Leslie Charteris - The Saint Returns

Pat was coming down the hill.

“Are ye alone?” he called. “Couldn’t ye catch her?”

The Saint closed the attaché case and went to meet his friend.

“She’s still running,” he answered.

“Ah, well, and I’m not sorry,” said Pat. “She was a darlin’ little thing. Led astray by her ould man.” He gestured toward the castle. “Them’s the two buzzards I’d like to take apart.”

“Are they all right?”

“They’re trussed up so they couldn’t give a flea any trouble. I’ve a throat as dry as a Bedouin’s wit. What say we leave’m there to stew while we go get a spot o’ some-thin’ to ease the pain?”

“We’d better bring them along,” Simon said. “I’d like to get in touch with Drew before he decides I’ve made off with the loot.”

“I wonder where his real daughter is?”

“I did some checking, and it seems she definitely flew to Mexico the day she disappeared from home. By now she’s probably enjoying her honeymoon.”

“While we have our few days o’ peace and freedom ruined chasin’ after her all over Ireland,” said Kelly. “Well, maybe we can get in a day o’ fishin’ anyway.” He scratched his chin, and gave Simon a sly sidelong glance. “Still an’ all, it’s too bad that colleen Mildred, or Phyllis, or whativer her name really is, turned out to be such a naughty one. I’m thinkin’ ye might have had more fun with her than with me.”

The Saint grinned pensively at the moon.

“It’s a small world,” he said cheerfully. “Maybe, one of these days, I will.”

Ordinarily the Saint concerned himself very little with rabbits, considering them — when he considered them at all — happy creatures hopping about fields, reputedly a plague to farmers, but cute subjects for greeting cards and Disney cartoons. He had not even devoted much thought to those bunnies of the nubile human kind who in recent years have established elegant burrows in cities all over the capitalist world.

Maybe it was the novel notion of bunnies in Berlin that brought Simon Templar to the unwonted but not unpleasant surroundings in which he found himself on a particular evening in late June. Three hours remained before the departure of his plane from Tempelhof. Why not sample the undoubtedly unique incongruities of the Berlin Bunny Club?

What Hefner had wrought, the world had bought — or, as in this case, borrowed. This was no franchised Playboy Club, but a free appropriation of some of their most publicized attractions, with local adaptations. Strange are the ways of the spread, and decline, of civilisations.

Ensconced comfortably at the dark bar, with long-limbed, bare-shouldered rabbits scurrying over the shadowy landscape, Simon had to admit that here, indeed, was something to stir the most cynical adventurer’s sense of audacity: it was not just the female forms; invitingly outfitted as they were, they presented nothing particularly novel in the way of human anatomy. It was the idea of the thing — the magnificent impudence of the fact that this harem of lovely but purportedly untouchable hares should be dispensing American steaks, French wines, and voyeuristic enticements far out here on the eastern marches, within the very jaws of Asia, surrounded on every side by hundreds of miles of bleak collectivism.

But for all one could have known in the hermetic dimness of the West Berlin rabbit hutch, it might have been December outside instead of June, the remembered lights of the Kurfürstendamm might have been the neon of Manhattan, and the ugly concrete slabs of The Wall not many yards away might have been among the foothills of Rockefeller Center. Here inside, everything was all sweetness and dark — soft jazz, good whiskey, and mass-produced, sanitized eroticism.

The synthetic aspects were repellent to the Saint, who now that he’d tried the experience could think of approximately eight hundred better ways to spend his rare spare moments than sitting at a bar visually absorbing standardized sexuality which had about as much impact to it as the identical squares of butter set out on the dining tables.

He drained his glass and had just pulled his money from his pocket when his attention was arrested by the approach of a most luxuriantly developed young lady whose display included things of much greater charm than the cellophane-covered packets in the tray at her waist.

“Zigaretten?” she said. “May I you serve?”

Simon handed her a bill and accepted one of the packs.

“You serve very nicely.”

“Thank you, sir,” she said, smiling, and moved away.

Such an ordinary event would not be worth recounting, except that it is with such seemingly insignificant encounters that a wait for a plane can turn into an adventure. If the cigarette bunny, in her mammary munificence, had not come along at just that moment, and if Simon had not turned to witness the oscillatory retreat of her pretty little bottom, made rabbit-like by a fascinating caudal appendage somewhat resembling an overgrown powder puff, he would not have noticed the iron-gray stocky man sitting alone at a table on the other side of the dance floor. Alone, at least, except for several bunnies who stood around laughing at some story he was telling.

Simon turned back to the bar and said almost absently to the white-jacketed young man behind it, “Another of the same, please.”

It took surprisingly few seconds for him to isolate from the mass of faces in his memory even so relatively obscure a figure as William Fenton, ex-Royal Navy, more recently with British Intelligence. Simon’s previous contact with him had been brief but friendly, and now he had to decide whether he wanted to — or ought to — renew the acquaintance. There was always the possibility that Fenton was involved incognito in some mission or other, and would not appreciate having his identity heralded all over bunny heaven.

“Here you are, sir.”

The bartender was blond and pale-eyed, and more for friendly efficiency than for lively conversation, which suited Simon fine. But, thanking him, he noticed a sudden change in the man’s expression, a shift to new alertness. The gray eyes followed — as the Saint could see by glancing into the mirror-covered wall — the entrance and transit of a dark unattractive individual in a poorly cut suit.

The newcomer did what most newcomers to clubs do not do: having entered by the front door, he went more or less directly to the rear door, an obscure portal shrouded in black velvet, AUSGANG glowing above it, and disappeared behind the curtains.

Even a person less well versed in the ways of the Ungodly than Simon Templar would have felt some suspicion by now that all was not precisely as it should be in this modern Wonderland. The hasty newcomer was no White Rabbit, but he was most certainly intent on meeting some sort of deadline, and he was choosing a strange route by which to do it.

The Saint had already gone beyond suspicion to active calculation. The eyes of the bartender became his mirror. The Teutonic mixologist had become overly busy polishing glasses, but his narrowing gaze never left the velvet drapes of the exit.

When Simon whirled from his stool it was already almost too late. The dance had just ended, and the departing couples had opened a clear avenue from the exit door to William Fenton’s table. Pushing slowly from between the black curtains was the blunt snout of a silencer.

Until that moment, the wine bunny had inadvertently shielded Fenton. Now she moved around his table to pour champagne, and there was no time for the Saint to call out a warning. In that space of a precious breath or two which an ordinary man would have wasted staring helplessly, Simon acted.