Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Europe

“I guess you rate pretty high in this town, Pete,” he remarked.

“If you mean I should get a ducat for speeding, you don’t know the quarter of it. They throw the books at me about once a week.”

“But in any serious case, I imagine you’d be as influential a witness as any guy could want.”

“Quit holding up on me,” Liefman implored. “Is the Saint on the war-path again?”

Simon began his tale at the beginning.

The return from Scherpenzeel, after a gargantuan repast devoured with respectful deliberation, was made at the same suicidal velocity, but so coolly timed that clocks were booming the hour that Simon had fixed in his mind as the Jaguar purred to a stop in the street where Hendrik Jonkheer plied his trade, but several doors away from the house itself. The short street was deserted except for one other car parked at the opposite end.

“I only hope you’ve figured this on the button,” Pieter Liefman said.

“I am the world’s greatest practical psychologist,” said the Saint. “Go ahead with your part of the act.”

He slipped out of the car and strolled unhurriedly down the street to Jonkheer’s door. The building was dark and wrapped in silence. He turned the door handle experimentally. The door started to yawn at his touch, and no inside chain stopped it.

Simon stepped in, closing it swiftly and silently behind him. With a pencil flashlight smothered in his hand so that the bulb was almost covered by his fingers, he let a dim glow play momentarily over the inside of the frame. The chain was dangling, the hasp at one end still attached to it with fragments of freshly torn wood adhering to the screws, testifying to the inherent weakness of such devices which was no surprise to him.

He turned the same hardly more than phosphorescent illumination around the hall, and at the foot of the stairs he saw the burly bodyguard, Zuilen, lying on the floor, the wrists and ankles expertly bound and tied together and his mouth covered with adhesive tape. The big policeman seemed uninjured, except probably in his dignity, to judge by the lively glare of wrath that smouldered in his eyes.

Simon went past him without pausing for any social amenities, moving with the fluid soundlessness of a disembodied shadow.

The door of the back office was ajar, outlined with the faint luminosity of a well-shaded light within. Simon pushed it with his fingertips, and it swung wider without even an uncooperative creak.

Inside, he saw that the light came from a small professionally shrouded electric lantern on the floor beside the massive safe. The safe was open, and the means of its opening were evident in an assortment of shining tools spread on a velvet cloth in front of it.

Between Simon and the safe stood a man with a large handkerchief knotted loosely around his throat, obviously serving as an easily replaceable mask, who was in the act of stuffing a handful of small tissue-paper packages into his pocket.

“Good evening,” said the Saint, because it seemed as tactful a way of drawing attention to himself as he could think of.

He said it very quietly, too, in case his audience had a weak heart, but just the same the man spun around like a puppet jerked with a string.

The movement stopped there, because Simon was playing the beam of his flashlight pointedly on the gun in his right hand, to discourage any additional reaction. But there was enough general luminance, between that and the shielded lamp on the floor, for each of them to see the other’s face.

Mr Upwater stared at him pallidly, and licked his lips.

“You weren’t supposed to be here for an hour,” he said stupidly.

“That’s what I told you,” said the Saint calmly, “so that I’d know about what time you’d be here. Naturally you wanted to have comfortable time to do the job before I arrived, but you wouldn’t want to be too long before, in case it was discovered too soon for me to walk in and take the rap. You did the groundwork very cleverly — getting me to come here this morning and case the joint for you, while at the same time establishing myself as a prime suspect. The only thing I was a little worried about was whether you meant to really let me do the job myself, and hijack the boodle afterwards. But I decided you wouldn’t take that big a chance — you couldn’t be quite sure that with so much loot in my pockets I mightn’t yield to temptation and double-cross you. When you said yourself that every man has his price, you gave me a fix on your thinking.”

Mr Upwater’s eyes were wild and haggard.

“You’ve got it all wrong,” he said feverishly. “I was afraid you were just kidding me — that you wouldn’t really do it at all — so I made up my mind to do it myself.”

“And not like any amateur, either,” said the Saint approvingly. “Those tools of yours are first class. I suppose you wouldn’t like to tell me how you got wind of the Angel’s Eye being re-cut here? They were certainly doing their best to keep it quiet, to try and avoid having any trouble with people like us, as I could tell by the reception I got when I started to ask questions. It was nice work of yours to locate it, but you must have thought you were really in luck when you heard I was in town, all ready to be the fall guy.”

“So help me, Mr Templar, I told you the truth—”

“Oh, no, you didn’t. Not from the word Go. I knew you were lying from the moment you said you delivered the Angel’s Eye the day before yesterday and the cutting was supposed to start yesterday. Anyone who knows anything about diamonds knows that a cutter would study an important stone like that for weeks, maybe even months, before he made the first cut, because if he made any mistake about the grain he might break it into a lot of worthless fragments. And I was doubly sure that you didn’t work for any big-time jewelers when you said that the Angel’s Eye was as big as the Hope diamond and weighed about a hundred carats. For your information, the Hope diamond, good as it is, is only forty-four and a quarter. It’s my business to know things like that, and it ought to be yours.”

Upwater swallowed.

“Can’t we call it quits?” he said desperately. “There’s plenty for both of us.”

“Thank you,” said the Saint, “but this time I’ll be happy to collect a legitimate reward, with no headaches.”

“Nobody’ll believe you,” Upwater said viciously. “I’ll say you were in it with me, right up to now.”

“I’m sorry,” said the Saint, “but I’ve taken care to prove otherwise.”

There was a sudden rush of feet, and the lights went on.

Two uniformed men stood in the doorway, with Pieter Liefman crowding in past them. Pieter put an arm around the Saint’s shoulders and spoke rapidly to the policemen in Dutch, and Upwater wilted as he realized that the trap was closed.

Some time later, as they all went out into the street, with Upwater handcuffed between the two officers, Simon looked for the car that had been parked on the far corner. It was no longer there.

Pieter intercepted the glance.

“It took off when I came back with the flatfeet,” he said.

Simon read the mute entreaty in Upwater’s white face, and shrugged.

“Okay,” he said. “We won’t say anything about Mabel. After all, she was the one who really brought me into this.”

On second thought, after he saw Mr Upwater’s next expression, he wondered if that was quite the right thing to mention.

Simon Templar always thought of her as the Rhine Maiden for the simple reason that he met her on his way down the Rhine. He had never found the time or the inclination to sit through Wagner’s epic on the subject, but he surmised that the Rhine Maidens of the operas would probably have been in keeping with the usual run of half-pint Siegfrieds and 200-pound Brünnhildes. The girl on the train was what Simon, in a mood of poetic fancy, would have liked a Rhine Maiden to be, and he didn’t care whether she could sing top F or not.