“Please, may I butt in?” Soren said, with his sepulchral precision. “All your deductions are dandy, Mr. Templar, but they are all tinted by your own rather melodramatic personality. You could be passing up a much less exciting reconstruction and motive.”
“Such as?”
“I don’t like to bring this up,” Soren said, looking around with his deeply earnest eyes, “and I would not, except in these circumstances. But most of us know that there were other complications about poor Oakridge. The popular picture of a scientist shows him as a kind of disembodied, dedicated priest. Sometimes this is true. But there are exceptions. Oakridge was one. His glands were fully as active as his brains. Not to mince words, he was a wolf. He gave Miss Tanner quite a bit of trouble.”
With her cheeks coloring under the glances that could not help converging on her, the girl said, “Oh yes, but—”
“But at least once your fiancé was annoyed enough to warn him.”
“I told him to keep his hands off her,” Ingram blurted straightly, “or he and I would have to talk it over somewhere outside. But I wouldn’t’ve jumped him from behind like that, like Mr Templar says it happened.”
“I don’t think there was any need to bring that up,” Rand interposed fussily. “It’s true that Oakridge was quite difficult in some ways. Not the scientific type that we’re used to in this country. I was strongly opposed to having him on this project at all, as a Russian, but his qualifications were so outstanding—”
“Hey!” Tanner almost bellowed suddenly. “You say he was a Russian?”
Professor Rand blinked at him irritably.
“Yes, but the FBI gave him a full clearance. He escaped into Poland from the Russian army that was invading it from one side while Hitler was driving in from the other—that was before Stalin suddenly changed allies. From there he got away to England and then to America. He worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the A-bomb. His name was Dmitri Okoloff. He took the name of Edward Oakridge when he became a citizen—from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where he’d worked.”
“You squawk about me bringing the Saint here,” Tanner grumbled ominously, “and you had him working—a Russian!”
“Shut up, Harry,” said the Saint with unexpected sharpness. “This is the slob who got murdered. Not a suspect. Get it?’
He had drawn all the eyes again, but they held him like nails, uncertain and exasperated in diverse ways, but nearly all ready to crucify him. And he felt astonishingly unconcerned.
“Had Oakridge learned English very well?” he asked, with his gaze on Rand like a blue flame.
“Quite well,” Rand said. “Without as much—er—vernacular as Dr Soren. But he was always trying. Except when he got excited. Then he’d blow up and start screaming in Russian.”
“Listen,” said the Saint tensely. “Oakridge had been conked on the head and a screwdriver rammed through his throat. He’s knocked out with a severe concussion, and he’s also bleeding to death. But the human body is awful tough—and from what I saw of him, Okoloff-Oakridge had an extra tough one. His brain recovered from the hit on the head before he bled to death through his gullet. But he knew he was gone, and he couldn’t yell, and he wanted to say who did it. He was only an adopted American, but he was going to write the name of a traitor, if it was the last thing he did.”
“You don’t have to be so theatrical,” Professor Rand said edgily. “We’ve all seen what he wrote.”
“But you couldn’t read it,” said the Saint. “It never occurred to anyone—including me—until this moment, that he was writing in Russian. Waking up from a crack on the head, dazed and dizzy and knowing that he was dying, he blew up. As you said, Professor. And in that foggy state he reverted to the writing that was most natural to him…And if this were one of those detective stories, I guess this is where everybody would be asked to take a deep breath and try to beat the Great Sleuth to the sniff.”
For enough seconds to be counted there were no takers. Then Harry Tanner said, almost as if he had been accepting a dare, “Does COP mean something else in Russian?”
“If it does, I wouldn’t know,” said the Saint. “About all I know besides tovarisch and vodka is some of the alphabet. But anyone who’s ever seen a newsreel or a news photo from behind the Iron Curtain must have noticed a word that’s bound to crop up in a lot of their posters, which looks like PYCCKU, and if they had an inquiring mind they could have figured out that it stood for Russky. You see, in Russian letters, ‘G’ is ‘S,’ and ‘P’ is ‘R,’ and if Oakridge had been starting to write, in his way, S-O-R-E-N—”
Tanner and Ingram began to move at the same time, in an oddly synchronized and yet spontaneous way.
Simon Templar eased the ash from his cigarette.
“I could make quite a phony production,” he said, “about who felt obliged to suggest the word COPY, and then had to knock it down, and who was so very intellectual about the kind of false clue that a clever murderer wouldn’t leave, and who had to try to drag in the angle of Jock and Marj’s romance and Oakridge’s wolfiness, and so on, but I will feel rather let down if they don’t find a Minox camera, or some prototype which the Russians must have invented first, on Dr Soren.”
Soren stood his ground until Tanner and Ingram put their hands on him, and then he started to thunder something incoherent about the Constitution.
They found the camera on him, anyhow.
It was the kind of evening in Harry Tanner’s home that Simon Templar heartily detested, even though Mrs Tanner, the inevitable plump, motherly woman, cooked an excellent dinner.
Marjorie Tanner was very eager and pretty and held hands a great deal of the time with Jock Ingram, who was very stalwart and modest and sincere. They would make a dream couple like the ideal Boy Scout and Girl Guide, and he could only wish every blessing on them.
Harry Tanner, bovinely exhilarated and unbent, said, “Anybody tell me you aren’t a detective, I’ll punch him right in the nose.”
“A dying man writes out the name of his murderer, and when someone tells us the alphabet he wrote in I’m just lucky enough to be able to read it,” said the Saint sourly. “That should qualify me as an Honorary Cop anywhere.”
Not to anyone would he ever admit that far more fragile threads of discernment had started to bring his sights to bear on Dr Soren before ever an alphabetical coincidence gave him the ammunition to fire a decisive challenge. If any such legend got around, he might never be able to shake off the stigma of being a natural detective.
THE PERFECT SUCKER
“Don’t ever run away with the idea that any fool can play the fool,” Simon Templar was heard to say once, without a blush. “To turn in a first-class performance as the ideal chump, the answer to the bunco artist’s prayer, the way I’ve played it sometimes to hook them on their own line, takes more talent than ordinary actors win awards for. If you overdo it and make yourself look too utterly stupid, a con man might pass you up simply because you seem too dumb to have even the rudimentary larcenous instinct which he needs for his routine. If you strike any false note, you’re likely to scare him into a dead run. You have to ad-lib all your own dialog, and you don’t get any rehearsal. And the discouraging thing is that no matter how much you polish your technique, you’ll never do so well as when you aren’t even trying.”
He was certainly not trying when he met Mr Irving Jardane, or Mr Jardane met him, for he had come to the Rogue River in Oregon with no thought of hooking anything more predatory than a few rainbow trout. At such times the Saint had to make no effort to look worthy of his often incongruous nickname. In the complete relaxation which a man can only achieve when solely preoccupied with the leisured assembling of a fly rod and reel in anticipation of a peaceful evening’s fishing, all the bronze and sapphire hardness which could edge the Saint’s face at some other moments was softened to an almost unbelievable innocence, which a more bemused critic than some of the sharks he had gaffed in his lifetime might have claimed
was the revelation of a wonderful childishness of heart which he had never really outgrown.
Mr Jardane was a rather stout gentleman of about sixty, with bristly white hair and the florid complexion of one who liked to live well—though perhaps not in the same sense as a dietician might define it. He came by the white frame cottage where Simon was sitting on the stoop and paused to ask, “Been doing any good here?”
The Saint did not delude himself for an instant that his interrogator was eager to know whether he had recently performed any acts of charity or beneficence. In piscatorial circles such a question has only one meaning, and Mr Jardane was very obviously a fellow fisherman. In fact, he was one of the fishingest fishermen Simon had seen for a long time, from the soles of his waders up to the crown of his special hat which was encircled with a string of small magnets to which clung a dazzling assortment of artificial flies. A plastic box of additional flies, with a magnifying lid, hung like a bib from around his neck; a creel was slung by a strap over one shoulder and a spinning tackle box by another strap over the other. He clutched both a fly rod and a spinning rod in one meaty hand, a landing net dangled down his back, and on his belt were holsters containing a hunting knife and a pair of pliers tricked out with half a dozen auxiliary gadgets. All this gear was of the finest quality, but one seldom saw so much of it on one man at one time.
Mr Jardane had the next cabin in the irregular row spread out along the high bank of the river in a parkland of tall pines between Grant’s Pass and Medford which made up the prettiest fishing camp on that stretch of water (and I have to put that in the past tense, because by the time you read this you might search for it in vain). Simon had already noticed him, as he noticed almost everyone who came within his long range of vision. Mr Jardane’s car was a Cadillac of the latest model: combined with his elaborate angling equipment, he gave the almost blatant impression of a man who had plenty of money to spend on anything he liked and who had no inhibitions about doing so. But fishermen are an infinitely varied crew, and the Saint could think of many more foolish or more wicked things for a rich man to splurge on.
“I got a couple this morning,” he said. “Only small ones. And I worked for them.”
“I worked,” grumbled Mr Jardane, “and didn’t get anything. Yes, I had one strike. But I lost him. Fishing’s lousy this year, anyhow. It’s those floods they had last winter. Chewed the bottom of the stream all to hell.”
“So I hear.”
“Anyhow, for me the fishing doesn’t have to be good,” said Mr Jardane defensively. “It’s just supposed to be good for me.”
If he was trying to get a raised eyebrow, he succeeded with that.
“Come again?” Simon murmured politely.
“You think I do this to eat fish? I hate fish. Except when it’s cargo. Me, I could eat steak and potatoes every day of my life. That’s cargo too. But I like cargo. I like work. So the doctors tell me I work too hard and I got to lay off at least a month out of every six and relax. They tell me to go fishing. So I go fishing. Relax? Every time I lose a fish, my blood pressure goes up out of sight. I can feel it. But you can’t argue with doctors. I’d rather try to figure a tight freight schedule any day.”
Simon grinned lazily.
“Is that your job?”
“Yes.” This was where Mr Jardane gave his name. He added, as if the additional explanation shouldn’t really have been necessary, “Transamerican Transport. The yellow trucks with the red lightning flashes painted on ’em. You must’ve seen ’em all over.”
“Oh. Those.”
“What’s wrong with ’em?”
“Aside from clogging the traffic when they’re crawling uphill, or barreling too fast down the other side, and stinking up the whole countryside with diesel fumes, I guess they’re wonderful.”
“They’re more than that. They’re necessary. Any time you eat a Maine lobster in California, or an Oregon pear in Florida, or a good steak most anywhere, as like as not Transamerican hauled it there. Think about that when you’re eating Gulf shrimp in Chicago. And you think we don’t pay for the roads? Listen, how many private individuals d’ye figure could afford to run a car if they had to take over the share of gas and highway taxes and licenses that’s paid by the trucks?”
“I’m sorry,” said the Saint amiably. “I wasn’t trying to start a fight. It’s only that I wonder sometimes if progress is worth all the things it spoils. I’m only a little crazy.”
Mr Jardane sniffed.
“All right,” he said aggrievedly. “But I made my pile out of the world the way it is, and I’ll bet I’ve done it as honestly as however you make a living.”
“That,” said the Saint mildly, “is certainly more than probable.”
The admission seemed to make Mr Jardane feel better. He watched Simon dextrously tying a tapered leader on the end of his line and asked chattily, “What sort of business are you in?”
“I used to be a sort of business investigator,” Simon told him, without feeling obliged to explain that the only sort of business he had ever investigated very deeply was funny business. “But I’m more or less retired now.”
He had said this so often that he had honestly begun to believe it, in spite of the fact that every month or two something infallibly happened to make a liar out of him.
“Retired already? And you look so much younger than me. But don’t think I envy you,” said Mr Jardane vigorously. “I’ve worked all my life, and I’ll die in harness, if those damfool doctors’ll let me. Wouldn’t know what to do with my time if I quit.”
“I go fishing,” murmured the Saint. “Like you’re doing.”
Mr Jardane blinked at him somewhat dubiously, as though he instinctively sensed a barb somewhere and was trying to locate its point. Failing in the immediate effort, he made a gesture of shrugging himself more purposefully into his manifold accouterments and said firmly, if fatuously, “Well, I guess I’ll give it another whirl. We’ll compare scores later.”
“Good luck,” Simon said pleasantly.
But he didn’t even glance up as Mr Jardane clomped away, being too intent on snipping his knot close and melting the remaining couple of millimeters of nylon into a tiny slip-proof bead with the tip of his cigarette.
When the sun dipped below the hills to the west he went down the bank and began to wade slowly up the riffle, pausing for a number of casts every few yards. There were still at least two hours of daylight left, but the direct sunlight was cut off from the water, and there was no reason why the trout shouldn’t begin biting, except for their own natural orneriness…Which, apparently, was at its worst that evening, for in the first hour the only specimen of salmo gairdnerii that rose to his fly was a fingerling of such immature dimensions that he could only release it and hope that the experience would keep it out of trouble until it grew to more edible size.
He took to a path by the water’s edge to bypass an unpromising stretch of rapids, and it brought him to a floating pier which the owner of the resort had hung some fifteen feet out into the stream to provide a place where anyone who was disinclined to wade could enjoy some limited casting. The outer end of it was already occupied by a small thin man with gold-rimmed glasses who was studiously baiting a spinning line, but Simon stopped on the pier anyway to light a cigarette and lean his rod against the handrail while he changed to the wet fly which he had decided to try next.
The alders and laurels along the bank were still green, but every gust of breeze harvested a flutter of falling leaves, and since the vanishing of the sun there was a perceptible crispness in the air. With the first russet fragrances of autumn blending with the sweet damp smell of the river, and the rush and chuckle of water playing accompaniment to the whispered arias of the treetops, and the softened light from the sky overlaying the landscape with a hint of gauze that a painter would despair of capturing, a poet might have felt that the mere catching of a fish was magnificently unimportant compared with the excuse that the attempt gave a man to enjoy so mu
ch beauty and tranquillity, and the Saint might easily have agreed with him. No doubt the relaxed and peaceful mood was even more plainly reflected in his lounging stance as he propped himself beside his rod and carefully wove his knot.
But a fisherman is still a fisherman anywhere, and so he felt no surprise or resentment when the frail man at the end of the pier interrupted his vacuous serenity with the conventional inquiry: “Any luck?”
“Not much yet,” Simon said cheerfully. “How are you doing?”
The other reached down into the water and pulled up a string from which dangled four small but not contemptible fish.
“How’s that?”
“Not bad.”
Simon was inevitably interested—he would have liked to call it envious, but he was human too.
“I see you’re one of the fellows who’d rather do it the hard way,” said the little man sociably, lowering his catch back into its natural cooler. “I’m afraid I’d be a complete duffer at fly casting.” He picked up his rod and held up the line, exhibiting a couple of salmon eggs on the hook with a small sinker a cubit ahead of them. “But I suppose you’d despise this kind of fishing.”
“It seems to catch trout,” Simon conceded.
The little man made a clumsy roundhouse cast but managed to reach out about forty feet. He had sparse mousy hair and an eager bony face; somehow he made one think of a timid schoolteacher.
“There’s a bit of art to it, all the same,” he insisted apologetically. “A lot of people don’t catch anything, even with salmon eggs. They get nibbles, and lose their bait, but they don’t seem to be able to hook the fish. It used to happen to me, till I made a study of it. First, I decided you have to let your egg go to the bottom, and leave it there, so it lies pretty much naturally. There’s no use to keep hauling it in and throwing it out again. If there’s a trout anywhere around, he’ll find it. And if he’s hungry, he’ll take it.”
Thanks to the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 13