Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Europe

“It’s so much smaller than I thought it would be.”

“It’s bigger than it looks. You could put a football field in the middle and have plenty of room to run around.”

“But the bottom — it’s all cut up into sort of dungeons.”

“They probably were. Locker rooms for the gladiators, cells for the Christians, dens for the wild beasts. They must have been roofed over with planks which rotted away long ago, which made the floor of the arena, with a layer of sand on top for easy cleaning. I expect you could hear everything that went on — from underneath. Until your turn was called... I wonder how many people have come up blinking into this same sunlight that we’re seeing, and these stones were the last thing they ever saw?”

She shuddered.

“You make it seem much too real.”

But there were no holiday crowds filling the amphitheater then. Just a handful of wandering tourists, a few self-appointed guides loafing in hopes of a generous audience, a few peddlers with trays of mass-produced cameos. Simon Templar was hardly aware of any of them. He was wholly enjoying the company of the refreshingly lovely girl whom a buccaneer’s luck had thrown into his life.

That is why he was completely astounded to realize, in the split second of pain and coruscating lights before unconsciousness rolled over him, that someone had come up behind and hit him on the head.

He had to repeat the steps of realization, laboriously, as the blackness slowly dissolved again. His first impression was that he had simply passed out, and he thought hazily of sunstroke, but he couldn’t believe that a little sun could do that to him. Then, as a focal point in his skull began to assert itself with painful throbbing, that last instant of awareness came back to him in a flash. He struggled up and opened his eyes.

He was not on the ground, but on a wooden bunk that was almost as hard. There was stone around him, but not the moldering stones of the Colosseum: there were modern blocks, trimly morticed. A door made of iron bars. And the only evidence of sun was a little light that came through a barred window high above his head.

He could not recall exactly when he had last looked at his watch, but it told him that at least two hours must have passed since he was talking to a delightful young blonde whose name he had not even learned. If he needed anything more than the ache in his head to attest the efficacy of the blow he had taken, the measurement was there on the dial.

He felt his pockets, thinking stupidly of robbery. They were empty. Robbery might have had something to do with it, but it would not account for the stone walls and the bars.

He was in jail.

He dragged himself to his feet, mastering a desire to vomit, and stumbled to the door. Holding on to the bars, he called out, “Hey! Hullo there!”

It reminded him idiotically of an arty play he had once seen.

Ponderous footsteps clumped deliberately along the passage, and a turnkey came in sight. The uniform clinched any lingering doubt about the jail.

“What am I doing here?” Simon demanded in Italian.

The man surveyed him unfeelingly.

“ Aspette ,” he said, and went away again.

Simon sat down on the hard cot and held his head in his hands, fighting to clear the cobwebs out of it.

Presently there were footsteps again, brisker and more numerous. Simon looked up and found the jailer unlocking the door.

It opened to admit a small delegation. First, in a kind of inverted order of precedence, came a burly police sergeant in uniform. After him came a superior officer in plain clothes, who was slight and rather dapper, but just as obvious a police type in European terms. Those two the Saint might have expected, if he had thought about it, no matter why he was where he was. But it was the third man, for whom they made way only after they had apparently satisfied themselves that the Saint’s attitude was not violent, who was the stopper.

He was a tall iron-gray man with a scholarly stoop, most formally dressed in swallow-tail coat and striped trousers, even carrying white gloves and a silk hat, and Simon recognized him at once. Several million other people would have made the same startled recognition, for Mr Hudson Inverest was not exactly an international nonentity.

“Well,” said the Saint, somewhat incredulously, “this is certainly a new high in service. I know the Secretary of State is technically responsible for people who get themselves in trouble abroad, but I didn’t expect you to bail me out in person.”

“You know who I am?” Inverest said matter-of-factly.

The Saint smiled.

“I’ve seen you in enough news pictures, caricatures — and television. Now I remember reading about you being here on an official visit. It’s really very thoughtful of you to be around just at this moment.”

The Secretary stared at him grimly over the top of his glasses.

“Mr Templar, what do you know about my daughter?”

Simon Templar’s eyebrows rose a little and drew together.

“Your daughter? I didn’t even know you had one.”

The uniformed sergeant started a threatening gesture, but the plainclothes man checked it with an almost imperceptible movement of his hand.

“My daughter, Sue,” Inverest said.

“A willowy blonde?” Simon said slowly. “With short curly hair and gray eyes?”

“You were with her at the Colosseum — just before she was kidnaped.”

It all clicked in the Saint’s recuperating mind, with a blind and devastating simplicity — even to a reaction of hers which had puzzled him at the time.

“I was talking to a girl like that,” he said. “I’d just made some silly crack about the State Department, and I noticed she took it in a rather funny way. But I hadn’t the faintest idea who she was. And then I got slugged over the head myself. If there were any witnesses, they must have seen that.”

“That was seen,” said the plainclothes man. “But it did not explain your presence there.”

“I was unable to leave,” said the Saint. “I was knocked cold, remember? Do you always arrest any innocent bystander who gets hurt at the scene of a crime?”

“When your pockets were searched for identification,” said the plainclothes man suavely, “it was found out at once who you are. Therefore you were brought here. I am sure that being arrested is not such a new experience for you.”

Simon turned to the Secretary.

“Mr Inverest, I never saw your daughter before in my life. I didn’t have the faintest idea who she was. I just happened to meet her outside the Colosseum. She was having an argument with a cab driver who was trying to overcharge her. I helped her out, and we went into the place together. We went on talking, naturally. And then I was conked on the head. That’s all I know.”

“There were two others,” said the superior policeman impartially. “After they knocked out Mr Templar, they grabbed Miss Inverest and rushed her out to a car which was waiting outside. I think, your Excellency, that if you give us a little time alone with Mr Templar, we may persuade him to tell us who they were and how he arranged to — as you say — put the finger on your daughter.”

Inverest waved him down impatiently. “Mr Templar is to be released at once.”

“Your Excellency must be joking.”

“I demand it in the name of the Government of the United States. There is no reasonable charge that can be brought against him.”

“But a man of his reputation—”

Inverest’s level gray eyes, oddly reminiscent of his daughter’s, searched the Saint’s face over his spectacle rims with the same detached appraisal that the girl had given it.

“Inspector Buono,” he said, “Mr Templar is rumored to have considerable disregard for the law, but there are no actual charges of lawbreaking pending against him in my country. His notoriety, as I understand it, comes from his reprehensible habit of taking the law into his own hands. But it is well known that he is a relentless enemy of criminals. I cannot think of anyone who would be less likely to have any part of such a crime as this. O si sic omnes! ”