The Saint in the Sun (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “At what time?” asked the attendant, unmoved by romantic visions. “Usually I close up at eight.”

  “At about nine,” said the Saint, ostentatiously unfolding a hundred-franc note from his wad. “I will give you two more of these when I take the boat, and you need not wait for us. I will tie it up safely when we come back.”

  “Jawohl, mein Herr!” agreed the man, with alacrity. “Whenever you come, at nine or later, I shall be here.”

  Simon and Irina walked back over the planking to the paved promenade where natives and visitors were now crisscrossing, at indicatively different speeds, on their homeward routes. The sun had already dropped below the high horizons to the west, and the long summer twilight would soon begin.

  “Suppose we succeed in this crazy project,” he said. “Have you thought about what we do next?”

  “My father will be free. I will book passage on a plane and take him back to Sweden with me.”

  “Your father will be free, but will you? And will I? Or for how long? Has it occurred to you, sweetheart, that the Swiss government takes a notoriously dim view of piratical operations on their nice neutral soil, even with the best of motives? And the Russkis won’t hesitate to howl their heads off at this violation of their extra-territorial rights.”

  Her step faltered, and she caught his arm.

  “I am so stupid,” she said humbly. “I should have thought of that. Instead, I was asking you to become a criminal, to the Swiss Government, instead of a hero. Forgive me.” Then she looked up at him in near terror. “Will you give it up because of that?”

  He shook his head, with a shrug and a wry smile.

  “I’ve been in trouble before. I’m always trying to keep out of it, but Fate seems to be against me.”

  “Through the travel agency, perhaps I can arrange something to help us to get away. Let me go back to my hotel and make some telephoning.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “A small hotel, down that way.” She pointed vaguely in the general direction of the Schwanenplatz and the older town which lies along the river under the ancient walls which protected it five centuries ago. “It is all I can afford,” she said defensively. “I suppose you are staying here? Or at the Palace?”

  They were at the corner of the Grand National Hotel and the Haldenstrasse.

  “Here. It’s the sort of place where travel bureaux like yours send people like me,” he murmured. “So you go home and see what you can organize, and I’ll see what I can work out myself. Meet me back here at seven. I’m in room 129.” He flagged a taxi which came cruising by. “Dress up prettily for dinner, but nothing fussy—and bring a sweater, because it’ll be chilly later on that thar lake.”

  This time he didn’t have to take advantage of a situation. She put her lips with a readiness which left no doubt as to how far she would have been willing to develop the contact in a less public place.

  “See you soon,” he said, and closed the taxi door after her, thoughtfully.

  He had a lot to think about.

  Without unchivalrously depreciating the value of any ideas she might have or phone calls she could make, he would not have been the Saint if he could have relied on them without some independent backing of his own. He had softened in many ways, over the years, but not to the extent of leaving himself entirely in the hands of any female, no matter how entrancing.

  By seven o’clock, when she arrived, he had some of the answers, but his plan only went to a certain point and he could not project beyond that.

  “I think I’ve figured a way to get into that house,” he told her. “And if the garrison isn’t too large and lively we may get out again with your father. But what happens after that depends on how hot the hue and cry may be.”

  She put down her sweater and purse on one of the beds—she had found her way to his room unannounced, and knocked on the door, and when he opened it she had been there.

  “I have been telephoning about that, as I promised,” she said. “I have arranged for a hired car and a driver to be waiting for us at Brunnen—that is at the other end of the lake, closer to the house than this, and just about as close to Zürich. He will drive us to the airport. Then, I have ordered through the travel agency to have a small private plane waiting to fly us all out.”

  “A private charter plane—how nice and simple,” he murmured. “But can you afford it?”

  “Of course not. I told them it was for a very rich invalid, with his private nurse and doctor. That will be you and I. When we are in Sweden and they give us the bill I shall have to explain everything, and I shall lose my job, but my father will be safe and they cannot bring us back.”

  He laughed with honest admiration.

  “You’re quite amazing.”

  “Did I do wrong?” She was crestfallen like a child that has been suddenly turned on, in fear of a slap.

  “No, I mean it. You worked all that out while you were changing your clothes and fixing your hair, and you make it sound so easy and obvious. Which it is—now you’ve told me. But I recognize genius when I see it. And what a lot of footling obstacles disappear when it isn’t hampered by scruples!”

  “How can I have them when I must save my father’s life? But what you have to do is still harder. What is your plan?”

  “I’ll tell you at dinner.”

  In an instant she was all femininity again.

  “Do I look all right?”

  She invited inspection with a ballerina’s pirouette. She had put on a simple dress that matched her eyes and moulded her figure exactly where it should, without vulgar ostentation but clearly enough to be difficult to stop looking at. The Saint did not risk rupturing himself from such an effort.

  “You’re only sensational,” he assured her. “If you weren’t, I wouldn’t be hooked on this caper.”

  “Please?”

  “I wouldn’t be chancing a bullet or a jail sentence to help you.”

  “I know. How can I thank you?” She reached out and took his right hand in both of hers. “Only to tell you my heart will never forget.”

  With an impulsively dramatic gesture, she drew his hand to her and placed it directly over her heart. The fact that a somewhat less symbolic organ intervened did not seem to occur to her, but it imposed on him some of the same restraint that a seismograph would require to remain unmoved at the epicenter of an earthquake.

  “Don’t I still have to earn that?” said the Saint, with remarkable mildness.

  When they got to the Mignon Grill at the Palace Hotel on the other side of the Kursaal (“I promised Dino last night I’d come in for his special Lobster Thermidor, before I had any idea what else I’d be doing tonight,” Simon explained, “but anyhow we should have one more good meal before they put us on bread and water.”), he told her how he was hoping to carry out the abduction, and once again she was completely impersonal and businesslike, listening with intense attention.

  “I think it could work,” she said at the end, nodding with preternatural gravity. “Unless…There is one thing you may not have thought of.”

  “There could be a dozen,” he admitted. “Which one have you spotted?”

  “Suppose they have already begun to brain-wash him—so that he does not trust us.”

  Simon frowned.

  “Do you think they could?”

  “You know how everyone in a Soviet trial always pleads guilty and begs to be punished? They have some horrible secret method…If they have done it to him, he might not even want to be rescued.”

  “That would make it a bit sticky,” he said, reflectively. “I wonder how you un-brain-wash somebody?”

  “Only a psychologist would know. But first we must get him to one. If it is like that, you must not hesitate because of me. If you must knock him out, I promise not to become silly and hysterical.”

  “That’ll help, anyway,” said the Saint grimly.

  The baby lobster were delicious, and he was blessed with the nerveless appetite to en
joy every bite. In fact, the prospect that lay ahead was a celestial seasoning that no chef could have concocted from all the herbs and spices in his pharmacopeia.

  But the time came when anticipation could not be prolonged any more, and had to attain reality. They walked back to the Grand National, and he picked up a bag which he had left at the hall porter’s desk when they went out. It was one of those handy zippered plastic bags with a shoulder strap which airlines emblazon with their insignia and distribute to overseas passengers to be stuffed with all those odds and ends which travellers never seem able to get into their ordinary luggage, and Simon had packed it with certain requisites for their expedition which would have been fatal to the elegant drape of his coat if he had tried to crowd all of them into various pockets. The boat was waiting at the marina, and in a transition that seemed to flow with the smoothness of a cinematic effect they were aboard and on their way into the dark expanse of the lake.

  Simon followed the shore line to Viznau before he turned away to the right. From his bag he had produced a hiker’s luminous compass, with the aid of which he was able to set a sufficiently accurate course to retrace the makeshift bearing be had taken that afternoon between his wrist watch and the sun. He opened the throttle, and the boat lifted gently and skimmed. Irina Jorovitch put on her cardigan and buttoned it, keeping down in the shelter of the windshield. They no longer talked, for it would only have been idle chatter.

  The water was liquid glass, dimpling lazily to catch the reflection of a light or a star, except where the wake stretched behind like a trail of swift-melting snow. Above the blackness ahead, the twinkling façades of Bürgenstock high against the star-powdered sky were a landmark this time to be kept well towards the starboard beam. Halfway across, as best he could judge it, he broke the first law by switching off the running lights, but there were no other boats out there to threaten a collision. Then when the scattered lights on the shore ahead drew closer he slacked speed again to let the engine noise sink to a soothing purr that would have been scarcely audible from the shore, or at least vague enough to seem distant and unalarming.

  He thought he should have earned full marks for navigation. The three tall chimneys that he had to find rose black against the Milky Way as he came within perception range of curtained windows glowing dimly over the starboard bow, and he cruised softly on beyond them into the cove where he had paused on the afternoon reconnaissance.

  This time, however, he let the boat drift all the way in to the shore where his cat’s eyes could pick out a tiny promontory that was almost as good as a private pier. He jumped off as the bow touched, carrying the anchor, which he wedged down into a crevice to hold the boat snugly against the land.

  Back in the boat, he stripped quickly down to the swimming trunks which he had worn under his clothes. From the airline bag he took a pair of wire-cutting pliers, and one of those bulky “pocket” knives equipped with a small tool-shop of gadgets besides the conventional blades, which he stuffed securely under the waistband of his trunks. Then came a flashlight, which he gave to Irina, and a small automatic pistol.

  “Do you know how to use this, if you have to?” he asked.

  “Yes. And I shall not be afraid to. I have done a lot of shooting—for sport.”

  “The safety catch is here.”

  He gave her the gun and guided her thumb to feel it.

  She put it in her bag, and then he helped her ashore.

  “The road has to be over there,” he said, “and it has to take you to the gates which you saw from your car. You can’t possibly go wrong. And you remember what we worked out. Your car has broken down, and you want to use their phone to call a garage.”

  “How could I forget? And when they don’t want to let me in, I shall go on talking and begging as long as I can.”

  “I’m sure you can keep them listening for a while, at any rate. Is your watch still the same as mine?” They put their wrists together and she turned on the flashlight for an instant. “Good. Just give me until exactly half-past before you go into action…Good luck!”

  “Good luck,” she said, and her arms went around him and her lips searched for his once more before he turned away.

  The water that he waded into was cold enough to quench any wistful ardour that might have distracted his concentration from the task ahead. He swam very hard, to stimulate his circulation, until his system had struck a balance with the chill, out and around the western arm of the little bay, and then as he curved his course towards the house with the three chimneys he slackened his pace to reduce the churning sounds of motion, until by the time he was within earshot of anyone in the walled garden he was sliding through the water as silently as an otter.

  By that time his eyes had accommodated to the darkness so thoroughly that he could see one of the dogs sniffing at a bush at one corner of the back porch, but he did not see any human sentinel. And presently the dog trotted off around the side of the house without becoming aware of his presence.

  Simon touched the rope connecting two of the marker buoys enclosing the private beach, feeling around it with a touch like a feather, but he could detect no wire intertwined with it. If there were any alarm device connected with it, therefore, it was probably something mechanically attached to the ends which would be activated by any tug on the rope. The Saint took great care not to do this as he cut through it with the blade of his boy-scout knife. But hardly a hand’s breadth below the surface of the water, making the passage too shallow to swim through, his delicately exploring fingers traced a barrier of stout wire netting supported by the buoys and stretched between their moorings, which would have rudely halted any small boat that tried to shoot in to the shore. He could feel that the wire was bare, apparently not electrified, but just in case it might also be attached to some warning trigger he touched it no less gingerly as he used his wire-cutters to snip out a section large enough to let him float through.

  The luminous dial of his watch showed that he still had almost five minutes to spare from the time he had allowed himself. He waited patiently, close to the projecting side wall, until the first dog barked on the other side of the house.

  A moment later, the other one chimed in.

  A man came out of the back door and descended the verandah steps, peering to left and right in the direction of the lake. But coming from the lighted house, it would have to take several minutes for his pupils to dilate sufficiently for his retinas to detect a half-submerged dark head drifting soundlessly shorewards in the star-shadow of the wall. Secure in that physiological certainty, the Saint paddled silently on into the lake bank, using only his hands like fins and making no more disturbance than a roving fish.

  Apparently satisfied that there was no threat from that side, the man turned and started back up the porch steps.

  Simon slithered out of the water as noiselessly as a snake, and darted after him. The man had no more than set one foot on the verandah when the Saint’s arm whipped around his throat from behind, and tightened with a subtle but expert pressure…

  As the man went limp, Simon lowered him quietly to the boards. Then he swiftly peeled off his victim’s jacket and trousers and put them on himself. They were a scarecrow fit, but for that nonce the Saint was not thinking of appearances: his main object was to confuse the watchdogs’ sense of smell.

  The back door was still slightly ajar, and if there were any alarms wired to it the guard must have switched them off before he opened it. The Saint went through without hesitation, and found himself in a large old-fashioned kitchen. Another door on the opposite side logically led to the main entrance hall. Past the staircase was the front door of the house, which was also ajar, meaning that another guard had gone out to investigate the disturbance at the entrance gate. The Saint crossed the hall like a hasty ghost and went on out after him.

  The dogs were still barking vociferously in spite of having already aroused the attention they were supposed to, as is the immoderate habit of dogs, and their redundant cla
mor was ear-splitting enough to have drowned much louder noises than the Saint’s barefoot approach. One of them did look over its shoulder at him as he came down the drive, but was deceived as he had hoped it would be by the familiar scent of his borrowed clothing and by the innocuous direction from which he came; it turned and resumed its blustering baying at Irina, who was pleading with the burly man who stood inside the gate.

  The whole scene was almost too plainly illuminated under the glare of an overhead floodlight, but the man was completely preoccupied with what was in front of him, doubtfully twirling a large iron key around a stubby forefinger, as Simon came up behind him and slashed one hand down on the back of his neck with a sharp smacking sound. The man started to turn, from pure reflex, and could have seen the Saint’s hand raised again for a lethal follow-up before his eyes rolled up and he crumpled where he stood. The dogs stopped yapping at last and licked him happily, enjoying the game, as Simon took the key from him and put it in the massive lock. Antique as it looked, its tumblers turned with the smoothness of fresh oil, and Simon pulled the gate open.

  “How wonderful!” she breathed. “I was afraid to believe you could really do it.”

  “I wasn’t certain myself, but I had to find out.”

  “But why—” She fingered the sleeve that reached only halfway between his elbow and his wrist.

  “I’ll explain another time,” he said. “Come on—but be quiet, in case there are any more of them.”

  She tiptoed with him back to the house. The hallway was deathly still, the silent emptiness of the ground floor emphasized by the metronome ticking of a clock. Simon touched her and pointed upwards, and she climbed the stairs behind him.

  The upper landing was dark, so that a thin strip of light underlining one door helpfully indicated the only occupied room. The Saint took out his knife again and opened the longest blade, holding it ready for lightning use as a silent weapon if the door proved to be unlocked—which it did. He felt no resistance to a tentative fractional pressure after he had stealthily turned the door-knob. He balanced himself, flung it open, and went in.