Leslie Charteris - Trust The Saint

Herr Uhrmeister, who was no dummkopf, but who had questioned why he should invest in the printing of a guide-book superficially like any other guide-book but to be dispensed gratuitously in certain locations without even mentioning the name of his shop, began to catch on.

“Now, we must begin to make these goblets.”

For some time they had sold very well indeed, if not like hot cakes, perhaps more appropriately like gold bricks, as they appeared in other places not ostensibly connected with Herr Uhrmeister’s establishment on ABC-Strasse, at preposterously inflated prices which were seldom questioned by buyers in a panic to get away with their purchase before anyone else saw it and outbid them, or the vendor realized what he was parting with.

The fact that the bases of the goblets, when cut into or broken open, proved to contain nothing but dust and air, did not constitute fraud under any statute, and in any case the hardihood of a buyer who would have brought formal complaint about having been cheated out of what he hoped to cheat the seller was practically inconceivable. Probably there was not one in a hundred who even suspected that he had been more than just unlucky. Nevertheless, after a while Frank Kolben’s restless mind perceived where the wheeze was falling short of its maximum potential pay-off, and went back to work to remedy that...

“If that’s Klaus Störtebeker’s own original goblet,” Simon persisted, “why is it still there? Why hasn’t someone else seen it and bought it before this? If it comes to that, why is the pawnbroker selling it?”

“Perhaps he hasn’t heard the story,” Eva responded. “Why should a little pawnbroker know everything? Why should everyone who passes know it? If we had passed last night instead of tonight, before you read that book, would we have known? At least I am not going to laugh at it and go away!”

She released his arm with a movement that was almost like throwing away something that had become distasteful, and turned to the door of the shop. It opened for her with a loud jangling of bells; the lights had always been on inside, and through the window Simon could see the presumable proprietor shuffle out through the curtains behind the counter at the back — an old man whose trade had plainly left him no illusions and even less patience with anybody who expected him to harbor one. The shop was apparently still open, ready to finance anyone who came by with acceptable security.

By the time Simon caught up with Eva inside, she already had the proprietor at a disadvantage in the less familiar aspect of buyer-seller relations, for such places.

“Are you crazy?” she was saying in German. “Three hundred marks — for a battered old thing like that?”

“It is very old,” said the shopkeeper, like a recitation. “Perhaps of the fifteenth century.”

“Then it is so much more second-hand. I will pay two hundred.”

“That is absurd, gracious lady. Perhaps two hundred and ninety...”

Simon picked up the goblet and examined it more closely. Judging by its weight, the stem and base seemed to be hollow, but they were solidly plugged at the bottom. He studied the construction and the sealing while the haggling ran its predestined course.

“Two hundred and forty, then. Not a pfennig more!”

“Very well.” The final despondent shrug. “But only because you are too beautiful, and I am too old and tired...”

Since the pawnbroker was an indigent, mildly alcoholic, pensioned-off uncle of Johann Uhrmeister, he knew when to cut the bargaining and clinch the sale.

Eva counted the money out of her own purse, quickly but precisely, and almost snatched the goblet out of Simon’s hands as she headed out of the shop.

He stayed with her patiently for a few yards along the Reeperbahn again, where she led him into a dazzlingly dreadful all-night restaurant. He followed her into a corner booth, where she ordered ham sandwiches and beer for both of them and put the goblet on the marble tabletop and leered at it as if it had been a prize they had won in a fun fair.

“Let’s get it open,” she said.

“I’ll need some sort of tool for that,” he told her. “The base is filled with some sort of solder. I can’t dig it out with a fork.”

“You could break the stem off, couldn’t you?”

He raised his eyebrows.

“After you just paid sixty dollars for it?”

“It was not bought to keep on a mantelpiece. I am too excited to wait. Break it!”

“Okay, if you say so.”

He picked up the goblet endways in two hands, and bent and twisted. It came apart at the junction of cup and stem, without too much resistance from the soft metal. And within the hollow stem they saw the end of a scroll — which could be dug out with a fork.

It was a piece of parchment rolled to about the size of a panatela, and stained with what most people would have taken for age but Franz Kolben could have told them was cold tea. Simon loosened and spread it with reverent care. The ink on it had also aged, to the color of dark rust, with the help of another of Mr. Kolben’s chemical tricks of the trade. The lettering at the top had involved more laborious research, but in convincingly medieval Gothic characters it announced:

Simon spelled it out with frowning difficulty which ended in irritated puzzlement.

“I thought I could get by in German,” he complained, “but what the hell does that mean?”

“It’s old German, of course,” she said, leaning close to his shoulder. “This was written more than five hundred years ago! In modern German it would be “ Dies ist der Platz wo ich meinen Schatz vergrub ” — “This is where I buried my treasure.”

“Can you read the rest?”

There was a crude map, or combination of map and drawing, as was the ancient custom. It showed a river at the bottom with ships on it, a recognizable church, and a narrow two-storey house, intricately half-timbered, and a distinctive high-peaked roof with gables surmounted by a conical-topped turret. So much the Saint saw, and was trying unsuccessfully to decipher the cramped and spiky script which filled the other half of the sheet when Eva snatched it out of his fingers and put it in her purse.

“I will read it later,” she said.

He showed his astonishment.

“Aren’t you too excited to wait any more?”

“Yes. But you’ve seen enough already — perhaps too much.”

“Are you afraid I might rush off and beat you to this treasure and take off with your share?”

“My share,” she said, “is all of it. Why should you have any? For breaking open the goblet? I bought it!”

“I thought this evening was supposed to be fifty-fifty,” he said slowly.

She shifted farther away from him, defensively.

“That was only for the food and drink and the shows, nothing else. The goblet was my own. Let anyone ask the man in the shop who paid for it.”

“You didn’t need to do that. I thought you only did it because you’d done all the talking.”

“I didn’t ask you to buy it. I decided for myself. And who saw it first? I did. You would have walked past and never seen it if I had not stopped you. And even then you said it couldn’t be the one. It was I who went in the shop!”

To record that this was one of the rare occasions when Simon Templar was totally flabbergasted would be an understatement of laconic grandeur. But there was no doubt that she meant it all.

He tried one more appeal to higher ethics: “And why would you have been interested if I hadn’t shown you that bit in my guide-book?”