Leslie Charteris - The Saint in the Sun

"He didn't. I divorced him."

"Then put it another way. Why did he let you?"

"Why should I tell you what's wrong with me? If I don't, there's always a chance you may never find out."

Nothing else had beclouded the idyllic relationship until Mrs. Bertha Noversham had arrived. Mrs. Noversham was the English woman whom Natalie had met on the Blue Train and whose company in Monte Carlo had postponed the problems of solitude. She had been to Corsica on the yacht of some titled plutocrats whom she had met at a roulette table and adopted as old friends on the basis of having seen them several times in the most fashionable London restaurants — Natalie had already told Simon about Mrs. Noversham's steamroller methods of enlarging her circle of acquaintances.

"Yes, dear, it was utterly divine," Mrs. Noversham said, sinking massively into a chair at their table without waiting for an invitation. "It's a shame you couldn't have gone along, but they did only have the one spare berth, and even I practically had to ask myself. They're such snobs, though — Sir Oswald wasn't knighted more than five years ago, and they couldn't get over me having the Duke of Camford for a great-uncle, and calling him a silly old fool, which he is."

She was a woman with a gross torso and short skinny legs, who masked whatever complexion she may have had with an impenetrable coating of powder and rouge, and dissimulated her possibly graying hair with a tint of magenta that never sprang from human follicle. In spite of this misguided effort, she failed to look a day under fortyfive, which may have been all she was. Her dress looked as if it had been bought from a black-and-white illustration in a mail-order catalog. But like magic charms to obscure and nullify all such cheap crudities, she wore Jewels.

It was a long time since the Saint had seen jewels in quite such ostentatious quantity, even in that traditional paradise of jewel thieves. Mrs. Noversham wore them in every conceivable place and form, and a few that required a long stretch of the imagination as well. She wore them in an assortment of settings so garish that she must have designed them herself, because no jeweller with a vestige of sanity would have banked on a customer falling in love with them in his shop window. If the most casual observer was to be left in doubt as to how she was loaded, it was not going to be her fault.

"I'll have a champagne cocktail," she told the waiter. "This wasn't some itty bitty little yacht, Mr. Templar. It's a small liner. Natalie can tell you — she came to dinner on board before we sailed. But do you know, with all that money, Lady Fisbee still insists on having all the wine iced, even the claret."

"You must have been glad it wasn't a longer trip," said the Saint earnestly.

"Well, you know what did cut it short?" Mrs. Noversham said, with the unction of a born connoisseur of catastrophes. "We had a robbery!"

"What, not another?" Natalie exclaimed.

"Yes, dear. Right in the harbor at Ajaccio. Lady Fisbee had given most of the crew a day off to go ashore — it's quite ridiculous the way she pampers those people — and all of us had dinner at the Hotel so that they wouldn't have to work. She's obviously still frightened of servants and thinks that she has to make them happy instead of it being the other way round. So there were only two men on board, and they were playing cards and probably drinking, and somebody got on board and jimmied the safe in Lady Fisbee's cabin and cleaned out the two other guests who had anything worth stealing as well."

Natalie turned to Simon and explained: "There was a robbery at the Métropole in Monte Carlo, too, while we were there. We must attract them."

"One of us does, dear. Perhaps it's a good job they couldn't find room for you, after all — you might have lost that nice collar of sparklers."

Natalie fingered the exquisitely mounted string of white fire around her throat almost self-consciously, and said: "I'm not really surprised. That wall safe that Lady Fisbee showed us looked terribly flimsy to me. The best thing about it was the way it was hidden. And that Italian actress said that she'd never needed anything safer than the bottom of a wardrobe under a pile of dirty laundry. As if professional thieves didn't already know all the hiding places that anyone could think of. Some people almost deserve to be robbed."

"Not me, dear," said Bertha Noversham smugly. "You know where I keep everything I'm not wearing, and nobody could get at that even in my sleep without me raising Cain, unless I was knocked out first, and that kind of thief never goes in for rough stuff. He wants to sneak in and sneak away without anyone having a chance to see him."

"But there are stick-up men, too," Simon mentioned.

"I hope I meet one some day — I'll have a surprise for him," said Mrs. Noversham darkly. "Where are you having dinner?"

She continued to anticipate and accept unuttered invitations with an aplomb that was paralyzing, and never stopped dominating the conversation with the bland assumption that they had only been waiting for her to relieve their boredom.

Before the meal was over, she had blithely devastated a dozen other characters or reputations, some of them belonging to people whom Simon did not even know by name, always in a way that obliquely underlined the impeccability of her own status as a social arbiter. She had a trick of flattering her listeners by taking it for granted that they would sneer at the same things she sneered at, while at the same time implying ominously that they would be wise to make positive efforts to continue in her good graces.

She accompanied them from dinner to the Palm-Beach Casino, and only left them to themselves again when she spotted a famous Hollywood producer and his richly panoplied wife, to whom she was sure she had passed the sugar at tea in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.

"I'm dreadfully sorry," Natalie said. "She's quite awful, isn't she? But I was so desperately glad to know anyone at all when I first got here, as I told you, that I didn't realize how overpowering she was."

"She has a fabulous technique," Simon admitted mildly. "I can see how anyone with the least insecurity would be a sitting duck for her. Before she's through, that popcorn potentate will be terrified of sticking the wrong fork in his caviar, in case Bertha changes her mind about introducing his wife to the Duchess of Camford, which he would never hear the last of."

"The point is, what are we going to do? If — well, if you're interested."

The Saint grinned.

"Tell her who I am. I don't think it really penetrated, when you introduced me. Rub it in. I think that'll scare her off. Of course, she'll try to scare you off too, but I'm counting on you to resist that."

"I don't think I'd be too shocked if you did steal her jewels. Somebody ought to stop her being so superior about everyone else."

"Where does she keep them, by the way?"

"She has a specially-made sort of apron with zipper pockets that she wears all the time; but with her figure, when she's dressed, it doesn't show because it hangs under the bulge, if you know what I mean."

"You couldn't be more discreetly graphic."

Natalie's lovely eyes dilated slightly with belated comprehension.

"I told you, didn't I? Just what you'd want to know, if you were a jewel thief. She was right — some people almost deserve to be robbed."

"I thought you were the one who said that, darling."

"Well, it was right anyway. Don't start to get me confused and frightened, Simon. We've had such a lot of fun, these few days. And I haven't bothered you with any silly questions, have I? Don't let me start now. But you were telling the truth, weren't you, when you told me you were strictly here on vacation?"