Saint Overboard (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  He picked himself up and erupted out of the cabin, slinging the towel round his neck, while Orace gaped goggle-eyed after him. In a few minutes he was back, tightening the belt of a pair of swimming trunks, and stuffing cigarettes into a waterproof metal case.

  “By the way,” he said, “we aren’t full up on juice for the auxiliary. As soon as you’ve cleared up, you’d better take the dinghy and fetch a couple of dozen bidons. Get some oil, too, and see that there’s plenty of food and drink. There’s another bird mixed up in this who’s less beautiful—a guy named Kurt Vogel—and we ought to be ready for travelling.”

  He went up on deck and looked around. The sun was flooding down on stucco villas and the rise of green behind, and cutting innumerable diamonds from the surface of the water. It was going to be a hot brilliant day. People were well awake on the other yachts nearby. A gramophone opened up cheerfully on one, and a loud splash and a shout heralded another of the morning’s bathers. The Falkenberg was too far away for him to be able to distinguish its signs of life: a couple of seamen were swabbing down the paint forward, but nothing that resembled the hook nosed man was visible. Simon noticed that besides the outboard dinghy there was now a small speed tender also tied up alongside which had not been there when he made his first survey—it had the air of being part of the Falkenberg’s equipment, and probably it had been away on a trip to the shore and returned while he was below.

  After a while he dived off the side and swam round the Pointe du Moulinet to the beach. He strolled the length of the plage while the sun dried him, and then chose a clear space to stretch himself out opposite the Casino.

  He had not seen Loretta Page during his walk, but he knew she would come. He lay basking in the voluptuous warmth, and knew with an exquisite certainty that the kind gods of adventure would take care of that. The story she had told him went through his memory, not in an exuberant riot of comprehension as it had when he first heard it, but in a steady flow, fact by fact, a sequence of fragments of accepted knowledge which strung logically together to make a tale that was breath-taking in its colossal implications. If it was something on a more grandiose scale than anything he had ever dreamed of even in his wildest flights of buccaneering, he was still ready to give it a run. He blew smoke into the sparkling air and considered the profile of Kurt Vogel. Properly worked on by an octet of bunched knuckles…

  “Hullo, old timer.”

  He dropped his gaze and saw her. She wore the same elementary swim suit, with a bathrobe that fitted her better than his had done, swept back by her hands on her hips and leaving her long satiny legs to the sun. The grey eyes were dark with devilment.

  He rolled up on one elbow. “Hullo, pardner.”

  “Did you sleep well?”

  “I saw ghosts,” he said sepulchrally. “Ghosts of the dead past that can never be undone. They rose up and wiggled their bony fingers at me, and said ‘You are not worthy of her!’ I woke up and burst into tears.”

  She slipped out of the striped gown and sat down beside him. “Wasn’t there any hope?”

  “Not unless you stretched out your little hand and lifted me out of the abyss. Couldn’t you take on the job of saving a lost soul? Of course you might always get lost yourself, but that wouldn’t matter. We could always console each other.”

  “I wonder why Ingerbeck’s didn’t think of signing you up years ago.” He smiled.

  “They might have tried, but I’m afraid I haven’t got any sort of affinity for dotted lines. Besides, I’m not naturally honest. You try to recover stolen property for the insurance companies, don’t you?”

  “That’s part of the job.”

  “Well, I do the same thing, but not for any insurance company.”

  “Not even on a ten per cent commission?”

  “I have worked on that basis, but it was a long time ago. My tastes were a lot more innocent and simple in those days.”

  “It’s not a bad reward, when there are millions to look for,” she said temptingly.

  He sighed.

  “It’s so dull to be honest. Nobody else but you could make it even bearable. But I know what you mean. I’m on a holiday, and I can always pick up a few millions some other time. It was your picnic originally, and you let me in on it—”

  “I needn’t have done that.”

  There was a cool and rather sad finality in her voice, so much in contrast to the wavering dance of her eyes that he looked at her keenly for a moment before replying. In that vivid and carefree surround of laughing swimmers and brightly-clad sunbathers he felt a shadow round them, cutting them off in a dynamic isolation of their own from all these thoughtless and ordinary things.

  “It was my charm,” he explained at length. “My father-confessor touch. You just couldn’t resist me.”

  She shook her head. The gold flashed in her hair, and her lips smiled, but the light mockery of her eyes was subdued to an elfin seriousness.

  “I mean I needn’t have given up hope and gone in for such desperate measures so soon.”

  “What’s happened?” he asked, and the brown smooth-muscled arm on which he was propped up turned so that his hand closed over hers.

  She looked down at him steadily, and the shadow around them failed to touch her enchanting face.

  “I had a note this morning,” she said. “It was delivered at the hotel before I woke up.

  I’ve got an invitation to have dinner with Vogel on the Falkenberg.”

  CHAPTER TWO:

  HOW SIMON TEMPLAR ALSO RECEIVED AN INVITATION AND A PAIR OF PINK SOCKS HOVE UP ON THE HORIZON

  1

  A stout gentleman ambled by, with a green eyeshade on his brow and a diminutive slip clinging by some miracle of adhesion to the re-entrant curve of his abdomen, looking like a debauched Roman emperor on his way to the bath; a Parisian sylph in a startling lace costume that left nothing except her birthday to the imagination arranged her white limbs artistically under a gaudy sunshade and waited for the rush of art students to gather round; two children disputing the ownership of a bucket opened up on a line of personalities that would have left a couple of bootleggers listening in awe; but these were events that might have been happening on another planet.

  He remembered the speedboat tied up alongside the Falkenberg, which had not been there before.

  “You hadn’t got some crazy idea of accepting, had you?” he said mechanically. “It’s what I’ve been waiting for.”

  “I know, but—what do you think happened last night?” She took one of his cigarettes.

  “I don’t think I could have been seen. I didn’t see the man who caught me—he came up behind. And it was pretty dark where I was. He caught me round the neck with his arm; then I fired the shot, he let go, and I dived.”

  “He’d know it was a woman.”

  “Not necessarily. Don’t you remember that Vogel said he was looking for a man?”

  “An obvious lie.”

  “A very stupid one—if it was. But what could it gain him? If you’d already seen a woman, it’d make you think there was something queer going on. If you hadn’t, what did it matter?”

  “He might have been trying to tempt me to keep up the lie—which would have given me away.”

  She shrugged her intoxicating shoulders. “Aren’t you rather looking for trouble?” she said.

  “That’s my job,” answered the Saint evenly. “And incidentally, it happens to be one of the reasons why I didn’t come to a sticky end many years ago. I’ll give you something else. Suppose Vogel wasn’t quite happy about me last night?”

  “Well?”

  “It was rather an unusual hour for anyone to be up and about—messing around with fenders. Not impossible, but unusual. And if Vogel’s the kind of man we think he is, he keeps alive by sorting out unusual things—like I do. He couldn’t make any fuss, because that’d be letting himself in if he was wrong. But he could puff away in that outboard, stop the engine, and paddle back quietly on the oars. He couldn’t have
seen you—probably he couldn’t even have heard what you said—but he could hear that there was a girl on board.”

  “Which isn’t impossible either,” she said demurely. Simon frowned.

  “You forget my Saintly reputation. But still, maybe to Vogel, with his low criminal mind, it isn’t impossible either. But it’s still unusual enough to be worth looking at. And then there’s you.”

  “Without a reputation.”

  “And not deserving one. You’ve been making a clear set at him for several days—weeks—whatever it is. That again may not be impossible. It might be his money, or his beauty, or because he sings so nicely in his bath. But if it isn’t even unusual, if I were in his place I’d think it was—interesting. Interesting enough, maybe, to try and find out some more about you.”

  She pressed his hand—she had been letting it rest in his all that time, as if she hadn’t noticed.

  “Dear man,” she said, “don’t you think I know all this?”

  “And if he only wants to see exactly where you stand in the game?”

  “I can pack a gun.”

  “Like any other ordinary innocent woman.”

  “Then I’ll go without it.”

  “You wouldn’t be much worse off.”

  “All the same, I’ll go.”

  “Three,” he quoted her, “didn’t come back.”

  She nodded. The impish humour still played on her lips and the surface of her eyes, but the depths behind it were clear and still.

  “When you join Ingerbeck’s, you don’t sign on for a cocktail party. You join an army. You take an oath—to do your job, to keep your mouth shut, and to take the consequences. Wouldn’t you go?”

  “Yes. But there are special risks.”

  “For a poor defenceless girl?”

  “They call it Worse than Death.”

  “I’ve never believed it.”

  He sat up and stared thoughtfully over the water. There was a quality of lightness in her decision that ended argument more finally than any dramatic protestations. She would go; because whatever the risk might be, it was not fact. It was her job to find out, not to guess.

  “I take it you’ve already accepted,” he said wryly.

  “The messenger was going to call back for my answer. I left a letter when I came out. I said I’d be delighted. Maybe Kurt Vogel isn’t so bad as he’s painted,” she said dreamily. “He left some lovely flowers with the invitation.”

  “I shouldn’t be surprised if you fell for him.”

  “I might.”

  “But now and then your conscience would prick you. When you were riding around in your Rolls, half strangled with, diamonds the memory of lost love would haunt you. I can see you stifling a sob, and pressing a penny into a poor beggar’s hand before you hurry on, because he reminds you of me.”

  “Don’t say it,” she pleaded tremulously. “I can’t bear it. How was I to know you cared like that?”

  The Saint scratched his head.

  “I must have forgotten to tell you,” he admitted. “Never mind.” He turned to her with cavalier blue eyes sobered to a thoughtful directness that she had seen before. “But does it leave me out?”

  “I don’t know,” she said steadily. “Have you decided to break off your holiday?”

  “Let’s have a drink and talk about it.”

  She shook her head.

  “I can’t risk it. Vogel may be ashore now—he may be anywhere. I’ve risked enough to talk to you at all. If you’ve changed your mind since last night, we’ll fight over it.”

  “Did I tell you I’d made up my mind?” Simon inquired mildly.

  “You let me think you had. I took a chance when I told you the story. I wanted you to know. I still do.” She was facing him without banter now, cool and possessed and momentarily unpossessable, and yet with a shadow of wistfulness deepening in her gaze. “I think Ingerbeck himself would have done the same. We might get a long way together, and if we came through there’d be plenty of commission to split. Just once, it might be fun for you to look at a dotted line.”

  His eyebrows slanted quizzically.

  “Otherwise?”

  “I suppose we can still be hung out to dry.”

  She stood up, dusting the sand from her robe. Simon picked himself up after her, and the grey eyes came back to his face.

  “Where should we meet on this—dotted line?” he asked resignedly.

  “I’ll be here tomorrow. No, not here—we can’t take this risk again. Suppose I swam out and met you, off the Pointe du Moulinet. Halfway house. At eleven.” She smiled, as he had seen her smile once before. “Are you looking for your pen?”

  “I can’t write, Loretta.”

  “You can make a cross.”

  “You know what that stands for?”

  “If it does,” she said, “you signed last night.”

  He watched her walking up towards the white spires of the Casino Balnéum, with all the maddening delight of movement in the swing of her brown body, and searched his vocabulary for words to describe the capaciousness of fortune. Admitted that all the gifts of that immoral goddess had strings harnessed to them—there were strings and strings. There was no real need in adventure for quite such a disturbing complication. And the Saint smiled in spite of that. The beach was empty after she had left it; that is to say, there were about a thousand other people on the Plage de l’Ecluse, but he found all of them sickeningly bovine. Including the Parisian vamp, who by this time was enjoying the devotion of three muscle-conscious young men, the debauched Roman emperor, and a hungry-looking tourist from Egg Harbor, New Jersey, who should have been old enough to know better.

  Simon turned away from the repulsive spectacle, and was rewarded by the almost equally unwelcome vision of Orace’s moustache, through which something more than the sea air was filtering.

  “You do break out at the most unromantic moments, Orace,” he complained, and then he saw that Orace’s eyes were still fixed glassily on the middle distance.

  “Is that the lidy, sir?”

  Orace’s martial voice was hushed with a sort of awe, and the Saint frowned.

  “She isn’t a lady,” he said firmly. “No lady would use such shameless eyes to try and seduce a self-respecting buccaneer from his duty. No lady would take such a mean advantage of a human being.” He perceived that his audience was still scarcely following him, and looked round. “Nor is that the wench I’m talking about, anyway. Come on away—you’ll be getting off in a minute.”

  They walked over the sand towards the bend by the swimming pool, where the

  Promenade des Alliés curves out towards the sea.

  “If you arsk me,” Orace remarked, recalling the grievance which had been temporarily smoothed over by his anatomical studies, “these Frogs are all barmy. First thing I arsks for petrol, an’ they give me paraffin. Then when I says that ain’t what I want, they tell me they’ve got some stuff called essence, wot’s just as good. I ’as a smell of this stuff, an’ blimey if it ain’t petrol. ’Ow the thunderinell can they ’elp goin’ barmy wiv a langwidge like that?”

  “I don’t suppose they can help it,” said the Saint gravely. “Did you buy some of this essence?”

  “Yessir. Then I tried to get some ice. They ’adn’t got no ice, but they tried to sell me some glass. I gave it up an’ brought the dinghy rahnd in case yer didn’t wanter swim back. Barmy?” said Orace sizzlingly.

  It was nearly one o’clock when the fuel tanks had been replenished from the cans which Orace had acquired at the cost of so much righteous indignation, and the Saint had cleaned himself up and put a comb through his hair. Orace produced a drink—freshened, in spite of gloomy prophecies, with ice—and required to know whether he should get lunch.

  “I don’t know,” said the Saint, with unusual brusqueness.

  He had no idea what he wanted to do. He felt suddenly restless and dissatisfied. The day had gone flat in prospect. They might have lazed through the long afternoon, st
eeping themselves in sunlight and romping through the light play of words. They might have plunged together through the cool rapture of the sea, or drifted out under spread sails to explore the Ile de Cézembre and picnic under the cliffs of St Lunaire. They might have enjoyed any of a dozen trivial things which he had half planned in his imagination, secure in a communion of pagan understanding that made no demands and asked no promises. Instead of which…

  Because gold rippled in a girl’s hair, and an imp of sophisticated humour lurked Pan-like in the shadows of her eyes, because the same gaze could sometimes hold a serenity of purpose beyond measure—Simon Templar, at thirty-four, with odysseys of adventure behind him that would have made Ulysses look like a small boy playing in a back yard—found himself in the beginning of that halcyon afternoon at a loose end.

  It wasn’t exactly the amount of money involved. Four million, if that was a minimum estimate of the total submerged wealth which Vogel had plundered from the sea bottoms, was certainly a lot of pounds. So was ten per cent of it. Or even half that. The Saint wasn’t greedy, and he had come out of each of his past sorties into the hazardous hinterlands of adventure with a lengthening line of figures in his bank account which raised their own monument to his flair for boodle. He had no need to be avaricious. There were limits—lofty, vertiginous limits, but limits nevertheless—to how much money one could spend, and he had a sublime faith that the same extravagant providence which had held him up all his life so far would keep him near enough to those limits to save him from feeling depressed. It wasn’t exactly that. It was a matter of principle.

  “You’re getting old,” he reproached himself solemnly. “At this very moment, you’re trying to persuade yourself to work for an insurance company. Just because she has a body like an old man’s dream, and you kissed her. An insurance company!”

  He shuddered.