She might not have heard him. She sprang up, stretching her arms so that the sleeves of the bathrobe fell back from her wrists.
“Oh, no!…It’s too perfect. I’m glad!” The mischief was in her eyes again, matching his own, almost eclipsing it for that moment of vibrant energy. “You’re telling the truth, I know. The Saint could only have been you. You would go out and take on any racket with your hands. Why didn’t you tell me at once?”
“You didn’t ask me,” answered the Saint logically. “Besides, modesty is my long suit.
The threat of publicity makes me run for miles. When I blush—”
“Listen!”
She wheeled and dropped on the berth beside him, and he listened.
“You’ve stolen, haven’t you?”
“With discretion.”
“You’ve tackled some big things.”
“I pick up elephants and wring their necks.”
“Have you ever thought of stealing millions?”
“Often,” said the Saint, leaning back. “I thought of burgling the Bank of England once, but I decided it was too easy.” She stirred impatiently.
“Saint,” she said earnestly, “there’s one racket working today that steals millions. It’s been running for years, and it’s still running. And I don’t mean any of the old things like bootlegging or kidnapping. It’s a racket that goes over most of the world, wherever there’s anything for it to work on, and it hits where there’s no protection. I couldn’t begin to guess how much money has been taken out of it since it began.”
“I know, darling,” said the Saint sympathetically. “But you can’t do anything about it. It’s quite legal. It’s called income tax.”
“Have you heard of the Lutine?”
He studied her with his gaze still tantalising and unsatisfied, but the eagerness of her held him more than what she was actually saying. He was discovering something between her soft-lipped beauty and her fire of anger; something that belonged equally to the lurking laughter of her eyes and the sober throb of persuasion in her voice, and yet was neither of these things; something that made all contradictions possible.
“It sank, didn’t it?” he said.
“In 1799—with about a million pounds’ worth of gold on board. There’ve been plenty of attempts to salve the cargo, but so far the sand’s been too much for them. Then the Lutina Company took over with a new idea: they were going to suck away the silt through a big conical sort of bell which was to be lowered over the wreck. It was quite a simple scheme, and there’s no reason why it shouldn’t have worked. The company received a few letters warning them not to go on with it, but naturally they didn’t pay much attention to them.”
“Well?”
“Well, they haven’t tried out their sand-sucker yet. The whole thing was blown sky-high in 1933—and the explosion wasn’t an accident.”
The Saint sat up slowly. In that supple movement the buffoonery slipped off him as his dressing-gown might have slipped off, and in the same transformation he was listening intently. Something like a breath of frozen feathers strolled up his spine—an instinct, a queer clairvoyance born of the years of inspired filibustering.
“Is that all the story?” he asked, and knew that it was not.
She shook her head.
“Something else happened in the same year. An American salvage ship, the Salvor, went out to search a wreck off Cape Charles. The Merida, which sank in 1911 and took the Emperor Maximilian’s crown jewels to the bottom with her—another million-pound cargo. They didn’t find anything. And fish don’t wear jewellery.”
“I remember the Terschelling Island fireworks—the Lutine. But that’s a new one.”
“It’s not the only one. Two years before that another salvage company went over the Turbantia with a fine comb. She was torpedoed near the Maars Lightship in 1916, and she had seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds’ worth of German bullion on her—then. The salvage company knew just where to look for it. But they didn’t find it…That was quite a small job. But in 1928 the Sorima Company made an official search for a collection of uncut diamonds and other stones worth more than a million and a quarter, which were on board the Elizabethville when another U-boat got her on her way back from South Africa during the war. Well, they found a lot of ammunition in the strong-room, and thirty shillings in the safe, which didn’t show a big dividend.”
“And this has been going on for years?”
“I don’t know how long. But just look at those three jobs. They average out at over a million pounds a time. Leave out all the other official treasure hunts that are going on now, and all the other millions that may have been sneaked away before the authorised salvage companies get there. Leave out all the other jobs that haven’t been discovered yet. Doesn’t it tell you anything?”
Simon Templar sat back and let the electric tingles play up his vertebrae and toe-dance airily over the back of his scalp. His whole body felt the pulse of adventure in exactly the same way as a sensitively tuned instrument can detect sounds inaudible to the human ear. And to him the sounds were music.
In that short silence he had a vivid picture of all the far reaches of the sea on which the Corsair cushioned her light weight. He saw the lift of storms and the raw break of hungry rocks and death stealing out of the invisible to give the waters their treasure. He saw the green depths, the ultimate dim places under the spume and sapphire beauty, saw the vast whale-shapes of steel hulls sunk in the jade stillness, and the gaunt ribs of half-forgotten galleons reaching out of the fronds of weed. What unrecorded argosies might lie under those infinite waters, no one would ever know. But those that were known, those that the sea had claimed even in the last four hundred years…His imagination reeled at the thought. The Almirante Florencia, lost treasure-house of the Armada, foundering in Tobermory Bay with two million pounds in plate and jewels. The Russian flagship Rurik, sunk on the Korean coast with two and a half million pounds in specie. The sixty-three ships of the Turkish Navy sent to the bottom of Navarino Bay in 1827 with ten million pounds between them. The Chalfont Castle, with her steering carried away and her plates sprung below the waterline in the great storm of that very year, drifting helplessly down on to the Casquets to the west of Alderney, and sinking in twenty fathoms with five million pounds of bar gold in her strong-room. Odd names and figures that he had heard disinterestedly from time to time and practically forgotten crept back from the hinterlands of unconscious memory and staggered him…And he saw the only possible, the only plausible corollary: the ghost pirate stealing through grey dawns to drop her divers and her steel grabs, the unsuspected gangsters of the sea who had discovered the most pluperfect racket of all time.
He would have thought that he had heard every note in the register of crime, but he had never dreamed of anything like that. The plot to swindle the Bank of Italy by means of one million perfectly genuine 100-lire bills, for his share in which he was entitled to wear the pendant of the Order of the Annunziata in the unlikely event of his ever attending a State function, was mere petty pilfering beside it. Sir Hugo Renway’s scheme for pillaging the cross-Channel gold routes was mere clumsy experiment in comparison. And yet he knew that the girl who sat looking at him was not romancing. She threw up the stark terse facts and left him to find the link, and the supernatural creep of his nerves told him where the link was.
Her grey eyes were on him, tempting and challenging as they had been when he first saw her with the lights striking gold in her hair and the sea’s damp on her slim shoulders, and in his mind he had a vision of the black expressionless eyes of the hook nosed man who stood up in the boat and lied to him.
“Why?” he said, with a dreamy rapture in his slow deep breath. “Why didn’t I know all this before?”
“Perhaps you were too busy.”
“Anything else could have waited,” said the Saint, with profound conviction. “Except perhaps the Bank of England…And is that what you’re detecting?”
She took a
cigarette from his pack, and a light from the butt between his fingers.
“Yes. I work for the Ingerbeck Agency—we have a contract with Lloyd’s, and we handle a lot of other insurance business. You see, where we work, there’s no ordinary police force. Where a ship sinks, the wreck is nominally under the protection of the country that covers the water, but if the underwriters have paid out a total loss the salvage rights belong to them. Which means precisely nothing. In the last fifty years alone, the insurance companies have paid out millions of pounds on this kind of risk. Of course they hoped to get a lot of it back in salvage, but the amounts they’ve seen would make you laugh.”
“Is it always a loss?”
“Of course not. But we’ve known—they’ve known—for a long time, that there was some highly organised racket in the background cheating them out of six figures or more a year. It’s efficient. It’s got to be. And yet it’s easy. It has clever men, and the best equipment that money can buy. We went out to look for them.”
“You?”
“Oh, no. Ingerbeck’s. They’ve been on it for the last five years. Some of their men went a long way. Three of them went too far—and didn’t come back.” She met his eyes steadily. “It’s that sort of racket…But one of them found a trail that led somewhere, out of hundreds that didn’t, and it’s been followed up.”
“To here?”
She nodded.
“You see, we came to a brick wall. The men could get so far, but they couldn’t go on. They couldn’t get inside the racket. Two of those who didn’t come back—tried. We couldn’t take a chance on anything drastic, because we’ve no official standing, and we hadn’t any facts. Only a good guess. Well, there was one other way. Somewhere at the top of the racket there must be a head man, and the odds are that he’s human.”
He took in the grace of her as she lounged there in the oversized bathrobe, understanding the rest.
“You came out to be human with him.”
The turn of her head was sorcery, the sculpture of her neck merging into the first hinted curve between the lapels of the bathrobe was a pattern of magic that made murder and sudden death egregious intrusions.
“I didn’t succeed—so far. I’ve tried. I’ve even had dinner with him, and danced at the Casino. But I haven’t had an invitation to go on board his boat. Tonight I got the devil in me, or something. I tried to go on board without an invitation.”
“Didn’t you guess there’d be a watch on deck?”
“I suppose so. But I thought he’d probably be sleepy, and I could move very quietly.” She grimaced. “He got me, but he let me go when I fired a shot beside his ear—I didn’t hurt him—and I dived overboard.”
“And thereby hangs a tale,” said the Saint.
4
He stood up and flicked his cigarette-end through a porthole, helping himself to another. The lines of his face were lifted in high relief as he drew at a match.
“You didn’t tell me all this to pass the time, did you?” he smiled.
“I told you because you’re—you.” She was looking at him directly, without a trace of affected hesitation. “I’ve no authority. But I’ve seen you, and I know who you are. Maybe I thought you might be interested.”
She straightened the bathrobe quickly, looking round for an ashtray. “Maybe I might,” he said gently. “Where are you staying?”
“The Hotel de la Mer.”
“I wish you could stay here. But tonight—I’m afraid there must be a thin chance that your boyfriend wasn’t quite satisfied with my lines when we exchanged words, and you can’t risk it. Another time—”
Her eyes opened wider, and he stretched out his hand with a breath of laughter. “I’m going to row you home now,” he said. “Or do we have another argument?”
“I wouldn’t argue,” she began silkily, and then, with the corners of her mouth tugging against her will, she took his hand. “But thanks for the drink—and everything.”
“There are only two things you haven’t told me,” he said. “One is the name of this boat you wanted to look at.”
She searched his face for a moment before she answered, “The Falkenberg.”
“And the other is the name of the boyfriend—the bloke who passed in the night.”
“Kurt Vogel.”
“How very appropriate,” said the Saint thoughtfully, “I think I shall call him Birdie when we get acquainted. But that can wait…I want to finish my beauty sleep, and I suppose you haven’t even started yours. But I’ve got a hunch that if you’re on the beach before lunch we may talk some more. I’m glad you dropped in.”
The fog was thinning to a pearl-grey vagueness lightening with the dawn when he rowed her back, and when he woke up there were ovals of yellow sunlight stencilled along the bulkhead from the opposite portholes. He stretched himself like a cat, freshening his lungs with the heady nectar of the morning, and lighted a cigarette. For a while he lay sprawled in delicious laziness, taking in the familiar cabin with a sense of new discovery. There she had sat, there was the cup and glass she had used, there was the crushed stub of her cigarette in the ashtray. There on the carpet was still a darkened patch of damp, where she had stood with the salt water dewing her slim legs and pooling on the floor. He saw the ripple of gold in her hair, the shaft of challenge in her eyes, the exquisite shape of her as he first saw her like a shy nymph spiced with the devil’s temper, and knew a supreme content which was not artistically rewarded by the abrupt apparition of a belligerent face sheltering behind a loose walrus moustache in the door leading to the galley.
“Lovely morn’n, sir,” said the face, and limped struttingly in to plunk down a glass of orange juice beside him. “Brekfuss narf a minnit.”
The Saint grinned ruefully and hauled himself up.
“Make it two minutes, Orace,” he said. “I had company last night.”
“Yessir,” said Orace phlegmatically, gathering up cups, and he had retired to the galley again before Simon saw that he had left a second glass of orange juice ostentatiously parked in the middle of the table.
The mist had receded under the sun until it was only a haze on the horizon, and a sky of pale translucent azure lofted over a sea like glass. Simon went up on deck with a towel round his middle and slipped adroitly into the water, leaving the towel behind. He cut away across the estuary in a straight line of hissing crawl, turned and rolled over on his back to wallow in the invigorating delight of cold water sheathing his naked limbs, and made his way back more leisurely to eat bacon and eggs in a deck chair in the spacious cockpit while the strengthening sun warmed his shoulders.
All these things, then, were real—the physical gusto of life, quickened by unasked romance and laced with the wine of danger. Even the privileged cynicism of Orace only served as a touchstone to prove reality, rather than to destroy illusion. It was like the old days—which as a matter of fact were by no means so old. He lighted a cigarette and scanned the other boats which he could see from his anchorage. A cable’s length away, towards the Pointe de la Vicomté, he picked a white rakish motor cruiser of about a hundred tons, and knew that this must be the one even before he went down to the saloon for a pair of binoculars and read the name from a lifebelt. Falkenberg. Simon’s lips twitched in a half-smile that was entirely Saintly. The name of the legendary Flying Dutchman was a perfect baptism for the pirate ship of that hawk-faced black-browed man who called himself Kurt Vogel, and the Saint mentally saluted the Antarctic quality of bravado that must have chosen it. Still using his binoculars from the prudent obscurity of the saloon, he took in the high outswept bows and the streamlined angles of the wheelhouse forward, the clean lines of superstructure dipping to the unusually low flat counter, and credited her with twin racing engines and a comfortable thirty knots. Abaft the saloon there was a curious projection neatly shrouded in canvas—for the moment he could not guess what it was.
He stropped his razor and ran water into a basin, and he was finishing his shave when his man came t
hrough with the breakfast plates. Simon rounded his chin carefully and said, “Orace, have you still got that blunderbuss of yours—the young howitzer you bought once in mistake for a gun?”
“Yessir,” said Orace unemotionally.
“Good.” The Saint wiped his razor and splashed water over his face. “You’d better get out my automatic as well and look it over.”
“Yessir.”
“Put a spot of oil in the works and load up a couple of spare magazines. And grease the cartridges—in case I take a swim with it.”
“Yessir.”
“We may be busy.”
Orace’s moustache stirred, like a field of corn under a passing zephyr. His limp was a souvenir of Zeebrugge Mole and days of authorised commotion as a sergeant of His Majesty’s Marines, but it is doubtful whether even in those years of international discord he had heard as many different calls to arms as had come his way since he first took service with the Saint.
“’Ave you bin gettin’ in trouble again?” he demanded fiercely. The Saint laughed behind his towel.
“Not trouble, Orace—just fun. I won’t try to tell you how beautiful she is, because you have no soul. But she came out of the sea like a mermaid, and the standard of living went up again like a rocket. And would you mind moving off that bit of the carpet, because the comparison is too hideous. She stood there with the water on her, and she said ‘Will you let me out?’ And I said ‘No!’ Just like that.”
“Did yer, sir?”
“And she pulled a gun on me.”
“Go on, did she?”
“She pulled a gun. Look, you pull a gun. Hold your hand like that. Right. Well, I said ‘Ha, ha,’—like that, very sinister. I switched out the lights! I leapt upon her! I grabbed her wrist! We fell on the bunk—”
“Steady on, sir, yer ’urting!”
“You shut up. She was crushed against me. Her lips were an inch from mine. For heaven’s sake stop whiffling your moustache like that. I felt her breath on my face. I was on fire with passion. I seized her in my arms…and…” Simon planted a smacking kiss on his crew’s horrified brow. “I said ‘Don’t you think Strindberg is too sweet?’ Now go and drown yourself.”
Saint Overboard (The Saint Series) Page 3
