She had said: “Of course I believe it. People always do, when the Saint tells them that, don’t they?”
It was at this memorable moment that he finally decided that the time had come at last when the pseudonym which had given him so much childish amusement for so many years must be put away in honorable retirement. He would never feel confident of fooling anyone with it again, and indeed he realized that he had been more than lucky to get away with it on the last several occasions when a perverse sentimental attachment had made him risk it just once more.
But even so, Natalie had surprised him again. She hadn’t followed up the identification with the usual babble of silly questions, or embarrassing flattery, or the equally routine recollection of some flagrant injustice, public or private, which he simply must do something about. She seemed perfectly satisfied to enjoy his company as an attractive man, without pestering him for reminiscences or otherwise reminding him that he was a kind of international celebrity, in the most refreshingly natural camaraderie.
It was almost too good to be true.
On the third evening, she handed him a sealed envelope.
“That’s for last night,” she said. “I saw exactly what you spent—I’ve got very sharp eyes. Tonight is on you, if you like. But about every other time it has to be on me, if we’re going on doing this. Now don’t get on a high horse. I’m not going to insult you by offering more than my share, and don’t you insult me by trying to make me a parasite. You don’t have to pick up all the checks until you’re married to me or keeping me, and I haven’t heard you offer to do either yet.”
This was altogether too much.
“What on earth did your husband divorce you for?” he asked.
“He didn’t. I divorced him.”
“Then put it another way. Why did he let you?”
“Why should I tell you what’s wrong with me? If I don’t, there’s always a chance you may never find out.”
Nothing else had beclouded the idyllic relationship until Mrs Bertha Noversham had arrived. Mrs Noversham was the English woman whom Natalie had met on the Blue Train and whose company in Monte Carlo had postponed the problems of solitude. She had been to Corsica on the yacht of some titled plutocrats whom she had met at a roulette table and adopted as old friends on the basis of having seen them several times in the most fashionable London restaurants—Natalie had already told Simon about Mrs Noversham’s steamroller methods of enlarging her circle of acquaintances.
“Yes, dear, it was utterly divine,” Mrs Noversham said, sinking massively into a chair at their table without waiting for an invitation. “It’s a shame you couldn’t have gone along, but they did only have the one spare berth, and even I practically had to ask myself. They’re such snobs, though—Sir Oswald wasn’t knighted more than five years ago, and they couldn’t get over me having the Duke of Camford for a great-uncle, and calling him a silly old fool, which he is.”
She was a woman with a gross torso and short skinny legs, who masked whatever complexion she may have had with an impenetrable coating of powder and rouge, and dissimulated her possibly graying hair with a tint of magenta that never sprang from human follicle. In spite of this misguided effort, she failed to look a day under forty-five, which may have been all she was. Her dress looked as if it had been bought from a black-and-white illustration in a mail-order catalog. But like magic charms to obscure and nullify all such cheap crudities, she wore jewels.
It was a long time since the Saint had seen jewels in quite such ostentatious quantity, even in that traditional paradise of jewel thieves. Mrs Noversham wore them in every conceivable place and form, and a few that required a long stretch of the imagination as well. She wore them in an assortment of settings so garish that she must have designed them herself, because no jeweller with a vestige of sanity would have banked on a customer falling in love with them in his shop window. If the most casual observer was to be left in doubt as to how she was loaded, it was not going to be her fault.
“I’ll have a champagne cocktail,” she told the waiter. “This wasn’t some itty bitty little yacht, Mr Templar. It’s a small liner. Natalie can tell you—she came to dinner on board before we sailed. But do you know, with all that money, Lady Fisbee still insists on having all the wine iced, even the claret.”
“You must have been glad it wasn’t a longer trip,” said the Saint earnestly.
“Well, you know what did cut it short?” Mrs Noversham said, with the unction of a born connoisseur of catastrophes. “We had a robbery!”
“What, not another?” Natalie exclaimed.
“Yes, dear. Right in the harbor at Ajaccio. Lady Fisbee had given most of the crew a day off to go ashore—it’s quite ridiculous the way she pampers those people—and all of us had dinner at the Hotel so that they wouldn’t have to work. She’s obviously still frightened of servants and thinks that she has to make them happy instead of it being the other way ’round. So there were only two men on board, and they were playing cards and probably drinking, and somebody got on board and jimmied the safe in Lady Fisbee’s cabin and cleaned out the two other guests who had anything worth stealing as well.”
Natalie turned to Simon and explained, “There was a robbery at the Métropole in Monte Carlo, too, while we were there. We must attract them.”
“One of us does, dear. Perhaps it’s a good job they couldn’t find room for you, after all—you might have lost that nice collar of sparklers.”
Natalie fingered the exquisitely mounted string of white fire around her throat almost self-consciously and said, “I’m not really surprised. That wall safe that Lady Fisbee showed us looked terribly flimsy to me. The best thing about it was the way it was hidden. And that Italian actress said that she’d never needed anything safer than the bottom of a wardrobe under a pile of dirty laundry. As if professional thieves didn’t already know all the hiding places that anyone could think of. Some people almost deserve to be robbed.”
“Not me, dear,” said Bertha Noversham smugly. “You know where I keep everything I’m not wearing, and nobody could get at that even in my sleep without me raising Cain, unless I was knocked out first, and that kind of thief never goes in for rough stuff. He wants to sneak in and sneak away without anyone having a chance to see him.”
“But there are stick-up men, too,” Simon mentioned.
“I hope I meet one some day—I’ll have a surprise for him,” said Mrs Noversham darkly. “Where are you having dinner?”
She continued to anticipate and accept unuttered invitations with an aplomb that was paralyzing, and never stopped dominating the conversation with the bland assumption that they had only been waiting for her to relieve their boredom.
Before the meal was over, she had blithely devastated a dozen other characters or reputations, some of them belonging to people whom Simon did not even know by name, always in a way that obliquely underlined the impeccability of her own status as a social arbiter. She had a trick of flattering her listeners by taking it for granted that they would sneer at the same things she sneered at, while at the same time implying ominously that they would be wise to make positive efforts to continue in her good graces.
She accompanied them from dinner to the Palm-Beach Casino, and only left them to themselves again when she spotted a famous Hollywood producer and his richly panoplied wife, to whom she was sure she had passed the sugar at tea in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.
“I’m dreadfully sorry,” Natalie said. “She’s quite awful, isn’t she? But I was so desperately glad to know anyone at all when I first got here, as I told you, that I didn’t realize how overpowering she was.”
“She has a fabulous technique,” Simon admitted mildly. “I can see how anyone with the least insecurity would be a sitting duck for her. Before she’s through, that popcorn potentate will be terrified of sticking the wrong fork in his caviar, in case Bertha changes her mind about introducing his wife to the Duchess of Camford, which he would never hear the last of.”
/> “The point is, what are we going to do? If—well, if you’re interested.”
The Saint grinned.
“Tell her who I am. I don’t think it really penetrated, when you introduced me. Rub it in. I think that’ll scare her off. Of course, she’ll try to scare you off too, but I’m counting on you to resist that.”
“I don’t think I’d be too shocked if you did steal her jewels. Somebody ought to stop her being so superior about everyone else.”
“Where does she keep them, by the way?”
“She has a specially-made sort of apron with zipper pockets that she wears all the time; but with her figure, when she’s dressed, it doesn’t show because it hangs under the bulge, if you know what I mean.”
“You couldn’t be more discreetly graphic.”
Natalie’s lovely eyes dilated slightly with belated comprehension.
“I told you, didn’t I? Just what you’d want to know if you were a jewel thief. She was right—some people almost deserve to be robbed.”
“I thought you were the one who said that, darling.”
“Well, it was right anyway. Don’t start to get me confused and frightened, Simon. We’ve had such a lot of fun these few days. And I haven’t bothered you with any silly questions, have I? Don’t let me start now. But you were telling the truth, weren’t you, when you told me you were strictly here on vacation?”
“Most strictly,” he smiled. “As long as nobody makes the path too straight and narrow for my tottering tootsies. Talking of which, why don’t we see if they can still keep time with this team of paranoiac Paraguayans, who are obviously subsidized by the local Society of Osteopaths?”
But that had been the very night during which, somewhat later, Mr Daniel Tench made his catastrophic verification of the laws of gravity.
The Saint had been detained all morning by the skeptical inspector of the Police Judiciaire, and when he got back he had found a brief note from Natalie saying that she had gone to Eden Roc with Mrs Noversham. By that time it was already late for lunch, and in any case he thought it might be more opportune to leave them on their own. He left an answering message for her to call him when she came in, and thus it was tea-time when she asked him to meet her at the Martinez, and it was there that he got off the wry reflection that could have been an epitaph on their brief friendship.
“This is another place where the guests often have jewels,” she pointed out.
“There are so damn many of them,” he complained, “Staying away from them is easier said than done.”
“And you do like some of the people, don’t you?”
“I never thought of you as one of the jewelled ones. Which is a compliment to someone’s good taste in settings. Because now I come to think of it, the choice bits of ice I’ve seen you wearing could be worth twice as much as all Bertha Noversham’s rocks, if they’re real. You see how I must have reformed? Something like this has to happen before I even start thinking like a jewel thief.”
“That isn’t the way Bertha sees it.”
Her voice was so cool that he stared at her.
“This is very interesting,” he said. “I know it was my idea for you to give me a build-up, but could you have oversold yourself?”
“I don’t know, but I couldn’t cover up for you. When Bertha called me about seven o’clock this morning, she’d just woken up and discovered that someone had taken that precious apron-bag of hers, which she was so sure couldn’t be done. I almost got the giggles when I remembered that the last thing she talked about on the way home last night was how she was going to break down and take something for her insomnia. But by the time I got to her room, she’d already called the manager, and of course they’d already found that man who fell off a balcony, so the police were there, and she’d told them that I knew about her apron and so you certainly knew too. She was much more hep than you thought—she knew who you were all the time. She didn’t blame me for letting you get so much out of me, but I couldn’t deny that you had.”
“Naturally,” said the Saint, without rancor. “I gathered most of that while I was being grilled, though the inspector did his best not to let on. But it seems to be bothering you more than it does me.”
She twisted her fingers together—he had not seen her so tensely defensive since their first meeting.
“How do you explain that man being on your balcony?”
“Just what the inspector asked me. I asked him if there was a French version of the English or American parable that we all know, only don’t ask me where it’s from, which says that ’if a man only makes a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he lives in the heart of a wilderness, the world will beat a path to his door.’ I’d hate to calculate how many billions the advertising industry has spent to prove that this is the silliest old saw that ever lost its teeth, but it still works for me. At one time in the shocking days you’ve heard about, I managed to become the best-known alleged crook since Raffles. Since then, there has been the dreariest procession of otherwise bright lads who could think of no more dazzling climax to their careers than to leave their tracks on my doorstep. Brother Tench was only the latest, but he won’t be the last.”
“He had Bertha’s apron, with all her jewels—she got them all back, I suppose you know. But what would he have done with them in your room?”
“He could’ve afforded to drop one piece, or even just one stone. And then with only an anonymous phone call, he could’ve had all the cops concentrating on me for days, while he wrapped up his getaway. As it is, the only thing that really saved me from being stuck was that he had all the boodle on him when they scraped him up.”
“Would you mind,” Natalie said, in a fainting voice, “if I went back and took a little nap? I guess I’m not used to coping with things like this.”
She made him walk back on the other side of the Croisette, the beach side, so that it was easy to look up at the facade of the Carlton as they approached it. When they were almost opposite, she stopped and pointed.
“That’s your balcony, isn’t it, to the right of the middle, on the fourth floor?”
“Yes.”
“Bertha’s on the sixth floor, the corner room on the left.”
“Is she?”
“And I’m on the floor below you, just a little more to the right.”
“I could have figured that from your room number, although you never invited me to see.”
“This man Tench had already been to Bertha’s room,” she said. “Suppose he was on his way to my room from there. That could just as well have taken him past your balcony, just because it was on the way, without him necessarily having the idea of planting something in your room.”
The Saint frowned. He had tried hard not to be unduly sensitive, but she was making it a little more difficult with every sentence.
“I suppose so,” he said. “I had a theory, but anyone else is entitled to another. I’m only the guy who was in the middle—as you’ve rather neatly pointed out.”
“But that’s the whole point, isn’t it?” she said. “They don’t seem to know where Tench started climbing around from. He didn’t have a room of his own in the hotel, apparently. Bertha swears that her door was bolted on the inside, but once he’d got into her room he could still have gone out by the door—and why wouldn’t he have done that, instead of risking his neck on the outside, if he was in cahoots with you and only wanted to bring you the jewels?”
“Thank you,” murmured the Saint, with a trace of irony. “I should have had you with me when I was trying to convince that inspector.”
“The only other reason that Tench would have to be on your balcony, except for your theory that he meant to try to frame you, would be if he was on his way somewhere else. To my room, perhaps.”
Simon gazed at her for quite a long time.
“Did you figure all that out in your own little head?”
“You don’t need to be sarcastic. Of course Bertha and I talked about—everything. And I f
eel rather ashamed of some of the things we said last night. She was just having a bad spell, but she isn’t a bad person.”
“Good. Then you don’t want me to steal her jewels, after all?”
“Or mine either. I’ll take all the blame, I’ve loved every minute of it, but Bertha reminded me of an old saying—‘Lead us not into temptation’. One can ask too much even of a Saint, can’t one?” She put out her hand suddenly. “Let’s just say good-bye now, and nothing else.”
“If that’s how you want it, darling. It’s your script.”
He raised her fingers to his lips, in a gesture that added a uniquely cavalier insolence to a Latin flourish, and watched her force her own way through the endlessly crawling cross-streams of traffic.
If that was how she wanted it, so be it.
He couldn’t remember when he had last felt so recklessly resentful. It had become almost a standing joke, for him, to protest that he was always being driven back towards the old bad ways by the people who refused to believe that he had ever forsaken them. But seldom had his admittedly equivocal past been raised to slap him in the face as unfairly as this.
Natalie Sheridan deserved to lose her bloody diamonds.
So did Mrs Noversham, for helping to put that bee in her bonnet. Simon would have bet anything that Natalie would never have reached the same conclusion by herself. But put two women together, and the ultimate outcome of their mutual catalysis can be predicted by no laws of chemistry or logic.
Simon scowled up again at the front of the hotel into which Natalie had already disappeared, imprinting a certain pattern on his mind.
Then he went up to his room and scowled vaguely out the other way, over the blue bay where speedboats towing aimless but tireless water-skiers cut random patterns between lazily graceful sailing skiffs and mechanically crawling pedalos, but in his mind he saw the same pattern, reversed, in which his window was still a kind of focal center.
Eventually it was the telephone which interrupted his brooding, with a strident abruptness that left him with what he recognized at once as a purely wishful flutter of hope. The uncompromisingly materialistic voice that greeted his response quickly reduced that pipedream to its basic fatuity.
The Saint in the Sun (The Saint Series) Page 2