The Saint in Persuit (2 page)

“I’m afraid not. Neither did the lawyer who delivered it. And we couldn’t have gotten a look at it afterwards without a search warrant or a burglary—even if she hadn’t destroyed it by then. But anything we did might have warned her that she was under surveillance, whereas the way things are it’s probably the last thing she’d think of. We don’t want to upset the apple cart at this point. Washington thinks you’re the man to follow through on this, rope the girl and give her plenty of slack without losing her until you’ve found out what it is she’s up to.”

“I do have a deft hand with apple carts,” Simon conceded, “and I’ll even admit to a certain natural aptitude for keeping my eye on girls. Where’s she staying?”

“The Tagus Hotel,” Colonel Wade said. “Here’s her picture. She only got in this morning, so she can’t have done very much yet. And by the way, we’ve got you a room reserved at the Tagus directly across the corridor from hers.”

“As travel agents you couldn’t be more efficient,” Simon murmured, as he picked up the snapshot from the desk. “And from the looks of this, even the entertainment on this tour is going to be first rate.”

The colonel smiled, this time more genuinely than he had before.

“Well, enjoy yourself. Hamilton says that’s one thing you can always be counted on to do. Call me if you need anything, but no routine reports are expected. And if you get in trouble, I never heard of you. You know the drill. The rest is up to you.” He shook the Saint’s hand briskly. “I hope we’re not moving too fast for you.”

“Not at all, Colonel,” Simon said from the doorway. “There’s nothing quite so likely to get me moving fast myself as a familiar aroma that’s emanating from somewhere around here—the sweet fragrance of vintage loot!”

2

Vicky Kinian had the kind of sweet dark-haired beauty that brings to mind orchards in the sunlight of a dewy morning, and arouses in the bosoms of mature men an almost painfully adolescent nostalgia for girls-next-door such as never really lived next door. She had the lovely youthful aura that the modern alchemists of Hollywood indebt themselves trying to transmute out of gold—and yet the closest she had ever been to Hollywood was the projection on a television set. She was, in actual fact, the perfect coral-lipped rose that poets imagine blushing unseen in the desert air of Arkansas or the more inhospitable portions of Sardinia, and when she turned twenty-five the longest trip she had ever taken had been from Des Moines, Iowa, to Yosemite.

So that for her there was none of the world-weary sense of a routine errand that a great many of her contemporaries would have experienced on the June morning when she walked into a Des Moines travel agent’s office to pick up an air ticket which was to waft her into considerably more hazardous excitement than International Airways customarily supplies along with its tournedos and Waldorf salads. And Vicky herself had known that she had more to be excited about even than a first trip to fabulous foreign shores. In her new handbag, along with her passport and vaccination certificate, was a third and more personal document—one she would show to no guardian of national borders and about which she had spoken to nobody—which promised mysterious developments in her life without giving any clue as to what those developments would prove to be.

And as she stepped into the travel agency that morning, a new disquieting ingredient had been added to the mixture of anticipation and curiosity which had kept her awake for several nights already. She stopped just inside the agency’s glass door, looked around at the dozen or so preoccupied people who were distributed on either side of the service counter, and turned to her companion, a short and shapeless, mousey-haired girl of the type that is foredoomed by an unlucky shuffle of chromosomes to play a brief walk-on bit in such affairs as this, and thereafter to be painlessly forgotten by everyone except herself. To give her at least one instant’s clear immortality, let us at least record her name, which happened to be Enid Hofstatter.

“I hate to sound like a nut,” Vicky Kinian said in a low voice, “but I can’t get over the feeling that somebody’s watching me whenever I come in this place.”

Enid, who was not going to Europe or anywhere else, and who on this day of Vicky’s initiation into the Jet Set was on the verge of strangling on her own envy, blinked at her through smartly framed glasses.

“So what? Probably some handsome hunk of man has already spotted you as a fellow passenger and can’t wait till you’re on the plane together. Is that bad?’

Vicky showed with her grimace that she did consider it bad. Like most young women, from Los Angeles to the Eastern Marches, she harbored the deep suspicion that her hometown was inhabitated by the most boring specimens of masculinity on earth.

Within five minutes she had added the stapled booklet of tickets to the other vital papers in her purse. Then as she thanked the travel agent and turned away from the counter she was once more so overwhelmed by the sensation that she was being spied on that she swept her eyes over the entire room in the hope of spotting her phantom shadow. But the other customers in the office seemed fully involved with business of their own. She said nothing to Enid this time, and tried to convince herself that she had seen too many old Hitchcock movies on the late late show.

The two girls had scarcely left the place when a tall man in an inconspicuous blue suit stepped from the doorway of a store opposite, quickly crossed the street, and entered the same travel agency.

As he approached the counter the manager noticed him and raised a hand.

“Ah, Mr Jaeger!” The travel agent paused and glanced around the room, then leaned forward across the counter and held down his voice. “Miss Kinian was just here, getting her ticket.”

The tall man smiled. His smile, momentarily tempering the sharp line of a broad thin-lipped mouth, was more aggressive than charming—the kind of smile an ambitious executive might give to a subordinate. A fierce purposeful-ness was stamped in his sharp features and bluish-green eyes and reflected even in the closely cropped hair, which had once been a light blond and now, tempered with grey, was like polished steel.

“I know,” he said. “I deliberately avoided her so that she can be completely surprised. You have my ticket?”

His words were precise and clipped, with a trace of an accent which any American would have vaguely assumed was regional rather than foreign.

“Here you are,” the manager answered, producing a folder. “Flight 624 to Lisbon via New York.”

Jaeger took the multiple ticket from the man and flipped through its thin sheaf of leaves.

“And my seat is definitely next to Miss Kinian’s on the transatlantic leg of the flight?”

“Yes sir. The young lady should be bowled over when her godfather shows up right next to her. How long is it since you last met her?”

The customer tucked his ticket into his jacket pocket and returned the travel agent’s professional smile.

“Not since she was a tiny little girl,” he said. “But I was very close to her father. Until he died, you would have called us inseparable.”

If he had been as nervous or as sensitive as Vicky Kin-ian, he would have had the same psychic impression of being followed, and he would have been just as right. He would also have been thoroughly capable of doing something about it. But unfortunately for him, he was so preoccupied with his own pursuit that he never noticed the elderly gentleman with the white Vandyke whiskers and old-fashioned pince-nez, leaning on a heavy cane at the window of an adjacent bookshop, who turned slightly to observe his departure, looking rather like a benevolent Trotsky.

For Vicky Kinian, the first part of her trip, including a hectic sightseeing stopover in New York City, had been such a frenzied medley of re-claiming and re-registering baggage, of transfers between ramps and gates and buses and airports and hotel and taxis, that she was already in a state of somewhat dazed exhaustion when she emerged from the last human maelstrom of Kennedy Airport’s waiting rooms and once more entered the clean cool hyperinsulated interior of a jet primed for the takeoff for Lisbon, and perhaps the first answer to a mystery that had obsessed her all her life. She stepped into the pale blue tunnel of the plane’s fuselage prepared to collapse in her assigned seat and thank the fates for letting her be born in the wide smog-free spaces of the American Midwest.

“Vicky Kinian!”

The sound of her own name was so unexpected that for a couple of seconds it meant no more to her than the bump of a piece of hand luggage on the floor of the plane.

“Vicky! Is it really you?”

She stared at the platinum-haired stewardess in the neat grey uniform who was speaking to her, and then she and the other girl laughed with amazement.

“Freda Oliveiros! Who would’ve thought we’d have a class reunion like this?”

The stewardess, pretty in a brittle and slightly hard-featured way, led her down the aisle, talking all the time.

“Not me. I never did go much for that old-school-garter bit. But it’s good to see that you’ve made the grade—a cash customer on a flight like this!”

“Don’t be silly! I work in a filing-cabinet prison a lot harder than you do on this gorgeous thing. I just …”

Freda Oliveiros got a dirty look from her co-stewardess as a sudden influx of passengers began to clog the plane’s entrance.

“You’ll have to tell me all about it later, Vicky. Here’s your seat. I’ll drop by as soon as I can take a breath.”

Vicky’s seat was on the aisle. The place next to the window was already taken by a light-haired man in a blue suit. He gave her a pleasant nod as she sat down but did not say anything. She was glad of that. She had dreaded the possibility of spending eight hours or so as captive audience of some dimwit whose conversational kindling had been collected from the pages of a fifty-cent joke book.

Flight phobia returned briefly as the big jet lumbered through takeoff. Once it was safely airborne, Vicky’s fear evaporated, but her hands were still unconsciously gripping the armrests on either side of her seat so tightly that her knuckles were blotchy white. The man next to her noticed and she quickly loosened her fingers.

“Quite right,” her companion said in a cultivated, faintly accented voice. “I think the plane can stay up without our help now.”

For some reason his thin-lipped smile, showing teeth that were almost too white and perfect, disconcerted her.

“I needn’t pretend I’m not a coward about this,” she said with a nervous laugh. “This is only the second time I’ve ever been off the ground.”

Vicky had half-expected everybody on the plane except herself to be at the very least a film star or a millionaire playboy. This man was no movie star she had ever seen, and something told her that he was no playboy either. Her imagination, working on his sharp tanned face and calculating narrow eyes, pictured him as the chief of some construction firm in the Middle East, or an oil geologist from Venezuela. What he confessed to her did much less to enliven her dreams.

“Don’t worry about being uneasy,” he said. “I fly constantly, and I still don’t believe these monsters can get off the ground. Let me introduce myself. I’m Curt Jaeger, a salesman of watches.”

“I’m Vicky Kinian, a bookkeeper.”

Curt Jaeger began asking all the conventional polite questions and, in answer to hers, told her about his life as a commercial traveller between Switzerland and North America, with occasional side trips to Brazil and Portugal.

“What a wonderful life,” Vicky sighed. “I’ve never even been out of America before.”

“But now you are going as a tourist, for pleasure, which is more than I can say,” Jaeger answered. “Tell me about your plans.”

He had a quiet way of inspiring confidence, but not enough to make Vicky confess to anything more than a sightseer’s interest in Europe. She enjoyed talking to him, though, and was almost disappointed when, during their early dinner, he left most of his food on his tray and swallowed two small pills.

“I’m afraid you will have to excuse me,” he told her. “I am always so afraid of airsickness that I can never enjoy the food on these trips. The best condition for me now is to be asleep.”

“I’m sorry. I never realized …”

“Nothing to worry about. I’ll be dead to the world inside of ten minutes. And if you don’t mind some advice from a traveller much more experienced than he likes to admit, get some sleep yourself. In the morning I’d enjoy giving you a few suggestions about what you should see in Lisbon.”

“I’d appreciate that,” she said. “I hope you feel better.”

“I will,” he said drowsily, and mumbled an indistinct goodnight as he turned his back towards her and settled his head on a pillow next to the window.

Many of the other passengers were settling down for the short night as their dinner trays were taken away. The cabin lights dimmed, and Vicky began to think of sleep herself.

“Hi, globetrotter,” said a low, cheerful voice. “Shall we talk a bit now?”

It was Freda Oliveiros, trim and still unwilted.

“Wonderful,” said Vicky. “I can’t get over running into you here.”

Freda perched on the arm of Vicky’s seat and kept her conversation down to a loud whisper.

“Who’d have thought it, Vicky! From that little school in Dullsville, me a flying waitress, and you part of the carriage trade.”

“If I’d had to spend another uninterrupted summer holding hands with an adding machine I’d have been completely off my rocker,” Vicky confessed. “So I decided to go for broke—and I do mean broke! I’m splurging a few bucks my father left me for me twenty-fifth birthday, and I couldn’t think of a better way to do it than seeing some of the places where he was during the war.”

“That’s right,” Freda said, “your dad was a spy, wasn’t he? Made you quite an exotic character back at Myrtle Hill.”

“German measles would’ve seemed exotic at Myrtle Hill,” Vicky replied. “But now that you mention it, there is a little more to this trip than …”

She stopped and compressed her lips. She had blurted out the words without thinking, mostly from a desire to impress an old-time confidante, and maybe to get the burden of the secret off her mind. Now Freda, sensing a confession in the offing, pounced.