“Why, yes. I was chasing the man who had it. I brought him down, but he kicked me in the face and got away.”
“I thought, perhaps, he might have dropped it.”
“I didn’t see it again.”
“Did the police search for it?”
“I don’t think anyone would have. Even if the man dropped it, he had plenty of time to pick it up again while I was knocked half silly. Anyway, it wasn’t around. And if the police had found it, they’d certainly have returned it to you.”
Her eyes examined him uncertainly.
“If anyone found it…anyone…I would pay a large reward.”
“If I knew where to lay my hands on it,” said the Saint, a little frigidly, “you wouldn’t have to ask for it back, or pay any reward.”
She nodded.
“Of course. I’m being stupid. It was a foolish hope. Excuse me.” She stood up abruptly. “Thank you for letting me talk to you—and again for what you tried to do. I must not bother you anymore.”
She held out her hand, and was gone. Simon Templar stood where she had left him and slowly lighted another cigarette. Then he walked to the window. From the balcony outside he was offered a superb panorama of mountains rolling down to the sparkling blue foreground of the lake, where an excursion steamer swam like a toy trailing a brown veil of smoke, but irresistibly his eye was drawn downwards and to the right, towards the corner outside the gardens where he had tackled the stocky man.
He could have persuaded himself that it was only an illusion that he could see something from where he stood, but the echoes of the false notes that the Signora Ravenna had struck were less easy to dismiss.
He put on his jacket and went downstairs. After only a short search in the bushes near where he had tangled with the stocky man, he found the briefcase.
3
He figured it out as he took it upstairs to his room. The briefcase had indeed flown out of the stocky man’s grasp when the Saint tackled him. It had fallen in among the rhododendrons. Then Kleinhaus had come along, shouting. The stocky man had been too scared to stop and look for it. He had scrammed the hell out of there. The police hadn’t looked for it, because they assumed it was gone. And the stocky man hadn’t come back to look, either because he was afraid to, or because he assumed the police would have found it.
And now the Saint had it.
He stood and looked at it for quite a while, behind his locked door. He only had to pick up the telephone—he presumed that Signora Ravenna was staying in the same hotel—and tell her to come and get it. Or perhaps the more correct procedure would be to call the police. But either of those moves called for a man devoid of curiosity, a pillar of convention, a paragon of deafness to the siren voices of intrigue—which the Saint was not. He opened it.
It required no instruments or violence. Just a steady pull on a zipper. It opened flat, exposing its contents in one dramatic revelation, as if they had been spread out on a tray.
Simon enumerated them as dispassionately as a catalog, while another part of his mind fumbled woozily over trying to add them into an intelligible total.
Item: one chamois pouch containing a necklace of pink pearls, perfectly graduated. Item: one hotel envelope containing eight diamonds and six emeralds, cut but unset, none less than two carats, each wrapped in a fold of tissue paper. Item: a cellophane envelope containing ten assorted postage stamps, of an age which suggested that they might be rare and valuable. Item: a book in an antique binding, which from the title pages appeared to be a first edition of Boccaccio’s Amorosa Visione, published in Milan in 1521. Item: a small oil painting on canvas without a frame, folded in the middle to fit the briefcase but apparently protected from creasing by the bulk of the book, signed with the name of Botticelli. Item: a folded sheet of plain notepaper on which was typed, in French:
M PAUL GALEN
137 WENDENWEG
LUCERNE
Dear Monsieur Galen,
The bearer, Signor Filippo Ravenna, can be trusted, and his merchandise is most reliable.
With best regards,
The signature was distinctive but undecipherable.
“And a fascinating line of merchandise it is,” brooded the Saint. “For a shoemaker, Filippo must have been quite an interesting soul—or was he a heel?…A connoisseur and collector of very varied tastes? But then why would he bring his prize treasures with him on a trip like this?…A sort of Italian Raffles, leading a double life? But a successful business man shouldn’t need to steal. And if he did, his instincts would lead him to fancy bookkeeping rather than burglary…A receiver of stolen goods? But then he wouldn’t need a formal introduction to someone else who sounds as if he might be in that line of business…And what a strange assortment of loot! There has to be a clue there, if I could find it…”
But for ten minutes the significance eluded him. And at that point he gave up impatiently.
There was another clue, more positive, more direct, in the letter to the mysterious Paul Galen, and it was one which should not be too difficult to run down.
He put the jewels, the stamps, and the letter in different pockets of his coat. The book and the painting, too bulky to carry inconspicuously, he put back in the briefcase and zippered it up again. He hid it, not too seriously, under the mattress at the head of the bed. Then, with a new lightness in his step, he went out and rang for the elevator.
It took him down one floor, and stopped again. Signora Ravenna got in.
For the space of one skipped heartbeat he wondered whether her room too might have a balcony from which she might have watched him retrieve the briefcase from the bushes below, but he met her eyes with iron coolness and only a slight pleasant nod to acknowledge their acquaintance, and his pulse resumed smoothly when she gave back only a small perfunctory smile.
She had put on a small black hat and carried a purse.
“The police have asked me to go and talk to them again,” she volunteered. “They have thought of more questions, I suppose. Did they send for you too?”
“I haven’t heard from them since last night,” he said. “But I expect they’ll get around to me eventually.”
It occurred to him that it was a little odd that he had not been asked to repeat the descriptions which Oscar Kleinhaus had promised to relay, but he was too busy with other thoughts to speculate much about the reasons for it. He was grateful enough to have been dropped out of the investigation.
As they strolled across the lobby, he said, “Will you think me impertinent if I ask another question?”
“No,” she said. “I want your help.”
“When your husband went out last night—did he say where he was going?”
She answered mechanically, so that he knew she was reciting something that she had said before.
“I was tired, and he wanted to look for a cafe where he had heard there were Tyrolean singers, so he went alone.”
“Didn’t you think it strange that he should take his briefcase?”
“I didn’t see him take it.”
Simon handed her into a taxi without another word.
He walked slowly towards the Schweizerhof. At the corner of the Alpenstrasse he bought a selection of morning papers, and sat down at the nearest cafe over a cup of chocolate to read methodically through all the headlines.
He had just finished when a shadow fell across the table, and a familiar voice said, “Looking to see whether you are a hero, Mr Tombs?”
It was Oscar Kleinhaus, and the disarming smile on his cherubic face made his remark innocent of offense. The Saint smiled back, no less disarmingly.
“I was rather curious to see what the newspapers said about it,” he admitted. “But they don’t seem to have the story yet.”
“No, I didn’t notice it either. I’m afraid our press is a little slow, by American standards. We think that if a story would be good in the morning, it will be just as interesting in the evening.”
“Would you care to join me?”
>
Kleinhaus shook his head.
“Unfortunately I have a business appointment. I hope I’ll have another opportunity. How long are you staying here?”
“I haven’t made any plans. I thought the police would want to know that, but no one’s been near me.”
“If they caught anyone for you to identify, they would want you. Until then, I expect they think it more considerate not to trouble you. But if you asked for your bill at the hotel, I’m sure they would be informed.” The round face was completely bland and friendly. “I must go now. But we shall run into each other again. Lucerne is a small town.”
He raised his collegiate hat with the same formal courtesy as the night before, and ambled away.
Simon watched him very thoughtfully until he was out of sight. Then he hailed a cab and gave the address which he had found in the briefcase.
The road turned off the Alpenstrasse above the ancient ramparts of the old town and wound up the hillside with ever widening vistas of the lake into a residential district of neat doll-house chalets. The house where the taxi stopped was high up, perched out on a jutting crag, and Simon had paid off the driver and was confirming the number on the door, with his finger poised over the bell, before he really acknowledged to himself that he had already had two wide-open and obvious opportunities to speak about the briefcase to more or less interested parties since he had found it, and that he had studiously ignored both of them—not to mention that he had made no move whatever to report his discovery to the police. But now he could no longer pretend to be unaware of what he was doing. And it is this chronicler’s shocking duty to record that the full and final realization gave him a lift of impenitent exhilaration which the crisp mountain air could never have achieved alone.
The door opened, and a manservant with a seamed gray face, dressed in somber black, looked him over impersonally.
“Is Monsieur Galen here?” Simon inquired.
“De la part de qui, m’sieur?”
“I am Filippo Ravenna,” said the Saint.
4
The room into which he was ushered was large and sunny, furnished with the kind of antiques that look priceless and yet comfortable to live with. The walls on either side of the fireplace were lined with bookshelves, on two others were paintings and a tapestry, in the fourth French windows opened on to a terrace overlooking the town and the mountains and the lake. The carpet underfoot was Aubusson. It was the living room of a man of wealth and cheerful good taste, and the manservant looked like an undertaker in it, but he withdrew as soon as he had shown the Saint in.
The man who advanced to greet Simon was altogether different. He had a muscular build rounded with good living, a full crop of black hair becomingly flecked with silver, and strong fleshy features. White teeth gleamed around a cigar.
“Buon giorno, Signor! Sono felicissimo di vederla.”
“We can speak French if you prefer,” said the Saint cautiously. It was safer than trying to speak Italian as a native tongue.
“As you wish. Or German, or English even. I struggle with all of them. I want my clients to feel comfortable, and they come from so many places.” He waved Simon to a couch facing the windows. “You have a letter, perhaps?”
Simon handed him the introduction. Galen glanced at it and put it in his pocket, and sat down.
“I knew you were coming,” he said apologetically, “but it is necessary to be careful.”
“Of course.”
“Sometimes my clients are so preoccupied with evading their own export restrictions that they forget we have Swiss import regulations too. That is their own affair, but naturally I want no trouble with the authorities here.”
“I understand your position,” said the Saint, understanding very little.
“Worse still,” Galen said talkatively, “there are people who try to offer me stolen things. That is why it is so pleasant to meet someone who is recommended like yourself. Aside from the risk involved with stolen property, it is so much trouble to sell, and the prices are bound to be miserable. It is not worth it.”
Simon nodded sympathetically, while his brain seemed to flounder in an intangible quicksand. So the eccentric assortment of treasures in Ravenna’s briefcase were supposed to be his own legitimate property, which finally disposed of one theory but at the same time cut away one possible piece of solid ground. Why, then, all the secrecy and mystery?
The Saint said conversationally, “So your clients come from all over Europe, do they?”
“From everywhere between the Iron Curtain and Portugal—every country where there are these annoying restrictions on foreign exchange and the free movement of wealth. What a pity there have to be so many barriers in this primitive civilization! However I have a nice central location, and Swiss money is good anywhere in the world. Also, I am very discreet. There is no law here against me buying anything I choose, and not a word about our transaction will get back to Italy from me. Other people’s problems are my business opportunity, but I prefer to think of myself as a kind of liberator.” He laughed genially. “Now, what do you have to sell?”
Simon gave him the chamois bag.
Galen took out the pink pearl necklace and held it up to the light.
“It is beautiful,” he said admiringly.
He studied it more closely, and then pondered for several seconds while he carefully evened the ash on his cigar.
“I can give you four hundred thousand Swiss francs,” he said at length. “Or, if you like, the equivalent in dollars, deposited at any bank in New York. That would be something over seventeen thousand dollars. It is a good price, in the circumstances.” He draped the necklace over his fingers and admired it again, then his shrewd dark eyes turned back to the Saint. “But it is not a lot of capital for you to start building a new fortune in America. Surely you have some other things to offer me?”
Simon Templar took an infinitesimal moment to reply. And in that apocalyptic instant he realized that he had found a foothold again with a suddenness that literally jarred the breath out of him.
It was all so simple, so obvious that in retrospect he wondered how it could ever have baffled him. Filippo Ravenna had been going to America to live and to make a fresh start. Ravenna was rich, but he would not be allowed to transfer all his assets across the Atlantic just by asking for a bank draft. Like many another European, he had nothing but money which was not translatable through ordinary channels. But someone had told him about Paul Galen. So Ravenna had bought things. Things whose only connecting characteristics were that they were relatively small, relatively light in weight, relatively easy to smuggle, and very valuable; things moreover which a man in his position could acquire without attracting undue attention. And he had brought them to Switzerland to convert back into hard money—with an introduction to Paul Galen, who had made an international business out of cooperating in such evasions, whose reputation in such tricky-minded circles was doubtless a guarantee of comparatively fair dealing and absolute discretion.
All that part of it was dazzlingly clear, and the other part was starting to grow clearer—some of it, at least.
The Saint found himself saying, almost absent-mindedly, “I left the other things at the hotel. You understand, I thought we should get acquainted first.”
Somewhere outside the room he was aware of indistinct voices, but it was a rather subconscious impression which he only recalled afterwards, for at the moment it did not seem that they could concern him.
“I hope I have made a good impression,” Galen said with lively good humor. “What else did you bring?”
“I have a small Botticelli,” said the Saint slowly. He was stalling for time really, while his mind raced ahead from the knowledge it now had to fit together the pieces that still had to tie in. “It is a museum piece. And a first edition of Boccaccio, in perfect condition—”
The door behind him burst open as if a tornado had struck it, and that was when he actually remembered the premonitory sounds of
argument that he had heard.
It was the Signora Ravenna, with her nubile bosom heaving and her black eyes blazing with dark fire. Behind her followed the funereal manservant, looking apologetically helpless.
“Go on,” she said. “What else was there?”
Galen was on his feet as quickly as a big dog. He glanced at the Saint with quizzical wariness as Simon stood up more leisurely.
“Do you know this lady?”
“Certainly,” said the Saint calmly. “She is Signora Ravenna.”
Galen almost relaxed.
“A thousand pardons. You should have told me your wife—”
“I am not his wife,” the young woman cut him short passionately. “My husband was murdered last night, by robbers who stole his briefcase with the things he brought to sell. This impostor is an American who calls himself Tombs—he is probably the employer of the men who killed my husband!”
Galen moved easily around the couch, without apparent haste or agitation.
That is quite an extraordinary statement,” he remarked temperately. “But no doubt one of you can at least prove your identity.”
“I can,” said Signora Ravenna. She fumbled in her handbag. “I can show you my passport. Ask him to show you his!”
“I’ll save you the trouble,” said the Saint amiably, in English. “I concede that this is Signora Ravenna, and it’s true she’s been a widow for about twelve hours.”
“Then your explanation had better be worth listening to,” Galen said in the same language.
It was produced so smoothly and casually that Simon never knew where it came from, but now there was an automatic in Galen’s hand, the muzzle lined up with Simon’s midriff. The melancholy manservant remained in the doorway, and somehow he no longer looked apologetic.
Simon’s gaze slid languidly over the barrel of the gun and up to Galen’s coldly questioning face. It was no performance that he scarcely seemed to notice the weapon. He was too happy with the way the other fragments of the puzzle were falling into place to care.
The Saint in Europe (The Saint Series) Page 13