Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Europe

He went out on to the terrace with Mrs Nussberg, and as he left the lounge he caught sight of Myra Campion’s face among the spectators who were staring after him in the pained blank manner of a row of dowagers who have been simultaneously bitten in the fleshy part of the leg by their favorite Pomeranians. Miss Campion’s sweet symmetrical features were almost egg-like in their stupefied bewilderment, and Simon’s smile as he reached the edge of the balcony and looked out over the dark sea came quite naturally.

“You’ve seen for yourself,” he said. “I’ve just got a natural gift for getting into trouble.”

“Served him right,” blared Mrs Nussberg. “The dirty little — ”

Her comment on Maurice Walmar’s lineage was certainly inaccurate, but Simon could understand her feelings.

The orchestra wailed into another erotic symphony, and the Saint expanded his chest and flicked his cigarette over the parapet. The job had to be completed.

“Would you like to dance?” he asked.

The Spanish Cow gazed at him suspiciously, her small eyes hard and bright in the sallow puffy face. Then, without answering, she marched towards the floor.

As they completed their first circle under the fairy lights, Simon saw that the colony was following his movements with bulging eyes. It went into small huddles and buzzed, as openly as convention would permit. He began to find more innocent entertainment in his sudden notoriety than he had ever expected — and the Saint had never found the appalled reactions of respectable society dull. There were times when he derived a purely urchin satisfaction from the flouting of the self-appointed Best People, and he was quite disappointed when the Spanish Cow broke away from him after a half-dozen turns.

“I can’t stay here with my dress soaking,” she said abruptly. Take me home.”

Simon walked back with her to the Provençal. The sky was a blaze of star-dust, and a whisper of music came from the Casino terrace. Down by the water there were tiny ripples hissing and chattering on the firm sand, and a light breeze murmured in the fronds of the tall palms. Simon had a fleeting remembrance of the slim exquisite softness of Myra Campion, and, being very human, he sighed inaudibly. But business was business.

A few yards from the hotel entrance Mrs Nussberg stopped. Her ropes of diamonds flashed in the light of the rows of bulbs flaming the marquee over the doors.

Thank you for helping me,” she said with a harsh effort.

Simon’s teeth flashed. He knew that she was taking stock of his tanned keen-lined face, the set of his wide shoulders and the length of lean muscular limbs. He knew that he was interesting to look at — conquering a natural bashfulness that he always kept well under control, he admitted the fact frankly.

“Not at all,” he said.

She opened her bag and held something out to him. He took it and unfolded it — it was a ten-thousand-franc note. He folded it again carefully, and handed it back with a smile.

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken,” he said pleasantly. “You don’t owe me anything. Good night.”

There began for Mrs Porphyria Nussberg an interlude of peace that must have been strange to her. The glances that she encountered veiled their derision with perplexed uncertainty; the giggles when she unharnessed herself of her corsets before going in to bathe were more subdued. The impulse to weep with helpless mirth whenever she appeared was still there, human nature being what it was, but the story of the Casino episode had flown around the town and cast a damp sheet over the pristine hilarity of the jest. There was the sight of Maurice Walmar’s bruised and swollen mouth for reinforcement, and the other aspiring wits looked at it and at the Saint’s leathery torso, and merged themselves thoughtfully into the background. Even the waiters, who had been encouraged to curry favor with the sportive element by smirking and winking at the audience whenever they were called upon to serve the woman, relapsed into the supercilious impersonality with which waiters in fashionable resorts cloak their yearning for tumbrils and guillotines.

Myra Campion cornered the Saint the very next afternoon. He was paddling contentedly along in the general direction of Gibraltar, feeling himself safely insulated from the seethe of popular speculation by the half-mile of limpid water that separated him from the shore, when his head encountered a firm but yielding obstruction. He rolled over and looked into the wet face of Miss Campion.

“You’ll have to swim farther out than this if you want to dodge me,” she said.

Destiny having overtaken him, Simon reflected philosophically that it could have chosen many less agreeable vehicles.

“Darling,” he said blandly, “I’ve been searching the whole ocean for you.”

She trod water, the slow swell lifting her small brown face against the intense sky, her eyes fixed on him inexorably.

“What was the idea — lashing out at Maurice like that?”

“Did you see what he did?”

“I heard about it. But you didn’t have to paste him that way.”

“I just slapped him,” said the Saint calmly. “Isn’t he on the beach today? Well, if I’d really pasted him he’d’ve spent the next six weeks in a hospital — getting his face remodeled.”

The Saint steered himself neatly around a drifting jellyfish seeking for its mate. “My dear, if you’re really upset about my slapping a conceited daffodil like Walmar for carrying a joke to those lengths, you haven’t the good taste I thought you had.”

There was a certain chilliness about their parting that the Saint realized was unavoidable. He swam back alone, floating leisurely through the buoyant sea and meditating as he went. He knew well enough that a set of diamonds like those displayed by Mrs Porphyria Nussberg are rarely obtained without some kind of inconvenience, but those incidental troubles were merely a part of the most enchanting game in the world.

Back on the sands, he stretched himself out beside Mrs Nussberg’s chair and chatted with no more than ordinary politeness. On the following morning he did the same thing. There was no hint of a pressing advance about it — it was simply the way in which any normal holiday acquaintance would have been expected to behave — but the Spanish Cow’s soured belligerence had lost its sting. Sometimes she looked at him curiously, with the habitual suspicion hesitating in the background of her beady eyes, as if the impact of a more common courtesy was still too strange to be taken at its face value.

That evening he walked with her along the beach. It was well into cocktail time, and the young brown bodies had taken themselves off the sands to refresh themselves at the Casino or the Perroquet, or to dance before dinner at Maxim’s. The last survivor was a shabby mahogany-tanned old man with a rake, engaged in his daily task of scratching the harvest of cigarette-ends and scraps of paper and orange peel out of the sand to leave it smooth and clean for the morrow’s sacrifices — a sad and apocryphal figure on the deserted shore.

They went by the almost empty Fregate, and Simon recalled the caricature in the entrance. It was still there — a brutal, sadistically accurate burlesque. Mrs Nussberg stared fixedly ahead, as if she had forgotten it, but he knew that she had not.

The Saint stepped aside. A lounging waiter realized what was happening too late, and started forward with an outraged yap, but the picture was out of the frame and shredded into small fragments by that time.

Simon held them out on his open hand.

“Do these belong to you?” he inquired gently, and the man suddenly looked up and found the Saint’s blue eyes fastened levelly upon him, as hard and wintry as frosted sapphires.