Therefore he had a sound excuse for going into the hotel with her, and when she asked for her key at the desk he deftly added that also to his burden.
“You don’t want to lug all this stuff upstairs,” he said. “Let me take them for you.”
She was studying his face again, with that watchful half-suspicious wonderment, as they rode up in the elevator. The elevator boy thought his own cynical thoughts, and under cover of the trophies with which he was laden the Saint pressed Mrs Nussberg’s key carefully into a plaque of soft wax, and wrapped the wax delicately in his handkerchief before he put it away.
He went just inside the sitting-room of her suite, and decanted the souvenirs on a side table.
“Won’t you have a drink?” she asked.
“Thanks,” said the Saint, “but I think it’s past my bedtime.”
She must have been pretty once, it occurred to him as she put down her bag with unaccustomed hesitancy. Pretty in a flashy common way that had turned only too easily into the obese overblown frowsiness that amused Walmar and his satellites so much.
She held out her hand.
‘Thank you so much,” she said, with a queer simplicity that had to struggle through the brassy roughness of her voice.
He went back to his own hotel with the memory of that parting in his mind.
She was the Spanish Cow. So he had christened her, and so she would always be. A fat, repulsive, noisy, quarrelsome, imbecile vulgarian—with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar collection of jewels. And it was a part of his career to take those jewels away and apply them to a better use than encircling her billowy neck. To make that possible he had had to play her like a fish on a line, and it had so happened that the fish had taken the line for a lifeline. It had ceased fighting—had brought itself to a wild grotesque travesty of coyness. When it discovered how it had been hoodwinked, it would fight again—but with other anglers. It would be bitter, coarse, obstreperous again, pulling faces and putting out its tongue. And that also was in the game.
In his room, he took a small case of instruments from a drawer, and selected a key blank that matched the impression on his wax plaque. It took him a full hour and a half to file a duplicate to his rigorous satisfaction, and then he changed his clothes and picked up an ordinary crook-handle walking stick and went out again.
It was late enough for him to have the road to himself, and no inquisitive eye observed the course he steered for the fire escape of the Provençal. With the calm dexterity of a seasoned Londoner boarding a passing bus, he edged the crook of his stick over the lowest platform and swung himself nimbly up. Then he flitted up the iron zigzag like a ghost on rubber-soled shoes. The lights were on behind the curtains of a room on the second floor, and a passionate declaration of eternal love wafted out into the balmy night as he went by. The Saint grinned faintly to himself and ascended to the third floor. The nearest window there was dark. He slid over the sill with no more noise than a ray of moonlight, and crossed as silently to the door. In another moment he was outside, the latch jammed back with a wedge of cardboard so that he could make his retreat by the same route, and the corridor stretching out before him like a broad highway to his Eldorado.
The key he had made fitted soundlessly into the lock of Mrs Nussberg’s suite, and he turned it without a scrape or a click and let himself into the sitting-room. He had closed the door again from the inside before he saw a thin strip of luminance splitting the darkness on his right, where the communicating door of the bedroom was and he realized, with a sudden settling of all his faculties into a taut-strong vigilance, that for some unaccountable reason the Spanish Cow had not yet sought the byre.
The Saint rested where he was, while he considered the diverse aspects of the misfortune. And then, with the effortless silence of a cat, he glided on towards the bedroom door.
It was at that moment that he heard the incredible noise.
4
For a couple of seconds he thought that after all he must have been mistaken—that Mrs Nussberg had gone to sleep, leaving the light on as a protection against banshees and things that go bump in the night, and was snoring with all the high bugle-like power of which her metallic nasal cavities should have been capable. Then, as the cadence dropped, and he made out a half-dozen words, he considered whether she might be giving tongue in her sleep. And then, as the sound continued, the truth dawned upon him with an eerie shock.
Porphyria Nussberg was singing.
Simon tiptoed to the crack through which the light came. If there had been lions in the way, he could not have stopped himself. More words came out to him, and the semblance of a melody, that twisted the first tentacles of a slow and awful understanding into his brain.
She was sitting on the stool in front of her dressing-table, gazing into the mirror, with her hands spread out inertly before her. The song was one of those things that the band had played that night—a song like all the others, a sentimental dirge to a flimsy tune, with a rhythm that was good to dance to and a refrain that was true enough for the theme song of a summer night’s illusion. But to Mrs Nussberg it might have been the Song of Songs. And a weird cold breath fanned the Saint’s spine as it came to him that perhaps it was.
She was singing it with a terrible quiet passion, gazing at the reflected image of her own face as if in the singing she saw herself again as she had been when a man desired her. She sang it as if it carried her back to the young years, when it had not been so strange for a handsome cavalier to dance with her without a fee, before time mocked those things into the unthinkable depths of loneliness. Her jewels were heaped in a reluctant pile in front of her. For the first time Simon began to understand them, and he felt that he knew why other women wore them at her age. “I once was beautiful,” they spoke for her in their pitiful proud defiance. “I once was young and desired. These stones were given to me because I was beautiful, and a man loved me. Here is your proof.” But she could not have seen them while she sang. She could not have seen anything but the warm clear flesh on which that creased and painted mask of a face had built itself in the working out of life, to be jeered at and caricatured. She could not have seen anything but the years that go by and leave nothing behind but remembrance. She sang, in that cracked tuneless voice, because that night the remembrance had come back—because, for a day and a night, a man had been kind. And there were tears in her eyes.
The Saint smoked his cigarette. And in a little while he went quietly away, as he had come, and walked home empty-handed under the stars.
ROME: THE LATIN TOUCH
The city of Rome, according to legend, is built upon the spot where the twin sons of Mars, Romulus and Remus (by a Vestal who must have been somewhat less than virgin) were suckled by a maternally-minded she-wolf, and there were bitter men in the police departments of many countries who would have said that that made it a very appropriate city for Simon Templar to gravitate into, even today. But they would have been thinking of him as a wolf in terms of his predatory reputation, rather than in the more innocuous modern connotation of an eye for a pretty girl. He had both, it is true, but it was as a lone wolf in the waste lands of crime that his rather sensational publicity had mostly featured him.
Simon Templar himself would have said, with an impish twinkle, that his affinity for Rome would be better attributed to the traditional association of the place as a holy city, for who could more aptly visit there than one who was best known by the nickname of “The Saint”?
It troubled him not at all that the incongruity of that sobriquet was a perpetual irritant to the officers of the law who from time to time had been called upon to try and cope with his forays: to revert to the wolf simile, it was enough for him that even his worst enemies had to concede that the sheep who had felt his fangs had always been black sheep.
But that morning, as he stood on the entirely modern sidewalk outside the ancient Colosseum, his interests were only those of the most ordinary sightseer, and any vulpine instincts he may
have had were of the entirely modern kind just referred to—the kind which produces formalized whistles at the sight of a modern Vestal, virtuous or not.
The Saint was too well-mannered for such crude compliments, but the girl he was watching could have been no stranger to them. From the top of her close-cropped curly golden head, down through her slim shapely figure and long slender legs to her thorough-bred ankles, she was fresh clean young American incarnate, the new type of goddess that can swim and ride and play tennis and laugh like a boy, to the horror of the conservatives on old Olympus.
Also, as happens all too seldom in real life, she was most providentially in trouble. Providentially from the point of view of any healthy footloose cavalier, that is. She was engaged in a losing argument with the driver of the carriage from which she had just alighted, a beetle-browed individual with all the assurance of a jovial brigand.
“But I made the same trip yesterday,” she was protesting indignantly, “and it was only two hundred lire!”
“One t’ousand lire,” insisted the driver. “You give-a me one t’ousand lire, please, Signora. Dat-a da right-a fare.”
It was all the opening that Simon could have asked.
He strolled up beside the girl.
“Where did you take him from?” he asked.
A pair of level gray eyes sized him up and accepted him gratefully.
“From the Excelsior.”
Simon turned to the driver.
“Scusami,” he said pleasantly, “ma lei scherza? The fare cannot be one thousand lire.”
“Mille lire,” said the driver obdurately. “It is the legal fare.” He waved his whip in the direction of three or four other unemployed carrozze parked expectantly in the shade of the Arch of Constantine. “Ask any other driver,” he suggested boldly.
“I prefer a more impartial witness,” said the Saint, with imperturbable good humor.
He reached out for the blanket that was neatly draped over the seat beside the driver, and flipped it back with a slight flourish. It disclosed a conventional taxi-meter which would have been in plain sight of the passenger seat if the blanket had not been so carefully arranged to hide it. Simon’s pointing finger drew the girl’s eyes to the figures on it.
“One hundred and ninety lire,” he said. “I’d give him exactly that, and forget the tip. It may teach him a lesson—although I doubt it.”
The coachman’s unblushing expostulations, accompanied by some scandalous reflections on their ancestry and probable relationship, followed them as the Saint drew her tactfully through the arches and out of earshot.
“All the carriages in Rome have meters. Just like a taxi,” he explained easily. “But there isn’t one of them that doesn’t have a blanket artistically draped over it, so that you’d never think it was there unless you knew about it. The driver can’t lose, and with the average tourist he usually wins. It’s brought the country almost as many dollars as the Marshall Plan.”
“I’m the original innocent,” she said ruefully. “This is my first trip abroad. Do you live here? You speak Italian as if you did.”
“No, but I’ve been around.”
A seedy-looking character wearing the typical emblem of his fraternity, a two-days growth of beard, sidled up to them.
“You want a guide?” he suggested. “I tell you all about the Colosseum. This is where they had the circus. Lions and Christians.”
“I know all about it,” said the Saint. “In a previous incarnation, I was Nero’s favorite clown. My name was Emmetus Kellius. Everybody used to laugh themselves sick when the lions bit me. So did I. I was smeared all over with hot mustard. Unfortunately, though, I was color-blind. One day, just for a laugh, Poppaea changed the mustard in my make-up pot for ketchup. Everyone said I gave the funniest performance of my life. It even killed me. However—”
The would-be guide stared at him disgustedly and went away.
The girl tried to stop giggling.
“Do you really know anything about it?” she asked. “It makes me wish I’d paid more attention to Latin when I was in school. But I never got much beyond Omnia Gallia in tres partes divisa est.”
“ ‘De Gaulle is divided in three parties,’ ” he translated brightly. “I wonder if our State Department knows about that.”
She shot him a sudden sharp glance which he did not understand at the time. It made him think that he was overdoing the flippancy, and he didn’t want to spoil such a Heaven-sent beginning.
He said, gazing across the arena, “I don’t care about knowing a lot of dull statistics about it. I just try to imagine it as it was before it began to fall apart. Those tiers with nothing but seats like rows of steps, right up to the top. The bleachers, full of excited bloodthirsty people. The arena baking in the same sun that’s on it now.”
“It’s so much smaller than I thought it would be.”
“It’s bigger than it looks. You could put a football field in the middle and have plenty of room to run around.”
“But the bottom—it’s all cut up into sort of dungeons.”
“They probably were. Locker rooms for the gladiators, cells for the Christians, dens for the wild beasts. They must have been roofed over with planks which rotted away long ago, which made the floor of the arena, with a layer of sand on top for easy cleaning. I expect you could hear everything that went on—from underneath. Until your turn was called…I wonder how many people have come up blinking into this same sunlight that we’re seeing, and these stones were the last thing they ever saw?”
She shuddered.
“You make it seem much too real.”
But there were no holiday crowds filling the amphitheater then. Just a handful of wandering tourists, a few self-appointed guides loafing in hopes of a generous audience, a few peddlers with trays of mass-produced cameos. Simon Templar was hardly aware of any of them. He was wholly enjoying the company of the refreshingly lovely girl whom a buccaneer’s luck had thrown into his life.
That is why he was completely astounded to realize, in the split second of pain and coruscating lights before unconsciousness rolled over him, that someone had come up behind and hit him on the head.
2
He had to repeat the steps of realization, laboriously, as the blackness slowly dissolved again. His first impression was that he had simply passed out, and he thought hazily of sunstroke, but he couldn’t believe that a little sun could do that to him. Then, as a focal point in his skull began to assert itself with painful throbbing, that last instant of awareness came back to him in a flash. He struggled up and opened his eyes.
He was not on the ground, but on a wooden bunk that was almost as hard. There was stone around him, but not the moldering stones of the Colosseum: there were modern blocks, trimly morticed. A door made of iron bars. And the only evidence of sun was a little light that came through a barred window high above his head.
He could not recall exactly when he had last looked at his watch, but it told him that at least two hours must have passed since he was talking to a delightful young blonde whose name he had not even learned. If he needed anything more than the ache in his head to attest the efficacy of the blow he had taken, the measurement was there on the dial.
He felt his pockets, thinking stupidly of robbery. They were empty. Robbery might have had something to do with it, but it would not account for the stone walls and the bars.
He was in jail.
He dragged himself to his feet, mastering a desire to vomit, and stumbled to the door. Holding on to the bars, he called out, “Hey! Hullo there!”
It reminded him idiotically of an arty play he had once seen.
Ponderous footsteps clumped deliberately along the passage, and a turnkey came in sight. The uniform clinched any lingering doubt about the jail.
“What am I doing here?” Simon demanded in Italian.
The man surveyed him unfeelingly.
“Aspette,” he said, and went away again.
Simon sat down o
n the hard cot and held his head in his hands, fighting to clear the cobwebs out of it.
Presently there were footsteps again, brisker and more numerous. Simon looked up and found the jailer unlocking the door.
It opened to admit a small delegation. First, in a kind of inverted order of precedence, came a burly police sergeant in uniform. After him came a superior officer in plain clothes, who was slight and rather dapper, but just as obvious a police type in European terms. Those two the Saint might have expected, if he had thought about it, no matter why he was where he was. But it was the third man, for whom they made way only after they had apparently satisfied themselves that the Saint’s attitude was not violent, who was the stopper.
He was a tall iron-gray man with a scholarly stoop, most formally dressed in swallow-tail coat and striped trousers, even carrying white gloves and a silk hat, and Simon recognized him at once. Several million other people would have made the same startled recognition, for Mr Hudson Inverest was not exactly an international nonentity.
“Well,” said the Saint, somewhat incredulously, “this is certainly a new high in service. I know the Secretary of State is technically responsible for people who get themselves in trouble abroad, but I didn’t expect you to bail me out in person.”
“You know who I am?” Inverest said matter-of-factly.
The Saint smiled.
“I’ve seen you in enough news pictures, caricatures—and television. Now I remember reading about you being here on an official visit. It’s really very thoughtful of you to be around just at this moment.”
The Secretary stared at him grimly over the top of his glasses.
“Mr Templar, what do you know about my daughter?”
Simon Templar’s eyebrows rose a little and drew together.
“Your daughter? I didn’t even know you had one.”
The uniformed sergeant started a threatening gesture, but the plainclothes man checked it with an almost imperceptible movement of his hand.
The Saint in Europe (The Saint Series) Page 16