Leslie Charteris - The Saint Returns

Altbergen was the kind of place whose existence is announced to the traveller by a minute sign pointing from the highway up something like a glorified cow path. Though Simon had found it on the map, he almost passed the turning, but managed to get his brakes down in time to make the sudden transition from modern highway engineering to rural improvisation.

The car bounded from boulder to pothole with protesting rattles, and it became increasingly obvious as the angle of climb approached something like fifty degrees that what they were on was possibly not a cow path at all, but an occasional river bed gouged out by the torrents of thawing spring.

Luckily for the automobile, as well as its occupants, the distance from highway to Altbergen was only seven kilometers — straight up, it seemed at times. But the drive was invigorating, shaking out any last traces of sluggishness traceable to the previous long and perhaps overindulgent evening.

Altbergen was as surprised to see Tanya and Simon as Tanya and Simon were relieved to see it. Set on the green slope of a tiny plateau, its site constituted the only place within miles where more than three houses together might have clung to the ground. As it was, there were not many buildings, perhaps twenty, including a small inn and a few starkly essential shops.

“It’s beautiful,” Tanya said. “I have seen it only in picture books. Like gingerbread houses.”

“Anyway,” Simon remarked, “if Ivan and Igor get this far, they won’t have much of a search to locate us.”

He parked in front of the inn, joining company with a pair of Volkswagens and a squarish deux chevaux whose natural tendency to look like a corrugated tin lean-to had apparently been well assisted by numerous trips between Altbergen and the nearest paved road.

From across the narrow street, the combined grocer and hardware merchant peered through his display window at the Zurich license plate. The servant girl who had been sweeping the threshold of the Gasthof with no great enthusiasm in the first place came to a complete halt as she gaped curiously at the novelty of city tourists — and rich ones, too, by the looks of them — coming to the Goldener Hirsch and unloading baggage with the apparent intention of making a stay.

Altbergen’s isolation from the conveniences of modern life meant that checking in simply consisted of being led up the steep stairs by the plump proprietress while the servant girl, a slim blond creature, staggered along behind with all the luggage, refusing Simon’s offers of help. There was no surrender of passports for inspection by the police overnight, no filling out of lengthy forms in the usual European manner, whereby one gains entry to sleeping quarters only by confessing in detail a large part of one’s own and one’s relatives’ pasts, and explaining precisely whence one has come and where one is going. There was not even a register to sign, and the proprietress had not asked for names.

“So, bitte,” she said, smiling as she opened the door of what was obviously the best room, “schön, nicht wahr?”

“Sehr schön,” Simon agreed, before Tanya could make any other comment.

The walls were all natural wood, with the lingering smell of fresh-cut lumber about them. There were two beds, huge and solid, with white comforters a foot thick but light as air. Beyond the double doors was an ornate balcony of the kind that fronted the upper floors of almost every house in the village.

“I didn’t want to attract more attention by asking for separate rooms,” Simon explained innocently to Tanya, in English. He went on more wickedly: “The only problem will be if Ivan and Igor get here. Which of them would you rather double up with?”

She turned away quickly, towards the balcony.

“Supper is from six o’clock,” the proprietress said in leaving. “If you want hot water or anything, the bell is there.”

“Oh, Simon, come look.”

Tanya was outside, deeply breathing the sharp clear air. The view she wanted him to see was superb: the snow-covered Alps, the dark green meadows studded with outcroppings of pale stone, the shingled roofs of the houses weighted with chunks of the same rock. There was a peace and timelessness totally unlike any other in the world.

He turned from the view to her, and thought that she looked happier than he had ever seen her. There had been very good moments, but the kind of deep-down contentment that he sensed in her now was something new and different. They seemed a long long way from subterfuge, treachery, and murder.

“You like it here?” he asked her.

“Very much. Yes.”

“There’s a great feeling of freedom, isn’t there?”

She nodded, smiling at the world in general.

“Perhaps.”

“More than you could ever have in Russia?” the Saint said.

Such a challenge had been on his mind for some time, but he had hesitated again and again to put it to her for fear she would assume that his true mission all along had been to tempt her to defect from the communist world. But if ever there was to be a moment to risk disrupting the rapport they had begun to achieve, this might have been it.

He realized his misjudgement instantly, in a silence that could almost be physically felt.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a moment. “That wasn’t very subtle... I suppose in your position, especially if one has relatives, even close friends who might... face some unpleasant consequences, it makes it difficult even to think about.”

She stood straighter, slipping her elbows from the broad rail of the balcony.

“I have never thought in such a way. It is not only difficult, it is impossible.”

“Then why are you so touchy about it?” he asked gently.

“I should be. You are hinting at treason, not talking about a... a trip to the seaside.”

He put his hands soothingly on her shoulders.

“All right. We’ll let it pass, okay? This is no time or place to start arguing ideologies. We both have a job to do.”

He could feel the tension begin to fade from her body. She took her lower lip between her teeth for a moment and looked him in the face before she answered.

“Okay,” she said, and she had to start smiling again just because she’d used that American expression.

“See up there?” the Saint said, pointing. “That looks as if it could be the monastery.”

“Where they make the liqueur.”

“Mm-hm. And somewhere around here somebody’s making something else — and I don’t mean that stew and red cabbage you smell.”

“Booby traps, I think you call them.”

“Yes. Well put. Now you can unpack and freshen up and prepare to greet me properly upon my heroic return.”

“Where are you going?”

“Trap shooting, of course.”

She followed him back into the bedroom.

“I go with you.”

He hesitated for a moment, and shrugged.

“Okay, if you like. This is your affair as much as mine. We shouldn’t run into anything on the first reconnaissance where you’d be a liability.”

“Really! You forget who I am. In the Soviet Union we recognize no difference between the sexes.”

“Well, I do,” said Simon, “but then I’ve had my memory refreshed recently.”

“That was not what I meant. My English...”

“Your English is fine, and so are you. Now let’s get going so we can be back here in time for that supper. I have the distinct impression that if we don’t dine here we don’t dine anywhere, unless you’re up to a few unrolled oats from some farmer’s horse trough.”

They went downstairs and accosted the servant girl, who was still reluctantly applying her broomstraws to the smoothly worn wood of the entranceway, and Simon asked her if there were any factories in the area. He might have asked for dinosaurs.