The Saint in Pursuit

by Leslie Charteris

  “Both of us at the Tagus!” Jaeger said. “Really? What a delightful coincidence. Now it doesn’t matter so much that I’ve not had time to give you my tips on Lisbon. I’ll be there myself for a few days and maybe you’ll even let me give you a guided tour in person…”

  “I couldn’t put you to so much trouble,” Vicky said without even trying to sound as if she meant it.

  Jaeger laughed.

  “I’d hardly consider it trouble. When you’ve had time to catch your breath we’ll make a plan. Right now we’d better fasten our safety belts.”

  When the plane had landed, the state of semi-suspended animation in which the passengers had spent most of the flight was changed to a rush of activity. With raincoats over arms and small baggage in hand they filed down the gangway into the blinding furnace of a Portuguese summer’s morning. Freda Oliveiros, saying conventional farewells to the travellers as they disembarked, had just time to give Vicky an encouraging pat on the arm and speak a few private words.

  “I’ll meet you at your hotel as soon as I’ve changed into my civvies, okay? Which is it?”

  “The Tagus. Couldn’t you stay with me there?”

  “Thanks, but the airline keeps a couple of apartments in town for holdover crews, and I’ve got some clothes there. It doesn’t cost a centavo, so why make your bill any bigger? I’ll just pop over to your place soon.”

  “Great,” Vicky agreed, and hurried on down the steps and across the hot pavement to the arrival portals.

  Curt Jaeger, ahead of her in the immigration line, gave up his place and joined her as they, with their fellow-passengers, filed respectfully past the uniformed inspectors to have their passports stamped. This internationally idiotic ritual, followed by the no less universally pointless struggle through a perfunctory Customs checkpoint, actually introduced only a very moderate delay before Vicky and her self-appointed protector were standing on the curb outside the terminal’s main entrance. It was only natural that they should share a taxi to their hotel, but Vicky felt worried about obligating herself to Jaeger. He had already tipped the porters who had carried out their luggage.

  “If we’re going to be doing some of the same things, like this,” she said, “I really can’t let you pay. Here…for the porters.”

  She thrust out a palmful of Portuguese coins that she had just obtained at the airport casa de câmbio, and with an indulgently amused look he chose a few escudos.

  “Very well, Miss Kinian, we shall keep this all very Dutch, within limits, but let me explain to you that I am on an expense account—and expense accounts, like justice, are quite blind. Or perhaps I should say, like dead men they tell no tales.”

  His choice of simile seemed peculiarly unapt to Vicky, but she reminded herself that there was no way he could have known how they applied bizarrely to her own situation. She settled back and began to enjoy the indescribable excitement of knowing that she, Vicky Kinian the nobody, was for the first time in her life on foreign soil.

  The taxi was soon entering the outskirts of the city, and when she leaned her head near the window on her side she could watch a fast-changing prospect of small busy shops, tree-lined walks, and above on the steep hillsides clusters and rows of colourwashed houses—pink, yellow, and green—baking like festive cakes in the sun.

  “It’s beautiful!” she exclaimed.

  “Maybe you’d like to see more, then,” Jaeger suggested. He leaned forward and spoke to the driver in Portuguese.

  “I’ve asked him to take us the long way around, by the waterfront,” he explained.

  The cab followed a street which led down a valley towards the sea-like estuary of the River Tagus on which the city faces. The efficient plainness of modern commercial buildings was occasionally relieved by such a startling souvenir of gaudy Moorish extravagance that Vicky’s head was constantly kept bobbing from one side to the other.

  “This stewardess on the flight,” Jaeger said, “is she a good friend of yours?”

  He spoke almost too casually, but Vicky was in no frame of mind to detect subtleties of tone.

  “Oh, Freda?” she said. “We were in school together when we were teenagers, but I haven’t seen her since—until last night. She knows Lisbon quite well, of course. I’m lucky to have run into her.”

  She did not take her eyes off the new views of pastel houses, water, and cliffs that the taxi’s route opened to her. She was sure she had never been more thrilled in her life, and she did not think of the implications of what she had said until Jaeger spoke again.

  “I hope that doesn’t mean I shall lose the privilege of helping you to enjoy Lisbon a little myself.”

  Vicky turned with a quick apologetic smile.

  “Of course not! I’m very lucky to have run into you, too, and I appreciate—”

  He raised a hand to stop her.

  “You have nothing to appreciate yet. Maybe a division of labor is the best solution, since you’re so popular. Your old school friend can guide you for the day while I make my business calls, but would you give me the pleasure of taking you to dinner tonight? As a professional salesman, I can offer the inducement that in these Catholic countries bars and restaurants don’t always welcome a woman alone.”

  She had already thought of that.

  “Well, thank you. I’d love to.”

  Then she thought of something else.

  “Oh, dear!”

  “Is something wrong?” her companion asked.

  “Well, I was just thinking. If I go with Freda during the day and then go out with you in the evening it might seem as if I was just making use of her and then leaving her on her own.”

  Jaeger deliberated for just a few seconds, looking ahead over the taxi driver’s shoulder.

  “I agree,” he said at length. “That would not be nice, so by all means let her come with us. Let her show you inside the churches and shops. I think I can be a better guide to a good dinner, and I should be happy to have you both as my guests.”

  Although that was what she had wanted him to say, Vicky had to make a perfunctory protest, but he interrupted after her first word.

  “Remember,” he said, “the expense account.”

  She laughed.

  “All right. You win. You’ve got yourself a date with a couple of jabbering American females. I hope you won’t be sorry.”

  “I think I can promise you,” Jaeger said smoothly, “that I won’t be.”

  Their circuit of Lisbon’s waterfront and center seemed finished so soon that Vicky was amazed when she looked at her watch and realized that it had been almost an hour since they had left the airport.

  “I’d better get on to the hotel,” she said reluctantly. “Freda is supposed to meet me there, and she may beat me to it at this rate.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Jaeger. “We’re almost there now, and I won’t delay you any more. I’ll call for you and your friend at seven o’clock this evening.”

  As soon as they arrived and registered at the Hotel Tagus—whose relationship to Lisbon’s River Tagus existed more in its christener’s imagination than in geographical fact—Vicky had thanked Jaeger and gone straight to her room. It was larger than she had expected, and because of its thick outer walls was as cool as a limestone cave. A small private balcony—there was one for every room in the four-storey building—looked from her third-floor vantage point out over the red-tiled roofs and peacefully tinted walls that sloped away towards the distant bright blue of the estuary.

  After enjoying the view for a minute she stepped back inside the room, closed the French doors behind her, loosened her dress, and started unpacking her suitcases. It was good to be alone for the first time in many hours.

  She would have taken considerably less pleasure in her apparent solitude, and her room’s old-fashioned spaciousness and agreeable temperature, if she had known that her neighbour on the right-hand side as she faced the estuary had been either listening to or watching every move she made since the bellhop who had b
rought her luggage upstairs had closed her door behind him. She would have been even more troubled if she had recognized him as the same bald stout man with the hearing-aid who had been a fellow-passenger on the flight from New York.

  Now he sat in his own room, with his short legs propped up quite comfortably, as if he had been doing this sort of thing all his life—which he had—stroking his white Vandyke beard and letting a pair of ingenious mechanical contrivances do most of the work of eavesdropping for him. When Vicky had been on her balcony he had been able, while sitting just inside the doors leading to his own balcony, to see every move she made in the angled mirror of a periscope-like device attached to an extension of his walking stick. Then, when she had gone back into her room, he had turned his attention to the amplifier of his oversized hearing-aid. A wire from the flat metal box led to a plug in his ear, bringing him the sound of even the most lady-like cough or discreet footstep from the other side of the wall.

  For a short while he heard little more than footsteps. Then there were the relatively explosive sounds of a door opening and the eruption of female conversation. The first voice was not that of Vicky Kinian.

  “Here I am, ready or not!”

  Vicky Kinian’s words were slower paced and softer than her visitor’s.

  “Good heavens, Freda, I don’t know how you did it. You look straight out of Vogue, and I still feel as if I’d just spent three days on a roller-coaster.”

  The next few minutes of feminine chitchat held no special interest for him. He sat like a bored television viewer waiting for the “station identification” commercials to get off his screen, until the next-door conversation had turned to something less cosmically inane.

  “I can line up dates for both of us if you’re interested,” the visitor—whose voice he recognized having heard on the plane the night before—was saying. “But I suppose you’re too wrapped up in your private scavenger hunt to care about a couple of mere cork ranchers.”

  “Well, my scavenger hunt is the main thing I’m interested in at the moment, but I beat you to it in the date department: I’ve already got one for both of us—if you’re interested!”

  “Good grief, a faster worker than Oliveiros!” the other girl exclaimed. “I knew I was slipping, but maybe I’d better rush for the altar before it’s too late. Who are the lucky guys?”

  “It’s just one lucky guy,” Vicky Kinian said. “That man who sat next to me on the plane—Mr Jaeger. He invited us both to dinner.”

  “Right. I remember: tall, blond, and foxy. He seemed nice enough, and who are we to turn down a free meal?”

  The question seemed to be settled, and the listener’s experienced ears detected that both women were now on their feet.

  “Well,” the visitor said, “what does your father’s letter want you to see first?”

  Vicky Kinian read in a nervous, almost awed voice, picking her way carefully over the Portuguese words that were interspersed with the English.

  “In Lisbon, go to Seguranca’s Antique Shop on Rua De Ouro at the corner of Viseli. They will remember me. Ask for the little box I paid a deposit on.”

  “And?” the other girl asked.

  “That’s all. He doesn’t explain.”

  “Well, that must be one humdinger of a box to be worth all this trouble…or else it must have something pretty fancy in it.”

  “Do you know where this place is?” Vicky Kinian asked.

  “I thought I knew every antique shop in Lisbon, but that’s a new one on me. I can lead you to the spot with no trouble, though. Let’s go have a look-see.”

  The goateed man had listened to the parting close of the door, placed his hearing-aid in his jacket pocket, and made a few notes on a small pad. Then he had hauled in his cane, slipped off its contrivance of angled mirrors, telescoped it back to its normal length, put on his hat, and set out for a bit of sightseeing in the vicinity of Rua De Ouro and Viseli.

  4

  Vicky Kinian and Freda Oliveiros stepped out of their taxi on to a sidewalk bordering a broad uncrowded intersection. During the ride from the hotel they had chattered about everything under the sun except the riddle they were on their way to solve, and now that they were brought face-to-face with the question mark they seemed to have nothing to say at all. Standing in the cool shadow of a large tree they let their eyes survey the complete three hundred and sixty degrees of the panorama. To the left was a cafe—round wrought-iron tables in the open air beneath a blue and yellow awning. Opposite where they stood was an apartment house, and then an office building of some kind. To their right was a bank. Behind them was a park.

  “Something must be wrong,” Vicky said. “Are you sure this is the right corner?”

  “Check your letter again.”

  Vicky confirmed the address: Seguranca’s Antique Shop on Rua De Ouro at the corner of Viseli.

  “Well, there’s the corner, but there isn’t any antique shop,” Freda said. “Maybe it went out of business, unless it’s in a back room somewhere. Or maybe…”

  “Wait a minute,” Vicky broke in. “Look at the name on that bank.”

  In large letters carved into the stone pediment above the bank’s columned entrance were the words “BANCO ANTIGO DE SEGURANÇA.”

  “Segurança,” Vicky read carefully. “It’s the same word.”

  “And antigo,” Freda carried on. “There’s your ‘antique’ shop all right. Segurança means something like ‘security.’ ”

  Vicky was frowning as she glanced from the letter to the marble portico of the bank.

  “But if it’s the bank why didn’t he just say so? Now that we’ve seen what he meant, it sounds like something out of a mystery story.”

  “Well, at least we’ve solved the first clue,” Freda said cheerfully.

  “We just followed his directions, but I’d hardly say we’d found any answers,” Vicky rejoined. “Why be so cryptic about a perfectly respectable-looking bank?”

  “Search me, Vicky. But let’s face it—nothing about this whole deal is exactly on the up-and-up, or your father would just have left you a nice traditional will to his estates and acres, not to mention his millions.”

  They were walking almost cautiously towards the bank as they talked. Vicky felt a strange reluctance to get too near the place. Somehow its marble massiveness reminded her of a mausoleum.

  “He never had acres or millions,” she said. “He hardly even had thousands.”

  “Well,” said Freda, “if you’ll excuse my delicacy, let’s be charitable and assume dear old dad handled things this way because he was in the cloak-and-dagger business and not because he was some kind of a nut. How does that letter go on?”

  “They will remember me. Ask for the little box I paid a deposit on.”

  They were at the foot of the wide stone stairway leading into the bank. Simultaneously they both stopped and exchanged looks of sudden realization.

  “A safe deposit box!” they said almost simultaneously.

  “Things are looking up, girl!” continued Freda. “Let’s go.”

  They climbed the steps quickly and walked into the bank’s ornate cavernous main floor. Vicky questioned a woman at the first barred window. She was asked, in hesitant English, to wait. A few moments later an old man with rimless round spectacles perched on his pointed beak walked stiffly across the tiled floor to meet them. Against the background of bars and barrel-vaulted stone ceiling he looked very appropriately like some gnomish custodian of long-interred wealth.

  “Senhorita,” he said as Vicky stepped towards him. “I am Valdez, assistant manager. May I help you? I am told it is a matter which goes back many years, and I am most qualified on such matters.”

  If he smiled, the event was obscured by a hanging garden of white moustache which covered his mouth entirely except for a bit of central lower lip.

  “I’ve come to ask about a safe deposit box my father rented here in 1945,” Vicky told him. “His name was Kinian—Major Robert Kinian.”


  Assistant Manager Valdez squinted briefly and shook his head.

  “I do not remember him myself, senhorita, but it is easy to look him up. Come into my office, please.”

  He led the way with a stiff-legged brisk gait to a private office rich in waxed wood and leather. Vicky gave more details. Shortly Valdez sat at his massive desk and opened a bound volume of records with the date 1945–46 on its spine. As he was going over one of the pages with a magnifying glass Freda made a sotto voce comment to Vicky, who was sitting next to her in a huge wooden chair.

  “If George Washington ever banked here, I bet this place would still have his checks.”

  “Senhorita,” said Valdez unexpectedly without looking up from his magnifying glass, “this bank still holds an unpaid note signed by Christopher Columbus.”

  Again, if the assistant manager’s drollery was accompanied by any trace of a smile, he was the only one who could have known it, and Vicky and Freda glanced at one another like two schoolgirls trying to stifle giggles.

  “Ah!” said Valdez suddenly, “here is the name Kinian, with a special notation. The box was taken by Robert Kinian on February 8, 1945, and the rent paid in advance for thirty years.

  When he looked up from the minuscule pen scratches of his ledger Vicky was leaning forward so tensely that he paused and blinked.

  “Do not fear, senhorita, the box is certain to be here, quite secure. The vault is even safe against earthquakes. We have learned from unhappy experience.”

  “I wasn’t worried about that,” Vicky assured him. “I’m just anxious to see the box.”

  Valdez stood up.

  “Good,” he said briskly. “All that is needed from you is some identification.”

  Vicky opened her purse.

  “Here’s my passport.”

  “Very good.” Valdez took the green booklet and inspected its first pages. “ ‘Victoria Eileen Kinian.’ Yes, that is correct. I am authorized to give you a key to this box. Now, if you will follow me, please…”

  They went with him out of the office, across the main floor again, and into a crypt-like stone chamber behind one of the counters. Armed with a ring of jangling keys, Valdez left the girls, shuffled off down a tunnel, and returned after an almost unbearable delay carrying a large metal box in his arms. He put the box on a table in the center of the room, handed Vicky a key, and held a chair for her and then for Freda.