Лесли Чартерис - Salvage for the Saint

After some thought, I am making a brief intrusion here, in preference to a footnote later.

This offspring of the successive talents of John Kruse and Peter Bloxsom, whom attentive readers will recognise as seasoned veterans of the latter-day genre of Saint adventures, is linked with just one feature unique among these semi-pastiches with which I have tried to beguile you over the last few otiose years.

Besides performing my usual role of meddler with the original television script (in which I frankly had a lot less authority than I had in revising this book which is now based on it) I had on this occasion the rare pleasure of spending a couple of weeks with the crew shooting in the south of France, making myself fractionally useful in suggesting and scouting locations and so forth. I even had the privilege of making a short but necessary voyage on the luxury yacht chartered at awful expense to play the part of the Phoenix — an experience in sampling how a real millionaire can live which I shall never forget.

But to make the memory even more special, by being on the spot I was able to con the amiable director into letting me walk through a tiny and totally unimportant scene. Thereby consigning myself, for once only, to video immortality.

No prizes are offered for spotting me in this extraordinary appearance. But when the TV Movie is re-run — as it assuredly will be — this Forenote might just give you a hint of what to watch for.

Or maybe not.

St Jean — Cap Ferrat

October 1982 L.C.

Like so many of Simon Templar’s hair-raising adventures, it began with a beautiful girl and led him to a merry-go-round of battle and murder and sudden death, and there was booty by the ton.

All of which, from Simon Templar’s point of view, was very much as it should have been. Those were the established ingredients of his life, and he could hardly remember a time when he would have wanted it otherwise.

But the ingredients never came together in the same way twice: it was never exactly the mixture as before. And that was a blessed bounty, a sublimely serendipitous piece of good organisation for which Simon Templar — who was also known as the Saint — never ceased to offer up thanks to whatever wise providence might have been responsible. To him the exhilarating wine of adventure had it own numberless subtleties of region and vintage, so that it always tasted fresh and bracing on his palate and made every escapade different and new.

This one was to take him from the Isle of Wight, that Mecca of yachtsmen and sandcastle-builders off the south coast of England, and down through France to the Mediterranean on a freewheeling chase across land and sea, and under the sea, and into the past...

He was finishing off some vigorous bedtime calisthenics with a toothbrush when he heard the soft but insistent knocking on the door of his Cowes hotel room.

He shrugged into his dressing gown, a positively shrieking green foulard effort, and made his way to the door. The knocking stopped briefly; then it re-started. The Saint paused, with his hand hovering over the doorknob.

His immediate impulse, the impulse of his temperament, was to open up without preamble and confront the late visitor. But one result of his years of notoriety was that it was never close season on Saints these days, and there were some hard against-the-grain compromises he had had to make for the sake of staying alive, which he considered an important priority. One of these reluctant compromises was the habit of challenging people who knocked on his door — especially people who knocked on his door late at night.

He spoke, aiming a short sharp question through the wood.

“Who is it?”

He would have been the first to agree that it wasn’t a startlingly original utterance. But it did have a certain workmanlike quality to it. It was a practical and utilitarian piece of dialogue answering perfectly to the needs of the moment.

The reply came in a vibrantly confidential whisper that thrilled its way back to him after the most fractional of hesitations.

“Mata Hari.”

It was good enough for the Saint. He opened the door — and saw at once that she was as gratifyingly beautiful as all uninvited late callers ought to be.

For her part, the first thing that hit her eye was his eye-searing robe; and it was a measure of her self-control that she confined her reaction to a single blink.

“Come right in — sunshine,” he invited, and led the way.

She puzzled a moment over the endearment as she followed him into the room, which in point of strict accuracy wasn’t a room only but a suite, and wasn’t even a suite only but nothing less than the most luxurious and expensive suite in the hotel. Simon Templar was sometimes inclined to extravagance, though he used an economical gesture now to indicate a chair.

“Your drink will be — let me guess — a gin and tonic. Am I right?”

Even as he spoke he was already at work at the compact cabinet, mixing the drink with an unhurried adroitness that few men could have matched without years of professional practice. By the time she nodded her agreement with his selection the ice was already tinkling into the glass; and it seemed only a bare few seconds later that the Saint was lounging back in a chair facing her with his own choice of alcoholic refreshment in his hand.

He studied her gravely for a few moments.

“Mata Hari,” he said, by way of explaining his greeting. “Either from my encyclopaedic knowledge of eastern languages or else because I came across the fact in a magazine somewhere, I happen to know that the words come from the Malay. Where English uses the crude and unimaginative monosyllable ‘sun’, the Malays say ‘mata hari’ — literally, it means ‘eye of the day’.”

“Oh,” she said, smiling. “How poetically oriental.”

“And in your case, I’d say, quite appropriate. I’ll bet you bring a lot of sunshine to a lot of old men’s dreams simply by strolling along by the harbour wall.” He paused, eyeing her reflectively. “That is, when you’re not too busy with the binoculars.”

She laughed, softly and with a kind of lilting warmth.

Of course, she’d known all along that he must have been aware of her. Four days ago he had come to the island bringing a lithe zestful fitness and a little leashed tiger of a powerboat, and in those four days she had hardly missed a single chance of watching him in action.

The Saint, who did many things superlatively well, was tipped as an eminently watchable challenger in tomorrow’s big race to Penzance, the first since the war; and she, it seemed, had decided that he was just as watchable during the run-up period. Like most of the other serious competitors, he and his navigator had got there a few days in advance for preparatory fine-tuning of both boat and men. It was a time to get oriented to the surroundings and the race atmosphere, too — and maybe to suss out the competition a little...

Just as the girl, for reasons of her own, had been sussing out Simon Templar.

At close quarters she had watched discreetly, cool and elegant behind inscrutable dark glasses on the hotel or Yacht Club terrace or on a bench near the Southampton ferry just along from where his boat was moored. At long range she’d resorted to the binoculars, which ostensibly followed her husband’s conspicuous and massively powered yellow cruiser but panned a frequent deviation, sweeping along the Solent skyline till they found, and locked on, the creamy bow wave and flashing red hull of Simon Templar’s Privateer.