Simon tiptoed to the crack through which the light came. If there had been lions in the way, he could not have stopped himself. More words came out to him, and the semblance of a melody, that twisted the first tentacles of a slow and awful understanding into his brain.
She was sitting on the stool in front of her dressing-table, gazing into the mirror, with her hands spread out inertly before her. The song was one of those things that the band had played that night — a song like all the others, a sentimental dirge to a flimsy tune, with a rhythm that was good to dance to and a refrain that was true enough for the theme song of a summer night’s illusion. But to Mrs Nussberg it might have been the Song of Songs. And a weird cold breath fanned the Saint’s spine as it came to him that perhaps it was.
She was singing it with a terrible quiet passion, gazing at the reflected image of her own face as if in the singing she saw herself again as she had been when a man desired her. She sang it as if it carried her back to the young years, when it had not been so strange for a handsome cavalier to dance with her without a fee, before time mocked those things into the unthinkable depths of loneliness. Her jewels were heaped in a reluctant pile in front of her. For the first time Simon began to understand them, and he felt that he knew why other women wore them at her age. “I once was beautiful,” they spoke for her in their pitiful proud defiance. “I once was young and desired. These stones were given to me because I was beautiful, and a man loved me. Here is your proof.” But she could not have seen them while she sang. She could not have seen anything but the warm clear flesh on which that creased and painted mask of a face had built itself in the working out of life, to be jeered at and caricatured. She could not have seen anything but the years that go by and leave nothing behind but remembrance. She sang, in that cracked tuneless voice, because that night the remembrance had come back — because, for a day and a night, a man had been kind. And there were tears in her eyes.
The Saint smoked his cigarette. And in a little while he went quietly away, as he had come, and walked home empty-handed under the stars.
Rome: The Latin touch
1
The city of Rome, according to legend, is built upon the spot where the twin sons of Mars, Romulus and Remus (by a Vestal who must have been somewhat less than virgin) were suckled by a maternally-minded she-wolf, and there were bitter men in the police departments of many countries who would have said that that made it a very appropriate city for Simon Templar to gravitate into, even today. But they would have been thinking of him as a wolf in terms of his predatory reputation, rather than in the more innocuous modern connotation of an eye for a pretty girl. He had both, it is true, but it was as a lone wolf in the waste lands of crime that his rather sensational publicity had mostly featured him.
Simon Templar himself would have said, with an impish twinkle, that his affinity for Rome would be better attributed to the traditional association of the place as a holy city, for who could more aptly visit there than one who was best known by the nickname of “The Saint”?
It troubled him not at all that the incongruity of that sobriquet was a perpetual irritant to the officers of the law who from time to time had been called upon to try and cope with his forays: to revert to the wolf simile, it was enough for him that even his worst enemies had to concede that the sheep who had felt his fangs had always been black sheep.
But that morning, as he stood on the entirely modern sidewalk outside the ancient Colosseum, his interests were only those of the most ordinary sightseer, and any vulpine instincts he may have had were of the entirely modern kind just referred to — the kind which produces formalized whistles at the sight of a modern Vestal, virtuous or not.