The Saint in Persuit (3 page)

“What? Don’t tell me you’ve taken up the cloak-and-dagger racket too?”

Vicky glanced at Curt Jaeger’s back; the rhythm of his breathing was slow and deep. The middle-aged man and woman on the other side of the aisle were engaged in their own low-voice conversation. Ahead of them she could see the broad gleaming dome of a baldheaded man with a hearing-aid bent close over a magazine.

“Promise you won’t tell anybody?” she asked Freda.

“Cross my heart.”

“Well,” Vicky whispered, “my father wrote a letter from Lisbon just before he disappeared and sent it to a lawyer in Des Moines, but the lawyer wasn’t to let me have it until I was twenty-five, assuming my father hadn’t come back by then. He gave it to me on my birthday.”

“And?”

“It was very peculiar, as if my father couldn’t really say what he meant. After all those years … he just said he hoped I’d come to Lisbon …”

“Sort of a slightly overdue wish-you-were-here?” prompted Freda.

“And he … he told me something to do when I got there.”

Freda waited until she could stand the silence no longer.

“For Pete’s sake, what? You’ve got me hooked now!”

Vicky looked around uneasily.

“I… I don’t want to say any more now,” she said. “But I can tell you that until I’ve done that first thing he asked me to do, the whole business is as much a mystery to me as it is to you.”

One of the other stewardesses came down the aisle and muttered to Freda “You’re wanted up front,” before she continued on.

“Just a sec,” Freda said, and turned back to Vicky. “This sounds more intriguing all the time. So it really is Kinian, the international private eye-full.”

“It probably won’t turn out to amount to anything,” Vicky said. “I know I sound silly, and I shouldn’t have bored you with it.”

“That’s a laugh. I really do happen to be the maddest spy-story fan on either side of this ocean. And I’ve also had a bit of experience finding my way around Lisbon—especially alone in the wee hours when some magnate got too big for bis girdle. Maybe I’ll be able to help you. I’ve got a two-day layover there.” She got to her feet. “If I don’t want to be stranded there, permanently, I’d better get back to my job. Sorry I’ve got to run. Catch a few winks and I’ll see you in the morning.”

Vicky thought she could go to sleep now. There was something about sharing almost anything that made it easier to live with. But in this case, if she could have known just how generously she had shared her story the effect on her would have been anything but relaxing.

Curt Jaeger’s thin lips, pressed close against his pillow, wore the faintest twist of a smirk. For the first time since finishing his dinner he allowed himself to think of going to sleep.

And two seats ahead, on the opposite side of the aisle, the baldheaded man with the white goatee and pince-nez, under cover of his magazine, slipped a curiously oversized hearing-aid microphone and amplifier unit into his coat pocket and switched off its battery.

3

Morning on the jetliner was so short and so crammed with facewashing, hairbrushing, and mass-produced breakfasts that there was only space for the shortest snatches of conversation. Vicky and Curt Jaeger, mopping up the last of their scrambled eggs, discovered they were both staying at the same hotel.

“Both of us at the Tagusl” Jaeger said. “Really? What a delightful coincidence. Now it doesn’t matter so much that I’ve not had time to give you my tips on Lisbon. I’ll be there myself for a few days and maybe you’ll even let me give you a guided tour in person …”

“I couldn’t put you to so much trouble,” Vicky said without even trying to sound as if she meant it.

Jaeger laughed.

“I’d hardly consider it trouble. When you’ve had time to catch your breath we’ll make a plan. Right now we’d better fasten our safety belts.”

When the plane had landed, the state of semi-suspended animation in which the passengers had spent most of the flight was changed to a rush of activity. With raincoats over arms and small baggage in hand they filed down the gangway into the blinding furnace of a Portuguese summer’s morning. Freda Oliveiros, saying conventional farewells to the travellers as they disembarked, had just time to give Vicky an encouraging pat on the arm and speak a few private words.

“I’ll meet you at your hotel as soon as I’ve changed into my civvies, okay? Which is it?”

“The Tagus. Couldn’t you stay with me there?”

“Thanks, but the airline keeps a couple of apartments in town for holdover crews, and I’ve got some clothes there. It doesn’t cost a centavo, so why make your bill any bigger? Ill just pop over to your place soon.”

“Great,” Vicky agreed, and hurried on down the steps and across the hot pavement to the arrival portals.

Curt Jaeger, ahead of her in the immigration line, gave up his place and joined her as they, with their fellow-passengers, filed respectfully past the uniformed inspectors to have their passports stamped. This internationally idiotic ritual, followed by the no less universally pointless struggle through a perfunctory Customs checkpoint, actually introduced only a very moderate delay before Vicky and her self-appointed protector were standing on the curb outside the terminal’s main entrance. It was only natural that they should share a taxi to their hotel, but Vicky felt worried about obligating herself to Jaeger. He had already tipped the porters who had carried out their luggage.

“If we’re going to be doing some of the same things, like this,” she said, “I really can’t let you pay. Here … for the porters.”

She thrust out a palmful of Portuguese coins that she had just obtained at the airport casa de cambio, and with an indulgently amused look he chose a few escudos.

“Very well, Miss Kinian, we shall keep this all very Dutch, within limits, but let me explain to you that I am on an expense account—and expense accounts, like justice, are quite blind. Or perhaps I should say, like dead men they tell no tales.”

His choice of simile seemed peculiarly unapt to Vicky, but she reminded herself that there was no way he could have known how they applied bizarrely to her own situation. She settled back and began to enjoy the indescribable excitement of knowing that she, Vicky Kinian the nobody, was for the first time in her life on foreign soil.

The taxi was soon entering the outskirts of the city, and when she leaned her head near the window on her side she could watch a fast-changing prospect of small busy shops, tree-lined walks, and above on the steep hillsides clusters and rows of colourwashed houses—pink, yellow, and green —baking like festive cakes in the sun.

“It’s beautifull” she exclaimed.

“Maybe you’d like to see more, then,” Jaeger suggested. He leaned forward and spoke to the driver in Portuguese. “I’ve asked him to take us the long way around, by the waterfront,” he explained.

The cab followed a street which led down a valley towards the sea-like estuary of the River Tagus on which the city faces. The efficient plainness of modern commercial buildings was occasionally relieved by such a startling souvenir of gaudy Moorish extravagance that Vicky’s head was constantly kept bobbing from one side to the other.

“This stewardess on the flight,” Jaeger said, “is she a good friend of yours?”

He spoke almost too casually, but Vicky was in no frame of mind to detect subtleties of tone.

“Oh, Freda?” she said. “We were in school together when we were teen-agers, but I haven’t seen her since—until last night. She knows Lisbon quite well, of course. I’m lucky to have run into her.”

She did not take her eyes off the new views of pastel houses, water and cliffs that the taxi’s route opened to her. She was sure she had never been more thrilled in her life, and she did not think of the implications of what she had said until Jaeger spoke again.

“I hope that doesn’t mean I shall lose the privilege of helping you to enjoy Lisbon a little myself.”

Vicky turned with a quick apologetic smile.

“Of course not! I’m very lucky to have run into you, too, and I appreciate—”

He raised a hand to stop her.

“You have nothing to appreciate yet. Maybe a division of labor is the best solution, since you’re so popular. Your old school friend can guide you for the day while I make my business calls, but would you give me the pleasure of taking you to dinner tonight? As a professional salesman, I can offer the inducement that in these Catholic countries bars and restaurants don’t always welcome a woman alone.”

She had already thought of that.

“Well, thank you. I’d love to.” Then she thought of something else. “Oh, dear!”

“Is something wrong?” her companion asked.

“Well, I was just thinking. If I go with Freda during the day and then go out with you in the evening it might seem as if I was just making use of her and then leaving her on her own.”

Jaeger deliberated for just a few seconds, looking ahead over the taxi driver’s shoulder.

“I agree,” he said at length. “That would not be nice, so by all means let her come with us. Let her show you inside the churches and shops. I think I can be a better guide to a good dinner, and I should be happy to have you both as my guests.”

Although that was what she had wanted him to say,Vicky had to make a perfunctory protest, but he interrupted after her first word.

“Remember,” he said, “the expense account.”

She laughed.

“All right. You win. You’ve got yourself a date with a couple of jabbering American females. I hope you won’t be sorry.”

“I think I can promise you,” Jaeger said smoothly, “that I won’t be.”

Their circuit of Lisbon’s waterfront and center seemed finished so soon that Vicky was amazed when she looked at her watch and realized that it had been almost an hour since they had left the airport.

“I’d better get on to the hotel,” she said reluctantly. “Freda is supposed to meet me there, and she may beat me to it at this rate.”

“Don’t worry,” said Jaeger. “We’re almost there now, and I won’t delay you any more. Ill call for you and your friend at seven o’clock this evening.”

As soon as they arrived and registered at the Hotel Tagus —whose relationship to Lisbon’s River Tagus existed more in its christener’s imagination than in geographical fact-Vicky had thanked Jaeger and gone straight to her room. It was larger than she had expected, and because of its thick outer walls was as cool as a limestone cave. A small private balcony—there was one for every room in the four-storey building—looked from her third-floor vantage point out over the red-tiled roofs and peacefully tinted walls that sloped away towards the distant bright blue of the estuary.

After enjoying the view for a minute she stepped back inside the room, closed the French doors behind her, loosened her dress, and started unpacking her suitcases. It was good to be alone for the first time in many hours.

She would have taken considerably less pleasure in her apparent solitude, and her room’s old-fashioned spaciousness and agreeable temperature, if she had known that her neighbour on the right-hand side as she faced the estuary had been either listening to or watching every move she made since the bellhop who had brought her luggage upstairs had closed her door behind him. She would have been even more troubled if she had recognized him as the same bald stout man with the hearing-aid who had been a fellow-passenger on the flight from New York.

Now he sat in his own room, with his short legs propped up quite comfortably, as if he had been doing this sort of thing all his life—which he had—stroking his white Vandyke beard and letting a pair of ingenious mechanical contrivances do most of the work of eavesdropping for him. When Vicky had been on her balcony he had been able, while sitting just inside the doors leading to his own balcony, to see every move she made in the angled mirror of a periscope-like device attached to an extension of his walking stick. Then, when she had gone back into her room, he had turned his attention to the amplifier of his ldngsized hearing-aid. A wire from the flat metal box led to a plug in his ear, bringing him the sound of even the most lady-like cough or discreet footstep from the other side of the wall.

For a short while he heard little more than footsteps. Then there were the relatively explosive sounds of a door opening and the eruption of female conversation. The first voice was not that of Vicky Kinian.

“Here I am, ready or not!”

Vicky Kinian’s words were slower paced and softer than her visitor’s.

“Good heavens, Freda, I don’t know how you did it. You look straight out of Vogue, and I still feel as if I’d just spent three days on a roller-coaster.”

The next few minutes of feminine chitchat held no special interest for him. He sat like a bored television viewer waiting for the “station identification” commercials to get off his screen, until the next-door conversation had turned to something less cosmically inane.

“I can line up dates for both of us if you’re interested,” the visitor—whose voice he recognized having heard on the plane the night before—was saying. “But I suppose you’re too wrapped up in your private scavenger hunt to care about a couple of mere cork ranchers.”

“Well, my scavenger hunt is the main thing I’m interested in at the moment, but I beat you to it in the date department: I’ve already got one for both of us—if you’re interested!”

“Good grief, a faster worker than Oliveiros!” the other girl exclaimed. “I knew I was slipping, but maybe I’d better rush for the altar before it’s too late. Who are the lucky guys?”

“It’s just one lucky guy,” Vicky Kinian said. “That man who sat next to me on the plane—Mr Jaeger. He invited us both to dinner.”

“Right. I remember: tall, blond, and foxy. He seemed nice enough, and who are we to turn down a free meal?”

The question seemed to be settled, and the listener’s ex-periencd ears detected that both women were now on their feet.

“Well,” the visitor said, “what does your father’s letter want you to see first?”

Vicky Kinian read in a nervous, almost awed voice, picking her way carefully over the Portuguese words that were interspersed with the English.

“In Lisbon, go to Seguranca’s Antique Shop on Rua De Ouro at the corner of Viseli. They will remember me. Ask for the little box I paid a deposit on.”