The Saint in Europe

by Charteris Leslie

“As a matter of fact, I only came this way to say hullo to an old friend of mine, one of your eminent citizens. You probably know him — Pieter Liefman. He makes some of the best beer in these parts. But he’s out of town, and won’t be back till tomorrow or the next day. I just want to wait over and see him.”

“You are a friend of Mr Liefman?”

“We are what you might call brothers under the suds.”

The manager studied him frankly for a while, and found it hard to see anything that threatened the peace and good name of the hotel. The Saint wore his clothes with the careless ease of a man accustomed to the best of everything, and with the confidence of one who did not have to think twice about paying for it. And at that moment the keen corsair’s face was in repose, and the imps of devilment stilled in the clear blue eyes — it was a trick of camouflage that sometimes served the Saint better than a disguise, and on those occasions almost made him seem to fit his incongruous nickname.

“I think we can find you a room,” said the manager.

So that minor problem was overcome, but not without starting a slight stir of curiosity that spread like an active virus through all levels of the human beings within the hotel, who were, after all, only human. Simon knew it when he came downstairs again, after a shower and a change, by the studiously veiled interest of the staff, the elaborately impersonal glances and politely inaudible whisperings of the other guests in the lobby. The years had given him an extrasensory perception of the subtle symptoms of recognition, but in the same time he had developed a protective tolerance for it. Let the speculations buzz: they could not embarrass him when he had nothing to hide.

For what he had told the manager was the simple truth. He had made the detour to Amsterdam in the course of an already aimless European vacation for no reason but the impulse to renew an old acquaintance and sample the products of the famous Liefman brouwerij at the source, and he had no thought of avenging any iniquities, robbing any robbers, or doing any of the other entertaining and lawless things which had made his name a nightmare to the police of four continents and given him the reputation which caused even tourists to stare furtively from behind their guidebooks.

That this peaceful project was to be short-lived was not his fault — he himself would have added, with a perfectly straight face, “as usual.”

He dined at the Lido, on a rijsttafel of heroic conception — the taste for, and the art of preparing, a true Indonesian curry being one of the few legacies left to the Netherlands from their former East Indian empire — and it was not until his appetite was on the verge of admitting defeat that he had time to become aware that he was the object of more than ordinary attention from a table across the room.

There were two people at it, a middle-aged couple whose accents, as he had unconsciously overheard them speaking to the waiter, identified them as English, and whose clothes had a dull neatness that was worn like a proud insigne of respectability. The man had a square shape, with thinning hair, rimless spectacles, and a face moulded in the lines of stolid responsibility. The woman was plump and motherly, and looked as if she would be equally at home in a kitchen or a church bazaar. They looked most obviously like a senior employee of a prosperous business house who had worked his way up from the bottom during a lifetime of loyal service, and his competent and comfortable wife. The only untypical thing about them was that instead of eating in the bored or companionable silence normally practised by such couples, they had been talking busily throughout the meal in low voices of which not a sound had reached the Saint’s sensitive ears — except, as has been said, when they spoke to the waiter. Simon Templar, whose favorite study was the mechanism of his fellow creatures, had begun to theorize about what gave them so much material for conversation, as approaching satiety released his interest from food. It was not, be concluded, an affair of connubial recriminations, which might typically have disrupted a typical taciturnity, and yet the conversation did not seem to be made up of pleasant trivialities, for the man’s air of permanent anxiety deepened as it went on, and once or twice he ran a hand over his sparse hair in a gesture almost of desperation.