Catch the Saint (14 page)

A plainclothes man in
overalls, on a ladder, was assiduously
fiddling with a
street-lamp near Caffin’s apartment building when Teal’s equally
unofficial-looking car parked near by. As Teal got
out, the lamp-fiddler paused in his labours to pull out a green
handkerchief and blow his nose, signalling that all instructions
had been carried out. If there had been problems,
the handker
chief, from another
pocket, would have been white, asking for a
discreet conference.

A husky young constable, in unobtrusively
casual clothes, fol
lowed Teal into the
building and towards the elevator. As they reached it, it discharged a stout
matron and her poodle, and Teal noted with satisfaction that they were met at
the street door and engaged on some pretext by his sergeant driver—a routine
pre
caution against any of the
intended objectives slipping through
the
cordon in disguise, improbable as that particular transmogri
fication
might have seemed.

As the lift bore him and
his junior colleague to Caffin’s floor, Teal clutched and turned his bowler
like a racing driver manipu
lating the wheel of his car as he steered
through a final chicane.

They arrived,
uneventfully, at Caffin’s door. Teal knocked, wishfully hoping that it would be
Caffin himself who looked out
at him when the door opened—assuming that it
was opened
without resistance. In spite of
all precautions, there was always a
risk,
with a man like Caffin, that some leak might have sprung an
unforeseen weakness in the trap.

The door did open, but it was not the beefy
countenance of
Sam Caffin which met Chief
Inspector Teal’s consternated stare.

He should long since have
accustomed himself to these experi
ences, but somehow
he never did. When he was confronted by
the
suave and smiling face of Simon Templar, he felt as if the en
tire building had suddenly evaporated, leaving him standing
precariously fifty feet up in the air.

“Scotland Yard, I
presume?” said the Saint, stepping back to
let
them enter. He was wearing a strangely formal outfit consist
ing of
immaculate dark coat and striped trousers. “I’m afraid
you’ve missed the party, but we still have some
leftovers.”

When Teal entered, in a
kind of ponderous daze, he saw that
the leftovers
consisted of Caffin, Pargit, and another man, sitting
in
a neat row on the sofa, arms and legs tied. Two small revolvers
lay on the coffee table in front of them. With wildly disarrayed
hair, rumpled clothing, and bruised faces, the trio looked
like the survivors of a tornado.

“Boys,” said the Saint, “meet
Chief Inspector Claud Eustace
Teal of
Scotland Yard. With his usual prompt efficiency, he’s ar
rived to take you away. You’re going to be having
some long
chats with him, so you
might as well start getting acquainted. As
for me, I’ll just be bumbling off. It was nice meeting you.”

He was on his way out when
Teal caught up with him and fol
lowed him into the
corridor outside the flat.

“Hold up there, Templar,” he
commanded. “You’re not get
ting out of
here without some explanations. I’ve got this place surrounded.”

“I’m overwhelmed by
your gratitude,” Simon said humbly.

Teal calmed down a
little. He tried to control his burning envy
of
this man who seemed to do more alone—defying the laws—
than
Teal could do with the whole of Scotland Yard behind
him.

“It’s not that I don’t
appreciate the way this has turned out,”
the
detective said, and for him that was a great and noble admis
sion. “But what happened here? What are you doing in that
suit?”

“Ah, the suit. Mr
Pargit was kind enough to give me a lift to London and bring, me calling on his
friend Caffin. But I wasn’t
sure that Caffin would be
so polite if I introduced myself as the notorious Saint, so I decided to seek
an audience with him as an
Inland Revenue man. The
fact that Pargit and I happened to
come up the lift at
the same time would be sheer coincidence. I
got
in quite easily. For some inexplicable reason nobody ever
seems to think of shooting an income-tax inspector.”

“And so you beat them
all up singlehanded.”

The Saint’s eyebrows
lifted innocently.

“They weren’t beat
up. We just had what are known in diplo
matic
circles as frank and productive discussions. A vigourous bargaining session. It
was really Pargit’s fault. He’s a born hag
gler.”
Simon lounged against the corridor wall with exasperating
nonchalance, looking as if he had just emerged from a session with his
tailor rather than two thugs and an art shark. “Remem
ber that old lady I told you about—the one Pargit took for a
sucker when he sold her an eighth-rate painting for several times what
is was worth? I was here as her representative. Pargit was
reluctant to make restitution at first, but we talked it over at
length and he finally saw the error of his ways. I have his personal
check for the dear old dame. Even though he’s repented, I suppose it’s too late
to keep him out of jail, but I’m sure his soul
will
benefit enormously.”

“Templar,” Teal
smouldered. “All I can say is …”

And, in fact, that was
absolutely all he could say.

That evening, Simon
entertained Julie and Adrian Norcombe a
t
one of London’s quieter and more admirable restaurants.
While sole and duck underwent awesome transformations from
their natural state, in a kitchen far removed from the crystal and
candlelight of the dining room, the Saint raised his first
glass of Bollinger.

“Dearly
beloved,” he said, “we are gathered here not only to
celebrate
Adrian’s freedom and the general triumph of justice,
but also something a little more tangible. Let’s drink to all
three.”

When they had sipped,
Adrian put forward his own glass and said shyly, “Thank you.”

He and his sister toasted
the Saint. And Julie asked, “Tangi
ble?”

Simon settled back in his
chair, pulled a slip of tinted paper
from his coat
pocket, and placed it on the table in front of them.
They
studied its simple but eloquent words and numerals, and
stared at him in astonishment.

“Ten thousand
pounds?” Julie quoted hoarsely.

“For you to divide
between you,” Simon said.

“But why should you
write us a check like that?” she ob
jected.

“I wrote the check,
but the money isn’t from me,” Simon
told her. “When I
told Lord Oldenshaw that the painting he’d
given
Pargit was a true and actual Rembrandt, and that we’d
saved it from being hijacked, and that I could
return it to him
immediately, he was so anxious to get his hands on it
that he
could hardly wait to show his
gratitude. Fifteen thousand pounds’
worth.
A small enough cut out of the half a million or more he’ll
get for the painting if he decides to sell it. Of
course if the ex
perts he’s no doubt
got swarming all over the painting tell
him it
isn’t
a genuine Rembrandt, the check he gave me won’t
be worth tuppence in the morning. It
is
genuine,
isn’t it, Adrian?”

He said it mainly to draw
Adrian out. The young man had so
far proved incapable of
putting more than three words together
consecutively.

“Oh, I’m certain it is. And Mr Pargit must
have been sure it
was or he wouldn’t have
gone to all that trouble.”

Julie impulsively reached
out and touched the Saint’s hand.

“Simon, it was
wonderful of you to do this.”

Since Simon could only
agree, he simply smiled and quietly
appreciated the
lingering warmth of her fingers. Adrian was
obviously
struggling to organise a new sentence.

“I
…
I’m very grateful,” he said.
“Perhaps I could show it
by doing a painting for
you. Whom would you prefer?”

“Whom?” the
Saint asked.

“Which artist?”

“Why, you, Adrian.
You have money in the bank, now. You
can afford to do
your own work.”

“I’m afraid my only
talent is imitating,” Adrian said resign
edly.
“Would you like a—an El Greco?”

“Something
soothing,” the Saint proposed. “Gainsborough.”

Adrian beamed.

“Oh, good. I haven’t
tried Gainsborough.”

“You’ve got a model
in the family.”

Julie rested her chin in
her hand and looked pensively at the
Saint.

“I wish I had a
talent, so I could show my gratitude.”

“I’m sure you’ll think of something,”
Simon responded. “For
a start you could
keep me company when I go back to Dorset
to pick up my car. We might even find time to do a little bird-
watching.”

She brightened.

“Oh, I’d love
that.” Then, for his eyes alone, her mouth
formed
the word she had said she would never say to him:
“Darling.”

The Adoring Socialite

CHAPTER 1

In the course of his good
works, of which he himself was not the smallest beneficiary, the man so
paradoxically called the
Saint had assumed many roles and placed himself
in such a
fantastic variety of settings
that the adventures of a Sinbad or a
Ulysses
had by comparison all the excitement of a housewife’s
trip to the market. His range was the world. His
identities had
encompassed cowboy and
playboy, poet and revolutionary, hobo
and
millionaire. The booty he had gathered in his years of buccaneering had
certainly made the last category genuine: The assets he had salted away would
have made headlines if they had
been
exposed to counting. He could have comfortably retired
at an age when most men are still angling for
their second promotion. But strong as the profit motive was as a factor in his
exploits, there were other drives which would never allow him
to put the gears of his mind permanently in neutral
and hang up his heels on the stern rail of a yacht. He had an insatiable
lust for action, in a world that squandered its
energies on
speeches and account
books. He craved the individual expres
sion
of his own personal ideals, and his rules were not those of
parliaments and judges but those of a man
impatient to accom
plish his
purposes, according to his own lights, by the most ef
fective means available at the moment.
This does not mean that all his waking hours were
conse
crated to one clear-cut objective
or another, attached to which
there
had to be the eventual prospect of some pecuniary reward.
Like anyone
else, he often found himself enmeshed in quite aim
less activities, some of which promised nothing but entries on
the
debit side of his imaginary ledgers.

Like, for instance, this
very Main-Line charity ball in Philadelphia, for which the tickets cost a mere
$100 each against the
$1,000 that many social
climbers would have paid to get one. In a situation that has nothing to do with
this story, Simon
Templar had been offered the ineffable
privilege of buying one
at cost, as a favour that
he could not gracefully refuse; and since
he
had paid his money and had nothing more exciting on his
agenda at the moment, he had decided that he might as well
look in, in a spirit of scientific if not wholly unmalicious curiosity,
and see what cooked in this particular segment of the Upper
Crust.

It was an impulse for which
his first impression was that he
should have had his head
examined. The Adelphi Ballroom of
the New Sylvania
Hotel was like a claustrophobic football field thronged with players attempting
to get champagne glasses from
one point to another
without splashing the contents over them
selves
or their neighbours or being toppled by dancers encroaching on drinkers’
territory. The air was dense with the essence of
acres
of French flowers and the effluvium of smouldering to
bacco leaves. Words
were lost in a whirlpool of words. Individuality was swallowed up in the mass.