The Saint in Europe (The Saint Series) Page 7

  She was very young—about seventeen or eighteen, he guessed—and her eyes were the bright greenish-blue that the waters of the Rhine ought to have been. She had pulled off her hat when she sat down, so that the unstudied symmetry of her curving honey-blonde hair framed her face in a careless aureole. She was beautiful. But there was something more to her than her mere unspoiled young beauty, something strange and startling that he could not define. She was the fairy princess that no man ever meets except in his most youthful dreams, the Cinderella that every man looks for all his life and knows he will never find. She was the woman that each man marries, only to find that he saw nothing but the mirror of his own hopes. And even when he had said that, the Saint knew that he had touched only a crude outline—that there was still something more which he might never be able to say. But because there seemed to be nothing of immediate importance in the newspaper he had bought at the station, and because even a lawless adventurer may find his own pleasure in the enjoyment of simple loveliness, Simon Templar leaned back with the smoke drifting past his eyes and wove romantic fantasies about the Rhine Maiden and the old man who was with her.

  “This is der most vonderful river of der whole vorld, Greta,” said the old man, gazing out of the window. “For der Danube der is a valtz, but this is der only river in der vorld dot has four operas written about it. Someday you shall see it all properly, Gretchen—die Lorelei, und Ehrenbreitstien, und all kinds of vonderful places—”

  An adventurer lives on impulse, riding the crest of life only because be takes the wave in the split second where others hesitate. The Saint said, quietly and naturally, with a slight movement of his hand, “I think there’s some better stuff over that way. Over around the Eifel.”

  The other two both looked at him, and the happy eyes of the solid old man lighted up. “Ach, so you know your Chermany!” Simon wondered what they would have said if he had explained that the police of two nations had once hunted him up from Innsbruck through Munich to Treuchtlingen and beyond, on a certain adventure that was one of his blithest memories, but he only smiled. “I’ve been here before.”

  “I know dot country, too,” said the old man eagerly, with his soft German-American accent faltering a little in his throat. “When I vos a boy we used to try and catch fish in der river at Gemünd, und vonce I get lost by myself in der voods going over to Heimbach. Now I hear der is a great talsperre, a big dam dot makes all der valley into a great lake. So maybe der is some more fish there now.”

  It was as if he had suddenly met an old friend; the sluicegates of memory were opened at a touch, and the old man let them flow, stumbling through his words with the same naive happiness as he must have stumbled through the woods and streams he spoke of as a boy. There were many places that the Saint also knew, and a nod of recognition here and there was almost as much encouragement as the old man needed. His whole life story, commonplace as it was, came pattering out with a childish zest that was almost frightening in its godlike simplicity. Simon listened, and was queerly moved.

  “…Und so I vork and vork, und I safe money and look after my little Greta, und she looks after me, und we are very happy. Und then at last I can retire mit a little money, not much, but plenty for us, und Greta is grown up.”

  The eyes of the old man shone with a serenity that was blinding, the eyes of a man who had never known the doubts and the fretfulness of his age, whose humble faith had passed utterly and incredibly unscathed through the squalid brawl of civilization perhaps because he had never been aware of it.

  “So now we come back to der Faderland to see my brother dot is a policeman in Mainz. Und Greta is going to see der vorld, und buy herself pretty clothes, und do all kinds of vonderful things. Isn’t dot all we could vant, Gretchen?”

  Simon glanced at the girl again. He knew that she had been studying his face ever since he had first spoken, but his clear gaze turned on her with its hint of the knowledge veiled down almost to invisibility. Even so, it took her by surprise.

  “Why…yes,” she stammered, and then in an instant her confusion was gone. She slipped her hand under the old man’s arm and rested her cheek on his shoulder. “But I suppose it’s all very ordinary to you.”

  The Saint shook his head.

  “No,” he said gently. “I’ve known what it is to feel just like that.”

  And in that moment, in one of those throat-catching flashes of vision where a man looks back and sees for the first time what he has left behind, Simon Templar knew how far he and the rest of the world had travelled when such a contented and unassuming honesty could have such a strange pathos.

  “I know,” said the Saint. “That’s when the earth’s at your feet, and you look at it out of an enchanted castle. How does the line go? Magic casements, opening on the foam. Of perilous seas in faery lands forlorn…”

  “There’s music in that,” she said softly. But he wondered how much she understood. One never knows how magical the casements were until after the magic has been lost.

  She had her composure back—even Rhine Maidens must have been born with that defensive armour of the eternal woman. She returned his gaze calmly enough, liking the reckless cut of his lean face and the quick smile that could be cynical and sad and mocking at the same time. There was a boyishness there that spoke to her own youth, but with it there were the deep-etched lines of many dangerous years which she was too young to read. “I expect you know lots of marvelous places,” she said.

  The Saint smiled.

  “Wherever you went now would be marvelous. It’s only tired and disillusioned people who have to look for sensations.”

  “I’m spoiled,” she said. “Ever since we left home I’ve been living in a dream. First there was New York, and then the boat, and then Paris, and Cologne—and we’ve scarcely started yet. I haven’t done anything to deserve it. Daddy did it all by himself.”

  The old man shook his head.

  “No, Gretchen, I didn’t do it all by myself. There was dot great man who helped me. You know?” He looked at the Saint. “Und he is on this train himself!”

  “Who’s that?” asked the Saint cheerfully.

  “Mr Voyson. Mr Bruce Voyson. He has der big factory where I vork. When I safe a little money I put it in his company because they pay so big dividends, und so there is alvays much more money, und I invest dot also, und so it all helps us. All my money I have in his company.”

  Simon hardly moved.

  “Sometimes I see him in der factory, und he has alvays something to say to me,” said the old man almost reverently.

  “Now today I see him on der platform at Cologne. You remember, Greta? I think he is very tired with all the vork he does to look after the factory, because he is vearing dark glasses und he is very stooped like he never was before und his hair is gone quite white. But I recognize him because I have seen him so often, und besides he has a scar on his hand dot I remember so veil und I see it when he takes off his glove. So I go up und speak to him und thank him, und at first he does not recognize me. Of course he has so many employees in der big factory, how can he remember every one of them all der time? But I tell him, ‘You are Mr Voyson und I vork in your factory fifteen years und I invest all my money in your company, und I vant to thank you that now I can retire and go home.’ So he shakes hands with me, und then he is so busy that he has to go away. But he is on der train, too.”

  “You put all your money in Voyson’s company?” repeated the Saint, with a sudden weariness.

  The old man nodded.

  “Dot is how I mean, I didn’t do it all by myself. If I hadn’t done that I should’ve had to vork some more years.”

  Simon Templar’s eyes fell to the newspaper on his knee. For it was on that day that the collapse of the Voyson Plastics Company was exposed by the sudden disappearance of the President, and ruined investors learned for the first time that the rock on which they had been lured to found their fortunes was nothing but a quicksand. Even the local sheet which the Saint had bo
ught devoted an entire column to the first revelations of the crack-up.

  Simon drew a slow breath as if he had received a physical blow. There was nothing very novel about the story; there never will be anything very novel about these things, except for the scale of the disaster, and certainly there was nothing very novel about it in the Saint’s experience. But his heart went oddly heavy. For a second he thought that he would rather anyone but himself should bring the tragedy—anyone who hadn’t seen what he had seen, who hadn’t been taken into the warmth and radiance of the enchanted castle that had been opened to him. But he knew that the old man would have to know, sooner or later. And the girl would have to know.

  He held out his paper.

  “Maybe you haven’t read any news lately,” he said quietly, and turned away to the window because he preferred not to see.

  2

  The lottery of travel had done a good job. It reached out into the world and threw lives and stories together, shuffled them in a brief contact, and then left them altered forever. An adventurer, a Rhine Maiden, an old man. Hope, romance, a crooked company promoter, a scrap of cheap newsprint, tragedy. Perhaps every route that carries human freight is the same, only one doesn’t often see the working of it. Human beings conquering and falling and rising again, each in his own trivial little play, in the inscrutable loneliness which everything human makes for itself wherever crowds mingle and never know each other’s names. Simon Templar had loved the lottery for its own sake, because it was a gamble where such infinitely exciting things could happen, but now he thought that it looked on its handiwork and sneered. He could have punched it on the nose. After a long time the old man was speaking to him.

  “It isn’t true. It couldn’t be true. Der great big company like dot couldn’t break down!”

  Simon looked into the dazed honest eyes.

  “I’m afraid it must be true,” he said steadily.

  “But I spoke to him only a little vhile ago. I thank him. Und he shook hands with me.” The old man’s voice was pleading, pleading tremulously for the light that wasn’t there. “No man could have acted a lie like dot…Vait! I go to him myself, und he’ll tell me it isn’t true.”

  He stood up and dragged himself shakily to the door, holding the luggage rack to support himself.

  Simon filled his lungs. He fell back into the reality of it with a jolt like a plunge into cold water, which left him braced and tingling. Mentally, he shook himself like a dog. He realized that the fragment of drama which had been flung before him had temporarily obscured everything else; that because the tragedy had struck two people who had given him a glimpse of a rare loveliness that he had forgotten for many years, he had taken their catastrophe for his own. But they were only two of many thousands. One never feels the emotion of these things, except academically, until it touches the links of one’s own existence. Life was life. It had happened before, and it would happen again. Of the many crooked financiers whom the Saint had known to their loss, there was scarcely one whose victims he had ever considered. But Bruce Voyson was actually on the train, and he must have been carrying some wealth with him, and the old man knew what he looked like.

  The girl was rising to follow, but Simon put his hands on her shoulders and held her back.

  “I’ll look after him,” he said. “Perhaps you’d better stay here.”

  He swung himself through the door and went wafting down the corridor, long-limbed and alert. A man like Bruce Voyson would be fair game for any adventurer, and it was in things like that that the Saint was most at home. The fact that he could be steered straight to his target by a man who could really recognize the financier when he saw him, in spite of his disguise, was a miracle too good to miss. Action, swift and spontaneous and masterly, was more in the Saint’s line than a contemplation of the brutal ironies of Fate, and the prospect of it took his mind resiliently away from gloom.

  He followed the old man along the train at a leisured distance. At each pause where the old man stopped to peer into a compartment the Saint stopped also and lounged against the side, patient as a stalking tiger. Sometime later he pushed into another carriage and found himself in the dining car, for it was an early train with provision for the breakfasts of late-rising travellers. The old man was standing over a table half-way down, and one glance was enough to show that he had found his quarry.

  Simon sank unnoticed into the adjoining booth. In a panel mirror on the opposite side he could see the man who must have been Bruce Voyson—a thin dowdily dressed man with the almost white hair and tinted glasses which the old German had described. The glasses seemed to hide most of the sallow face, so that the line of the thin straight mouth was the only expressive feature to be seen. The old German was speaking.

  “Mr Voyson, I’m asking you a question und I vant an answer. Is it true dot your company is smashed?”

  Voyson hesitated for a moment, as if he was not quite sure whether he had heard the question correctly. And then, as he seemed to make up his mind, his gloved fingers twisted together on the table in front of him.

  “Absolute nonsense,” he said shortly. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  The old man swallowed.

  “Then vhy is it, Mr Voyson, dot der paper here says dot it is all smashed, und everyone vants to know where you are?”

  “What paper is that?” demanded Voyson, but there was a harsh twitch in his voice.

  The old man dropped it on the table.

  “Dot’s der paper. If you don’t understand Cherman I translate it for you. It says, ‘Von of der biggest swindle in history vas yesterday in Maxton, Ohio, exposed—’ ”

  Voyson bit the corner of his mouth, then swung around. “Well, what about it?”

  “But, Mr Voyson, you cannot speak of it like dot. You cannot realize vat it means. If it is true dot der money is all gone…You don’t understand. All my life I vork and vork und I safe money, und I put it all in your company. It cannot be true dot all my money is gone—dot all my life I have vork for nothing—”

  “Suppose it is gone?” snapped Voyson. “There are plenty of others in the same boat.” He sighed. “It’s all in the luck of the game.”

  The old man swayed and steadied himself heavily.

  “Luck?” he said hoarsely. “You talk to me of luck? When I am ruined, und it says here dot it vas all a swindle—dot you are nodding but a criminal—”

  Voyson’s fist hit the table.

  “Now you listen to me,” he rasped. “We’re not in America now—either of us. If you’ve got any complaints you can take me back to Ohio first, and then go ahead and prove I swindled you. That’ll be soon enough for you to start shooting off your mouth about criminals. Now what d’you think you’re going to do about it? Think it over. And get the hell out of here while you do your thinking, or I’ll call the guard and have you thrown off the train!”

  The Saint’s muscles hardened, and relaxed slowly. His dark head settled back almost peacefully on the upholstery behind him, but the wraith of a smile on his lips had the grim glitter of polished steel. A steward hovered over him, and he ordered a sandwich which he did not want without turning his head.

  Minutes later, or it might have been hours, he saw his travelling acquaintance going past him. The old man looked neither to right nor left. His faded eyes stared sightlessly ahead, glazed with a terrible stony emptiness. His big toil-worn hands, which could have picked Voyson up and broken him across one knee, hung listlessly at his sides. His feet slouched leadenly, as if they were moved by a conscious effort of will.

  Simon sat on. After another few minutes Voyson paid his bill and went past, walking jerkily. His coat was rucked up on one side, and Simon saw the tell-tale bulge on the right hip before it was straightened.

  The Saint spread coins thoughtfully on the table to cover the price of his sandwich. His eyes ran over the selection of condiments which had come with it, and almost absent-mindedly he dropped the pepper-pot into his pocket. Then he
picked up the sandwich as he stood up, took a bite from it, and sauntered out with it in his hand.

  At the entrance of the next coach something caught the tail of his eye, and he stopped abruptly. The door at the side was open, and the bowed figure of the old German stood framed in the oblong, looking out. The broad rounded shoulders had a deathly rigidity. While Simon looked, the gnarled hands tightened on the handrails by which the figure held itself upright, stretching the skin white over the knuckles, then they let go.

  Simon covered the distance in two lightning strides and dragged him back. A train passing in the opposite direction blasted his ears with its sudden crashing clamor, and went clattering by in a gale of acrid wind. The old man fought him blindly, but Simon’s lean strength pinned him against the bulkhead. The noise outside whisked by and vanished again as suddenly as it had come, giving place to the subdued rhythmic mutter of their own passage.

  “Don’t be a fool!” snapped the Saint metallically. “What sort of help is that going to be to Greta?”

  The old man’s struggling arms went limp, gradually. He gazed dumbly back, trying to understand. His throat moved twice, convulsively, before his voice came.

  “Dot’s right…Dot’s right…I must look after Greta. Und she is so young…”

  Simon let him go, and he went weakly past, around the corner into the main corridor.

  The Saint lighted a cigarette and inhaled deeply. It had been close enough…And once again he gave himself that mental shake, feathering himself down to that ice-cold clarity of purpose in which any adventurer’s best work must be done. It was a tough break for the old German, but Simon couldn’t keep his mind solely on that. He didn’t want to. Such distractions as the rescuing of potential damn-fool suicides from sticky ends disturbed the even course of buccaneering. Voyson was on the train, and the ungodly prospered only that a modern pirate might loot them.