Catch the Saint
Authors: Leslie Charteris
THE SAINT
In the course of his good works, of which he himself
was not the smallest beneficiary, the man so paradoxi
cally called the Saint had assumed many roles and
placed himself in such a fantastic variety of settings that
the adventures of a Sinbad or a Ulysses had by
compari
son all the excitement of a housewife’s trip to the
market. His range was the world. His identities had
encompassed cowboy and playboy, poet and revolution
ary, hobo and millionaire. The booty he had gathered
in his years of buccaneering had certainly made the last
category genuine: The assets he had salted away would
have made headlines if they had been exposed to count
ing. He could have comfortably retired at an age when
most men are still angling for their second promotion. But strong as
the profit motive was as a factor in his exploits, there were other drives
which would never
allow him to put the gears of his
mind permanently in
neutral and hang up his heels on the
stern rail of a yacht.
He had an insatiable lust
for action, in a world that
squandered its energies on
speeches and account
books. He craved the
individual expression of his own
personal ideals, and his
rules were not those of parliaments and judges but those of a man impatient to
accomplish his purposes, according to his own lights,
by
the most effective means available at the moment.
—from “The Adoring
Socialite”
CATCH THE SAINT
LESLIE CHARTERIS
Two original stories by Norman Walker
Adapted by Flemming Lee
A
DIVISION OF CHARTER COMMUNICATIONS INC.
A GROSSET & DUNLAP
COMPANY
CATCH THE SAINT
Copyright © 1975 by Leslie Charteris
All rights reserved
Published by arrangement with Doubleday & Company, Inc.
Charter Books
A Division of Charter Communications Inc.
A Grosset & Dunlap Company
360 Park Avenue South
New York, New York 10010
Manufactured in the
United States of America
Contents
foreword
I:
THE MASTERPIECE MERCHANT
II:
THE ADORING SOCIALITE
Foreword
The time seems to have come when Simon
Templar cannot
plausibly go on being
contemporary, or else too many literary de
tectives
smarter than Chief Inspector Teal are going to be de
ducing his present age from the internal evidence of
several sto
ries in the Saga that were highly
topical at the time they first appeared, and in which the Saint was irrevocably
linked with certain historic dates and events. And awkward questions are
bound to be
asked about how, in 1975 or later still, he retains
the same exuberance and agility that he displayed forty and more
years ago.
The only alternative to
taking him into the realms of science
fiction
for a miraculous rejuvenation, if the demand for more
stories about him continues, is to delve into his past for hitherto
untold adventures of his earlier years
—
which,
indeed, some
loyal followers maintain were his
best.
This, then, is the first
experiment of that kind. Although the
stories
in this book are brand new, they are not set in 1975, the year of first publication,
but must be regarded as having taken
place
before the world war of 1939. Any “dated” details in them
that may be spotted by today-conscious readers are therefore
strictly intentional.
LC
The Masterpiece Merchant
CHAPTER 1
Every weekday morning at
precisely ten o’clock, Mrs Evelyn
Teasbury backed her
shiny black Rolls Royce from its green-doored garage in Upper Berkeley Mews and
embarked on her
rounds of London and environs.
Simon Templar, that
aficionado of the unexpected, that mas
ter
of the unpredictable, never followed any such set routine. But he also lived in
Upper Berkeley Mews, and in the course of the years since Mrs Teasbury’s
husband had died, he had often ob
served the old
lady’s departures. Hatted and gloved, impeccable
in
spite of reduced circumstances, she would back her well-pre
served but ancient Rolls (obviously a major feature of her late
husband’s estate) into the street, leave it running while she closed
the gleaming green garage door, and drive smoothly and
slowly away. Her clothing and the car never changed, year after year, as
Mrs Teasbury stiffly but gracefully mounted the stairs of her
seventies. The garage door got a fresh coat of paint every spring,
and Mrs
Teasbury’s hair became whiter and whiter; otherwise
her contribution to the appearance and activities of the neigh
bourhood was inconspicuous but immutable.
It was therefore a big
surprise to Simon Templar when he set
out one morning in
his own new, growling, incredibly expensive
Hirondel
and overtook Mrs Teasbury as she left her modest flat
on
foot. He had never seen her walk any farther than the garage
before. He came to a stop alongside the slowly moving
figure and
hailed her with a cheerful “Good
morning!”
They had often exchanged
just about that many words apiece,
and Mrs Teasbury,
like all females, had been taken with Simon’s dashing good looks and open
pleasantness.
“Good morning,”
she said quietly, with a nod, and started to
move
on towards the corner.
“Would you like a
ride?” Simon asked. “In fact, I insist.”
He had recognised the
dignified struggle between acceptance
and rejection
which had flashed across her wrinkled face. He was
out
of the car opening the door for her before she could reply.
“I’m very grateful to
you,” she breathed as he pulled away
from
the kerb. “Walking is a bit of a struggle for me these days.”
“Is your car under
the weather?” he asked.
He could immediately sense
the tension that gripped his pas
senger.
“It’s gone,”
she said. “I had to sell it.”
There was something in
the wording and the way she spoke
that made him
realise that she was admitting a personal catas
trophe
and not just a timely business transaction. She desperately
wanted to tell him, or someone, more about it; she wanted
to be
questioned.
“You had to?”
he asked. “I hope nothing is wrong.”
It was normal, in the
course of inflation and political fluctua
tion,
that a person in reduced circumstances living on a non-
growing
income might find her circumstances getting more and more reduced. But Mrs
Teasbury immediately confessed some
thing more drastic:
“Yes,” she
said. “Wrong is definitely the word. I have been
wronged.
I have been taken advantage of and lied to and cheated.
So I’ve been forced to sell my car in order to pay my
bills.” She hesitated, and Simon waited, driving slowly with no particular
destination
in mind. Mrs Teasbury had probably just come as
close to crying as she would ever come in front of a relative stranger.
“I’m not sure why I’m telling you this, except that I’ve
heard some wild tales about what you’ve done to
criminals, and I
feel that what has
been done to me is a crime.”
“What happened
exactly?” Simon asked.
“I’m not asking for
help. What’s done is done. If you would
please
drop me off at an underground station that would take me
to High Holborn I’d be most grateful. I have to go begging to my
banker.”
Simon continued driving
nowhere.
“I realise you’re
not asking for anything,” he said. “But I’d like
to know what happened.”
“I was given very bad
advice, to say the least,” she said. “A cer
tain
so-called art expert whose name I now detest advised me
several years ago to sell some paintings my husband and I
had
bought. This was after my husband had died, and I needed to
make some good investments. This art dealer told
me that what I
had would never be
worth much. He arranged for me to sell my
paintings through him for next to nothing, and to put money into
several paintings that he assured me would go up
in value. ‘Skyrocket’ was the word he used. This all happened over a period of
years. I bought the most recent
painting from him just last
year.”
“I can imagine the
rest,” Simon said. “The art treasures you
bought
turned out to …”
“To be rubbish,”
the old lady interrupted. “And I read in the
paper
a few days ago that one of the paintings I had
sold
to this
individual
for eight hundred pounds had gone at auction for
nineteen thousand pounds. And this is only nine years after I
sold it.”
“Of course if you
accuse your dealer of cheating you he’ll
apologise
profusely and say he can’t be right all the time.
“Exactly,” Mrs
Teasbury snapped. “That is exactly what he
did
say. But he deliberately took advantage. He talked me into
believing that art works were the best investment I could make,
and that his advice was the best I could follow. Over the
years, he
has underpaid me for the paintings I
owned and vastly over
charged me for the
paintings he sold me. Now I have nothing. It’s my own fault. I should have gone
about it all quite differently.”
“Would you mind
telling me your art dealer’s name?” Simon
asked
very quietly.