Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Europe

The eyes were quite calm, utterly devoid of open menace, but there was something in them that choked his instinctive retort in his throat. Something in the eyes, and the tuned softness of the voice that spoke past them.

He shook his head mutely, astounded at his own silence, and the Saint smiled genially and dropped the torn relics at his feet.

On the front of the Casino there were banners and posters proclaiming the regular weekly gala.

“Are you going?” asked Simon casually.

The bright defensive eyes switched to him sidelong.

“Are you?”

“I hadn’t thought about it.”

They walked a few steps, and then she said, sharply, “Would you come with me?”

Simon did not hesitate for an instant.

“I’d love to,” he said easily, and she said nothing more until he left her at the

Provençal.

Before climbing into white shirt and tuxedo, the Saint packed a bag. He was travelling very light, but he still preferred not to leave his preparations for a getaway to the last minute. And he had decided that the getaway should take place that night. He did not want to delay it any longer. He was a little tired of Juan-les-Pins, and, even in that brief time, more than a little tired of the part he had to play.

But when he collected Mrs Nussberg again there was no hint of that in his manner. Her dyed hair had been freshly waved into desperate undulations, and the powder was crusted thickly on her face and arms. Her hands and neck were a blaze of precious stones.

He saw her hard painted lips smile for the first time.

“You are very kind,” she said, as they walked down to the Casino.

The Saint shook his head.

“This gala business is a wonderful racket,” he murmured lightly. “The same place, the same food, the same music, the same floor show — but they charge you double and let out a few colored balloons, and everyone thinks they’re having a swell time.”

As a matter of strict fact, it went a little further than colored balloons — Simon, who had attended these events before, had expected it and balanced the factor into his plans. There were rag dolls, for instance — those long-legged sophisticated puppets with which some women love to clutter up their most comfortable chairs. Simon was also able to add a large bouquet of flowers, an enormous box of chocolates, and three of the aforesaid colored balloons to the bag. When at last he escorted a supremely contented Mrs Nussberg home, he looked rather like an amateur Santa Claus.

Therefore he had a sound excuse for going into the hotel with her, and when she asked for her key at the desk he deftly added that also to his burden.

“You don’t want to lug all this stuff upstairs,” he said. “Let me take them for you.”

She was studying his face again, with that watchful half-suspicious wonderment, as they rode up in the elevator. The elevator boy thought his own cynical thoughts, and under cover of the trophies with which he was laden the Saint pressed Mrs Nussberg’s key carefully into a plaque of soft wax, and wrapped the wax delicately in his handkerchief before he put it away.

He went just inside the sitting-room of her suite, and decanted the souvenirs on a side table.

“Won’t you have a drink?” she asked.

“Thanks,” said the Saint, “but I think it’s past my bedtime.”

She must have been pretty once, it occurred to him as she put down her bag with unaccustomed hesitancy. Pretty in a flashy common way that had turned only too easily into the obese overblown frowsiness that amused Walmar and his satellites so much.

She held out her hand.

‘Thank you so much,” she said, with a queer simplicity that had to struggle through the brassy roughness of her voice.

He went back to his own hotel with the memory of that parting in his mind.

She was the Spanish Cow. So he had christened her, and so she would always be. A fat, repulsive, noisy, quarrelsome, imbecile vulgarian — with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar collection of jewels. And it was a part of his career to take those jewels away and apply them to a better use than encircling her billowy neck. To make that possible he had had to play her like a fish on a line, and it had so happened that the fish had taken the line for a lifeline. It had ceased fighting — had brought itself to a wild grotesque travesty of coyness. When it discovered how it had been hoodwinked, it would fight again — but with other anglers. It would be bitter, coarse, obstreperous again, pulling faces and putting out its tongue. And that also was in the game.

In his room, he took a small case of instruments from a drawer, and selected a key blank that matched the impression on his wax plaque. It took him a full hour and a half to file a duplicate to his rigorous satisfaction, and then he changed his clothes and picked up an ordinary crook-handle walking stick and went out again.

It was late enough for him to have the road to himself, and no inquisitive eye observed the course he steered for the fire escape of the Provençal. With the calm dexterity of a seasoned Londoner boarding a passing bus, he edged the crook of his stick over the lowest platform and swung himself nimbly up. Then he flitted up the iron zigzag like a ghost on rubber-soled shoes. The lights were on behind the curtains of a room on the second floor, and a passionate declaration of eternal love wafted out into the balmy night as he went by. The Saint grinned faintly to himself and ascended to the third floor. The nearest window there was dark. He slid over the sill with no more noise than a ray of moonlight, and crossed as silently to the door. In another moment he was outside, the latch jammed back with a wedge of cardboard so that he could make his retreat by the same route, and the corridor stretching out before him like a broad highway to his Eldorado.

The key he had made fitted soundlessly into the lock of Mrs Nussberg’s suite, and he turned it without a scrape or a click and let himself into the sitting-room. He had closed the door again from the inside before he saw a thin strip of luminance splitting the darkness on his right, where the communicating door of the bedroom was and he realized, with a sudden settling of all his faculties into a taut-strong vigilance, that for some unaccountable reason the Spanish Cow had not yet sought the byre.

The Saint rested where he was, while he considered the diverse aspects of the misfortune. And then, with the effortless silence of a cat, he glided on towards the bedroom door.

It was at that moment that he heard the incredible noise.

For a couple of seconds he thought that after all he must have been mistaken — that Mrs Nussberg had gone to sleep, leaving the light on as a protection against banshees and things that go bump in the night, and was snoring with all the high bugle-like power of which her metallic nasal cavities should have been capable. Then, as the cadence dropped, and he made out a half-dozen words, he considered whether she might be giving tongue in her sleep. And then, as the sound continued, the truth dawned upon him with an eerie shock.

Porphyria Nussberg was singing.

Simon tiptoed to the crack through which the light came. If there had been lions in the way, he could not have stopped himself. More words came out to him, and the semblance of a melody, that twisted the first tentacles of a slow and awful understanding into his brain.

She was sitting on the stool in front of her dressing-table, gazing into the mirror, with her hands spread out inertly before her. The song was one of those things that the band had played that night — a song like all the others, a sentimental dirge to a flimsy tune, with a rhythm that was good to dance to and a refrain that was true enough for the theme song of a summer night’s illusion. But to Mrs Nussberg it might have been the Song of Songs. And a weird cold breath fanned the Saint’s spine as it came to him that perhaps it was.