Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Europe

“You see,” he explained diffidently, “we had a friendly tip from Italy that two known Italian criminals had bought tickets to Switzerland. It was my job to keep an eye on them. I’m afraid they gave me the slip last night, for long enough to attack and rob Signor Ravenna. When I met you at the scene of the crime, Mr Tombs, I didn’t know if you might be associated with them, so I didn’t introduce myself completely. But we kept watch on you. We saw you find the briefcase and take it to your room — incidentally, we recovered it as soon as you went out, with its interesting contents.”

Galen put the automatic in his pocket and took out the necklace.

“Except this,” he said conscientiously.

“Thank you,” said Kleinhaus. “Meanwhile, Mr Tombs, we went on keeping an eye on you, to see where you’d lead us. I still didn’t know how deeply you were involved in the affair, and I was as puzzled as you seem to have been by the things Ravenna was carrying and by the motive for the robbery. Most of that has now been cleared up. One of my men followed you here, and I followed Signora Ravenna myself after I talked to her at the police station a little while ago. Her answers seemed as suspicious to me as they apparently did to you.”

“How long have you been listening?” Simon asked.

“Monsieur Galen’s servant was too agitated by the way Signora Ravenna behaved when he told her her husband was already here to remember to shut the front door, so I’ve been in the hall all the time. It was very illuminating.” The detective’s bright blue eyes shifted again. “Now, Signora Ravenna, I still want to hear what you were going to say.”

Her face was a white mask.

“I have nothing to say! You can’t be serious about such an accusation — and from such a person! Can you believe I would have my own husband murdered?”

“Such things have happened,” Kleinhaus said sadly. “However, we can check in another way. I’m glad to be able to tell you now that the two men have already been caught. Mr Tombs will be able to identify them. Then you can confront them, and we’ll see what they say when they realize there’s only one way to save their own skins.”

It was pitiful to see the false indignation drain out of her face, and the features turn ugly and formless with terror. She moistened her lips, and her throat moved, but no sound came. And then, as if she understood that in that silence she had already betrayed her own guilt for all to see, she gave an inarticulate little cry and ran past Galen, shoving him out of the way with a hysterical violence that sent him staggering, and ran out through the French windows, out on to the sunlit terrace that went to the edge of the cliff where the house perched, and kept on running...

Inspector Kleinhaus, presently, was the first to turn from looking down over the edge. With a conclusive gesture he replaced his absurdly juvenile hat.

“Perhaps that saves a lot of unpleasantness,” he remarked. “Well, I must still ask you to identify the two men, Mr Tombs — your name really is Tombs, is it?”

“It sounds sort of ominous, doesn’t it?” said the Saint easily.

He still had eight diamonds, six emeralds, and ten valuable stamps in his pockets which no one was left to ask embarrassing questions about, and at such a time it would have been very foolish to draw any more attention to himself.

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.

Also there was a story about the Saint’s vengeance on an absconding company promoter, readable but not particularly distinguished, and a story called “The Spanish Cow,” the only recorded instance where the Saint deliberately played gigolo with a covetous eye on a fat old woman’s jewels, but with a most unpredictable denouement. The manuscripts of these I have lost somewhere: nobody else could find them except me, and I don’t seem to be able to. Nor do I have the heart to try and write them again from memory. There is nothing so dead to me as a story that has been written once and left behind. These are like children that died young: it’s too bad we can’t have them with us today, but there would be something zombie-like about their resurrection, and so we can only write them off and devote ourselves to the more positively entertaining business of making new ones.

— Leslie Charteris (1947)

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

“People,” said Myra Campion languidly, “ought to have to pass an examination and get licensed before they’re allowed to exhibit themselves on a bathing beach.”

Simon Templar smiled vaguely and trickled sand through his fingers. Around them spread the sun-baked shambles of Juan-les-Pins — a remarkable display of anatomy in the raw. As far as the eye could see in either direction, men and women of all nationalities, ages, shapes, sizes, and shades of color, stripped to the purely technical minimum of covering demanded by the liberal laws of France, littered themselves along the landscape and wooed the ultra-violet ray with a unanimous concentration of effort that would have restored world prosperity if it had been turned into the channels of banking or breeding pedigree wombats or some such lucrative field of endeavor. Reclining on straw mat, under beach umbrellas, in deck chairs, or even on the well-worn sand itself, they sprawled along the margin of that fashionable stretch of water in a sizzling abandon of scorched flesh that would have made a hungry cannibal lick his lips. To the Saint’s occasionally cynical eye there was something reminiscent of an orgy of human sacrifice in that welter of burnt-offerings on the altar of the snobbery of tan. Sometimes he thought that a keen ear might have heard the old sun-god’s Homeric laughter at the childish sublimation that had repopulated his shrine, as the novices turned themselves like joints on a spit, basted their blistered skin with oils and creams, and lay down to roast again, suffering patiently that they might triumph in the end. Simon looked at teak-bronzed males with beautifully lubricated hair parading themselves in magnificent disdain amongst the pink and peeling and furtively envious newcomers, and, being as brown as they were, only larger-minded, he was amused.

But not at that moment. At that moment he was interested exclusively in Mrs Porphyria Nussberg.

Mrs Nussberg, at that moment, was methodically divesting herself of a set of boned pink corsets, preparatory to having her swim. The corsets were successfully removed under cover of her dress, defiantly rolled up, and deposited in her canvas chair. The dress followed, and Mrs Nussberg was revealed in a bright yellow bathing costume of nineteenth-century cut, which rose to the base of her neck and extended itself along her limbs almost to the knees and elbows. The completion of her undressing was hailed with irreverent applause from several parties in her neighbourhood.

“I wonder,” said Myra Campion languidly, making her observation more particular in all the arrogance of her own golden slenderness, “how that woman has the nerve to come here.”

“Maybe it amuses her,” suggested the Saint lazily, with his blue eyes narrowed against the sun. “Why do fat men feel an urge to wear check suits?”

His vagueness was rather an illusion. As a matter of fact he was quite pleasantly conscious of the sum blonde grace of the girl beside him, but he had the gift of splitting his mind between two distinct occupations, and one half of his mind had been revolving steadily around Mrs Nussberg and Mrs Nussberg’s jewels for several days.