Unbelieving, she stared at him. She had never seen him before. Clean, carefully and inconspicuously dressed, smoothly pink-faced, the embryo of a stolid pillar of the civilized state. She looked down at herself, travel-stained and not caring. At the people around — townspeople mostly, sprinkled with tourists. They were like utter strangers; she looked at them with a queer pride, a pride in the dust and stains of the road that had become part of her, in which they had no part. She looked at Simon Templar, brown and dusty and strong like herself, sitting there with an amazed and motionless foreboding in his eyes. He was real. He belonged. Belonged back there under the wide reaches of the sky that she had once thought so terrible and comfortless, which now was the only ceiling of peace.
“Darling, your nose is peeling,” said Jack Easton jovially, and something that had been in her, which had grown dim and vague in the passing of seven days, was suddenly lifeless, dying without pain.
“No, no, no!” she cried, with her heart aching and awake. “Simon, I can’t go back. I can never go back!”
Lucerne: The loaded tourist
1
The lights of Lucerne were twinkling on the lake as Simon Templar strolled out towards it through the Casino gardens, and above them the craggy head of old Pilatus loomed blackly against a sky full of stars. At a jetty across the National quai a tourist launch was disgorging a load of trippers, and the clear Swiss air was temporarily raucous with the alien accents of Lancashire and London. Simon stood under a tree, enjoying a cigarette and waiting patiently for them to disperse. He had a deep aversion to mobs, and did not want to walk in the middle of one even the short distance to his hotel: something perhaps overly sensitive and fastidious in him recoiled instinctively from their mildly alcoholic exuberance and the laughter was just a shade too loud and shallow for his tranquil mood. It was not because he was afraid of being recognized. Any one of them would probably have reacted to his name, or at least to his still better-known sobriquet, the Saint, but none would have been likely to identify his face. The features of the mocking buccaneer whose long and simultaneous vendettas with the underworld and the law had become legendary in his own lifetime were known to few — a fact which the Saint had often found to his advantage.
But at that moment he was not even thinking of the advantages of anonymity. He was simply indulging a personal distaste for boisterous holiday-makers. He was still trying to take a holiday himself. He wanted nothing from them except to be left alone, and they had nothing to fear from him.
Presently they were gone, and the esplanade was deserted again. He dropped his cigarette and stood like a statue, absorbed in the serene beauty of shimmering water and sentinel mountains.
From the direction of the Hotel National, off to his left, came a single set of footsteps. They were solid, purposeful, a little hurried. Simon turned only his head, and saw the man who made them as he came nearer — a stoutish man of middle height, wearing a dark suit and a dark homburg, carrying a bulky briefcase, the whole effect combined with his intent and urgent gait giving him an incongruously brisk and business-like appearance in the peaceful Alpine night. Simon caught a glimpse of his face as he passed under one of the street lamps that stood along the waterfront; it had a sallow and unmistakably Latin cast that was accentuated by a small pointed black beard.
Then, hardly a moment later, Simon realized that he was not watching one man, but three.