Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Pursuit

Vicky took a deep breath and walked through the gate. She continued decisively and quickly down the gravel path towards the location of the German memorial. Something cautioned her, however, to avoid making too much noise, and as she got closer to the monument she slowed her pace and moved so quietly that she could scarcely hear her own footsteps.

Then she stopped.

She was almost within sight of the monument, and she thought that a faint scratching or scraping noise had come from its direction. Poised without breathing, she listened. The only sounds now were the background chirping and semi-musical sawing of nocturnal insects. It wouldn’t have been surprising if her imagination had tended to embellish nature a bit.

She walked on, however, more cautiously than ever. Turning a corner in the path she came within sight of the memorial silhouetted against the brilliantly moonlit sky. Its face was in deep shadow, but as she moved on towards it, approaching to within fifty yards, she saw a shadow stir. Something like true petrifaction seized her, so that she could not move even a finger. The dim shape by the monument moved again, but she could only make out that it was big enough to be human and was not a stray dog or cat.

Self-preservation almost screamed at her, urging her to run, calling in nightmare panic to set her feet moving. But Vicky Kinian had come a long way from her last schoolgirl Hallowe’en, and once having straddled life and gotten the reins in her hands she felt an even stronger instinct to hold on and not be thrown.

Suddenly anger began to replace fright. Somebody was meddling with her shrine, and she was not about to leave before she had at least seen who it was and what he was doing. She suspected that Simon Templar, true to his mystical nickname, had somehow found out the secret of the monument and was busily in the process of trying to steal her inheritance. If so, she would have no hesitation about walking up and bashing him on the head with her purse.

Her very readiness to attack the Saint in a lonely graveyard with nothing more deadly than a handbag showed a certain faith in his gallantry which she did not recognize in herself until later. But that trust did make her careless. She did not take quite the extremes of care in sneaking up for a closer look at the memorial that she might have otherwise. She tiptoed from tombstone to tombstone, working her way towards the great stone eagle that brooded on top of the exile’s monument, trying to make out what the figure at the base of the edifice was doing.

When she was within fifty feet she could make out the man’s back. The scraping noise she had heard had apparently been the sound of a glasscutter. Now, using some kind of suction device with a short handle, he was removing the whole curved sheet of glass from the memorial’s door and setting it on the ground beside him. She noticed that he did not then reach immediately for one of the metal boxes on the shelves inside, but stood there as if undecided what to do next.

Vicky decided to move nearer, and as she did the toe of her high-heeled shoe caught on a stone ridge surrounding one of the burial plots, and she almost fell. A pebble clattered. The man at the monument pivoted, stared about into the darkness, and slunk quickly away among the tombstones and scattered trees to her right.

She waited, surprised that the poacher had given up so quickly, and disturbed by a new realization: she had seen enough to know that the man beside the monument had not been the Saint. Who he was she had no idea. Nothing about him had been familiar, and though she had not seen his face as more than a shadowy blur she was sure she did not know him. Had he followed her earlier in the day, or did he have some other source of information? Crouched in the shadow of a gravestone, she turned over the possibilities in her mind while she wavered between running away as fast as she could, and waiting, as still as a terrified rabbit, until she felt the danger had passed.

The way of the rabbit seemed safer. The man had, after all, not seen her, and he might decide that the rattling stone signalled no danger to him. In that case he would come back soon and begin his work again. If he had been really frightened, though, he might leave the cemetery and give her a chance at the urns. Either way, there was no point in revealing her presence.

She waited a long time. The moon rose a short but quite perceptible distance further above the big memorial’s stone eagle than it had been when she had first stooped and hidden in the shadows. There was still no sound or other trace of her rival’s whereabouts. She decided finally, after many minutes, and when one of her legs had gone completely to sleep, that the man had done just what he had seemed to be doing: hurried away from the monument and fled as inconspicuously as possible out of the cemetery.

The thought that he had been so easily discomfited gave Vicky a new sense of her own powers. She stood up, got some circulation restored to her numbed leg, and walked with as much confidence as she could summon to the opened shrine. A musty smell came from the shelves, which were having their first exposure to fresh air for twenty-five years or more. Her eyes were becoming more and more accustomed to the darkness, and the moon was distributing more light as it rose higher, but even so she could just barely make out the name-plates on the metal funerary boxes. Luckily the position of the reputed remains of Josef Meier at the left end of the upper shelf had remained fixed in her mind since that afternoon.

Gingerly she raised her arms and touched the box with just the tips of her fingers. Finding herself still undemolished by divinely hurled thunderbolts, she took the full weight of the box in her hands and carried it into the moonlight. There was no lock holding the lid closed, only a sliding catch made of chrome, but the catch was hard to move after so many years and for several seconds she exerted all her strength in an effort to budge it.

She was so intently occupied that she did not hear the very slight rustling in the shrubs just behind her; or if she did, it remained in the periphery of her consciousness, automatically interpreted as the brushing of a wind-gust through the leaves. When the rustle suddenly became the crashing plunge of a heavy body through foliage not ten feet away from her, she was too shocked and horrified even to scream.

She whirled, and leaping at her was a shadowed figure whose face — limp-featured and grotesque like a rubber mask — was as grey as death itself in the moonlight.

Stumbling back, she would have screamed then, but the man’s hands were on her. Fingers clamped across her windpipe and closed off her nose and mouth. No trace of oxygen could get to her lungs and no cry could escape from her throat.

The man dodged behind her, pulling her back against him as he kept up his relentless deadly pressure. The small resting-place of Josef Meier fell to the ground. All she wanted now was air, but there was none for her in the whole universe.

As her sight dimmed, the moon, emotionless and cold, having seen many such things in its time, seemed to fill her whole brain like a painfully gigantic glowing bubble ready to burst.

The Saint walked inconspicuously out of the Hotel Portal, past a preoccupied desk clerk, and then past the swarm of excited gawkers who surrounded the broken body of Curt Jaeger which lay on the sidewalk just a few paces beyond the entrance doors. A lack of curiosity would have seemed particularly noteworthy under the circumstances, so Simon dutifully paid a last homage to his would-be murderer by momentarily craning his neck on the edge of the crowd in a mock effort to see the crumpled remains.

Then he hurried on to his rented car with as much urgency as he dared to show, and a few minutes later was speeding towards the Cimetière Internationale. He had intended to be there long before this. Now the sky was completely dark, and as he moved from traffic light to traffic light away from the center of the city he could catch glimpses of the not quite full moon above the tops of houses and between apartment blocks. If he had wasted too much time in his last waltz with Jaeger he might very well find that Vicky Kinian — or some less deserving party, such as a lieutenant of Jaeger’s — might already have scooped whatever riches lay in the multiple tomb of the German exiles.