To my father, with love

Paris: The covetous headsman

1

“I hope, Monsieur Templar,” said Inspector Archimède Quercy, of the Paris Police Judiciaire, in passable English, “that you will not think this meeting is unfriendly.”

“Nevertheless,” Simon replied, in perfect French, “to be summoned here on my very first day in Paris seems at least an unusual distinction.”

“The Saint is an unusual personage,” said Inspector Quercy, reverting gratefully to his native tongue.

He was a long thin man with a long thin nose, and even with rather long thin hair. He had a solemn anxious face and wistful eyes like a questioning spaniel. Simon knew that that appearance was deceptive. It was the Saint’s business, in the cause of outlawry, to know the reputations of many police officers in many places, and he knew that on the record Inspector Quercy’s instincts, if the canine parallel must be continued, leaned more towards those of the bloodhound, the retriever, and the bulldog.

“If you come here as a simple tourist,” Quercy said, “France welcomes you. We have, as you well know, a beautiful country, good food, good wine, and pretty girls. They are all at your disposal — for you, no doubt, have plenty of those good American dollars which France so badly needs. But as the Saint — that would be altogether different.”

“Monsieur the Inspector is, perhaps, anti-clerical?” Simon suggested gravely.

“I refer, Monsieur, to the nom de guerre under which you are so widely known. I have not, it is true, been informed of any charges pending against you anywhere, nor have the police of any other country requested me to arrest you for extradition, but I have read about your exploits. Your motives are popularly believed to be idealistic, in a peculiar way. That is not for me to judge. I only tell you that we want none of them here.”

“What, no ideals — in the Palais de Justice?”

Quercy sighed. He gazed across his littered desk into the dancing blue eyes under quizzically tilted brows, and for a moment the lugubriousness in his own gaze was very deep and real. The sight of the tall broad-shouldered figure sprawled with such impudent grace in his shabby armchair made a mockery of the conventional stiffness of the room, just as the casual elegance of its clothing affronted the hard-worn dilapidation of the furniture; the warm bronze of the preposterously handsome face seemed to bring its own sun into the dingy room, whispering outlandish heresies of open skies and wide places where the wind blew, and because of this man the office seemed more cramped and drab and dustier than ever, and the gloom of it touched the soul of its proper occupant. It was a sensation that many other policemen had had when they came face to face with that last amazing heir to the mantle of Robin Hood, when they knew it was their turn to try to tame him and realized the immensity of the task...

“I mean,” said Inspector Quercy patiently, “that there are servants of the Republic, of whom I am one, employed here to concern themselves with crime. If you, as an individual, acquire knowledge of any crime or criminals, we shall be glad to receive your information, but we do not allow private persons to take over the duties of the police. Still less do we permit anyone to administer his own interpretation of justice, as I hear you have sometimes claimed to do. Furthermore I must warn you that here, under the Code Napoleon, you would not have the same advantage that you have enjoyed in England and America. There, you are legally innocent until you are proved guilty; here, with sufficient grounds, you may be placed on trial and required to prove yourself innocent.”

The Saint smiled.

“I appreciate the warning,” he murmured. “But the truth is, I did come here for the food, the wine, and the pretty girls. I hadn’t thought of giving you any trouble.” The devil in him couldn’t resist adding, “So far.”

“Let it remain that way, Monsieur. A vacation does everyone good.”

Simon offered a cigarette, and struck a light for them both.

“Now that I know how you feel about me,” he remarked, “I suppose I ought to thank you for not trying to pin that Rosepierre murder on me. It must have taken great restraint not to grab such a readymade scapegoat.”

He had been reading the story in a newspaper at breakfast. The body of a young man identified as Charles Rosepierre had been found murdered in the Bois de Boulogne, the spacious park adjacent to the most fashionable residential quarter of Paris. There appeared to be no clue to the murderer, or even to the motive, for he was a respectable clerk in a shipping office, vouched for by his employers as honest and hard-working and by his friends and associates as being sober and amiable and impossible to connect with any shady acquaintances. He carried very little money, but he had not been robbed. He had left the office at the usual time on the day he died, apparently with no apprehensions, and it was understood that he was going to have dinner and call later on the girl he was courting, but he had not been seen since until his body was found a few yards from one of the roads through the park. There was no hint of a jealous rival, nor did anything in his open commonplace life give any grounds to believe in a crime of passion, yet a passion of some weird kind must have been involved. For what lent the crime the eerie touch of horror that justified the space allotted to it in the press was the fact that although he had died almost instantly from a knife stab in the heart, his head had been severed from his body after he was dead, and was found where it had presumably rolled a few feet away.

“I might have thought of you,” Quercy said, without the ghost of a smile, “if Rosepierre’s body had not been found two hours before your plane landed at Orly. When he was killed and his head was being cut off, there is no doubt that you were half-way over the Atlantic.”

“It was clever of me to arrive with a cast-iron alibi. You really have no ideas about how I could have faked it?”

“I am satisfied, Monsieur, that that would be beyond even your powers.”

“One day I must figure out how it could be done,” said the Saint, and in some incredible way he made it sound possible.

The Inspector grunted.

“You have not, perhaps, any more constructive suggestions about the mystery?”

“I read a detective story once with a decapitated body in it, in which the head was actually taken from an entirely different body, the object being to confuse the police and no doubt the readers too.”

“The medical examination, in this case, proves positively that the head which was found did indeed belong to the body.”

“A big part of your problem, then, seems to be to find an answer to why anyone who had already killed someone, for whatever reason, should afterwards take the trouble to cut off his head. It was not done to prevent identification, because the head was left there.”

“Exactly.”

Simon gazed at the ceiling.

“Perhaps,” he said slowly, “the name of the victim is a clue. Is it possible that you have in Paris some demented aristocrat who is still nursing a grudge for the treatment given to his ancestors during the Revolution? He has made a vow to track down and take vengeance on the lineal descendants of the revolutionary leaders who gave his forebears the radical haircut. Mistaking the name of this unfortunate young man for Robespierre, and having no guillotine handy, he—”

There came, perhaps providentially, a knock on the door, and an agent entered.

“ Mademoiselle North est ici, Monsieur l’Inspecteur.”

“Good. I will see her at once. It is the sister of the murdered man,” he explained to the Saint.

“Then why is her name North?”

“She was adopted as a child by an American family. It is quite a story.” Quercy stood up. “But I must not detain you any longer.” He held out his hand. “Amuse yourself well, Monsieur Templar, and remember what I have told you.”

“I will do my best,” said the Saint, and wondered even to himself just what he meant.

2

He took a long look at the girl who was entering as he went out. She was American, obviously, in every outward particular, stamped unmistakably with all the details of dress and grooming that label the American product to a sophisticated glance anywhere. And since a pretty face is a pretty face in any country within the same broad ethnic limits, there was nothing about her features to mark her as conspicuously French by birth. She had softly waved black hair and clear brown eyes and a wide mouth which in happier circumstances, the Saint’s instinct told him, could be generous in many ways.

Simon carried the image of her vividly in his mind as he retraced his way through the musty labyrinth of the upper floors and down the ancient winding stairway to the street. He stood at the gates of the courtyard for a few moments, indulging himself in indecision, and knowing all the time that his decision was already made. There was a sidewalk cafe on the other side of the boulevard. He crossed it and sat down at a table from which he could watch the entrance of the building he had just left.

And so, he reflected cheerfully, it was going to happen to him again.

It was true, as he had told Quercy, that he hadn’t come to Paris with any intention of getting into trouble. But trouble had that disastrous propensity for getting into him. It was, of course, originally Quercy’s fault for ordering him to report at the Prefecture. The summons had been most courteously phrased, but it had been an order, just the same. The Saint had an unpardonably rebellious attitude towards all orders, especially police orders. That had prepared the ground. And then, the Inspector had rashly proceeded to plant a seed. It was not that Simon could legitimately resent his warning, which had been most discreetly and even benevolently phrased, but nevertheless it had the ingredients of a challenge. The Saint had never found it easy to leave a challenge alone. And unfortunately, there was an intriguing murder mystery immediately to hand for fertilizer. Even so, he might have been able to resist, but then he had seen the girl. It was harder still for him to leave a pretty girl alone. And hadn’t Quercy himself invited him to enjoy the pretty girls? And so upon fertilizer and seed and cultivated ground, to conclude the metaphor, had fallen the warm rain of her presence, and the result was inevitable, as it had always been...

The Saint ordered a Suze, paid for it at once so that he could leave at any moment, and waited.

An hour passed before she came out, and he got up and threaded his way nonchalantly through the traffic. She stood outside the Palais, looking hopefully up and down the street for a taxi, and Simon timed his crossing so that he arrived beside her as one came by, and their hands met on the door handle.

They looked at each other with the surprise, confusion, and incipient hostility normal to any two people caught in such a deadlock, the Saint playing his part exactly as if the accident was none of his making, and then he smiled.

“A photo finish,” he said. “Shall we flip for it, or are we lucky enough to be going the same way?”

She smiled back — he had counted on the sound of a familiar accent to earn that.

“I’m going to my hotel — the Georges Cinq.”

“Mine too,” said the Saint, truthfully, although his answer would have been the same whatever she had said.

As the cab turned along the Quais des Grands Augustins he knew that she was looking at him more closely.

“Didn’t I just see you in that detective’s office?” she asked.

“I didn’t think you noticed,” he said. “But I saw you.”

“Are you a reporter?”

He considered the possibilities of the role for an instant.

“No.”

“Are you connected with the police?”

Intuition, which had been whispering to him, raised its voice to a sure command. At this moment, in this situation, with this girl, the truth would gain him more than any fiction.

“My name is Simon Templar.”

“The Saint.”

She was one of those people whom he met all too seldom, who could hear his name and recognize its connotation without gasping, swooning, or recoiling, and at first, he was glad to see, she received it even without fear. “The Saint,” she said, looking at him with no more than ordinary curiosity, and then the fear barely began to stir in her eyes.

“No, darling,” he said quickly. “I didn’t kill your brother. Even Quercy will vouch for that. He knows I was in an airplane over the Atlantic at the time.”

“Do you suspect me?”

“Did you do it?”

“I was on the Atlantic, too. On a boat. I landed at Cherbourg this morning. A policeman was waiting for me at the Georges Cinq.”

“Don’t let anyone tell you these cops aren’t efficient. They sent for me almost as quickly.”

Simon lighted a cigarette and gave his hunch one last retrospective survey, for the duration of a long inhalation. His mind was made up.

He said, “This is on the level. Quercy had me in his office, giving me a solemn warning to keep my nose clean while I’m here. So I just naturally have an unholy desire to make a monkey out of him. I like you. And your brother’s case is the hottest thing on Quercy’s blotter right now. If I could break it and hand him the pieces on a platter, it’d be a magnificent moment. And I’m sure you want the case solved, whoever does it. So will you let me help — if I can?”

Her straightforward dark eyes studied him for many seconds.

She said, “Thank you. I like you, too. But what can you do?”

“I may think of something. First, I’ve got to know everything you can tell me. May I take you to lunch?”

“Yes. But I’ve got to stop at the hotel first. They didn’t even give me time to see my room.”

3

In the lobby, while she was asking for her key, a man stepped up beside her at the desk, removed a rich black homburg with a slight flourish, and said, “Pardon, Miss North.” He extended a card. Looking over her shoulder, Simon saw that it said “M Georges Olivant” with an address in St Cloud.

“I ’ave waited for you all zis morning,” Olivant said. “I am an old friend of your fahzer. I would ’ave met you at ze boat, but I was unable to leave Paris because of business.”

He was a stout man with a face that was unfortunately reminiscent of a well-fed rat, although the only fur on it was a carefully trimmed black moustache, the rest of the skin having that glossy pink patina which can only be produced by the best barbers. From the points of his polished shoes, up through his studiously tailored blue suit and studiously manicured fingernails, to the top of his pomaded head, he exuded an aroma of cologne and solid prosperity. He spoke English in an aggressive way which somehow gave the impression that he was extremely proud of his accent, which was atrocious. And just as the Saint had liked Valerie North at first glance, from the first glance he disliked M Olivant.

“This is quite a surprise,” the girl was saying politely. “How did you know about me, and how did you find me so quickly?”

“I read about your trip in ze newspapers,” Olivant said, “so of course I am waiting for you. Eet was not difficult. Zere are not so many ’otel in Paris where ze Americans descend.”

She seemed to take the reference to a newspaper story on her trip so matter-of-factly that a tiny line creased between the Saint’s brows. Her name had meant nothing to him, and he thought he was aware of most celebrities.

“Then you must have known my brother,” the girl said.

“Alas, no. I am in Belgium, on business, when I read ze newspaper. It is ze first I ’ear of you bose since ze war. I mean to look for ’im, of course. But as soon as I return, before I can look, I read in ze newspaper about ’im again, and ’e is dead.” Olivant allowed an expression of grief to dwell on his face for a measured period of time, and then bravely set it aside. “’Owever, I come to place myself at your service. For finding ze murderers, we can only ’ope ze police ’ave success. But anysing else I can do... You will, per’aps, ’ave lunch wiz me?”

The girl’s eyes went to the Saint, and Simon made a faint negative movement with his head.

“I’m sorry,” she said, “but I’ve already promised... May I introduce Mr—”

“Tombs,” said the Saint promptly, holding out his hand.

The same kind of impulse that had made him introduce himself with complete candor to Valerie North now made him duck behind the alias which often afforded him a morbid private amusement, but this time his inward smile vanished abruptly as Olivant shook hands. From a man who looked like Olivant, he had expected a fleshy and probably moist and limp contact, but the palm that touched his own was hard and rough like a laborer’s.

Deep in the Saint’s brain a little premonitory pulse began to beat, like the signal of some psychic Geiger counter, but his face was a mask of conventional amiability.

“Mr Tombs,” Olivant repeated, like a man who made a practise of memorizing names. “Zen per’aps bose of you—”

“I don’t want to be rude,” said the Saint firmly, “but my job depends on this exclusive interview. You know how newspapers are.”

M Olivant made a visible effort to look like a man who knew how newspapers are.

“I am desolate.” He turned back to the girl. “For cocktails, zen, per’aps? I ’ave look forward so much to zis meeting—”

“Excuse me,” said the Saint.

He strolled across the lobby to the little newsstand and glanced quickly over its wares. A guidebook with a shiny stiff paper cover caught his eye, and he bought it, and wiped the cover briskly with his handkerchief while he waited for his change. He walked back, holding the book by one corner, to where M Olivant was taking his talkative leave of Valerie North.

“I come ’ere, zen, at five o’clock. I ’ave so much to tell you about your poor fahzer, and what ’e does for us in ze Resistance before ze Gestapo take ’im... To sink I ’ave not see you since you were such a leetle girl!”

“I’ll look forward to it,” said the girl, self-consciously letting her hand be kissed, and looked at the Saint. “May I run upstairs just for a minute and see my room before we go?”

“Sure.”

As she left, Simon showed M Olivant his book, holding it in such a way that the other was practically forced to take it.

“M Olivant, would you say this was any good?”

Olivant took the book and thumbed perfunctorily through a few pages.

“Eet is probably quite ’elpful, Mr Tombs. So you don’t work ’ere all ze time?”

“No, this is a special assignment”

“Ah. I ’ope you make a good story.”

“At least it’s a chance to travel,” said the Saint conversationally. “But I don’t suppose that means much to you. From what you were saying, it sounds as if you spent most of your time doing it. What sort of business are you in?”

“I ’ave many affairs,” Olivant said impressively, and seemed to think that was an adequate answer.

He held out the book, and Simon took it back again by the corner.

“Maybe you’d let me talk to you later, Monsieur Olivant. You should have some interesting things to tell about Miss North’s family.”

“Ah, yes, eet is a most interesting story.” Olivant seemed curiously uninterested. He extended his hand briskly. “Now, I ’ave anozzer appointment. Eet ’as been a pleasure to meet you. Au revoir, Mr Tombs.”

The Saint watched him go, with the sensation of that inappropriately calloused hand lingering on his fingers, and then he turned to the concierge and asked for a large envelope, into which he slid his newly acquired guidebook, being careful not to touch the book again except by the one corner he was holding it by.

4

“Tell me,” said the Saint, “as the most ignorant reporter in this town, what put you in the news. I mean, even before anything happened to your brother.”

They sat in opposite armchairs across a table in the tiny downstairs room of the Restaurant Châtaignier, sniffing the savory bouquet of its incomparable homard au beurre blanc rising from the plates in front of them, while the chef and proprietor himself uncorked a bottle of cool rosé.

“It sounds silly,” said Valerie North, “but I was on one of those radio quiz programs. I happened to know the answer to who was the painter of the Mona Lisa, and the prize I won was a free trip to Europe. They asked me what I planned to do with it and I said it’d give me the chance I’ve always hoped for to get to know my brother.”

“It does sound a little unusual,” Simon admitted. “Hadn’t you ever met?”

“Not since we were kids. We were born and lived here, till 1940, when the Germans were advancing on Paris. I was too young to remember much about it, but everyone was very frightened, and my father said we must go away. He wouldn’t go himself, but he sent us with the wife of a neighbor — my mother died when we were very young. Somewhere on the road we were strafed by a plane, and the woman was killed. Charles and I went on alone.”

“Was he older or younger than you?”

“Two years older. But we were both children. Somehow, presently we got separated. I just went on, helplessly I guess, with the stream of refugees who were trudging away to the southwest. Somewhere, after that — it all seems so far away and confused — I was picked up by an American couple who’d also been caught in the blitz. They took me to Bordeaux, and then afterwards to America. They were sweet people — they still are — and they hadn’t any children, and they treated me like their own. Later on, they were able to find out somehow that my father had died in a concentration camp. They adopted me legally, and I took their name.”

“So for all practical purposes, you really are an American.”

“I went to school in Chicago — Mr North is an accountant there — and now I’m a secretary in a mail-order house. And the only French I know is from high school.”

“Who was your father?”

“All I know about him is his name, Eli Rosepierre. And he was some sort of working jeweler.”

The Saint paused with his wine-glass half-way to his lips.

“Was he Jewish?”

“I think so.”

“I told Quercy there might be something in the name,” he observed. “Of course, the name Eli fixes it. Now I get the Rosepierre. A literal translation of Rosenstein. I wonder... He must have been very brave or very foolish to stay here, with the Nazis coming.”

“Perhaps he was only too optimistic,” she said. “You know, I’d never thought of that, about the name.”

“Was he rich?”

“I don’t think so. He worked very hard. But he may have been thrifty. I don’t really know. As far as I can remember we lived in an ordinary decent way, not poverty-stricken and not specially luxurious.”

“But it’s at least a possibility.”

“What difference does it make? Whatever he had the Nazis must have confiscated.”

“If they could find it.”

“I suppose,” she said, “you’re looking for a motive.”

“There must be one. And I’ve got to find it.”

She watched him subdividing the last succulent pieces of lobster with loving regret.

“When did you locate your brother again?” be asked.

“Only a few months ago. The Norths had tried from time to time, without any luck. Last winter, I thought I’d try just once more, on my own. I had an advertisement translated into French, and sent it to all the Paris newspapers. Of course, for all I knew, he might have been anywhere else in France, if he was alive at all. But just by a miracle, he saw it. We exchanged letters and snapshots. He’d thought I was probably dead, too. And then, when I won that prize on the radio, it seemed as if everything was set for a real Hollywood ending.”

“I can see why that story would get a play in the papers,” said the Saint thoughtfully. “And the correspondents of the French news agencies would naturally pick it up and send it back here.”

“They did. Charles’s last letter said he was quite embarrassed about the publicity he was getting.”

“So after that, anyone with any interest in the Rosepierre family, whether they read advertisements or not, would know a good deal about both of you.”

“I suppose so.”

Simon shamelessly used a piece of bread to mop up the last delectable traces of the ambrosial sauce.

“Are you reasonably sure that this Charles Rosepierre was your brother?”

Valerie stared at him.

“He must have been!.. I mean, he seemed to remember the same things that I did. And people here knew him by that name, didn’t they? And there’s quite a resemblance — look!”

She took out her wallet and extracted a photograph which she passed to him. It showed a dark, rather delicate-featured young man with an engaging smile. Simon dispassionately compared it, detail by detail, with the face of the girl opposite him.

“There’s a great likeness,” he conceded finally. “It’s probably true. I was only groping in the dark.”

“Here’s another thing.” She was fumbling in her purse again, and she came out with a small round piece of silver like a coin. “My father gave it to me just before he sent us away. It’s one of those things that stand out in this disjointed kind of childhood memory. He gave both Charles and me one. And Charles mentioned it in his first letter answering my advertisement. He said he still had his, and he wondered if I still had mine.”

“That’s pretty convincing.”

Simon took the piece of silver and looked at it, and a slight frown of puzzlement began to wrinkle his forehead.

“But if he was Jewish,” he said, “why a Saint Christopher medal?”

She shrugged.

“Maybe he’d been converted. Or maybe he hoped it would bluff the Gestapo, if they caught us.”

“Or maybe,” said the Saint, in a faraway voice, “it was just the handiest thing he had in the shop.”

She gazed at him blankly, while he examined the medal more closely and turned it over, half hoping to find some inscription on the back. But on the back was only a little quarter-inch indented square, much like a hallmark, except that the indentation was filled only with what looked like a cuneiform pattern of microscopic scratches which conveyed nothing to the keenest naked eye, if they had any significance at all.

And yet, for the first time, the darkness in which he had been groping did not seem so dark. There were vital pieces missing in the jigsaw which he was trying to put together, but at last he was beginning to perceive the outlines into which they would have to fit.

He was very silent while they finished the meal and the wine, so that by the time he called for the check the girl was fidgeting with understandable impatience.

“May I keep this just for a few hours?” he said at last, and dropped the medallion into his pocket without waiting for her permission.

“Have you thought of anything?” she asked.

He stood up.

“A lot of things. I’m not tantalizing you just to be mysterious, but they’ll take the rest of the afternoon to check on, and I don’t want to raise any false excitement until I’ve got facts to go on.”

He walked with her to the Boulevard Raspail, the nearest thoroughfare where they would be likely to find taxis, and only his quiet air of being so absolutely certain of what he was doing somehow forced her to control her exasperation.

“I’m telling the driver to take you to the Place Vendôme,” he said, as he opened the door of the first cab. “You’ll find dozens of fascinating shops in all directions from there, which will keep you amused until your feet hurt. At five o’clock, wherever you are, grab another taxi and tell him to take you to a restaurant called Carrere, in the Rue Pierre Charron. Will you repeat that?” She did so. “I’ll meet you there at the bar. Until then, you must not on any account go back to the Georges Cinq.”

“But why not?”

“Because as long as you’re wandering around the town, the killer isn’t likely to bump into you. At the hotel, he knows where to find you. And I like your head where it is. I don’t want it cut off.”

Her eyes grew big and round.

“You don’t think it could happen to me?”

“I’ll answer that when I know why it happened to your brother. Meanwhile, don’t take any chances.”

“But remember, I promised to meet that Mr Olivant at five-thirty.”

“I want to be around when you do it. That’s what I’m talking about.”

Her breath broke in a gasp of incredulity.

“You mean you suspect him?”

“Darling,” said the Saint, “this isn’t one of those storybook mysteries, with half a dozen convenient suspects. I’ve known ever since friend Olivant showed up that he had to be a good bet. The only problem still is to find the motive and prove it on him.”

He closed the door gently after her, and turned towards the next cab.

5

On a narrow street near the Odeon he found, unchanged as if the German occupation had only ended yesterday, a little stationery and book shop which in those days would have earned a spot promotion for any Gestapo officer who had uncovered its secrets. Simon Templar went in and stood browsing over the titles on the shelves, while the jangling of the vociferous little bell hung on the door he had opened died away into silence. He heard a shuffle of footsteps at the back of the shop, and a voice that he recognized said courteously, “ Bonjour, m’sieu.”

Without turning, the Saint said, in French, “Do you have, by chance, a copy of the poems of François Villon?”

There was an instant’s pause, and the dry voice said mechanically, “I regret, but today there is so little demand for those old books.”

“ ‘But where are the snows of yesteryear?’ ” Simon quoted sorrowfully.

Suddenly his elbow was seized in a wiry grip, and he was spun around to face the proprietor’s sparkling eyes.

“ Mon cher Saint! ”

“ Mon cher Antoine! ”

They fell into an embrace.

“It is so many years, my dear friend, since I have heard that password!”

“But you remembered.”

“Who of us will ever forget?”

They held each other off at arm’s length, and the years fell away between them. And as Simon laughed in the face of Antoine Louvois it was heart-warming for him to remember that this frail-looking gray man had been the redoubtable Colonel Eglantine of the maquis, whose exploits had perforated the intestinal tracts of Himmler’s minions with even more ulcers than bullets, and he thought again that only a French hero would have had the sense of humor to hide his identity behind the name of a delicate flower. Those days, when the Saint’s commission from Washington had been as tenuously legal as anything in his career, seemed very far away now, but it was good to still have such a friend.

“What brings you back, mon cher ami?” Louvois asked. “We shall have much to talk about.”

“Another time, Antoine. This afternoon I am in a hurry.”

“Is there anything I can do?”

“That is why I came.”

Louvois relaxed into instant attention. As if not a day had passed, with a sobering of expression too subtle to define, he was again the sharp-witted, cold-blooded, efficient duellist of the last war’s most dangerous game.

“ Je suis toujours à ta disposition, mon vieux. ”

“Was there, in the Resistance, a man named Georges Olivant?”

“What is he like?”

Simon described him.

“There were so many,” Louvois said, “and under so many names. I do not recall him myself. I can make inquiries.”

“On the other hand, he may just as well have been a traitor.”

“There were many of them, also, and many of them also have thought it wise to change their names. But that might be a little easier to trace.”

Simon put down the envelope which he still carried, into which he had put the guidebook with the conveniently shiny cover which Olivant had handled.

“On the cover of this book,” he said, “are the fingerprints of this man. But cut off the top left-hand corner, which has my own prints.”

“That will make it very easy, if his prints are on record.”

“You still have friends at the Prefecture?”

“Naturally.”

“I do not want this to become known to Inspector Quercy, of the Police Judiciaire.”

“He is a good man.”

“There is a personal reason.”

“ Entendu. He will know nothing about it.”

“It is urgent.”

“I will close the shop and take the book over at once myself. I will have a report for you within two hours.”

The Saint fingered the medallion in his pocket.

“There is one other thing I can do while you are gone,” he said. “Do you have an accommodating friend who is a doctor, who would have a microscope that I can use for a few minutes?”

“I can find one. Let me telephone first.”

Louvois retired to the back of the shop and returned in a few minutes with a name and address written on a slip of paper.

“It is all arranged. He is expecting you.”

“Thank you, Antoine. I will come back and wait for you. À tout à l’heure.”

“ À tout à l’heure. ”

Simon walked to the address which was only a few blocks away. The doctor, a taciturn man with an old-fashioned spade beard, showed him directly into a small laboratory and left him there, asking no questions except whether the Saint knew how to operate the microscope and whether he required anything else.

The Saint placed the Saint Christopher medal face down on the platform, centered the square indentation on the back under the objective, and aimed the light on it.

As he adjusted the focus, the pattern of almost invisible scratches sprang to his eye as legibly as a page of print.

He read the words so painstakingly engraved there, and then he lighted a cigarette and sat back on the stool, and knew the answers to many questions, while pictures formed for him in the drifting smoke.

He saw old Eli Rosepierre in his workshop, knowing that the Germans were coming, and too proud or too disheartened to run away, it didn’t matter what his reason was, but wanting to save his children. And knowing that it was hopeless to trust them with such jewels and gold as he could lay his hands on, even though they would be lost to him anyway, but wanting to give them something that the invaders could not touch, for the future. And knowing that the children were too young to be relied upon to understand or to remember anything he might tell them about the modest wealth that was still secure. And faced with the problem of giving them the key to it in a form which they might understand someday, but which would be least likely for a child to destroy.

Anything on paper, of course, was out of the question. It was too easy to mutilate or deface, or lose, or a finder could read and take advantage of it. A tattoo might have done, but Rosepierre was not a tattooer. He was a jeweler.

And he had found a jeweler’s solution.

Simon saw the old man working through the night, with aching eyes, carving the most important achievement of his engraver’s art. The etching of the Lord’s prayer on the head of a pin was a mere abstract diversion by comparison. This was his testament. On a medallion, because it was most indestructible; of silver only, because it would be least likely to attract a thief; of Saint Christopher, because it might disarm racial persecutors, and because it might be treasured more carefully — as indeed it had been...

The Saint took out the slip of paper with the doctor’s address and copied down the words from the medal on the other side.

Then, more for idle physical distraction than anything, he wrote underneath the English translation.

There was only one weakness in Eli Rosepierre’s ingenious ideas. Why would his children ever have been likely to discover the minute engraving on the backs of their good-luck medals?

And in the next flash, Simon knew the answer to that one, too. There must have been someone whom Eli Rosepierre trusted, to whom Rosepierre had given an inkling of his scheme, whom Robespierre had charged to find the children again, if it were ever possible, and tell them what to look for.

Olivant.

Simon thanked the doctor, who still asked no questions, and went back to Louvois’s little papeterie. He paced up and down the street and almost wore himself out before the old guerrilla fighter returned. But the springy gait of the retired maquisard gave him his answer even before Louvois spoke. “We have success, mon cher!”

Louvois insisted on unlocking the door and entering the shop before he would say any more.

“The fingerprints are those of one Georges Orival, mon cher Saint. He was a collaborationist, and for that he was sentenced to fifteen years in prison.”

“He has escaped, or more probably been released,” said the Saint. “And he is looking very prosperous, under the name of Georges Olivant.”

“No doubt the sale type had plenty of blood money hidden away before they caught him.”

“He is now preparing to collect a lot more.”

Louvois stroked his chin meditatively.

“Perhaps that can be prevented. There are still many of us who do not think that imprisonment was enough.”

“ Ne t’en fais pas,” said the Saint. “His goose is practically cooked already. I personally guarantee it. I must go now and take care of him, but as soon as this is finished we must have our reunion.”

6

To his relief, although he had consciously tried to reassure himself that he had nothing to worry about, Valerie North was waiting at the bar of the Carrere, as he had instructed her. He ordered a Martini to keep her company while she finished hers, and paid the tab, but he would not talk even though the bar was deserted at that hour.

“All the bartenders in this area speak English,” he said, “and I don’t want to risk even a chance of future complications. Our caravanserai is just around the corner, but I didn’t want you to go there alone.”

As soon as they had finished, he steered her down the street to the Avenue Georges V, and turned her quickly into the Georges V Apartments, just before the hotel entrance. They rode up to her floor in the elevator of the apartment wing, and he piloted her expertly through the connecting passage to the hotel section.

“Don’t ask me how I know these back ways,” he said. “I couldn’t tell you without incriminating myself. As far as you’re concerned, it’s good enough to fool anyone who’s naturally expecting you to use the hotel lobby.”

He found a chambermaid to open the door for them with a pass key. Inside, Valerie fetched up short with an exclamation, so abruptly that he trod on her heels.

The room was a shambles. Her two suitcases were open, the contents strewn all over the bed, the other furniture, and the floor. But he was not seriously surprised.

“Did you try to unpack in a hurry when you ran up before lunch?” he inquired calmly.

“Of course not! Who would unpack like this? There’s been a burglar here!”

She ran aimlessly about, rummaging among her disordered effects.

“Don’t get excited,” he murmured. “I don’t think there’s any harm done that a little ironing won’t fix. If you’d been here yourself, it might have been very different.”

“I haven’t got much jewelry,” she protested, “but—”

“I expect it’s all there,” he said. “The one valuable piece was safe all the time.”

He held out the Saint Christopher medal.

She took it, and stared at him.

“You’ve got to talk now,” she said. “If you don’t, I’ll go crazy — or do something I may be sorry for.”

“I’m ready now,” he said. “Turn that medal over.”

“Yes.”

“You see that little square impression in the back?”

“Yes.”

“I put it under a microscope this afternoon. There’s fine engraving in it. Here’s a copy that you can read.”

He gave her the scrap of paper on which he had written down the inscription and its translation. While she looked at it, he cleared a space on the bed, and sat down and lighted a cigarette. He felt very placid now.

She read:

I, Eli Rosepierre, bequeath to the bearer, of whom this shall be sufficient identification, one half of the $50,000 which I have on deposit at the Chase National Bank, New York. Eli Rosepierre.

“You see,” he said, “you’re moderately rich. Your father was lucky enough to have some assets that the krauts couldn’t reach.”

Her face was a study.

“Then Charles’s medal—”

“Must have been a duplicate of that one, leaving him the other half.”

She sank unsteadily into the nearest chair, ignoring the clothes which she crushed underneath her.

Simon laughed, and got up again to give her a cigarette.

After a full minute, she said, “Where is the other medal now?”

“I expect your brother’s murderer has it. But he hasn’t had time to do anything with it. Besides, he won’t be satisfied until he has both of them.”

“Why hasn’t he done anything until now?”

“Because he couldn’t. Your father confided at least part of his secret to a friend whom he trusted, named Georges Orival. But Orival turned collaborationist, and after the war he was tried and imprisoned. He only recently got out, and he hasn’t wasted much time. He introduced himself to you as Georges Olivant.”

“Olivant!”

“Apart from his obvious phoniness,” said the Saint, “I know I had something when I shook hands with him. He looks like one of the idle rich, but he has corns on his hands like a laborer. He didn’t get them from pottering about in his garden. He’s been doing several years at hard labor.”

The girl’s hand shook a little as she drew at the cigarette.

“And he’s waiting for me downstairs!”

“I’m sure it would take a lot to keep him away.”

“We must tell the police!”

“Not yet. We still haven’t got enough evidence for a murder charge against him. And we still want that other medal. So we’re going to meet him just as if you didn’t expect a thing.”

“I couldn’t!”

Simon Templar gazed down at her with level blue eyes in which the steel was barely discernible.

“You must, Valerie. And you must go along with anything I say, no matter how absurd it sounds. You said you’d let me help you. I haven’t done badly so far, have I? You’ve got to let me finish the job.”

7

M Georges Olivant folded the evening paper he had been reading and tucked it into his pocket.

“Eet say ’ere,” he said, “ze police ’ave learn nozzing new about ze tragedy of your brozzer. But do not fear. Zey are very pairseestent. Soon, I am sure, zey will ’ave ze clue.”

“They know more than they’re saying for publication,” Simon remarked. “They told me so.”

He wanted to draw Olivant’s attention to himself, not only to turn it away from Valerie North’s pale stillness.

“So, you ’ave talk wiz zem?”

“And I’ve got a few leads of my own.”

“I ’ave read American stories,” Olivant said, “where ze reporter is always a better detective zan ze police. You are per’aps one of zose?”

“Sometimes I try to be. Anyway, at least the motive for the murder is known.”

“Eet is?”

Simon took a leisured taste of his cocktail.

“Miss North’s father — and the father of Charles Rosepierre — had a nice piece of change stashed away in a New York bank. He made a will leaving it equally between them. A rather unique kind of will. It was engraved in microscopic letters on the backs of two Saint Christopher medals, one of which he gave to each of the children. Miss North’s medal has already been deciphered. Here’s a copy of the inscription.”

He gave Olivant the scrap of paper, and tasted his drink again while the man read it.

The girl’s knee touched his, inadvertently, under the crowded table, and he felt it tremble. He tried to quiet her with a comforting pressure of his own.

He had to admit that Olivant was good. The man’s face did not change color, and the dilation of his eyes could be explained on perfectly legitimate grounds.

“Eet is amazing!” Olivant ejaculated. “Eet must be, as you say, unique... So, of course, poor Charles was killed to steal ’is copy!”

“You’d make a good detective yourself.”

“But eet still does not say by ’oo!”

“I’ve got ideas of my own on that score.”

Olivant’s eyebrows rose in arches towards his well-oiled hair.

“What ees zat?”

“I’ve been talking to a fellow I met who used to be a big shot in the underground. We’ve got a hunch that there’s some connection with somebody that Rosepierre trusted, who went wrong and went the Nazi way — who may even have betrayed Rosepierre to the Gestapo. But if they tortured him, he must have died before he’d write them a check on that New York bank!”

For the first time Simon saw the crawl of fear beneath Olivant’s sleek surface. It was no more than an infinitesimal twitch, instantly smothered, but it was all that he needed.

“Eet is too ’orrible to sink about,” Olivant said. He turned to the girl. “Your fahzer was such a wonderful man. Everyone love ’im.”

“You can’t think of anyone who might have turned on him?” she managed to ask.

“I could not think of anyone ’oo would be so bad!”

“My Resistance friend thinks he can,” said the Saint. “Anyway, he’s making inquiries.”

Olivant picked up his glass and drained it, and wiped his mouth.

“I ’ope wiz all my ’eart zat ’e succeed,” he said. “But we make Miss North upset again wiz zis talk. I see it. Instead to remind ’er of ’er poor fahzer and ’er poor brozzer, we should try to make ’er forget a leetle... Now, I ’ave ze idea. I ’ave my car. Tonight it would be nice to drive out to St Cloud, to my ’ouse, where we ’ave a nice dinner, and per’aps ’elp ourselves to feel better.”

Valerie looked at the Saint desperately, but Olivant might have been anticipating the glance.

“Of course,” he said, “if Mr Tombs is not engage, I am most ’appy if ’e come also.”

It was precisely what the Saint would have predicted, and the sheer cosmic inevitability of it gave him the same feeling of Olympian omnipotence that a master dramatist must experience as he sees the last loose ends of his play falling into place with flawless accuracy in the third act.

“I think that’s a swell idea,” he said.

He was afraid even then that Valerie would rebel, but terror seemed to have built up in her until she was gripped in a kind of trance that left her without volition.

They drove with Olivant at the wheel of a glistening new car, all three of them pressed together in the front seat, so that Simon could feel the rigidity of her body against him shaken by an occasional shiver, and knew that Olivant must have felt it too, though the man chattered incessantly about nothing and Simon did his best to help keep the empty conversational ball rolling.

Once, while they were still passing through the Bois de Boulogne, Olivant broke off in the middle of a sentence and said, “Are you nervous, Miss North? Believe me, I drive most careful.”

“I guess I’m just over-tired,” she said. “Or else I’m catching a chill.”

“I know, you ’ave ’ad a shocking day.”

She turned to the Saint, leaning closer to him.

“Where are we?”

He hadn’t wanted to refer to it, but he had to.

“The Bois de Boulogne,” she repeated after him. “Where Charles was—”

“Please,” Olivant said quickly. “For a leetle while, try not to sink of un’appy sings.”

“Now that it’s come up,” said the Saint, in a very even tone that tried unobtrusively to transmit some of his strength to her, “I must ask you one more question. About those medals, Valerie, that your father gave you and your brother. He didn’t just give them to you to put in your pockets, did he? How were you supposed to wear them?”

They were on silver chains,” she said expressionlessly. “He must have riveted them, or welded them, or something. At least, I know that mine had no catch that you could undo, and it was too small to come off over my head. I wore it day and night for years. Finally when I got older I had to have the chain cut, because I had other necklaces I wanted to wear, and I couldn’t wear that one all the time.”

Simon drew a deep breath.

“That’s the last answer,” he said softly. “That explains everything. Of course, he had to take the least possible risk of your losing them. And because your brother didn’t have to be bothered about other necklaces, he never had his chain cut. He was still wearing it when he was killed. And all the murderer had was a knife. People don’t normally carry wire-cutters, or a hacksaw, or a file, when they set out to commit a straightforward murder. It hadn’t occurred to him that the chain wouldn’t unfasten. And it was too strong for him to break with his hands, and too small to take off over the head. So the only way he could take it, on the spot, was to—”

“No!” the girl cried out shudderingly, and buried her face in her hands.

The car seemed to swerve a trifle.

“I am ashame for you,” Olivant said harshly. “’Ow you can ’urt Miss North like zis?”

“I’m sorry,” said the Saint.

But he wasn’t, for the answer to that last question, the mystery of why Charles Rosepierre’s head had been hacked off after he was dead, had to be known. And he knew now, and there were no more questions. With certainty there came a lowering kind of peace.

Olivant’s house was not large, but it stood well in what appeared to be moderately spacious grounds, which looked overgrown and unkempt, about half-way up the hill from the river. The interior was somber and smelled damp, as if it had lacked the warmth of human occupancy for a long time. Simon was sure that it had.

Olivant ushered them into the heavily furnished drawing-room and turned, rubbing his hands. He seemed to have recovered his overpowering confidence, and his smile was fat and expansive.

“Now,” he said, “Ve are going to be ’appy. What will you ’ave? A cocktail? Sherry? I make you a drink, and zen I make dinner. I ’ave no servant tonight, but I am very good chef.”

“Living alone and liking it, eh?” said the Saint mildly.

‘“Yes. Tonight eet is just ourselves.”

Simon put out his cigarette. He could enjoy the full flavor of a situation as well as anyone, but he knew that there were occasions when to prolong the enjoyment for epicurean reasons alone could complicate it with unnecessary and unjustifiable risks.

He put a hand into his coat pocket as if reaching for another pack of cigarettes, but it came out with a stubby blue-black automatic.

“In that case, we won’t put you to a lot of trouble, Monsieur Orival,” he said pleasantly. “Besides which we prefer not to be drugged or poisoned, whichever you had in mind. All we want is Charles Rosepierre’s medallion.”

“Are you crazy, Templar?”

The Saint smiled.

“I see you know my real name,” he murmured. “I thought you would. You only had to ask a few questions at the hotel. It was a little harder for me to get yours, but your fingerprints on that guidebook were a big help.”

The man’s face had turned red at first, but now the blood was draining out of it, leaving it gray.

“My name ees Olivant. Zis is an outrage!”

“It’s going to be a worse one,” said the Saint cheerfully, “if we don’t get that medal. I’m sure it’s either in your pocket or in this house somewhere. Now, will you hand it over, or shall I shoot you in the stomach and look for it myself?”

Orival licked his lips.

“Eet is in my safe,” he said at last “Be’ind zat picture.”

“Go and get it.”

Orival dragged his steps to the painting and lifted it off the wall. Behind it was a small steel door. He manipulated the dial, and the door opened. He reached in.

He should not have been so conventional as to turn around with a gun in his hand. Simon was expecting it, and ducked. Orival’s one shot went wild, but the Saint’s did not.

Then the French windows burst open, and Inspector Quercy walked in.

8

“ Enfin,” Quercy said stolidly, when the facts that he did not know had been told to him, “Miss North has both the medals, and she should be able to claim the inheritance without too much difficulty. And we have this canaille, but not in the condition that the State would have preferred.” He prodded the body of Orival, alias Olivant, with his foot, and signed to the two uniformed men who had followed him in. “Remove it.”

“The State ought to thank me,” said the Saint, “for saving you the expense of a trial and execution.”

“It is lucky for you,” Quercy said, “that I saw what happened, and know that you fired in self-defense. We have, of course, been following Miss North all day, to see if the murderer might approach her. You see, we are not quite so stupid and useless as you would like to make us.”

Valerie North said, “I hope you won’t hold it against him. He’s done so much for me. I’m afraid he’d never let me pay him, but at least I don’t want him to get in trouble.”

“He has an irresistible advocate in you, Mademoiselle,” Quercy said gallantly.

Simon glanced surreptitiously at the open safe, and then at the windows through which the two agents had just disappeared with their unlamented burden.

“By the way,” he said, “just to complete the record, I think Orival still had the murder knife in his pocket.”

“Yes, we shall need that for the police museum.”

Quercy hurried out after his men. He was back in a few minutes, shaking his head.

“For once you were mistaken, Monsieur le Saint. It is not on him.”

Simon shrugged.

“Well, I guess he got rid of it.”

“It is not very important.”

Simon Templar agreed. What was important, to him, was that in those few minutes he had been able to transfer the negotiable contents of the late Georges Orival’s safe to his own pockets. He caught the girl’s eye, but she said nothing, and he knew that her sense of humor was coming back.

Amsterdam: The angel’s eye

1

The Hollandia is one of the best hotels in Amsterdam. The best hotels everywhere exercise a proper discretion over the guests whom they admit to their distinguished accommodations. The clerk at the Hollandia read the name that Simon Templar had filled in on the form in front of him, and his brow wrinkled as he looked up.

“Mr Templar,” he said, “are you by any chance the Saint?”

Simon sighed imperceptibly. He knew that look. As a man who had rather a weakness for the best hotels, it was sometimes a little tiresome to him.

“You guessed it,” he said.

The clerk smiled with the utmost courtesy.

“I do not know if we have a room that would suit you.”

“I’m not too hard to please.”

“Excuse me,” said the clerk.

He retired to an inner office. In a few minutes he came back, accompanied by an older and more authoritative personage.

“Good afternoon, Mr Templar,” said the personage cordially, “I am the manager. It is nice of you to come to us. But you do not have a reservation.”

“No,” said the Saint patiently. “But I wasn’t expecting any trouble. I’m still not expecting any. Not any at all. I’m on vacation.”

“Of course.”

“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.

It was about the same time that Simon realized, from the frequent glances in his direction, that he was somehow being made a major factor in the discussion.

He gazed out of the window at the twinkling lights reflected in the ornamental lakes of the Vondel Park and hoped that his impression was mistaken, or that they would soon find something else to argue about.

A voice at his elbow said, “Excuse me, Mr Templar — you are the Saint, aren’t you?”

He turned resignedly. It was the woman, of course.

“I suppose somebody told you at the Hollandia,” he said. “But they should have told you not to worry. I’ve promised not to murder anyone or steal their jewels while I’m here.”

“My name’s Upwater,” she said. “And I did want to talk to you about jewels. But not about your stealing them. I’ve heard that you’re really a good man, and you help people in trouble, and we’re in terrible trouble. I told my husband it seemed like Providence, your being here, just when this awful thing has happened. I said, ‘The Saint’s the only person who might be able to help us,’ and he said, ‘Why should you bother?’ and we had quite an argument, but I had to speak to you anyway. At least you’ll listen, won’t you? May I call him over?”

She had already dumped herself in a vacant chair, and the Saint did not see any way short of outright churlishness to dislodge her. In the mellow aftermath of a good meal, such violent measures were unthinkable. And he had nothing else in particular to do. That was so often what got him into things...

He grinned philosophically, and nodded.

“What’s the matter with these jewels?” he inquired.

She turned and beckoned to her husband, who started to get up from their table, looking more worried than ever.

“As a matter of fact,” she said, “it’s only one jewel. A diamond.”

“Oh.”

“We’ve lost it. And it doesn’t belong to us.”

‘That could be embarrassing,” Simon admitted. “But why should I know where to look for it?”

“It’s been stolen.”

“Not by me.”

“This is a perfect blue stone,” said Mr Upwater, sitting down heavily, “as big as the Hope diamond. It’s worth half a million dollars in your money.”

2

“I work for a very exclusive firm of jewelers in Bond Street, in London,” Mr Upwater explained, in a ponderous and painstaking way. “I’ve been with them myself for thirty years. The stone belongs to one of our clients. It is a magnificent gem, with a rather romantic name — the Angel’s Eye. But being an old stone, it isn’t too well cut. Our client decided to have it re-cut, which would improve its appearance and even enhance its value. As the oldest employee of the firm, it was entrusted to me to bring here, to one of the best cutters in Amsterdam, to have the work done.”

“And somebody swiped it from you on the way?” Simon hazarded.

“Oh, no. I delivered it to the cutter, Hendrik Jonkheer, yesterday. Today I went back to watch the start of the cutting. Mrs Upwater went with me. I’d brought her along, for a little holiday. And — tell Mr Templar what happened, Mabel.”

“Mr Jonkheer looked Mr Upwater straight in the eye,” said Mrs Upwater, “and told him he’d never seen him before and he certainly hadn’t brought him any diamond.”

Something like a phantom feather trailed up the Saint’s spine, riffling his skin with ghostly goose-pimples. And on the heels of that psychic chill came a warm pervasive glow of utter beatitude that crowned his recent feast more perfectly than the coffee and Napoleon brandy which he had not yet touched nor would ever do. His interest was no longer polite or even perfunctory. It had the vast receptive serenity of a cathedral.

For just as a musician would be electrified by a cadence of divine harmonies, so could the Saint respond to the tones of new and fabulous adventure. And about this one, he knew, there could be nothing commonplace. Suddenly he was humbly grateful for his ambiguous reputation, for the little difficulty at the hotel, for the resultant gossip, for the extravagant bonus which it had brought him. Because in a few simple unmistakable words the prosaic Mr and Mrs Upwater had placed in his hands the string to a kite of such superlatively crooked design that its flight, wherever it led, could bring only joy to his perversely artistic soul — a swindle of such originality and impudence that he contemplated it with an emotion bordering upon awe.

“That,” said the Saint at length, with transcendent understatement after so long a pause, “is a lulu.”

“I can’t get used to it yet,” Mr Upwater said dazedly. “He stood there, Mr Jonkheer did, looking straight at me just like I’m looking at you, only as if he thought I was a lunatic, and said he’d never set eyes on me before in his life. He almost had me believing I’d gone out of my mind. Only I knew I hadn’t.”

“It’s just like that story,” Mrs Upwater said. “You must know the one. About the girl and her mother who go to a hotel in Paris, and the mother’s sick, so the daughter goes out to get her some medicine, and when she gets back everybody in the hotel says they’ve never seen her before, or her mother, and when she goes to the room where she left her mother it’s a different room, and there’s nobody there.”

Simon nodded, almost in a trance himself.

“I know the story,” he said. “It turns out that the mother had the plague, or something, doesn’t it? And they got rid of her and tried to cover it up because they didn’t want to scare away the tourists... But this is a new twist!”

“That it is,” said Mr Upwater gloomily. “Only diamonds don’t get any disease. But they’re worth a lot of money.”

At last the Saint was able to control the palpitating gremlins inside him enough to reach for a cigarette.

“You’re sure you went to the right place?” he asked.

“I couldn’t go wrong. The name’s on the door.”

“And you’re sure it was Jonkheer you saw?”

“Of course I’m sure. It was the same man both times. The police knew him, too.”

“You’re been to the police already?”

“Of course I have. First thing I did, when I saw I wasn’t getting anywhere with Jonkheer. They went with me to the shop. But it was his word against mine, and they preferred his. Said he was a well-known respectable citizen, but they didn’t know the same about me. I almost got locked up myself. They as good as said I was either off my nut or trying to blackmail him.”

“Didn’t anyone else see you give him the stone?”

“No. It was just him and me. I didn’t take Mrs Upwater with me yesterday — she wanted to stay at the hotel and do our unpacking.”

“But if you say you gave it to him, Tom,” said Mrs Upwater loyally, “I know you did.”

Simon picked up his balloon glass and rolled the golden liquid around in it.

“Didn’t you get a receipt or anything?”

“Indeed I did. But this Dutchman swears it isn’t even in his writing.”

“Could someone else have disguised himself as Jonkheer?”

“If you saw him, Mr Templar, you’d know that couldn’t be done, except in a story.”

“How about a black-sheep twin brother?”

“I thought of that, too,” Mr Upwater said dourly. “I’m not a fool, and I’ve read books. He just doesn’t have one. The police vouch for that.”

The Saint sipped his cognac reverently. Everything was getting better and better.

“And you would have vouched for Jonkheer.”

“I never met him before,” Mr Upwater said carefully, “but I’ve known about him for years. Everyone knows him in the trade.”

“So you’ve no idea what would turn a man like that into a thief.”

Mr Upwater moved his hands hopelessly.

“Who knows what makes anyone go wrong? They say that every man has his price, so I suppose every man can be tempted. And that stone was big enough to tempt anyone.”

“Then,” said the Saint, “the same could be said about you.”

“That’s what he’s afraid of,” Mrs Upwater said gently.

Simon sniffed his brandy again, watching the man.

“What does your firm think about it?”

“I haven’t told them yet,” Upwater said dully. “I haven’t had the courage. You see—”

“You see,” Mrs Upwater put in, and her voice began to break, “they know Mr Jonkheer, too. They’ve done business with him for a long time. My husband’s been with them for a long time too, but he’s only an employee. Someone’s got to be guilty... They can’t prove that Tom’s lying, because he isn’t, but that’s not enough. If he can’t prove absolutely that he’s telling the truth—”

“There’d always be a doubt,” her husband finished for her. “And with a firm like I work for, in that kind of business, that’s the end. They’d let me out, and I’d never get another job. I might as well put my head in a gas oven, or jump in one of these canals.”

He pulled off his spectacles abruptly and put a trembling hand over his eyes.

Mrs Upwater patted his shoulder as if he had been a little boy, “There, there,” she said meaninglessly, and looked at the Saint with tears brimming in her eyes. “Mr Templar, you’re the only man in the world who might be able to do something about a thing like this. You must help us!”

She really didn’t have to plead. For Simon Templar to have walked away from a story like that would have been as improbable a phenomenon as a terrier ignoring the presence of a rat waltzing under his nose. There were people who thought that the Saint was a cold-blooded nemesis of crime, but altogether aside from the irresistible abstract beauty of the situation that the Upwaters had set before him, he felt genuinely sorry for them.

His human sympathy, however, detracted nothing from the delight with which he viewed the immediate future. It was true that only a few hours ago he had promised to be good, but there were limits. His evening, and in fact his whole visit to Amsterdam, was made.

He signaled to a waiter.

“I think we should all have a drink on this,” he said.

The half-incredulous joy in Mrs Upwater’s tear-dimmed eyes, to anyone else, would have been enough reward.

“You will help us?” she said breathlessly.

“There’s nothing I can do tonight. So we might as well just celebrate. But tomorrow,” Simon promised, “I will pay a call on your Mr Jonkheer.”

3

The name was on the door, as Mr Upwater had said, of a narrow-fronted three-storied brick building in a narrow street of similar buildings behind the Rijksmuseum: “HENDRIK JONKHEER,” and in smaller letters under it, “ Diamantslijper ” From the weathered stone of the doorstep to the weathered tile of the peaked roof, the house had a solid air of permanence and tradition. The only feature that distinguished it from its equally solid neighbors was the prison-like arrangement of iron bars over the two muslin-curtained ground floor windows. Definitely it bore no stigma of a potentially flashy or fly-by-night operation.

Simon tugged at the old-fashioned bell-pull, and heard it clang somewhere in the depths of the building. Presently the door opened, no more than a foot, to the limit of a chain fastened inside, and a thin young man in a knee-length gray overall coat looked out.

“May I see Mr Jonkheer?” Simon said.

“Your business, sir?”

“I’m a magazine writer, doing an article on the diamond business. I thought a man of Mr Jonkheer’s standing could give me some valuable information.”

The young man unfastened the chain and let him in to a bare narrow hall. There were doors on one side and another at the back, and a flight of uncarpeted wooden stairs led upwards. On a hard chair beside the stairs, with a newspaper on his lap and one hand under the paper, sat a burly man with blond close-cropped hair who stared at the Saint woodenly.

“One moment, please,” said the young man.

He disappeared through the door at the end of the hall. The burly man continued to stare motionlessly at the Saint, as if he were stuffed. In a little while the young man came back.

“This way, please.”

The back room was a homely sort of office, the only possible sanctum of an individualistic old-world craftsman who needed no front for his skill. It contained an ancient roll-top desk with dusty papers overflowing from its pigeonholes and littered over its surfaces, a battered swivel chair at the desk, and two overstuffed armchairs whose leather upholstery was dark and shiny with age. There were china figures and family photographs in gilt frames on the marble mantelpiece over a black iron coal fireplace. The safe stood under another barred window, and massive though it was, it would not have offered much more resistance than a matchbox to a modern cracksman.

Mr Jonkheer was a short bald man in his shirtsleeves, with a wide paunch under a leather apron and a wide multiple-chinned face. It was obvious at a glance that no make-up virtuoso could have duplicated him. His pale blue eyes looked small and bright behind thick gold-rimmed glasses.

“You are a writer, eh?” he said, with a kind of gruff affability. “Which magazine do you write for?”

“Any one that’ll buy what I write.”

“So. And what can I tell you for your article?”

The Saint sat in one of the heavy armchairs and opened a pack of cigarettes.

“Well, anything interesting about your work,” he said.

“I cut jewels — principally diamonds.”

“I know. I’m told you’re one of the best cutters in the business.”

“There are many good ones. I am good.”

“I suppose you’ve been doing it all your life?”

“Since I am an apprentice, at sixteen. I have been cutting stones, now, for forty years.”

“You must have cut some famous jewels in that time.”

A twin pair of vertical lines began to pucker between the cutter’s bushy brows.

“Famous?”

“I mean, well-known jewels, that people would like to read about.”

“I have cut many good stones.”

This was manifestly going to make no revelationary progress. Simon said, as offhandedly as he could, “You’re too modest, Mr Jonkheer. For instance, how about the Angel’s Eye?”

There was no audible sound effect like a sickening thud, but the response was much the same. In a silence that fairly hummed with hollowness, the diamond cutter’s small bright eyes hardened and froze like drops of his own gems.

The Saint exhaled cigarette smoke and tried to appear as if he noticed nothing out of the ordinary.

At last Jonkheer said, “What about the Angel’s Eye?”

“You know the stone I mean?”

“Of course. It is a famous diamond.”

“How are you going to re-cut it?”

“I am not re-cutting it.”

Jonkheer’s tone was still gruff, but no longer affable. Simon looked puzzled.

“But you have it here.”

“I do not.”

“I was told—”

“You are mistaken.”

“I don’t get it,” said the Saint, with an ingenuous frown. “The fellow who referred me to you said positively that the Angel’s Eye was brought to you for re-cutting only the other day. I don’t mean to pry into your business, but—”

The other’s steady stare was cold with suspicion.

“Who was this person?”

“It was somebody in the trade. I don’t know that I ought to mention his name. But he was very definite.”

Jonkheer gazed at him for a longer time, with no increase in friendliness. Then he turned his head slightly and called, “ Zuilen, kom tock binnen! ”

The burly blond man who had been sitting out in the hall walked in instantly, and without any preliminary sound, so that Simon realized that the door of the little office had never been fully closed and the big man must have been standing directly outside it. He brought his newspaper with him, carrying it rather awkwardly, as if he had something underneath it. With his left hand, he took a small leather folder from his pocket and showed Simon the card in it. The card carried his photograph and an inscription which Simon did not have time to read, but he recognized the official-looking seal and the word politie.

The big man, whose name was evidently Zuilen, was a very polite politieagent.

“May I see your credentials, please?”

“My passport is at the hotel,” said the Saint.

“Something, perhaps, from the magazine you write for?”

“I don’t write for any particular magazine. I just peddle my stuff wherever I can.”

“You must have something on you, some evidence of identity,” said the blond man patiently. “Please.”

He did not openly suggest that if none were produced, the matter could be continued at headquarters. That would have been superfluous.

Simon produced his wallet, and watched interestedly while Zuilen glanced at the contents. The detective’s eyes snapped from the first card that caught them to the Saint’s face as if a switch had been flicked, but his manner remained painstakingly correct.

“Mr Templar,” he said, “I did not hear that you were a writer.”

“It’s a new racket,” said the Saint easily.

The blond man handed the wallet back.

“You would do well to search for your material somewhere else,” he said. “There is nothing to interest you here.”

“Now wait a minute,” Simon argued. “I’m not making any trouble. I was told on the best authority that Mr Jonkheer had received a diamond called the Angel’s Eye to re-cut. I simply asked him about it. That isn’t a crime.”

“I am glad there is no crime,” said the burly man stolidly. “We do not like to have crime from foreigners, especially during the tourist season. Mr Jonkheer does not have any such diamond. Also he does not wish to be bothered. It is better that you do not make any trouble.” He held the door firmly open. “Good day, Mr Templar.”

A few moments later, without a harsh word having been spoken or an overt threat having been uttered, the Saint found himself indisputably out on the sidewalk, blinking at the noonday sunshine and listening to the rattle of chain and bolts being refastened on the inside of the old oak door.

4

“It was a lovely job,” Simon told the Upwaters. “I never had a chance of getting to first base.”

They sat around a lunch table in one of the crypt-like rooms of the d’Vijff Vliegen, that quaintly labyrinthine restaurant on the Spuistraat, where they had arranged to meet, although only the Saint seemed to have much appetite for the excellent kalfoesters, thin fillets of veal browned in butter and lemon juice, with stewed cucumbers and brown beans, which he had ordered for what he considered fairly earned nutriment.

“That policeman, too,” said Mrs Upwater indignantly. “That Jonkheer really must have the wool pulled over their eyes.”

“Or else they’re all in the swindle up to the neck with him,” Mr Upwater said bitterly.

“However it goes,” said the Saint, “the place is pretty well guarded. And I haven’t the faintest doubt that the Angel’s Eye is there. They were so grimly determined to deny it. I could see it gave Jonkheer a good jolt when I asked about it. I bet they’re still worrying about what my angle is, if that’s any help to you.”

“It’s there, all right,” Upwater said gloomily. “Did you see his safe?”

“Oh, yes. In his office.”

“I didn’t see it. I was taken right into his workshop, the first time, and the second time I didn’t get any further than the hall. If I’d seen the safe, I might have been able to have the policeman make him open it.”

“His office is on the ground floor, at the back of the hall.”

“The diamond probably isn’t there now, anyway,” said Mrs Upwater.

Simon took a deep pull at his beer.

“How big is this diamond?” he asked. “You said it was as big as the Hope. How big is that?”

“About a hundred carats,” Upwater said. He put the tips of his thumb and forefinger together, forming a circle, “About so big. It’d be easy to hide anywhere.”

Simon forked together the last remnants of food on his plate, and ate them with infinite enjoyment. Any lingering doubts that he might have had were gone. He knew that this was going to be an adventure to remember.

“I told you, I’m certain the Angel’s Eye is at Jonkheer’s,” he said. “That’s why the cop is staying on the premises. But I don’t think it’s hidden. I think they figure it’s well enough guarded. And an old-fashioned conservative type like Jonkheer would have complete confidence in an old-fashioned safe like that, just because it weighs a few tons and he’s had it ever since he went into business. He wouldn’t believe that any up-to-date expert could go through it like a coffee-can.”

The man and woman gazed at him uncertainly.

“What good does that do us?” Mr Upwater asked at length. “I’m no safe-cracker.”

“But I am,” said the Saint.

There was another long and pent-up silence.

“You’d burgle it?” Mrs Upwater said.

“I think you knew all along,” said the Saint gently, “that I would.”

Mrs Upwater began to cry.

“You can’t do that,” Mr Upwater protested. “That’s robbery!”

“To take back your own property?”

“But if you got caught—”

“If I only take the Angel’s Eye, which Jonkheer isn’t supposed to have anyway, how is he going to phrase his squawk?”

Mr Upwater clutched his wife’s hand, staring at the Saint with a pathetic sort of devotion.

“I never thought I’d find myself siding with anyone about breaking the law,” he said. “But you’re right, Mr Templar — Jonkheer’s got us by the short hairs, and the only way we can ever get even is to steal the diamond back, just about the same way that he got it. Only I could never’ve thought of it myself, and it beats me why you’d take a chance like that to help a total stranger.”

Simon lighted a cigarette.

“Well,” he said, and his smile was happily Mephistophelian, “suppose I did just happen to take something else besides your diamond — by way of interest, you might say — would you feel it was your duty to tell the police about me?”

“I wouldn’t,” said Mrs Upwater promptly, dabbing her eyes. “A man like Jonkheer deserves to lose everything he’s got.”

“Then that’s settled,” said the Saint cheerfully. “How about some dessert? Some oliebollen? Or the flensjes should be mildly sensational.”

Mr Upwater shook his head. He was still staring at the Saint much as a lost explorer in the Sahara would have stared at the approach of an ice wagon.

“I’m too nervous to eat,” he said. “I’ll be in a sweat until this is over. When will you do it?”

“On the stroke of midnight,” said the Saint. “I’m superstitious about the witching hour — it’s always been lucky for me. Besides, by that time our friend Jonkheer will be sound asleep, and even the police guard will be drowsy. I’m pretty sure Jonkheer lives over the shop, and he’s the type who would go to bed about ten.”

“Isn’t there anything I can do, Mr Templar? I wouldn’t be much of a hand at what you’re planning, but—”

“Not a thing. Take Mrs Upwater sightseeing. Have dinner. Go to your room, break out some cards, and send for a bottle of schnapps. When the waiter brings it, make like I’ve gone to the bathroom. If anything goes wrong, you’ll be my alibi — we were all playing cards. I’ll see you soon after midnight, with your diamond.” Simon looked at his watch. “Now, if you’re through, I’ll run along. I’ve got to shop for a few things I don’t normally carry in my luggage.”

He spent an interesting afternoon in his own way, and got back to the Hollandia about six o’clock with no particular plans for the early part of the evening. But that state of tranquil vagueness lasted only until he turned away from the desk with his key. Then a hand smacked him violently between the shoulder-blades, and he turned again to meet the merry dark horn-spectacled eyes of a slight young man who looked more like a New Yorker than any New Yorker would have done.

“Simon, you old son-of-a-gun!” cried Pieter Liefman. “What shemozzle are you up to here?”

The scion of Amsterdam’s most traditionalistic brewery had spent some years in the United States, and prided himself on his complete assimilation of the culture of the New World.

“Pete!” The Saint grinned. “You couldn’t have shown up at a better moment.”

“I’ve been out in the sticks,” Liefman said. “I just got back in town and got your message, and I came right over to try and track you down. What’s boiling?”

“Let’s get a drink somewhere and I’ll tell you.”

“My hot-shot’s outside. We can drive out to Scherpenzeel, to the De Witte.”

“Good enough. The way you drive, you can get me back in plenty of time for what I want to do later.”

As Pieter Liefman needled his Jaguar through the sparse evening traffic with an ebullient disregard for all speed laws and principles of safety that would have had most passengers gripping the seat and muttering despondent prayers, Simon Templar leaned back with a cigarette and reflected gratefully on his good fortune. Pieter’s timely arrival had made his project even neater than he had hoped.

“I guess you rate pretty high in this town, Pete,” he remarked.

“If you mean I should get a ducat for speeding, you don’t know the quarter of it. They throw the books at me about once a week.”

“But in any serious case, I imagine you’d be as influential a witness as any guy could want.”

“Quit holding up on me,” Liefman implored. “Is the Saint on the war-path again?”

Simon began his tale at the beginning.

5

The return from Scherpenzeel, after a gargantuan repast devoured with respectful deliberation, was made at the same suicidal velocity, but so coolly timed that clocks were booming the hour that Simon had fixed in his mind as the Jaguar purred to a stop in the street where Hendrik Jonkheer plied his trade, but several doors away from the house itself. The short street was deserted except for one other car parked at the opposite end.

“I only hope you’ve figured this on the button,” Pieter Liefman said.

“I am the world’s greatest practical psychologist,” said the Saint. “Go ahead with your part of the act.”

He slipped out of the car and strolled unhurriedly down the street to Jonkheer’s door. The building was dark and wrapped in silence. He turned the door handle experimentally. The door started to yawn at his touch, and no inside chain stopped it.

Simon stepped in, closing it swiftly and silently behind him. With a pencil flashlight smothered in his hand so that the bulb was almost covered by his fingers, he let a dim glow play momentarily over the inside of the frame. The chain was dangling, the hasp at one end still attached to it with fragments of freshly torn wood adhering to the screws, testifying to the inherent weakness of such devices which was no surprise to him.

He turned the same hardly more than phosphorescent illumination around the hall, and at the foot of the stairs he saw the burly bodyguard, Zuilen, lying on the floor, the wrists and ankles expertly bound and tied together and his mouth covered with adhesive tape. The big policeman seemed uninjured, except probably in his dignity, to judge by the lively glare of wrath that smouldered in his eyes.

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 professionally shrouded electric lantern on the floor beside the massive safe. The safe was open, and the means of its opening 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 playing 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 shielded 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 approvingly. “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 important 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 forty-four 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.

The Rhine: The Rhine maiden

1

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 Brünnhildes. 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 train because he had made the trip from Cologne to Mainz by boat before, and had announced himself a Philistine unimpressed. Reluctantly, he had summarized that much-advertised river as an enormous quantity of muddy water flowing northwards at tremendous speed under a litter of black barges and tugboats and pleasure steamers, 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 demonstrate 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 symmetry of her curving honey-blonde hair framed her face in a careless aureole. She was beautiful. But there was something 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 adventurer 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. Someday you shall see it all properly, Gretchen — die Lorelei, und Ehrenbreitstien, und all kinds of vonderful places—”

An adventurer lives on impulse, riding the crest of life only because be 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 Gemünd, und vonce I get lost by myself in der voods going over to Heimbach. Now I hear der is a great talsperre, 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 sluicegates 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 because I have seen him so often, und besides he has a scar on his hand dot I remember so veil 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 remember 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.”

“You put all your money in Voyson’s company?” repeated the Saint, with a sudden weariness.

The old man nodded.

“Dot is how I mean, I didn’t do it all by myself. If I hadn’t done that I should’ve had to vork some more years.”

Simon Templar’s eyes fell to the newspaper on his knee. For it was on that day that the collapse of the Voyson Plastics Company was exposed by the sudden disappearance of the President, and ruined investors learned for the first time that the rock on which they had been lured to found their fortunes was nothing but a quicksand. Even the local sheet which the Saint had bought devoted an entire column to the first revelations of the crack-up.

Simon drew a slow breath as if he had received a physical blow. There was nothing very novel about the story; there never will be anything very novel about these things, except for the scale of the disaster, and certainly there was nothing very novel about it in the Saint’s experience. But his heart went oddly heavy. For a second he thought that he would rather anyone but himself should bring the tragedy — anyone who hadn’t seen what he had seen, who hadn’t been taken into the warmth and radiance of the enchanted castle that had been opened to him. But he knew that the old man would have to know, sooner or later. And the girl would have to know.

He held out his paper.

“Maybe you haven’t read any news lately,” he said quietly, and turned away to the window because he preferred not to see.

2

The lottery of travel had done a good job. It reached out into the world and threw lives and stories together, shuffled them in a brief contact, and then left them altered forever. An adventurer, a Rhine Maiden, an old man. Hope, romance, a crooked company promoter, a scrap of cheap newsprint, tragedy. Perhaps every route that carries human freight is the same, only one doesn’t often see the working of it. Human beings conquering and falling and rising again, each in his own trivial little play, in the inscrutable loneliness which everything human makes for itself wherever crowds mingle and never know each other’s names. Simon Templar had loved the lottery for its own sake, because it was a gamble where such infinitely exciting things could happen, but now he thought that it looked on its handiwork and sneered. He could have punched it on the nose. After a long time the old man was speaking to him.

“It isn’t true. It couldn’t be true. Der great big company like dot couldn’t break down!”

Simon looked into the dazed honest eyes.

“I’m afraid it must be true,” he said steadily.

“But I spoke to him only a little vhile ago. I thank him. Und he shook hands with me.” The old man’s voice was pleading, pleading tremulously for the light that wasn’t there. “No man could have acted a lie like dot... Vait! I go to him myself, und he’ll tell me it isn’t true.”

He stood up and dragged himself shakily to the door, holding the luggage rack to support himself.

Simon filled his lungs. He fell back into the reality of it with a jolt like a plunge into cold water, which left him braced and tingling. Mentally, he shook himself like a dog. He realized that the fragment of drama which had been flung before him had temporarily obscured everything else; that because the tragedy had struck two people who had given him a glimpse of a rare loveliness that he had forgotten for many years, he had taken their catastrophe for his own. But they were only two of many thousands. One never feels the emotion of these things, except academically, until it touches the links of one’s own existence. Life was life. It had happened before, and it would happen again. Of the many crooked financiers whom the Saint had known to their loss, there was scarcely one whose victims he had ever considered. But Bruce Voyson was actually on the train, and he must have been carrying some wealth with him, and the old man knew what he looked like.

The girl was rising to follow, but Simon put his hands on her shoulders and held her back.

“I’ll look after him,” he said. “Perhaps you’d better stay here.”

He swung himself through the door and went wafting down the corridor, long-limbed and alert. A man like Bruce Voyson would be fair game for any adventurer, and it was in things like that that the Saint was most at home. The fact that he could be steered straight to his target by a man who could really recognize the financier when he saw him, in spite of his disguise, was a miracle too good to miss. Action, swift and spontaneous and masterly, was more in the Saint’s line than a contemplation of the brutal ironies of Fate, and the prospect of it took his mind resiliently away from gloom.

He followed the old man along the train at a leisured distance. At each pause where the old man stopped to peer into a compartment the Saint stopped also and lounged against the side, patient as a stalking tiger. Sometime later he pushed into another carriage and found himself in the dining car, for it was an early train with provision for the breakfasts of late-rising travellers. The old man was standing over a table half-way down, and one glance was enough to show that he had found his quarry.

Simon sank unnoticed into the adjoining booth. In a panel mirror on the opposite side he could see the man who must have been Bruce Voyson — a thin dowdily dressed man with the almost white hair and tinted glasses which the old German had described. The glasses seemed to hide most of the sallow face, so that the line of the thin straight mouth was the only expressive feature to be seen. The old German was speaking.

“Mr Voyson, I’m asking you a question und I vant an answer. Is it true dot your company is smashed?”

Voyson hesitated for a moment, as if he was not quite sure whether he had heard the question correctly. And then, as he seemed to make up his mind, his gloved fingers twisted together on the table in front of him.

“Absolute nonsense,” he said shortly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

The old man swallowed.

“Then vhy is it, Mr Voyson, dot der paper here says dot it is all smashed, und everyone vants to know where you are?”

“What paper is that?” demanded Voyson, but there was a harsh twitch in his voice.

The old man dropped it on the table.

“Dot’s der paper. If you don’t understand Cherman I translate it for you. It says, ‘Von of der biggest swindle in history vas yesterday in Maxton, Ohio, exposed—’ ”

Voyson bit the corner of his mouth, then swung around. “Well, what about it?”

“But, Mr Voyson, you cannot speak of it like dot. You cannot realize vat it means. If it is true dot der money is all gone... You don’t understand. All my life I vork and vork und I safe money, und I put it all in your company. It cannot be true dot all my money is gone — dot all my life I have vork for nothing—”

“Suppose it is gone?” snapped Voyson. “There are plenty of others in the same boat.” He sighed. “It’s all in the luck of the game.”

The old man swayed and steadied himself heavily.

“Luck?” he said hoarsely. “You talk to me of luck? When I am ruined, und it says here dot it vas all a swindle — dot you are nodding but a criminal—”

Voyson’s fist hit the table.

“Now you listen to me,” he rasped. “We’re not in America now — either of us. If you’ve got any complaints you can take me back to Ohio first, and then go ahead and prove I swindled you. That’ll be soon enough for you to start shooting off your mouth about criminals. Now what d’you think you’re going to do about it? Think it over. And get the hell out of here while you do your thinking, or I’ll call the guard and have you thrown off the train!”

The Saint’s muscles hardened, and relaxed slowly. His dark head settled back almost peacefully on the upholstery behind him, but the wraith of a smile on his lips had the grim glitter of polished steel. A steward hovered over him, and he ordered a sandwich which he did not want without turning his head.

Minutes later, or it might have been hours, he saw his travelling acquaintance going past him. The old man looked neither to right nor left. His faded eyes stared sightlessly ahead, glazed with a terrible stony emptiness. His big toil-worn hands, which could have picked Voyson up and broken him across one knee, hung listlessly at his sides. His feet slouched leadenly, as if they were moved by a conscious effort of will.

Simon sat on. After another few minutes Voyson paid his bill and went past, walking jerkily. His coat was rucked up on one side, and Simon saw the tell-tale bulge on the right hip before it was straightened.

The Saint spread coins thoughtfully on the table to cover the price of his sandwich. His eyes ran over the selection of condiments which had come with it, and almost absent-mindedly he dropped the pepper-pot into his pocket. Then he picked up the sandwich as he stood up, took a bite from it, and sauntered out with it in his hand.

At the entrance of the next coach something caught the tail of his eye, and he stopped abruptly. The door at the side was open, and the bowed figure of the old German stood framed in the oblong, looking out. The broad rounded shoulders had a deathly rigidity. While Simon looked, the gnarled hands tightened on the handrails by which the figure held itself upright, stretching the skin white over the knuckles, then they let go.

Simon covered the distance in two lightning strides and dragged him back. A train passing in the opposite direction blasted his ears with its sudden crashing clamor, and went clattering by in a gale of acrid wind. The old man fought him blindly, but Simon’s lean strength pinned him against the bulkhead. The noise outside whisked by and vanished again as suddenly as it had come, giving place to the subdued rhythmic mutter of their own passage.

“Don’t be a fool!” snapped the Saint metallically. “What sort of help is that going to be to Greta?”

The old man’s struggling arms went limp, gradually. He gazed dumbly back, trying to understand. His throat moved twice, convulsively, before his voice came.

“Dot’s right... Dot’s right... I must look after Greta. Und she is so young...”

Simon let him go, and he went weakly past, around the corner into the main corridor.

The Saint lighted a cigarette and inhaled deeply. It had been close enough... And once again he gave himself that mental shake, feathering himself down to that ice-cold clarity of purpose in which any adventurer’s best work must be done. It was a tough break for the old German, but Simon couldn’t keep his mind solely on that. He didn’t want to. Such distractions as the rescuing of potential damn-fool suicides from sticky ends disturbed the even course of buccaneering. Voyson was on the train, and the ungodly prospered only that a modern pirate might loot them.

A little way further down the carriage Simon found the financier sitting in a first-class compartment by himself. The Saint eased back the door and stepped through, sliding it shut behind him. He stood with his sandwich in one hand and his cigarette in the other, balancing himself lightly against the sway.

“A word with you,” he said.

3

Voyson looked up.

“Who are you?” he demanded irritably.

“ New York Herald Tribune, European edition,” said the Saint coolly and mendaciously. “I want an interview. Mind if I sit down?”

He took a seat next to the financier as if he had never considered the possibility of a refusal.

“Why do you think I should have anything to tell you?”

The Saint smiled.

“You’re Bruce Voyson, aren’t you?” He touched the man’s head, then looked at his fingertips. “Yes, I thought so. It’s wonderful what a difference a little powder will make. And those dark glasses help a lot, too.” His fingers patted one of Voyson’s hands. “Besides, if there’s going to be any argument, there ought to be a scar here which would settle it. Take that glove off and show me that you haven’t got a scar, and I’ll apologize and go home.”

‘I’ve no statement to make,” said Voyson coldly, though the ragged edge of his nerves showed in the shift of his eyes and the flabby movement of his hands. “When I have, you’ll get it. Now d’you mind getting out?”

“A bad line,” murmured the Saint reprovingly. “Very bad. Always give the papers a break, and then they’ll see you get a good seat when the fireworks go off.” He put his left arm around the financier’s shoulders, and patted the man’s chest in a brotherly manner with his right hand. “Come along now, Mr Voyson — let’s have the dope. What’s the inside story about your company?”

Voyson shook him off savagely.

“I’ve got no statement to make, I tell you! The whole story’s a rigmarole of lies. When I get back I’ll sue every paper that’s printed it — and that goes for yours too! Now get out — d’you hear?”

“Spoken like a man,” drawled the Saint appreciatively. “We ought to have had a newsreel here to record it. Now about this trip of yours—”

“Where did you get that?” whispered Voyson.

His eyes were frozen on the booklet of colored papers which the Saint was skimming through. Simon glanced up and back to them again.

“Out of your pocket,” he answered calmly. “Just put me down as inquisitive.”

He turned the leaflets interestedly, examining them one by one until he came to the end. Then he replaced them in their neat folder, snapped the elastic, and stowed it away in his own pocket.

“Destination Batavia, I see,” he remarked genially. “Well, I’m sure you’ll be able to straighten everything out when you get back to Maxton. Putting duty before everything else and going home by the shortest route, too. Indonesia is on the direct line to Ohio from here — via Australia. Are you taking in Australia? You oughtn’t to miss the wallabies... You certainly are going to have a nice long voyage to recover from the strain of trying to save your shareholders’ money. And by the way, there are quite a lot of extradition difficulties from Indonesia to the United States when a guy is wanted for your particular kind of nastiness, aren’t there?”

Voyson rubbed his chin with a shaking hand. His gaze was fixed on the Saint with the quivering intensity of a guinea-pig hypnotized by a snake.

“Picked my pocket, eh?” he got out harshly. “I’ll see your editor hears about that. I’ll have you arrested!”

He reached up for the communication cord. Simon tilted his head back and half closed his eyes.

“What a story!” he breathed ecstatically. “Of course it’ll delay you a bit, having to stay on in Germany to make the charge and see it all through. But if you think it’s worth it, I do. It’d be front page stuff!”

Voyson sank down again.

“Will you get out of my compartment?” he grated. “I’ve stood as much from you as I intend to—”

“But you haven’t stood as much from me as I’ve got waiting for you, brother,” said the Saint.

His eyes opened suddenly, very clear and blue and reckless, like sapphires with steel rapier-points behind them. He smiled.

“I’m here on business, Bruce,” he said, in the same gentle voice with the tang of bared sword-blades behind its melting smoothness. “I won’t deceive you any longer — the Herald Tribune only knows me from the comic section. And I don’t like you, brother. I never have cared much for your line of business, anyway, and the way you spoke to that poor old man in the dining car annoyed me. Remember him? He was on the point of chucking himself off this train under another one just now when I happened along. Somehow, my pet, I don’t think it would have distressed me nearly so much if you’d had the same idea.”

“Who are you?” asked Voyson huskily.

“I am the Saint — you may have heard of me. Just a twentieth-century privateer. In my small way I try to put right a few of the things that are wrong with this cockeyed world, and clean up some of the excrescences I come across. You come into the category, comrade. You must be carrying quite a tidy bit of boodle along to comfort you in your exile, and I think I could spend it much more amusingly than you—”

Voyson’s lips whitened. His hand slipped behind him, and Simon looked down at the barrel of an automatic, levelled into the center of his chest. Only the Saint’s eyebrows moved.

“You’ve been getting notions from some of these gangster pictures,” he said. “May I go on with my eating?”

He put the sandwich on his knee and lifted off the top slice of bread. Then he felt in his pocket for the pepper-pot. The perforations in the top seemed inadequate, and he unscrewed the cap.

Voyson squinted at him.

“That makes it easier to deal with you,” he said, and then a cloud of pepper struck him squarely in the face.

It came with a crisp upward fling that drove the powder straight up his nostrils and up under the shield of his glasses into his eyes. He choked and gasped, and in the same instant his gun was struck aside and detached skillfully from his fingers.

Minutes of streaming agony passed before his tortured vision returned. While he wept with the stinging pain of it his pockets were rifled again, this time without any attempt at stealth. Once he tried to rise, and was pushed back like a child. He huddled away and waited impotently for the blindness to wear off.

When he looked up the Saint was still there, sitting on the seat opposite him with a handkerchief over his face and a litter of papers sorted out on his lap and overflowing on either side. The window had been lowered so that the draught could clear the air.

“You crook!” Voyson moaned.

“Well, well, well!” murmured the Saint amiably. “So the little man’s come to the surface again. Bad business, that hay fever of yours. Speaking as one crook to another, Bruce, you ought to give up gun play until you’re cured. Sneezing spoils the aim.”

He removed the handkerchief from his face, sniffed the air cautiously, and tucked the silk square back in his pocket. Then he began to gather up the papers he had been investigating.

“I can only find ninety thousand dollars in cash,” he said. “That’s not a lot of booty out of a five-million-dollar swindle. But I see there are notes of two million-dollar transfers to the Asiatic Bank in Batavia, so maybe you didn’t do so badly out of it. I wish we could touch some of that bank account, though.”

He enveloped the documents deliberately in the wallet from which he had taken them, and tossed it back. Voyson’s bloodshot glare steadied itself.

“I’ll see that you don’t get away with this,” he snarled.

“Tell me how,” invited the Saint, but his smile was still a glitter of clean-cut marble.

“Wait till we get to Mainz. There are plenty of people on this train. What are you going to do — walk me out of the station under that gun in broad daylight? I’d like to see you do it. I’ll call your bluff!”

“Still hankering for that publicity?”

“I’ve got to have those tickets,” said Voyson, with his chest laboring. “And my money. I’ve got to get to Batavia. You won’t stop me! I shan’t have to stay behind to make any charges. Your having a gun will be enough — and my money and tickets on you. I know the numbers of all those bills, and the tickets are signed with my name. The police’ll be glad to see you!” Voyson’s hands were clenching and twitching spasmodically. “I think I read about you being in trouble here some time ago, didn’t I?”

Simon said nothing, and Voyson’s voice picked up. It grew louder than it need have done, almost as if the financier was trying to bolster up his own confidence with the sound of it.

“The German police wanted you pretty badly then! You’re the Saint, eh? It’s a good thing you told me.”

“You make things very difficult, brother,” said the Saint.

His quietness was unruffled, almost reflective, yet to any man in his senses that very quietness should have flared with warnings. Voyson was beyond seeing them. He leaned forward with the red pin-point in his stare glittering.

“I want it to,” he raved. “You’ve come to the wrong man with your nonsense. I’ll give you thirty seconds to hand back my tickets—”

“One moment,” said the Saint.

His soft incisiveness floated like a white-hot filament across the other’s babble of speech, and suddenly Voyson saw the coldness of his eyes, and went silent.

“You’re reminding me of things that I haven’t remembered for a long time,” said the Saint soberly.

His cigarette-end dropped beside his heel, and was trodden out. The blue eyes never looked down at it.

“You’re right — the Saint has been something of a crook sometimes, even if that didn’t hurt anybody but specimens like you. And since I reformed I’ve become rather sophisticated. Maybe it’s a pity. One loses sight of some simple elementary things that were very good. It wasn’t always like that. Since you know my name so well, you may remember that I once had only one cure for creatures like you. I was judge and executioner.”

The train thundered south, perfected machinery roaring on its unswerving lines through a world of logic and materialism forged into wheels. And in one compartment of it Bruce Voyson sat mute, clutched in an eerie spell that drove like a clammy wind through the logic on which he had based his life.

“Romantic, wasn’t it?” went on that incredible voice. “But the law has so many loopholes. Before it can hang you for murder you’ve got to beat your victim’s brains out with a club. And yet you are a murderer, aren’t you? Just a few minutes ago, a friend of ours would have committed suicide on your account if I hadn’t spotted him in the nick of time. For all I know, others may have done the same thing already. Certainly some of your victims will. And while that’s going on, you’re on your way to Batavia to enjoy at least two million dollars of their money — two million which would do a little towards helping them to a fresh start. And all those dollars would be available for the receivers if you met with an unfortunate accident. There doesn’t seem to be any obvious reason why you should go on living, does there?”

Simon Templar put his hand in his pocket and took out the folder of tickets. Deliberately, he tore it across twice and scattered the pieces out of the window. Voyson started forward with a strangled gasp, and looked into the muzzle of his own gun.

“You’ve reminded me of days that I like to remember,” said the Saint. “There is a justice above the law, and it seems just that a man like you should die.”

Voyson’s red-rimmed eyes narrowed, and then he flung himself across the short space.

4

Simon took out a handkerchief and wiped the gun carefully all over. It was a small-caliber weapon, and the single crack of it should not have alarmed anyone who heard it among the other noises of the train.

Still holding it in his handkerchief, he folded Voyson’s fingers around the butt, taking care to impress their prints on the shiny surface. Voyson slumped in the corner, with the bullet puncture in his right temple showing in the center of a shaded circle of burnt cordite. Working with dispassionate speed, the Saint dropped his sandwich and pepper-pot out of the window, picked up a couple of crumbs, and erased his fingerprints from the handle. He wiped the inside catch of the door in the same way, slid it back, and brushed his handkerchief over the outside as he closed it again. There was no flaw in the scene: nothing could have seemed more natural than that a man in Voyson’s position should have lost his nerve and taken the easy way out. Simon was without pity or regret.

But as he went back to his own compartment he felt happy. He had always known that the old days were good, and the return had its own emotion.

He saw his fellow-travellers again with a sense of surprise and unreality. For a while he had almost forgotten them. But the old German caught his hand as he sat down, holding it in a kind of tremulous eagerness, with a pathetic brilliance awake in his dulled eyes.

“I vant to thank you,” he said. “You safe me from doing something very foolish. I vas a coward — a traitor. I run away.”

“Don’t we all?” said the Saint.

The old man shook his head.

“Dot vould have been a wicked thing to do. But I am not like dot now. Perhaps it isn’t so bad. I am used to vork, und at my age I have so much experience, I am a better vorkman than any young man. So I say, I go back und vork again. Does a few more years matter so much?”

“And I’m going to work too,” said the girl. “Between us, we’ll get it all back twice as quickly.”

Simon looked at them both for a long time. There was ninety thousand dollars in his pocket, which was money in any man’s life. He could have enjoyed every cent of it. He didn’t want to see what he was seeing.

And yet, half against his will, against the resentful primitive selfishness which is rooted in every man, adventurer or not, he found himself looking at something grand and indestructible. Even the enigma of the Rhine Maiden baffled him no longer. He saw it only as the riddle of the ultimate woman waiting for life in the fearless faith of the enchanted castle, waiting for the knight in shining armour who must come riding down the hills of the morning with her name on his shield. And he did not want to see the magic dimmed. “I don’t think you’ll have to do that,” he said. He smiled, and held out the thin folds of bills he had taken. Life was still rich; he could take plenty more. And some things were cheap at any price. “I had a word with Voyson myself. I think I made him see that he couldn’t get away with what he was doing. Anyway, he changed his mind. He asked me to give you this.”

The train was slowing up, and a guard came down the corridor shouting, “ Hier Mainz, alles umsteigen! ” Simon stood up and took down his valise. Being human, he was aware that the girl’s eyes were fixed on him with an odd breathlessness, and he thought that she could carry with her many worse ideals.

Tirol: The golden journey

Introduction

There are just a few stories which I genuinely regret losing, which were lost by force of circumstance and which I can do nothing about. They were all original Saint stories too, and I was thinking of them while working on a new collection of shorter pieces which I am now trying to finish up.

One of them, called “The Golden Journey,” was an open-air story about hiking in Germany in 1931, which was published in Harper’s in 1934. In 1931, if you remember, the French had only just moved out of the Rhineland, and Hitler was nothing but a beer-hall politician, and there was a new spirit among the youth of Germany — a spirit which at that time I think might have developed into something very fine if Nazism hadn’t taken it over and channeled it in the way we know. In those days they spent all their spare time rucksacking through the countryside on bicycles or on foot, singing along the roads and singing at night in the inns; it was, I thought at the time, a lot better than crashing around in hot rods and jitterbugging, although we know what it came to. It was a great background for a happy story then, and yet it is a story which I think it may never be possible to revive. Too many ugly things stand between that memory and the present and they cannot be forgotten even in a period of peace. But the story depends on that background entirely and can’t be translated to any other time nor place. So, let it die, along with many other pleasant things that will never come back.

— Leslie Charteris (1947)

( Editorial note: Needless to say, it was revived...)

1

Probably if Belinda Deane hadn’t been born with such liquid brown eyes, such a small straight nose, such a delightful chin, she would never have been spoiled. And if she hadn’t been spoiled, Simon Templar would never have felt called upon to interfere. And if he hadn’t interfered... But the course of far more important histories has been changed by the curve of an eyebrow before now.

Belinda Deane knocked on the door of his hotel bedroom in Munich at half past twelve, which was less than an hour after his breakfast, and he put down his razor and went cheerfully to let her in.

“I... I’m sorry,” she said, when she saw him.

“Why?” Simon asked. “Don’t you approve of this dressing gown?”

He returned to the mirror and calmly resumed the scraping of his face. The girl stood with her back to the door, twisting a scrap of handkerchief in her fingers.

“Mr Templar,” she said, “my bag’s been stolen.”

“How did that happen?”

“It was in my room. I... I left it for a few minutes, and when I came back it was gone!”

“Too bad,” murmured the Saint gravely.

He turned the angle of his jawbone with care, stretching his head sideways. His unruffled accents held a sublime and seraphic saintliness of innocence which in itself was a volume of explanation for his nickname. It took the girl’s breath away for a moment, and then she froze over.

“Too bad,” she said coldly, “is putting it mildly. It had all my money in it, and my letter of credit, and my passport — everything. I’ve never been in such a mess in my life. What am I going to do?”

“Have you told the hotel about it?”

“Of course. I’ve had managers and clerks and detectives prowling about my room for the last half-hour.”

Simon shrugged.

“It seems a pity you didn’t go on to Garmisch yesterday with Jack.”

She gazed at him glacially, but his back was turned to her and he was imperturbably intent on his shave. A glacial gaze inevitably loses much of its effect when it has to be reflected by a mirror and the recipient is merely paying the polite minimum of attention anyhow. The disadvantage made her furious, and she controlled herself with an effort. Simon’s amused blue eyes decided that Jack Easton had certainly picked a Tartar, but he admitted that wrath and hauteur sat very well on her small imperious face.

“If you remember,” she said with unnatural restraint, “I told my fiancé that tramping about with him over a lot of dreary roads and sleeping in filthy village inns without any sanitation was not included in the terms of our engagement, and just wasn’t my idea of a good time. I’m a civilized woman, not a farm hand. Also that happens to be my own business. Why don’t you try to suggest something helpful?”

“You haven’t any friends here?”

“None at all.”

The Saint raised one eyebrow.

“In that case, you’re only left with your bank’s correspondents here, or the American consulate. Failing those two,” he added flippantly, “you could lie down on the tram-lines outside and wait with resignation for the next tram—”

The door banged violently behind her, and Simon glanced at it and chuckled.

He ran cold water into the basin, submerged his head to remove the last traces of lather, and dried it off with a rough towel. Then he brushed his hair and sat down at the small desk where the telephone stood. He fished the directory out of a drawer, and with it the girl’s expensive bag. From it he took her letter of credit, discovered the Munich correspondent’s name there, and called the number.

“This is the American consulate,” he said, when he was connected with the necessary Personage. “We have information of a trick that’s being played on the banks around here by an American girl. She comes in with the story that her letter of credit has been stolen, and tries to get an advance without it. There is no accurate description of her at the moment, except that she is dark and about one meter sixty centimeters tall. Anything else we learn will be communicated to the police, but in the meanwhile we’re taking the responsibility of warning the principal banks. Your safest course will be to make no advance in those circumstances. Tell the girl you will have to get in touch with New York or wherever it is, and ask her to call back in three or four days. By that time you’ll have a full description from the police.”

A couple of minutes later he was speaking to the American consul.

“I say!” he bleated, in the plaintive tones of Oxford. “D’you happen to know a young thing by the name of Deane — Miss Deane?”

“No,” said the consul blankly. “What about her?”

“Well, I met her in a beer garden last night. She’s an American girl — at least, she said she was. Dashed pretty, too. She told me her bag and things had been stolen, and I lent her five pounds to wire home for money. Well, I’ve just been sniffing a cocktail with another chap and we were comparing notes, and it turns out he met the same girl in another beer garden last Tuesday and lent her ten dollars on the same story. So we toddled round to the hotel she said she was staying at to make inquiries, and they hadn’t heard of her at all. So we decided she must be a crook, and we thought we’d better tell you to warn your other citizens about her, old boy!”

“I’m very much obliged. Can you tell me what she looks like?”

“Like a wicked man’s dream, old fruit! About five foot three, with the most luscious brown eyes...”

His last call was to the hotel manager. Simon Templar spoke German, as he spoke other languages, like a native, and he put on his stiffest and most official staccato for the occasion.

“This is the Central Police Office. We have information received that a new swindle is by an American girl worked. She tells you that her money from her room in your hotel stolen is. Then will she a few days more to stay attempt, or money to borrow... So! That has already yourself befallen... No, unfortunately is there nothing to do. It is impossible the untruthfulness of her story to prove. You must however no compensation pay, and if you her room engaged announce, will you sorely less money lose.”

Simon finished his dressing in an aura of silent laughter, and went out to lunch.

He was scanning a magazine in his room about four o’clock when another knock came on his door and the girl walked in. She looked pale and tired, but the Saint hardened his heart. Even the spectacle of his attire could only rouse her to a faint spark of sarcasm.

“Have you joined the boy scouts or something?” she asked.

Simon turned his eyes down to his brown knees unabashed.

“I’m going down to Innsbruck and up over the Brenner Pass into Italy. Tramping about over a lot of dreary roads and sleeping in ditches — all that sort of thing. It’s one of the most beautiful trips in the whole world, and the only way you can get the best out of it is on foot. I’m catching a train to Lenggries at five, and starting from there early tomorrow morning — that cuts out the only dull part. What luck have you had?”

“None at all.” The girl flung herself into a chair. “I’d never have believed anything could have been so hopeless. My God, the way I’ve been looked at today, you might think I was some kind of crook! I went to the bank. Yes, they’d be delighted to get in touch with my bank in Boston, but they couldn’t do anything till they had a reply. How long would it take? Four days at least. And what was I going to do till then? The manager didn’t know, but he shrugged his shoulders as if he thought I’d be lucky to stay out of jail that long. Then I went to the consulate. The consul’s eyes were popping out of his head almost as soon as I’d begun to tell him the trouble. If the bank was willing to cable Boston for me, what was the trouble? I told him I couldn’t go without eating for four days. He said he was only authorized to allow me fifty cents a day and send me home. I asked him what he thought I could eat for fifty cents, and he bawled me out! He said I was a disgrace to the country, and an American citizen had no business to be abroad without any means of support, and if he shipped me home I’d go straight to jail when I landed. And then he showed me the door. I’ve never been so humiliated in my life! If I don’t get that consul fired out of the service—”

“But surely you can stay on here till some money arrives?” suggested the Saint ingenuously.

“Not a chance. I’ve just seen the manager. He said as much as he could without insulting me openly — told me he would require my room by seven o’clock if I couldn’t pay him up to date by that time.”

“Distinctly awkward,” remarked Simon judicially.

The girl bit her lip.

“I...I’ve got to do something,” she stammered. “I don’t know how to say it — I hate asking you, after all this — but I’ve got to have something to see me through till the bank gets a reply from Boston, and they can’t do that till after the week-end. Or when Jack gets to Innsbruck about Tuesday — I can send a wire to him there. I... I know I’m practically a stranger, but if you could lend me just enough—”

“My dear,” said the Saint blandly, “I should be delighted. But I haven’t got it to lend.”

Her eyes opened wide.

“You haven’t got it?”

She spread out a brown hand.

“Take a look. My luggage went off in advance this afternoon. All I’m going to need — toothbrush and towel and blankets — is in my rucksack. My bill here is paid, and I’ve got about forty marks in my belt — enough to buy food and beer. I can’t get any more till I get to Bolzano. I couldn’t even send you on to Innsbruck — the third-class fare for one is about fifteen marks, and the remaining twenty-five wouldn’t feed me.”

She stared at him aghast. Her pretty mouth quivered. There was a moistness very close to the tears of sheer hysterical fright in her eyes.

“But what on earth am I going to do?” she wailed.

Simon lighted a cigarette, and allowed his gaze to return to her face.

“You’ll just have to walk to Innsbruck with me,” he said.

2

Simon Templar had been cordially disliked by many different people in his time, but rarely with such a wholehearted simplicity as that which Belinda Deane lavished on him the next morning. On the other hand, unpopularity had never lowered his spirits: he strode along carolling to the skies, and meditating on the infinite variety of the accidents of travel.

He had met Belinda Deane and Jack Boston on the train from Stuttgart a week before. There had been some complication about their tickets, and their knowledge of German was infinitesimal. The Saint, to whom human companionship was the breath of life, and who would seize any excuse to beguile a journey by making the acquaintance of his fellow-travellers, had stepped in as an interpreter. Thereafter they had gone around Munich together, until Easton had separated to join an old friend — “a great-open-space friend,” he described him — on a short walking trip from Garmisch to Innsbruck by way of Oberammergau. This decision had been the subject of a distressing scene at which Simon had been coerced into the position of umpire.

It was not by any means the first he had witnessed. One glance had been sufficient to tell him that Belinda had been blessed with a face and figure that would make even hard-boiled waiters scramble for the privilege of serving her, but one hour in her company had been enough to show him that they must have been doing it ever since she left her cradle, with the inevitable results. Everything that New England and Paris had to give had been endowed upon her — background, breed, education, poise. She could have been taken for the flower of American sophistication at its most perfect. Intelligence, knowledge, charm — she had them all. She knew exactly the right thing to say and do in any circumstances, entirely because she had been trained to circumstances where the same things were always being said and done. Jack Easton, a youngster of less ancient lineage, confessed that there were times when she scared him.

“Sometimes she ought to be spanked,” he said once, when he and Simon were alone together after that last scene.

He was annoyed, because the quarrel had consisted of a healthily stubborn bluntness piling up in competition with an increasingly chilly self-possession, and there was something about the Saint which always drew out confidences.

“What she really needs,” said Easton, “is for somebody to club her and drag her off to a desert island and make her wash dishes and dig up her own potatoes.”

“Why don’t you do it?” murmured the Saint.

“Because I know she’d never forgive me as long as she lived. Besides,” said Easton, morosely practical, “I don’t know any desert islands.”

Simon smoked for a time before he replied. The idea had come to him on the spur of the moment, and the more he thought of it the more it made him smile. The troubles of young love had always seemed more worthwhile to him than most things.

“It wouldn’t matter so much if she never forgave me,” he said. “And it could be done without desert islands.”

Belinda trotted beside him and hated him. The leisurely swing of his long legs was measured to a pace that made her work to keep up with him. His pack rode like a feather on his broad shoulders, and the possibility of fatigue didn’t seem to enter his head. She glanced sidelong at his strong brown profile, down over his check cotton shirt with rolled-up sleeves, his broad leather belt, leather shorts, and bare legs, and hated him still more for the ease of his untrammeled masculinity. She had been moved to sarcasm at the expense of his costume in the hotel, but now she tried not to admit that the curious glances of the few people they passed were centered on her. Her light tweed skirt came from Paris, her green suede golfing jacket was the latest thing from Fifth Avenue: from the rudimentary crown of her jaunty little hat to the welts of her green and white buckskin shoes she was as smart and pretty as a picture, and she knew it. It was unjust that smartness should give her no advantage.

The Saint sang.

“Give me the life I love,

Let the lave go by me—”

Belinda gritted her small white teeth. She had never done much walking, and after the first few miles she was feeling tired. The fact that the man at her side should have been able to allot the major ration of his breath to singing was like a deliberate affront. She began to wonder for the first time why she should ever have considered his fantastic proposition, but it had seemed like the only practical solution. Even now, she could think of nothing else that she could have done. And from the moment when she had wearily accepted, he had taken charge — registered her luggage to Innsbruck, paid the carriage fees, rushed her to the station, almost abducted her while her mind was still numbed by the shock of inconceivable circumstances... The morning grew hotter, and she struggled out of her jacket.

“Could you find room for this somewhere?” she asked, like a queen conferring a favor.

The Saint cocked a clear blue eye at her.

“Lady,” he said, “this pack weighs twenty-five pounds. Are you sure you can’t manage twelve ounces?”

She walked on speechlessly.

The scenery meant nothing to her. Roads were merely the links in an endless trail, which ended tantalizingly at every bend and the crest of every rise, only to lead on again immediately. When he called the first halt, at the end of nearly four hours’ marching, she fell on the dirty grass by the roadside and wondered if she would ever be able to get up again.

“My stockings have got holes in them,” she said.

He nodded.

“There’s nothing like plenty of ventilation to keep your feet in condition.”

She tore her stockings off without a word and threw them away, but her hands trembled. Simon, unmoved, opened his pack and produced food — coarse black bread and butter, cheese, and liver sausage.

“How about some lunch?”

She looked at the bread down her nose.

“What’s that stuff?”

“The most wholesome bread in the world. All the vitamins, minerals, and roughage that any dietitian could desire. Preserves the teeth and massages the intestines.”

“I don’t care for it, thank you.” As a matter of fact, she was at the stage where her stomach felt too tired for food. “All I want is a drink.”

“We’ll stop at the next village and get some beer.”

“I don’t drink beer.”

The Saint ploughed appreciatively on into his massive hunk of bread.

“The water should be all right in that stream over there,” he said, indicating it with a movement of his hand.

“Are you suggesting,” she inquired icily, “that I should go down on all fours and lap it up like a cow?”

Simon chewed.

“Like a gazelle,” he said, “would be more poetic.”

She closed her eyes and lay there motionlessly, and if he sensed the simmering of the volcano he gave no sign of it. He ate his fill and smoked a cigarette, then he walked over to the stream, drank frugally, and bathed his face. When he came back she was sitting up. He strapped his pack and hoisted it deftly.

“Ready?”

Somehow she picked herself up. Her muscles had stiffened during the rest, and it was agony to squeeze her feet back into her shoes, which were cut for appearance rather than comfort. Only a strained and crackling obstinacy drew the effort out of her: the mockery of his cool blue gaze told her only too frankly that he was waiting for her to break down, and she wondered how long she would be able to cheat him of that satisfaction.

He drove her on relentlessly. Hills rose and fell away. Scattered cottages, tilled fields, pastures, woods, blurred by in a crawling panorama. They marched through a deep forest of mighty trees where woodcutters were working, along a road lined with stacks of brown logs. The sweet-smelling air held the music of whining saws and the clunk and ring of axes, but it meant nothing to her but an interval of blessed relief from the heat of the sun. Even then, the shadowy vastness of it was a little terrifying. She had never been so close to the rich mightiness of the earth: to her, “country” had only been something rather cute and amusing, a drawing-room picture brought into three dimensions, to be visited as a stunt in the company of sleek automobiles whose purring mechanism drowned the silences with their reassurance of civilized man’s conquest of nature. Without that comfort she was like a child left in the dark. On the rare occasions when a car passed them she watched it yearningly, and then licked the dust from her lips and felt lonelier when it had gone. Once a cart kept them company for a quarter of an hour, while Simon and the driver exchanged shouted witticisms.

Presently their path led beside a small river, with a tall ledge of rock rising on their left. The going was worse there, strewn with loose stones which seemed to slip backwards with her as fast as she went forward. The crunch of them under her plodding footsteps resolved itself into a maddening rhythm of hate. “ Beast — bully — swine — beast — bully — swine! ” they drummed out, bruising her feet at every step. Then she slipped on one. There was a tearing sound, and she stopped and leaned against the rocky wall.

“My heel’s come off.”

“What’s holding your toes on?” asked the Saint interestedly.

Suddenly all her pent-up bitterness boiled over, so that for a moment she forgot her weariness. Her eyes blazed, and his tanned features swam in her vision. Before she knew what she was doing she had smacked his face.

When her sight cleared again he had not moved.

“Belinda,” he said quietly, “there’s another lesson you obviously haven’t learned. When a girl strikes a man she’s trading on a false idea of chivalry. If you do that again I shall put you across my knee.”

“You wouldn’t dare!” she panted, but for the first time in her life she was afraid.

He made no attempt to argue with her. Lowering his pack, he opened it and took out a pair of plain leather sandals.

“I thought something like that would happen. These are your size, and you’ll find them much more comfortable.”

He waited while she took off her shoes and threw them into the river, where they floated forlornly like derelict emblems of respectability. Looking down at her feet, she felt the incongruity of her attire and jerked off the jaunty little hat. Shortly afterwards she lost patience with carrying it and let it fall by the wayside — another relic of herself to be marked up in the score of hatred which was etched on her soul in burning acid.

Evening found their path widening out into a bowl of open land, flat and stony, where the river diverged into a network of rambling channels winding and intersecting across an area of hard barren ground broken by a few stunted trees and clumps of parched grass. Simon pointed to a house that was visible on a slight rise in the midst of it.

“That’s an inn,” he said, “and there will be beer.”

She saw it as a prospect of rest, a thousand leagues distant. She was so tired that each individual step called for a separate effort, and she had to keep her eyes fixed on the objective to force herself to complete the distance. The guest-room inside was unlighted and gloomy: she expected it was filthy as well, but she was past caring. She sank on to a wooden bench, put her elbows on the stained bare table, and buried her face in her hands.

By that time there was a gnawing void of hunger below her ribs, and when the serving-girl came she ordered chocolate. Simon called for beer, with an extra tankard for the gamekeeper who sat puffing his pipe in the far corner.

The gamekeeper was a big slow-spoken man with a lined weather-beaten face like a walnut. He wore the costume of the country — small green felt hat with a brush at the back, leather shorts hung on embroidered leather suspenders, striped woolen gaiters which left his ankles bare. Simon steered him on to the subject of camping. The gamekeeper said it was forbidden in the woods on the east, through which a footpath would take them across the frontier into Austria. It was a great pity, said the gamekeeper, because he knew what would have been an ideal spot only a few hundred meters away, and he winked prodigiously, and roared with laughter. Simon bought him another tankard of beer, and they brought the serving-girl into the conversation. The low-ceilinged room rang with the ebb and flow of their carefree voices.

Belinda drank her hot syrupy chocolate, and thought, “He’s vulgar, he’s common, he only wants to humiliate me. How could he have anything to talk about with people like that? He can come in here and flirt with a little servant girl like a tough in a saloon. That man must despise him. It’s horrible! Oh, my God, why didn’t I know what he was like before?” She couldn’t understand a word, and nobody paid any attention to her. She had never been ignored before. “They’re all cheap, all of them,” she thought. “They don’t talk to me because they know I belong to a different class.” She raised her chin and tried to express this superiority in her attitude, but it was cold comfort. When Simon returned to her it was almost a relief.

“I’d like to have something to eat and go straight to bed,” she said.

The Saint raised his eyebrows.

“You can have some food as soon as we’re settled in, but we aren’t settling in here.”

“I tell you I can’t walk another yard,” she said haggardly. “Can’t you see I’m half dead?”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to walk another three hundred yards or so.”

“What’s wrong with this place?”

He gestured with his tankard.

“We’re sleeping in the woods.”

She stared at him incredulously.

“I don’t understand you.”

“In the woods,” explained the Saint. “ Im wold. Dans les bois. Unter den Linden.”

“You must be crazy.”

“Not at all. The partridges do it, and suffer no grievous harm. I’ve done it often enough myself, and very rarely died of it. You don’t seem to understand the situation. Ambling along as we are, it’ll take us about a week to get to Innsbruck. At the moment, we are the proud possessors of some thirty-five marks. You pay four marks for a bed in a gasthaus, and we’ve still got to eat.”

She realized that the man in the corner was watching her curiously. It came to her that at all costs her dignity must leave that room untouched. The inexorable mathematics of Simon’s argument scarcely made any impression on her; she was in the grip of circumstances that were crushing her till she could have screamed, but she could not make a scene and bring herself down to the level she had just despised.

She stood up and went out without speaking, Simon following her. It had grown darker, and the twitter and chirp and rustle of night creatures was all around them as they entered the wood. Simon took the lead, humming. The spot the gamekeeper had described was near a tributary of the river they had recently quitted, a grassy hollow away from the footpath and a few feet above the stream. Simon’s expert eye appraised it and found no fault. He lowered his pack to the ground and began to unfasten it.

“Will you get some water while I make the fire?” he said.

He put the billy-can down beside her and went off to gather dry logs. In a very short time he had kindled a cheerful blaze, and she huddled gratefully up to it, for it had turned colder after the sun went down. Simon took bread, eggs, and butter from his rucksack, and picked up the billy. It was empty.

“I asked you to get some water,” he said.

She raised her sullen eyes to him over the fire.

“I’m not a servant,” she said.

“Neither am I,” said the Saint quietly. “You’ll do your share or go hungry — whichever you prefer.”

The girl struggled to her feet.

“Oh, I could kill you!” she cried passionately, and went groping down to the stream.

3

Belinda fell asleep at first out of pure exhaustion, but it was still dark when she woke up again. The fire had died down to a cone of red embers, and there was a chill in the air that made her shiver. She pulled the spare width of her groundsheet over her, as Simon had shown her how to do if it began to rain, but it was too thin to give any warmth. Even a summer night turns cool out of doors towards two and three o’clock: unsuspected little breezes stir the air and strike through the thickest blankets. The body’s warmth, unguarded by the moderating vigilance of walls and ceilings, drifts away like smoke in the limitless vastness of space.

The grass, which had looked so flat and felt so soft, developed innumerable bumps and hardnesses which bruised her bones. A tenuous dampness rose from it and when she moved her head on the unsympathetic pillow of her sandals rolled up in a towel it felt wet and cold. The star-sprinkled sky, lofting billions of empty miles over her head, panicked her with its aloofness from her own microscopic insignificance. Oh, blessed civilization and the flattering barricades of pigmy architecture, which has made us afraid of the supernal majesty of our first home!.. The woods around her were full of moving shadows and the whisper of tiny scuttering feet, the flutter of a miniature cosmos hunting and fighting and dying and marching on. The throbbing wings of an owl passing overhead made her heart leap into her mouth... She lay there aching and fearful, waiting and praying for the sky to pale with the dawn, hating and yet glad of the company of the man who slept peacefully on the other side of the fire. She dozed and woke again, stiff and cold and miserable. Untold ages passed before the roof of the world lightened; other countless æons went by before the first beams of the sun gilded the topmost leaves of the trees. When the rays reached her they might give her a little warmth, and she would be able to sleep again. A flock of birds whirred cheeping across the faded stars. The golden radiance on the tree-tops crept down with maddening slowness...

When her eyes opened again it was broad daylight. The fire had been coaxed to life again. It crackled and hissed cheerily, while Simon Templar bent over it on one knee and juggled with the billy and a sizzling frying-pan.

“Eight o’clock and a lovely morning, Belinda,” he said. The fragrance of boiling coffee came to her nostrils, and she felt half sick with hunger and sleeplessness. She pulled herself up, instinctively searching for comb and mirror, and what she saw in the glass horrified her. “I must get a wash,” she said.

He passed her a cake of soap.

“The bath’s right on the doorstep, and breakfast will be ready in five minutes.”

The cold water nipped her face and hands, but it freshened her. Afterwards she dealt ravenously with scrambled eggs and two slices of the coarse black bread, and smoked a cigarette with her coffee. When it was done, the Saint climbed to his feet and stretched himself.

“I’ll make the beds,” he said. “It’s your turn to wash up.”

She looked resentfully at the pan, slimy with the congealed yellowness of egg, and shuddered.

“How do you expect me to do that?” she asked dangerously.

“It’s easy enough. I’ll show you.”

He led the way down the bank to the edge of the stream. He scooped a handful of earth into the pan, plucked up a tuft of grass by the roots, and held the two things out to her.

“Scrub the earth around with the grass, and repeat until clean. Rinse and dry.”

All her hatred and disgust was seething up again, but she tried to keep her balance. To lose her temper was the worst way to go about undermining his insolent assurance.

“There are limits,” she said, as evenly as she could, “and I think you’ve reached them.”

“Hadn’t it occurred to you that dishes have to be washed?”

“It hadn’t occurred to me that a man could ask me to put my hands into a foul mess like that. But perhaps I still thought you might have some of the more elementary instincts of a gentleman. It was rather an absurd mistake to make, wasn’t it?”

“Very,” said the Saint carefully. “Especially after last night. As I explained to you — camp chores are split two ways. Can you make a fire?”

“I’ve never tried.”

“Then it’s safe to assume you can’t. Can you cook?”

“Unfortunately I wasn’t brought up in a kitchen.”

“In that case you can only make yourself useful by fetching water and washing up. If you like eating scrambled eggs, you can help by cleaning up after them. If you don’t like that, you can live on bread and water, which involves no washing. The diet is dull, but you won’t starve on it. Let’s have it quite clear. You chose to travel this way—”

“I’ve never regretted anything so much in my life.”

“You might have regretted being locked up in a German prison still more. I’m not running a conducted tour with a team of cooks and bottle-washers trailing behind. This is a simple matter of the fair division of labor. There are six more days of it coming, and you may as well try to get through them decently.”

“What do you think I am?” she flared. “A working slut like that girl at the inn?”

His eyes met hers steadily.

“I think you’re an idle loafer who ought to learn a little about honest work. I think you’ve lain so soft all your life that you need some hardship and crude discomfort to catch your spine before it dissolves altogether. Both those things are going to happen to you before we get to Innsbruck. You’ve ceased to be ornamental, so now you’re going to turn into a useful working squaw — and like it!”

“Am I?” she said, and then her open hand struck him across the face.

It was done before she knew what she was doing, an instant after she had knocked the pan spinning out of his light grasp into mid-stream, her thin and ragged self-control bursting like tissue before the intolerable flame of her resentment. The torrent of words came afterwards: she saw his smile quietly, and lashed out in sudden fear at the good-humored white flash of his teeth, but her clenched fist met empty air.

He bent her over his knee and did exactly what he had promised to do, with an impersonal efficiency quite devoid of heat. When he released her she was sobbing with impotent rage and real stinging pain. She turned and ran blindly up the bank: if she had had a knife she would have driven it into his throat, but without it her one idea was to get away. Half unconsciously she found the path which he had pointed out as the one that ran into Austria. There must be a road somewhere further on: there would be cars, someone would give her a lift. Her eyes were hot and swimming with shame and anger.

Then she looked back and saw him following her. She glimpsed his tall figure through the trees, rucksack on back, swinging lithely along without making any effort to overtake her. She plunged on till her lungs were bursting and the agony of her stiffened joints made every step a torture, but he was always the same distance behind, unhurried and inescapable as doom. She had to rest or fall down.

“Go away! Go away!” she cried, and struggled on with her heart pounding.

The trees thinned out, and she saw telegraph poles on the other side of a field. She ran out into the road. A truck was coming towards her, headed south: she stood in the middle of the road and waved to it till it stopped.

“Take me wherever you’re going!” she babbled. “Take me to Innsbruck! I’ll pay you anything you ask!”

The driver looked down at her uncomprehendingly.

“Innsbruck?” He pointed down the road. “ Dorthin. Aber es ist sehr weit zu laufen— ”

She pantomimed frantically, trying to make him understand. Why couldn’t she speak German?... And then the Saint’s clear voice spoke coolly from the side of the road, in the driver’s own idiom.

“Permit me to introduce my wife. A little family argument. Please don’t bother. She’ll get over it.”

The driver’s mouth and eyes opened in an elaborate “ Ach, so! ” of intelligence, the bottomless sympathy of one woman-ridden male to another. He chuckled, and engaged his gears.

“ Verzehen Sie, mein Herr! Ich habe auch eine Frau! ” he flung backwards as he drove on.

Belinda’s strength drained out of her. She threw herself down at the side of the road and wept, with her face hidden in her arms. The Saint’s quiet voice spoke from above her head like the voice of destiny.

“It’s no good, Belinda. You can’t run away. Life has caught up with you.”

Days followed through which she moved in a kind of fog — days of physical exhaustion, dark rooms in inns, meals tastelessly yet ravenously devoured, washing of dishes and ruin of manicured hands, lumpy beds on the bare ground, scorching sun, dust, sweat, rain, and cold. Once, after a day of ceaseless drizzle, when she had to sleep in her sodden clothes on earth that squelched under the flimsy groundsheet, she was certain she must catch pneumonia and die, and felt cruelly injured when the fresh air and healthy life refused even to let her catch a cold in the nose. She had those moods of self-pity when any added affliction would have been welcome, so that she could have looked up to Heaven like Job and protested that no one had ever suffered so much.

Self-pity alternated with the hours when her mind was filled with nothing but murderous hatred of the man who was always beside her, calm and unchanging as a mountain, blithely unruffled in good weather and bad. She carried out the tasks he set her because she had no choice, but she swore she would die before he could say he had broken her spirit. At first she washed the frying-pan perfunctorily, and brought it back with scraps of earth still clinging to the stubborn traces of egg. He said nothing about it, but that night he scrambled only two eggs and gave them to her, gray and gritty with the remains of mud she had left.

“That’s your ration,” he said remorselessly. “If you don’t like it, have the pan clean next time.”

Next time she finished her scouring with the towel, and when she wanted to wash she tried to take his. He stopped her.

“Egg is grand for the complexion,” he said. “But if you object to drying your face on a dishcloth, the usual remedy applies — plus washing the towel.”

Sometimes she thought she would steal his knife while he slept and cut his throat: the impulse was there, but she knew she would have been lost without him. Even when the rain had poured all day and everything was drenched, he conjured dry wood out of empty air and had a fire going in no time; he introduced unexpected variety into their simple fare, and robbed orchards for apples with abandoned enthusiasm of a schoolboy. He was never bad-tempered or at a loss: he smoothed difficulties away without appearing to notice them. For thirty-six hours after her spanking she sulked furiously, but it made no mark on his tranquility. The tension of labored silence slipped perforce into a minimum of essential conversation — strained and hostile on her part, unfailingly natural and good-humored on his. Three days passed before she discovered that his eyes were soundlessly laughing at her.

Nothing is more difficult than for two people to be together every hour of the day and punctiliously ignore each other’s existence. Nothing, she found out miserably, can grow more irksome than keeping alive a grudge against someone who is utterly untroubled by rancor. Sometimes the loneliness of her self-imposed silence welled up on her so that she could have shrieked aloud for relief. Imperceptibly, the minimum of essential remarks seemed to increase. Every detail of their daily life became an excuse for some trivial speech which it was torment to resist. She found herself chattering for a quarter of an hour about the pros and cons of boiled and fried onions.

And then came the incredible night when she slept straight through until morning, and woke up contented. For a while the feeling baffled her, and she lay on her back and puzzled about it.

And then it dawned on her in a surprising flash. She was no longer tired! They had covered twenty miles the previous day, by the Saint’s reckoning, and yet her limbs felt supple and relaxed, and her feet were not sore. Had they chosen an exceptionally soft piece of ground on which to camp, or had her body learned to adapt itself to the unyielding couch as well as to the abrupt changes from heat to cold? She could not understand it, but the night lay behind her as an interval of unbroken rest, blissful as a child’s or a wild animal’s. The consciousness of her surroundings came to her with a sense of shock. They had rolled into their blankets high up on a wooded slope on the southern shores of the Achensee: from where she lay she could see fragments of the placid waters of the lake gleaming like splinters of pale blue grass between the trees. On her left, the woods curved up and away in a rich green rolling train to the mighty shoulders of a white-capped peak that took the morning light to its brow in glistening magnificence. When she looked directly upwards, nothing came between her gaze and the arching tent of the sky where three fluffy white clouds floated slowly eastwards with the red glow of the recent sunrise catching them like the reflection of a fire. She had never really seen a sky before, or the glory of trees and rolling hills.

Belinda drank in a picture of unimagined beauty whose very strangeness made it unforgettable. In truth it was nothing scenically startling, not in any way the kind of view to which tourist excursions are run: it was only an odd corner of the natural splendor of the world, all of which is beautiful. But it was the first corner of the world to which the eyes had ever been opened with emotion, a starting point of undreamed-of experience which must be for ever as unique as all beginnings. Dazed with it as if she had awakened on a different planet, she climbed out of her blankets at last and searched mechanically for comb and mirror. The reflection that met her eyes seemed like the portrait of a stranger. Wind and sun had tinted a delicate gold into her skin, and there was a soft flush in her cheeks that had never been there before unless she dabbed it on. Her lips were riper, her eyes clearer and brighter than she had ever thought Nature could make them. She was entranced with herself.

She put her bare feet on the grass, and the sweet touch of the dew on them made the rest of her body aware of being soiled and sticky. Reluctant to separate her toes from the green coolness, and yet eager to perfect that physical joyousness in every way, she strapped on her sandals. In the days before that, she realized with amazement, she had been too weary, too numb with self-pity, to care about anything but superficial cleanliness.

She dug out the soap and went down to the lake shore carrying her towel. What a perfume there was in the chill of the air, what a friendly peace in the stillness of earth and sky! She stood on the road by the shore and looked to her left towards the sleeping white houses of Pertisau, the specks of gaudily striped cafe parasols on the lakeside terraces, and it was like looking at the vanguard of an invasion, and she was a savage come down from the clean hills to gaze in wonder at this outpost of civilization.

She stripped off her clothes and washed, and swam out a little way into the crystal water. It was very cold, but when she had dried herself she was tingling. She went up the hill again slowly, filled with an extraordinary happiness. She had no more envy of those people who were sleeping in soft beds half a mile away, who would presently rise and straggle down to eat their breakfasts in stuffy dining-rooms. How much they were missing — how much she had missed!

Breakfast... She was hungry, in a clear, keen way that matched the air. She delved into the Saint’s pack for food, picked up the frying pan and inspected it. The fire was out, and when she turned over the heap of fuel beside it the wood was damp. How did one kindle a fire?

Simon Templar rolled over and opened his eyes. He hitched himself up on one elbow.

“Hullo — am I late?” he said, and glanced at his watch. It was half past six.

Belinda saw him with a start. She had forgotten... she hated him, didn’t she? She remembered that she was still holding the frying-pan, and dropped it guiltily.

“It’s about breakfast-time,” she said. Her mouth felt clumsy. Odd, how hard it had become to make every word as impersonal and distant as she had trained herself to do — to convey with every sentence that she only spoke to him because she had to.

He threw off his blankets, and dived back into them again to return with two handfuls of twigs.

“Always sleep with some firewood and keep it dry,” he explained.

In a few seconds flames were licking up among the dead ashes, steaming the moisture from the other wood as he built it up around his tinder in a neat cone. He gathered the eggs together, and one of them escaped from his corral and went rolling down the hill. He ran after it, grabbed for it, and caught his toe on the projecting root of a tree; the chase ended in a headlong plunge and a complete somersault which brought him up with his back to the bole of a young sapling. There was something so comical about him as he sat there, with the rescued ovum triumphantly clutched in one hand, that Belinda felt a smile tugging at her lips. She fought against it; her chest ached, and the laughter tore at her throat; she gave way because she had to laugh or suffocate, and bowed before the gale. Simon was laughing too. The wall, the precious barrier that she had built up, was crumbling like sand in that tempest of mirth, and she could do nothing to hold it together...

Presently she was saying, “Why don’t you show me how you do those eggs, then I could take a turn with them?”

“It’s easy enough when you know how. Like everything else, there’s a trick in it. You’ve got to remember that a scrambled egg goes on cooking itself after you take it off the fire, so if you try to finish them in the pan they’re hard and crumby when you serve them. Take them off while they still look half raw, and they end up just fine and juicy.”

She had never enjoyed a meal more in her life, and when it was finished she could not bear to think that they must leave that place almost at once. It was like a reprieve when he announced that his shirt was unspeakable, and they must pause for a washing day. They scrubbed their clothes in pools formed by the tiny waterfall that cascaded close by their camping-ground, and spread them in the sun to dry. It was mid-afternoon before she had to tear herself away: she went down with him to the road feeling newly refreshed and fit for a hundred miles before sundown, yet with the knowledge that she left part of her heart behind up there with the trees and sky.

As they reached the road a band of twenty young people were coming towards them, singing as they came. The men wore leather shorts and white linen shirts; some of the girls wore the same, others wore brief leather skirts. All of them carried packs, and many of the packs were heavy. Belinda saw one man laden with an enormous iron pot and a collection of smoke-blackened pans: he looked like a huge metalized snail.

“ Grüss Gott! ” cried the leader, breaking the song as he came up with them, in the universal greeting of Tirolese wayfarers, and Simon smiled and answered, “ Grüss Gott! ” The others of the party joined in. A couple from the middle fell out and stopped.

“ Wohin gehen Sie? ” asked the boy — he was little more.

Simon told him they were on their way to Jenbach and thence to Innsbruck.

“We go also to Jenbach,” said the boy. “ Kommen Sie mit! ”

The group re-formed around them, and they went on together, past Seespitz and down the long hill that leads to the Inn valley. Belinda was happy. She was proud to be able to keep up with them tirelessly, and their singing made light of the miles. She was seeing everything as if she had been blind from her birth until that day. At one place a gang of men were working on the road; once she would have passed by without looking at them — they would have been merely common workmen, dirty but necessary cattle to serve the needs of those whose cars used the road. Now she saw them. They were stripped to the waist, bodies muscled like statues and polished with sweat like oil, harmonies of brown skin and blue cotton trousers. One party called “ Grüss Gott! ” to the other, smiling, fellow freemen of the air.

“What does that mean — Grüss Gott?” she asked the Saint.

“Greet God,” he answered, and looked at her. “Isn’t that only gratitude?”

The boy on her other side spoke a little English. She asked him where they came from and what they were doing.

“We are Wandervogel. We are tired of the cities, and we make ourselves gypsies. We sing for money, and work in the fields when we can, and make things to sell. Your sandals — they are a pattern made by the Wandervogel. We live now, and some day perhaps we die.”

“Are you happy?” she asked, and he looked at her in simple wonder.

“Why not? We do not want to be rich. We have all the world to live in, and we are free like the birds.”

They came to Jenbach in the cool of the evening, and again there was an inn. But this time it was different.

“We do not go with you anymore,” said the boy. “We go to Salzburg. But first we drink to our friendship.”

Belinda sat on a wooden bench and recalled the first time she had entered an inn. Then she had been too sick at heart to care whether it was dirty; now she would not have cared for a different reason, though she had learned that the inns were as clean as any room in her own home. Again there was a sunburned laborer sitting in the corner she chose, and the Saint talked with him, and when the serving-girl had distributed a tray-load of tankards she joined them and was chaffed and flirted with. It was the first gasthof over again; the difference was in Belinda herself. Now she sat alert, eyes sparkling and shifting from one face to another in an attempt to follow the weaving shuttle of their voices, and when they laughed she laughed, pretending she understood. And the background of it all she did understand, without knowing how. There was a community of happiness and contentment, a fellowship and a freemasonry of people whose feet were rooted in the same good earth, a shared and implicit enjoyment of the food and drink and challenging seasons, a spontaneous hospitality without self-consciousness, a unity of pagans who had greeted God. Man spoke to man, laughed, jested, holding back none of himself, untroubled by fears and jealousies: having no reason to do otherwise, each took the other immediately for a passing friend. Why not? The world they knew was large enough for them all. Why should not nation and nation meet in the same humanity? And Belinda found she was thinking too much, and she was glad when one man who had carried a mandolin slung across his back took it down and strummed a chord on the wires, and the voices round him rose in unison:

Trink, trink, Brüderlein, trink,

Lass doch die Sorgen zu Hause

—with the others chiming in, beating the tables with their tankards, till they were all singing—

Meide den Kummer und meide den Schmerz,

Dann ist das Leben ein Scherz; and the repetition rattled the glass in the windows:

Meide den Kummer und meide den Schmerz,

Dann ist das Leben ein Scherz!

Belinda listened, and Hilaire Belloc’s lines, memorised parrot-fashion at school, went through her mind with a new haunting meaning: “Do you remember an inn, Miranda? Do you remember an inn?”... That was an inn which she would always remember, and she felt strangely humble when the last strong hand had been shaken and she stood outside alone with Simon Templar under the darkening sky.

“How far is it from here to Innsbruck?” she asked as they walked away from the valley in search of a place to sleep.

“We could do it in one long day by the road, which is rather dull and dusty. Or if we struck out the way we’re going, making a detour, it’d be two easy days.”

They were following a lonely cart-track, and every scuff of their footsteps sounded as clearly as if they had been alone in the world. A wagon laden with cordwood creaked out of the blue haze, drawn by a horse and a bullock in double harness; the wagoner cracked his whip and bade them good-evening as he went by. Was that a symbol of something?...

Belinda said, “Those Wandervogel must be very happy.”

“They belong to a new generation,” said the Saint quietly. “There are many people like them here, under different names. It’s an attempt to find a way out of the mess this world is in. The cities have failed them, and they’re looking back to the ancient wisdom of contentment with simple things. At least it’s better than idle hopelessness. And who’s to say? Maybe they’ve got something.” He looked around him. “Here’s grass and a stream and wood to make a fire — shall we make this our camp?”

4

They cooked their food and ate in silence, but it was not the same silence as others that there had been. Belinda was oddly subdued, and Simon knew that his work was done. Afterwards, when it was finished and they sat on over cigarettes and enamel mugs of coffee, they were still quiet. Simon was thinking of other evenings of great peace in his life, as a man does in times of perfect contentment for the joy of comparing the incomparable, and he thought also of another more perilous adventure which had once taken him over the trail they had retraced.

Belinda hugged her knees and gazed into the dancing flames. Why had she never noticed the sweet smell of wood-smoke before?... A log rolled over, scattering a small Vesuvius of sparks, and she said, “What are things like where you’re going after Innsbruck?”

Simon kicked the log back.