Leslie Charteris - The Saint in Europe

“I hope, Monsieur Templar,” said Inspector Archimède Quercy, of the Paris Police Judiciaire, in passable English, “that you will not think this meeting is unfriendly.”

“Nevertheless,” Simon replied, in perfect French, “to be summoned here on my very first day in Paris seems at least an unusual distinction.”

“The Saint is an unusual personage,” said Inspector Quercy, reverting gratefully to his native tongue.

He was a long thin man with a long thin nose, and even with rather long thin hair. He had a solemn anxious face and wistful eyes like a questioning spaniel. Simon knew that that appearance was deceptive. It was the Saint’s business, in the cause of outlawry, to know the reputations of many police officers in many places, and he knew that on the record Inspector Quercy’s instincts, if the canine parallel must be continued, leaned more towards those of the bloodhound, the retriever, and the bulldog.

“If you come here as a simple tourist,” Quercy said, “France welcomes you. We have, as you well know, a beautiful country, good food, good wine, and pretty girls. They are all at your disposal — for you, no doubt, have plenty of those good American dollars which France so badly needs. But as the Saint — that would be altogether different.”

“Monsieur the Inspector is, perhaps, anti-clerical?” Simon suggested gravely.

“I refer, Monsieur, to the nom de guerre under which you are so widely known. I have not, it is true, been informed of any charges pending against you anywhere, nor have the police of any other country requested me to arrest you for extradition, but I have read about your exploits. Your motives are popularly believed to be idealistic, in a peculiar way. That is not for me to judge. I only tell you that we want none of them here.”

“What, no ideals — in the Palais de Justice?”

Quercy sighed. He gazed across his littered desk into the dancing blue eyes under quizzically tilted brows, and for a moment the lugubriousness in his own gaze was very deep and real. The sight of the tall broad-shouldered figure sprawled with such impudent grace in his shabby armchair made a mockery of the conventional stiffness of the room, just as the casual elegance of its clothing affronted the hard-worn dilapidation of the furniture; the warm bronze of the preposterously handsome face seemed to bring its own sun into the dingy room, whispering outlandish heresies of open skies and wide places where the wind blew, and because of this man the office seemed more cramped and drab and dustier than ever, and the gloom of it touched the soul of its proper occupant. It was a sensation that many other policemen had had when they came face to face with that last amazing heir to the mantle of Robin Hood, when they knew it was their turn to try to tame him and realized the immensity of the task...

“I mean,” said Inspector Quercy patiently, “that there are servants of the Republic, of whom I am one, employed here to concern themselves with crime. If you, as an individual, acquire knowledge of any crime or criminals, we shall be glad to receive your information, but we do not allow private persons to take over the duties of the police. Still less do we permit anyone to administer his own interpretation of justice, as I hear you have sometimes claimed to do. Furthermore I must warn you that here, under the Code Napoleon, you would not have the same advantage that you have enjoyed in England and America. There, you are legally innocent until you are proved guilty; here, with sufficient grounds, you may be placed on trial and required to prove yourself innocent.”

The Saint smiled.

“I appreciate the warning,” he murmured. “But the truth is, I did come here for the food, the wine, and the pretty girls. I hadn’t thought of giving you any trouble.” The devil in him couldn’t resist adding, “So far.”

“Let it remain that way, Monsieur. A vacation does everyone good.”

Simon offered a cigarette, and struck a light for them both.

“Now that I know how you feel about me,” he remarked, “I suppose I ought to thank you for not trying to pin that Rosepierre murder on me. It must have taken great restraint not to grab such a readymade scapegoat.”

He had been reading the story in a newspaper at breakfast. The body of a young man identified as Charles Rosepierre had been found murdered in the Bois de Boulogne, the spacious park adjacent to the most fashionable residential quarter of Paris. There appeared to be no clue to the murderer, or even to the motive, for he was a respectable clerk in a shipping office, vouched for by his employers as honest and hard-working and by his friends and associates as being sober and amiable and impossible to connect with any shady acquaintances. He carried very little money, but he had not been robbed. He had left the office at the usual time on the day he died, apparently with no apprehensions, and it was understood that he was going to have dinner and call later on the girl he was courting, but he had not been seen since until his body was found a few yards from one of the roads through the park. There was no hint of a jealous rival, nor did anything in his open commonplace life give any grounds to believe in a crime of passion, yet a passion of some weird kind must have been involved. For what lent the crime the eerie touch of horror that justified the space allotted to it in the press was the fact that although he had died almost instantly from a knife stab in the heart, his head had been severed from his body after he was dead , and was found where it had presumably rolled a few feet away.

“I might have thought of you,” Quercy said, without the ghost of a smile, “if Rosepierre’s body had not been found two hours before your plane landed at Orly. When he was killed and his head was being cut off, there is no doubt that you were half-way over the Atlantic.”

“It was clever of me to arrive with a cast-iron alibi. You really have no ideas about how I could have faked it?”

“I am satisfied, Monsieur, that that would be beyond even your powers.”

“One day I must figure out how it could be done,” said the Saint, and in some incredible way he made it sound possible.

The Inspector grunted.

“You have not, perhaps, any more constructive suggestions about the mystery?”

“I read a detective story once with a decapitated body in it, in which the head was actually taken from an entirely different body, the object being to confuse the police and no doubt the readers too.”

“The medical examination, in this case, proves positively that the head which was found did indeed belong to the body.”

“A big part of your problem, then, seems to be to find an answer to why anyone who had already killed someone, for whatever reason, should afterwards take the trouble to cut off his head. It was not done to prevent identification, because the head was left there.”

“Exactly.”

Simon gazed at the ceiling.

“Perhaps,” he said slowly, “the name of the victim is a clue. Is it possible that you have in Paris some demented aristocrat who is still nursing a grudge for the treatment given to his ancestors during the Revolution? He has made a vow to track down and take vengeance on the lineal descendants of the revolutionary leaders who gave his forebears the radical haircut. Mistaking the name of this unfortunate young man for Robespierre, and having no guillotine handy, he—”

There came, perhaps providentially, a knock on the door, and an agent entered.