“You don’t have a Swedish accent.”
“Perhaps because I learnt English first from her, and I suppose she had a Finnish or a Russian accent. Then there were all sorts of teachers in Swedish schools. I speak everything like a mixture. But I learnt enough languages to get a job in a travel agency in Stockholm. My father could not get permission to leave Russia after the war, and my mother had learned to prefer the capitalist life and would not go back to join him. I don’t think she was too much in love with him. At last there was a divorce, and she married a man with a small hotel in Göteborg, who adopted me so that I could have a passport and travel myself. But soon after, they were both killed in a car accident.”
“I see…or do I? Your problem is that you don’t know how to run a hotel?”
“No, that is for his own sons. But I thought that my father should be told that she was dead. I wrote to him, and somehow he received the letter—he was still at the University. He wrote back, wanting to know all about me. We began to write often. Now I didn’t even have a mother, I had nobody, it was exciting to discover a real father and try to find out all about him. But then, one day, I got another letter from him which had been smuggled out, which was different from all the others.”
The Saint sipped his wine. It was a native Johannisberg Rhonegold, light and bone-dry, the perfect punctuation for the glutinous goodness into which he was dunking.
“How different?”
“He said he could not stand it any more, the way he was living and what he was doing, and he wished he could escape to the West. He asked if I would be ready to help him. Of course I said Yes. But how? We exchanged several letters, discussing possibilities, quite apart from the other letters which he went on writing for the censors to read.”
“How did you work that?”
“Through the travel agency, it was not so hard to find ways. And at last the opportunity came. He was to be sent to Geneva, to a meeting of the disarmament conference—not to take part himself, but to be on hand to advise the Soviet delegate about scientific questions. It seemed as if everything was solved. He only had to get out of the Soviet embassy, here in Switzerland, and he would be free.”
The Saint’s ease was no longer gently quizzical. His blue eyes, many southern shades darker than hers, had hardened as if sapphires were crystallizing in them. He was listening now with both ears and all his mind, but he went on eating with undiminished deference to the cuisine.
“So what’s the score now?”
“I came here to meet him with some money, and to help him. When he escaped, of course, he would have nothing. And he speaks only Russian and Finnish…But something went wrong.”
“What, exactly?”
“I don’t know.”
Until then, she had been contained, precise, reciting a synopsis that she must have vowed to deliver without emotion, to acquit herself in advance of the charge of being just another hysterical female with helpful hallucinations. But now she was leaning across the table towards him, twisting her fingers together, and letting her cold lovely face be twisted into unbecoming lines of tortured anxiety.
“Someone betrayed us. We had to trust many people who carried our letters. Who knows which one? I only know that yesterday, when he was to do it, I waited all day up the street where I could watch the entrance, in a car which I had hired, and in the evening he came out. But not by himself, as we had planned. He was driven out in an embassy car, sitting between two men who looked like gangsters—the secret police! I could only just recognize him, from a recent photograph he had sent me, looking around desperately as if he hoped to see me, as if I could have rescued him.”
Her coffee and Benedictine arrived, and Simon said to the waitress, “You can bring me the same, in about five minutes.”
He harpooned a prize corner crust, and set about mopping the dish clean of the last traces of fondue. He said, “You should have got here sooner. There’s an old Swiss tradition which says that when fondue is being eaten, anyone who loses the bread off their fork has to kiss everyone else at the table. It must make for nice sociable eating…So what happened?”
“I followed them. It was all I could think of. If I lost him then, I knew I would lose him for ever. I thought at first they were taking him to the airport, to send him back to Russia, and I could make a fuss there. But no. They went to Lausanne, then on to here, and then still farther, to a house on the lake, with high walls and guards, and they took him in…Then I went to the police.”
“And?”
“They told me they could do nothing. It was part of the Soviet embassy, officially rented for diplomatic purposes, and it could not be touched. The Russians can do whatever they like there, as if they were in Russia. And I know what they are doing. They are keeping my father there until they can send him back to Moscow—and then to Siberia. Unless they kill him first.”
“Wouldn’t that have been easier from Geneva?”
“There is another airport at Zürich, almost as close from this house, and without the newspaper men who will be at Geneva for the conference.”
Letting his eyes wander around the quiet little square, Simon thought that you really had to have a paperback mind to believe tales like that in such a setting. The table where they sat outside the restaurant was under the shade of the awning, but he could have stretched a hand out into the sunshine which made it the kind of summer’s day that travel brochures are always photographed on. And gratefully enjoying their full advertised money’s worth, tourists of all shapes and sizes, the importance of that event, or trudging up the hill to gawk at the Lion Memorial carved in the rock to commemorate the Swiss mercenaries who died in Paris with unprofitable heroism defending the Tuileries against the French Revolution, or to the Glacier Garden above that which preserves the strange natural sculpture of much more ancient turnings—all with their minds happily emptied of everything but the perennial vacation problem of paying for their extra extravagances and souvenirs. Not one of them, probably, would have believed in this plot unless they saw it at home on television. But the Saint knew perhaps better than any man living how thinly the crust of peace and normalcy covered volcanic lavas everywhere in the modern world.
He turned back to Irina Jorovitch, and his voice was just as tolerantly good-humored as it had been ever since she had intruded herself with her grisly reminder of what to him were only the facts of life. He said, “And you think it should be a picnic for me to rescue him.”
She said, “Not a picnic. No. But if any man on earth can do it, you can.”
“You know, you could be right. But I was trying to take a holiday from all that.”
“If you would want money,” she said, “I have nothing worth your time to offer. But I could try to get it. I would do anything—anything!”
It was altogether disgraceful, he admitted, but he could do nothing to inhibit an inward reflex of response except try not to think about it.
“Gentleman adventurers aren’t supposed to take advantage of offers like that,” he said, with unfeigned regret.
“You must help me,” she said again. “Please.”
He sighed.
“All right,” he said. “I suppose I must.”
Her face lit up with a gladness that did the same things for it that the Aurora Borealis does to the Arctic snows. It was a reaction that he had seen many times, as if his mere consent to have a bash had vaporized all barriers. It would have been fatally intoxicating if he ever forgot how precariously, time after time, he had succeeded in justifying so much faith.
“It isn’t done yet, darling,” he reminded her. “Tell me more about this house.”
It was on the southern shore of the Vierwaldstättersee, he learned, the more rugged and less accessible side which rises to the mingled tripper-traps and tax-dodger chalets of Bürgenstock, and by land it was reachable only by a second-to-secondary road which served nothing but a few other similarly isolated hermitages. Although it was dark when she passed it, she was sure ther
e was no other residence nearby, so that anyone approaching in daylight would certainly be under observation long before he got close. The walls around the grounds were about seven feet high, topped with barbed wire, but with slits that the inmates could peep through—to say nothing of what electronic devices might augment their vigilance. Added to which, she had heard dogs barking as she drove past.
“Nothing to it,” said the Saint, “if I hadn’t forgotten to bring my invisible and radar-proof helicopter.”
“You will think of something,” she said, with rapturous confidence.
He lighted a cigarette and meditated for almost a minute. “You say this house is right on the lake?”
“Yes. Because at the next turning after I passed, my headlights showed the water.”
“Do you think you could recognize it again, from the lake side?”
“I think so.”
“Good. Then let’s take a little boat ride.”
He paid his bill, and finished his coffee while he waited for the change. Then they walked down the Löwenstrasse and across the tree-shaded promenades of the Nationalquai to the lake front. Just a few yards to the left there was a small marina offering a variety of water craft for hire, which he had already casually scouted without dreaming that he would ever use it in this way. With the same kind of companionship, perhaps, but not for this kind of mission…The Saint chose a small but comfortably upholstered runabout, the type of boat that would automatically catch the eye of a man who was out to impress a pretty girl—and that was precisely how he wanted them to be categorized by anyone who had a motive for studying them closely. Taking advantage of the weather and the informal customs of the country, he was wearing only a pair of light slacks and a tartan sport shirt, and Irina was dressed in a simple white blouse and gaily patterned dirndl, so that there was nothing except their own uncommon faces to differentiate them from any other holiday-making twosome.
And as he aimed the speedboat diagonally south-eastwards across the lake, with the breeze of their own transit tousling her short white-blond hair and moulding the filmy blouse like a tantalizing second skin against the thrusting mounds of her breasts, he had leisure to wish that they had been brought together by nothing more pre-emptive than one of those random holiday magnetisms which provide inexhaustible grist for the world’s marriage and divorce mills in self-compensating proportions.
She had put on a pair of sunglasses when they left the restaurant, and out on the water the light was strong enough for Simon to take out a pair of his own which had been tucked in his shirt pocket. But they would be useful for more than protection against the glare.
“Get the most out of these cheaters when we start looking for the house,” he told her as he put them on. “Don’t turn your head and look at anything directly, just turn your eyes and keep facing somewhere else. Behind the glasses, anybody watching us won’t be able to tell what we’re really looking at.
“You think of everything. I will try to remember.”
“About how far did you drive out of Lucerne to this house?”
“I cannot be sure. It seemed quite far, but the road was winding.”
This was so femininely vague that he resigned himself to covering the entire southern shore if necessary. On such an afternoon, and with such a comely companion, it was a martyrdom which he could endure with beatific stoicism. Having reached the nearest probable starting point which he had mentally selected, he cut the engine down to a smooth idling gait and steered parallel to the meandering coast line, keeping a distance of about a hundred yards from the shore.
“Relax, Irina,” he said. “Any house that’s on this stretch of lake, we’ll see. Meanwhile, we should look as if we’re just out for the ride.”
To improve this visual effect, he lowered himself from his hot-water-rodder’s perch on the gunwale to the cushion behind the wheel, and she snuggled up to him. “Like this?” she asked seriously.
“More or less,” he approved, with fragile gravity, and slipped an arm around her shoulders.
It was only when they had passed Kehrsiten, the landing where the funicular takes off up the sheer palisade to the hotels of Bürgenstock on its crest, that he began to wonder if she had overestimated her ability to identify the house to which Karel Jorovitch had been taken from an aspect which she had never seen. But he felt no change of tension in her as the boat purred along for some kilometers after that, until suddenly she stiffened and clutched him—but with the magnificent presence of mind to turn towards him instead of to the shore.
“There, I have seen it!” she gasped. “The white house with the three tall chimneys! I remember them!”
He looked to his right, over her flaxen head which had a disconcertingly pure smell which reminded him somehow of new-mown hay, and saw the only edifice she could have been referring to.
The tingle that went through him was an involuntary psychosomatic acknowledgement that the adventure had now become real, and he was well and truly hooked.
In order to study the place thoroughly and unhurriedly, he turned towards Irina, folded her tenderly in his arms, and applied his lips to hers. In that position, he could continue to keep his eyes on the house whilst giving the appearance of being totally preoccupied with radically unconnected pursuits.
It was surprisingly unpretentious, for a diplomatic enclave. He would have taken it for a large old-fashioned family house—or a house for a large old-fashioned family, according to the semantic preference of the phrase-maker. At any rate, it was not a refurbished mansion or a small re-converted hotel. Its most unusual feature was what she had already mentioned: the extraordinarily high wire-topped garden walls which came down at a respectable distance on both sides of it—not merely to the lake edge, but extending about twelve feet out into the water. And for the further discouragement of anyone who might still have contemplated going around them, those two barriers were joined by a rope linking a semicircle of small bright red buoys such as might have marked the limits of a safe bathing area, but which also served to bar an approach to the shore by boat—even if they were not anchored to some underwater obstruction which would have made access altogether impossible.
And on the back porch of the house, facing the lake, a square-shouldered man in a deck chair raised a pair of binoculars and examined them lengthily.
Simon was able to make all these observations in spite of the fact that Irina Jorovitch was cooperating in his camouflage with an ungrudging enthusiasm which was no aid at all to concentration.
Finally they came to a small headland beyond which there was a cove into which he could steer the boat out of sight of the watcher on the porch. Only then did the Saint release her, not without reluctance, and switched off the engine to become crisply businesslike again.
“Excuse the familiarity,” he said. “But you know why I had to do it.”
“I liked it, too,” she said, demurely.
As the boat drifted to a stop, Simon unstrapped his wrist watch and laid it on the deck over the dashboard. He held his pen upright beside it to cast a shadow from the sun, and turned the watch to align the hour hand with the shadow, while Irina watched fascinated.
“Now, according to my boy scout training, halfway between the hour hand and twelve o’clock on the dial is due south,” he explained. “I need a bearing on this place, to be able to come straight to it next time—and at night.”
From there, he could no longer see anything useful of Lucerne. But across the lake, on the north side, he spotted the high peaked roof of the Park Hotel at Viznau, and settled on that as a landmark with multiple advantages. He sighted on it several times, until he was satisfied that he had established an angle accurately enough for any need he would have.
“This is all we can do right now,” he said. “In broad daylight, we wouldn’t have a prayer of getting him out. I don’t even know what the odds will be after dark, but I’ll try to think of some way to improve them.”
The beautiful cold face—which he had discove
red could be anything but cold at contact range—was strained and entreating.
“But what if they take him away before tonight?”
“Then we’ll have lost a bet,” he said grimly. “We could hustle back to Lucerne, get a car, come back here by road—I could find the place now, all right—and mount guard until they try to drive away with him. Then we could try an interception and rescue—supposing he isn’t already gone, or they don’t take him away even before we get back. On the other hand, they might keep him here for a week, and how could we watch all that time? Instead of waiting, we could be breaking in tonight…It’s the kind of choice that generals are paid and pilloried for making.”
She held her head in her hands.
“What can I say?”
Simon Templar prodded the starter button, and turned the wheel to point the little speedboat back towards Lucerne.
“You’ll have to make up your own mind, Irina,” he said relentlessly. “It’s your father. You tell me, and we’ll play it in your key.”
There was little conversation on the return drive. The decision could only be left to her. He did not want to influence it, and he was glad it was not up to him, for either alternative seemed to have the same potentiality of being as catastrophically wrong as the other.
When he had brought the boat alongside the dock and helped her out, he said simply: “Well?”
“Tonight,” she replied resolutely. “That is the way it must be.”
“How did you decide?”
“As you would have, I think. If the nearest man on the dock when we landed wore a dark shirt, I would say tonight. It was a way of tossing up, without a coin. How else could I choose?”
Simon turned to the man in the blue jersey who was nearest, who was securing the boat to its mooring rings.
“Could we reserve it again tonight?” he inquired in German. “The Fräulein would like to take a run in the moonlight.”
The Saint in the Sun (The Saint Series) Page 16
