Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Europe

She was singing it with a terrible quiet passion, gazing at the reflected image of her own face as if in the singing she saw herself again as she had been when a man desired her. She sang it as if it carried her back to the young years, when it had not been so strange for a handsome cavalier to dance with her without a fee, before time mocked those things into the unthinkable depths of loneliness. Her jewels were heaped in a reluctant pile in front of her. For the first time Simon began to understand them, and he felt that he knew why other women wore them at her age. “I once was beautiful,” they spoke for her in their pitiful proud defiance. “I once was young and desired. These stones were given to me because I was beautiful, and a man loved me. Here is your proof.” But she could not have seen them while she sang. She could not have seen anything but the warm clear flesh on which that creased and painted mask of a face had built itself in the working out of life, to be jeered at and caricatured. She could not have seen anything but the years that go by and leave nothing behind but remembrance. She sang, in that cracked tuneless voice, because that night the remembrance had come back — because, for a day and a night, a man had been kind. And there were tears in her eyes.

The Saint smoked his cigarette. And in a little while he went quietly away, as he had come, and walked home empty-handed under the stars.

The city of Rome, according to legend, is built upon the spot where the twin sons of Mars, Romulus and Remus (by a Vestal who must have been somewhat less than virgin) were suckled by a maternally-minded she-wolf, and there were bitter men in the police departments of many countries who would have said that that made it a very appropriate city for Simon Templar to gravitate into, even today. But they would have been thinking of him as a wolf in terms of his predatory reputation, rather than in the more innocuous modern connotation of an eye for a pretty girl. He had both, it is true, but it was as a lone wolf in the waste lands of crime that his rather sensational publicity had mostly featured him.

Simon Templar himself would have said, with an impish twinkle, that his affinity for Rome would be better attributed to the traditional association of the place as a holy city, for who could more aptly visit there than one who was best known by the nickname of “The Saint”?

It troubled him not at all that the incongruity of that sobriquet was a perpetual irritant to the officers of the law who from time to time had been called upon to try and cope with his forays: to revert to the wolf simile, it was enough for him that even his worst enemies had to concede that the sheep who had felt his fangs had always been black sheep.

But that morning, as he stood on the entirely modern sidewalk outside the ancient Colosseum, his interests were only those of the most ordinary sightseer, and any vulpine instincts he may have had were of the entirely modern kind just referred to — the kind which produces formalized whistles at the sight of a modern Vestal, virtuous or not.

The Saint was too well-mannered for such crude compliments, but the girl he was watching could have been no stranger to them. From the top of her close-cropped curly golden head, down through her slim shapely figure and long slender legs to her thorough-bred ankles, she was fresh clean young American incarnate, the new type of goddess that can swim and ride and play tennis and laugh like a boy, to the horror of the conservatives on old Olympus.

Also, as happens all too seldom in real life, she was most providentially in trouble. Providentially from the point of view of any healthy footloose cavalier, that is. She was engaged in a losing argument with the driver of the carriage from which she had just alighted, a beetle-browed individual with all the assurance of a jovial brigand.

“But I made the same trip yesterday,” she was protesting indignantly, “and it was only two hundred lire!”

“One t’ousand lire,” insisted the driver. “You give-a me one t’ousand lire, please, Signora. Dat-a da right-a fare.”

It was all the opening that Simon could have asked.

He strolled up beside the girl.

“Where did you take him from?” he asked.

A pair of level gray eyes sized him up and accepted him gratefully.

“From the Excelsior.”

Simon turned to the driver.

“ Scusami ,” he said pleasantly, “ ma lei scherza? The fare cannot be one thousand lire.”

“ Mille lire ,” said the driver obdurately. “It is the legal fare.” He waved his whip in the direction of three or four other unemployed carrozze parked expectantly in the shade of the Arch of Constantine. “Ask any other driver,” he suggested boldly.

“I prefer a more impartial witness,” said the Saint, with imperturbable good humor.

He reached out for the blanket that was neatly draped over the seat beside the driver, and flipped it back with a slight flourish. It disclosed a conventional taxi-meter which would have been in plain sight of the passenger seat if the blanket had not been so carefully arranged to hide it. Simon’s pointing finger drew the girl’s eyes to the figures on it.

“One hundred and ninety lire,” he said. “I’d give him exactly that, and forget the tip. It may teach him a lesson — although I doubt it.”

The coachman’s unblushing expostulations, accompanied by some scandalous reflections on their ancestry and probable relationship, followed them as the Saint drew her tactfully through the arches and out of earshot.

“All the carriages in Rome have meters. Just like a taxi,” he explained easily. “But there isn’t one of them that doesn’t have a blanket artistically draped over it, so that you’d never think it was there unless you knew about it. The driver can’t lose, and with the average tourist he usually wins. It’s brought the country almost as many dollars as the Marshall Plan.”

“I’m the original innocent,” she said ruefully. “This is my first trip abroad. Do you live here? You speak Italian as if you did.”

“No, but I’ve been around.”

A seedy-looking character wearing the typical emblem of his fraternity, a two-days growth of beard, sidled up to them.

“You want a guide?” he suggested. “I tell you all about the Colosseum. This is where they had the circus. Lions and Christians.”

“I know all about it,” said the Saint. “In a previous incarnation, I was Nero’s favorite clown. My name was Emmetus Kellius. Everybody used to laugh themselves sick when the lions bit me. So did I. I was smeared all over with hot mustard. Unfortunately, though, I was color-blind. One day, just for a laugh, Poppaea changed the mustard in my make-up pot for ketchup. Everyone said I gave the funniest performance of my life. It even killed me. However—”

The would-be guide stared at him disgustedly and went away.

The girl tried to stop giggling.

“Do you really know anything about it?” she asked. “It makes me wish I’d paid more attention to Latin when I was in school. But I never got much beyond Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est .”

“ ‘De Gaulle is divided in three parties,’ ” he translated brightly. “I wonder if our State Department knows about that.”

She shot him a sudden sharp glance which he did not understand at the time. It made him think that he was overdoing the flippancy, and he didn’t want to spoil such a Heaven-sent beginning.

He said, gazing across the arena, “I don’t care about knowing a lot of dull statistics about it. I just try to imagine it as it was before it began to fall apart. Those tiers with nothing but seats like rows of steps, right up to the top. The bleachers, full of excited bloodthirsty people. The arena baking in the same sun that’s on it now.”