventure. Is there anything special you want to see on the Reeperbahn?”
“Everything.”
“That might be a rather wide order.”
“I’ve heard they have women who wrestle in a tank full of mud.”
“Well, that might be a fairly romantic start,” he admitted. “I guess we could try that for an hors d’oeuvre, and play it by ear from there.”
The Reeperbahn in Hamburg (which once meant “The Street of Rope-Workers”) has long since lost its nautical connotation, except as regards the transient sailors who have made it the essential symbol of their port of call. It has become to Hamburg what Montmartre became to the tourist in Paris—who has no relationship with the Parisian. Along its few short blocks and up some of the side streets which lead off it is clustered a variety of establishments catering to the most generally deplored forms of human indulgence which even the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah might have contemplated with some respect. “But unlike those classic citadels of depravity, the Reeperbahn, which was also destroyed by fire from the heavens delivered by the air raiders of World War II, has risen again from the ashes with still more reprehensible vigour and the added modern advantages of coruscating neon.
There is available every gratification traditionally craved by the male animal on a toot, from the brassy ballroom to the dim-lighted cabaret, from the costumed chorus to the table-top strip-tease, from the extrovert’s parade of flesh to the introvert’s pornography, literate or pictorial, still or motion picture, with companionship from overdressed to undressed, with all the necessary alcohols to make everything enticing, if you take enough of them—or, if you are harder to intoxicate, and want to seek just a little harder, more costly but more powerful narcotics. It is all there, with the effort of search scaled down to the minimum which any aspiring debauchee should be able to muster, or he should give up and stay home. Everything from the oldest sensations to the newest variations—down to such exotic eccentricities as the principal attraction at the Jungmühle, where they had agreed to start their sampling.
Simon and Eva sat at a front table in an auditorium like a small converted theater, in which the side walls near the stage were smeared and stained with peculiar splash marks which suggested that past performers had pelted an unappreciative audience with unsavory tokens of their indignation, instead of being thus showered themselves by dissatisfied spectators according to the antique custom. The reality and actuality of this wild hypothesis was promptly concretized by a servitor who arrived with two large sheets of plastic and politely but matter-of-factly indicated that they should be tucked on like oversized bibs before even ordering anything spillable.
“I shall drink
beer all the time,” Eva said rather primly. “It’s the cheapest thing to order, and it’s always safe even in the worst places, and we shouldn’t get drunk in the first dive or two we try.”
“I suppose that’s a sound approach,” said the Saint, with respect.
The superannuated discard of a travelling opera company who had been sentimentally vocalizing on the stage bowed off, with the muted approval of the congregation; a tarpaulin cover was removed from what might have been a shallow orchestra pit, revealing that it had been converted into a kind of wading trough paved with moist brown mud; the spotlights brightened, and two women entered from opposite wings and met in the center of the stage, draped in vivid satin robes which they threw off as the loudspeakers identified them. Underneath they wore only bikini trunks and their own exuberant flesh and glands. The formalities having been complied with, they seized each other by the hair and fell into the tank with a juicy splash.
Thereafter it was much the same as the traditional ballet popularised in the commercial guise of wrestling by hundreds of artistes of the grunt and grimace and groan, except that these performers not only had an opportunity to illustrate the more delicate and sensitive feminine approach but had a shallow quagmire of lusciously textured sludge to do it in. This gave them a few extra vulnerable targets to kick, twist, and gouge, and an additional weapon to bring into play. While one of them was attempting to suffocate the other by grinding her face into the mud, she could suffer the indignity of having her panties pulled down and stuffed with the same goo and when not so intertwined they could throw gobs of it in each other’s faces, which if inaccurately aimed might splatter the scenery or the onlookers—which explained the spray flecks on the walk and the considerately furnished bibs. By the time this tender choreography had run its course both the exponents were decently covered from crown to toe with a succulent coating of gunk, and their sex appeal was almost equal to that of two hippopotami emerging from a wallow.
Simon, dividing his clinical attention between the grappling amazons and Eva, was somewhat nonplussed by her reaction, or the lack of it. She seemed to be neither startled, nor shocked, nor disgusted, nor embarrassed, nor morbidly fascinated by these revelations of the infinite range of female grace and tenderness. The most you could have said, based on her outward placidity, was that she was mildly amused. It was none of the obvious responses that he would have expected of a woman so bent on experience that she had to pick up a stranger in a bar to facilitate it.
Trust the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 2
