Leslie Charteris - Trust The Saint

Simon, dividing his clinical attention between the grappling amazons and Eva, was somewhat nonplussed by her reaction, or the lack of it. She seemed to be neither startled, nor shocked, nor disgusted, nor embarrassed, nor morbidly fascinated by these revelations of the infinite range of female grace and tenderness. The most you could have said, based on her outward placidity, was that she was mildly amused. It was none of the obvious responses that he would have expected of a woman so bent on experience that she had to pick up a stranger in a bar to facilitate it.

“Shall we sit out another minuet?” he inquired. “Or should we move on?”

“I think we should try something else,” she replied with the same demure detachment. “Do you know — you won’t believe me — I’ve never seen a strip-tease?”

“I believe that can he easily remedied,” he said, with the same gravity.

The German strip-tease follows much the same pattern as the American original, but with characteristic efficiency it moves much more briskly towards the essential objective, which is that the teaser should strip. In the opinion of many students, this leads to what might be paradoxically called a decent haste in the peeling. The esoteric stimuli of the bump and grind have never enslaved many addicts in Europe, but to replace that allure the German ecdysiast has the advantage of a law which permits her to expose every last square centimetre of her person provided she does not wiggle it. Therefore with studious legality even the G-string is twanged off during a momentary blackout before the final climax, or not even bothered with in incidental tableaux, and the uncomplicated connoisseur of nudity can be assured of one hundred per cent satisfaction.

On and around the Reeperbahn, the problem is not to find a place that features this kind of entertainment but to decide which one to patronize. Each of them has its panegyrist outside to buttonhole the passer-by and extol the lewd delights within. The first such temple of voyeurism that Simon picked at random, however, failed so drably to live up to its eulogy that he could not quite make himself accept it as a single and final sample of what the town could offer in that line, and he himself suggested one more try. Their next gamble was the Colibri, and there the density of the crowd which happily shared its tables on a basis of vacant chairs rather than acquaintance indicated that it relied less on a barker outside than on a clientele that knew its way around. The supposition was rapidly justified: the exhibitionists averaged younger and comelier, and disrobed with a continuing celerity that would have given even a jaded sultan no cause for complaint.

But Eva watched this with no perceptible difference from the way she had viewed the lamentable display in the preceding joint — without horror or excitement, but with a sort of tepid amusement that narrowly escaped the suspicion of boredom.

“Is it what you expected?” he asked, when she caught his eyes on her instead of on the latest playful grouping of naked maidens.

“More or less.”

“You don’t seem to get much of a kick out of it.”

“Did you expect me to? A normal woman shouldn’t get much of a kick out of watching other women undress, should she?”

“I was wondering why you were so keen to do it.”

“To know just what people mean when they talk about these shows, and what it is that they go to see. You see, I’m really terribly innocent, and yet a woman hates to be called unsophisticated. But I can admit it to you, because you don’t know any of my friends, and after this I shall know as much as they do.”

He was certainly not qualified to confirm or contest that, but it was a divertingly novel approach. He said, “Now what would you like to add to your education?”

“I’ve heard there’s a street of little houses, where the girls sit in the windows or make bargains at the doors.”

There was such a street, or alley, and they obtained directions to it without difficulty, but at the half-barricaded entrance they were barred by a stodgily correct Polizist .

“Very sorry,” he said in English, recognizing automatically that only foreigners attempted this transgression. “Not for ladies. Men only.”

“How silly,” she pouted as they walked away after a brief futile argument. “There are women in there already, aren’t there?”

“But only on business,” Simon pointed out. “I can understand how they could resent being stared at like specimens in a zoo by other women who’d never done that kind of work. But perhaps you didn’t know that it can be work.”

She gave him a sharp defensive glance, which he blandly pretended not to notice. He seemed to be merely looking around for some other potential source of the sophistication she wanted.

“There must be some way for a man to meet a girl that is not so cold-blooded,” she said at last. “You must have had some experience in that way. I can’t see you going in that closed street to buy a woman. But what else would you do?”

He forbore from mentioning that he had not done so badly by just sitting at the bar of a first-class hotel. They were at the corner of another turning, down which the darkness was splintered by a blazing frontage of all-purpose brilliance topped by a vertical arrangement of fluorescent tubes which spelled the name Sübersack.

“If I were a sailor on the loose,” he said, remembering bygone days in far-off ports when he had been little more than that, “I’d probably try my luck in a joint something like that.”

The inside was as stark and garish as the outside. There was no attempt at décor, merely a practical provision of seats and tables. Girls and women in street clothes that made no pretension of glamor, and ordinary-looking men of mostly middle and lower ages in even more undistinguished tailorings, stood around or sat and drank and/or eyed each other and/or danced in a minimum of empty floor space to the rhythms of a juke box.

Simon and Eva sat on a bench in a corner and ordered more beer. A peripatetic artist of curiously ageless aspect came by, whipped out a pair of nail scissors, and snipped away at a piece of plain paper which, unfolded, separated, and swiftly pasted to two plain white cards, became a mirror-pair of their two silhouettes in black cut-out. The likenesses were extraordinary. Simon registered his appreciation with largesse which was apparently excessive, for the artist beamingly began snipping again. The scissors twinkled and flew, and out of their quicksilver nibbling came another mirror-pair of silhouettes, only this time it was a pastoral whimsy, a boy and a girl and a fawn framed in a woodland bower, all filigreed in a couple of minutes with a delicacy and truth of line that many a competent draughtsman would have been glad to achieve with a pen in half an hour. The snipper presented those shadowgraphs as a reciprocal bonus, with a smile and a bow, and went away, but for Simon Templar, who had his own peculiarly slanted scale of values, this was the happiest highlight of the evening so far.

“I think this is rather dull,” Eva said.

The Saint by that time was beginning to feel unwontedly adaptable.

“What would you suggest next?” he asked.

“There are special movies, aren’t there, which are only shown privately?”

“There are such things. But I don’t think you’d like them.”

“Then we can walk out. But I’d like to know why I didn’t like them.”

“They mightn’t be so easy to find. Even around here, they’re probably illegal.”

“At least we can inquire.”

“And expensive.”

She opened her eyes wider.

“But we agreed to go Dutch. Are you running short? Or do you think I wasn’t serious?” She opened her bag and took out a small wad of currency held in a clip, from which she pulled three hundred-mark notes. “Here — when we settle up, you give me the change, if there is any.”