The Saint in Pursuit Page 4

  “Regard the box as your own now, senhorita,” he said. “I shall leave you alone.”

  “Our own private dungeon,” Freda said with a shiver when he had gone, gazing around at the forbidding walls of the room. “Solid granite three feet thick. Open that thing and let’s get out of here. What are you waiting for?”

  Vicky was sitting with the key in her hand, hesitating to use it. Freda’s question broke the spell, and she inserted the key carefully into the lock at the end of the box.

  “I don’t know,” she confessed. “For some reason, this is all giving me the creeps. I feel a little like—who was that girl in the old story who opened a box and discovered too late what she’d let out?” She turned the key. “Pandora,” she remembered aloud. “Pandora.”

  The only sound in the bank’s inner sanctum was the faintly echoing click of a lock which had not been used for twenty-five years. Vicky touched the cold metal cover of the container as though it might give her an electric shock and then lifted it.

  Looking very much alone on the bottom of the box was a white envelope, slightly yellowed with age like the letter that the lawyer had given her in Iowa.

  “It doesn’t seem like much,” she said huskily.

  She was staring down at it without showing any sign of intending to pick it up.

  “Well, for goodness’ sake, it’s not going to bite you!” Freda encouraged her.

  Vicky finally reached in and lifted it out. It was somewhat bulkier than she had thought at first glance.

  “I think it’s just a letter,” she said appraisingly.

  Freda sat back with a shake of her platinum-blonde head.

  “Your old man must’ve eaten wild goose every day and twice on Sundays. Okay, read us the next installment.”

  Vicky had started to tear open the envelope, but then she stopped, weighing it in her palm.

  “I’d rather not—here,” she said. “This feels like a regular project. Let’s go back to my room where we can settle down—in case there’s a shock that’s going to knock me flat.”

  Freda stood up with a shrug of suffering resignation.

  “It’s your snipe hunt, sweetie. My lot is but to follow and hope you drop a few golden crumbs when you finally hit the jackpot. The prize must be pretty big if it was worth putting up this much of a smokescreen to cover it.”

  They left Senhor Valdez with thanks and an empty coffer, and took a taxi back to the Tagus Hotel. Vicky was subdued during the drive and avoided saying a word about her father or the trail he had left behind him. Outside the quiet entrance of the hotel, which seemed almost completely deserted in comparison with its more typically central hostelries, Freda stopped and held Vicky back.

  “I know all this is none of my business,” she said. “My only excuse is that you got me hooked on this awful suspense. I won’t come in if you don’t want me to.”

  “Of course you should come in!” Vicky shook herself out of her abstracted state enough to put some sincere warmth into her answer. “I got you interested in this, and I might never even have found that bank without you. Let’s get upstairs and have a look.”

  They walked into the low-keyed interior of the Tagus’s lobby, past potted palms and overstuffed sofas. Freda, taking everything in like a nervous bird as usual, focussed on the reception desk and nudged Vicky.

  “Half-step, comrade,” she whispered. “Dig the gorgeous chunk of senhor.”

  Vicky looked, and as she did so the tall black-haired man who had been talking to the receptionist happened to glance up and look right at her. He was so unbelievably handsome, so easily and effortlessly elegant, and carried such magnetism in his steady gaze that she felt a quick shiver pass completely through her body.

  “With those blue eyes I don’t think he’s a senhor,” she muttered inadequately.

  “I may fight you for him,” Freda rejoined under her breath. “He’s the best-looking devil I’ve seen in ages.”

  Vicky peeked back over her shoulder at the cleanly honed hawkish profile as she climbed the stairs.

  “Oh well,” she sighed, “why fight? We’ll never see him again anyway.”

  Everyone who has ever read any other story about Simon Templar, alias the Saint, will infallibly identify that as one of the most hard-worked errors of prophecy in the Saga. But this chronicler cannot fiddle with the record merely to avert a cliche.

  That’s what the girl said. Honestly.

  CHAPTER TWO

  HOW FREDA OLIVEIROS SHARED A TAXI, AND CURT JAEGER’S APPETITE WAS STRAINED

  1

  Without even waiting to open his suitcase, once he had seen it deposited in his room and taken possession of his key, Curt Jaeger had left the hotel again and completed a swift and efficient rendezvous with a business associate of long standing, whose interest in Swiss watches was basically limited to those that he fancied to wear himself, and those that in commercially viable quantities might be smuggled or stolen for sale in some underground market.

  What this invaluable local contact really specialized in was methods of population control which are viewed by the temporal powers of Portugal with as much disfavour as they are by the Vatican, since they do not go to work until many years after the critical instant of conception. But on order, and against sufficient cash payment, this unobtrusive handyman could guarantee the removal, permanent or temporary, of unwelcome members from one’s circle of acquaintance. His professional name was simply Pedro; he was small as a jockey, and he had the black blinking eyes of a myopic rat.

  He watched with Jaeger from one of the outdoor tables of a cafe down the street as Freda and Vicky returned to the Tagus after their trip to the bank. Pedro’s unlovely facial structure was overhung by a nose of stunning amplitude shaped like a headsman’s axe. In the shadows of this massive outcropping dwelt a pencil-thin moustache which jutted on either side directly out from its moorings to quiver its tips just beyond its cultivator’s high cheekbones. When Pedro squinted at the two American girls as they walked from their taxi into the hotel, his Stygian eyes blinked more rapidly than usual down the slopes of his nose, and his pilous antennae vibrated like the feelers of a roach sensing feasts beneath the kitchen sink.

  “The dark one is prettier, but the blonde one did not look so bad either,” he said in hissing Portuguese. “It seems a pity you cannot…avoid her in some other way.”

  “I am not hiring you to think for me, Pedro,” Jaeger retorted. “I am hiring you to do two things, and to do them quickly and efficiently. Get the blonde out of the way immediately, and before you dispose of her learn all she has been told by the dark girl about letters or other information from the dark girl’s father. Is that understood?”

  “Bem,” assented Pedro. “I understand.”

  Jaeger’s hard turquoise eyes were capable of projecting a threat which made even Pedro squirm and nervously suck his two prominent front teeth.

  “And if,” Jaeger said, “you should get any romantic Latin ideas about keeping her hidden away for yourself, or selling her to Arab slave traders, or some other nonsense, you had better remember…”

  “Senhor!” Pedro interjected, with a look of reproachful innocence.

  “You had better remember what happened to Tico,” Jaeger concluded.

  Pedro looked thoroughly unhappy as he remembered what had happened to Tico those many years ago.

  “It shall be as you say,” he promised.

  “Good. Everything is in order, then? Your friend who drives a taxi, is he ready?”

  “He waits just around the corner now.”

  “Very well. Tell him no more than you have to—and meet me here this evening at six-thirty to let me know what you have learned from the blonde.”

  “Bem!” Pedro said, concluding the consultation. “We shall be waiting to welcome her when she comes out.”

  Feeling safe at last in her hotel room, all thought of the glamorously Mephistophelean stranger whom she had seen in the lobby passed out of her mind fo
r the moment as she hurried to open her father’s delayed-action envelope. She almost dropped her purse in her eagerness to get the envelope out of it, but then she hesitated before tearing the sealed paper; in spite of her feverish curiosity she would almost have preferred that a ghostly wind would tear the missive out of the fingers and whip it out of the window.

  “Just let me read it to myself first,” she said to Freda. “Then if I can tell you all about it, I will.”

  “If you don’t mind I’ll take the strain off my stays in the meantime,” Freda said accommodatingly.

  She spread herself out in an easy chair as Vicky tore open the envelope. Inside were six hand-written pages.

  Still standing, Vicky unfolded them, and as she read her anxious expression turned to one of amazed shock. She sank slowly to a sitting position on the edge of the bed as she read on.

  At long last she mumbled, “This is fantastic…”

  Freda could control herself no longer.

  “What is, Vicky, for heaven’s sake?”

  Vicky skimmed quickly through the last two pages before answering. Then, her face drained of colour, she clutched the disordered leaves of the letter in her hands and stared dizzily out at the sky.

  “I can’t tell you, Freda,” she said in a trance-like monotone. “At least, not now.”

  Freda stood up. Determined good humour veneered a note of understandable disappointment when she replied.

  “I shouldn’t be here now anyway. I should have kept my long nose out of your private affairs in the first place.”

  Vicky, realizing that she could not possibly tell Freda what the letter said, pretended to be more badly shaken than she was.

  “Please forgive me, Freda,” she breathed. “But I’ve got to think it out before I can talk about it.”

  Freda had recovered, at least superficially, all of her usual bounce.

  “Forget it, honey! I’ll go take me a siesta at the communal pad and be back for our dinner date. How’s that?”

  “Fine. I’m so sorry, but you can’t imagine what a shock I’ve had.”

  “Don’t worry your pretty little bean about me. Get some rest yourself, and I’ll join you at seven.”

  “Thanks so much.”

  Freda turned back from the doorway and said, “I just hope my father never writes me a cliff-hanging letter like that!”

  For a second or two she hesitated in the corridor, turning over the idea of going back into the room and cancelling out the three-cornered evening with Vicky and Curt Jaeger, which promised to be about as titillating as last night’s lettuce salad. She was slightly irritated already to have wasted half a day for nothing but a quick brushoff when Vicky finally found her goodies. But her alternatives in evening revelry happened to be fairly uninspiring—and besides, plain old-fashioned nosiness made her want to drag out the class reunion bit until she had been let in on Vicky’s secret.

  She was turning away from Vicky’s room when she noticed that the door of the room opposite was ajar. Through the opening she caught just a glimpse of the breathtakingly handsome dark-haired man she had spotted beside the reception desk a few minutes before. She slowed her pace hopefully, but he seemed not to have seen her, and the door closed. That, apparently, was going to be typical of her luck on this particular Lisbon layover. With a philosophical jerk of her shoulders, she walked briskly away to the stairs.

  If she had dreamed how strongly the man called Curt Jaeger shared her lack of enthusiasm for a triangular dinner date, and to what extremes he had already gone to ensure the reduction of the company to a more intimate number, the last thing she would ever have willingly done was to walk down the steps of the Tagus Hotel, but she was not a morbidly hyper-imaginative type. Although the Tagus was not the sort of place that ambitious cabmen would choose as a waiting post, she felt no suspicion at seeing one parked in the street. She assumed that a small man with the large nose and bristling black moustache, his face shadowed by a ludicrously broad-brimmed hat, had just paid the taxi driver for his own ride and that he now bustled to open the door of the car for her out of pure Latin gallantry.

  “Senhorita,” he hissed with a bow as she stepped into the back seat of the automobile.

  Then, when she was seated, he suddenly hopped in beside her and slammed the door shut. Instantly the driver pulled away from the curb so fast that she was bounced back against the upholstery.

  “Be quiet, senhorita, and there weel be no trouble!” the little man said in English.

  Freda, who had held her own against considerably more hefty males than this one, was more angry than scared. She got her purse on her safer side and slid over against the door.

  “That’s what you think, buster!” she snapped. “Now get out of here pronto or you’ll see plenty of trouble! Driver—”

  Her uninvited fellow traveller moved so swiftly that she was not sure whether the knife had been whipped from his pocket or whether it had been in his hand all the time. In any case, it was one of those very large switch knives whose butcher-shop blade stays concealed in its weighty handle until a button is pressed. The sharp silvery point flashed out at her like the head of a snake and stopped just short of her ribs.

  “Do not waste your voice,” the little man said. “The driver weel only pay attention to me. I am suggest that you should pay attention to this that I am holding in my hand.”

  He nuzzled the point of the blade almost affectionately against the thin material of her dress just below her breast.

  “I’ll scream my head off,” she threatened with less assurance.

  “And I would cut your head off and you would not scream any more.”

  The man seemed to think his rejoinder was humorous, but the sharp tip of his knife pressed harder against her and assured Freda that his basic intentions were entirely serious. She was really terrified for the first time. The driver—the back view of his head reminded her grotesquely of a carved coconut with a cap on—swung his taxi around several corners and headed away from the center of the city. The neighbourhoods they passed through began to deteriorate into jumbles of warehouses, dingy-looking bars, and grubby housing.

  “What do you want?” Freda asked tensely. “Where do you think you’re taking me?”

  “You weel know quick,” was the answer. “Do not make trouble.”

  The cab pulled into a narrow cobbled street of two-storey houses whose walls and window shutters seemed to be nearing the end of an ancient contest to decide which could flake off the most paint or plaster. Freda was so terrified by now that she took in only the vaguest impression of her surroundings. The man with the knife muttered his instructions as the driver opened the door on her side of the automobile.

  “You weel get out, please, and go into that house—weethout no fuss!”

  The switchblade reinforced his order, and the girl obeyed, clutching her purse tightly against her body almost as if she hoped it was all the men were really after. The car was parked within three paces of a doorway which the driver, in a parody of politeness, held open for her. He was an imbecilic-looking lout with a battered nose and cavernous bushy-browed eye sockets, one of the ugliest mortals she had ever laid eyes on. Even so, she thought she preferred him to the sinister little cutthroat behind her. As she entered the house she looked longingly back over her shoulder past the knifeman’s broad-brimmed hat at the sunlight on the wall opposite—and the last thing she saw was the long taxi, black and shining like a well-kept hearse.

  The man with the knife locked the door when they were all three inside, and it took several seconds for Freda’s eyes to accustom themselves to the dimness of the room. The two windows were shuttered and the driver jerked dusty draperies across them, cutting off the light that would have filtered in through the crevices. The room itself was depressingly shabby and underfurnished, like part of a rental house that had been used by family after family for years until finally it had been closed for months because no one would have it.

  “Seet at the table, senh
orita.”

  Freda summoned every volt of her courage in a final effort to intimidate her chief captor with sheer defiance.

  “You can’t get away with this—whatever you think you want! I’m an American citizen, and…”

  The moustached man’s hatchet-chop of a laugh showed just how singularly unimpressed he was by her national prestige and her threats.

  “Seet down!” he ordered. “What we want ees so easy, senhorita, as you weel see. Do not trouble yourself. Seet at the table here!”

  He kicked a crippled chair into place for her and she sullenly sat on it. The thick wooden slab of a table top in front of her was covered with a film of reddish dust.

  “What is it, then?” she demanded.

  The driver was standing by as dumb and motionless as a wax-museum Neanderthaler. The other man took paper and pen from his pocket and put them down for her to use.

  “Seemply a note to your woman friend at the hotel, to say you have been called away and cannot have dinner tonight.”

  Freda stared at him with incredulity and the eager hope that she might get out of the situation a lot more easily than she had imagined.

  “All this so I’ll cancel a dinner date?” she asked.

  “Sim, senhorita. Just write an excuse to your girlfriend so her admirer can see her alone.”

  “Why?”

  “I am not like so many questions,” the man said more harshly. “Write the letter! Tell her you have business that makes you leave Lisboa.”

  Freda pondered her situation for just a few seconds, and decided that any further resistance would be a waste of time. She took the pen and wrote a short note in deliberately overformal English saying that she had been called away suddenly to work on a flight.