“All finished?” the Saint asked as he rejoined them on the steps.
“We have agreed,” the art dealer said. “There is only for my colleague to see the paintings also. He is the only expert in France whose opinion I respect above my own. While I, of course, trust Mademoiselle Lambrini completely, the money involved in this transaction is not all mine, and it is necessary to have a confirmation of my judgment.”
Simon glanced at Annabella. She seemed untroubled by any misgivings, and apparently the price they had agreed on pleased her.
“Congratulations to both of you, then,” he said. “You won’t be needing me any more. Maybe Monsieur LeGrand would be kind enough to give me a ride back into Paris.”
“Oh, but I do need you!” Annabella exclaimed.
She took his arm as they followed LeGrand to his car.
“Monsieur LeGrand’s friend just called to say he has had car trouble on the road coming out here,” she said. “I need you for protection until he comes…and then of course I shall need you for the celebration.”
The Saint inclined his head gracefully.
“Where celebrations are concerned, my availability is unlimited.”
“As you like, Monsieur,” LeGrand said. “You are welcome to ride with me.”
“Monsieur Templar will stay with me,” Annabella insisted. “You will be coming back to my house with the professor in any case, won’t you?”
LeGrand looked at his wrist watch and shook his head.
“Perhaps not. My wife does not care for managing my business very long. I had to leave her in charge while I drove out here. But I shall see that Professor Clarneau comes to see you as quickly as possible.”
“I must admit that I’m impatient,” Annabella said.
They walked to LeGrand’s car. He paused to shake hands before getting into the driver’s seat.
“It was a pleasure, Mademoiselle,” he said to Annabella. “And an honor, Monsieur.”
“It will be an even greater pleasure for me when our deal is completed,” Annabella said. “What about delivering the paintings…and the money?”
LeGrand laughed as he settled himself and closed the car door. He looked up with his elbow on the open window frame.
“I don’t blame you for being anxious, Mademoiselle. My wife is already as anxious for me to sell the paintings so that she can have a certain fur coat that has monopolized her dreams for the past ten months or so.” He made one of his shrugging gestures. “Therefore our interests are parallel. If Professor Clarneau approves the paintings—or perhaps I should say, when Professor Clarneau approves the paintings—he will be able to hand you a check on the spot. He is my partner in this transaction, and the money is in our joint account, so that you can have your payment immediately, without my having to be around. I shall countersign the check when I meet him now, and he can take the paintings with him back to Paris in his station wagon. Is that good enough?”
“Very good,” Annabella said contentedly.
LeGrand winked at her as he started his car’s engine.
“Of course, you drove such a hard bargain that Clarneau may be shocked—but I trust you can charm him into being reconciled to the price.”
“Don’t even joke about such things!” Annabella remonstrated.
LeGrand was about to pull away when Simon asserted himself in the dialogue for the first time.
“Monsieur LeGrand,” he said quietly. “Are you certain it was your friend who telephoned?”
LeGrand took his hand off the gear shift lever and his bushy eyebrows suddenly arched to an almost comical extreme.
“Of course it was. What do you mean?”
Annabella gave the Saint a ferocious look which clearly said, Simon, please shut up and don’t rock the boat! but he went ahead in spite of it.
“I mean that these characters who’ve been so busy trying to swipe Mademoiselle Lambrini’s worldly goods—not to mention Mademoiselle Lambrini—might just have decided to try another angle.”
Annabella’s beautiful red lips were compressed with exasperation, and LeGrand looked more impatient than worried.
“What angle?” he asked. “What would they have to do with Paul Clarneau? Are you suggesting that he…No. That is impossible. He has been my friend since we were boys!”
“I’m not suggesting anything—and certainly not that your chum Clarneau is a crook. I’m just wondering whether or not somebody might be using him as bait for a trap that you’re about to drive right into.”
LeGrand gave a nasal snorting laugh and shook his head as he put the car in gear.
“Apparently you read too many crime stories, Monsieur Templar—or live too many. You can’t believe an ordinary automobile breakdown when you hear about one.” He gunned the engine, then looked at the Saint again sardonically. “Of course if you would like to come along to protect me, or to protect Mademoiselle Lambrini’s interests…”
Annabella firmly caught Simon’s arm and held him close beside her.
“He can protect my interests quite well enough by staying here,” she said. “Just hurry, please, and send your friend along as soon as possible.”
“A votre service!” LeGrand said, with mock humility. His car’s wheels threw up gravel. “And don’t let Monsieur Templar dream up any ghosts to steal our paintings before Clarneau comes to take them!”
6
Twenty-five minutes after Marcel LeGrand had driven away, an American station wagon of venerable vintage crunched up the drive and stopped at the front door. Simon and Annabella went outside, and the driver of the car all but ran to meet them. He was a small elderly man, but powerfully knobby, with the look of one who ate little and trotted two miles every day before breakfast.
“I am so sorry, Mademoiselle, Monsieur!” he cried. “The gods would of course do such a thing to me on this day!”
Simon shook his hand and Annabella protested that automobile trouble was nobody’s fault.
“She is old but usually dependable,” the man said. “In my work I need the space for carrying paintings and statues from place to place.” He suddenly stopped himself. “But I have not even introduced myself! I am Professor Paul Clarneau.”
“We guessed,” the Saint said.
“Do come in,” Annabella Lambrini urged him. “The paintings are only a few minutes older, after all.”
“Of course!”
Simon followed them into the front room and watched as Clarneau went into similar ecstasies to those of LeGrand.
“I assure you they are genuine,” Annabella said. “But you are welcome to make whatever tests you have to do in order to check.”
“I would not for a moment doubt your word,” Professor Clarneau replied gallantly. “If you don’t mind, though, I shall look more closely…”
He waited with eyebrows raised, until Annabella had given him her go-ahead. Then, blinking rapidly, as if the blink were an essential part of his investigatory technique, the little man began to crawl around on the floor peering at parts of the canvases through a magnifying glass, studying the surface of the paint at various angles, and inspecting the backs of the frames. After a few minutes, during which Annabella was speechless with suspense, he scrambled back to his feet.
“Voila,” he said happily. “It is done. They are beautiful—beautifully genuine!”
Annabella broke into a broad smile and then tried to maintain it as the Saint put in a comment.
“I thought you had to use X-rays and chemical analysis and all that sort of thing.”
Clarneau answered indulgently.
“Only when my own opinion is doubtful,” he said. “In this case I am quite satisfied. A person who has devoted his life to art develops an instinct for true masterpieces. Chemicals have been wrong. When my eye is convinced, it has never been mistaken.”
“I’m very happy for both of you then,” Simon said to him and Annabella. “Shall we start the celebration?”
“After I have something to celebrate,”
Annabella answered.
Clarneau looked blank. Then his face brightened.
“Oh, yes! The money.” He reached into his coat pocket. “I have here a check for the amount you agreed on with LeGrand. He has already signed it, and I shall countersign it as soon as you have signed the bill of sale. You will want to read it, of course. It’s rather long, but it simply says that for the amount we pay you, you agree to assign us all rights to the paintings. LeGrand and I have already put our names at the proper place.”
He handed Annabella a long and closely printed piece of paper.
“While I read it I’ll have Hans pack the paintings for you,” she told him.
“You have crates?” he asked.
“I have a large container that holds all five,” she said.
“I’ll help Hans,” Simon suggested.
“Wonderful. He knows where the crate is. He’ll be in back—through that door—somewhere.”
Simon carefully picked up one of the paintings and carried it away toward the back of the house. As Annabella read the bill of sale he and Hans appeared at intervals until all five of the paintings had been removed. Then Simon came back once more into the living room.
“Would you like to look at the crate before we put the cover on, Professor?” he asked.
Clarneau shrugged as if to say it was not necessary, but followed the Saint to the rear of the house anyway. The wooden crate was in a storage room which otherwise contained only a large cupboard, and the mysterious assortment of old boxes, cartons, battered trunks and valises, and all the other aging junk which irresistibly accumulates in such limbos. The crate was about four feet high, the same in width, and three feet deep—large enough for what the Saint had in mind.
Clarneau looked at it, satisfied himself that the five paintings had been slipped properly into their slots, where they were held by padded channels at the top and bottom, and said he was well pleased.
“Good,” Simon said as the Professor went back to the living room. “Let’s get this end nailed on, then, Hans.”
“I had a hammer here,” the chauffeur said. “I am sure I did.”
“I haven’t seen it,” the Saint told him, untruthfully, having surreptitiously spirited it into his own hip pocket.
“Strange. I have another in the garage. I come back in a moment.”
Hans left the room and the Saint immediately slid every painting out of the packing crate and into the cupboard by the wall. He worked quickly but efficiently, not making a sound as he listened for approaching footsteps. The cupboard door creaked slightly as he closed it, but not loudly enough to be heard in the front part of the house. With the paintings out of sight he dumped books from one of the dusty boxes into the crate until it held the approximate equivalent in weight of the paintings.
When Hans Kraus came back into the storage room with a hammer, Simon was just fitting the end cover onto the packing case.
“I’ll hold,” he said. “You hammer.”
Hans began banging away.
“Not too many nails—and not too hard,” Simon said. “You don’t want to jar the paint off the canvases.”
Hans looked concerned and finished the job with a nail at each corner.
“Gut?” he said with satisfaction.
“Sehr gut,” Simon agreed. “Let’s get it into the station wagon.”
Hans put down the hammer and took one end of the crate; Simon picked up the other.
“Heave,” he said, and they carried the crate out of a back door, around the house, and to the front door.
“Shall we put it in?” Hans asked.
“By all means. Let’s give the customer his money’s worth,” the Saint said.
He opened the back of the station wagon and helped Hans shove the crate inside.
“All right,” he said. “You can tell them it’s ready to go.”
Hans nodded and went into the house. Simon knew and had counted on the fact that the station wagon was not visible from the front room where Annabella and her customer were completing their transaction. Without a wasted motion the Saint jumped into the station wagon, closed the rear door behind him, and jerked the hammer from his pocket. In a few seconds he had loosened the end cover from the crate. He pulled it away and bent and flattened the bared nail points into the pinewood of the cover. Then he climbed into the crate himself, kneeling on the books, and tapped a pair of nails into the inner side of the cover so that he could use them as handles to pull the cover snugly into place. It was a simple matter then to secure the cover with another couple of nails driven lightly at an angle from inside.
Enough light came through minor crevices of the box to enable the Saint to see his own hands as his eyes adjusted themselves. He had had to work blindly while fixing the cover in place. Now he settled back in comfort in a sitting position, leaning his back against the rough inner wood of the container with his long legs only moderately cramped.
He waited and listened, and in a very few minutes he heard voices approaching the station wagon.
“I really don’t know,” Annabella was saying. “Hans said he was out here.”
“Well, if you don’t mind, I must be on my way without saying goodbye to him,” Professor Clarneau said. “LeGrand will be waiting anxiously for me.”
The rest of the conversational interchange was largely drowned by the opening and closing of the car door and the starting of the engine. As the station wagon pulled away Simon heard only one phrase shouted merrily by the driver:
“Don’t drink too much champagne before lunch!”
The station wagon lurched out of the driveway and onto the road, but it did not turn toward the main Paris road. It turned right instead. The Saint could tell that much by centrifugal pressures even though he could see almost nothing through the tiny crevices in the crate. But presently instead of continuing in its original direction the station wagon made another right turn. It seemed to Simon that it was heading toward Paris all right, but by a devious route.
He relaxed. The noontime sun sent slivers of light across his hands folded on his knees. The vibrating wooden box, shaking rhythmically now and then, had a soporific effect that made him as drowsy as if he had been at home in bed. Up in the front seat of the station wagon the driver was whistling, and the off-key strains of Funiculi Funicula blended with the rush of warm air blowing back through the open windows.
The ride was not a short one. The Saint calculated that he must be in the southern outskirts of Paris proper before the station wagon slowed almost to a halt, made a gingerly bumpy turn, and honked its horn.
Simon heard a large door scrape across concrete, and the wagon moved ahead again for a short distance.
“You got them?” somebody shouted in Austrian-accented German.
The driver answered in foreigner’s German which might have had somewhat garlicky Neapolitan flavor: “Of course! It went like clockwork. Where is the trunk?”
“Upstairs.”
The driver got out of the station wagon and slammed the door hard.
“Then let’s get it down here, shall we?” he said impatiently.
Simon heard the two pairs of footsteps moving away. After a few seconds he took his hammer and pulled out the two nails which held the end of the wooden crate in place. In a moment he had pushed it open far enough to allow him to look at his surroundings.
He was inside some sort of garage or small warehouse which had no windows. Next to the station wagon was an old Volkswagen bus. There was assorted automotive junk scattered around the place, none of it worth noticing twice. The Saint rolled quickly out of the crate and replaced its cover, tacking it into place with four efficient blows of his hammer. He was just getting out of the back of the station wagon when he heard someone coming down a flight of stairs at the rear of the garage. Simon ducked and waited, peering around the corner of the wagon until he had ascertained that the intruder was alone. The man was, in fact, so preoccupied with not dropping a tray he was carrying that he would not ha
ve noticed the Saint if he had been standing bolt upright. Simon recognized him as one of the two characters who had put Hans Kraus to sleep and tried to kidnap Annabella Lambrini outside LeGrand’s gallery the day before.
The man with the tray opened a door on the left side of the garage, beyond the Volkswagen bus, and kicked it shut behind him. Simon followed stealthily, crossing the greasy floor of the garage, after a backward glance to make certain he had left the station wagon closed, and gently opened the door which the man ahead of him had entered. It led down a short passage, at the end of which was another door, much stouter than the first. It was half open, and the Saint could hear a low-pitched voice speaking bad French.
“Here is to eat.”
It was Marcel LeGrand’s voice which answered.
“We don’t want food! When are you going to let us out of here?”
Another male voice, unknown to Simon, joined in.
“This is an outrage! You can’t get away with this!”
“Be quiet! I untie only your hands so you eat.”
The Saint slipped quietly through the door into the small dank room. The man who had been carrying the tray was bending over Marcel LeGrand, who was tied in a straight chair. Next to him, bound in another chair, was a thin white-haired man who would undoubtedly turn out to be the real Professor Clarneau.
LeGrand’s startled expression betrayed Simon’s entrance. The captor turned and met the edge of the Saint’s hand. The chop descended with the force of an axe, and sent its victim sprawling unconscious on the stone floor.
“Monsieur Templar!” LeGrand cried. “Wonderful! How…”
“Quietly!” Simon cautioned him, untying his hands. “Are you all right?”
“Yes, but how did you know we were here? This is my friend Clarneau. They stopped his car. They made me sign a check…”
“I can imagine,” the Saint said. “We can talk later. For now, get out of here through the window in the passageway between here and the garage. Hurry!”
Professor Clarneau, who looked like a large white rat in an old-fashioned black suit, was opening and closing his mouth without making any noise. For that hysterical silence Simon was grateful.
The Saint Abroad Page 5