Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Europe

“It’s been stolen.”

“Not by me.”

“This is a perfect blue stone,” said Mr Upwater, sitting down heavily, “as big as the Hope diamond. It’s worth half a million dollars in your money.”

“I work for a very exclusive firm of jewelers in Bond Street, in London,” Mr Upwater explained, in a ponderous and painstaking way. “I’ve been with them myself for thirty years. The stone belongs to one of our clients. It is a magnificent gem, with a rather romantic name — the Angel’s Eye. But being an old stone, it isn’t too well cut. Our client decided to have it re-cut, which would improve its appearance and even enhance its value. As the oldest employee of the firm, it was entrusted to me to bring here, to one of the best cutters in Amsterdam, to have the work done.”

“And somebody swiped it from you on the way?” Simon hazarded.

“Oh, no. I delivered it to the cutter, Hendrik Jonkheer, yesterday. Today I went back to watch the start of the cutting. Mrs Upwater went with me. I’d brought her along, for a little holiday. And — tell Mr Templar what happened, Mabel.”

“Mr Jonkheer looked Mr Upwater straight in the eye,” said Mrs Upwater, “and told him he’d never seen him before and he certainly hadn’t brought him any diamond.”

Something like a phantom feather trailed up the Saint’s spine, riffling his skin with ghostly goose-pimples. And on the heels of that psychic chill came a warm pervasive glow of utter beatitude that crowned his recent feast more perfectly than the coffee and Napoleon brandy which he had not yet touched nor would ever do. His interest was no longer polite or even perfunctory. It had the vast receptive serenity of a cathedral.

For just as a musician would be electrified by a cadence of divine harmonies, so could the Saint respond to the tones of new and fabulous adventure. And about this one, he knew, there could be nothing commonplace. Suddenly he was humbly grateful for his ambiguous reputation, for the little difficulty at the hotel, for the resultant gossip, for the extravagant bonus which it had brought him. Because in a few simple unmistakable words the prosaic Mr and Mrs Upwater had placed in his hands the string to a kite of such superlatively crooked design that its flight, wherever it led, could bring only joy to his perversely artistic soul — a swindle of such originality and impudence that he contemplated it with an emotion bordering upon awe.

“That,” said the Saint at length, with transcendent understatement after so long a pause, “is a lulu.”

“I can’t get used to it yet,” Mr Upwater said dazedly. “He stood there, Mr Jonkheer did, looking straight at me just like I’m looking at you, only as if he thought I was a lunatic, and said he’d never set eyes on me before in his life. He almost had me believing I’d gone out of my mind. Only I knew I hadn’t.”

“It’s just like that story,” Mrs Upwater said. “You must know the one. About the girl and her mother who go to a hotel in Paris, and the mother’s sick, so the daughter goes out to get her some medicine, and when she gets back everybody in the hotel says they’ve never seen her before, or her mother, and when she goes to the room where she left her mother it’s a different room, and there’s nobody there.”

Simon nodded, almost in a trance himself.

“I know the story,” he said. “It turns out that the mother had the plague, or something, doesn’t it? And they got rid of her and tried to cover it up because they didn’t want to scare away the tourists... But this is a new twist!”

“That it is,” said Mr Upwater gloomily. “Only diamonds don’t get any disease. But they’re worth a lot of money.”

At last the Saint was able to control the palpitating gremlins inside him enough to reach for a cigarette.

“You’re sure you went to the right place?” he asked.

“I couldn’t go wrong. The name’s on the door.”

“And you’re sure it was Jonkheer you saw?”

“Of course I’m sure. It was the same man both times. The police knew him, too.”

“You’re been to the police already?”

“Of course I have. First thing I did, when I saw I wasn’t getting anywhere with Jonkheer. They went with me to the shop. But it was his word against mine, and they preferred his. Said he was a well-known respectable citizen, but they didn’t know the same about me. I almost got locked up myself. They as good as said I was either off my nut or trying to blackmail him.”

“Didn’t anyone else see you give him the stone?”

“No. It was just him and me. I didn’t take Mrs Upwater with me yesterday — she wanted to stay at the hotel and do our unpacking.”

“But if you say you gave it to him, Tom,” said Mrs Upwater loyally, “I know you did.”

Simon picked up his balloon glass and rolled the golden liquid around in it.

“Didn’t you get a receipt or anything?”

“Indeed I did. But this Dutchman swears it isn’t even in his writing.”

“Could someone else have disguised himself as Jonkheer?”

“If you saw him, Mr Templar, you’d know that couldn’t be done, except in a story.”

“How about a black-sheep twin brother?”

“I thought of that, too,” Mr Upwater said dourly. “I’m not a fool, and I’ve read books. He just doesn’t have one. The police vouch for that.”

The Saint sipped his cognac reverently. Everything was getting better and better.

“And you would have vouched for Jonkheer.”

“I never met him before,” Mr Upwater said carefully, “but I’ve known about him for years. Everyone knows him in the trade.”

“So you’ve no idea what would turn a man like that into a thief.”

Mr Upwater moved his hands hopelessly.

“Who knows what makes anyone go wrong? They say that every man has his price, so I suppose every man can be tempted. And that stone was big enough to tempt anyone.”

“Then,” said the Saint, “the same could be said about you.”

“That’s what he’s afraid of,” Mrs Upwater said gently.

Simon sniffed his brandy again, watching the man.

“What does your firm think about it?”

“I haven’t told them yet,” Upwater said dully. “I haven’t had the courage. You see—”

“You see,” Mrs Upwater put in, and her voice began to break, “they know Mr Jonkheer, too. They’ve done business with him for a long time. My husband’s been with them for a long time too, but he’s only an employee. Someone’s got to be guilty... They can’t prove that Tom’s lying, because he isn’t, but that’s not enough. If he can’t prove absolutely that he’s telling the truth—”

“There’d always be a doubt,” her husband finished for her. “And with a firm like I work for, in that kind of business, that’s the end. They’d let me out, and I’d never get another job. I might as well put my head in a gas oven, or jump in one of these canals.”

He pulled off his spectacles abruptly and put a trembling hand over his eyes.

Mrs Upwater patted his shoulder as if he had been a little boy, “There, there,” she said meaninglessly, and looked at the Saint with tears brimming in her eyes. “Mr Templar, you’re the only man in the world who might be able to do something about a thing like this. You must help us!”

She really didn’t have to plead. For Simon Templar to have walked away from a story like that would have been as improbable a phenomenon as a terrier ignoring the presence of a rat waltzing under his nose. There were people who thought that the Saint was a cold-blooded nemesis of crime, but altogether aside from the irresistible abstract beauty of the situation that the Upwaters had set before him, he felt genuinely sorry for them.