The only occupant, a pale shock-headed man in trousers and shirtsleeves, shrank back in the chair where he sat, staring.
“Professor Jorovitch, I presume?” said the Saint unoriginally.
Irina brushed past him.
“Papa!” she cried.
Jorovitch’s eyes dilated, fixed on the automatic which Simon had lent her, which waved in her hand as if she had forgotten she had it. Bewilderment and terror were the only expressions on his face.
Irina turned frantically to the Saint.
“You see, they have done it!” she wailed. “Just as I was afraid. We must get him away. Quick—do what you have to!”
Simon Templar shook his head slowly.
“No,” he said. “I can’t do that.”
She stared at him.
“Why? You promised—”
“No, I didn’t, exactly. But you did your best to plant the idea in my head. Unfortunately, that was after I’d decided there was something wrong with your story. I was bothered by the language you used, like ‘the capitalist life,’ and always carefully saying ‘Soviet’ where most people say ‘Russian,’ and saying that hearing my name was ‘like winning a big prize’ instead of calling it a miracle or an answer to prayer, as most people brought up on this side of the Curtain would do. And being so defensive about your hotel. And then when we came over this afternoon I noticed there was no Russian flag flying here, as there would be on diplomatic property.”
“You’re mad,” she whispered.
“I was, rather,” he admitted, “when I suspected you might be trying to con me into doing your dirty work for you. So I called an old acquaintance of mine in the local police, to check on some of the facts.”
The gun in her hand levelled and cracked.
The Saint blinked, but did not stagger. He reached out and grabbed her hand as she squeezed the trigger again, and twisted the automatic out of her fingers.
“It’s only loaded with blanks,” he explained apologetically. “I thought it was safer to plant that on you, rather than risk having you produce a gun of your own, with real bullets in it.”
“A very sensible precaution,” said a gentle new voice. It belonged to a short rotund man in a pork-pie hat, with a round face and round-rimmed glasses, who emerged with as much dignity as possible from the partly-open door of the wardrobe.
Simon said, “May I introduce Inspector Oscar Kleinhaus? He was able to tell me the true story—that Karel Jorovitch had already defected, weeks ago, and had been given asylum without any publicity, and that he was living here with a guard of Swiss security officers until he completed all the information he could give about the Russian espionage apparatus in Switzerland. Oscar allowed me to go along with your gag for a while—partly to help you convict yourself beyond any hope of a legal quibble, and partly as an exercise to check the protection arrangements.”
“Which apparently leave something to be desired,” Kleinhaus observed, mildly.
“But who would have thought it’d be me they had to keep out?” Simon consoled him magnanimously.
The two guards from the bank and the front of the house came in from the landing, looking physically none the worse for wear but somewhat sheepish—especially the one who was clad only in his underthings.
“They weren’t told anything about my plan, only that they were going to be tested,” Simon explained, as he considerately shucked off and returned the borrowed garments. “But they were told that if I snuck close enough to grab them or slap them they were to assume they could just as well have been killed, and to fall down and play dead. We even thought of playing out the abduction all the way to Zürich.”
“That would have been going too far,” Kleinhaus said. “But I would like to know what was to happen if you got away from here.”
“She said she’d arrange for a car to pick us up at Brunnen, and there would be a light plane waiting for a supposed invalid at the Zürich airport—which would have taken him at least as far as East Germany.”
“They will be easy to pick up,” Kleinhaus sighed. “Take her away.”
She spat at the Saint as the guards went to her, and would have clawed out his eyes if they had not held her efficiently.
“I’m sorry, darling,” the Saint said to her. “I’m sorry it had to turn out like this. I liked your story much better.”
The irony was that he meant it. And that she would never believe him.
PROVENCE: THE HOPELESS HEIRESS
Simon Templar saw her again as he was sampling the Chausson du Roi at La Petite Auberge at Noyes.
A chausson means, literally, a bedroom slipper, hence, in the vocabulary of French cuisine, it is also the word for a sort of apple turnover, which bears a superficial resemblance to a folded slipper with the heel tucked into the toe. The Chausson du Roi, however, as befits its royal distinction, is not a dessert, and contains nothing so commonplace as apples. It envelops sweetbreads liberally blended with the regal richness of truffles, and it is one of the specially famous entrées of La Petite Auberge, whose name so modestly means only “the little inn,” but which is one of the mere dozen restaurants in all of France decorated by the canonical Guide Michelin with the three stars which are its highest accolade. Noyes is in the south, not far from Avignon of the celebrated bridge, and is a very small village of absolutely no importance except to its nearest neighbors, which hardly anyone else would ever have heard of but for the procession of gourmets beating a path to a superior munch-trap. And she personified one rather prevalent concept of the type to be expected in such company.
She had truly brown hair, the rare and wonderful natural color of the finest leather, styled with careless simplicity, with large brown eyes to match, a small nose, a generous mouth, and exquisitely even teeth, all assembled with a symmetry that might have been breath-taking—if it had been seen in a slightly concave mirror.
Because she was fat.
Simon estimated that she probably scaled about 180 pounds bone dry, the same as himself. Except that his pounds were all muscle stretched over more than two yards of frame, whereas she had to carry too many of them horizontally, with a head less height, in billows of rotundity that might have delighted Rubens but would have appalled Vargas. It was a great pity, he thought, for without that excess weight even her figure might have been beautiful: her ankles were still trim and her calves not too enlarged, and her hands were small and shapely. But from the way she was tucking into the provender on her plate there seemed to be little prospect of her central sections being restored to proportion with her extremities.
She wore no ring on the third finger of her left hand, and the man with her was certainly old enough to be her father, but there was no physical similarity between them. He was gray-haired and gray-eyed, with a thin, meticulously sculptured, gray mustache, and the rest of him was also as thin as she was obese. But nothing else about him confirmed the ascetic promise of his slenderness. To mitigate the warmth of the summer evening, his dark gray suit had been custom tailored of some special fabric, perhaps even custom woven, which combined the conventionally imperative drab-ness of correct male attire with the obvious lightness of a tissue of feathers; his snowy shirt was just solid enough to be opaque without pretending to be as substantial as the least useful handkerchief; his cuff-links were cabochon emeralds no bigger than peanuts, and his wrist watch was merely one different link in a broad loose bracelet which anyone without Simon Templar’s assayer’s eye would have dismissed as Mexican silver instead of the solid platinum that it was. In every detail, examined closely enough, there was revealed a man who carved nothing but the best of everything—but with a discrimination refined to the ultimate snobbery of modesty.
Simon seized a chance to satisfy his curiosity when the dining-room hostess (he had noted an increasing number of personable and competent young women in such posts of recent years, and wondered if it would be correct to call them maîtresses d’hôtel) came by to inquire whether everything was to his ple
asure.
“At the corner table?” she said, answering his return question. “That is Mr Saville Wakerose. I should have thought you would know him. Isn’t he one of your greatest gourmets?”
The Saint had never set eyes on Mr Wakerose before that summer, but the name was instantly familiar, and at once it became hardly a coincidence at all that they should have been eating in the same restaurants on three consecutive days—the Côte d’Or at Saulieu, the Pyramide at Vienne, and now the Petite Auberge at Noyes. For each one was a three-starred shrine of culinary art, and they were spaced along the route from Paris to the Mediterranean at distances which could only suggest an irresistible schedule to any gastrophilic pilgrim with the time to spare. In which category Simon Templar was an enthusiastic amateur when other obligations and temptations permitted, but Saville Wakerose was a dean of professionals. In twenty years of magazine articles, newspaper columns, lecture tours, and general publicity, he had established his authority as a connoisseur of food and wine and an arbiter of general elegance at such an altitude that even princes and presidents were reported to cringe from his critiques of their hospitality. And he had not merely parlayed his avocation into a comfortable living in which the best things in life were free or deductible, but he had climaxed it some four years ago by marrying the former Adeline Inglis, the last scion of one of those pre-welfare-state fortunes, who in her débutante days had inspired ribald parodists to warble:
Sweet Adeline,
For you I pine;
Your dough divine
Should mate with mine…
Since then she had had five or six husbands, in spite of whom she still had plenty of dough left when Saville Wakerose added himself to the highly variegated roster. He was to be the last of the list, for a couple of years later, before the habitual rift could develop in their marital bliss, a simple case of influenza followed by common pneumonia suddenly retired her for all time from the matrimonial market, leaving him presumably well consoled in his bereavement.
“He has a very young wife,” Simon observed, with intentional discretion.
The hostess smiled.
“That is not his wife. She is his belle-fille, Miss Flane.”
Belle-fille does not mean what it might suggest to anyone with a mere smattering of French. The fat girl was Wakerose’s step-daughter. And with that information another card spun out of the Saint’s mental index of trivial recollections from his catholic acquaintance with all forms of journalism. One of Adeline Inglis’s earliest husbands, and the father of her only experiment in maternity, had been Orlando Flane, a film star who had shone in the last fabulous days before Hollywood became only a suburb instead of the capital of the moving picture world.
That, then, would have to be the one-time photographers’ darling Rowena Flane, whose father had never had much talent and was rated nothing but an alcoholic problem after the divorce, and who blew out what was left of his brains soon afterwards, but who had left her those still discernible traits of the sheer impossible beauty which had made him the idol of millions of sex-starved females before their fickle frustrations transferred themselves to the school of scratching, mumbling, or jittering goons who had succeeded him.
Adeline Inglis, Simon seemed to recall, searching his memory for the imprint of some inconsequential news photo, had taken advantage of the best coiffeurs, couturiers, and cosmeticians that money could buy to succeed in looking like a nice well-groomed middle-class matron dolled up for a community bridge party. Her daughter, fortuitously endowed with a far better basic structure, had not given it a fraction of that break. But he wondered why somebody close to her hadn’t pointed out that even if she suffered from some glandular misfortune, there were better treatments for it than to indulge her appetite as she seemed inclined to do. Most especially somebody like Saville Wakerose, who through all his professional gourmandizing had taken obvious pride in preserving the figure of an aesthete.
And from that not so casual speculation began an incident which brought the Saint to the brink of a fate worse than…But let us not be jumping the gun.
Although he had never been so crude as to even glance towards Rowena Flane and her step-father while making his inquiries, Simon knew that the recognition had been mutual, and when the hostess’s peregrinations took her to the corner table he had no doubt that some equally sophisticated inquiry was made about himself. But he would not have predicted that it would have the result it did.
It was one of those mild and ideal evenings in May, when summer often begins in Provence, and after succumbing to an exquisite miniature Soufflé au Grand Marnier he was happy to accede to the suggestion of having his coffee served outside under the trees. Wakerose and Rowena had started and finished before him and were already at a table on the front terrace which Simon had to pass in search of one for himself, and Mr Wakerose stood up and said: “Excuse me, Mr Templar. We seem destined to keep crossing paths on this trip. Why not give in to it and join us?”
“Why not?” Simon said agreeably, but looked at the fat girl for his cue.
She smiled her endorsement with a readiness which suggested that the invitation could actually have been her idea.
“Thank you,” Simon said, and sat down beside her.
Liqueurs came with the coffee—a Benedictine for her, a Châtelaine Armagnac for Mr Wakerose. Simon decided to join him in the latter.
“It makes an interesting change,” said Mr Wakerose. “And I like to enjoy the libations of the territory, whenever they are reasonably potable. And after all, we are nowhere near Cognac, but much nearer the latitude of Bordeaux.”
“And those black-oak Gascon casks make all the difference from ageing in the limousins,” Simon concurred, tasting appreciatively. “I think it takes a harder and drier brandy to follow the more rugged wines of the Rhône—like this.”
As an exercise in one-upmanship it was perhaps a trifle flashy, but he had the satisfaction of seeing Saville Wakerose blink.
“Are you just on the trail of food and drink?” Rowena asked. “Or is it something more exciting?”
“Just eating my way around,” said the Saint carelessly, having accustomed himself to these gambits as a formality that had to be suffered with good humor. “That can be exciting enough, in places like this.”
“You sound as if you’d evolved a formula for handling silly questions. But I suppose you’ve had to.”
It was Simon’s turn to blink—though he was sufficiently on guard, from instinct and habit, to permit himself no more than a smile. But it was a smile warmed by the surprised recognition of a perceptivity which he had been guilty of failing to expect from a poor little fat rich girl.
“You’ve probably had to do the same, haven’t you?” he said, and it was almost an apology.
“It appears that we all know each other,” Mr Wakerose observed drily. “Although I did forget the ceremonial introductions. But I’m sure Mr Templar made the same subtle inquiries about us that we made about him.”
Simon realized that Wakerose was also a gamesman, and nodded his sporting acknowledgement of the ploy.
“Doesn’t everybody?” he returned blandly. “However, I was telling the truth. The only clues I’m following are in menus. I stopped looking for trouble years ago—because quite enough of it started looking for me.”
Saville Wakerose trimmed his cigar.
“We haven’t only been eating our way around, as you put it, in all those places where you’ve been seeing us,” he said. “We’ve also been seeing all the historic sights. Are you familiar with the history of these parts, Mr Templar?”
Simon joyously spotted the trap from afar.
“Only what I’ve read in the guide books, like everyone else,” he said, skirting it neatly and leaving the other to follow.
Wakerose just as gracefully sidestepped his own pitfall.
“Rowena loves history, or at least historical novels,” he explained, “and I prefer to read cook books. But I let her drag me around the anc
ient monuments, and she lets me show her the temples of the table, and it makes an interesting symbiosis.”
It was a stand-off, like two duellists stopped by a mutual discovery of respect for the other’s skill, and accepting a tacit truce while deciding how—or whether—to continue.
Simon was perfectly content to leave it that way. He turned to Rowena again with a new friendliness, and said, “Historical novels cover a lot of ground, between deluges—from the Flood to Prohibition. Do you like all of ’em, or are you hooked on any particular period?”
“It’s not the period so much as the atmosphere,” she said. “When I want to relax and be entertained, I want romance and glamor and a happy ending. I can’t stand this modern obsession with everything sordid and complicated and depressing.”
“But you don’t think life only started to be sordid and depressing less than a hundred years ago?”
“Of course not. I know that in many ways it was much worse. But for some reason, when writers look at the world around them they only seem to see the worst of it, or that’s all they want to talk about. But when they look back, they bring out the best and the happiest things.”
“And that’s all you want to see?”
“Yes, if I’m paying for it. Why spend money to be depressed?”
“I could see your point,” Simon said deliberately, “if you were a poor struggling working girl with indigent parents and a thriftless husband, dreaming of an escape she’ll never have. But if we put the cards on the table, and pretend we know who you are—why do you need that escape?”
Wakerose had suddenly begun to beam like an emaciated Buddha.
“This is prodigious,” he said. “Mr Templar is putting you on, Rowena.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Simon said quickly, but without taking his eyes off her. “It was meant as an honest question.”
“Then you tell me honestly,” she said, “why a rich girl with no worries shouldn’t prefer to dream about knights in shining armor or dashing cavaliers, instead of the kind of men she sees all the time.”
The Saint in the Sun (The Saint Series) Page 18