Trust the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “Come in,” Kolben said grudgingly.

  “You might be interested to know that the new star we’re introducing in this picture is a German.” Simon chattered on, once they were all inside the hallway and the street door was closed again. “I wonder if you’d recognize him.”

  He took from his pocket the card with a silhouette on it which was not his own, and showed it. Kolben scarcely batted an eyelid—but to Simon Templar a much more infinitesimal flicker of reaction than that would have been enough. Without an instant’s hesitation, without even waiting for any verbal rejoinder, he brought his fist up under Kolben’s helpfully extended chin in the shortest and wickedest uppercut in the business.

  “Have you gone mad?” Eva gasped, as Kolben descended to the floor with the precipitate docility which the standard cliché compares with being pole-axed.

  “That’s what I’ll have to try to sell the jury, darling, if I’m wrong about this,” Simon answered, and as she suddenly flew at him he hit her reluctantly but accurately on the back of the neck with the minimum of essential force.

  That gave him a few minutes with nothing to worry about except the chance that they might have other friends in the house, but as he sped swiftly and softly from room to room he found no one except, at last, trussed to an iron cot in an attic, the one man he had been seeking.

  “Herr Roeding,” he said reproachfully, as he was removing the cords and adhesive tape, “it’s all right for you to poke around in antique shops and accept free guide-books, but a research chemist of your age shouldn’t escort young women to the hot spots of the Reeperbahn.”

  “They are all in it together,” spluttered the victim. “Uhrmeister who gives out the books, his daughter who wants to see all the shows, the uncle who is a pawnbroker, and her husband who owns this house. And that story about Störtebeker’s goblet—”

  “I’ve heard it.” said the Saint. “It’s very well done. And if you’d been the ordinary sucker it would only have cost you a few thousand marks. But Kolben recognized you or your name, or both, and he must have realized that you were worth more on the hoof than as just another disappointed treasure-hunter. If a pal of ours in Washington hadn’t asked me to give it a whirl before it was officially reported that you were missing and might have defected under the Wall, you would probably have been smuggled out on the next freighter to Russia.”

  Ernst Roeding massaged some color back into his hand, but his face was still gray.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  THE BIGGER GAME

  Because I once translated the autobiography of Juan Belmonte, one of the historically greatest bullfighters of them all, with what I hoped was an authoritative introduction, Simon Templar has by association been assumed by some readers to be an aficionado himself, or even a graduate practitioner of the art. In one interview with an English reporter, who had received disappointing replies to a few leading questions designed to show up the Saint’s devotion to bullfighting, which could in print be either pilloried or ridiculed according to the delightful convention of most English interviewing, complained peevishly, “You sound so lukewarm about it—have you lost your afición?”

  “I just haven’t been in any of the countries where they do it, lately,” said the Saint.

  “And you don’t miss it? I’d have expected a man like you to want to try it himself, like other people take up golf. Haven’t you ever tried to stand up to a bull with a cape?”

  “If I told you about my greatest moment in that line,” said the Saint equably, “you’d either splash it all over your paper, which would be a breach of confidence, or you wouldn’t believe me, which would hurt my pride. So let’s save us both embarrassment by trying some other subject. After all, burglars can make just as big headlines as bullfighters.”

  In simple fact, Simon had tried his cape-work against very-young bulls at round-up time on the fincas of a couple of breeders whom he had known in Spain, and his natural grace and superb reflexes had caused some of the privileged observers to proclaim perhaps extravagantly that he was a born phenomenon whose refusal to make it a career would be a disaster through which tauromachy would continue irreparably impoverished. But he had never taken any but a spectator’s part in any formal corrida, and in spite of the acidulous journalist’s imputation he had never felt any ambition to.

  Nevertheless the Saint’s last answer, like many of his smoothest evasions, was only bald truth which it privately amused him to veil and confuse.

  He did actually, once, make a quite such as no matador up to and including Belmonte ever dreamed of, or is likely to dream of since, except in nightmares.

  (I must intrude myself again here to mention that what I have just italicized has no connection with the English word “quite,” meaning “moderately,” as in a phrase like “quite nice,” often pronounced “quaite naice.” This one is pronounced in Spain something like key-tay, and in a formal bullfight refers to the work of luring the bull away from a fallen picador, the lancer on the horse which the bull has felled, despite the squeals of Anglo-Saxon tourists in the stands, who as charter members of some SPCA do not regard human beings as animals that should not be cruelly treated. Aficionados, who may be more sentimental, rate the quite as a rather valiant job, sometimes almost heroic.)

  Simon Templar really did think of the hunting of criminals sometimes as a sport, and infinitely more exciting than the pursuit of the much less cunning and dangerous quarry which satisfies other self-designated sportsmen. But just as devotees of the more generally accepted versions of the chase rate some forms as more challenging than others, to the Saint one of the supreme refinements was to spot the villain before he became the answer to a whodunit, or to anticipate the crime before the perpetrators had finally decided to commit it.

  Sometimes, Simon maintained, a man is ineluctably marked for murder. He may be the political candidate with the reform platform in a town that doesn’t want to be reformed, the crook who has decided to squeal on a powerful racket, the inconvenient husband who stands in the way of somebody’s hot ideas for a reshuffle—there are many obvious possibilities. But since murders, like marriages, require at least two participants, the consummation requires an inexorable aggressor as well as a predestined victim.

  There was an evening in London when the Saint felt sure he had met both together. This was at the bar of the White Elephant, which was a supper club where in those days you might run into anyone that you read about in the papers, and frequently did.

  The slight swarthy man with the burning black eyes and the ugly scar on one temple he recognized instantly as Elías Usebio, who had been called the greatest matador since Manolete: Simon had never seen him in the ring, but that scimitar profile had been widely caricatured, especially since his sensational wedding and equally publicized retirement a year ago.

  Iantha Lamb, whom he had married, or who had married him, would have been ecstatically recognized by many millions more to whom he was only a name which they were still very vague about, such being the more international scope of motion pictures and their attendant publicity. Iantha Lamb was a movie star, if not of the first magnitude, at least a luminary to gladden the box office. Although there were sour-pots who sneered that she acted better in bedrooms than before cameras, except for certain films which her first husband had spent a small fortune buying up, anything that she did was news and she had worked hard at making it newsworthy. Her assiduously advertised weakness was for men who lived with death at their elbow—racing drivers, lion tamers, deep-sea divers, test pilots, soldiers of fortune, young men on a flying trapeze, anyone whose luck had more chances to run out than that of most people. Her wild romances with these statistical bad bets had filled more columns of print than her thespian achievements ever earned, culminating with her marriage to Usebio, the torero, who until he cut his pigtail had been generally rated most likely to become an obituary.

  “You were sensational then, Elías,” she said almost wistfully. “Nobody wh
o hasn’t seen you in a corrida can imagine how wonderful you were. Every time you stepped out into the ring, I died. But you always lived, and that was more wonderful still.”

  “And now I expect to go on living.” Usebio said indulgently, “until I am knocked down on the sidewalk by a runaway bus.”

  “Does that mean that you lost your nerve?” asked the other man who was with them.

  He was much taller and bigger, with the fine mahogany tan which develops on a certain type of Englishman, but as a rule only when he has been exiled for a long time to colonies where the sun shines more consistently than it normally does at home. He had large white teeth to contrast with his complexion, and an outdoor man’s interesting crowfoot wrinkles to point up his light gray eyes, and the ideal dusting of gray in his hair to give it all distinction, without making him seem old.

  He too was recognizable—in a lesser degree, but Simon happened to have read an article about him not long before, in the kind of magazine one thumbs through in waiting-rooms. His name was Russell Vail, and he was what is rather oddly called a white hunter: that is, he guided package-priced adventurers to the haunts of wild animals, told them when to shoot, and finished off the specimens that they wounded or missed, never forgetting that a satisfied client must go home not only with a soporific supply of anecdotes but also with the hides, heads, and horns to prove them. He had chaperoned a number of Hollywood safaris into Darkish Africa and had written a book about it, which made him a personality too.

  “I only decided not to be stupid,” Usebio said quietly. “It is a matter of arithmetic. Even if you are very good, every afternoon there is a chance for the bull to get you. Each time you go out, he has more chances. If you shoot at a target often enough, no matter how difficult it is, one day you must hit it. Too many bullfighters have forgotten that. They say, “In one year, three years, when I am forty, I will retire.” But before that, they meet a bull who does not know the date. There is only one time when you can say you retire and be sure of it. That is when you are alive to say you will not fight again, not even once more.”

  “Quit while you’re ahead, eh?” Russell Vail said heartily. “Well, that’s how the sharpies play cards.”

  “Elías was always very brave,” Iantha Lamb said. “All the critics always said that.”

  “So, I had been lucky, and I was well paid, and I had not lived foolishly, as many bullfighters do. I was a rich man. I did not have to go on fighting, except for a thrill. And then I discovered a much greater thrill—to go on living, and be the husband of Iantha. That was the surprise present I gave her on our honeymoon.”

  “And what a surprise,” she said pensively. “The last thing I ever expected. But don’t blame it on me. I never asked for it.”

  Usebio looked up almost in pain, and said, “Who spoke of blame? I wanted to give you my life, and how could I give it if I did not have it?”

  There was a slightly awkward silence, and Russell Vail ordered another round of drinks.

  Simon, who had been eavesdropping unashamedly, was suddenly aware of Iantha Lamb’s huge slanting elfin eyes fixed on him with an intensity of the kind which every attractive male learns to interpret eventually, no matter how much modesty he may have started life with. He only met her gaze for a moment and then concentrated on stirring the ice in his Peter Dawson, but he could still feel her watching him.

  Russell Vail took a hefty draught from his fresh glass and started up again.

  “All this stuff about getting killed, Elías—honestly, aren’t you making a bit much of it? Fox-hunters get killed. Football players get killed. House painters get killed. Even ordinary pedestrians get killed on the streets. Considering how many bullfighters there must be in Spain and Mexico, do they really have such a lot of accidents?”

  “It is not the same,” Usebio said patiently, though a sensitive ear could detect the underlying effort. “The fox is not trying to kill the hunter. The public does not want a house painter to come as close as he can to falling off his ladder.”

  “Oh, yes, your bullfight fans want their thrill. But even a fox has a more sporting chance. The bull never gets away, does he?”

  “He is not intended to. It is so difficult to explain to an Anglo-Saxon. But bullfighting is not a sport. It is an exhibition, to let the matador show his skill and courage.”

  “By tormenting a wretched hunk of beef that’s doomed before he starts?”

  Vail smiled all the time, blazoning good nature with gleaming incisors.

  “It is no more a hunk of beef than those African buffalo I have heard you speak of,” Usebio said.

  “But they aren’t shut up in a little arena, either. They’re out in the open, where I have to find them—and they’re just as likely to be hunting me!”

  “And you have a big gun that can knock them over with one touch of your finger.” The ragged scar on Usebio’s forehead seemed to throb lividly as he raised a finger to it, though his voice did not change. “Did you ever come close enough to one for it to do something like this to you?”

  Vail took another solid sip, and answered a little more loudly, “I’m not so bloody silly. I’m not trying to impress an audience. But even without taking unnecessary risks, a lot of chaps in my profession have got themselves killed. A lot more than toreadors, I wouldn’t mind betting,” Usebio winced.

  “I do not know about toreadors, except what I have seen in a French opera, Carmen. The men who do what I do are called toreros.”

  “All right, toreros—bullfighters—what’s in a name?”

  “Elías is being modest,” his wife put in. “He’s a matador de toros. That’s more special than just any torero. It’s like being a star instead of just any actor.”

  “I’m sorry,” Vail said, smiling more relentlessly than ever. “No offense meant. But I’d still like to know the figures.” “Well, does either of you know them?”

  There was no immediate answer, and Simon Templar could not resist sneaking another glance at the trio to observe any non-verbal response. And once again, disconcertingly, the glance was trapped by Iantha Lamb’s boldly speculative gaze.

  This time he couldn’t break the contact too hastily without looking foolish, and she said, while he was still caught, “Somebody should be umpiring this—how about you?”

  Simon felt four more eyes converging on him simultaneously, but they didn’t bother him. He said amiably, “I’m no statistician either.”

  “You don’t look like one,” she said. “You look much more interesting. What are you?”

  That was one of the questions he always hated: the truth was far too complicated for ordinary purposes, and the easier falsehoods or flippancies became tedious after all the times he had tried them.

  “I’ve been called a lot of things.”

  “What’s your name?”

  He decided that this was one situation where he might as well give it, and let the gods take it from there.

  It was perhaps significant, if not surprising, that neither Vail nor Usebio had any reaction to it, other than astonishment at the reaction of Iantha Lamb, who seemed as if she would have been happy to swoon.

  “My hero!” she crowed, while they looked understandably blank.

  “Please,” begged the Saint, as she slid off her stool and began to move towards him.

  An expression of ineffable smugness came over her internationally fabled face. She looked exactly like the cat that had one paw on the mouse’s tail.

  “All right…for a price.”

  “Name it.”

  “Later,” she said, in the husky undertone that had throbbed from a thousand sound tracks.

  Possibly because of a linguistic advantage, Russell Vail was the first of her two escorts to recover.

  “That’s fine,” he said, with unflagging joviality. “But can’t we be introduced?”

  She did that, formally. Usebio bowed with dignity. Vail shook hands, insisting on the grasp of his powerful paw.

  “You must be somethi
ng special,” he said, “if you send Iantha like that.” He might have been momentarily set back by the discovery that his consciously muscular grip was very gently but unmistakably equalled, but the check was barely perceptible. He went on, with the same geniality, “Did you ever do any big-game hunting?”

  “A little,” said the Saint.

  “Do you know anything about bullfighting?” Usebio asked.

  “A little.”

  “Well, what do you think?” asked Iantha Lamb.

  Simon shrugged.

  “I think you’ll never settle that argument with figures, anyhow. So X number of guys were killed at the battle of Waterloo and Y number of guys were killed at El Alamein. What formula do you use to figure who was braver?”

  “In other words,” she insisted, “the only proof would be to test one against the other, like making a bullfighter go big-game hunting, or sending a big-game hunter into a bullfight.”

  “I’d like to see any bullfighter take on a buffalo with his bare hands,” muttered Vail. “Or a rogue elephant. Or—”

  “Or a man-eating shark,” Simon said. “Can both of them swim?…I’m not being facetious. There are different skills involved, as well as courage. A bullfighter might be a lousy shot. A big-game hunter probably wouldn’t even know how to hold a cape. If you want to match a bullfighter and a big-game hunter on equal terms—present company excepted, I hope—the only fair way would be in some field where they’re both amateurs.”

  Iantha Lamb pouted.

  “What would you suggest?”

  It was then perhaps that the Saint felt his first truly premonitory chill. For an academic conversation, the point didn’t have to be pressed so hard. But he said lightly, “How about tiddly-winks? It’s easier to arrange than shark wrestling.”

  She seemed petulantly disappointed, but Russell Vail grinned more widely as he emptied his glass.

  “That’s a great idea,” he said. “But I’ve got a better one. Knives and forks and a juicy steak. Can we settle for that? I’m famished.”