Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Pursuit

Readers who have an uneasy feeling that they have “read” this new book before can relax again. They haven’t. But they may be recalling the plot of the original comic strip on which it is based, which was syndicated by the New York Herald Tribune between July 17, 1959, and January 7, 1960. Of course, I wrote that, too.

L C

It is a philosophical observation so profound as to be platitudinous, that a man’s past is never finally past until he is buried; that any encounter, any incident in his life, though he may long since have filed it away as ancient history and for all everyday purposes forgotten it, may only be waiting with the infinite patience of a time-bomb to make violent re-entry into the peacefully lulled passage of his days.

This fact has been discovered with grave discomfiture by such diverse divisions of mankind as professional puritans, retired embezzlers, complacent bigamists, signers of petitions, devisers of unsolvable murders, and ambitious politicians who go into public life without first making sure that certain smouldering letters have been permanently extinguished.

In this episode of the chronicles of Simon Templar with which we are about to be concerned, the bomb had been planted during a war which ended a quarter of a century before the fuse ran out of its length. And if he could accept such a delayed resurrection with his equanimity ruffled by little more than a raised eyebrow, it was because he was within certain limits a resigned fatalist. If he had ever in his adventurous life been subject to wild waves of hope or unnerving attacks of apprehensiveness, he would never have survived to enjoy the fame and more importantly the fabulous fortune that his sallies as a twentieth-century Robin Hood had earned him. But ever since he had made it his vocation to prey on the world’s bullies, crooks, and pompous bloatpurses, he had accepted it as an inexplicable but incontrovertible destiny that trouble would always come to him even when he wasn’t looking for trouble, and that the only intelligent response was, in the words of the classic parable, to relax and enjoy it. Considering the antipathy he had aroused among both the Ungodly and their tax-supported official foes, most people in his place would have figured themselves stupendously successful to have stayed alive at all. Simon Templar, called the Saint, had not only survived but prospered in the greatest good humour with a Zarathustrian confidence in his ordained eventual victory over everything that the Ungodly could throw at him.

The first spark out of the past this time was a telephone call that traced him somehow to a hotel in Tokyo, and a dry voice that he had only ever known by the code name of Hamilton and an unlisted number in Washington.

“I’ve got a little job for you,” it said, “that should give you much more of a lift than those geishas.”

“I packed up my cloak and dagger in mothballs years ago,” said the Saint. “And I thought you’d have retired before you got senile.”

“This is unfinished business,” Hamilton said. “I’m having a plane ticket to Lisbon delivered to you. If you can bear to get out of your kimono, ask for Colonel Wade at our embassy there. He’ll brief you.”

“Just be sure it’s a first-class ticket,” said the Saint. “My days of patriotic economizing are over.”

It would never have seriously occurred to him to refuse, and he knew that Hamilton knew it — just as he knew that Hamilton would never have called him out of that distant past without some irresistible reason. And that was all he needed to tell him that life had made a new move in the very special game it played with him, and there was a challenge that any true buccaneer must accept.

So it was that less than two days and half a world away from that brief conversation he sat relaxed — black-haired, lean, immaculately tailored, piratically handsome — in the Lisbon Embassy, confronting a much less relaxed military attaché who was obviously inclined to fidget about incursions of civilians into his territory.

“I can’t say this is a sentimental journey, exactly,” Simon Templar said, “even if I do get a lump in my throat when I think of the American taxpayers footing my expenses. But it does take me back.”

His quizzical blue eyes glanced over the panelled room, which was protected from the glaring heat beyond its wide windows by the best imported Yankee air-conditioning, and across the spacious mahogany desk at the officer’s neat uniform. The officer fidgeted. He was a middle-aged man with reddish hair and a baritone voice whose low pitch seemed self-consciously cultivated.

“Were you here in Lisbon with the OSS during the war?” he asked with forced cordiality. “I — er — I haven’t been filled in completely on your background.”

“Nobody has,” the Saint said simply. “We were all very busy in those days, weren’t we, Colonel?”

He realized as he said it, with a certain shock, how inexorably it dated him. Time slips by with such astounding smoothness that we are seldom aware of the space it has covered until we count back. But a few of the Saint’s activities during that war have been inescapably recorded in other volumes of this saga, so that some milestones cannot be hidden from any student with a mastery of elementary arithmetic.

“Yes, we were,” was all Colonel Wade could think of to reply. He produced a salesman’s sudden depressing smile. “Well, wherever you were exactly in the forties, Washington seems to think you’re the man for this job now, and my orders aren’t to question you at all, of course...”

Most of the officer’s sentences never seemed to come to a full period, leaving the impression that he was about to say “but—” He cleared his throat and unnecessarily straightened some papers on the desk in front of him. Simon Templar waited, secure and cool in his own un-uniformed independence.

“This — er — matter involves one of our Intelligence Officers, a Major Robert Kinian, who disappeared here in Lisbon in 1944. He’d been to school in Germany for years, spoke the language perfectly, and he’d been undercover there during the first part of the war. Then in February of ’44 he came here and...” Wade flicked one of his hands. “...disappeared...”

“A lot of people disappeared in 1944,” the Saint said impassively. “But I’d have thought that by this time you’d have closed the file on an agent who disappeared on a risky mission in wartime.”

The colonel pressed his hands together in front of him, steeple-like, carefully matching the tip of each finger precisely with its opposite.

“If it was an assignment like Kinian’s — never,” he said. “There was too much involved, and there are questions we want answered because the answers could still mean a lot today. We don’t give up easily. If you see what I mean.”

The officer showed quiet pride in American intelligence’s bulldoggery. Simon let him enjoy himself for a moment before deflating him as gently as possible.

“And just what have you found out about him in these last twenty-five years?”

The Saint refrained from bearing down on the number for the sake of good civilian-military relations. Colonel Wade nevertheless betrayed embarrassment. His homemade steeple crumpled and he smoothed his already smooth papers with nervous hands.

“We — er — we haven’t found out anything, yet,” he admitted.

“No clues at all?” Simon asked.

“No,” said the colonel. “I can give you the whole story very quickly.”