The Saint in Europe (The Saint Series) Page 9

  “Too bad,” murmured the Saint gravely.

  He turned the angle of his jawbone with care, stretching his head sideways. His unruffled accents held a sublime and seraphic saintliness of innocence which in itself was a volume of explanation for his nickname. It took the girl’s breath away for a moment, and then she froze over.

  “Too bad,” she said coldly, “is putting it mildly. It had all my money in it, and my letter of credit, and my passport—everything. I’ve never been in such a mess in my life. What am I going to do?”

  “Have you told the hotel about it?”

  “Of course. I’ve had managers and clerks and detectives prowling about my room for the last half-hour.”

  Simon shrugged.

  “It seems a pity you didn’t go on to Garmisch yesterday with Jack.”

  She gazed at him glacially, but his back was turned to her and he was imperturbably intent on his shave. A glacial gaze inevitably loses much of its effect when it has to be reflected by a mirror and the recipient is merely paying the polite minimum of attention anyhow. The disadvantage made her furious, and she controlled herself with an effort. Simon’s amused blue eyes decided that Jack Easton had certainly picked a Tartar, but he admitted that wrath and hauteur sat very well on her small imperious face.

  “If you remember,” she said with unnatural restraint, “I told my fiancé that tramping about with him over a lot of dreary roads and sleeping in filthy village inns without any sanitation was not included in the terms of our engagement, and just wasn’t my idea of a good time. I’m a civilized woman, not a farm hand. Also that happens to be my own business. Why don’t you try to suggest something helpful?”

  “You haven’t any friends here?”

  “None at all.”

  The Saint raised one eyebrow.

  “In that case, you’re only left with your bank’s correspondents here, or the American consulate. Failing those two,” he added flippantly, “you could lie down on the tramlines outside and wait with resignation for the next tram—”

  The door banged violently behind her, and Simon glanced at it and chuckled.

  He ran cold water into the basin, submerged his head to remove the last traces of lather, and dried it off with a rough towel. Then he brushed his hair and sat down at the small desk where the telephone stood. He fished the directory out of a drawer, and with it the girl’s expensive bag. From it he took her letter of credit, discovered the Munich correspondent’s name there, and called the number.

  “This is the American consulate,” he said, when he was connected with the necessary Personage. “We have information of a trick that’s being played on the banks around here by an American girl. She comes in with the story that her letter of credit has been stolen, and tries to get an advance without it. There is no accurate description of her at the moment, except that she is dark and about one meter sixty centimeters tall. Anything else we learn will be communicated to the police, but in the meanwhile we’re taking the responsibility of warning the principal banks. Your safest course will be to make no advance in those circumstances. Tell the girl you will have to get in touch with New York or wherever it is, and ask her to call back in three or four days. By that time you’ll have a full description from the police.”

  A couple of minutes later he was speaking to the American consul.

  “I say!” he bleated, in the plaintive tones of Oxford. “D’you happen to know a young thing by the name of Deane—Miss Deane?”

  “No,” said the consul blankly. “What about her?”

  “Well, I met her in a beer garden last night. She’s an American girl—at least, she said she was. Dashed pretty, too. She told me her bag and things had been stolen, and I lent her five pounds to wire home for money. Well, I’ve just been sniffing a cocktail with another chap and we were comparing notes, and it turns out he met the same girl in another beer garden last Tuesday and lent her ten dollars on the same story. So we toddled round to the hotel she said she was staying at to make inquiries, and they hadn’t heard of her at all. So we decided she must be a crook, and we thought we’d better tell you to warn your other citizens about her, old boy!”

  “I’m very much obliged. Can you tell me what she looks like?”

  “Like a wicked man’s dream, old fruit! About five foot three, with the most luscious brown eyes…”

  His last call was to the hotel manager. Simon Templar spoke German, as he spoke other languages, like a native, and he put on his stiffest and most official staccato for the occasion.

  “This is the Central Police Office. We have information received that a new swindle is by an American girl worked. She tells you that her money from her room in your hotel stolen is. Then will she a few days more to stay attempt, or money to borrow…So! That has already yourself befallen…No, unfortunately is there nothing to do. It is impossible the untruthfulness of her story to prove. You must however no compensation pay, and if you her room engaged announce, will you sorely less money lose.”

  Simon finished his dressing in an aura of silent laughter, and went out to lunch.

  He was scanning a magazine in his room about four o’clock when another knock came on his door and the girl walked in. She looked pale and tired, but the Saint hardened his heart. Even the spectacle of his attire could only rouse her to a faint spark of sarcasm.

  “Have you joined the boy scouts or something?” she asked.

  Simon turned his eyes down to his brown knees unabashed.

  “I’m going down to Innsbruck and up over the Brenner Pass into Italy. Tramping about over a lot of dreary roads and sleeping in ditches—all that sort of thing. It’s one of the most beautiful trips in the whole world, and the only way you can get the best out of it is on foot. I’m catching a train to Lenggries at five, and starting from there early tomorrow morning—that cuts out the only dull part. What luck have you had?”

  “None at all.” The girl flung herself into a chair. “I’d never have believed anything could have been so hopeless. My God, the way I’ve been looked at today, you might think I was some kind of crook! I went to the bank. Yes, they’d be delighted to get in touch with my bank in Boston, but they couldn’t do anything till they had a reply. How long would it take? Four days at least. And what was I going to do till then? The manager didn’t know, but he shrugged his shoulders as if he thought I’d be lucky to stay out of jail that long. Then I went to the consulate. The consul’s eyes were popping out of his head almost as soon as I’d begun to tell him the trouble. If the bank was willing to cable Boston for me, what was the trouble? I told him I couldn’t go without eating for four days. He said he was only authorized to allow me fifty cents a day and send me home. I asked him what he thought I could eat for fifty cents, and he bawled me out! He said I was a disgrace to the country, and an American citizen had no business to be abroad without any means of support, and if he shipped me home I’d go straight to jail when I landed. And then he showed me the door. I’ve never been so humiliated in my life! If I don’t get that consul fired out of the service—”

  “But surely you can stay on here till some money arrives?” suggested the Saint ingenuously.

  “Not a chance. I’ve just seen the manager. He said as much as he could without insulting me openly—told me he would require my room by seven o’clock if I couldn’t pay him up to date by that time.”

  “Distinctly awkward,” remarked Simon judicially.

  The girl bit her lip.

  “I…I’ve got to do something,” she stammered. “I don’t know how to say it—I hate asking you, after all this—but I’ve got to have something to see me through till the bank gets a reply from Boston, and they can’t do that till after the week-end. Or when Jack gets to Innsbruck about Tuesday—I can send a wire to him there. I…I know I’m practically a stranger, but if you could lend me just enough—”

  “My dear,” said the Saint blandly, “I should be delighted. But I haven’t got it to lend.”

  Her eyes opened wide.


  “You haven’t got it?”

  She spread out a brown hand.

  “Take a look. My luggage went off in advance this afternoon. All I’m going to need—toothbrush and towel and blankets—is in my rucksack. My bill here is paid, and I’ve got about forty marks in my belt—enough to buy food and beer. I can’t get any more till I get to Bolzano. I couldn’t even send you on to Innsbruck—the third-class fare for one is about fifteen marks, and the remaining twenty-five wouldn’t feed me.”

  She stared at him aghast. Her pretty mouth quivered. There was a moistness very close to the tears of sheer hysterical fright in her eyes.

  “But what on earth am I going to do?” she wailed.

  Simon lighted a cigarette, and allowed his gaze to return to her face.

  “You’ll just have to walk to Innsbruck with me,” he said.

  2

  Simon Templar had been cordially disliked by many different people in his time, but rarely with such a wholehearted simplicity as that which Belinda Deane lavished on him the next morning. On the other hand, unpopularity had never lowered his spirits: he strode along carolling to the skies, and meditating on the infinite variety of the accidents of travel.

  He had met Belinda Deane and Jack Boston on the train from Stuttgart a week before. There had been some complication about their tickets, and their knowledge of German was infinitesimal. The Saint, to whom human companionship was the breath of life, and who would seize any excuse to beguile a journey by making the acquaintance of his fellow-travellers, had stepped in as an interpreter. Thereafter they had gone around Munich together, until Easton had separated to join an old friend—“a great-open-space friend,” he described him—on a short walking trip from Garmisch to Innsbruck by way of Oberammergau. This decision had been the subject of a distressing scene at which Simon had been coerced into the position of umpire.

  It was not by any means the first he had witnessed. One glance had been sufficient to tell him that Belinda had been blessed with a face and figure that would make even hard-boiled waiters scramble for the privilege of serving her, but one hour in her company had been enough to show him that they must have been doing it ever since she left her cradle, with the inevitable results. Everything that New England and Paris had to give had been endowed upon her—background, breed, education, poise. She could have been taken for the flower of American sophistication at its most perfect. Intelligence, knowledge, charm—she had them all. She knew exactly the right thing to say and do in any circumstances, entirely because she had been trained to circumstances where the same things were always being said and done. Jack Easton, a youngster of less ancient lineage, confessed that there were times when she scared him.

  “Sometimes she ought to be spanked,” he said once, when he and Simon were alone together after that last scene.

  He was annoyed, because the quarrel had consisted of a healthily stubborn bluntness piling up in competition with an increasingly chilly self-possession, and there was something about the Saint which always drew out confidences.

  “What she really needs,” said Easton, “is for somebody to club her and drag her off to a desert island and make her wash dishes and dig up her own potatoes.”

  “Why don’t you do it?” murmured the Saint.

  “Because I know she’d never forgive me as long as she lived. Besides,” said Easton, morosely practical, “I don’t know any desert islands.”

  Simon smoked for a time before he replied. The idea had come to him on the spur of the moment, and the more he thought of it the more it made him smile. The troubles of young love had always seemed more worthwhile to him than most things.

  “It wouldn’t matter so much if she never forgave me,” he said. “And it could be done without desert islands.”

  Belinda trotted beside him and hated him. The leisurely swing of his long legs was measured to a pace that made her work to keep up with him. His pack rode like a feather on his broad shoulders, and the possibility of fatigue didn’t seem to enter his head. She glanced sidelong at his strong brown profile, down over his check cotton shirt with rolled-up sleeves, his broad leather belt, leather shorts, and bare legs, and hated him still more for the ease of his untrammeled masculinity. She had been moved to sarcasm at the expense of his costume in the hotel, but now she tried not to admit that the curious glances of the few people they passed were centered on her. Her light tweed skirt came from Paris, her green suede golfing jacket was the latest thing from Fifth Avenue: from the rudimentary crown of her jaunty little hat to the welts of her green and white buckskin shoes she was as smart and pretty as a picture, and she knew it. It was unjust that smartness should give her no advantage.

  The Saint sang.

  “Give me the life I love,

  Let the lave go by me—”

  Belinda gritted her small white teeth. She had never done much walking, and after the first few miles she was feeling tired. The fact that the man at her side should have been able to allot the major ration of his breath to singing was like a deliberate affront. She began to wonder for the first time why she should ever have considered his fantastic proposition, but it had seemed like the only practical solution. Even now, she could think of nothing else that she could have done. And from the moment when she had wearily accepted, he had taken charge—registered her luggage to Innsbruck, paid the carriage fees, rushed her to the station, almost abducted her while her mind was still numbed by the shock of inconceivable circumstances…The morning grew hotter, and she struggled out of her jacket.

  “Could you find room for this somewhere?” she asked, like a queen conferring a favor.

  The Saint cocked a clear blue eye at her.

  “Lady,” he said, “this pack weighs twenty-five pounds. Are you sure you can’t manage twelve ounces?”

  She walked on speechlessly.

  The scenery meant nothing to her. Roads were merely the links in an endless trail, which ended tantalizingly at every bend and the crest of every rise, only to lead on again immediately. When he called the first halt, at the end of nearly four hours’ marching, she fell on the dirty grass by the roadside and wondered if she would ever be able to get up again.

  “My stockings have got holes in them,” she said.

  He nodded.

  “There’s nothing like plenty of ventilation to keep your feet in condition.”

  She tore her stockings off without a word and threw them away, but her hands trembled. Simon, unmoved, opened his pack and produced food—coarse black bread and butter, cheese, and liver sausage.

  “How about some lunch?”

  She looked at the bread down her nose.

  “What’s that stuff?”

  “The most wholesome bread in the world. All the vitamins, minerals, and roughage that any dietitian could desire. Preserves the teeth and massages the intestines.”

  “I don’t care for it, thank you.” As a matter of fact, she was at the stage where her stomach felt too tired for food. “All I want is a drink.”

  “We’ll stop at the next village and get some beer.”

  “I don’t drink beer.”

  The Saint ploughed appreciatively on into his massive hunk of bread.

  “The water should be all right in that stream over there,” he said, indicating it with a movement of his hand.

  “Are you suggesting,” she inquired icily, “that I should go down on all fours and lap it up like a cow?”

  Simon chewed.

  “Like a gazelle,” he said, “would be more poetic.”

  She closed her eyes and lay there motionlessly, and if he sensed the simmering of the volcano he gave no sign of it. He ate his fill and smoked a cigarette, then he walked over to the stream, drank frugally, and bathed his face. When he came back she was sitting up. He strapped his pack and hoisted it deftly.

  “Ready?”

  Somehow she picked herself up. Her muscles had stiffened during the rest, and it was agony to squeeze her feet back into her shoes, which
were cut for appearance rather than comfort. Only a strained and crackling obstinacy drew the effort out of her: the mockery of his cool blue gaze told her only too frankly that he was waiting for her to break down, and she wondered how long she would be able to cheat him of that satisfaction.

  He drove her on relentlessly. Hills rose and fell away. Scattered cottages, tilled fields, pastures, woods, blurred by in a crawling panorama. They marched through a deep forest of mighty trees where woodcutters were working, along a road lined with stacks of brown logs. The sweet-smelling air held the music of whining saws and the clunk and ring of axes, but it meant nothing to her but an interval of blessed relief from the heat of the sun. Even then, the shadowy vastness of it was a little terrifying. She had never been so close to the rich mightiness of the earth: to her, “country” had only been something rather cute and amusing, a drawing-room picture brought into three dimensions, to be visited as a stunt in the company of sleek automobiles whose purring mechanism drowned the silences with their reassurance of civilized man’s conquest of nature. Without that comfort she was like a child left in the dark. On the rare occasions when a car passed them she watched it yearningly, and then licked the dust from her lips and felt lonelier when it had gone. Once a cart kept them company for a quarter of an hour, while Simon and the driver exchanged shouted witticisms.

  Presently their path led beside a small river, with a tall ledge of rock rising on their left. The going was worse there, strewn with loose stones which seemed to slip backwards with her as fast as she went forward. The crunch of them under her plodding footsteps resolved itself into a maddening rhythm of hate. “Beast—bully—swine—beast—bully—swine!” they drummed out, bruising her feet at every step. Then she slipped on one. There was a tearing sound, and she stopped and leaned against the rocky wall.

  “My heel’s come off.”

  “What’s holding your toes on?” asked the Saint interestedly.

  Suddenly all her pent-up bitterness boiled over, so that for a moment she forgot her weariness. Her eyes blazed, and his tanned features swam in her vision. Before she knew what she was doing she had smacked his face.