“Two hundred and forty, then. Not a pfennig more!”
“Very well.” The final despondent shrug. “But only because you are too beautiful, and I am too old and tired…”
Since the pawnbroker was an indigent, mildly alcoholic, pensioned-off uncle of Johann Uhrmeister, he knew when to cut the bargaining and clinch the sale.
Eva counted the money out of her own purse, quickly but precisely, and almost snatched the goblet out of Simon’s hands as she headed out of the shop.
He stayed with her patiently for a few yards along the Reeperbahn again, where she led him into a dazzlingly dreadful all-night restaurant. He followed her into a corner booth, where she ordered ham sandwiches and beer for both of them and put the goblet on the marble tabletop and leered at it as if it had been a prize they had won in a fun fair.
“Let’s get it open,” she said.
“I’ll need some sort of tool for that,” he told her. “The base is filled with some sort of solder. I can’t dig it out with a fork.”
“You could break the stem off, couldn’t you?”
He raised his eyebrows.
“After you just paid sixty dollars for it?”
“It was not bought to keep on a mantelpiece. I am too excited to wait. Break it!”
“Okay, if you say so.”
He picked up the goblet endways in two hands, and bent and twisted. It came apart at the junction of cup and stem, without too much resistance from the soft metal. And within the hollow stem they saw the end of a scroll—which could be dug out with a fork.
It was a piece of parchment rolled to about the size of a panatela, and stained with what most people would have taken for age but Franz Kolben could have told them was cold tea. Simon loosened and spread it with reverent care. The ink on it had also aged, to the color of dark rust, with the help of another of Mr. Kolben’s chemical tricks of the trade. The lettering at the top had involved more laborious research, but in convincingly medieval Gothic characters it announced:
Simon spelled it out with frowning difficulty which ended in irritated puzzlement.
“I thought I could get by in German,” he complained, “but what the hell does that mean?”
“It’s old German, of course,” she said, leaning close to his shoulder. “This was written more than five hundred years ago! In modern German it would be “Dies ist der Platz wo ich meinen Schatz vergrub”—“This is where I buried my treasure.”
“Can you read the rest?”
There was a crude map, or combination of map and drawing, as was the ancient custom. It showed a river at the bottom with ships on it, a recognizable church, and a narrow two-storey house, intricately half-timbered, and a distinctive high-peaked roof with gables surmounted by a conical-topped turret. So much the Saint saw, and was trying unsuccessfully to decipher the cramped and spiky script which filled the other half of the sheet when Eva snatched it out of his fingers and put it in her purse.
“I will read it later,” she said.
He showed his astonishment.
“Aren’t you too excited to wait any more?”
“Yes. But you’ve seen enough already—perhaps too much.”
“Are you afraid I might rush off and beat you to this treasure and take off with your share?”
“My share,” she said, “is all of it. Why should you have any? For breaking open the goblet? I bought it!”
“I thought this evening was supposed to be fifty-fifty,” he said slowly.
She shifted farther away from him, defensively.
“That was only for the food and drink and the shows, nothing else. The goblet was my own. Let anyone ask the man in the shop who paid for it.”
“You didn’t need to do that. I thought you only did it because you’d done all the talking.”
“I didn’t ask you to buy it. I decided for myself. And who saw it first? I did. You would have walked past and never seen it if I had not stopped you. And even then you said it couldn’t be the one. It was I who went in the shop!”
To record that this was one of the rare occasions when Simon Templar was totally flabbergasted would be an understatement of laconic grandeur. But there was no doubt that she meant it all.
He tried one more appeal to higher ethics: “And why would you have been interested if I hadn’t shown you that bit in my guide-book?”
“All the thousands of people who must have read it could say that,” she scoffed. “And then the man who wrote the book would say that he had the best claim.”
Franz Kolben would have been proud of her.
The Saint might almost have merited official sanctification if he had not had to subdue an unhallowed masculine impulse to remodel her pretty but obnoxiously self-satisfied face with one eloquent set of knuckles, but he was catatonically immobilized by an insuperable reluctance to sink to the level of some of his latter-day imitators. But he still had a tattered sense of humour.
“All right,” he said. “Here’s your change.” He made a rough calculation, counted out money, and pushed it towards her. “Have fun—and don’t buy any more mugs.”
She took the change without demur, like a God-given right, and put it away where she had put the parchment. She had no sense of humor that vibrated with his.
“Now let me out,” she said, and the clutch on her handbag was no tighter than the set of her mouth.. “If you try to stop me, or follow me, I’ll call the police.”
The Saint could usually rise to an occasion, but this was one that had been immutably taken out of his hands. He was caught at a disadvantage that would have baffled anyone. If she had been a man, there might have been a remedy, even if it involved physical violence, but to start anything so drastic with her, in such a crowded place or the equally bright and busy street outside, would have only been inviting certain arrest on the most ignominious charges.
He moved aside, and she picked up the two broken pieces of the goblet and stepped past him.
“Thank you,” she said stiffly, “for taking me out.”
“Thank you,” he murmured, with a subtlety that surely went over her head, “for taking me.”
He watched her exit, reflecting wryly that it was sometimes hard to maintain the attitude of a knight-errant towards womankind in the light of such revelations of what cupidity could do to their rectitude.
He paid the bill and went out, but by the time he reached the street she was nowhere to be seen. This was nothing like any conclusion that he had anticipated from their brief encounter, but he was philosopher enough to find some compensation in the discovery that after all life still had some surprises left. And the night had not been completely wasted, for in the course of their peregrinations he had found one other thing which he had come to Hamburg to look for.
He walked back to the Sübersack, and ordered a beer, and caught the eye of the roving silhouette-cutter. The man came over, beaming, with scissors already twinkling. Simon let him proceed, but took from his pocket another silhouette—not one of those he had recently seen cut, but identical in style and mounting. He showed it.
“Is this one of yours?”
“Yes, that is my work.”
“Do you remember the man?”
The artist’s friendliness seemed to begin to dwindle fractionally.
“That is difficult. Man sieht so viele Leute. Is he a friend of yours?”
“He sent this picture to a friend of mine, and I wondered where he had it made. Was he here with anyone that you know?”
The other’s face became finally blank.
“Man kann sich nicht an jeden erinnern. I am sorry, I have quite forgotten.”
Simon laid a hundred-mark note on the table.
“Couldn’t you remember if you tried?”
The silhouettist swiftly separated the black profiles he had cut, pasted them on cards, and pushed back the money.
“Danke schön,” he said. “You already paid me too much. I am sorry that I can do no more for you, but neither do I want to make t
rouble for anyone. In this quarter I have learned to mind my own business.” His smile flashed again as he moved away. Simon decided that he had had all he wanted for one night, and went home.
At breakfast the next morning he opened his guide-book again, turning this time to the section on “Old Hamburg.” The day was chilly and drizzly, more inducive to armchair exploration than to outdoor sightseeing, but he finally put on a trenchcoat and drove himself out nevertheless to take the recommended ramble. Following the suggested route with the aid of a map, he walked by way of the Rathausmarkt to the St Katharinen chapel, and thence to inspect the old mansions on the Deichstrasse overlooking the Nikolaifleet canal. Picturesque as they were, none of them came within range of matching the sketch he had seen on the parchment.
After a decent break for lunch, he went on up by the St Nikolai across to the Kleine Michaeliskirche and on to the great St Michaelís church, “Der Michael” as it is called by the citizens, which is still one of the landmarks of the town. But most of the other original buildings in that area had been razed by the bombings, and where there were not still empty spaces there were mostly modernistic shops and apartments. At the end of another long block to the west he found another church in the Zeughausmarkt, but it was a very obviously post-war restoration. Then he started back along Hütten, and had a hesitant resurgence of hope as he came to a few old timber-frame houses there, and more on the Peterstrasse which branched off it. But nothing corresponded even remotely with what he had seen on the map that came from the goblet, though he zigzagged and crisscrossed through every side street and alley in the precinct.
Of course, it would have been fairly fantastic if the result had been any different. Without benefit of the hieroglyphics which he had been unable to read, he might have tramped aimlessly around the city for days without finding a church and a house something like a primitive drawing which he had only seen for a few seconds. In fact, the instructions might have eliminated Hamburg altogether. They might have referred to any village in North Germany, anywhere along the Elbe. He had simply treated himself to some fairly fresh air and moderate exercise, while time went by that might have been spent more usefully. After all, he had come there to look for a man, not to be wild-goosed into a fanciful treasure hunt.
He had concentrated on only two clues: that the man was harmlessly nutty on antiques, and that the last communication from him had been a cut-out silhouette pasted on a blank card and mailed back to his daughter with scrawled greetings and the bare announcement that he was enjoying himself. Simon Templar had merely tried to weave a similar course in the hope that he might trip over a trail.
“I never promised to go straight after the War,” he had protested to the man who telephoned him from Washington, who was known only as Hamilton. “And anyhow I’m enjoying my retirement. Why don’t you nurse your own babies?”
“Just this once,” Hamilton wheedled. “This chap is very important. As a matter of fact, we haven’t even let out a word that he’s missing. If he’s actually gone over to the Other Side, it’s not going to be funny. We can’t write him off till we know there’s no chance of getting him back.”
And that was as stale a bait as any game fish ever rose to, Simon retrospected as he achieved his weary return, at cocktail time to the embalming basement of the Vier Jahreszeiten.
And there, already sitting at the corner table which they had occupied some twenty-four hours earlier, was Eva.
She looked up and saw him and smiled with a tremulous invitation which was a disintegrative switch from the atmosphere in which they had parted. But the Saint was not petty enough to turn that into a barrier.
He veered towards her as if they had had a date all the time, and he had only just seen her, and said, “Are we going Dutch again, or are you buying?”
“Please have a drink,” she said.
He ordered a double Peter Dawson, and left her to continue.
“I hoped you would come back here,” she said. “I was so ashamed of myself after last night. It’s terrible what money will do to your thinking. Can you ever forgive me?”
“That depends,” he said calmly. “How much am I offered?”
“I found the house,” she said. “With the directions, it wasn’t so hard.”
He sat down.
“Where?”
“In St Pauli. I asked questions, and found out it was the oldest part of Hamburg. So I looked there, and I found it. But it was not for sale.”
“Very likely.”
“But I rang the doorbell. The man was most unpleasant. He said he was happy there, and he didn’t want to sell his house to anyone. Then I had a wonderful idea. I said I was from a movie company, and we would like to rent it for a little while, just for a few shots…Then he began to be a little interested.”
Simon’s drink came, and he raised the glass to her and sipped.
“And you made a deal?”
“Well, yes and no. He talked a lot about what a nuisance it would be for him to move out, and the personal things he’d have to pack up, and the damage that might be done, and his invalid mother who would be so upset at being moved, and why should he have so much inconvenience when he was not hard up for a few marks. But at last he said that we could rent it for two weeks for fifty thousand marks.”
Simon’s lips shaped a whistle.
“Twelve thousand five hundred dollars—that’s probably half what the house is worth.”
“At least a quarter. But he said it would be as much trouble for him as if he was renting it for two years, and he would not do it for anything less. And he said for a movie company it was a bargain, it would cost them twice as much to build a reproduction, and there was something wrong with them if they couldn’t spend such a small amount. I could see that nothing would change him. I know how stubborn a German can be.”
“And I know you’re a good bargainer,” he said. “So that’s what you’re going to have to pay?”
“I told him I would have to talk to the producer. I shall have to talk to somebody. I told you, I am only a girl who works in an office. Perhaps with all my savings I can find ten thousand marks. I don’t have rich friends. I was such a fool to think I could do this all by myself.”
He gazed at her thoughtfully.
“So you’d like to go back to our old deal, and go Dutch again?”
“If you could forgive me. And you have the best right to share the treasure.”
He shook his head callously.
“We still haven’t found any treasure. But if you want to start again now, with me putting up four marks to your one, we’re not fifty-fifty anymore. We’re eighty-twenty.”
Her eyes swam before she covered them.
“All right,” she said. “It’s my own fault. But I can’t come as close as this and give it all up. I accept.”
“And I hope it’s a lesson to you,” he said virtuously. “But before I put up this dough, I’d like to see the house and be sure you’ve found the right one. That is, if you think you can trust me now not to burgle it on my own.”
“I will show it to you whenever you like.”
“Why not now?” said the Saint. “Pay for the drinks, and let’s go.”
They went out and took a taxi. She gave the driver directions in which he heard “St Pauli Hafenstrasse”; the route seemed at first to be heading towards the Reeperbahn again, but turned down towards the river and the docks. When they stopped and got out, he could see the spire of a small church, but it was not at all individual: almost any church with a steeple would have had some resemblance to the one in the map-drawing.
“It is just along here, on the Pinnasberg,” Eva said. There was no question about the house when he saw it. Although it was wedged into a single facade by its neighbors on either side, instead of standing alone, the complicated woodwork and the steep gabled roof capped with the unique round tower were exactly as he recalled them from the crude sketch he had seen the night before, even before Eva produced the parchment and unroll
ed it for him again under a street lamp.
“It certainly seems to fit,” he admitted to her, and had to admit to himself a way-down temblor of excitement that was no longer such a frequent symptom to him as it had been in less hardened days.
“It does—even the distance and direction from the church, I measured them.”
“What does all the writing say?”
“The first part tells where the house is. It seems easy to you now, of course, but it was not easy for me the first time to know where he was talking about. In five hundred years, there are many changes…Then it tells what to look for inside the house. The treasure is in one of the cellars which lead towards the river, in a closed-up tunnel. He gives all the measurements and the marks to follow.”
Simon surveyed the edifice broodingly.
“I still say the rent is inflated,” he remarked. “It might be much cheaper to burgle the joint.”
“But then we would still have to dig. It would take more than just a few minutes, and suppose we were caught? The other way, we have plenty of time, two weeks, and nothing to worry about.”
“Except fifty thousand marks,” said the Saint. “Before we put our shirts on this, let’s be certain there isn’t any other way to swing it.”
Without waiting for her compliance, he crossed the street and mounted the steps and hammered on the door of the house they had been looking at. She caught up with him before it opened.
“What are you going to do?”
“See if we can’t make a better deal. Just introduce me as your boss the movie producer.”
It was Franz Kolben himself who opened the door, for that was where he lived, and he had made it a most profitable residence since he took over the management from his father-in-law, with the help of such intermittent interruptions. Although he had not expected a visit at precisely that moment, he was quick to put on the curmudgeonly expression which it called for.
“Excuse me for disturbing you at such an hour,” said the Saint, when Eva had made the necessary presentation, “but I must call Hollywood tonight and give them all the information.”
Trust the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 4