Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Pursuit

Suddenly the girl stopped and then walked forward rapidly until she came to a very large monument set back in a semicircle of shrubs and trees. Mischa, from his faraway vantage point, could not make out the letters carved into the stone above Vicky Kinian’s head, but he could tell that the monument was no ordinary one. It was like a semicircular wall of granite ten feet high and twenty feet or so wide, topped by a great stone eagle with wide drooping wings. The concave front of the structure was faced with a bronze-framed glass door behind which there seemed to be several shelves.

Mischa could observe nothing more from where he had to wait his turn for a closer view. Vicky Kinian stood close against the glass door and studied whatever lay behind it for almost twenty minutes. Several times she looked around to make sure nobody was watching her, and she seemed to be having trouble making some sort of decision. Finally she hastily stooped and dropped her bouquet on to the semicircular stone step that formed a low platform in front of the monument. Then she turned and walked away through the cemetery at a much faster pace than she had used when she had come in.

The Saint did not follow her, so Mischa waited, now moving closer to the big monument, concealing himself behind a conventional tombstone more notable for lavishness of proportion than good taste. Simon Templar, once the girl was completely out of sight, went and stood in front of the glass-fronted memorial himself. In less than two minutes he turned away and strode back toward the cemetery’s gate.

Now Mischa could have his own turn at the Cimetière Internationale’s suddenly most popular landmark. He hurried up to the curved granite structure, gazed dolefully at the doleful face of the carved eagle, and read the lettering which the bird protected with outspread wings.

The words translated themselves automatically in Micha’s mind: Here rest the ashes of free Germans to whom fate denied a return to their Fatherland.

Behind the glass door, which was locked flush against the granite, were four shelves, each bearing a row of ten small metal caskets.

Mischa had no time for meditation on the meaning of it all. He turned again, and by walking fast managed to bring the Saint within his purview near the cemetery gate. There followed another tripartite procession back to the Hotel Portal, where Vicky Kinian and Simon Templar got out of their respective vehicles and went separately into the lobby. Mischa walked to the bar across the street from the Portal and telephoned his supervisor, his voice betraying unmitigated self-approbation.

“I have interesting news,” he said.

“Useful as well as interesting, I hope,” snarled the man at the other end of the line. “Has he been anywhere? Have you lost him?”

“Of course I haven’t lost him!” Mischa said indignantly. “He has just come back to the hotel, and I can see the entrance from where I am. He seemed to tell the doorman that he would be inside only a few minutes.”

“You are a mindreader as well as a hunting dog. Tell me everything Templar did while he was out.”

Mischa described his processional tour of the graveyard.

“This gravestone that they were both looking at,” his bearded superior said with great interest. “Tell me more about it.”

“That is all I know. It was a monument to Germans who died in Switzerland during the war. It is full of ashes.”

“And of what else? Something much more intriguing than ashes, I have no doubt. The girl or Templar will go back for whatever is hidden there as soon as they think it is safe. But you must see that they do not get it.”

“I shall take tools and go as soon as it is dark,” Mischa said.

“Go now!” the other man responded impatiently. “What if somebody should get there before you?”

“I go,” said Mischa with dignity. “But what about the Saint? I cannot watch him also.”

“You concern yourself with whatever is in that shrine,” was the reply. “I shall occupy myself with Mr Templar!”

All the intensely individual interests which had been launched like homing missiles in the general direction o£ Vicky Kinian from such diverse silos as Washington, Tokyo, and the American Midwest, and Simon Templar could only speculate where else, had now converged upon a single city, and even two small parts of that city: a place of accommodation for the living and a place of accommodation for the dead, the Hotel Portal and the Cimetière Internationale. And some of the personages involved in Vicky Kinian’s treasure hunt were soon to find that the shortest route between the two locations was not necessarily a straight line.

The Saint, returning to the hotel from the cemetery after observing Vicky’s fascination with a memorial to German exiles, had not for a moment forgotten the mysterious disappearance in a Lisbon alley of a vital letter that he had not had time to read, and was continuously alert to the uncomfortable fact that he himself might be under somebody else’s watchful eye. But unless he had searched behind each potted plant in the Portal’s lobby like the folkloric old spinster looking under beds, he would have had no way of knowing that Curt Jaeger, ensconced in a low chair behind the additional cover of the largest newspaper he could buy, was watching every step he took towards the elevator with an ardour that should have wilted the foliage of his verdurous ambuscade.

The Saint had one objective in his own mind at the moment, and although it had some concern with the dead it was considerably less violent than the thoughts that were reaching their logical climax in Jaeger’s head at just the same time. Jaeger was a man of quick decision who believed in the tactical value of a minimum of delay and a maximum of force. He had done his homework. He knew what Simon Templar looked like and he knew his room number. Now it was only a matter of putting a simple but utterly deadly plan into effect.

When the elevator doors had closed behind the Saint, Jaeger got up from his chair, put aside his newspaper neatly folded on a nearby table, pressed one arm close against his ribs to feel the reassuring hardness of the thing that was concealed there, and followed the path his prey had taken across the Portal’s thick carpet.

The Saint, in the meantime, had reached his room on the sixth floor and was taking from a drawer a small wooden box which opened into an inexpensive (so that it would not arouse the evaluating instincts of Customs inspectors) traveller’s chess board. When the chessmen were put aside, only a twist of the box’s catch was necessary to reveal the false bottom where — in a bed of cotton — lay certain implements designed to circumvent the locksmith’s most cunning defences. The mechanism that held the door of the German memorial tombstone closed was a good one, but there was sure to be something in the Saint’s kit that would quickly overcame its resistance.

He did not know what he would find in that macabre oversized strongbox, but he admired the ingenuity of whoever had chosen it as an open-air bank vault and he was determined to get to it ahead of Vicky Kinian. She would spend some time pondering how to break into it, and in any case she would almost certainly wait until it was dark before she took any action. While she was being cannily cautious, the Saint would exercise qualities more natural to him and open the shrine while there was still a little daylight left.

He glanced out of the window of his room as he slipped the chess box into his jacket pocket. The sun had already disappeared and the street lights down in the street six floors below were beginning to win their competition with the fading glow in the sky above. Simon felt sure that if he hurried he could be back from the burying ground in time to invite Vicky Kinian out for a truce dinner and a pipe of peace before she even began to get up her nerve to leave the hotel.