The Saint in Persuit (13 page)

“Give up, chum,” Simon said. “You didn’t figure on having to fight for your loot, and you’ve gone too soft to handle anything tougher than a lightweight female.”

Jaeger, wheezing for breath, grabbed up a sharp-edged glass ashtray and hurled it at the Saint. It flew past Simon’s ear and thumped on to the sofa.

“If you mistreat the crockery I’ll have to ask you to leave,” said the Saint.

He went after his opponent again, and Jaeger countered by trying for a clinch, tangling Simon’s arms with his own and using all his weight to push him back towards the window. The Saint balked, braced himself, and freed a hand. He cocked back his fist and unleashed a short jab at Jaeger’s nose. Jaeger staggered, letting go his grip on Simon, and launched a vicious kick.

The Saint caught the flying foot in midair.

“Sorry to behave badly for a host,” he said, “but I’ll have to ask you to leave.”

With both hands on Jaeger’s ankle he whipped him around in a perfectly timed swing that sent the other man not against the wall this time, but straight at the open window …

And suddenly there was only one man left in the room.

Simon braced himself on the window frame and looked down, secure in the knowledge that there were no lights on to reveal his interest to anybody in the street below or in the neighbouring buildings. There was a hole in the glass outcrop of the marquee six storeys down, and great excitement among the people on the sidewalk. Jaeger’s sudden ungainly appearance in front of the hotel was already public knowledge, but nobody—unless someone had happened to be looking directly upwards as he made his unsuccessful attempt to defy the force which controlled Newton’s apple —would know from which window he had fallen.

The Saint felt no remorse. Jaeger had taken precisely what he had intended to dish out, no more and no less, and nothing could have been fairer than that.

Simon checked to make sure that his double purpose chess box was still in his jacket pocket, and went to the door—a means of egress he much preferred to the one the late Curt Jaeger had planned for him. He would be out of the hotel before the police could begin to unfurl their clumsy nets, and Curt Jaeger’s Luger—the only thing which could connect the Saint’s room with the fallen man—would go with him.

2

“Ghoul” Vicky Kinian said accusingly to herself.

“An aperitif, mademoiselle?” the white-haired waiter asked.

Vicky looked up from the spotless surface of her small table. Outside the sidewalk cafe of the Beau Rivage the Quai du Mont-Blanc was almost dark. Within half an hour she could safely proceed with the task ahead of her. In the meantime, she wondered, what would be the best booster for a girl who was about to do her first job of grave-robbing?

“An Old Fashioned,” she said, and then remembered she was in Switzerland and not in the Kit Kat Steak House in southern Des Moines. “Oh, I don’t guess you’d have that …”

“Of course, mademoiselle. Immediately.”

The aged cupbearer limped away to fetch her drink, and Vicky continued to meditate nervously on her immediate future. She told herself that she was not really a grave-robber, of course, since her father’s instructions clearly specified which of the urns in the cemetery shrine contained not human ashes but something—just what she still did not know—much less necromantic and much more valuable. All she had to do was break through the monument’s glass door and take the metal box marked Josef Meier, and then run —no, walk—out of the graveyard. It was not really so ghoulish, and it would all be over in a matter of minutes.

The old waiter came back with her Old Fashioned. She bypassed the vegetation and gulped down the whisky, gratefully feeling the warmth hit her stomach all at once and begin to filter through her bloodstream.

She looked out at the street again. Passing cars were using their lights and she could no longer think of any excuse to delay. She fumbled too much money on to the table and left the cafe without waiting for the waiter to express his appreciation. Within a few seconds she was able to hail a passing taxi. She had vaguely hoped that every means of public transport in Geneva might by some fortuitous circumstance be occupied or out of working order for the next twelve hours, thus depriving her of the opportunity of doing what she both longed to do and dreaded.

But the cab driver, against all the laws of cab drivers’ temperament, did not even twitch a querulous eyebrow when she asked him to take her to the Cimetiere Internationale, much less turn her down flat as she was secretly hoping he would. He phlegmatically pushed his meter and his engine into gear, and took off towards the desired location with distressing speed by the most efficient possible route.

All Vicky’s hopes for blowouts or mechanical disasters came to naught, and within an incredibly short time she was being ferried along the almost unpopulated road on the edge of the city which led to the entrance of the cemetery.

“Cimetiere Internationale?” the driver called over his shoulder, as if giving her a last chance to change her mind.

“Yes,” she answered.

A few minutes later the automobile came to a stop in front of the open gates which she had passed through earlier in the day. The area had no artificial lights, and the only illumination came from an almost full moon rising above the steep hills to the east. The many-shaped monuments in the graveyard beyond its barred fence looked like grotesque emerging creatures from an infernal world frozen in position for a moment by the sound of the car.

Again she almost changed her mind. She could simply sit where she was and tell the driver to take her back to the easy safety of the Hotel Portal. But that would also be going back to the easy dull safety of eight hours a day at the telephone office—and admitting that when her one big chance had come to make her life something more than a digit in the bottomless arithmetic of the Welfare State she had flubbed because she had the heebie-jeebies.

She got out of the taxi. She wanted desperately to ask the driver to wait, but she had already decided that that would be too risky. He could not see the shrine to German exiles from where he was parked, but the sound of breaking glass might easily carry to his ears through the quiet night, and in any case he could be a possible source of all sorts of complications. Besides he was pretending not to understand English as she questioned him about the fare, though he had understood her perfectly well when he had picked her up, which probably meant that he would have refused to comprehend that she wanted him to wait, even if she had asked him.

He took her money and drove away after giving her a final look which she was sure could only be described as pitying. She watched the red taillights disappear and then turned to face the cemetery gate. There was no sign of another living human being in any direction. On the road which circled the boundary of the graveyard there was not even the sound of an automobile to replace the frightening emptiness in her brain left by the departed taxi. Her only company was the lopsided ball of the moon which silvered the jumble of tombstones ahead of her.

Much as she disliked being alone in such a place, for strictly practical reasons she was far more worried about running into human than into ghostly interference. She thought she could safely assume that the Swiss, like most other people, had no taste for strolling in cemeteries at night.

Vicky took a deep breath and walked through the gate. She continued decisively and quickly down the gravel path towards the location of the German memorial. Something cautioned her, however, to avoid making too much noise, and as she got closer to the monument she slowed her pace and moved so quietly that she could scarcely hear her own footsteps.

Then she stopped.

She was almost within sight of the monument, and she thought that a faint scratching or scraping noise had come from its direction. Poised without breathing, she listened. The only sounds now were the background chirping and semi-musical sawing of nocturnal insects. It wouldn’t have been surprising if her imagination had tended to embellish nature a bit.

She walked on, however, more cautiously than ever. Turning a corner in the path she came within sight of the memorial silhouetted against the brilliantly moonlit sky. Its face was in deep shadow, but as she moved on towards it, approaching to within fifty yards, she saw a shadow stir. Something like true petrifaction seized her, so that she could not move even a finger. The dim shape by the monument moved again, but she could only make out that it was big enough to be human and was not a stray dog or cat.

Self-preservation almost screamed at her, urging her to run, calling in nightmare panic to set her feet moving. But Vicky Kinian had come a long way from her last schoolgirl Hallowe’en, and once having straddled life and gotten the reins in her hands she felt an even stronger instinct to hold on and not be thrown.

Suddenly anger began to replace fright. Somebody was meddling with her shrine, and she was not about to leave before she had at least seen who it was and what he was doing. She suspected that Simon Templar, true to his mystical nickname, had somehow found out the secret of the monument and was busily in the process of trying to steal her inheritance. If so, she would have no hesitation about walking up and bashing him on the head with her purse.

Her very readiness to attack the Saint in a lonely graveyard with nothing more deadly than a handbag showed a certain faith in his gallantry which she did not recognize in herself until later. But that trust did make her careless. She did not take quite the extremes of care in sneaking up for a closer look at the memorial that she might have otherwise. She tiptoed from tombstone to tombstone, working her way towards the great stone eagle that brooded on top of the exile’s monument, trying to make out what the figure at the base of the edifice was doing.

When she was within fifty feet she could make out the man’s back. The scraping noise she had heard had apparently been the sound of a glasscutter. Now, using some kind of suction device with a short handle, he was removing the whole curved sheet of glass from the memorial’s door and setting it on the ground beside him. She noticed that he did not then reach immediately for one of the metal boxes on the shelves inside, but stood there as if undecided what to do next.

Vicky decided to move nearer, and as she did the toe of her high-heeled shoe caught on a stone ridge surrounding one of the burial plots, and she almost fell. A pebble clattered. The man at the monument pivoted, stared about into the darkness, and slunk quickly away among the tombstones and scattered trees to her right.

She waited, surprised that the poacher had given up so quickly, and disturbed by a new realization: she had seen enough to know that the man beside the monument had not been the Saint. Who he was she had no idea. Nothing about him had been familiar, and though she had not seen his face as more than a shadowy blur she was sure she did not know him. Had he followed her earlier in the day, or did he have some other source of information? Crouched in the shadow of a gravestone, she turned over the possibilities in her mind while she wavered between running away as fast as she could, and waiting, as still as a terrified rabbit, until she felt the danger had passed.

The way of the rabbit seemed safer. The man had, after all, not seen her, and he might decide that the rattling stone signalled no danger to him. In that case he would come back soon and begin his work again. If he had been really frightened, though, he might leave the cemetery and give her a chance at the urns. Either way, there was no point in revealing her presence.

She waited a long time. The moon rose a short but quite perceptible distance further above the big memorial’s stone eagle than it had been when she had first stooped and hidden in the shadows. There was still no sound or other trace of her rival’s whereabouts. She decided finally, after many minutes, and when one of her legs had gone completely to sleep, that the man had done just what he had seemed to be doing: hurried away from the monument and fled as inconspicuously as possible out of the cemetery.

The thought that he had been so easily discomfited gave Vicky a new sense of her own powers. She stood up, got some circulation restored to her numbed leg, and walked with as much confidence as she could summon to the opened shrine. A musty smell came from the shelves, which were having their first exposure to fresh air for twenty-five years or more. Her eyes were becoming more and more accustomed to the darkness, and the moon was distributing more light as it rose higher, but even so she could just barely make out the name-plates on the metal funerary boxes. Luckily the position of the reputed remains of Josef Meier at the left end of the upper shelf had remained fixed in her mind since that afternoon.

Gingerly she raised her arms and touched the box with just the tips of her fingers. Finding herself still undemolished by divinely hurled thunderbolts, she took the full weight of the box in her hands and carried it into the moonlight. There was no lock holding the lid closed, only a sliding catch made of chrome, but the catch was hard to move after so many years and for several seconds she exerted all her strength in an effort to budge it.

She was so intently occupied that she did not hear the very slight rustling in the shrubs just behind her; or if she did, it remained in the periphery of her consciousness, automatically interpreted as the brushing of a wind-gust through the leaves. When the rustle suddenly became the crashing plunge of a heavy body through foliage not ten feet away from her, she was too shocked and horrified even to scream.

She whirled, and leaping at her was a shadowed figure whose face—limp-featured and grotesque like a rubber mask —was as grey as death itself in the moonlight.

Stumbling back, she would have screamed then, but the man’s hands were on her. Fingers clamped across her windpipe and closed off her nose and mouth. No trace of oxygen could get to her lungs and no cry could escape from her throat.

The man dodged behind her, pulling her back against him as he kept up his relentless deadly pressure. The small resting-place of Josef Meier fell to the ground. All she wanted now was air, but there was none for her in the whole universe.