Thanks to the Saint (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “Yes,” said Miss Ashville grimly. “She answered. That’s what I want to show you.”

  She went to a drawer in the battered but carefully polished bureau and brought back a letter. It was on the very heaviest pearl-gray stationery, with a very large engraved monogram in gold in one corner surrounded by a corona of twinkling effects which at the first glance would have been taken for stars but on closer scrutiny proved to be tiny coronets. It must have betrayed a powerful fixation, he thought.

  The aggressive but agreeable perfume that still clung to the paper and the impetuous self-indulgent sprawl of writing both connected with still very lively memories, but the tone was altogether different.

  Dear Miss Ashville,

  I’m sorry to hear of Richard’s bad luck—which I think and hope you may be exaggerating slightly—but I must say I’m surprised he should take this sneaky way of getting his sister to write begging letters for him.

  After all, getting divorced is for better or for worse like getting married. He made a settlement which satisfied him at the time, and he can’t keep trying to go back on it whenever things aren’t going well for him, or when would it ever stop?

  If either of you thinks you have any legal claim on me, please talk to my lawyers who will know how to deal with it.

  Yours truly, Elise Ashville

  “Brrr,” said the Saint.

  “You see?” said the homely sister. “Of course I’m prejudiced, but she just can’t be a nice person.”

  “Did you ever talk to the lawyers?”

  “I did not. You know very well I’d have been wasting my time. That’s what people like her have lawyers for. Besides, Richard hasn’t any legal claim. I know it, and she knew it when she said that.”

  Simon glanced at the letter again.

  “Had you quarreled before? ‘Dear Miss Ashville…Yours truly’—as if you’d never even met.”

  “We haven’t. Not to this day. I was abroad when they got married. I went to work for the Berlitz school in Brussels not long after the war, teaching American English—did you know that they teach both kinds? I only gave it up and came back when I realized that Richard might need someone to take care of him. I’m glad I did, but I wish I’d saved up more money. What I had put away didn’t go very far.”

  “Have you talked to a lawyer of your own? I should think any sharp operator could cook up a case that’d at least be good enough to get into court and that wouldn’t be good publicity. Her lawyers might easily advise her to fork out something just to avoid that.”

  She shook her head definitely.

  “That couldn’t be done without Richard signing complaints and summonses and knowing all about it, and he’d never do that. He’s that kind of fool, but I love him for it.”

  “Then what did you think the paper could do?”

  “There’s a kind of pride that wouldn’t ask for charity, like Richard’s,” she said, “and another kind that can’t bear to think of a wicked woman getting away with what she’s done, without letting everyone know the rottenness of her. That’s my kind. I’ve read about her in the gossip columns since I’ve been back, going to the parties and the fancy restaurants, and always with some prince or baron or something, and it makes me boil over inside. If you print those stories, I think you ought to print the other things that are just as true. Perhaps it won’t do Richard any good, I’ve got to resign myself to that anyhow, but it’d be an eye opener to some of her fine friends.”

  “I’m afraid,” said the Saint cynically, “that nothing would shock most of them, except if she ran out of money.”

  “Do you think I’m just being vindictive?”

  He considered her levelly.

  “Yes. And I thoroughly approve. I often think the world could use a lot more vindictiveness—only I’d rather call it righteous indignation. I had to see you to make up my mind, but you’ve convinced me—you and this letter—that something has to be done.”

  He gave the letter back to her, and she took it reluctantly.

  “Then why don’t you keep it and publish it?”

  “I can’t.” Simon had not forgotten his promise to Stern and the editor, and he kept it scrupulously. “I hope you won’t think I’ve taken advantage of you, but I never said I was a newspaperman. I just let you assume it. My name is Templar, and I am sometimes called the Saint.”

  Even though she had spent the last ten years in Belgium, the durability or the international scope of his reputation was reflected in the enlargement of her eyes.

  “You…But how…”

  “I have ways of hearing all sorts of things,” he said glibly. “Don’t ask me how I got interested in your brother’s case, because I couldn’t tell you the truth. But I’m going to work on it.”

  “If there’s anything I can do to help you—”

  “I wouldn’t be bashful about asking, believe me. But I don’t know yet what can be done.” But already, under an air of vaguely discouraged perplexity, his brain was racing. “The only thing I’m sure of is that, given enough time, I usually dream up something.”

  When he phoned Elise Ashville, after lunch, she answered the ring herself, but her voice was cold and almost unrecognizable until he gave his fictitious identity. Then it became warm and languorous.

  “Darling. When do I see you again?”

  “What are you doing?”

  “Getting ready to go to the office. Got to make a few decisions and do a few chores. But for this evening, you name it.”

  “What about your Marchese?”

  “He can dry up and blow away. He woke me up at nine o’clock this morning, calling to ask how my headache was. I told him I had a wonderful night but he was spoiling my beauty sleep.” She laughed, intimately. “I’ll tell him I want to be alone and go to bed early tonight, to make up for it. Whatever you say.”

  “I was teasing,” he said. “I have to catch the plane to Chicago in two hours, to see about a deal there. You remember, I told you yesterday I was not entirely a gentleman of leisure.”

  “I don’t remember you telling me anything about your business. We were much too busy, weren’t we?”

  “For me, to mix business and pleasure is mixing champagne and vinegar. The result is all vinegar, no champagne. I prefer us to be all champagne. You will still be here next Tuesday, if I can finish talking to these dreary pill makers and fly back?”

  “You’ve got a date. But what dreary pill makers?”

  “I shall tell you when it is all over. Until Tuesday, then, most wonderful Elise!”

  He figured that that should be just enough to keep her nagged by an intermittent but persistent bug of curiosity, which by Tuesday should have piqued her to an ideal pitch of receptivity. But just in case it should torment her into trying to beat his timing, he made one more phone call, to David Stern.

  “I’ve talked to Ashville’s sister, and kept your paper out of it, as we agreed. By the same token, I haven’t anything to tell you. Except thanks.”

  “But are you going to do anything?”

  “If I told you what I had in mind, you mightn’t approve. I don’t want you to sprain your conscience. And another thing. If I happened to make Elise very angry with me, it’s just possible she might include you for having introduced me. Personally I think she’d swallow it and keep quiet, rather than admit that anyone got the best of her, but I’d hate to expose you to the risk. So if she checks with you again, you never saw the Count of Cristamonte before and you didn’t vouch for him. I simply came to the office, introduced myself, and started asking a lot of questions about local industrial conditions, and finally conned you into adjourning to a cool cocktail bar, and then to dinner. I said I wasn’t free yet to tell you what I might be interested in manufacturing, except that it was something sensational in the medical field.”

  “That’s all very well,” protested the publisher, “but I think you owe it to me—”

  “To save you from being an accessory before the fact,” said the Saint. �
�One day, when I’m sure there’s not going to be a squawk, I may tell you more. Meanwhile, let this be a lesson to you not to get involved with shady characters like me.”

  Again he hung up, before he could be pinned down by any more questions than he was inclined to answer.

  As a matter of record, he did not fly to Chicago, but drove a hundred miles in the opposite direction, down to the Gulf coast and the picturesque outpost of Grand Isle at the end of the road, to sample the fabled fishing in the bayous and out around the offshore oil rigs. He spent a very innocent and refreshing three days and drove back to New Orleans on Tuesday afternoon only because he had committed himself. It was a sacrifice for which he felt thoroughly entitled to a halo.

  He called Elise Ashville as soon as he had checked in at one of the elegant new motels on the Airline Highway and was put through with flattering speed by her office secretary. Her voice, in spite of a brave attempt at complacency, confirmed that the splinter he had deliberately planted had not stopped plaguing her.

  “Darling. I hope you had a very dull trip.”

  “Terribly dull—but profitable.” He had not forgotten his accent. “Do we still have our date?”

  “I was counting on it. I sent the Marchese to Mexico—to find out if it really isn’t too hot at this time of year. How were your dreary pill makers?”

  “Very dreary, but very nice to me. If I call for you at your flat at seven, will that give you time to have relaxed and made yourself beautiful?”

  “Make it seven-thirty. I must be specially fascinating. You don’t know how you’ve tortured me, and now I shall drive you mad until I find out what you’ve been up to.”

  “I shall enjoy that,” he said.

  She was not used to men being confident and casual enough to have that note of carefree mockery in their voices when they spoke to her, and it sent unfamiliar currents tingling through her spine.

  Enjoying a soothing facial massage and a stimulating body rub from her new maid, who was a trifle clumsy but much more obsequious and uncomplaining than the last one, she wondered whether this adventure might turn into something more durable than the others. She was not naturally promiscuous so much as amoral and ambitious: the discovery that with wealth added to her considerable physical endowments she could use titled playboys as playthings had gone to her head but had not completely turned it. To pick up and discard them at a whim flattered the ego of an ex-waitress, but to marry one merely for his title, with all the world knowing as well as she that that was all she had bought, would have violated every principle of the same plebeian common sense.

  But as the Countess of Cristamonte, if he was actually even solvent in his own right…She toyed lazily with the name while she wallowed lengthily in the oiled and foamed and scented water of her sunken Roman bath. It was not so bad. Of course, she had sometimes dreamed of a Prince, but there were hardly any genuine ones left whom you could meet outside of a real palace, and most of them were either too young or too old. She might do worse than this, and she certainly wouldn’t have to apologize for him physically…While she allowed herself to be fluff-dried and powdered (she had observed these symbols of supreme luxury in a movie when she was a little girl, and in a depression would have slashed her office overhead to the bone before she dispensed with any of them) she almost accepted his proposal, and abruptly recalled that he had not yet made it. But that could be arranged, if the other qualifications were in order. Tonight she would be sure to have time to probe further into that.

  “You can leave as soon as you’ve tidied up, Germaine,” she said, as she sat penciling her eyebrows. “And don’t come crashing in early in the morning.”

  “Oui, madame. At vat hour do you vish me to be ’ere?”

  “Not a minute before ten-thirty.” The maid might have to get used to some highly bohemian goings-on eventually, but there was no point in shocking her into a dither in the first few days. “I know I’ll be up very late tonight, and I won’t want to be disturbed.”

  “I understand, madame.”

  By the time she opened the door herself to the Saint’s ring, she had an excited feeling that the wheel of Fortune was spinning into a pattern loaded with her numbers—which only proves how misleading such hunches can be.

  “Darling,” she said. “You’re terribly punctual.”

  “Should I have pretended I did not care if I waited another hour to see you?” He kissed her hand with a flourish but went no farther except with eloquent eyes, and she thought that only a truly sophisticated gentleman would have had the gumption, in the circumstances, not to try to muss up a lady’s freshly perfected makeup at the very start of the evening. “I cannot play these games, especially after the games I have had to play since I was here.”

  “You look very healthy for a man who’s spent a weekend in Chicago.”

  “Only because on Saturday and Sunday I have to go out to the country clubs, or the yacht clubs,” he said quickly. “I have only one thing against America: when a business man wants to take you away for a change from the office atmosphere—be careful! When he gets you to take off your coat, he is planning to take your shirt.”

  “Is that what those dreary pill makers did to you?”

  “Yes. No. That is, they tried, but they didn’t. I think I made a good deal.”

  “Darling. You’re at home here, remember? Make us a cocktail.” She settled into her corner of the oversize couch. “The very driest Martini, for me.”

  He stirred up some Romanoff vodka with ice and allowed four drops of Cazalis & Prats to fall in the pitcher.

  “You see? I am learning all the tricks of an American business man.”

  “Why do you want to be an American business man?”

  “Because, alas, I don’t have the temperament of a gigolo. When I compliment a beautiful woman, I want her to believe me and not think I am complimenting her bank account. Here’s an American compliment for you: you look good enough to eat. Is that why I would be called a wolf?”

  She laughed.

  “Well, you won’t have to prove it that way. I’ve made a reservation for us at Antoine’s.”

  “No.”

  Her head went back a fraction of an inch, as if jolted by a tiny invisible blow, and her eyebrows went up.

  “Why not? It’s the most famous place in New Orleans.”

  “That is the first reason. I have seen nothing but famous places for so many days now that I’m bored with them. Second”—he ticked the list off on his fingers, smiling disarmingly—“where I come from, it is the custom for a man who is taking a woman to dinner to choose the place. Unless she is paying, which I’ve told you does not agree with me. Third, I did not plan to go to any restaurant, which would be crowded and noisy and either too stuffy or too air-conditioned. For us, this time, I wanted something quite different.”

  “Don’t tell me you want to cook something here!”

  “Do I already look so domesticated?” he said reproachfully. “No, I am thinking much more romantically. It came to me while I was on the plane, thinking of you and of our first real date. What would be quite different, I thought, from the first date to which anyone else would invite her? So I had an idea. I remembered I noticed last night it was almost a full moon. I had time after I got here to hire a car, to make inquiries, to drive around. I found a place beside the lake, at the end of a road, fifteen or twenty miles out of town, away from all the traffic and the people, with the most beautiful big trees and nice ground to park, and there I decided we would have a picnic.”

  She stared at him with mounting incredulity.

  “A picnic? Are you kidding?”

  “Ah, but you are thinking of the American or the English picnic. The blanket spread on the ground, the sand in the sandwiches, the ants in the warm beer. I shall show you how a civilized Frenchman picnics.”

  “In these clothes? And after you told me to get all dressed up for you—”

  “Certainly. In the car I have folding chairs, a folding table,
even a tablecloth. I have knives and forks and plates and napkins. In a large box of ice I have caviar, vichyssoise, prawns in aspic, pheasant glazed with truffles—all from one of the best kitchens in town—a salad needing only to be mixed, and a magnum of Bollinger. For music, I provide some of the world’s greatest orchestras—on records. You will be served as well as you could be in the finest restaurant, if only I don’t spill anything. But all this, and the moon on the water, we shall have all to ourselves.”

  “You and me and the mosquitoes,” she said, though his dramatic enthusiasm was so enchanting that her tone of voice was softened in spite of herself. “Darling. We’d be eaten alive!”

  He shook his head.

  “I have already thought of that too.”

  He reached for her hand and held it open, and took a small gold box from his pocket and tipped out a pill into her upturned palm. The pill was a little larger than an aspirin tablet, pink and sugar-coated. Then he poured her a glass of water.

  “Take it.”

  “What’s the idea?” she demanded suspiciously. “Is this one of those happy-dope pills that you think’ll make me agree to anything, or just not care how much I get bitten?”

  “No, it isn’t. I give you my word of honor that it cannot possibly harm you, or upset you, or affect your good judgment. It isn’t an aphrodisiac, or a drug that will place you at my mercy.”

  “Well, these are two things I wasn’t worrying about.” She raised the pill to her lips and stopped again. “If I take it, will you promise to answer my next question?”

  “I promise.”

  She put the tablet in her mouth and washed it down.

  “Now,” she said, “tell me what your business was with those pill makers in Chicago.”

  “It was about this pill.”

  “Don’t cheat. A full answer.”

  He grinned ruefully.

  “Now you have cheated me. I was looking forward so much to having you try to seduce the answer from me. Instead, I am trapped…Very well. They were bargaining for the formula of this pill, which will keep all mosquitoes and gnats and such nuisances away from you for the rest of the night. So do you have any more arguments against my picnic?”