Leslie Charteris - The Saint Overboard

"By the way," he said, "we aren't full up on juice for the auxiliary. As soon as you've cleared up, you'd better take the dinghy and fetch a couple of dozen bidons. Get some oil, too, and see that there's plenty of food and drink. There's another bird mixed up in this who's less beautiful — a guy named Kurt Vogel — and we ought to be ready for traveling."

He went up on deck and looked around. The sun was flooding down on stucco villas and the rise of green behind, and cutting innumerable diamonds from the surface of the water. It was going to be a hot brilliant day. People were well awake on the other yachts near by. A gramophone opened up cheerfully on one, and a loud splash and a shout heralded another of the morning's bathers. The Falkenberg was too far away for him to be able to distinguish its signs of life: a couple of seamen were swabbing down the paint forward, but nothing that resembled the hooknosed man was visible. Simon noticed that besides the outboard dinghy there was now a small speed tender also tied up alongside which had not been there when he made his first survey — it had the air of being part of the Falkenberg's equipment, and probably it had been away on a trip to the shore and returned while he was below.

After a while he dived off the side and swam round the Pointe du Moulinet to the beach. He strolled the length of the plage while the sun dried him, and then chose a clear space to stretch himself out opposite the Casino.

He had not seen Loretta Page during his walk, but he knew she would come. He lay basking in the voluptuous warmth, and knew with an exquisite certainty that the kind gods of adventure would take care of that. The story she had told him went through his memory, not in an exuberant riot of comprehension as it had when he first heard it, but in a steady flow, fact by fact, a sequence of fragments of accepted knowledge which strung logically together to make a tale that was breath-taking in its colossal implications. If it was something on a more grandiose scale than anything he had ever dreamed of even in his wildest flights of buccaneering, he was still ready to give it a run. He blew smoke into the sparkling air and considered the profile of Kurt Vogel. Properly worked on by an octet of bunched knuckles…

"Hullo, old timer."

He dropped his gaze and saw her. She wore the same elementary swim suit, with a bathrobe that fitted her better than his had done, swept back by her hands on her hips and leaving her long satiny legs to the sun. The grey eyes were dark with devilment.

He rolled up on one elbow.

"Hullo, pardner."

"Did you sleep well?"

"I saw ghosts," he said sepulchrally. "Ghosts of the dead past that can never be undone. They rose up and wiggled their bony fingers at me, and said 'You are not worthy of her!' I woke up and burst into tears."

She slipped out of the striped gown and sat down beside him.

"Wasn't there any hope?"

"Not unless you stretched out your little hand and lifted me out of the abyss. Couldn't you take on the job of saving a lost soul? Of course you might always get lost yourself, but that wouldn't matter. We could always console each other."

"I wonder why Ingerbeck's didn't think of signing you up years ago."

He smiled.

"They might have tried, but I'm afraid I haven't got any sort of affinity for dotted lines. Besides, I'm not naturally honest. You try to recover stolen property for the insurance companies, don't you?"

"That's part of the job."

"Well, I do the same thing, but not for any insurance company."

"Not even on a ten per cent commission?"

"I have worked on that basis, but it was a long time ago. My tastes were a lot more innocent and simple in those days."

"It's not a bad reward, when there are millions to look for," she said temptingly.

He sighed.

"It's so dull to be honest. Nobody else but you could make it even bearable. But I know what you mean. I'm on a holiday, and I can always pick up a few millions some other time. It was your picnic originally, and you let me in on it—"

"I needn't have done that."

There was a cool and rather sad finality in her voice, so much in contrast to the wavering dance of her eyes, that he looked at her keenly for a moment before replying. In that vivid and carefree surround of laughing swimmers and brightly-clad sunbathers he felt a shadow round them, cutting them off in a dynamic isolation of their own from all these thoughtless and ordinary things.

"It was my charm," he explained at length. "My father-confessor touch. You just couldn't resist me."

She shook her head. The gold flashed in her hair, and her lips smiled; but the light mockery of her eyes was subdued to an elfin seriousness.

"I mean I needn't have given up hope and gone in for such desperate measures so soon."

"What's happened?" he asked; and the brown smooth-muscled arm on which he was propped up turned so that his hand closed over hers.

She looked down at him steadily, and the shadow around them failed to touch her enchanting face.

"I had a note this morning," she said. "It was delivered at the hotel before I woke up. I've got an invitation to have dinner with Vogel on the Falkenberg."

A stout gentleman ambled by, with a green eyeshade on his brow and a diminutive slip clinging by some miracle of adhesion to the reentrant curve of his abdomen, looking like a debauched Roman emperor on his way to the bath; a Parisian sylph in a startling lace costume that left nothing except her birthday to the imagination arranged her white limbs artistically under a gaudy sunshade and waited for the rush of art students to gather round; two children disputing the ownership of a bucket opened up on a line of personalities that would have left a couple of bootleggers listening in awe; but these were events that might have been happening on another planet.

He remembered the speedboat tied up alongside the Falkenberg, which had not been there before.

"You hadn't got some crazy idea of accepting, had you?" he said mechanically.

"It's what I've been waiting for."

"I know, but— What do you think happened last night?"

She took one of his cigarettes.

"I don't think I could have been seen. I didn't see the man who caught me — he came up behind. And it was pretty dark where I was. He caught me round the neck with his arm; then I fired the shot, he let go, and I dived."

"He'd know it was a woman."

"Not necessarily. Don't you remember that Vogel said he was looking for a man?"

"An obvious lie."

"A very stupid one — if it was. But what could it gain him? If you'd already seen a woman, it'd make you think there was something queer going on. If you hadn't, what did it matter?"

"He might have been trying to tempt me to keep up the lie — which would have given me away."

She shrugged her intoxicating shoulders.

"Aren't you rather looking for trouble?" she said.

"That's my job," answered the Saint evenly. "And incidentally, it happens to be one of the reasons why I didn't come to a sticky end many years ago. I'll give you something else. Suppose Vogel wasn't quite happy about me last night?"

"Well?"

"It was rather an unusual hour for anyone to be up and about — messing around with fenders. Not impossible, but unusual. And if Vogel's the kind of man we think he is, he keeps alive by sorting out unusual things — like I do. He couldn't make any fuss, because that'd be letting himself in if he was wrong. But he could puff away in that outboard, stop the engine, and paddle back quietly on the oars. He couldn't have seen you — probably he couldn't even have heard what you said — but he could hear that there was a girl on board."