Once upon a yet more recent time, Simon Templar, who was known in many circles but fortunately for him not everywhere as “The Saint,” chanced to be dining at an adjacent table at Stallmästaregarden on the same night as Ernest Moldys had elected to take fodder at that hostelry.
“What I want,” said Mr Moldys aggressively, “is some of these ‘crayfters.’ ”
He was then still in his mid-thirties, and handsome enough in the pseudo-rugged way that appeals to advertising photographers commissioned to prove that even hairy-chested tattooed he-men can enjoy after-shave lotions. In lieu of personality he affected an aggressive manner developed from watching certain old television films and designed to impress his masculinity upon his consorts of the moment, whom he carefully selected for their youthful impressionability, like the round-faced flaxen-haired girl who accompanied him that evening.
“I am sorry,” said the head waiter, “but the kräftor season does not begin until tomorrow.”
Kräftor is the fresh-water crayfish which looks exactly like a four-inch miniature northern lobster, and which is one of the most prized delicacies of Swedish gastronomy.
“I told you that when I told you about them, Ernest,” said the girl, who looked as if she should have been doing her homework instead of going to dinner with such an obviously raffish date.
“I bet you can get them in America any time—if anyone wants ’em,” said Mr Moldys, implying that few people would condescend to do so.
“In Sweden the season is very short,” said the head waiter apologetically. “It is only one month, beginning tomorrow, August the eighth.”
“So what? So I made a mistake in the date. But that’s only a few hours away. What’s the difference? Don’t tell me you haven’t got a stock in the kitchen right now, ready for opening day. So let’s have some.”
“I am sorry, but the law is very strict. We cannot serve kräftor before tomorrow.”
Mr Moldys glowered.
“That’s why you’ll be goddam square-heads all your lives,” he said loudly.
The head waiter bowed icily and moved away, but Mr Moldys continued to hold forth for some time on the shortcomings of Europe in general, Scandinavia in particular, and the Swedish nation especially, in a voice that was pitched for the attention not only of his companion but of half the other customers in the room. It went to the limits of embarrassment before he consented to let her soothe him, and switched on again the flashing smile for which too many foolish virgins had forgiven his tasteless tantrums.
Although Mr Moldys tirelessly dramatized himself to an extent which had caused his privileged associates to nickname him “The Ham,” it was one of his failings that he could not confine himself to the act of charm, but firmly believed that the paperback private-eye performance was even more important.
Simon Templar would have been glad to forget the foregoing exhibition as quickly as possible, but a hardly overstretched arm of coincidence encircling a comparatively small capital had him installed at a veranda table at lunch the very next day at the Restaurant Riche, which is one of the impeccably best in Stockholm, when it again scooped in Ernest Moldys, who was now bedazzling another potential juvenile delinquent with the same enticing figure and coloration as his admirer of the night before, but a slightly different facial arrangement.
By this time Mr Moldys had lost interest in kräftor and wanted smorgasbord, which he was told the restaurant was not serving that day.
“Are you nuts?” demanded Mr Moldys indignantly. “All Swedish restaurants have smorgasbord. They do in America, anyway.”
“In Sweden there was always smorgasbord in the old days,” said another head waiter politely. “But it is not so fashionable here any more. However, you are lucky. Today is the first day of the crayfish.”
“Oh, we must have those, Ernest,” said the nymphet. “They are wonderful—”
“I don’t want any. I heard all about them yesterday, when I couldn’t get any. Now I don’t care if I never have one. I want smorgasbord.”
“How about some herring, sir? We have several kinds, the same as you would find in a smorgasbord.”
“I had herring yesterday. I can’t eat it every day. For Chrissake, can’t you ever get anything you want, when you want it, in this broken-down country? I know back-street delicatessens in New York that’d make this joint look sick.”
Mr Moldys was talking in the same intentionally public-address voice which he had used the night before, and as he glanced around to observe what attention he was getting, he caught Simon Templar’s analytical eye on him, and was vain enough to honestly believe that he recruited himself an ally by turning on a brilliantly comradely smile.
“You know what I mean, don’t you?” he said. “I can see you’ve been around. All this olde-world tradition and doing everything by the book—they’re so far back, they don’t even know they’ve been left behind! Don’t you lose your mind sometimes?”
“Sometimes, I wonder why the natives don’t lose theirs,” said the Saint calmly. “Considering some of the things they have to put up with.”
Ernest Moldys stared at him for several seconds with a strangely increasing uncertainty, and finally threw down his napkin with thinly disguised petulance.
“Let’s get out of here, you beautiful Viking, and see if we can’t get what we want somewheres else.”
Simon saw the head waiter pick up the reservation slip that had been on their table, and beckoned him.
“What was that charming character’s name?”
“A Mr Moldys.” The man showed him the paper. “You did not know him?”
“I wouldn’t want to,” said the Saint.
But this became untrue an instant after he said it; for the name, combined with something that had been vaguely familiar about the face, suddenly rang a bell in the complex circuits of Simon Templar’s memory, which absorbed every item of criminal intelligence that touched it like a sponge, but had to be prodded in sometimes peculiar ways to squeeze the information back out again.
At this moment he recalled certain facts about Ernest Moldys which made him want very much to know more. There were, for instance, some details about the suicide of that sixteen-year-old starlet in Hollywood on which his recollection was hazy, to say nothing of the exact terms of a reward which had once been offered by the victims of one of Mr Moldys’s more remunerative depredations.
The Saint did not ordinarily feel that his mission required him to administer personal correctives to obnoxious American tourists whose misbehavior could supply gratuitous ammunition to the ever-watchful snipers at the free world, but this was a case where natural impulse and lofty objective combined irresistibly with sound business practise. Once upon an earlier time the consequent leg work might have seemed discouragingly long-drawn and complicated, but in the age of electronic communications and jet aircraft it was almost no effort at all to a man who could sleep at any hour and altitude in a reclining seat like a child in a cradle. The Saint, who had nothing else planned for the weekend, merely took an SAS plane over the North Pole from Copenhagen to Los Angeles and returned by the same route, with his errands accomplished, in less time than it took Lindbergh to hobble from New York to Paris.
Ernest Moldys had done very well out of the last exercises of his vocation, but he also had very expensive tastes. These, like his other fickle appetites, were only partly genuine, another large part being dictated by his own conception of the way a stage or movie star such as he should have been would live. But the resulting pattern had made alarmingly rapid inroads on the folios of American Express travellers’ checks into which he had contrived to convert most of his loot, and he only knew one trade that was likely to replenish them.
Therefore he listened with guarded but lively interest one evening when he was having a cocktail by himself in the bar of the Grand Hotel, and a tall and vaguely piratical-looking individual whose features were recently familiar came in with an older man who wore his dark suit and bifocals with
the unmistakable patina of a high-priced attorney, and after ordering a couple of Peter Dawsons on the rocks they continued what must have been a lengthily waged discussion.
“What burns me,” said the Saint, “is that this harpy tells the court she needs all that alimony just to live on, in the style to which I’ve accustomed her. And she gets it. I have to pay her a company president’s income just to feed and clothe her, supposedly. And the next thing I know, she’s financing a season of Shakespeare. Well, if she can afford that, she obviously doesn’t need all that money to live on, and we ought to be able to get it reduced.”
“I know how you feel, Mr Hurley,” said the legal type. “But it’s her income now, and she can do what she likes with it.”
“If she wants to play at being a producer, she could cash in some of her jewels. Must be more than a quarter of a million dollars I spent on them—and of course she kept ’em all. There was ninety thousand just for a string of little rocks to hang where she should have a rope. Why doesn’t she hock them for capital?”
“They were part of the divorce settlement, Mr Hurley. There’s no law that says she has to dig into her capital for anything she can pay for out of income.”
“Does that include gigolos? This big nance that she’s backing—with my money—nobody ever heard of him before. But she’s going to make him a star. Even a California divorce-court judge couldn’t be stupid enough not to see that she must have some other motive besides giving young genius a break.”
“But you yourself called him a ‘big nance’—and that’s pretty common gossip. You don’t seriously think you could convince anyone that they were having an affair.”
“Frankly, that part of it baffles me. Enid has always been queer for actors, but at least she only flipped for the virile kind. When the next one of those comes along that queen is going to wonder what hit him.”
“Perhaps you should look forward to that, Mr Hurley. She might marry the next one, if he’s virile enough.”
“She’d never be stupid enough to do that unless he earned more than she’s getting from me. Not that that’d stop her having her fun…It still gripes me. Enid Hurley, the great impresario, preparing to stand Copenhagen on its ear, dazzling ’em with my diamonds, taking over Kronborg Castle, yet, with my money!”
“Try not to think about it. Go down to Cannes and look at the bikinis.”
“That’s not what I interrupted your vacation for. I want you to try and do something.”
“I’ve told you—”
“But she doesn’t have a lawyer here, telling her. Go to Copenhagen and see her. Bluff her. Try to throw a scare into her. Tell her we’re going to court to ask for a revision of the settlement. Tell her this proves she doesn’t need so much alimony, which tell her the Court wouldn’t give her for immoral purposes like subsidizing this swishy ham. Dress it up in all the phony legal gobbledygook, and if you do it well enough you might worry the hell out of her. Then offer to call it off if she’ll agree to accept a nice fat cut.”
“I don’t think you’ve got a chance.”
“Well, let me take that chance, will you? I can’t let it go without trying. You might be able to convince her that she stands a good chance of ending up with nothing, if she fights it. She might even be tried for perjury or promoting vice or something. The arguments are your business. You’ll be paid for it.”
“It’s not that I mind earning a fee, Mr Hurley, but I can’t conscientiously encourage you to spend your money with such a small prospect of getting anything in return.”
“I’d rather do that than give it all to Enid without a struggle. And if you do swing it, you can bill me for a twenty-thousand-dollar bonus.”
“Well,” said the lawyer, glancing at his watch, “let’s go to lunch and see if we can’t improve our case just a little.”
They paid their bill and departed, leaving Mr Moldys with his ears still tingling, but not from the traditional eavesdropper’s embarrassment. It was, rather, a warm glow of satisfaction that they had served him well, with a not inconsiderable assist from some possible guardian devil—a sensation that harmonized well with an equally symbolic itching of the fingers.
Mrs Enid Hurley, a rich divorcée with jewels and a weakness for actors—it was a situation that might have been made for him. The only thought that failed to occur to him was that it had.
About all that was left for him to find out for himself was the name of the hotel where this pre-cooked goose was laying its golden eggs, and in a city as small as Copenhagen this would normally have taken no more than a few phone calls after his arrival. For him, the catastrophic obstacle was in the word “arrival.” The cynical counsellor who had advised him to take a cure overseas had handed him, for a disproportionate fee, a list of countries warranted to be salubrious for his ailment, but Denmark was not one of them. And thus, after only a few minutes’ contemplation of this windfall that had been so extravagantly dumped in his lap, he found himself glaring at it with the obsessive acerbity of a shark which has discovered a succulent skin-diver cavorting in its dining depths, only to learn from an unpredicted bump on the nose that this mouth-watering morsel is protected inside a plastic bubble installed by the anti-shark experts of some camera crew shooting scenes for another submarine superscoop.
What this trauma might have done to the psyche of Ernest Moldys (he had tried to crash the marquees with more euphonious and star-sounding appellations, but had lately settled on the theory of honest down-to-earthiness: if Ernest Borgnine could win Academy Awards and Ernest Hemingway could cop Pulitzer Prizes, who could make cracks about Ernest Moldys?) is an interesting speculation, but it was not put to the final test, for after three days and nights of agonized frustration his sufferings were ended by precisely the kind of miracle he had been reduced to dreaming about.
As he entered his hotel and headed for the desk to ask for his key that auspicious afternoon, a woman hurried in front of him with a preoccupied flash of apology and commanded the attention of the uniformed incumbent with the bulldozing confidence of five generations of spoiled American wives behind her.
“I’m Mrs Hurley,” she proclaimed, with the clarity of royalty announcing itself. “Have you got me a driver yet?”
“A driver, Mrs Hurley?” The attendant looked blank. “What kind of driver did you want?”
“Do I have to go over all that again? I told you last night—”
“I was not on duty last night, madame.”
“Well, whoever was here on the desk. I told him I needed someone to drive my car to Hälsingborg tomorrow, and he promised me he’d arrange it.”
The attendant thumbed through a large ledger of scrawled notes and began a muttered consultation with an assistant, and the woman looked at Moldys again.
“I’m sorry—don’t let me hold you up. This is obviously going to take time!”
He gave her the most dazzlingly good-natured smile that he could achieve with his heart in his mouth, without letting it fall out. He was so staggered by his good fortune that he almost lost all the savoir-faire on which he prided himself.
“Please—I’m not in any hurry.”
“This is so aggravating, I thought I’d drive across from Hälsingborg and see some of the country, instead of flying, so yesterday I have to slip in the bathtub and fall down and crack my wrist.” She raised a left hand which protruded from a small cast which had been hidden by the foulard sling in which she carried it. “Now I’ve got the problem of taking my car back. I suppose I could get along by myself somehow, but I might get into trouble, and it seems foolish to take a chance.”
“I am sorry, madame,” said the man behind the desk, “but I can find nothing about a driver. Perhaps when the night porter comes on duty—”
“But if I’m going to leave at all, I’ve got to leave first thing in the morning. If he hasn’t done anything about it, somebody else had better get on the ball. Are you sure you looked under the right name? It’s H-U-R-L-E-Y. Mrs Enid Hurley.”
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br /> “Yes, madame. But there is nothing here. Would you like me to try to find you a driver?”
At long last, Ernest Moldys regained full possession of his wits, and simultaneously of his voice. Although he was still finding it hard to believe that this was not all a wonderful dream, he knew exactly what had to be done and how to do it.
“Mrs Hurley,” he said, “if you won’t think I’m being presumptuous, you have no problem. I’d be honored if you’d let me drive you to wherever you were going.”
“Oh, but I couldn’t possibly take up your time!”
Thus, after a little perfunctory argument and an interval of a few hours, she was seated with him at a window table on the Strand Hotel’s roof terrace, overlooking the lights of half the city, while they toasted each other in various experimental flavors of brännvin over the prawn pancakes and debated amiably on the merits of each. It was not even an ordeal for Mr Moldys, for although she was considerably older than his usual choice, she was in such a superbly groomed and pampered state of preservation that she did not look a day older than himself. She had classic features and a Vogue-model figure, and her personality would have made the local chick whom he had sidetracked for the occasion look insipid beside her.
The only fault he had to find was that the diamonds he had heard so much about were not in evidence. As if sensing something critical in the way he had studied her evening finery, she fingered the costume necklace and bracelet set she was wearing, and said, “I’m afraid I’m not very dressy, for a place like this. But I only came for a couple of days, and since I was driving alone it didn’t seem very smart to load all my baubles in the car, so I left them in the hotel safe in Copenhagen.”
Trust the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 13
