The Saint in Europe (The Saint Series) Page 14

  “I happened to see Signor Ravenna jumped on last night by the two thugs who stole his briefcase,” he said. “I imagine he was on his way to see you then. I tried to catch them, but I didn’t do so good. There’s an independent witness, a local citizen, who saw me try, and he’s on record with the police…This morning Signora Ravenna came to my room and asked me about the briefcase. She said she had no idea what was in it and couldn’t imagine why anyone would attack her husband. I told her that so far as I knew the thieves had gotten away with it.”

  “A bluff, to try and make it look as if they weren’t working for you,” Signora Ravenna said vehemently. “You had it all the time!”

  “I didn’t,” said the Saint steadily. “But after you left, I went on thinking. It occurred to me that there was just an outside chance that the fellow I nearly caught had dropped it, and then nobody had thought of looking for it—everybody taking it for granted that somebody else had got it. I went back to the spot and looked. Sure enough, there it was in the bushes. I took it back to my room.”

  “You see, he admits it! I saw him again after that, and he didn’t say anything about finding it. He meant to steal it all the time. The only thing he doesn’t confess is that the whole thing was planned!”

  “While Signora Ravenna was asking me questions,” Simon continued imperturbably, “I also asked her a few. And I knew damn well she was lying. That made me curious. So I opened the briefcase. I found the painting, the book, the necklace which you have—and, of course, that letter of introduction to you. It was just too much for my inquisitive nature. So I came here, using Ravenna’s name, to try and find out what was going on. You’ve been kind enough to explain the background to me. I now know that Ravenna was simply trying to turn his assets into American money which he could use when he emigrated—which, you’ve explained to me, isn’t a crime here, whatever they think of it in Italy. So now I’m satisfied about that—but not about why Signora Ravenna told me so many lies.”

  “I leave that to you, Monsieur Galen,” said the woman with a triumphant shrug. “I would not even tell the police, still less a perfect stranger.”

  Galen’s dispassionate eyes rested immovably on the Saint’s face.

  “And what is your business, Mr Tombs?”

  “Just think of me,” said the Saint, “as a guy with a weakness for puzzles, and an incorrigible asker of questions. I have a few more.” He looked at Signora Ravenna again. “Are you positive your husband couldn’t have discussed this deal with anyone?”

  “Only with his best friend, who gave him the introduction to Monsieur Galen.”

  “And you’re sure you never mentioned it to anybody?”

  “Of course not.”

  “But as I said this morning, the jokers who waylaid your husband knew he was carrying something valuable, and even knew it was in his briefcase. How do you account for that?”

  “I don’t know how crooks like you find out these things,” she flared. “Why don’t you tell us?”

  Simon shook his head.

  “I suggest,” he said rather forensically, “that those crooks could only have known because you told them—because you hired them to get rid of your husband and bring you back his most negotiable property.”

  The servant in the doorway was pushed suddenly aside, and a short spherical man elbowed his way unceremoniously past him into the room.

  “I am Inspector Kleinhaus, of the police,” he said, “and I should also like to hear the answer to that.”

  5

  “You see,” he explained diffidently, “we had a friendly tip from Italy that two known Italian criminals had bought tickets to Switzerland. It was my job to keep an eye on them. I’m afraid they gave me the slip last night, for long enough to attack and rob Signor Ravenna. When I met you at the scene of the crime, Mr Tombs, I didn’t know if you might be associated with them, so I didn’t introduce myself completely. But we kept watch on you. We saw you find the briefcase and take it to your room—incidentally, we recovered it as soon as you went out, with its interesting contents.”

  Galen put the automatic in his pocket and took out the necklace.

  “Except this,” he said conscientiously.

  “Thank you,” said Kleinhaus. “Meanwhile, Mr Tombs, we went on keeping an eye on you, to see where you’d lead us. I still didn’t know how deeply you were involved in the affair, and I was as puzzled as you seem to have been by the things Ravenna was carrying and by the motive for the robbery. Most of that has now been cleared up. One of my men followed you here, and I followed Signora Ravenna myself after I talked to her at the police station a little while ago. Her answers seemed as suspicious to me as they apparently did to you.”

  “How long have you been listening?” Simon asked.

  “Monsieur Galen’s servant was too agitated by the way Signora Ravenna behaved when he told her her husband was already here to remember to shut the front door, so I’ve been in the hall all the time. It was very illuminating.” The detective’s bright blue eyes shifted again. “Now, Signora Ravenna, I still want to hear what you were going to say.”

  Her face was a white mask.

  “I have nothing to say! You can’t be serious about such an accusation—and from such a person! Can you believe I would have my own husband murdered?”

  “Such things have happened,” Kleinhaus said sadly. “However, we can check in another way. I’m glad to be able to tell you now that the two men have already been caught. Mr Tombs will be able to identify them. Then you can confront them, and we’ll see what they say when they realize there’s only one way to save their own skins.”

  It was pitiful to see the false indignation drain out of her face, and the features turn ugly and formless with terror. She moistened her lips, and her throat moved, but no sound came. And then, as if she understood that in that silence she had already betrayed her own guilt for all to see, she gave an inarticulate little cry and ran past Galen, shoving him out of the way with a hysterical violence that sent him staggering, and ran out through the French windows, out on to the sunlit terrace that went to the edge of the cliff where the house perched, and kept on running…

  Inspector Kleinhaus, presently, was the first to turn from looking down over the edge. With a conclusive gesture he replaced his absurdly juvenile hat.

  “Perhaps that saves a lot of unpleasantness,” he remarked. “Well, I must still ask you to identify the two men, Mr Tombs—your name really is Tombs, is it?”

  “It sounds sort of ominous, doesn’t it?” said the Saint easily.

  He still had eight diamonds, six emeralds, and ten valuable stamps in his pockets which no one was left to ask embarrassing questions about, and at such a time it would have been very foolish to draw any more attention to himself.

  JUAN-LES-PINS: THE SPANISH COW

  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.

  Also there was a story about the Saint’s vengeance on an absconding company promoter, readable but not particularly distinguished, and a story called “The Spanish Cow,” the only recorded instance where the Saint deliberately played gigolo with a covetous eye on a fat old woman’s jewels, but with a most unpredictable denouement. The manuscripts of these I have lost somewhere: nobody else could find them except me, and I don’t seem to be able to. Nor do I have the heart to try and write them again from memory. There is nothing so dead to me as a story that has been written once and left behind. These are like children that died young: it’s too bad we can’t have them with us today, but there would be something zombie-like about their resurrection, and so we can only write them off and devote ourselves to the more positively entertaining business of making new ones.

  —Leslie Charteris (1947)


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

  1

  “People,” said Myra Campion languidly, “ought to have to pass an examination and get licensed before they’re allowed to exhibit themselves on a bathing beach.”

  Simon Templar smiled vaguely and trickled sand through his fingers. Around them spread the sun-baked shambles of Juan-les-Pins—a remarkable display of anatomy in the raw. As far as the eye could see in either direction, men and women of all nationalities, ages, shapes, sizes, and shades of color, stripped to the purely technical minimum of covering demanded by the liberal laws of France, littered themselves along the landscape and wooed the ultra-violet ray with a unanimous concentration of effort that would have restored world prosperity if it had been turned into the channels of banking or breeding pedigree wombats or some such lucrative field of endeavor. Reclining on straw mat, under beach umbrellas, in deck chairs, or even on the well-worn sand itself, they sprawled along the margin of that fashionable stretch of water in a sizzling abandon of scorched flesh that would have made a hungry cannibal lick his lips. To the Saint’s occasionally cynical eye there was something reminiscent of an orgy of human sacrifice in that welter of burnt-offerings on the altar of the snobbery of tan. Sometimes he thought that a keen ear might have heard the old sun-god’s Homeric laughter at the childish sublimation that had repopulated his shrine, as the novices turned themselves like joints on a spit, basted their blistered skin with oils and creams, and lay down to roast again, suffering patiently that they might triumph in the end. Simon looked at teak-bronzed males with beautifully lubricated hair parading themselves in magnificent disdain amongst the pink and peeling and furtively envious newcomers, and, being as brown as they were, only larger-minded, he was amused.

  But not at that moment. At that moment he was interested exclusively in Mrs Porphyria Nussberg.

  Mrs Nussberg, at that moment, was methodically divesting herself of a set of boned pink corsets, preparatory to having her swim. The corsets were successfully removed under cover of her dress, defiantly rolled up, and deposited in her canvas chair. The dress followed, and Mrs Nussberg was revealed in a bright yellow bathing costume of nineteenth-century cut, which rose to the base of her neck and extended itself along her limbs almost to the knees and elbows. The completion of her undressing was hailed with irreverent applause from several parties in her neighbourhood.

  “I wonder,” said Myra Campion languidly, making her observation more particular in all the arrogance of her own golden slenderness, “how that woman has the nerve to come here.”

  “Maybe it amuses her,” suggested the Saint lazily, with his blue eyes narrowed against the sun. “Why do fat men feel an urge to wear check suits?”

  His vagueness was rather an illusion. As a matter of fact he was quite pleasantly conscious of the sum blonde grace of the girl beside him, but he had the gift of splitting his mind between two distinct occupations, and one half of his mind had been revolving steadily around Mrs Nussberg and Mrs Nussberg’s jewels for several days.

  Of late Mr Nussberg he knew little, except that he had lived in Detroit and manufactured metal buttons for attachment to cheap overalls, and had in due course died, full of honor and indigestible food. Simon rather suspected that he had been a small man with a bald head and baggy trousers, but he admitted that this suspicion was based on nothing more substantial than the theory that women of Mrs Nussberg’s size and demeanour are usually married by small men with bald heads and baggy trousers. The point was purely academic, anyway: it was now Porphyria Nussberg who carried the burden of a reputedly fabulous fortune on her massive shoulders, and whose well-padded physique, which in some respects did actually resemble that of a camel, should have been speculating anxiously about the size of the needle’s eye through which it might one day be called upon to pass.

  Mrs Nussberg had arrived on the same day as the Saint himself, but she had since become far better known. She was popularly referred to by a variety of names, of which “The Queen of Sheba,” “Cleopatra,” and “The American Tragedy” were a fairly representative selection. But to Simon Templar she would always be the Spanish Cow.

  From this it should not be nastily assumed that the Saint was unnecessarily vulgar. To those of cosmopolitan education, the Spanish Cow is an allusion hardly less classical than others that had been bestowed upon Porphyria. The Spanish Cow—la vache espagnol—is, curiously enough, a creature of the French mythology, and is indignantly repudiated by Spain. It is the symbol of everything clumsy, inefficient, and absurd. When a Frenchman wishes to say that he speaks English excessively badly, he will tell you that he speaks comme une vache espagnol—like a Spanish Cow. In the same simile he may dance, play bridge, butt into a petting party, or remember that he owes you a few thousand francs. For the benefit of those in search of higher education, it might be explained that this does not stem from any ancient national antagonism or occult anthropomorphic legend; it is, etymologically, a corruption of Basque espagnol, and originated in the belief of French purists that the Basques speak atrociously, but this is not the place to enter that argument. To Simon, the name fitted Mrs Nussberg like a glove, with a pleasing ambivalence that included her swarthy complexion and distinctly bovine build.

  She waddled on towards the water’s edge through a cloud of giggles, grins, and whispered comments that were pitched just loud enough to reach her ears, and Simon kicked his toes through the sand and gazed after her thoughtfully. The daily baiting of the Spanish Cow had lost most of its novelty as a spectacle for him, though the rest of the beach showed no signs of tiring of it. It had already rivalled water-skiing among the sports of that season. It had the priceless advantage of costing nothing, and of giving a satisfactory reaction to the most awkward tyro. Goaded far enough, Mrs Nussberg could always be relied upon to give a demonstration in return which dissolved the onlookers into shrieks of laughter. It happened, according to plan, that morning. As Mrs Nussberg tested the temperature of the water with her toes, the Adonis of the beach came swaggering along the rim of wet sand, rippling his rounded muscles—Maurice Walmar, heir to millions and one of the oldest titles to the Almanach de Gotha, a privileged person at any time, and the most daring leader of the new sport. His dark sensual eyes took in the situation at once, and a smile touched his lips. He fell on his knees and bowed his head to the ground in an elaborate mockery of homage.

  Mrs Nussberg put out her tongue at him. The beach howled with delight.

  “She must be screwy,” opined Myra Campion, fascinated.

  The opinion was pretty generally held. Properly provoked, Mrs Nussberg could be depended on to pull the most horrible faces at her tormentors, squawk abuse at them like a trained parrot, and even put her fingers to her nose. Far from bringing forbearance, that apparent screwiness seemed to fan a spark of pure sadism in the onlookers—the same savage instinct that impels urchins to throw stones at an idiot village boy.

  “Have you seen that caricature of her outside the Fregate?” asked Miss Campion. “The boy who draws portraits on the beach did it. It’s too perfect. She tried to make them take it down, and they said she could have it if she bought it. They told her she could have it for fifty thousand francs, but it’s still there. In a frame, hanging up in the entrance.”

  “I’ll have to take a look at it,” said the Saint. He stood up, dusting the sand from his legs. “Do you think you could get around that buoy again before lunch?”

  As he slid easily through the cool smooth water he looked back and saw the bright yellow bathing cap of the Spanish Cow bobbing in the sunlight close to the shore, as she paddled about with her clumsy breast stroke. He pillowed his face in the blue sea and drifted on with a sweep of long effortless arms, gazing down through the crystalline transparency to the misty depths where tiny fish flicked and turned like silver sparks, and decided that the time was ripe for Mrs Nussberg and her jewels to meet Romance.

  2

  It all began the day after Simon arri
ved at Juan-les-Pins. He was sitting on a high stool in a sandwich bar, refreshing his interior with a glass of iced orange juice, when the Spanish Cow came in. Simon did not then know her real name, nor had he become sufficiently interested to christen her, but, observing that she wore voluminous beach pyjamas with broad horizontal stripes of purple and yellow, which made her look like a great blowsy wasp, it is probable that some of the emotion he felt might have been detected by an eagle eye. The Saint’s sense of humor was very human, and the barman looked at him and grinned sympathetically, as one who in his day had also been confronted by the spectacle for the first time. It is therefore possible that the Saint’s face was not quite so woodenly disciplined as a meticulous politeness might have wished. It is possible that one of his eyebrows may have twitched involuntarily, or the corners of his mouth widened a slight half-millimetre, in answer to the barman’s confidence. And then he glanced at the vision again, and saw that it was staring at him through a pair of lorgnettes and pulling faces at him.

  The Saint blinked. He regarded his orange juice suspiciously. To a man of his abstemious habits, it was a remarkable hallucination to affront the brain at eleven o’clock in the morning—even in a morning of such potent sunshine as those shores boast in July.

  He looked again. Mrs Nussberg put out her tongue in a grimace of bloodcurdling menace.

  Simon swayed slightly on his stool. His friends had frequently told him that he was quite mad, but he had never expected to lose his last vestige of sanity in quite so disturbing a way. He turned uneasily to an inspection of the other patrons of the bar, wondering if the portly Dutchman on his left would suddenly seem to be elongating and turning bright green, or if the charming honey-blonde damsel on his right would be pulling off her pink ears and stirring them into her coffee. Instead he found the other customers still of normal shape and hue, smiling broadly. He braced himself to look at the striped vision again. It applied its thumb to its nose and extended its fingers towards him, waggling them with hideous glee.