Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Pursuit

“Do they know about me?” he asked.

“They do not know nothing,” replied the driver emphatically. “I hear Pedro was dead the minute they plugged him. So it’s all right if you pay me.”

“What did you find in the girl’s room?” Jaeger asked without optimism. Vicky’s revelation during dinner that she had memorized and destroyed the vital part of her father’s letter had already made Pedro’s search of her room seem hardly necessary.

“We didn’t go in,” was the answer. “A man come out-had a letter on him.”

“Came out?” Jaeger asked impatiently, straining to understand the difficult accent. “Out of what?”

“This man, he come out of the girl’s room. We followed him to an alley. Pedro took him and there was a big fight. Then the cops come and we run—”

“Without the letter?”

“We couldn’t get it,” the thug said excitedly. “Like I tell you, the cops come, shoot Pedro. I beat it out of there.”

“This man who came out of her room — do you know him? Who was he?”

“Don’t know. Very tall, black hair, eyes blue...”

“Thin? Fat?”

“More thin — like a matador. Strong as hell — and quick!”

The Latin began appealing to his gods and their female relatives to witness the inhuman power and swiftness of his foe in the alley fight. Jaeger interrupted him again.

“And you found out nothing else?”

“No, but we done as you told us, so you can pay me. You can pay me for Pedro too. I give to his widow.”

Jaeger had needed all his powers of self-restraint to prevent himself from screeching hysterically.

“You are a stupid idiotic oaf,” he had said coldly. “If I ever see you again or hear from you again, it will be your fortunate widow who needs a donation.”

He had slammed down the receiver and spent many feverish hours during the wakeful night raking his brain for some clue as to who the stranger might be who was threatening to interrupt his long, long climb just before he reached the pinnacle.

In the taxi with Vicky in Geneva, he tried once more. Surely, he told himself for the hundredth time, if someone had broken into her room and taken something, she would be aware of it — and eventually admit it to him. He was, after all, her only friend in a foreign land.

“I am worried about you,” he insisted. “Perhaps I can ask one question that will not seem like prying into your secrets...”

“Worried about me?” Vicky asked.

She had spent most of the flight, as well as the drive between airport and city center, in a pensive, quiet, apparently almost depressed mood.

“Yes. Is it possible that anybody else could be looking for the same thing as you may be?”

Vicky’s reaction was not at all sophisticated. She glanced at him sharply.

“What made you ask that?”

“A simple logic,” Jaeger said offhandedly, raising a cigarette to his lips. “There are few secrets of which rumors do not reach the wrong people. Luckily you need not worry about the little you have told me. I said I was a salesman of watches, but to be less modest, I am owner of the agencies which distribute them, and frankly I have too much money to be tempted by your story.”

“I’m not very experienced about anything like this,” Vicky began, but Jaeger went on.

“I only want to warn you to look out for some adventurer or other who may try to steal your secret or talk you out of it. If anything like that happens, would you tell me?”

Vicky stared at him for a few seconds before she answered.

“I think you’re a mindreader, Curt. As a matter of fact something did happen.” She looked out of the window rather than at him as she went on, but her entry into Geneva carried none of the glamorous charge that had excited her when she had first arrived in Portugal. She was too preoccupied with worry and indecision about what she was doing to experience any very happy sensations. “It happened last night, while you and I were out for dinner. Somebody broke into my room.”

Jaeger’s eyes narrowed.

“I was afraid of just that sort of thing,” he said gravely. “Did he — the burglar — did he take anything?”

“He took the letter my father wrote me, and—”

Jaeger allowed himself to become agitated.

“Well, did you not report this? Did the police—”

“I have to tell you the rest,” Vicky said evenly. “In the first place, you’ll remember that I’d already cut out the part that mattered from the letter. But the most fantastic thing is, the man who took it came back to see me!”

This time Jaeger did not need to squander any theatrical talents on looking astonished.

“To see you? And you never said a word?”

“He was waiting in my room when you took me home,” she explained. “And he had the nerve to offer to help me.”

“Well, naturally!” Jaeger exploded. “He stole your letter, confirmed that you were after something valuable, and since you had cut out the important part of the letter he had to come back and find out more.”

“Don’t worry. I didn’t tell him anything.”

“Don’t worry?” Jaeger exclaimed incredulously. “You’re lucky to be alive! And you let this criminal go?”

“He wasn’t a criminal,” Vicky retorted with a sudden heat that surprised even her. “In fact, he almost convinced me...”

“You sound as if you’re defending him,” said Jaeger. “Who was he? Or I should say, who did he claim to be?”

“I probably shouldn’t tell anybody — just in case I have to change my mind about him. If I’m going to be an adventuress I’ll have to learn to think like one.”

Jaeger almost glowed visibly with elder-brotherly exasperation.

“How could there be any doubt? If the man had had good intentions of any kind he would scarcely have broken into your room!” He turned in his seat to plead with her earnestly. “Vicky, have I not been a good friend to you? A new one, but one who has not given you the slightest reason to distrust his motives?”

“That’s true,” she said.

“Then you must — you absolutely must tell me who this man is! I know officials here in Geneva who can investigate him. It is utterly foolish for you to expose yourself to this kind of risk, and I won’t stand by and allow it.”

She looked at him with a new kind of fear in her eyes-one related to her own unconventional intentions.

“I don’t want any officials poking their noses into my business,” she said.

“All right,” Jaeger replied more calmly. “They won’t — if you’ll tell me who this man was.”

Vicky thought for a moment and then gave a defeated sigh.

“His name was Simon Templar — the Saint...”

Although the Saint’s formidable reputation was strongly in the minds of both Vicky Kinian and Curt Jaeger when their taxi stopped in front of the Portal Hotel, they would probably have experienced something like the supremely invigorating shock of a bucket of ice water on the nape of the neck if they had been aware of his actual physical proximity. Mercifully for their adrenal equilibrium, they were not subjected to this brusque exhilaration; although when they walked into the hotel, Simon was watching from his car only a hundred feet away, and when Curt Jaeger came out alone a few minutes later the Saint was able to take a long unobstructed look at his face before he got into another cab and rode away.

Simon was less impressed by Vicky Kinian’s sharp-featured boyfriend than he was by the hotel she had chosen. Apparently the prospect of future riches had completely subverted her ingrained standards, for from a one-horse elevatorless hostelry in an unpretentious quarter of Lisbon she had seen fit to remove herself to one of the finest examples of solid understated elegance in Geneva. The Portal was directly on the lake, and beyond the braid-draped doorman who stood beneath its crested marquee the Saint could watch the course of sails and speedboats across the calm water.