Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Europe

Simon Templar put his hand in his pocket and took out the folder of tickets. Deliberately, he tore it across twice and scattered the pieces out of the window. Voyson started forward with a strangled gasp, and looked into the muzzle of his own gun.

“You’ve reminded me of days that I like to remember,” said the Saint. “There is a justice above the law, and it seems just that a man like you should die.”

Voyson’s red-rimmed eyes narrowed, and then he flung himself across the short space.

Simon took out a handkerchief and wiped the gun carefully all over. It was a small-caliber weapon, and the single crack of it should not have alarmed anyone who heard it among the other noises of the train.

Still holding it in his handkerchief, he folded Voyson’s fingers around the butt, taking care to impress their prints on the shiny surface. Voyson slumped in the corner, with the bullet puncture in his right temple showing in the center of a shaded circle of burnt cordite. Working with dispassionate speed, the Saint dropped his sandwich and pepper-pot out of the window, picked up a couple of crumbs, and erased his fingerprints from the handle. He wiped the inside catch of the door in the same way, slid it back, and brushed his handkerchief over the outside as he closed it again. There was no flaw in the scene: nothing could have seemed more natural than that a man in Voyson’s position should have lost his nerve and taken the easy way out. Simon was without pity or regret.

But as he went back to his own compartment he felt happy. He had always known that the old days were good, and the return had its own emotion.

He saw his fellow-travellers again with a sense of surprise and unreality. For a while he had almost forgotten them. But the old German caught his hand as he sat down, holding it in a kind of tremulous eagerness, with a pathetic brilliance awake in his dulled eyes.

“I vant to thank you,” he said. “You safe me from doing something very foolish. I vas a coward — a traitor. I run away.”

“Don’t we all?” said the Saint.

The old man shook his head.

“Dot vould have been a wicked thing to do. But I am not like dot now. Perhaps it isn’t so bad. I am used to vork, und at my age I have so much experience, I am a better vorkman than any young man. So I say, I go back und vork again. Does a few more years matter so much?”

“And I’m going to work too,” said the girl. “Between us, we’ll get it all back twice as quickly.”

Simon looked at them both for a long time. There was ninety thousand dollars in his pocket, which was money in any man’s life. He could have enjoyed every cent of it. He didn’t want to see what he was seeing.

And yet, half against his will, against the resentful primitive selfishness which is rooted in every man, adventurer or not, he found himself looking at something grand and indestructible. Even the enigma of the Rhine Maiden baffled him no longer. He saw it only as the riddle of the ultimate woman waiting for life in the fearless faith of the enchanted castle, waiting for the knight in shining armour who must come riding down the hills of the morning with her name on his shield. And he did not want to see the magic dimmed. “I don’t think you’ll have to do that,” he said. He smiled, and held out the thin folds of bills he had taken. Life was still rich; he could take plenty more. And some things were cheap at any price. “I had a word with Voyson myself. I think I made him see that he couldn’t get away with what he was doing. Anyway, he changed his mind. He asked me to give you this.”

The train was slowing up, and a guard came down the corridor shouting, “ Hier Mainz, alles umsteigen! ” Simon stood up and took down his valise. Being human, he was aware that the girl’s eyes were fixed on him with an odd breathlessness, and he thought that she could carry with her many worse ideals.

There are just a few stories which I genuinely regret losing, which were lost by force of circumstance and which I can do nothing about. They were all original Saint stories too, and I was thinking of them while working on a new collection of shorter pieces which I am now trying to finish up.

One of them, called “The Golden Journey,” was an open-air story about hiking in Germany in 1931, which was published in Harper’s in 1934. In 1931, if you remember, the French had only just moved out of the Rhineland, and Hitler was nothing but a beer-hall politician, and there was a new spirit among the youth of Germany — a spirit which at that time I think might have developed into something very fine if Nazism hadn’t taken it over and channeled it in the way we know. In those days they spent all their spare time rucksacking through the countryside on bicycles or on foot, singing along the roads and singing at night in the inns; it was, I thought at the time, a lot better than crashing around in hot rods and jitterbugging, although we know what it came to. It was a great background for a happy story then, and yet it is a story which I think it may never be possible to revive. Too many ugly things stand between that memory and the present and they cannot be forgotten even in a period of peace. But the story depends on that background entirely and can’t be translated to any other time nor place. So, let it die, along with many other pleasant things that will never come back.

— Leslie Charteris (1947)

( Editorial note : Needless to say, it was revived...)

Probably if Belinda Deane hadn’t been born with such liquid brown eyes, such a small straight nose, such a delightful chin, she would never have been spoiled. And if she hadn’t been spoiled, Simon Templar would never have felt called upon to interfere. And if he hadn’t interfered... But the course of far more important histories has been changed by the curve of an eyebrow before now.

Belinda Deane knocked on the door of his hotel bedroom in Munich at half past twelve, which was less than an hour after his breakfast, and he put down his razor and went cheerfully to let her in.

“I... I’m sorry,” she said, when she saw him.

“Why?” Simon asked. “Don’t you approve of this dressing gown?”

He returned to the mirror and calmly resumed the scraping of his face. The girl stood with her back to the door, twisting a scrap of handkerchief in her fingers.

“Mr Templar,” she said, “my bag’s been stolen.”

“How did that happen?”

“It was in my room. I... I left it for a few minutes, and when I came back it was gone!”

“Too bad,” murmured the Saint gravely.

He turned the angle of his jawbone with care, stretching his head sideways. His unruffled accents held a sublime and seraphic saintliness of innocence which in itself was a volume of explanation for his nickname. It took the girl’s breath away for a moment, and then she froze over.

“Too bad,” she said coldly, “is putting it mildly. It had all my money in it, and my letter of credit, and my passport — everything. I’ve never been in such a mess in my life. What am I going to do?”

“Have you told the hotel about it?”

“Of course. I’ve had managers and clerks and detectives prowling about my room for the last half-hour.”

Simon shrugged.

“It seems a pity you didn’t go on to Garmisch yesterday with Jack.”

She gazed at him glacially, but his back was turned to her and he was imperturbably intent on his shave. A glacial gaze inevitably loses much of its effect when it has to be reflected by a mirror and the recipient is merely paying the polite minimum of attention anyhow. The disadvantage made her furious, and she controlled herself with an effort. Simon’s amused blue eyes decided that Jack Easton had certainly picked a Tartar, but he admitted that wrath and hauteur sat very well on her small imperious face.