The Saint in Pursuit

by Leslie Charteris

  On the face of it his assertion was not obviously credible, and the guardians of public order can perhaps not be censured for escorting him into the light at the end of the alley and demanding to inspect his papers.

  “You’ll see from my passport that I’m a simple tourist,” Simon assured them, with injured innocence. “Those thugs attacked me and tried to rob me. I’d suggest you grab hold of them instead of…”

  He looked towards the men he had left polishing the cobblestones with their shirt fronts. They were struggling to their feet and setting a course which would take them as fast as possible from any opportunity to congratulate their uniformed rescuers.

  The Saint pointed commandingly.

  “As you’ll notice,” he said, “they aren’t waiting like honest characters to register a complaint. Personally, I intend to report your behavior to my embassy.”

  The aristocratic appearance of their captive, as well as the evident justification of what he was saying, was enough to convince the policemen that they might very well be making a mistake of the sort that can have most embarrassing consequences. Without waiting to hear any elaboration of the details with which he would regale his embassy, they ordered him to wait where he was while they chased his attackers. He was only too glad to oblige, and as soon as the cops had taken off around the corner after their rapidly limping quarry he pulled out his fountain-pen flashlight and hurried to the spot where he had thrown Vicky Kinian’s letter.

  He expected to see the envelope immediately, and it took him only a few seconds to realize that it was nowhere in the section of the alley where he had thrown it. And yet there was no chance that one of his sparring partners could have grabbed it; he was certain that he had kept them too occupied during the whole melee.

  Simon whirled quickly and sprinted after the two policemen. Now that the rainstorm had passed there was no wind to have blown the envelope away, and the only other obvious possibility was that one of the cops had noticed it and snatched it up on the run.

  In the narrow street beyond the alley, down to the left, the sounds of the chase were still near, and took the form of sharp shouts and a confused skidding of feet, at least some of them flat.

  “In there! He can’t get out!”

  “That way! The other one!”

  As Simon raced on to the dimly lit scene it became clear that the two fugitives had split up, and that only one of them had had the foresight—or good luck—to pick a route which might conceivably lead to a prolongation of his malodorous career. The second one had made the error of getting himself cornered in a cul de sac full of garbage bins. The Saint arrived in time to see him—the little roach-like entity with the moustache—caught in the powerful beam of one of his pursuers’ electric torches, struggling with the closed rear door of an apartment building which formed the end of the architectural trap. He was shielding his face with one hand and clutching his long knife in the other.

  The policemen immediately showed signs of recognition, if not of joy.

  “Halt, you unprintable unspeakable!” yelled one of them.

  “Halt or I’ll shoot!” shouted the other, snatching out an automatic, but still keeping a respectful distance.

  The prodigal obviously anticipated that the Lisbon police force would stop depressingly short of barbequing a fatted calf in honour of his return to the land of the Godly, and in fact were more likely to barbeque him, and this no doubt caused him to panic. Instead of obeying the commands of his pursuers, he took the ungentlemanly and imprudent step of throwing his knife at them, hoping to make his getaway through the apartment building’s back entrance before they could recover their balance.

  But there are days in everybody’s life when little things seem continually to go wrong, and it was such a day in the life of Pedro the Population-Adjuster. Little things like a wrong turning and a tightly locked door added up to a moment of acute inconvenience as a cop’s finger squeezed a trigger twice and caused two notable perforations in Pedro’s anatomy just above his hammered-silver belt buckle.

  Pedro writhed to the ground and twitched to grotesquely sprawled stillness as the policemen strode to his side to pronounce their benediction.

  “Misbegotten swine!”

  “He should have had it long ago.”

  The Saint intervened.

  “I hate to intrude on your sorrow, boys,” he said, “but I wonder if either of you picked up a letter I dropped in the alley back there?”

  The two officers became aware of his presence once again.

  “Senhor!” one of them hailed him in congratulatory tones. “You were quite right. There is no blame on you. This pig is known to us, and we have finally caught him in one of his crimes!”

  “To say the least,” Simon concurred, looking down at the blood-soaked body at their feet. “I wonder why he was after me?”

  “Oh, senhor, he would do anything—stick you up in a back street, kidnap your children, kill! Anything it would pay him to do, he would do. He has been in jail four times—since he was a boy.”

  “Five times,” the other officer corrected.

  “No, it was four. The last time—”

  “And probably it ought to have been forty-five,” Simon cut in pacifically. “But now that he’s no longer a problem, I’m more interested in my letter. Did you happen to find it as you passed through the alley?”

  “Letter? No, senhor. No letter.”

  Both men shook their heads, confirming to each other that they had found nothing.

  “But if you will come to the station with us, senhor, you can describe the other villain and answer questions that may produce…”

  Simon declined politely and gave them a half-salute of farewell.

  “I have already seen justice done,” he said. “I am satisfied—and there is a lady waiting for me who will be most unsatisfied if I am much later in meeting her.”

  “But if you are wanted as a witness, senhor?”

  He calmed them down by showing them a passport with a genuine photograph of himself on it and giving them the name of a hotel at which he was not staying. Having no complaint against him, and perhaps preferring to recite the epic of their deeds to their superiors without any burdensome touches of realism from a stranger, they let him go then, and as he walked away the last words that reached him were: “I will bet you a bottle of Ferreirinha that it was four times!”

  Actually the Saint scarcely heard them. He was too preoccupied with the sudden new spine-tingling awareness that he was no longer a free-roving agent circling the perimeter of a situation and leisurely debating his own possible points of entry. Someone even farther outside and still beyond his ken was watching him.

  CHAPTER THREE

  HOW THE SAINT CONTINUED THE PURSUIT AND WAS OBSERVED IN HIS TURN

  1

  “I hope you won’t think I’m rude,” Vicky Kinian said. “It sounds ridiculous to turn down an invitation to a night club on my first night in Portugal, but I’m absolutely bushed. I feel as if I hadn’t slept in a week.”

  Curt Jaeger was as sympathetic as ever.

  “I don’t blame you,” he said as he escorted her across the lobby of the Tagus. “And from the sound of what you told me at dinner you have an even more exhausting time ahead of you.”

  Vicky nodded and wearily started up the stairs.

  “I’m getting worn out just arguing with my conscience about the whole thing.”

  “If I were you,” Jaeger told her, “I would go on and find this treasure while I was arguing with my conscience. It might be an amusing adventure, and if in the end you decide not to keep it, you should at least be entitled to a finder’s reward.”

  His reasoning appealed to Vicky, since it allowed her to do what she wanted to do while telling herself that she was really not doing it.

  “I’ll think about it,” she said when they had come to the door of her room. “Anyway, I’ll be going on as soon as I can arrange it.”

  “Going on?” he aske
d.

  “I might as well tell you, it’s such a coincidence and you’ve been so nice. I have to go to Switzerland next. I can’t see any harm in telling you that.”

  Jaeger almost laughed.

  “You do lead a merry chase,” he said. “But the fates seem to be conspiring to keep us together. Of course I too will be going to Switzerland, to my head office, when my business is finished here—which it almost is.”

  “Well, I’m glad the fates brought us together here,” Vicky said. “The dinner and the champagne were delicious. And you were very kind to listen to my troubles.”

  “Not troubles—opportunities,” he said. “And in case you should worry, let me assure you again that as a point of honour I am as anxious as you that no one else will ever learn what you have told me.”

  They shook hands then and said goodnight. Jaeger went back down the stairs to his own room, while Vicky, faint with tiredness, unlocked her door and pushed on the light switch just inside.

  For an instant she thought that the strain of the past few days was making her see things, for lounging perfectly relaxed in an armchair half-facing the door was the tall devastatingly magnetic man she had noticed downstairs in the lobby that afternoon.

  She froze, stared, and her next thought was that she had walked into the wrong room.

  “I’m so sorry…” she began, but before she could even start to retreat she collected her wits enough to notice a pair of her own shoes on the floor near the bed, and her cosmetics on the dressing table.

  By now the visitor had risen unhurriedly to his feet.

  “You needn’t be sorry,” he said in a soothing tone. “Please come in.”

  Vicky’s impulse was to turn back and call for help, but the man’s manner and the almost supernatural holding-power of his blue eyes—as clear and bright as a tropical sea even in the yellowish illumination of the hotel room kept her where she was, poised on the threshold.

  “This is my room,” she said unnecessarily. “What are you doing here?”

  The man seemed to resist the temptation to make some lighthearted joke.

  “I’ll be glad to answer that question, Vicky, but it’ll take a little while,” he told her. “If you’ll please come in and sit down I’ll tell you. Right now you look like a doe ready to bolt for her life.”

  “I am ready to bolt,” Vicky assured him. “You tell me what you want, and I’ve got plenty of wide open spaces behind me in case I don’t like what I hear.”

  He shrugged.

  “At least you’re willing to listen,” he said. “We’re making progress.”

  “I think I’ll get the manager,” the girl said uncertainly.

  The lean, towering man looked around innocently.

  “If you need help, I’ll be glad to oblige. What’s the problem?”

  She did not return his glimmer of a smile, but she was no longer quite so tensed for flight.

  “ ‘All right,” she said. “So you’ve given me a chance to scream or make a run for it, and if you’d wanted to hurt me you could have hidden somewhere and grabbed me after I closed the door. But that still doesn’t mean we’re old buddies. Who are you?”

  “My name is Simon Templar, sometimes called the Saint, and I’m not dangerous if taken as directed. Why don’t you shut the door and let me start convincing you that I’m on your side?”

  She had reacted sharply to the sound of his name, and now she studied his face with heightened interest.

  “The Saint?” she repeated incredulously. “Why should I believe that?”

  “Would a passport convince you?”

  She was already convinced enough to risk leaving the doorway and coming forward far enough to take the booklet he held out to her. Still keeping a safe distance, she looked at the photograph and the pages crowded with visa stamps. She half smiled as she handed the passport back at full arm’s length.

  “So a celebrity broke into my room,” she said whimsically. “That makes it all right, I guess. What did you do—pick the lock?”

  “I was afraid it might compromise your reputation if I asked the room clerk to let me in. So I did what any gentleman cracksman would have done.”

  “Well, that certainly needs explaining, even if you are the Saint,” she retorted indignantly.

  “It was quite easy, really. I’ll show you the trick if you’re interested.”

  “I mean, why should you want to get into my room?”

  He took a step towards the open door, and she moved back so that he could not cut off her escape route.

  “Wouldn’t it have been out of character if I hadn’t?” he answered unassumingly. “I mean, think what a disappointment it would be if the Saint showed up politely ringing your doorbell with his hat in his hand.”

  “And that’s the only reason?” she asked sarcastically.

  “I’ll be glad to discuss this if you’ll close the door,” he replied. “Just in case there are any big ears flapping down the hall.”

  “Mighty thoughtful of you,” she conceded. “Okay, I’ll take a chance—but if you do anything funny I’ll scream my head off. You stay over there by the sofa and I’ll stay over here.”

  Simon agreed with an amused shrug, and settled his rangy frame on the sofa cushions. Vicky Kinian shut the door, and perched uneasily on the arm of a chair not far from it.

  “Now,” she said, “please tell me what’s going on.”

  “I will, but bear in mind that I agree in advance that I’m completely unscrupulous—so you can spare me any outbursts of righteous indignation.” He crossed his long legs and swung one arm along the back of the sofa. “I broke in here the first time when you went out to dinner. I was looking for a certain letter…”

  Her dark eyes flashed angrily, and she glanced towards the top of the wardrobe.

  “Well, I never heard of such—”

  “Gall,” Simon supplied helpfully. “And if I hadn’t found the letter at the time that reflex of yours would have given away where it was hidden.”

  She was on her feet.

  “Well, you can just give it back to me right now!”

  The Saint’s face showed genuine regret.

  “I would if I could, Vicky. Unfortunately you have more followers than Moses did when the going was easy—and I was set upon by a couple of rude fans who were ready to go to any extremes to get a souvenir.”

  “Who? Where?”

  “A couple of unsavory types who were disfiguring the corridor when I came out—I would guess with ideas of combing out your room themselves. I tried to start a false scent by marching straight on out of the hotel, but they followed me up the street with the notion of finding out whether I’d brought anything valuable with me. I managed to discourage them somewhat, but during the short but merry tussle your letter still managed to disappear. I searched all around while the cops chased my playmates, and I checked with the cops after the chase was over, and all I can deduce is that some other ardent admirer of yours—some fourth party—picked it up and ran off with it while the rest of us were getting our exercise at the other end of the alley.”

  “Brilliant!” commented Vicky. “Now nobody has it!”

  “Not nobody—just somebody unknown. Maybe you have a clue as to who it might be—and it’s certainly important now for you to tell me what was in that letter.”

  The girl’s temper was at the flash-point.

  “Well, if that doesn’t take the blue ribbon! You’d think it was your letter or something. You haven’t even started to explain what you’re up to!”

  “All right,” he said in a business-like voice, “I can’t prove to you—or even risk telling you in a room that may be bugged—just how legitimately I found out why you’re here in Lisbon. But if you want proof in the morning I’ll supply it. In the meantime, I’ll just say that I know in a general way what you’re after, and I know that there are some pretty vicious parties on the same trail.”

  He studied her keenly.

  “It occurs to me th
at you may not even realize how much danger you’re in—and what kind of rough characters are in this paper chase with you.”

  “Why, no, I didn’t,” she answered in honeyed tones. “You’re the first one I’ve met.”

  “Think it out for yourself,” Simon urged her, unabashed. “This other character has the letter now, anyway—and his methods prove that he’s up to no good.”

  “Of course, your methods are perfectly normal and prove that anyone ought to trust you,” she responded.

  “As I said, I can’t prove much of anything at this hour of the night,” he admitted patiently. “Maybe we should concentrate on the point that you now know that your father’s secret isn’t completely secret, and that the hounds of the Ungodly are even now sniffing at your threshold.”

  Vicky glanced fearfully towards the door of her room.

  “At my threshold?” she breathed.

  “Figuratively speaking. And when they come after you in some dark alley, you may be very glad to have somebody on your side who knows at least as much about these sorts of shenanigans as they do.”

  The girl’s distracting mouth hardened.

  “Shenanigans is right,” she said brusquely. “And you, I suppose, are the knight in shining armour who’s going to defend me through thick and thin.”

  “In two easy cliches, that’s it,” Simon said.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what’s going on,” she said belligerently. “You stole my letter, found out that the most important part was missing, and now you’re giving me this nice saintly story to get me to tell you what was in it!”

  Simon rose and faced her.

  “I’ve told you the truth. I’d only just started to read the letter when—”

  “A nice trick, but it’s not going to work, Mr Templar,” she interrupted. “I memorized the part that had the important instructions in it, and destroyed it so nobody else could find it—and it’s going to stay that way!”

  She had to admit to herself that the Saint looked genuinely concerned.

  “But don’t you see, if that’s true you’re in even more danger,” he said urgently. “If the other side knows you did that, they’ll go to any lengths to find out from you what was in it. Don’t forget what happened to your father…”