Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Pursuit

“The dark one is prettier, but the blond one did not look so bad either,” he said in hissing Portuguese. “It seems a pity you cannot... avoid her in some other way.”

“I am not hiring you to think for me, Pedro,” Jaeger retorted. “I am hiring you to do two things, and to do them quickly and efficiently. Get the blonde out of the way immediately, and before you dispose of her learn all she has been told by the dark girl about letters or other information from the dark girl’s father. Is that understood?”

“Bem,” assented Pedro. “I understand.”

Jaeger’s hard turquoise eyes were capable of projecting a threat which made even Pedro squirm and nervously suck his two prominent front teeth.

“And if,” Jaeger said, “you should get any romantic Latin ideas about keeping her hidden away for yourself, or selling her to Arab slave traders, or some other nonsense, you had better remember...”

“Senhor!” Pedro interjected, with a look of reproachful innocence.

“You had better remember what happened to Tico,” Jaeger concluded.

Pedro looked thoroughly unhappy as he remembered what had happened to Tico those many years ago.

“It shall be as you say,” he promised.

“Good. Everything is in order, then? Your friend who drives a taxi, is he ready?”

“He waits just around the corner now.”

“Very well. Tell him no more than you have to — and meet me here this evening at six-thirty to let me know what you have learned from the blonde.”

“Bem!” Pedro said, concluding the consultation. “We shall be waiting to welcome her when she comes out.”

Feeling safe at last in her hotel room, all thought of the glamorously Mephistophelean stranger whom she had seen in the lobby passed out of her mind for the moment as she hurried to open her father’s delayed-action envelope. She almost dropped her purse in her eagerness to get the envelope out of it, but then she hesitated before tearing the sealed paper; in spite of her feverish curiosity she would almost have preferred that a ghostly wind would tear the missive out of the fingers and whip it out of the window.

“Just let me read it to myself first,” she said to Freda. “Then if I can tell you all about it, I will.”

“If you don’t mind I’ll take the strain off my stays in the meantime,” Freda said accommodatingly.

She spread herself out in an easy chair as Vicky tore open the envelope. Inside were six hand-written pages.

Still standing, Vicky unfolded them, and as she read her anxious expression turned to one of amazed shock. She sank slowly to a sitting position on the edge of the bed as she read on.

At long last she mumbled: “This is fantastic...”

Freda could control herself no longer.

“What is, Vicky, for heaven’s sake?”

Vicky skimmed quickly through the last two pages before answering. Then, her face drained of colour, she clutched the disordered leaves of the letter in her hands and stared dizzily out at the sky.

“I can’t tell you, Freda,” she said in a trance-like monotone. “At least, not now.”

Freda stood up. Determined good humour veneered a note of understandable disappointment when she replied.

“I shouldn’t be here now anyway. I should have kept my long nose out of your private affairs in the first place.”

Vicky, realizing that she could not possibly tell Freda what the letter said, pretended to be more badly shaken than she was.

“Please forgive me, Freda,” she breathed. “But I’ve got to think it out before I can talk about it.”

Freda had recovered, at least superficially, all of her usual bounce.

“Forget it, honey! I’ll go take me a siesta at the communal pad and be back for our dinner date. How’s that?”

“Fine. I’m so sorry, but you can’t imagine what a shock I’ve had.”

“Don’t worry your pretty little bean about me. Get some rest yourself, and I’ll join you at seven.”

“Thanks so much.”

Freda turned back from the doorway and said: “I just hope my father never writes me a cliff-hanging letter like that!”

For a second or two she hesitated in the corridor, turning over the idea of going back into the room and cancelling out the three-cornered evening with Vicky and Curt Jaeger, which promised to be about as titillating as last night’s lettuce salad. She was slightly irritated already to have wasted half a day for nothing but a quick brushoff when Vicky finally found her goodies. But her alternatives in evening revelry happened to be fairly uninspiring — and besides, plain old-fashioned nosiness made her want to drag out the class reunion bit until she had been let in on Vicky’s secret.

She was turning away from Vicky’s room when she noticed that the door of the room opposite was ajar. Through the opening she caught just a glimpse of the breathtakingly handsome dark-haired man she had spotted beside the reception desk a few minutes before. She slowed her pace hopefully, but he seemed not to have seen her, and the door closed. That, apparently, was going to be typical of her luck on this particular Lisbon layover. With a philosophical jerk of her shoulders, she walked briskly away to the stairs.

If she had dreamed how strongly the man called Curt Jaeger shared her lack of enthusiasm for a triangular dinner date, and to what extremes he had already gone to ensure the reduction of the company to a more intimate number, the last thing she would ever have willingly done was to walk down the steps of the Tagus Hotel, but she was not a morbidly hyper-imaginative type. Although the Tagus was not the sort of place that ambitious cabmen would choose as a waiting post, she felt no suspicion at seeing one parked in the street. She assumed that a small man with the large nose and bristling black moustache, his face shadowed by a ludicrously broad-brimmed hat, had just paid the taxi driver for his own ride and that he now bustled to open the door of the car for her out of pure Latin gallantry.

“Senhorita,” he hissed with a bow as she stepped into the back seat of the automobile.

Then, when she was seated, he suddenly hopped in beside her and slammed the door shut. Instantly the driver pulled away from the curb so fast that she was bounced back against the upholstery.

“Be quiet, senhorita, and there weel be no trouble!” the little man said in English.

Freda, who had held her own against considerably more hefty males than this one, was more angry than scared. She got her purse on her safer side and slid over against the door.

“That’s what you think, buster!” she snapped. “Now get out of here pronto or you’ll see plenty of trouble! Driver—”

Her uninvited fellow traveller moved so swiftly that she was not sure whether the knife had been whipped from his pocket or whether it had been in his hand all the time. In any case, it was one of those very large switch knives whose butcher-shop blade stays concealed in its weighty handle until a button is pressed. The sharp silvery point flashed out at her like the head of a snake and stopped just short of her ribs.

“Do not waste your voice,” the little man said. “The driver weel only pay attention to me. I am suggest that you should pay attention to this that I am holding in my hand.”

He nuzzled the point of the blade almost affectionately against the thin material of her dress just below her breast.

“I’ll scream my head off,” she threatened with less assurance.

“And I would cut your head off and you would not scream any more.”

The man seemed to think his rejoinder was humorous, but the sharp tip of his knife pressed harder against her and assured Freda that his basic intentions were entirely serious. She was really terrified for the first time. The driver — the back view of his head reminded her grotesquely of a carved coconut with a cap on — swung his taxi around several corners and headed away from the center of the city. The neighbourhoods they passed through began to deteriorate into jumbles of warehouses, dingy-looking bars, and grubby housing.