The Saint in Europe (7 page)

Simon went past him without pausing for any social amenities, moving with the fluid soundlessness of a disembodied shadow.

The door of the back office was ajar, outlined with the faint luminosity of a well-shaded light within. Simon pushed it with his fingertips, and it swung wider without even an uncooperative creak.

Inside, he saw that the light came from a small profesнsionally shrouded electric lantern on the floor beside the massive safe. The safe was open, and the means of its openнing were evident in an assortment of shining tools spread on a velvet cloth in front of it.

Between Simon and the safe stood a man with a large handkerchief knotted loosely around his throat, obviously serving as an easily replaceable mask, who was in the act of stuffing a handful of small tissue-paper packages into his pocket.

“Good evening,” said the Saint, because it seemed as tactful a way of drawing attention to himself as he could think of.

He said it very quietly, too, in case his audience had a weak heart, but just the same the man spun around like a puppet jerked with a string.

The movement stopped there, because Simon was playнing the beam of his flashlight pointedly on the gun in his right hand, to discourage any additional reaction. But there was enough general luminance, between that and the shieldнed lamp on the floor, for each of them to see the other’s face.

Mr Upwater stared at him pallidly, and licked his lips.

“You weren’t supposed to be here for an hour,” he said stupidly.

“That’s what I told you,” said the Saint calmly, “so that I’d know about what time you’d be here. Naturally you wanted to have comfortable time to do the job before I arrived, but you wouldn’t want to be too long before, in case it was discovered too soon for me to walk in and take the rap. You did the groundwork very cleverly-getting me to come here this morning and case the joint for you, while at the same time establishing myself as a prime suspect. The only thing I was a little worried about was whether you meant to really let me do the job myself, and hijack the boodle afterwards. But I decided you wouldn’t take that big a chance-you couldn’t be quite sure that with so much loot in my pockets I mightn’t yield to temptation and double-cross you. When you said yourself that every man has his price, you gave me a fix on your thinking,”

Mr Upwater’s eyes were wild and haggard.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” he said feverishly. “I was afraid you were just kidding me-that you wouldn’t really do it at all-so I made up my mind to do it myself.”

“And not like any amateur, either,” said the Saint apнprovingly. “Those tools of yours are first class. I suppose you wouldn’t like to tell me how you got wind of the Angel’s Eye being re-cut here? They were certainly doing their best to keep it quiet, to try and avoid having any trouble with people like us, as I could tell by the reception I got when I started to ask questions. It was nice work of yours to locate it; but you must have thought you were really in luck when you heard I was in town, all ready to be the fall guy.”

“So help me, Mr Templar, I told you the truth-“

“Oh, no, you didn’t. Not from the word Go. I knew you were lying from the moment you said you delivered the Angel’s Eye the day before yesterday and the cutting was supposed to start yesterday. Anyone who knows anything about diamonds knows that a cutter would study an imporнtant stone like that for weeks, maybe even months, before he made the first cut, because if he made any mistake about the grain he might break it into a lot of worthless fragments. And I was doubly sure that you didn’t work for any big-time jewelers when you said that the Angel’s Eye was as big as the Hope diamond and weighed about a hundred carats. For your information, the Hope diamond, good as it is, is only fortyfour and a quarter. It’s my business to know things like that, and it ought to be yours.”

Upwater swallowed.

“Can’t we call it quits?” he said desperately. “There’s plenty for both of us.”

“Thank you,” said the Saint, “but this time I’ll be happy to collect a legitimate reward, with no headaches.”

“Nobody’ll believe you,” Upwater said viciously. “I’ll say you were in it with me, right up to now.”

“I’m sorry,” said the Saint, “but I’ve taken care to prove otherwise.”

There was a sudden rush of feet, and the lights went on. Two uniformed men stood in the doorway, with Pieter Liefman crowding in past them. Pieter put an arm around the Saint’s shoulders and spoke rapidly to the policemen in Dutch, and Upwater wilted as he realized that the trap was closed.

Some time later, as they all went out into the street, with Upwater handcuffed between the two officers, Simon looked for the car that had been parked on the far corner. It was no longer there.

Pieter intercepted the glance.

“It took off when I came back with the flatfeet,” he said.

Simon read the mute entreaty in Upwater’s white face, and shrugged.

“Okay,” he said. “We won’t say anything about Mabel. After all, she was the one who really brought me into this.”

On second thought, after he saw Mr Upwater’s next expression, he wondered if that was quite the right thing to mention.

III. THE RHINE:
The Rhine Maiden

Simon Templar always thought of her as the Rhine Maiden for the simple reason that he met her on his way down the Rhine. He had never found the time or the inclination to sit through Wagner’s epic on the subject, but he surmised that the Rhine Maidens of the operas would probably have been in keeping with the usual run of half-pint Siegfrieds and 200-pound Brunnhildes. The girl on the train was what Simon, in a mood of poetic fancy, would have liked a Rhine Maiden to be; and he didn’t care whether she could sing top F or not.

Simon took the tram because he had made the trip from Cologne to Mainz by boat before, and had announced himнself a Philistine unimpressed. Reluctantly, he had summarнized that much-advertised river as an enormous quantity of muddy water flowing northwards at tremendous speed unнder a fitter of black barges and tugboats and pleasure steamнers, with a few crumbling ruins on its banks shouldering awkwardly between clumps of factory chimneys. Scenically, it had been scanned and found wanting by the keen and gay blue eyes that had reflected every great river in the world from the Nile to the Amazon, even though he found the ruins a little pitiful, as if they had only asked to be left in the peace of years and had been refused. Also Simon took the train because it was quicker, and he had unlawful business to conclude in Stuttgart; which was perhaps the best reason of all.

For the saga of any adventurer take this: an idea, a scheme, action, danger, escape, and perhaps a surprise somewhere. Repeat indefinitely, with irregular interludes of quiet. Flavor it with the eternal discontent of unattainable horizons, and the everlasting content of an eagle’s freedom. That had been Simon Templar’s life since the day when he was first nicknamed the Saint, and it was his one prayer that he might be spared many years more in which to demнonstrate the peculiar brand of saintliness which he had made his own. With valuable property burgled from an unsavoury ex-collaborationist’s house near Paris in his valise, and his fare paid out of a wallet picked from the pocket of a waiter who had made the mistake of being rude to him, the Saint lighted a cigarette and leaned back in his corner to be innocently glad that the lottery of travel could still shuffle a girl like that into the compartment chosen by a voyaging buccaneer.

She was very young-about seventeen or eighteen, he guessed-and her eyes were the bright greenish-blue that the waters of the Rhine ought to have been. She had pulled off her hat when she sat down, so that the unstudied symнmetry of her curving honey-blonde hair framed her face in a careless aureole. She was beautiful. But there was someнthing more to her than her mere unspoiled young beauty, something strange and startling that he could not define. She was the fairy princess that no man ever meets except in his most youthful dreams, the Cinderella that every man looks for all his life and knows he will never find. She was the woman that each man marries, only to find that he saw nothing but the mirror of his own hopes. And even when he had said that, the Saint knew that he had touched only a crude outline-that there was still something more which he might never be able to say. But because there seemed to be nothing of immediate importance in the newspaper he had bought at the station, and because even a lawless advenнturer may find his own pleasure in the enjoyment of simple loveliness, Simon Templar leaned back with the smoke drifting past his eyes and wove romantic fantasies about the Rhine Maiden and the old man who was with her.

“This is der most vonderful river of der whole vorld, Greta,” said the old man, gazing out of the window. “For der Danube der is a valtz; but this is der only river in der vorld dot has four operas written about it. Some day you shall see it all properly, Gretchen-die Lorelei, und Ehrenнbreitstien, und all kinds of vonderful places-“

An adventurer lives on impulse, riding the crest of life only because he takes the wave in the split second where others hesitate. The Saint said, quietly and naturally, with a slight movement of his hand: “I think there’s some better stuff over that way. Over around the Eifel.”

The other two both looked at him; and the happy eyes of the solid old man lighted up.

“Ach, so you know your Chermany!”

Simon wondered what they would have said if he had explained that the police of two nations had once hunted him up from Innsbruck through Munich to Treuchtlingen and beyond, on a certain adventure that was one of his , blithest memories; but he only smiled.

“I’ve been here before.”

“I know dot country, too,” said the old man eagerly, with his soft German-American accent faltering a little in his throat. “When I vos a boy we used to try and catch fish in der river at Gemund; und vonce I get lost by myself in der voods going over to Heimbach. Now I hear der is a great Thalsperre, a big dam dot makes all der valley into a great lake. So maybe der is some more fish there now.”

It was as if he had suddenly met an old friend; the sluiceнgates of memory were opened at a touch, and the old man let them flow, stumbling through his, words with the same naive happiness as he must have stumbled through the woods and streams he spoke of as a boy. There were many places that the Saint also knew; and a nod of recognition here and there was almost as much encouragement as the old man needed. His whole life story, commonplace as it was, came pattering out with a childish zest that was almost frightening in its godlike simplicity. Simon listened, and was queerly moved.

“… Und so I vork and vork, und I safe money and look after my little Greta, und she looks after me, und we are very happy. Und then at last I can retire mit a little money, not much, but plenty for us; und Greta is grown up.”

The eyes of the old man shone with a serenity that was blinding, the eyes of a man who had never known the doubts and the fretfulness of his age, whose humble faith had passed utterly and incredibly unscathed through the squalid brawl of civilization perhaps because he had never been aware of it.

“So now we come back to der Faderland to see my brother dot is a policeman in Mainz. Und Greta is going to see der vorld, und buy herself pretty clothes, und do all kinds of vonderful things. Isn’t dot all we could vant, Gretchen?”

Simon glanced at the girl again. He knew that she had been studying his face ever since he had first spoken, but his clear gaze turned on her with its hint of the knowledge veiled down almost to invisibility. Even so, it took her by surprise.

“Why-yes,” she stammered; and then in an instant her confusion was gone. She slipped her hand under the old man’s arm and rested her cheek on his shoulder. “But I suppose it’s all very ordinary to you.”

The Saint shook his head.

“No,” he said gently. “I’ve known what it is to feel just like that.”

And in that moment, in one of those throat-catching flashes of vision where a man looks back and sees for the first time what he has left behind, Simon Templar knew how far he and the rest of the world had travelled when such a contented and unassuming honesty could have such a strange pathos.

“I know,” said the Saint. “That’s when the earth’s at your feet, and you look at it out of an enchanted castle. How does the line go”?-‘Magic casements opening on the foam of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn…’”

“There’s music in that,” she said softly.

But he wondered how much she understood. One never knows how magical the casements were until after the magic has been lost.

She had her composure back-even Rhine Maidens must have been born with that defensive armour of the eternal woman. She returned his gaze calmly enough, liking the reckless cut of his lean face and the quick smile that could be cynical and sad and mocking at the same time. There was a boyishness there that spoke to her own youth; but with it there were the deep-etched lines of many dangerous years which she was too young to read.

“I expect you know lots of marvelous places,” she said.

The Saint smiled.

“Wherever you went now would be marvelous. It’s only tired and disillusioned people who have to look for sensations.”

“I’m spoiled,” she said. “Ever since we left home I’ve been living in a dream. First there was New York, and then the boat, and then Paris, and Cologne-and we’ve scarcely started yet. I haven’t done anything to deserve it. Daddy did it all by himself.”

The old man shook his head.

“No, Gretchen, I didn’t do it all by myself. There was dot great man who helped me. You know?” He looked at the Saint. “Und he is on this train himself!”

“Who’s that?” asked the Saint cheerfully.

“Mr Voyson. Mr Bruce Voyson. He has der big factory where I vork. When I safe a little money I put it in his company because they pay so big dividends, und so there is alvays much more money; und I invest dot also, und so it all helps us. All my money I have in his company.”

Simon hardly moved.

“Sometimes I see him in der factory, und he has alvays something to say to me,” said the old man almost reverently. “Now today I see him on der platform at Cologne. You remember, Greta? I think he is very tired with all the vork he does to look after the factory, because he is vearing dark glasses und he is very stooped like he never was before und his hair is gone quite white. But I recognize him beнcause I have seen him so often, und besides he has a scar on his hand dot I remember so vell und I see it when he takes off his glove. So I go up und speak to him und thank him, und at first he does not recognize me. Of course he has so many employees in der big factory, how can he rememнber every one of them all der time? But I tell him, ‘You are Mr Voyson und I vork in your factory fifteen years und I invest all my money in your company, und I vant to thank you that now I can retire and go home.’ So he shakes hands with me, und then he is so busy that he has to go away. But he is on der train, too.”