Leslie Charteris - The Saint in the Sun

He stared at her. Her arms went up, and her hands linked behind his neck, her eyes half closed and her mouth half open.

"I would be very grateful," she said.

"I'm sure you would," he said as lightly as possible. "And if the flics didn't pin it on me, your husband would only shoot me and get acquitted."

"Who would tell him? It is for his good, too, and what he does not know will not hurt him, any more than what I had to do before with Undine."

Simon realized, almost against credibility, that she was perfectly sober and completely serious. It was one of the most stunning revelations of total amorality that even he had ever encountered — and ethical revulsion made it no easier to forget that it came with the bait of a face and body that might have bothered even St Anthony.

He let his head be drawn down until their lips met and clung; and then as he responded more experimentally she drew back.

"You will do it?"

The Saint had reached an age when it seemed only common sense to avoid gratuitously tangling with the kind of woman which hell hath no fury like, but he never lied if he could avoid it.

"I'll think about it," he said truthfully.

"Do not think too long," she said. "You would do it cleverly; but another person could also do it, not so cleverly, but to be acquitted. Only then I would not owe you anything."

"You aren't offering a down payment?" he said with a shade of mockery.

"No. But I am not like Undine. I would not cheat in that way."

She looked searchingly into his eyes for some seconds longer, but the pouting mask of her beauty gave no hint of whatever she thought she found. Then abruptly she turned and walked to the door. Before he could be quite sure of her intention, she had opened it without a pause and gone out; it closed behind her, and the click of her heels went away uninterruptedly down the stone hall and ended in the metallic rattle of the elevator gate.

The Saint took a long slow breath and passed the back of a hand across his forehead.

Then he picked up his glass again and emptied it.

He knew then that his strange destiny was running true to form, and that all the apparently random and pointless incidents of the past thirty-six hours, which have been recorded here as casually as they happened, could only be building towards the kind of eruptive climax in which he was always getting involved. But now he could go to sleep peacefully, secure in the certainty that something else would have to happen and that this would quite possibly show him what he had to do.

But he never dreamed how bizarre the denouement was to be.

He made his own breakfast of eggs and instant coffee the next morning, and after that it seemed not too early to call Maureen Herald. He was prepared to have been told that there was a Do Not Disturb on her telephone, but instead the hotel operator reported eventually: "Elle ne répond pas." He was surprised enough to have it repeated, making sure there was no mistake.

He had his call transferred to the concierge, and pressed the question of when she had gone out. He was told about nine o'clock, and was happy to be ashamed of his trend of thought.

He would have to be patient a while longer, then, for the next development.

He drove to the section of the Pampelonne beach which they call "Tahiti", and walked along the sand far enough to get away from the densest crowd, which naturally clustered near the end of the road. Peeled down to his trunks, he stretched himself out to enjoy the sun and the scene with the timeless tranquillity of a lizard.

It seemed only a matter of minutes before the purple and orange Chris-Craft came around the point on his left and cruised slowly across the bay, just as it had done the day before. The same grotesque monster with blue-lensed eyes and giant cigar, clad in the same horrible combination of fluorescent green and crimson and yellow, sat up on the side and steered it in the same negligent manner, scanning the shore; only this time it was alone. The servile Wilbert had apparently been left to some other chore.

From time to time Undine's cigar waved back in response to a wave from some would-be playmate on the beach, but the speedboat purred on without swerving. It looked as if Sir Jasper was not in the mood for company today, or as if his regular wolf-promenade would be satisfied with only one specific quarry which he had not yet flushed.

The speedboat voyaged all the way down to the "Epi-Plage" at the southern end of the strand, where the more fanatical sun-worshippers regularly scandalize the conventional with their uninhibited exposures among the dunes, but even that did not seem to offer its colorific commodore what he was seeking. It turned, and retraced its course until it was almost opposite the Saint, and then suddenly poured on the power and veered out and away with a foaming arrogance that almost swamped two or three small craft which had the temerity to be near the path it had chosen, and disappeared to the northeast around the rocky salient of Cap du Pinet.

Simon glanced at his wrist watch, a habit of reference which was almost a reflex with him, and it showed a quarter to eleven.

He wondered what connection, if any, Undine's disinterest might have had with the outcome of the previous night; but he knew that this speculation was only an idle pastime.

When the heat began to become oppressive he went for a swim, and then he enjoyed the sun all over again. And it was twenty minutes to one before he felt restive — and recognized that the feeling was as much due to a plain gastric announcement of lunch time as to any psychic impatience for new events.

Then he rolled over and saw Maureen Herald coming towards him.

In sunglasses and a chiffon scarf cowled over her head and knotted under her chin in the style of that season, she was like a hundred other girls on the beach except for the distinctively long-lined greyhound figure which her wet bikini clung to like paint — until she was close enough to reveal the classical delicacy of her face.

"Hi," she said.

Simon unwound himself vertically with a delight which surprised himself.

"Hi," he said. "I was wondering where we'd catch up. I called you about half-past nine, but you'd already gone out."

"I had to see Undine. I called you as soon as I could, but your phone didn't answer. I hoped I'd find you here."

"How did it go?"

She met his eyes squarely.

"He signed the contract."

She sat down, and he gave her a cigarette.

"Was it difficult?"

"It nearly was," she said. "You were wonderful to say nothing, the way you did, when I stood you up at the Sénéquier. But later on I was wishing you hadn't been such a good sport. He wasn't so bad at the restaurant, except that it was like being out with a brass band, but after dinner we had to go to his villa."

"Not to see etchings?"

"Not quite. To see if the contract had arrived. It might have come, he sad, if it was sent special delivery. But of course it hadn't." She inhaled deeply. "Then he laid it on the line anyhow — what I'd have to do if he was going to sign. It was as corny as any old melodrama, but he was flying high by that time and he meant it. I was scared stiff."

"But Heaven will protect the working girl. the song says." She gazed out towards the horizon unseeingly, as though she were watching a movie that was being projected on a screen inside her sunglasses, and her voice was a toneless commentary on what she saw replayed.

"The only thing I could think of was just as hysterically corny. I told him about my mother and my brother, and I said: 'That's the only reason I can't say no, but I can't make myself pretend to enjoy it. If you can enjoy it like that, go ahead.' And I lay down limp like a rag doll." She turned to Simon again, and gripped his arm in a sudden gesture that was more like a convulsive release of suppressed tension than anything personal. "And it worked!"