The Saint Abroad Page 8
“What is it?” she asked shakily.
“LeGrand had visitors. Did you notice the coffee cups? Most likely he and his wife were taken by surprise. His wife was being held hostage for his co-operation in another room of the house.”
“Why…that’s something out of an old television series!” Annabella protested. “And…who would it be?”
“I’m not dreaming this up,” Simon assured her. “LeGrand gave me a signal. Now you tell me who would be giving him a dastardly deal like that.”
“I?”
“Yes, you, Fräulein Lenscher.”
She stared. Even in the semi-darkness the Saint could see from the expression on her face that his words had hit the mark so suddenly and squarely that she was unable even to pretend innocence.
“Where did you hear that name?” she finally said weakly.
“A large bird told me. Now give me the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, or I resign and you get stuck with a stopped check.”
She hesitated between fury and desperation.
“All right. Do you promise not to try to get me in trouble?”
“You’re already in trouble, but I won’t make it any worse—as long as I get my fair share of the profits for all the time I’ve spent on you…Never mind the indignation bit. Give me your true life story before it’s too late.”
She nodded and began to speak with frantic precision.
“My father was not Italian. He was Austrian, and in the army in the war. Hitler was having various paintings shipped from Italy to a big art museum he was building in Linz. My father was involved in guarding the paintings, along with some other German and Italian officers. When Italy was invaded and the Russians were advancing from the east it became obvious that the Linz museum would never be finished. Paintings were stored in salt mines for safekeeping, and also in other places.”
“And your father helped himself to a few?” Simon asked.
“He thought when the collapse came that it was as well he should have them as the Russians. These particular paintings came from the collection of a friend of his—an Italian count who was killed by Communists at the end of the war and left no heirs.” She paused. “You may not believe that, but it is true.”
“It should be easy to check,” Simon said. “But I’m less interested in your father’s ethics than I am in his exploits as an art collector.”
Annabella shrugged.
“I don’t know all the details,” she continued. “Apparently it was quite easy in the confusion at the end for his Italian friend to place some of the paintings in my father’s custody. My father hid them away until it was safe for him to get them and secretly move them…and they ended up here in France.”
Not having any evidence to contradict it, the Saint had to be content with her story. He was fairly satisfied. If not pure fact, what Annabella—or Anna Lenscher—had told him at least had coherence and plausibility.
“So there are no owners to return the paintings to, and your father left them to you?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said flatly.
“Why didn’t he try to sell them himself?”
“I don’t know. He liked them. And he was afraid of getting in trouble, I suppose.”
“That’s one of his weaknesses you unfortunately didn’t inherit,” the Saint said drily. “Now, about something else: this mob of aspiring hijackers that’s following you around with drawn pistols. Who are they?”
“I don’t know. Possibly men who were with my father in the war and suspected what he had done.”
“And Hans?” the Saint asked.
“He has always been with my family. He knows the truth about the paintings.”
Simon felt there was no more time to spend hashing the background history. He motioned Hans to stay in the car and then took his companion by her hand and led her down the street and around the corner.
“Do you mind if I keep calling you Annabella?” he asked. “I’m used to it.”
“Please do. And now…”
“And now look through this hedge. You see that Volkswagen bus?”
“Yes.”
“It belongs to the men who kidnapped LeGrand this morning,” he said softly. “Keep your eye on it. If it should leave while I’m at the house, have Hans drive my car and follow it.”
“What are you going to do?” she whispered.
“What I can. Keep out of sight!”
He disappeared from her view and made his way through the cover of hedges and the deep shadow of trees until he had re-entered LeGrand’s grounds and reached the side of his house. A thin blade of yellow light shone between two curtains in a side window. Putting one eye against the glass of the window, Simon could see LeGrand, a dark-haired woman who had to be LeGrand’s wife, and two of the men whom he had left locked in the garage that morning before Mathieu had interfered, otherwise known as Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Tweedledum was holding a gun on LeGrand and the woman.
“Yes,” he was saying in labored French. “I was with her father when he took them. It can’t be denied that I, who took risks in smuggling them through Russian lines, deserve a share. And now, congratulations on your performance, Monsieur LeGrand. If your wife will join us now we will go.”
LeGrand looked stunned.
“My wife?”
“A security precaution,” the man with the gun said. “So that you do not call for help. She will be released when we cross the border. In the meantime, keep silent. The paintings, Gunter? Are they in the car?”
“Yes. Gino has taken them out and will lock them in the steamer trunk.”
“Alone?” Tweedledum grumbled. “I don’t trust him or anybody else at this stage. Bring her along, and hurry!”
Simon congratulated himself on leaving Annabella behind to watch the Volkswagen bus. There had been no one in sight in its vicinity when he and she had looked at it through the bushes. Apparently the man with the paintings had been going from the house to the bus by one route while the Saint had been going from the bus to the house by another way. He would just have to hope that Annabella could take care of any contingency in her sector while he tried to turn the tables here.
Through the slit between the curtains he saw glimpses of Marcel LeGrand’s distraught face as his wife was led from the room at gunpoint. Simon stepped back from the window and hurried along the side of the house to the front, where he had just time to slip into the dark shelter of the shrubbery next to the steps before the door opened.
Madame LeGrand came out first, followed closely by Tweedledee, who was gripping her arm tightly from behind. As Tweedledum emerged from the house he turned back to speak to an invisible LeGrand.
“Stay in there and do not cause any trouble and your wife will be telephoning you in a few hours.”
LeGrand’s wife and Tweedledee had stopped to wait before going on down the steps to the lawn. Simon steadied himself, muscles tensed, like a cobra ready to strike. Suddenly he sprang forward, grabbing both the ankles of Madame LeGrand’s guard and sweeping the man’s feet out from under him. The woman half fell as the man tried to cling to her as he crashed full length onto the steps. Simon, in a continuation of the same movement that had brought the man low, yanked him by his feet entirely off the ground like a long bag of grain and banged his head forcefully against the stone treads.
Tweedledum whirled, but before he could fully realize what was happening his comrade was a crumpled casualty sprawled half in the bushes, and the Saint was launching a new attack in the form of a leap onto the steps and a fist in the tender center of the gunman’s solar plexus. LeGrand joined in at the same time, hurling himself at the man’s back from inside the house. His attack was unorthodox but effective: he had jumped entirely off the ground, hooked his legs around the man’s waist, and was riding him with the clinging desperation of a boy on a bucking bronco.
After the Saint’s blow to the stomach, however, the bronco did not have much buck left. Simon stood back and watched as the bizarre eque
strian act lurched down the steps and collapsed on the ground, the would-be kidnapper emitting a bellows-like gust of breath as LeGrand’s weight sandwiched him heavily against the earth.
Simon took the man’s pistol, held it on him, and helped LeGrand to his feet.
“Mon dieu, I am grateful!” the art dealer gasped to the Saint. “How can I ever thank you enough?”
Then another voice, one which should not have been there to chime in, spoke up with quiet irony.
“And how can I?” Then the tone of the voice sharpened suddenly. “Drop the gun, Monsieur Templar!”
Simon reluctantly let the pistol slip from his fingers to the grass. He and LeGrand turned to see the man who called himself Inspector Mathieu, together with his companion Bernard, facing the group with drawn guns from the shadow of a tree ten feet away.
“So we meet the forces of law and order once again,” Simon said, with exaggerated reverence in his voice.
“For the last time,” Mathieu said confidently. “You have saved us a great deal of trouble by taking the fight out of these pests.” He indicated the two half-conscious men on the ground with a wave of his automatic. “And now you can retire from the battle yourself. Where are…”
He was interrupted by an excited and innocently happy female cry.
“Oh, Simon, you’ve got them!”
The cry was Annabella’s. She had just come running around the house without noticing Mathieu and Bernard. Now she stopped with a change of expression which would have been wonderfully comical in less catastrophic circumstances, as Mathieu stepped into the light.
“Don’t move, Mademoiselle,” he ordered.
He turned again to the Saint.
“Monsieur,” he said harshly, “there are too many women here for you to risk trifling with us. But just to salve your conscience, I shall explain that we are not thieves. I am an investigator for an agency in Milan which is seeking to recover art which disappeared from Italy during the war.”
“Those are my father’s paintings!” Annabella interrupted fiercely.
“He looted them,” Mathieu said.
“He did not!”
“Never mind; they are going back where they belong.”
“Assuming you’re telling the truth,” Simon said, “don’t you think Mademoiselle Lambrini deserves something? The paintings have been in her family for almost a generation.”
“That does not legalize her possession,” Mathieu snapped. “But I do not have time to waste on quibbles! Tell me where the paintings are, one of you, or we shall have to twist the information out of these ladies!”
He nodded toward Annabella, and Bernard grabbed her by the wrist and pulled her toward him with one arm caught up behind her. Annabella’s eyes went wide with fear, while LeGrand turned pale. The dealer cast an agonized look at his wife, and then at the Saint
“Shouldn’t we…tell?” he asked weakly.
“We do not want to hurt the girl,” Mathieu urged. “One of you will tell us shortly anyway!”
Annabella gave a hopeless sigh.
“It’s my arm he’ll break,” she said. “If nobody else tells, I will.”
LeGrand accepted the invitation to appeasement with relief. His nerves were obviously at breaking point.
“The paintings are locked in the false bottom of a trunk,” he blurted.
“Where?” Mathieu asked.
“In…in the car of those men,” LeGrand said, pointing to the dazed forms on the ground. “I don’t know where it is.”
“Where?” Mathieu demanded of the group in general.
“Through there—on a side road,” Annabella said. “It’s a Volkswagen bus.”
She looked at Simon with a wretched expression of shame at her capitulation and then dropped her gaze to the ground. Mathieu noted her look with satisfaction.
“Go, Bernard,” he said. “Hurry. Get them!”
His assistant ran away across the lawn into the darkness. “We may be excused now, I take it?” Simon asked politely.
“You may not,” Mathieu replied. “Not until I know that you have told the truth.”
There was almost a full minute of silence before Bernard came running back across the grass into the light.
“They’re gone!” he panted. “I found the trunk broken open and a man knocked out on the ground. Somebody had hit him with a rock, I think.”
Mathieu expelled breath furiously. He cursed the group in front of him and then he cursed the world in general. Annabella did not look ashamed any longer, nor the least bit surprised. She looked glowingly pleased.
“If you would like to have the paintings,” she said to Mathieu in a sweet voice, “you can bid against Monsieur LeGrand for them.”
“You have them?” Mathieu exploded.
“My chauffeur has them, and he won’t be where you can find him,” she answered calmly.
LeGrand sat down on the front steps of his house and cupped his chin in his hands with his elbows resting on his knees.
“I am not bidding on anything,” he muttered heavily. “I am finished with this whole affair.”
As his voice trailed off, Annabella took his check from her purse and handed it to him.
“This is no good anyway, I suppose,” she said. Then she turned to the Italian. “Monsieur Mathieu,” she said brightly, “do you want the paintings or do I look for another customer?”
“But you…you are a thief!” Mathieu sputtered self-righteously.
“A defect of character most of us here share,” said the Saint. “Why don’t you pay Mademoiselle half the paintings’ market value as established by Monsieur LeGrand? That takes into account the obvious fact that neither of you can really believe a word the other says, and that both of you will be lucky to get out of this without ending up in jail.”
Mathieu pressed his lips together grimly as he thought over the situation. He looked piercingly at Annabella, who presented a front as smooth and uncommunicative as polished crystal. He looked at Bernard, who squirmed like a vaguely guilty puppy.
“Twenty-five percent?” Mathieu growled.
“Forty percent,” Annabella said firmly.
“Thirty-five,” Mathieu sighed with resignation.
“It’s not enough,” said Annabella.
“All right!” snapped Mathieu. “Forty! When? I want to get this over with.”
“The sooner the better,” Annabella said delightedly. “Tonight?”
“But don’t call us, we’ll call you,” Simon put in. “Give us a telephone number we can reach and we’ll tell you when and where to come.”
“Bon,” Mathieu said with resignation. He indicated Tweedledum and Tweedledee on the ground. “And these creatures?”
“Have you any insecticide?” Simon asked.
Marcel LeGrand stood up in alarm.
“You can’t kill them here!” he moaned.
“No one is going to kill them,” Mathieu said. “We shall lock them somewhere in your house, Monsieur LeGrand, and we shall wait here until we have the telephone call from Monsieur Templar and Mademoiselle Lambrini. Rather, I shall wait here. Bernard will go for the money. Does that suit everyone?”
“Can you get it tonight?” Simon asked.
“You will take lire?” Mathieu asked.
“I’ll take anything as long as I can spend it,” Annabella replied.
“We can pay then. We can go to…We have sources.”
“Fine,” said the Saint. “We’ll be in touch.”
“I have the VW key,” Annabella said. “Let’s take it.”
“All right.” He walked a few yards with her and then looked back. “And if anybody follows us, the deal is off—permanently.”
They hurried away through the shadows.
“He’s really letting us go!” Annabella said unbelievingly.
“He’s got no choice,” Simon replied, taking her hand and helping her through a hedge. “Are we telling him the truth this time or is there another layer to the cake?”
“And walloped him with a large chunk of native limestone?” Simon asked.
“Exactly!” Annabella beamed.
They had come to the Volkswagen bus. Annabella pointed into the bushes, where a man lay gagged and trussed.
“Did you tie him?” Simon asked.
“Hans did.”
“And the paintings?”
“Hans took them in your car. I told him to go and wait for us at a park about a mile from here.”
“Great work,” Simon said. “Unless, of course, Hans is half way to the Himalayas by now.”
“Hans would never betray me,” Annabella said confidently. “Let’s go.”
And she was right. When Simon, following her directions, had driven along the requisite streets, he saw his car next to a small park across from a school building. Hans got out of the driver’s seat only after the Saint and Annabella had stepped out of the Volkswagen and could be clearly identified by the light of a street lamp.
“Everything is good?” he enquired.
“Everything is good if you have the paintings,” Simon answered.
“Aber natürlich! They are here, in the back seat.”
Simon took out each of the paintings in turn and quickly inspected them in the lamplight. They were all there and in perfect condition.
“Hans,” he said, “you’re a gem. Let’s call Mathieu and get this deal over with.”
“There’s a telephone kiosk on the corner,” Annabella said eagerly. “I’ll do it.”
She ran away like a happy schoolgirl and Hans shook his head admiringly.
“She is a vunderful lady,” he said. “Like her father. As you say, she is a chop off the old block.”
“Sometimes we say a chip off the old joint,” Simon murmured.
Hans wanted to know all that had happened back at Marcel LeGrand’s house, so the Saint filled him in while Annabella was in the phone box. She returned to the car, where the men were standing, with a contented smile on her face.