16 The Saint Overboard Read online

  "Perhaps you were too busy."

  "Anything else could have waited," said the Saint, with pro­found conviction. "Except perhaps the Bank of England. . . . And is that what you're detecting?"

  She took a cigarette from his pack, and a light from the butt between his fingers.

  "Yes. I work for the Ingerbeck Agency—we have a contract with Lloyd's, and we handle a lot of other insurance business. You see, where we work, there's no ordinary police force. Where a ship sinks, the wreck is nominally under the protection of the country that covers the water; but if the underwriters have paid out a total loss the salvage rights belong to them. Which means precisely nothing. In the last fifty years alone, the insurance companies have paid out millions of pounds on this kind of risk. Of course they hoped to get a lot of it back in salvage, but the amounts they've seen would make you laugh."

  "Is it always a loss?"

  "Of course not. But we've known—they've known—for a long time, that there was some highly organised racket in the back­ground cheating them out of six figures or more a year. It's efficient. It's got to be. And yet it's easy. It has clever men, and the best equipment that money can buy. We went out to look for them."

  "You?"

  "Oh, no. Ingerbeck's. They've been on it for the last five years. Some of their men went a long way. Three of them went too far—and didn't come back." She met his eyes steadily. "It's that sort of racket. . . . But one of them found a trail that led somewhere, out of hundreds that didn't; and it's been followed up."

  "To here?"

  She nodded.

  "You see, we came to a brick wall. The men could get so far, but they couldn't go on. They couldn't get inside the racket. Two of those who didn't come back—tried. We couldn't take a chance on anything drastic, because we've no official standing, and we hadn't any facts. Only a good guess. Well, there was one other way. Somewhere at the top of the racket there must be a head man, and the odds are that he's human."

  He took in the grace of her as she lounged there in the over­sized bathrobe, understanding the rest.

  "You came out to be human with him."

  The turn of her head was sorcery, the sculpture of her neck merging into the first hinted curve between the lapels of the bathrobe was a pattern of magic that made murder and sudden death egregious intrusions.

  "I didn't succeed—so far. I've tried. I've even had dinner with him, and danced at the Casino. But I haven't had an invitation to go on board his boat. To-night I got the devil in me, or something. I tried to go on board without an invitation."

  "Didn't you guess there'd be a watch on deck?"

  "I suppose so. But I thought he'd probably be sleepy, and I could move very quietly." She grimaced. "He got me, but he let me go when I fired a shot beside his ear—I didn't hurt him—and I dived overboard."

  "And thereby hangs a tale," said the Saint.

  4

  He stood up and flicked his cigarette-end through a porthole, helping himself to another. The lines of his face were lifted in high relief as he drew at a match.

  "You didn't tell me all this to pass the time, did you?" he smiled.

  "I told you because you're—you." She was looking at him directly, without a trace of affected hesitation. "I've no author­ity. But I've seen you, and I know who you are. Maybe I thought you might be interested."

  She straightened the bathrobe quickly, looking round for an ashtray.

  "Maybe I might," he said gently. "Where are you staying?"

  "The Hotel de la Mer."

  "I wish you could stay here. But to-night—I'm afraid there must be a thin chance that your boy friend wasn't quite satisfied with my lines when we exchanged words, and you can't risk it. Another time——"

  Her eyes opened wider, and he stretched out his hand with a breath of laughter.

  "I'm going to row you home now," he said. "Or do we have another argument?"

  "I wouldn't argue," she began silkily; and then, with the cor­ners of her mouth tugging against her will, she took his hand. "But thanks for the drink—and everything."

  "There are only two things you haven't told me," he said. "One is the name of this boat you wanted to look at."

  She searched his face for a moment before she answered:

  "The Falkenberg"

  "And the other is the name of the boy friend—the bloke who passed in the night."

  "Kurt Vogel."

  "How very appropriate," said the Saint thoughtfully. "I think' I shall call him Birdie when we get acquainted. But that can wait. ... I want to finish my beauty sleep, and I suppose you haven't even started yours. But I've got a hunch that if you're on the beach before lunch we may talk some more. I'm glad you dropped in."

  The fog was thinning to a pearl-grey vagueness lightening with the dawn when he rowed her back; and when he woke up there were ovals of yellow sunlight stencilled along the bulkhead from the opposite portholes. He stretched himself like a cat, freshen­ing his lungs with the heady nectar of the morning, and lighted a cigarette. For a while he lay sprawled in delicious laziness, taking in the familiar cabin with a sense of new discovery. There she had sat, there was the cup and glass she had used, there was the crushed stub of her cigarette in the ashtray. There on the carpet was still a darkened patch of damp, where she had stood with the salt water dewing her slim legs and pooling on the floor. He saw the ripple of gold in her hair, the shaft of challenge in her eyes, the exquisite shape of her as he first saw her like a shy nymph spiced with the devil's temper; and knew a supreme con­tent which was not artistically rewarded by the abrupt apparition of a belligerent face sheltering behind a loose walrus moustache in the door leading to the galley.

  "Lovely morn'n, sir," said the face, and limped struttingly in to plunk down a glass of orange juice beside him. "Brekfuss narf a minnit."

  The Saint grinned ruefully and hauled himself up.

  "Make it two minutes, Orace," he said. "I had company last night."

  "Yessir," said Orace phlegmatically, gathering up cups; and he had retired to the galley again before Simon saw that he had left a second glass of orange juice ostentatiously parked in the mid­dle of the table.

  The mist had receded under the sun until it was only a haze on the horizon, and a sky of pale translucent azure lofted over a sea like glass. Simon went up on deck with a towel round his middle and slipped adroitly into the water, leaving the towel behind. He cut away across the estuary in a straight line of hiss­ing crawl, turned and rolled over on his back to wallow in the invigorating delight of cold water sheathing his naked limbs, and made his way back more leisurely to eat bacon and eggs in a deck chair in the spacious cockpit while the strengthening sun warmed his shoulders.

  All these things, then, were real—the physical gusto of life, quickened by unasked romance and laced with the wine of dan­ger. Even the privileged cynicism of Orace only served as a touchstone to prove reality, rather than to destroy illusion. It was like the old days—which as a matter of fact were by no means so old. He lighted a cigarette and scanned the other boats which he could see from his anchorage. A cable's length away, towards the Pointe de la Vicomté, he picked a white rakish mo­tor cruiser of about a hundred tons, and knew that this must be the one even before he went down to the saloon for a pair of binoculars and read the name from a lifebelt. Falkenberg. Si­mon's lips twitched in a half-smile that was entirely Saintly. The name of the legendary Flying Dutchman was a perfect baptism for the pirate ship of that hawk-faced black-browed man who called himself Kurt Vogel, and the Saint mentally saluted the antarctic quality of bravado that must have chosen it. Still using his binoculars from the prudent obscurity of the saloon, he took in the high outswept bows and the streamlined angles of the wheelhouse forward, the clean lines of superstructure dipping to the unusually low flat counter, and credited her with twin racing engines and a comfortable thirty knots. Abaft the saloon there was a curious projection neatly shrouded in canvas—for the moment he could not guess what it was.


  He stropped his razor and ran water into a basin; and he was finishing his shave when his man came through with the break­fast plates. Simon rounded his chin carefully and said: "Orace, have you still got that blunderbuss of yours—the young howitzer you bought once in mistake for a gun?"

  "Yessir," said Orace unemotionally.

  "Good." The Saint wiped his razor and splashed water over his face. "You'd better get out my automatic as well and look it over."

  "Yessir."

  "Put a spot of oil in the works and load up a couple of spare magazines. And grease the cartridges—in case I take a swim with it."

  "Yessir."

  "We may be busy."

  Orace's moustache stirred, like a field of corn under a passing zephyr. His limp was a souvenir of Zeebrugge Mole and days of authorised commotion as a sergeant of His Majesty's Marines, but it is doubtful whether even in those years of international discord he had heard as many different calls to arms as had come his way since he first took service with the Saint.

  " 'Ave you bin gettin' in trouble again?" he demanded fiercely.

  The Saint laughed behind his towel.

  "Not trouble, Orace—just fun. I won't try to tell you how beautiful she is, because you have no soul. But she came out of the sea like a mermaid, and the standard of living went up again like a rocket. And would you mind moving off that bit of the carpet, because the comparison is too hideous. She stood there with the water on her, and she said 'Will you let me out?' And I said 'No!' Just like that."

  "Didyer, sir?"

  "And she pulled a gun on me."

  "Go on, did she?"

  "She pulled a gun. Look, you pull a gun. Hold your hand like that. Right. Well, I said 'Ha, ha,'—like that, very sinister. I switched out the lights! I leapt upon her! I grabbed her wrist! We fell on the bunk——"

  "Steady on, sir, yer 'urting!"

  "You shut up. She was crrrushed against me. Her lips were an inch from mine. For heaven's sake stop whiffling your moustache like that. I felt her breath on my face. I was on fire with passion. I seized her in my arms . . . and . . ." Simon planted a smack­ing kiss on his crew's horrified brow. "I said 'Don't you think Strindberg is too sweet?' Now go and drown yourself."

  He picked himself up and erupted out of the cabin, slinging the towel round his neck, while Orace gaped goggle-eyed after him. In a few minutes he was back, tightening the belt of a pair of swimming trunks, and stuffing cigarettes into a waterproof metal case.

  "By the way," he said, "we aren't full up on juice for the auxil­iary. As soon as you've cleared up, you'd better take the dinghy and fetch a couple of dozen bidons. Get some oil, too, and see that there's plenty of food and drink. There's another bird mixed up in this who's less beautiful—a guy named Kurt Vogel—and we ought to be ready for traveling."

  He went up on deck and looked around. The sun was flooding down on stucco villas and the rise of green behind, and cutting innumerable diamonds from the surface of the water. It was going to be a hot brilliant day. People were well awake on the other yachts near by. A gramophone opened up cheerfully on one, and a loud splash and a shout heralded another of the morn­ing's bathers. The Falkenberg was too far away for him to be able to distinguish its signs of life: a couple of seamen were swabbing down the paint forward, but nothing that resembled the hooknosed man was visible. Simon noticed that besides the outboard dinghy there was now a small speed tender also tied up alongside which had not been there when he made his first survey—it had the air of being part of the Falkenberg's equipment, and probably it had been away on a trip to the shore and re­turned while he was below.

  After a while he dived off the side and swam round the Pointe du Moulinet to the beach. He strolled the length of the plage while the sun dried him, and then chose a clear space to stretch himself out opposite the Casino.

  He had not seen Loretta Page during his walk, but he knew she would come. He lay basking in the voluptuous warmth, and knew with an exquisite certainty that the kind gods of adventure would take care of that. The story she had told him went through his memory, not in an exuberant riot of comprehension as it had when he first heard it, but in a steady flow, fact by fact, a sequence of fragments of accepted knowledge which strung logically together to make a tale that was breath-taking in its colossal implications. If it was something on a more grandiose scale than anything he had ever dreamed of even in his wildest flights of buccaneering, he was still ready to give it a run. He blew smoke into the sparkling air and considered the profile of Kurt Vogel. Properly worked on by an octet of bunched knuc­kles. . . .

  "Hullo, old timer."

  He dropped his gaze and saw her. She wore the same ele­mentary swim suit, with a bathrobe that fitted her better than his had done, swept back by her hands on her hips and leaving her long satiny legs to the sun. The grey eyes were dark with devilment.

  He rolled up on one elbow.

  "Hullo, pardner."

  "Did you sleep well?"

  "I saw ghosts," he said sepulchrally. "Ghosts of the dead past that can never be undone. They rose up and wiggled their bony fingers at me, and said 'You are not worthy of her!' I woke up and burst into tears."

  She slipped out of the striped gown and sat down beside him.

  "Wasn't there any hope?"

  "Not unless you stretched out your little hand and lifted me out of the abyss. Couldn't you take on the job of saving a lost soul? Of course you might always get lost yourself, but that wouldn't matter. We could always console each other."

  "I wonder why Ingerbeck's didn't think of signing you up years ago."

  He smiled.

  "They might have tried, but I'm afraid I haven't got any sort of affinity for dotted lines. Besides, I'm not naturally honest. You try to recover stolen property for the insurance companies, don't you?"

  "That's part of the job."

  "Well, I do the same thing, but not for any insurance com­pany."

  "Not even on a ten per cent commission?"

  "I have worked on that basis, but it was a long time ago. My tastes were a lot more innocent and simple in those days."

  "It's not a bad reward, when there are millions to look for," she said temptingly.

  He sighed.

  "It's so dull to be honest. Nobody else but you could make it even bearable. But I know what you mean. I'm on a holiday, and I can always pick up a few millions some other time. It was your picnic originally, and you let me in on it——"

  "I needn't have done that."

  There was a cool and rather sad finality in her voice, so much in contrast to the wavering dance of her eyes, that he looked at her keenly for a moment before replying. In that vivid and care­free surround of laughing swimmers and brightly-clad sunbathers he felt a shadow round them, cutting them off in a dynamic isolation of their own from all these thoughtless and ordinary things.

  "It was my charm," he explained at length. "My father-con­fessor touch. You just couldn't resist me."

  She shook her head. The gold flashed in her hair, and her lips smiled; but the light mockery of her eyes was subdued to an elfin seriousness.

  "I mean I needn't have given up hope and gone in for such desperate measures so soon."

  "What's happened?" he asked; and the brown smooth-muscled arm on which he was propped up turned so that his hand closed over hers.

  She looked down at him steadily, and the shadow around them failed to touch her enchanting face.

  "I had a note this morning," she said. "It was delivered at the hotel before I woke up. I've got an invitation to have dinner with Vogel on the Falkenberg."

  II. HOW SIMON TEMPLAR ALSO RECEIVED AN INVITATION,

  AND A PAIR OF PINK SOCKS HOVE UP ON THE HORIZON

  A STOUT gentleman ambled by, with a green eyeshade on his brow and a diminutive slip clinging by some miracle of adhesion to the reentrant curve of his abdomen, looking like a debauched Roman emperor on his way to the bath; a Parisian sylph in a startling lace costume that left nothing except
her birthday to the imagination arranged her white limbs artistically under a gaudy sunshade and waited for the rush of art students to gather round; two children disputing the ownership of a bucket opened up on a line of personalities that would have left a couple of bootleggers listening in awe; but these were events that might have been happening on another planet.

  He remembered the speedboat tied up alongside the Falk­enberg, which had not been there before.

  "You hadn't got some crazy idea of accepting, had you?" he said mechanically.

  "It's what I've been waiting for."

  "I know, but— What do you think happened last night?"

  She took one of his cigarettes.

  "I don't think I could have been seen. I didn't see the man who caught me—he came up behind. And it was pretty dark where I was. He caught me round the neck with his arm; then I fired the shot, he let go, and I dived."

  "He'd know it was a woman."

  "Not necessarily. Don't you remember that Vogel said he was looking for a man?"

  "An obvious lie."

  "A very stupid one—if it was. But what could it gain him? If you'd already seen a woman, it'd make you think there was something queer going on. If you hadn't, what did it matter?"

  "He might have been trying to tempt me to keep up the lie— which would have given me away."

  She shrugged her intoxicating shoulders.

  "Aren't you rather looking for trouble?" she said.

  "That's my job," answered the Saint evenly. "And inciden­tally, it happens to be one of the reasons why I didn't come to a sticky end many years ago. I'll give you something else. Suppose Vogel wasn't quite happy about me last night?"

  "Well?"

  "It was rather an unusual hour for anyone to be up and about —messing around with fenders. Not impossible, but unusual. And if Vogel's the kind of man we think he is, he keeps alive by sorting out unusual things—like I do. He couldn't make any fuss, because that'd be letting himself in if he was wrong. But he could puff away in that outboard, stop the engine, and paddle back quietly on the oars. He couldn't have seen you—probably he couldn't even have heard what you said—but he could hear that there was a girl on board."