Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Pursuit

He did not watch for long, however. Once Curt Jaeger had been carried well out of sight by his taxi, and once Vicky Kinian had had ample time to get herself and her luggage to her room, Simon himself let the doorman usher him into the quiet bronze and gold of the lobby. Within three minutes he had signed for a room and seen his bags carried away to it. Without bothering to inspect his new lodgings more thoroughly, he used a lobby telephone to notify the car-hire agency of his whereabouts, and then went back to the Volkswagen he had rented from them, unfolded a newspaper, and prepared to wait as long as necessary for Vicky Kinian to make her next move. He could only hope that whatever she had to do next involved an actual excursion of some kind on her part, and not some such less detectable form of communication as a phone call. He was also gambling on the probability that she would be too anxious to get on with her quest to sit around the hotel for the remaining few hours of summer daylight.

While Simon waited, and while Vicky unpacked and changed her clothes, a new member of the Kinian caravan was going into underhanded action back at the Geneva airport. The Saint had, in fact, seen him not many minutes before, but he had been no more than a rather ugly face among a great many other unimpressive faces in the terminal building. The only thing which might in any way have made him memorable was his nearness to the bald man with the white Vandyke whiskers just before that dawdling character had made his abrupt departure from the airport; but there had been a host of other people in the same area too, and it would have taken a full-time paranoid to suspect them all.

The new character’s name, for the convenience of our own record, was Mischa Ruspine, and his dour countenance seemed to be suspended limply between two protrusive ears which resembled a pair of not quite identical outsized teacup handles. Sheltering that wholesome and inviting physiognomy was a display of unwashed brown hair that started thin on top, gathered momentum behind his ears, and ended in a thick climactic heap on his coat collar. He was indeed an associate of the persistent eavesdropper in the white Vandyke, and just before that latter party had forsaken the airport terminal he had muttered out of the corner of his mouth:

“The tall man with black hair down by the photograph machine.”

“Hm,” Mischa had confirmed identification.

He had received his instructions earlier, so no further dialogue was necessary. He watched his assignment stroll to the booth of a car rental agency, and managed to stand inconspicuously near enough to overhear most of his conversation with the uniformed counter girl. What he heard convinced him that he could combine pleasure with business by relaxing in the terminal bar and returning to the U-Drive agency later. There was no point in wasting energy and running the risk of losing the Saint in traffic as he followed him, when he could instead wait in comfort and then follow with perfect certainty about where he was going.

So Mischa had sipped his way through two cold lagers, stretching them over thirty minutes, and then had shuffled back to the car rental booth. His normal gait was somehow as dour as his countenance.

“I have something to deliver to a Mr Templar,” he told the girl. “He said you would know what hotel he had gone to.”

The girl looked at him with ingenuous surprise.

“Your timing is very good,” she said. “He just telephoned. He is staying at the Hotel Portal.”

“Merci, mademoiselle.”

“Do you know where that is?”

“Oui, mademoiselle. I do.”

His next stop was at a telephone kiosk near the terminal exit. He dialled a local number and within a few moments heard the voice of the man in the white Vandyke.

“Realite Foto.”

“This is Mischa. I have the information. He hired a car at the airport to drive himself, and then followed the other two when they left.”

His revelation failed to spark enthusiasm at the other end of the line.

“I could have predicted that without leaving you there to watch. But where did they go?”

“Templar has registered at the Portal,” Mischa answered. “Obviously the girl stays there too.”

“Are you sure he did not see you following?”

“I was too smart to follow. He said he would let the car renters know which hotel he chose, so I waited until he phoned them.”

In spite of Mischa’s smug self-satisfaction, the reaction of his superior was still anything but congratulatory.

“Then you can be still smarter and go there prepared to begin following — and at once! What if Templar has already left the hotel? You may never pick him up again. And the girl...”

“Do not worry,” said Mischa. “I am on my way.”

“The thought that you are on your way is most unlikely to relieve my worry. Hurry, and report back when you have something worthwhile to tell me!”

The phone connection clicked abruptly dead, and Mischa turned sulkily from the kiosk and ambled with deliberate slowness out to the airport’s public parking area, then panicked at the thought of possible failure in his assignment and exceeded the speed limit all the way to the Hotel Portal. There, to his immense relief, he saw Simon Templar sitting by the curb in his rented Volkswagen reading a newspaper.

Smugness returned. Mischa parked his car at a safe distance behind the Saint’s and began his own share of what he correctly assumed to be the wait for Vicky Kinian.

It was almost half an hour later when she came out of the hotel and had the doorman call her a taxi. The Saint’s car spat smoke for an instant as its engine caught. Mischa turned the key in his own ignition. The procession set off along some of the less-travelled streets of Geneva, away from the central city.

Mischa, who knew the town well, speculated with each new turn about their ultimate destination. Even so, he was completely surprised when the rear lights of the Saint’s car flashed red as he approached the entrance gate of the International Cemetery. The cab carrying Vicky Kinian pulled over to the curb. The Volkswagen’s brake-lights went off and it whipped on past. For an instant Mischa was undecided, but his orders gave priority to following Simon Templar. As he zipped past the taxi, Vicky Kinian was getting out and walking towards a flower vendor beside the cemetery gate.

The Saint’s car moved on beyond the graveyard, made a U-turn, and stopped just out of sight of the entrance gate. Mischa’s car flew past, made a U-turn, and stopped just out of sight of the Volkswagen’s occupant.

The cemetery was set in a locale which permitted such automotive acrobatics to take place without much danger either of smashups or police intervention. The road was almost unused, and the countryside immediately around the graveyard’s perimeter was a preserve of rocky slopes and evergreens which might have been fifty miles into the Alps instead of on the outskirts of a bustling city.

The cemetery itself was an uncrowded community of quiet stone whose streets were deserted pebbled walks and whose houses were marble sepulchres. Scattered yew trees and ranks of solemn monuments cast long shadows across the grass in the red light of the sinking sun. Following on foot behind the Saint, Mischa could see Vicky Kinian walking uneasily among those shadows, a spray of white flowers clutched like a protective talisman in one of her hands.

She seemed unsure of her course, but after each hesitation she would start out with an air of fresh confidence, as if she had satisfied herself that she was heading in the right direction. It was easy for Mischa to saunter, hands clasped behind him, in the distant background, appearing to admire the herbaceous borders which lined the footpaths. It was obviously less easy for the Saint to make himself inconspicuous, since he, unlike Mischa, was known to the girl. He kept well away from her, using trees and the massive walls of mausoleums as cover for his apparently innocent movements.