Trust the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  Moldys gallantly concealed his disappointment, although it seemed as if the luck which he thought had changed was turning dangerously coy again.

  “A woman like you doesn’t need jewels as much as they need her,” he said, omitting to credit the writer from whom he had swiped the line.

  Later in the meal, he learned for the first time that Hälsingborg, their destination on the west coast of Sweden, lay only two and a half miles across a narrow strait from the similarly named Danish town of Helsingör which was practically a suburb of Copenhagen, a mere thirty miles from the Danish capital.

  “Both sides used to be fortified,” explained Mrs Hurley, “and King Erik of Pomerania, who owned all the Scandinavian countries too, in those days, five or six hundred years ago, charged a toll on all the ships going through the Sound. It must have been quite a racket, because when Frederik II got to be King of Denmark he rebuilt the fort on his side into a fancy castle which he called Kronborg. It was finished about 1585, only fifteen years before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet and made it the scene of a practically prehistoric legend. That’s what they call poetic license, I guess.”

  “You sound as if you’d made a real study of it,” he said admiringly.

  “Well, naturally I’m interested. You see, I’m putting on a production of Hamlet there—of course, Helsingör is the place that Shakespeare called ‘Elsinore.’ ”

  “What a wonderful idea, to do Hamlet right in the very place where it happened!”

  “It probably never happened at all, and it certainly couldn’t have happened there, as I’ve told you. But even the Danes have probably convinced themselves by now that it did. It isn’t a new idea to put on the play there—people have been doing it since 1816. The challenge is to do it better.”

  “You know, I’d never have taken you for a producer.”

  “Because I’m not chewing a cigar? But I’m as tough as any of them, I hope.”

  “I refuse to believe it. At least, not like most of the ones I came across.”

  “Don’t tell me you’re an actor!”

  “I used to be, sort of.” He was ad-libbing furiously now, not sure where he was going, but inspiredly sure that he was on the right track. “Nothing very important, you know. But some kind critics predicted a great future for me.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I quit while I was ahead. I was on the verge of getting somewhere, when I inherited quite a bit of money, and the incentive to keep struggling was gone. But even now I can feel what it would mean to speak those lines in the place that Shakespeare himself was actually thinking of.”

  “Lots of ’em have done it—from Sir Laurence Olivier, way back in 1937 with Vivien Leigh, to Sir John Gielgud in ’39. Sir Michael Redgrave in 1950, and Richard Burton in ’54. He doesn’t need to be knighted since they made him the King in Camelot. But I still see the part differently from any of them.”

  Mr Moldys saluted her with another heartening measure of aromatic alcohol followed by the traditional beer chaser, and said:

  “This above all: to thine own self be true,

  And it must follow, as the night the day,

  Thou canst not then be false to any man”

  She looked at him with thoughtful interest.

  “That was a nice reading,” she said. “I’ve always thought Hamlet should be played something like you would naturally do it—as a real he-man trying to break out of a neurotic tradition, not a tormented introvert himself.”

  “Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,” he said.

  “And thus the native hue of resolution

  Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”

  “Exactly,” she agreed. “Now, I’ve got a young actor who’s physically just the way I visualize a Hamlet type, but temperamentally I’m beginning to worry about him.”

  Moldys was astute enough not to crowd his luck any harder at that moment, and in any case he wanted time to decide what to drive for. But he was exultantly certain that he had made a tremendous impression, and it was unthinkable that such a sequence of breaks could fail to climax somehow in a perfect pay-off.

  The Saint had a privileged insight into that psychology, having been the subject of it on several occasions himself.

  Moldys played it with creditable restraint for the rest of the evening and through the following day’s long drive, devoting as much time as possible to the rôle of intelligent listener, sympathetic but disinterested, agreeable but authoritative, which demanded a minimum of effort but gave him the maximum space in which to wait for the decisive opening.

  But in spite of all that, when they sat at dinner again the following night on the terrace of the newly completed Kärnan Hotel on the sea front of Hälsingborg, he began to experience some of the classic emotions of the mythical giant Tantalus (of whom he personally had never heard) whose name is immortalized in the word “tantalize,” whose doom it was to be parched by eternal thirst while chained beside a pool which always playfully receded a millimeter beyond the utmost reach of his tongue. He had even developed a confident belief that he was attractive to her on the most downright sexual plane, and that was an angle from which he knew unlimited approaches. But between consummation and salvation, between all his tactical advances and her jewels, still lay those two-and-a-half miles of international water and the whimsies of international treaties. His lawyer, who was highly conscientious within his limits, had been most insistent on those technicalities.

  Thus they looked at each other in a farewell atmosphere across a table which commanded the narrow strait separating them from the romantic turrets of Kronborg Castle, which was accommodatingly floodlit, and sighed with appropriate appreciation, and she could say, “I just hope everything will work out all right. I’m taking on such a big thing on my own. I mustn’t even begin to doubt what I’m doing.”

  Ernest Moldys took a big chance, from desperation, and leaned forward to try another quote, in his best voice:

  “Doubt thou the stars are fire,

  Doubt that the sun doth move,

  Doubt truth to be a liar,

  But never doubt I love…”

  “You must believe in what you’re doing, Mrs Hurley,” he covered himself hastily.

  “Sometimes that isn’t so easy.” She continued to stare at him with an air of discovery. “I talk very big and independent, but it’s a lonely business.”

  “I’ll be waiting to read the notices, and I’m sure they’ll be great.”

  “Don’t talk as if you’d be a million miles away. You’ve got to come to the opening. In fact, since you’ve come this far, why don’t you come over with me and see what we’re doing?”

  “I can’t.” He had to think of a reason quickly, and perhaps automatically clutched at a recent memory for inspiration. “My attorney is arriving from New York tomorrow to see me about some important business, and I must be back in Stockholm to meet him.”

  She grimaced.

  “Don’t talk to me about lawyers—I left Copenhagen to get away from one who was trying to blackmail me, in a strictly professional way. Packed an overnight bag and drove on to the ferry at Helsingör without telling anyone where I was going. I’m hoping by this time he’ll’ve gotten tired of cooling his heels in my hotel waiting for me to come back.”

  Unlike Moldys, she did not have to improvise any of her explanations, for the creation of cover stories was one of the Saint’s greatest specialties, and when he had polished one there was seldom a crevice in it for any question that had not been anticipated and prepared for.

  He found her more attractive than ever that night, even if his primary impetus was provided by the magnetism of the diamonds which still reposed in a hotel safe a few infinite miles away, and his wooing might have become troublesome if she had not been able to plead that her cracked wrist was aching and throbbing in a way that would have completely inhibited her from responding with all the enthusiasm that such an occasion deserved. The Saint had not overlooked th
at hazard either.

  The restless night that Moldys spent, however, was due to less romantic discouragement. In spite of all the auspices, the chariot of fortune seemed to have ended its delirious gallop in a morass of pure glue.

  He was finishing a gloomy breakfast in the dining room next morning when Enid Hurley came in, and even across the room her face told him that something new and dire had been added to the situation.

  “You’ll never guess,” she said incontrovertibly, as she reached his table.

  “What?”

  “You remember that lawyer I mentioned last night? Well, he was hired by my ex-husband to pester me. So this morning I thought, before I actually went back, it might be smart to call my secretary in Copenhagen and find out if he was still hanging around. And you know what I find out?”

  “No.”

  “He’s gone, all right. But while I’ve been away, since he couldn’t work on me, it seems he went to work on my actor, and got him so scared that he’s quit and flown back to Hollywood. So here I am, scheduled for an opening in ten days, with no leading man.”

  “That’s terrible,” said Moldys uncertainly.

  “It’s worse than that! It’s such a cheap victory for that bastard I was married to. He’s made me look ridiculous in front of the whole world. And there’s nothing I can do about it. You don’t replace a sensational Hamlet overnight.”

  She stared at him as if she were going to burst into tears. But instead of saline solution, her eyes slowly filled with a strange inspirational light. Suddenly she pointed a finger like a sword.

  “You,” she breathed.

  “What?” said Ernest Moldys, drawing a total blank in what should have been his climactic moment.

  “You could play Hamlet,” she said. “The way I visualized it. Better than that weak-kneed fop who walked out. You must do it, Ernest!”

  Moldys moistened his lips and swallowed hard to hold down his bouncing aorta. He had a buzzing in his ears and a feeling of vertigo that made him hold on to the table to keep the room from spinning.

  It is not for nothing that an over-enthusiastic actor is vulgarly referred to as a “ham.” In the opinion of this etymologist, the term has neither anatomical nor dietetic connotations, but is simply an abbreviation of “Hamlet,” the part which supposedly symbolizes the pinnacle of histrionic ambition. And if the perfect illustration of this theory was called for, no better example could be cited than Mr Ernest Moldys.

  And now it seemed as if the miracle in which he had almost lost faith had at the last moment answered its last mysterious cue and handed him the ultimate rôle on what would have been conventionally called a silver platter by anyone who was not more practically fascinated by its incrustation of diamonds.

  “You must do it,” Enid Hurley was pleading. “For me. You can start rehearsing tomorrow. You know the lines already, I’m sure. You can phone your attorney in Stockholm, and tell him to fly over and meet you in Copenhagen instead. If it means any extra expense, I’ll take care of it. Between us, we’ll show ’em. Please, Ernest, tell me you will!”

  With her impassioned eagerness and stark-naked need, it was not hard for Mr Moldys to forget that she was a comparatively old bag. Perhaps, he reflected (if he was capable just then of reflecting so coherently) he had too long been squandering his talent for seduction. At any rate, with everything else considered, the prospective change of pace was in no way deterrent.

  Rising at last to his moment of truth, he leaned forward and covered her hand caressingly.

  “Enid,” he said, “for you, I’ll do it. ‘The play’s the thing…’ ”

  Simon Templar was unable this time to take the usual bows for the script he had written, because he thought it advisable to stay well out of sight until Ernest Moldys was far off the ferry and irrevocably committed to Danish soil.

  Moldys was allowed to drive a little way from the dock before a uniformed guard stopped him and asked for his passport.

  The guard handed the passport to a large dour individual in plain clothes who loomed up behind him.

  At the same moment, a spectacled American legal type whom Moldys abruptly recognized appeared on the other side of the car and opened the door. Before he had finished resolving the conclusion that this could only be the attorney of Mrs Hurley’s ex-husband who had not given up after all but had been lying in wait with some new scheme of harassment, Mrs Hurley had slipped nimbly out of the adjoining seat and was hurrying away, with the supposed pestering lawyer making no attempt to detain or follow her.

  The plain-clothes man put the passport in his pocket and said stiffly, “Mr Moldys, I am of the Danish State Police. We have been asked by the American Government to hold you for extradition. You are under arrest.”

  The American lawyer leaned over to exhibit an identification card in a small plastic case. It bore his photograph and the insignia of the Department of Justice. He said, “I expect I’ll be taking you back, Hambo.”

  Mr Moldys was too devastated even to feel insulted.

  “Who set me up?” he croaked.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the Federal agent virtuously.

  Ernest Moldys would have been prematurely enlightened if he had witnessed the reunion of Mrs Hurley with the piratical-looking man who had last been heard speaking of her so vindictively, around the corner of an adjacent building.

  “You must have been magnificent,” Simon Templar said, and hugged her. “At this point I’ve a good mind to bow out and let you collect all of the reward.”

  “I wouldn’t want that,” she said. “I only tried to lead up to everything exactly the way you coached me. I never thought I could do it. I told you I never did any professional acting myself. It was my daughter who had all the talent. I’m the one who’d be very happy to bow out now.”

  The Saint shook his head.

  “I’m afraid that’s impossible. You’ll certainly have to testify on the charges involving her. And frankly, it should be worth something to see the Ham’s performance when he finds out why he shouldn’t have avoided meeting the parents of that girl in the drama school that he gave such a shoddy deal to. At the very least, he would have known your real name was different from the stage label she was using.”

  THE CONVENIENT MONSTER

  “Of courrse,” said Inspector Robert Mackenzie, of the Inverness-shire Constabulary, with a burr as broad as his boots seeming to add an extra “r” to the word, “I know ye’re only in Scotland as an ordinary visitor, and no’ expectin’ to be mixed up in any criminal business.”

  “That’s right,” said the Saint cheerfully.

  He was so used to this sort of thing that the monotony sometimes became irritating, but Inspector Mackenzie made the conventional gambit with such courteous geniality that it almost sounded like an official welcome. He was a large and homely man with large red hands and small twinkling gray eyes and sandy hair carefully plastered over the bare patch above his forehead, and so very obviously and traditionally a policeman that Simon Templar actually felt a kind of nostalgic affection for him. Short of a call from Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal in person, nothing could have brought back more sharply what the Saint often thought of as the good old days, and he took it as a compliment that even after so many years and even as far away as Scotland itself, he was not lost to the telescopic eye of Scotland Yard.

  “And I suppose,” Mackenzie continued, “ye couldna even be bothered with a wee bit of a local mystery.”

  “What’s your problem?” Simon asked. “Has somebody stolen the haggis you were fattening for the annual Police Banquet?”

  The Inspector ignored this with the same stony dignity with which he would have greeted the hoary question about what a Scotsman wore under his kilt.

  “It might be involvin’ the Loch Ness Monster,” he said with the utmost gravity. “Nae doot ye’ve hairrd of that.”

  “All right,” said the Saint good-humouredly. “I started this. I suppose I h
ad it coming. But you’re the first policeman who ever tried to pull my leg. Didn’t they tell you that I’m the guy who’s supposed to do the pulling?”

  “I’m not makin’ a joke,” Mackenzie persisted aggrievedly, and the Saint stared at him.

  It was in the spring of 1933 that a remarkable succession of sober and reputable witnesses began to testify that they had seen in Loch Ness a monstrous creature whose existence had been a legend of region since ancient times, but which few persons in this century had claimed to have seen for themselves. The descriptions varied in detail, as human observations are prone to do, but they seemed generally to agree that the beast was roughly thirty feet long and could swim at about the same number of miles per hour; it was a dark gray in color, with a small horse-like head on a long tapering neck, which it turned from side to side with the quick movements of an alert hen. There were divergencies as to whether it had one or more humps in its back, and whether it churned the water with flippers or a powerful tail, but all agreed that it could not be classified with anything known to modern natural history.

  The reports culminated in December with a photograph showing a strange reptilian shape thrashing in the water, taken by a senior employee of the British Aluminum Company, which has a plant nearby. A number of experts certified the negative to be unretouched and unfaked, and the headline writers took it from there.

  Within a fortnight, a London newspaper had a correspondent on the scene with a highly publicized big-game authority in tow; some footprints were found and casts made of them—which before the New Year was three days old had been pronounced by the chief zoologists of the British Museum to have all been made by the right hind foot of a hippopotamus, and a stuffed hippopotamus at that. In the nationwide guffaw which followed the exposure of this hoax, the whole matter exploded into a theme for cartoonists and comedians, and that aura of hilarious incredulity still coloured the Saint’s vague recollections of the subject.