16 The Saint Overboard Read online

  "Which isn't impossible either," she said demurely.

  Simon frowned.

  "You forget my Saintly reputation. But still, maybe to Vogel, with his low criminal mind, it isn't impossible either. But it's still unusual enough to be worth looking at. And then there's you."

  "Without a reputation."

  "And not deserving one. You've been making a clear set at him for several days—weeks—whatever it is. That again may not be impossible. It might be his money, or his beauty, or because he sings so nicely in his bath. But if it isn't even unusual, if I were in his place I'd think it was—interesting. Interesting enough, maybe, to try and find out some more about you."

  She pressed his hand—she had been letting it rest in his all that time, as if she hadn't noticed.

  "Dear man," she said, "don't you think I know all this?"

  "And if he only wants to see exactly where you stand in the game?"

  "I can pack a gun."

  "Like any other ordinary innocent woman."

  "Then I'll go without it."

  "You wouldn't be much worse off."

  "All the same, I'll go."

  "Three," he quoted her, "didn't come back."

  She nodded. The impish humour still played on her lips and the surface of her eyes, but the depths behind it were clear and still.

  "When you join Ingerbeck's, you don't sign on for a cocktail party. You join an army. You take an oath—to do your job, to keep your mouth shut, and to take the consequences. Wouldn't you go?"

  "Yes. But there are special risks."

  "For a poor defenceless girl?"

  "They call it Worse than Death."

  "I've never believed it."

  He sat up and stared thoughtfully over the water. There was a quality of lightness in her decision that ended argument more finally than any dramatic protestations. She would go; because whatever the risk might be, it was not fact. It was her job to find out, not to guess.

  "I take it you've already accepted," he said wryly.

  "The messenger was going to call back for my answer. I left a letter when I came out. I said I'd be delighted. Maybe Kurt Vogel isn't so bad as he's painted," she said dreamily. "He left some lovely flowers with the invitation."

  "I shouldn't be surprised if you fell for him."

  "I might."

  "But now and then your conscience would prick you. When you were riding around in your Rolls, half strangled with di­amonds, the memory of lost love would haunt you. I can see you stifling a sob, and pressing a penny into a poor beggar's hand before you hurry on, because he reminds you of me."

  "Don't say it," she pleaded tremulously. "I can't bear it. How was I to know you cared like that?"

  The Saint scratched his head.

  "I must have forgotten to tell you," he admitted. "Never mind." He turned to her with cavalier blue eyes sobered to a thoughtful directness that she had seen before. "But does it leave me out?"

  "I don't know," she said steadily. "Have you decided to break off your holiday?"

  "Let's have a drink and talk about it."

  She shook her head.

  "I can't risk it. Vogel may be ashore now—he may be any­where. I've risked enough to talk to you at all. If you've changed your mind since last night, we'll fight over it."

  "Did I tell you I'd made up my mind?" Simon inquired mildly.

  "You let me think you had. I took a chance when I told you the story. I wanted you to know. I still do." She was facing him without banter now, cool and possessed and momentarily unpossessable, and yet with a shadow of wistfulness deepening in her gaze. "I think Ingerbeck himself would have done the same. We might get a long way together; and if we came through there'd be plenty of commission to split. Just once, it might be fun for you to look at a dotted line."

  His eyebrows slanted quizzically.

  "Otherwise?"

  "I suppose we can still be hung out to dry."

  She stood up, dusting the sand from her robe. Simon picked himself up after her, and the grey eyes came back to his face.

  "Where should we meet on this—dotted line?" he asked re­signedly.

  "I'll be here to-morrow. No, not here—we can't take this risk again. Suppose I swam out and met you, off the Pointe du Moulinet. Halfway house. At eleven." She smiled, as he had seen her smile once before. "Are you looking for your pen?"

  "I can't write, Loretta."

  "You can make a cross."

  "You know what that stands for?"

  "If it does," she said, "you signed last night."

  He watched her walking up towards the white spires of the Casino Balneum, with all the maddening delight of movement in the swing of her brown body, and searched his vocabulary for words to describe the capriciousness of fortune. Admitted that all the gifts of that immoral goddess had strings harnessed to them—there were strings and strings. There was no real need in adventure for quite such a disturbing complication. And the Saint smiled in spite of that. The beach was empty after she had left it; that is to say, there were about a thousand other people on the Plage de l'Ecluse, but he found all of them sickeningly bovine. Including the Parisian vamp, who by this time was en­joying the devotion of three muscle-conscious young men, the debauched Roman emperor, and a hungry-looking tourist from Egg Harbor, New Jersey, who should have been old enough to know better.

  Simon turned away from the repulsive spectacle, and was re­warded by the almost equally unwelcome vision of Orace's mous­tache, through which something more than the sea air was filtering.

  "You do break out at the most unromantic moments, Orace," he complained; and then he saw that Orace's eyes were still fixed glassily on the middle distance.

  "Is that the lidy, sir?"

  Orace's martial voice was hushed with a sort of awe; and the Saint frowned.

  "She isn't a lady," he said firmly. "No lady would use such shameless eyes to try and seduce a self-respecting buccaneer from his duty. No lady would take such a mean advantage of a human being." He perceived that his audience was still scarcely following him, and looked round. "Nor is that the wench I'm talking about, anyway. Come on away—you'll be getting off in a minute."

  They walked over the sand towards the bend by the swimming pool, where the Promenade des Alliés curves out towards the sea.

  "If you arsk me," Orace remarked, recalling the grievance which had been temporarily smoothed over by his anatomical studies, "these Frogs are all barmy. First thing I arsks for petrol, an' they give me paraffin. Then when I says that ain't what I want, they tell me they've got some stuff called essence, wot's just as good. I 'as a smell of this stuff, an' blimey if it ain't pet­rol. 'Ow the thunderinell can they 'elp goin' barmy wiv a lang­widge like that?"

  "I don't suppose they can help it," said the Saint gravely. "Did you buy some of this essence?"

  "Yessir. Then I tried to get some ice. They 'adn't got no ice, but they tried to sell me some glass. I gave it up an' brought the dinghy rahnd in case yer didn't wanter swim back. Barmy?" said Orace sizzlingly.

  It was nearly one o'clock when the fuel tanks had been re­plenished from the cans which Orace had acquired at the cost of so much righteous indignation, and the Saint had cleaned him­self up and put a comb through his hair. Orace produced a drink —freshened, in spite of gloomy prophecies, with ice—and re­quired to know whether he should get lunch.

  "I don't know," said the Saint, with unusual brusqueness.

  He had no idea what he wanted to do. He felt suddenly rest­less and dissatisfied. The day had gone flat in prospect. They might have lazed through the long afternoon, steeping themselves in sunlight and romping through the light play of words. They might have plunged together through the cool rapture of the sea, or drifted out under spread sails to explore the Ile de Cézembre and picnic under the cliffs of St Lunaire. They might have en­joyed any of a dozen trivial things which he had half planned in his imagination, secure in a communion of pagan understanding that made no demands and asked no promises.
Instead of . which . . .

  Because gold rippled in a girl's hair, and an imp of sophisti­cated humour lurked Pan-like in the shadows of her eyes; be­cause the same gaze could sometimes hold a serenity of purpose beyond measure—Simon Templar, at thirty-four, with odysseys of adventure behind him that would have made Ulysses look like a small boy playing in a back yard, found himself in the beginning of that halcyon afternoon at a loose end.

  It wasn't exactly the amount of money involved. Four million, if that was a minimum estimate of the total submerged wealth which Vogel had plundered from the sea bottoms, was certainly a lot of pounds. So was ten per cent of it. Or even half that. The Saint wasn't greedy; and he had come out of each of his past sorties into the hazardous hinterlands of adventure with a lengthening line of figures in his bank account which raised their own monument to his flair for boodle. He had no need to be avaricious. There were limits—lofty, vertiginous limits, but limits nevertheless—to how much money one could spend; and he had a sublime faith that the same extravagant providence which had held him up all his life so far would keep him near enough to those limits to save him from feeling depressed. It wasn't exactly that. It was a matter of principle.

  "You're getting old," he reproached himself solemnly. "At this very moment, you're trying to persuade yourself to work for an insurance company. Just because she has a body like an old man's dream, and you kissed her. An insurance company!"

  He shuddered.

  And then he turned his eyes to study a speck of movement on the borders of his field of vision. The speed tender was moving away from the side of the Falkenberg, heading towards the Bee de la Vallée. For a moment he watched it idly, calculating that its course would take it within a few yards of the Corsair: as it came nearer he recognised Kurt Vogel, and with him a stout grey-bearded man in a Norfolk jacket and a shapeless yellow Panama hat.

  Simon began to get up from his chair. He began slowly and almost uncertainly, but he finished in a sudden rush of decision. Any action, however vague its object, was better than no action at all. He skated down the companion with something like his earlier exuberance, and shouted for Grace.

  "Never mind about lunch," he said, scattering silk shirts and white duck trousers out of a locker. "I'm going on shore to take up ornithology."

  2

  One of the vedettes from St Malo was coming in to the jetty when the Saint scrambled back on deck, and the Falkenberg's tender was still manoeuvering for a landing. Simon dropped into his dinghy and wound up the outboard. Fortunately the Corsair had swung round on the tide so that she screened his movements from any chance backward glances from the quay, and he started off up-river and came round in a wide circle to avoid identifying himself by his point of departure. Not that it mattered much; but he wanted to avoid giving any immediate impression that he was deliberately setting off in pursuit.

  He cruised along, keeping his head down and judging time and distance as the Falkenberg's tender squeezed in to the steps and Vogel and his companion went ashore. Looking back, he judged that with any luck no curious watcher on the Falkenberg had observed his hurried departure, and by this time he was too far away to be recognised. Then, as Vogel and the grey-bearded man started up the causeway towards the Grande Rue, the Saint opened up his engine and scooted after them. He shot in to the quay under the very nose of another boat that was making for the same objective, spun his motor round into reverse under a cloudburst of Gallic expostulation and profanity, hitched the painter deftly through a ring-bolt, and was up on land and away before the running commentary he had provoked had really reached its choicest descriptive adjectives.

  The passengers who were disembarking from the ferry effec­tively screened his arrival and shielded his advance as he hustled after his quarry. The other two were not walking quickly, and the grey-bearded man's shabby yellow Panama was as good as a beacon. Simon spaced himself as far behind them as he dared when they reached the Digue, and slackened the speed of his pursuit. He ambled along with his hands in his pockets, submerg­ing himself among the other promenaders with the same happy-go-lucky air of debating the best place to take an aperitif before lunch.

  Presently the yellow Panama bobbed across the stream in the direction of the Casino terrace, and Simon Templar followed. At that hour the place was packed with a chattering sun-soaked throng of thirsty socialites, and the Saint was able to squeeze himself about among the tables in the most natural manner of a lone man looking for a place—preferably with company. His route led him quite casually past Vogel's table; and at the pre­cise moment when the hook-nosed man looked up and caught his eye, Simon returned the recognition with a perfect rendering of polite interest.

  They were so close together that Vogel could scarcely have avoided a greeting, even if he had wished to—which the Saint quietly doubted. For a moment the man's black expressionless stare drilled right through him; and then the thin lips spread in a smile that had all the artless geniality of a snake's.

  "I hope you didn't think I was too unceremonious about dis­turbing you last night," he said.

  "Not at all," said the Saint cheerfully. "I didn't leave the baccarat rooms till pretty late, so I was only just settling in."

  His glance passed unostentatiously over the grey-bearded man. Something about the mild pink youthful-looking face struck him as dimly familiar, but he couldn't place it.

  "This is Professor Yule," said the other, "and my name is Vogel. Won't you join us, Mr—er——"

  "Tombs," said the Saint, without batting an eyelid, and sat down.

  Vogel extended a cigarette-case.

  "You are interested in gambling, Mr Tombs?" he suggested.

  His tone was courteous and detached, the tone of a man who was merely accepting the obvious cue for the opening of a conventional exchange of small talk; but the Saint's hand hovered over the proffered case for an imperceptible second's pause be­fore he slid out a smoke and settled back.

  "I don't mind an occasional flutter to pass the time," he mur­mured deprecatingly.

  "Ah, yes—an occasional flutter." Vogel's eyes, like two beads of impenetrable jet, remained fixed on his face; but the cold lipless smile remained also. "You can't come to much harm that way. It's the people who play beyond their means who come to grief."

  Simon Templar let a trickle of smoke drift down his nostrils, and that instantaneous instinctive tension within him relaxed into a pervasive chortle of pure glee which spread around his inside like a sip of old brandy. Kurt Vogel, he reflected, must have been taking a diet of the kind of mystery story in which the villain always introduces himself with some lines of sinister innuendo like that—and thereby convinces the perhaps otherwise unsuspecting hero that something villainous is going on. In the same type of story, however, the hero can never resist the temptation to respond in kind—thereby establishing the fact that he is the hero. But the Saint had been treading the fickle tight­ropes of piracy when those same romantic juveniles were cooing in their cradles, and he had his own severely practical ideas of heroism.

  "There's not much chance of that," he said lightly, "with my overdraft in its present state."

  They sat eye to eye like two duellists baffled for an opening; and the Saint's smile was wholly innocent. If Kurt Vogel had hoped to get him to betray himself by any theatrical insinuations of that sort, there were going to be some disappointed hearts in Dinard that fine day. But Vogel's outward cordiality never wav­ered an iota. He gave away nothing, either—the innuendo was only there if the Saint chose to force it out.

  "Are you staying long?"

  "I haven't made any plans," said the Saint nebulously. "I might dart off at any moment, or I might hang around until they make me a local monument. It just depends on how soon I get tired of the place."

  "It "doesn't agree with everybody," Vogel assented purringly. "In fact, I have heard that some people find it definitely un­healthy." Simon nodded.

  "A bit relaxing, perhaps," he admitted. "But I don't mind that. Up to t
he present, though, I've found it rather dull."

  Vogel sat back and stroked the edge of the table with his finger-tips. If he was disconcerted, the fact never registered on his face. His features were a flat mask of impassively regulated scenery behind that sullen promontory of a nose.

  A waiter equilibrating under a dizzy tray of glasses swayed by and snatched their order as he passed. At the same time an ad­joining table became vacant, and another party of thirst-quenchers took possession. The glance of one of them, sweeping round as he wriggled his legs in, passed over the Saint and then became faintly fixed. For a brief second it stayed set; then he leaned sideways to whisper. His companions turned their heads furtively. The name of Yule reached the Saint clearly, but after that the surrounding buzz of conversation and the glutinous strains of the Casino band swallowed up the conversation for a moment. And then, above all interfering undertones, the electric sotto voce of a resplendently peroxided matron in the party stung his eardrums like a saw shearing through tin: "I'm sure it must be! ... You know, my dear—the bathy-something man. ..."

  Simon Templar's ribs lifted under his shirt with the deep breath that he drew into his lungs, and the twirtle of bliss within him rose to a sweet celestial singing. He knew now why the name of Professor Yule had seemed familiar, and why he had tried to place that fresh apple-cheeked face over the trim grey beard. Only a few months ago the newspapers had run their stories and the illustrated weeklies had carried special pictures; the National Geographic Magazine had brought out a Yule Expedition num­ber. For Wesley Yule had done something that no man on earth had ever done before. He had been down five thousand feet into the Pacific Ocean, beyond any depth ever seen before by human eyes—not in any sort of glorified diving bell, but in a fantastic bulbous armour built to withstand the terrific pressure that would have crushed an unprotected man like a midge on a window-pane, in which he was able to move and walk about on the ocean floor nearly a mile below the ship from which he was lowered. He was the man who had perfected and proved a deep-sea costume compared with which the "iron men" of previous diving experiments were mere amateurish makeshifts, a combina­tion of metallic alloys and scientific construction that promised to revolutionise the exploring of the last secrets of the sea. . . . And now he was in Dinard, the guest of Kurt Vogel, arch hi­jacker of Davy Jones!