“Must have been an extra big night.”
“He has the splitting headache and the nausea, of course, but much worse than he can ever remember having them. And a bad cough, though he can’t remember whether he smoked a lot more than his normal quota of cigarettes. Naturally, he has no appetite for breakfast. But he doesn’t improve during the day. He feels worse all the time, he can’t eat, and his eyeballs turn yellow. The following day, his wife thinks he must have an attack of jaundice, and calls me in. By that time he has stopped passing urine. I do what I can, but in two days he is dead.”
“Another casualty to the expense-account system,” said the Saint. “His wife ought to sue the Government for instituting a tax system that forces business men to entertain each other to death just so they can have a little fun with their own profits before the tax collectors grab for them.”
Dr Javers frowned. It was evident that on top of everything else he disapproved of flippancy, at least when it detracted from the importance he attributed to his own conversation.
“I’d given him a complete check-up only three weeks before. His social-business drinking hadn’t been going on long enough to do any irreparable damage. His liver and kidneys were still in good shape. He showed no signs of any cardiac condition. In fact, I would have testified anywhere that there was nothing organically wrong with him.”
“Anyone can make a mistake, I suppose.”
“Not me, Mr Templar. Not that bad a mistake. In fact, to protect my own reputation, it was I who urged that there should be a post-mortem. The subject’s wife agreed, and I was completely vindicated. He had absolutely no chronic lesion or disease. If he had watched his diet, cut down his drinking, and taken a little exercise, there was no reason why he couldn’t have lived as long as any of us. But he died, actually, of acute kidney failure.”
“So he was poisoned.”
“Obviously. But what with?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t do it.”
“I’ll give you a little help. It was done with something that anyone can buy without any restriction, which you’d be likely to find in almost any house, and which isn’t generally considered poisonous at all. And generally speaking, it isn’t. This poisoning was a freakish accident. It depended on an entirely separate circumstance which I included in my summary, if you were paying close enough attention.”
Simon made a heroic effort to mute a sigh.
“I’m no toxicologist, doctor,” he said. “You tell me.”
“I’ll give you one more clue,” Javers said, with visibly expanding egocentric glee. “There was a heavy smear of lipstick on the collar of the coat he had worn on his last night out. But he insisted, and I believe him, that this was merely a souvenir of the floor show at one of the clubs to which he had taken his customer, which had one of those numbers where the chorus girls make fools of some of the men at the ringside tables.”
The Saint shrugged.
“I give up.”
Javers shook his head, and his round smug face shone with delight. In any sensibly ordered world, no further justification should have been needed for punching him in the nose.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” he said. “You still haven’t really tried. I want to find out how good you are. Think it over for a while.”
He moved away, chortling to himself, leaving Simon unexpectedly unhooked and joyfully free to set a course towards a prettily molded blonde in another corner whom he had been wistfully watching for some time.
Needless to say, the Saint did not think about Dr Javers’s conundrum for a moment, but Dr Javers was not so easily dismissed. An hour later he came all the way across the room to buttonhole Simon relentlessly again.
“Have you found the answer yet?”
“No,” Simon said patiently. “What is it?”
The doctor beamed at him gloatingly.
“You haven’t concentrated on it yet. I know, I’ve been watching you. Unfortunately I have to leave now, but I’m not letting you off so lightly. I’m going to leave you with the problem. It’ll torment you later, when you’re trying to go to sleep or waking up in the morning. And when you can’t stand it any longer, you can call me.” He handed Simon a card. “We’ll have a spot of dinner together and I’ll explain it to you. Or if you happen to have hit on that solution. I’ve got a few other scientific puzzles for you to sharpen your wits on. I expect I’ll hear from you one of these days.”
He departed again, chuckling fatly, and Simon put the card in his pocket and took a mental pledge never to look at it again or to waste another instant wondering what chemical coincidence Dr Javers’s patient could have succumbed to.
Experience should long since have taught him the intrinsic danger of such rash resolutions, but he felt that in this case at least there was nothing he could obtain from such an odious bore that would be worth the tedium and irritation of getting it. He held firmly to this erroneous assumption for several weeks, during which he was fully occupied with other matters that are recorded elsewhere in these annals, which left him no spare time to fret over tricky puzzles that did not immediately concern him.
The nudge of Destiny was still far from perceptible at first, one night in Paris when he came home very late to his suite at the George V, giving a perfunctory bonsoir to the anonymous cleaning woman whom he passed on her knees in the corridor. But he had hardly taken off his coat and tie when there was a timid touch on the buzzer at the outer door, and he opened it and recognized her more by her drab fatigue uniform than anything else.
“May I speak with Monsieur a moment?” she asked nervously.
“But certainly, Madame,” he replied cordially, in the same French, giving her the ceremonious title which Gallic gallantry may accord even to the humblest servant.
She came in, a gray woman toil-worn to nothing but skin and bones and indefatigable persistence, yet with a great dignity in her large deep-set eyes.
“I know who you are, Monsieur Templar,” she said, when she had shut the door. “Everyone talks about le Saint staying here. I have waited many nights for the chance to catch you at a good moment.”
“What is your trouble?” he asked.
“It is a long story, but I will try to make it short. My name is Yvonne Norval. I had a husband once, and his name was Norval, so that is also the name of my daughter Denise. But he died long ago, in Algeria, after the Liberation, which did not settle everything for the professional soldiers. Denise is almost sixteen now, and she was born the day after I was notified of his death.”
“A small consolation, perhaps. But it must have been hard for you to bring her up alone.”
“Very hard, Monsieur. The pay of a French sergeant is not much, at the best, and the pension of his widow is even less. But we had waited a long time for a child, always promising ourselves that if ever we were blessed with one it should have the best upbringing that we could give it, at any sacrifice. For neither of us had had much, but there must always be a time when any family can improve itself, if the parents are determined to pass on to their children a little more than they received. And after I had lost my husband, this hope became an obsession. I was already twenty-seven years old when Denise was born: I had had the best of my own life. But I still had a good figure and a pretty face, though you would not believe it now.”
It was hard to realize that simple arithmetic made her no more than forty-three. Anyone’s guess would have pegged her at least twelve years older. But the Saint said, “On the contrary, Madame, one sees that you must once have had great beauty, and now it has only matured, like a good wine.”
“I had, at any rate, something that men still wanted, for a little while,” she said calmly. “And since I no longer had any use for it, I gave the benefit to Denise.”
“Je vous écoute,” said the Saint. “Please sit down. At an hour like this, I have nothing but time.”
This was a poetic exaggeration, but on this occasion he did not feel that the time was wasted.
The tale
that he heard might have sounded to a cynic like the plot for a soap opera that no soap manufacturer would dare to sponsor, but it was told with a stoical dispassionateness that gave it a quality of classic tragedy.
Yvonne Norval had chosen the oldest profession with no illusions, solely on her cold-blooded estimate that there was no other in which she was qualified to earn so much money so quickly. But unlike most of her sisters in it, she had hoarded every franc that she could. She spent nothing on personal luxuries, and no more than the essential minimum on such decorative vanities as were necessary to attract her clientele; her Spartan willpower and singleness of purpose substituted for the expensive stimulus of drink and drugs which many others depended on to numb their self-disgust, and with the cunning and ferocity of a tigress she evaded or fought off the approaches of the pimps who would have helped themselves to the largest share of her income. She did not say it all in those words, but the facts were implicit in her own austere way of telling it.
In seven years of this rigorous dedication, she had expended the last saleable vestige of her original stock-in-trade, but she had accumulated a fund that would guarantee her daughter’s care and education for the next ten, on a much higher level even than she could have hoped for if a fellagha sniper’s aim had been a little less deadly.
She placed the child in a convent school of excellent standing, representing herself as the widow of an Army officer whose snobbish family had sternly refused to recognize their marriage or its offspring. Too proud to plead for the charity of these intransigent in-laws, she was depositing everything he had left her to pre-pay the raising of their daughter in the style to which she should be entitled: the fact that she herself would thus be forced to take any menial job for her own subsistence was not to cloud the childhood of Denise. When the little girl became aware enough to ask why Yvonne visited her so seldom and never took her home, she would be told that her mother was married again, to a man who was so intensely jealous of the past that he refused ever to see the fruit of it; perhaps one day he would relent, her mother was working on him constantly, but the day had not dawned yet. The sympathetic nuns had agreed to lend their silence to the deception.
“They would have needed a very tolerant confessor themselves,” said the Saint, “if they had not been moved by such a sacrifice as yours. But after this, did you still have more trouble?”
“Like you, Monsieur, I thought it was ended. But if it had been, I should not be talking to you. Instead, it was only beginning. After all, there was a maquereau I did not escape.”
His given name was Pierre, and in the half-world where he belonged he was known as Pîerrot-le-Fût—a gross arrogant beast of the type that are loosely called Apaches, but not because there is anything noble in their savagery. Of surnames he had a variety, but once when he was picked up in a police dragnet it had amused him to call himself Pierre Norval—that same day, Yvonne had refused his “protection” for the nineteenth time, in particularly graphic phrases, and under the influence of a stolen bottle of Calvados it had struck him as a brilliantly subtle retaliation. Even afterwards, he was still entranced with his own malicious genius, and continued to use the name, grumbling obscure crudities about his unfaithful “wife.”
In a psychological reaction, that has afflicted many better men, rejection had not quenched his interest but had inflamed it. He did not think for an instant that she was irresistible or irreplaceable, he knew a dozen girls who were prettier or better built or more entertaining, but that abstract estimate made it an even more intolerable affront to his vanity that Yvonne should turn him down. It had become a point of honor that he must subjugate her, so that in his own time he could humiliate her as she had humiliated him. And to this objective he had devoted more tenacity and ingenuity than he would ever have squandered on any legitimate enterprise.
And when he finally found the key, it fitted more perfectly than he could have hoped for in his most vindictive imaginings.
“Somehow, he found out what I had done with Denise, and how I had paid the school so that she would be safe no matter what became of me. Naturally, I had let no one know about the money I was saving. And now there was no way for him to touch it. But he had armed himself with the one weapon that I could not fight. He told me that unless I became his slave, he would wait until Denise was old enough to be destroyed, and then tell her all the truth about herself and about me.”
For a few seconds the Saint was utterly at a loss for words, and in that silence he realized that no comment he could have made would have been adequate. In a lifetime that had been lived as close as possible to every form of evil, he had never heard a blackmail threat of such callous enormity.
Finally he said, “You should have killed him.”
“You are right. But that is easier for most people to say than to do, especially for a woman. And if I had done that, even the nuns might have turned against me. The whole scandal might have come out. And even if I escaped the guillotine, I could no longer have hoped to help Denise a little more, perhaps, after she left the school—to see her sometimes and perhaps not have her hate me altogether for giving her up to satisfy the new jealous husband I had invented.”
“So you had to accept Pierrot-le-Fût.”
“Yes. I accepted him. I had a little time left in which men of a lower class, or drunk enough, would still pay for me. And even after that, he would not let me go. He had not yet satisfied his hate. He kept me as his cook, his servant, to wait on his friends and their girls and to clean up after them. And to bring home enough money to pay for this privilege, I could go out and work as a scrub woman also, as you saw me tonight.”
Simon thought this must be the end of the story.
“You have my sympathy and my homage, Madame,” he said. “But that cannot be all you wanted of me. Tell me what you think I could do.”
“I would not have troubled you, Monsieur Templar, if only what I have been doing was enough. I am used to the work now, and to the beatings when he is drunk, and I am still able to hold back a little money which he does not know about, which I am saving for when Denise will need it. But now, Pierrot threatens something much worse than before.”
“Can there be such a thing?” asked the Saint incredulously.
“Yes. Now this filthiness says that what I do is no longer enough. He has been watching Denise. She is old enough and pretty enough, he says, to profit him much more than I can, in the one trade that he understands.”
Simon Templar would never again claim that he had heard everything.
“But what threat could he use to make that possible?”
“He may not need one. He can find some way to shame her at the school, by telling the truth about me to her, or to her friends, or to their parents. Then, when she is an outcast by them or by her own shame, he will take over, by force if necessary. He and his kind know only one art, but they know it well. And because I tried so hard to have her gently brought up, she will have none of the defenses that I had. Pierrot-le-Fût is not stupid, you must understand, but he is utterly ruthless, and he is obsessed with one idea which has become a mania. For him to reduce and ruin Denise would be his last and greatest triumph.”
“And, of course, there is no bribe left to offer him. He has had the satisfaction of making you suffer the last possible indignity. Now he can only look forward to the sadistic climax of proving that all your sacrifice was in vain.”
“C’est ça. One believes, now, that the Saint understands everything.”
“That’s one thing I’ll never do,” said the Saint. “But I’ll keep trying.”
He lighted a cigarette and stared out of the elaborately lace-curtained windows through which he could see practically nothing, listening to the vague rumbles and beeps and blended voices and sporadic clatters of the city without hearing them, and wondered if some miracle would ever earn him a reprieve from the reputation to which he had dedicated himself.
He could no longer have been flippant about soap operas, but
he was beginning to think that a magnificent soap opera could have been built around him, except that hardly anyone would have believed the plot material except himself.
“Tell me some more about this charmer, Pierrot-le-Fût,” he said.
The details he was mainly interested in were the haunts and habits of the specimen. He wrote down certain addresses that Yvonne Norval gave him, and when he had finished asking questions she stood up with quiet dignity.
“I apologize for taking so much of your time, Monsieur,” she said. “But since you have heard it all, may I dare to hope a little?”
“I will try to think of something,” he said. “But whatever happens, when you leave this room, you must forget that you ever spoke to me, or told me anything. This may be our last meeting, but in any case, we never met.”
“C’est entendu, Monsieur le Saint.”
It was the most natural thing for him to offer his hand as he opened the door for her, but he was somewhat stunned and embarrassed when she bent over it and touched it to her lips. Then, before he could protest, she was gone.
It was quite a while since the Saint had tackled such a relatively basic and elementary problem as this. Regardless of the visions of starry-eyed spiritual or psychological idealists, he had never believed in the redemption or rehabilitation of such creatures as Pierrot-le-Fût: he believed in one fast, thrifty, and final cure for what ailed them, a treatment which eliminated all risk of a relapse. The fact that he had not administered this remedy so often of late was not due to any loss of faith in the efficacy of death as a disinfectant, but to the distracting pressure of too many more intriguing and more profitable claims on his attention. He realized now how much he had missed some of the old simple pleasures. But it had taken a pustule of such almost incredible stature as Pierrot-le-Fût to remind him of them.
The next evening he headed for the area near Montmartre which was frequented by the self-baptized Pierre Norval and his ilk, not to sample any of the garish boîtes clustered around the Place Pigalle where pilgrims from all over the world pay their traditional respects to the symbols of mammalian reproduction, but to sift through some of the unglamorous outlying cafés where the parasites on the by-products of this activity met to scheme, drink, boast, connive, gamble, and trade every kind of illicit merchandise—vegetable, mineral, and human. And without any elaborate disguise, using only a few of those subtle shifts of dress and demeanor which were his own inimitable masterpieces of camouflage, he was able to do it without ever incurring the kind of attention that would have greeted an ordinary tourist who had strayed so far from the time-honored tourist trap-line.
Trust the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 8
