Trust the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 3

  “Shall we sit out another minuet?” he inquired. “Or should we move on?”

  “I think we should try something else,” she replied with the same demure detachment. “Do you know—you won’t believe me—I’ve never seen a strip-tease?”

  “I believe that can he easily remedied,” he said, with the same gravity.

  The German strip-tease follows much the same pattern as the American original, but with characteristic efficiency it moves much more briskly towards the essential objective, which is that the teaser should strip. In the opinion of many students, this leads to what might be paradoxically called a decent haste in the peeling. The esoteric stimuli of the bump and grind have never enslaved many addicts in Europe, but to replace that allure the German ecdysiast has the advantage of a law which permits her to expose every last square centimetre of her person provided she does not wiggle it. Therefore with studious legality even the G-string is twanged off during a momentary blackout before the final climax, or not even bothered with in incidental tableaux, and the uncomplicated connoisseur of nudity can be assured of one hundred per cent satisfaction.

  On and around the Reeperbahn, the problem is not to find a place that features this kind of entertainment but to decide which one to patronize. Each of them has its panegyrist outside to buttonhole the passer-by and extol the lewd delights within. The first such temple of voyeurism that Simon picked at random, however, failed so drably to live up to its eulogy that he could not quite make himself accept it as a single and final sample of what the town could offer in that line, and he himself suggested one more try. Their next gamble was the Colibri, and there the density of the crowd which happily shared its tables on a basis of vacant chairs rather than acquaintance indicated that it relied less on a barker outside than on a clientele that knew its way around. The supposition was rapidly justified: the exhibitionists averaged younger and comelier, and disrobed with a continuing celerity that would have given even a jaded sultan no cause for complaint.

  But Eva watched this with no perceptible difference from the way she had viewed the lamentable display in the preceding joint—without horror or excitement, but with a sort of tepid amusement that narrowly escaped the suspicion of boredom.

  “Is it what you expected?” he asked, when she caught his eyes on her instead of on the latest playful grouping of naked maidens.

  “More or less.”

  “You don’t seem to get much of a kick out of it.”

  “Did you expect me to? A normal woman shouldn’t get much of a kick out of watching other women undress, should she?”

  “I was wondering why you were so keen to do it.”

  “To know just what people mean when they talk about these shows, and what it is that they go to see. You see, I’m really terribly innocent, and yet a woman hates to be called unsophisticated. But I can admit it to you, because you don’t know any of my friends, and after this I shall know as much as they do.”

  He was certainly not qualified to confirm or contest that, but it was a divertingly novel approach. He said, “Now what would you like to add to your education?”

  “I’ve heard there’s a street of little houses, where the girls sit in the windows or make bargains at the doors.”

  There was such a street, or alley, and they obtained directions to it without difficulty, but at the half-barricaded entrance they were barred by a stodgily correct Polizist.

  “Very sorry,” he said in English, recognizing automatically that only foreigners attempted this transgression. “Not for ladies. Men only.”

  “How silly,” she pouted as they walked away after a brief futile argument. “There are women in there already, aren’t there?”

  “But only on business,” Simon pointed out. “I can understand how they could resent being stared at like specimens in a zoo by other women who’d never done that kind of work. But perhaps you didn’t know that it can be work.”

  She gave him a sharp defensive glance, which he blandly pretended not to notice. He seemed to be merely looking around for some other potential source of the sophistication she wanted.

  “There must be some way for a man to meet a girl that is not so cold-blooded,” she said at last. “You must have had some experience in that way. I can’t see you going in that closed street to buy a woman. But what else would you do?”

  He forbore from mentioning that he had not done so badly by just sitting at the bar of a first-class hotel. They were at the corner of another turning, down which the darkness was splintered by a blazing frontage of all-purpose brilliance topped by a vertical arrangement of fluorescent tubes which spelled the name Sübersack.

  “If I were a sailor on the loose,” he said, remembering bygone days in far-off ports when he had been little more than that, “I’d probably try my luck in a joint something like that.”

  The inside was as stark and garish as the outside. There was no attempt at décor, merely a practical provision of seats and tables. Girls and women in street clothes that made no pretension of glamor, and ordinary-looking men of mostly middle and lower ages in even more undistinguished tailorings, stood around or sat and drank and/or eyed each other and/or danced in a minimum of empty floor space to the rhythms of a juke box.

  Simon and Eva sat on a bench in a corner and ordered more beer. A peripatetic artist of curiously ageless aspect came by, whipped out a pair of nail scissors, and snipped away at a piece of plain paper which, unfolded, separated, and swiftly pasted to two plain white cards, became a mirror-pair of their two silhouettes in black cut-out. The likenesses were extraordinary. Simon registered his appreciation with largesse which was apparently excessive, for the artist beamingly began snipping again. The scissors twinkled and flew, and out of their quicksilver nibbling came another mirror-pair of silhouettes, only this time it was a pastoral whimsy, a boy and a girl and a fawn framed in a woodland bower, all filigreed in a couple of minutes with a delicacy and truth of line that many a competent draughtsman would have been glad to achieve with a pen in half an hour. The snipper presented those shadowgraphs as a reciprocal bonus, with a smile and a bow, and went away, but for Simon Templar, who had his own peculiarly slanted scale of values, this was the happiest highlight of the evening so far.

  “I think this is rather dull,” Eva said.

  The Saint by that time was beginning to feel unwontedly adaptable.

  “What would you suggest next?” he asked.

  “There are special movies, aren’t there, which are only shown privately?”

  “There are such things. But I don’t think you’d like them.”

  “Then we can walk out. But I’d like to know why I didn’t like them.”

  “They mightn’t be so easy to find. Even around here, they’re probably illegal.”

  “At least we can inquire.”

  “And expensive.”

  She opened her eyes wider.

  “But we agreed to go Dutch. Are you running short? Or do you think I wasn’t serious?” She opened her bag and took out a small wad of currency held in a clip, from which she pulled three hundred-mark notes. “Here—when we settle up, you give me the change, if there is any.”

  Simon put away the deposit unblushingly, with the impersonal courtesy of a banker. They went out again, and he said, “I suppose one of those touts on the Reeperbahn could tell us what the chances are.”

  “Let’s go this way.” She pointed. “It looks like a nice sinister street.”

  He thought that its sinister air was probably only an illusion compounded of grime and bad lighting, but he automatically set himself on the alert for any flicker of a shadow or whisper of sound that would give split-second warning of a sneak attack. It seemed rather far-fetched to imagine that she would have gone through such a long and roundabout routine merely to set him up for a rendezvous with a mugger, but he had survived far beyond any reasonable expectation for a man of his proclivities largely because he never completely ruled out any such possibilities, however remote. But a
t the same time taking the likelier line that there was no such sordid anticlimax in store, he was trying to decide at what point he should set a limit to the depths of depravity to which a gentleman could properly escort a scientifically inquisitive lady, whilst toying with his own scientific temptation to find out how far she would go before calling off the experiment.

  And then all these avenues of speculation dead-ended suddenly and electrifyingly as they came down to within a few yards of the Reeperbahn again, without any incident, and yet Eva abruptly stopped in her tracks and clutched the Saint’s arm as if she had been confronted by a rampaging ogre.

  It was nothing so spectacular that she pointed at, however. Nothing but the window of a side-street pawnshop, located there to accommodate patrons of the main drag who might find themselves temporarily embarrassed for the wherewithal to prolong a promising spree. Inside the window were spread and stacked and suspended the weird miscellaneous pledges of uncounted revellers who had moved on and left their collateral unredeemed, every conceivable form of security from cuff-links to clarinets.

  And near the center of the window was a tarnished pewter goblet.

  On which were crudely carved the initials “KS.”

  Suspended, Simon saw, as Eva dragged him closer, from the scratched outline of a gibbet…

  “That’s it, isn’t it?” she breathed. “The goblet that it tells about in your guide-book!”

  “It couldn’t be,” he said mechanically.

  “But it is! It’s exactly like the book describes it—the initials, the gallows, every thing!”

  The Saint stared at it. He couldn’t go on arguing with what she said. And yet he was in the same state of incredulous shock that must stun anyone who sees the number of his ticket listed as the winner of some National Lottery or the Irish Sweep. It was the thing that everybody has day-dreamed of but recognized realistically that it will never happen. And yet, even more inescapably than a bolt of lightning, it has to strike someone, somewhere.

  But in this instance, the chronicler must now reveal, the lightning was no electrical phenomenon. It was the stroke of genius of Franz Kolben, perhaps the most financially successful though inglorious author that Hamburg has ever known. A little belated background may here be necessary. Mr Franz Kolben (who formerly preferred to be known as “Frank”) was, as the Saint had somewhat intuitively divined, in fact a born native of Milwaukee, USA, an off-sprout of German immigrants who had raised him bilingually with better motives than he had ever applied to this advantage. Leaving home as soon as he could dispense with its fringe benefits, young Frank had found employment in a modern furniture factory in Grand Rapids, from which he graduated to a more exclusive atelier in Chicago which fabricated equally modern antiques. From there, since he was an ambitious and go-ahead type with wits as sharp as any chisel, it was another logical step from the manufacturing to the retailing side, which not only paid better but offered more scope to his developing ingenuity, and enlarged his vision from the limited area of phony period furniture to the entire field of bogus antiquity. He was in a fair way to becoming the beardless wonder of the racket in that region when the draft finally netted him and unfeelingly transmuted him from an operator to a number in an operation.

  World War II had reached its supposedly glorious conclusion about the time Sergeant Kolben had finally convinced the arbiters of his destiny that his knowledge of German entitled him to an occupation billet in Europe rather than a combat assignment in the Pacific. To his indescribable chagrin, he had presented his case so convincingly that no subsequent effort could change his orders, and in due inexorable course he found himself in Hamburg, a very small cog in the Military Government, replacing some lucky veteran with enough points to be heading for home and honorable discharge.

  With all his faults, however, Frank Kolben had never been a quitter, and he wasted less time than many more honest men in unprofitable pining. His background and knowledge inevitably trended him in one particular direction, and when he detected one of the earliest traders to come out of hiding in the act of selling a battle-happy GI a piece of cheap china guaranteed to be genuine old Dresden lovingly cached through blitz and krieg, he knew he had it made. What might have begun and ended in less talented hands as a rudimentary exercise in blackmail, blossomed under Frankie’s green-hungry thumbs into an industry which may have mulcted the warriors homing from its range of more hard-earned dollars than any temptation but sex. To this day, there are probably few communities in America where you could not find some spurious souvenir of German liberation which Kolben had helped to produce.

  But there came a time at last when all the well-heeled buyers had been repatriated, and even Master Sergeant Kolben was eligible for discharge, and Frankie found to his astonishment that he was not yet ready to go home. He had done all right and he had evolved notions of doing better, and he had also formed a sentimental attachment which satisfied all his desires in that zone. He decided to stay on, and his hunch was right. Very soon the free-spending soldiery was replaced by prosperous German industrialists from the Rhineland and the South, and then they in turn were diluted by the first venturesome trickle of civilian tourists from former enemy countries, a trickle which swelled rapidly into a tide, which washed up a regular supply of suckers on the doorstep of Frankie’s very satisfied partner—whose name, we need no longer conceal, was Uhrmeister.

  The Introduction to Hamburg had been one of Frankie’s sublimest inspirations, and he had worked hard on it, despite the fact that he had cribbed practically all its information from other publications. The labor of assembling, rearranging, and paraphrasing the material sufficiently to evade suit for infringements of copyright had been surprisingly arduous, for he had no natural literary inclination, but it was fully rewarded by the opportunity to inject the one sentence which was completely and incontrovertibly original with him: “He is said to have hidden a map of its whereabouts in the base of a pewter goblet on which he carved his initials suspended from a gallows, but if has never been found.”

  “Where did you read this, Franz?” asked Uhrmeister when he saw the manuscript—he could never get used to addressing his associate, who spoke German as well as he did himself, by anything but the German name. “I lived here all my life, and this is the first time I heard it.”

  “I made it up, Papa,” Frankie admitted cheerfully. “But it is the most important thing in the book. Remember, to almost any tourist, a guide-book is like gospel. He may not believe what you tell him—but everything he reads in a book, he believes. So when you see a likely mark, you don’t tell him anything. You give him the book.”

  Herr Uhrmeister, who was no dummkopf, but who had questioned why he should invest in the printing of a guide-book superficially like any other guide-book but to be dispensed gratuitously in certain locations without even mentioning the name of his shop, began to catch on.

  “Now, we must begin to make these goblets.”

  For some time they had sold very well indeed, if not like hot cakes, perhaps more appropriately like gold bricks, as they appeared in other places not ostensibly connected with Herr Uhrmeister’s establishment on ABC-Strasse, at preposterously inflated prices which were seldom questioned by buyers in a panic to get away with their purchase before anyone else saw it and outbid them, or the vendor realized what he was parting with.

  The fact that the bases of the goblets, when cut into or broken open, proved to contain nothing but dust and air, did not constitute fraud under any statute, and in any case the hardihood of a buyer who would have brought formal complaint about having been cheated out of what he hoped to cheat the seller was practically inconceivable. Probably there was not one in a hundred who even suspected that he had been more than just unlucky. Nevertheless, after a while Frank Kolben’s restless mind perceived where the wheeze was falling short of its maximum potential pay-off, and went back to work to remedy that…

  “If that’s Klaus Störtebeker’s own original goblet,” Simon persisted, “why is
it still there? Why hasn’t someone else seen it and bought it before this? If it comes to that, why is the pawnbroker selling it?”

  “Perhaps he hasn’t heard the story,” Eva responded. “Why should a little pawnbroker know everything? Why should everyone who passes know it? If we had passed last night instead of tonight, before you read that book, would we have known? At least I am not going to laugh at it and go away!”

  She released his arm with a movement that was almost like throwing away something that had become distasteful, and turned to the door of the shop. It opened for her with a loud jangling of bells; the lights had always been on inside, and through the window Simon could see the presumable proprietor shuffle out through the curtains behind the counter at the back—an old man whose trade had plainly left him no illusions and even less patience with anybody who expected him to harbor one. The shop was apparently still open, ready to finance anyone who came by with acceptable security.

  By the time Simon caught up with Eva inside, she already had the proprietor at a disadvantage in the less familiar aspect of buyer-seller relations, for such places.

  “Are you crazy?” she was saying in German. “Three hundred marks—for a battered old thing like that?”

  “It is very old,” said the shopkeeper, like a recitation. “Perhaps of the fifteenth century.”

  “Then it is so much more second-hand. I will pay two hundred.”

  “That is absurd, gracious lady. Perhaps two hundred and ninety…”

  Simon picked up the goblet and examined it more closely. Judging by its weight, the stem and base seemed to be hollow, but they were solidly plugged at the bottom. He studied the construction and the sealing while the haggling ran its predestined course.