The Saint in Persuit (10 page)

“Good. You say you’ve got a man watching the hotel?”

“Right.”

“Then why don’t you have him keep an eye on her movements? They’re nice movements, but she knows me now and she’s liable to spot me if I stay too close for too long. I’ll hang around in the background until we see what’s up, and I’ll phone the hotel desk occasionally in case you’ve left any messages for me.”

The Saint shaved and dressed, and about half an hour later he went downstairs to the lobby. Leaving his own key at the desk, he observed that the key to room 302 was in its slot.

The same clerk to whom he had confessed his admiration of Vicky Kinian the day before was on duty again.

“Miss Kinian is already out?” Simon remarked disappointedly. “I don’t suppose you have any idea where she went?”

He gave his question additional priority by extending an example of the national currency halfway across the counter between two fingers as he asked it.

“I gave her the name of a travel agency, senhor,” answered the clerk, making the bill disappear on his own side of the desk with consummately unobtrusive prestidigitation. She also asked my advice about sightseeing and I recommended a few places of interest.”

“A travel agent?” Simon asked with unhappy surprise. “She is leaving, then?”

“She is leaving the hotel this afternoon, senhor. She wishes to fly to Switzerland. If you wished to begin a friendship with her, senhor, I am afraid you have not had enough time.”

“Perhaps I shall have to follow her to Switzerland,” Simon said jokingly. “You don’t know which flight she’s taking?”

The clerk shook his head and glanced at another customer who was waiting his turn.

“I am sorry I cannot tell you more. Perhaps at the agency just around the corner …”

“Fine.” The Saint hesitated before leaving. “The sightseeing she mentioned—do you know …”

“She wanted to know how she could see the most places in a short time, and I suggested to her the bus which makes a tour of the city in three hours.” The clerk glanced at his wristwatch. “It stops in front of the hotel here to take on passengers at eleven.”

“Is it one of those tours that herds the sheep from church to church and gallery to gallery and allows them fifteen seconds to gawk at each masterpiece?”

The clerk smiled deferentially.

“I am afraid so, senhor.”

“I think Miss Kinian will be very occupied, then, and well taken care of without any help from me,” Simon reflected aloud. “Maybe I shall have better luck later.”

He had just thanked his informant and turned from the reception counter when the clerk called him back from the switchboard with which he also had to divide his attention.

“Senhor! Please, a call for you. Would you like to take it in your room or here?”

“In my room, I think. Have them hold the line for just a minute.”

As Simon climbed the stairs he considered the relative advantages and disadvantages of joining Vicky Kinian on her sightseeing tour. It seemed probable that she was motivated by a real desire to see some of the sights of Lisbon before leaving. With only a few hours left before she flew to Switzerland, she would want to fill in the time as touristically as she could. After all, she might be zeroing in on a fortune, but while she was in the process she was just a thrifty Iowa girl bedazzled by her first glimpse of Europe. If she expected to pocket her bonanza in Lisbon, she wasn’t likely to choose to do it in the company of forty other rubbernecks.

The Saint unlocked the door to his room, locked it again behind him, and picked up his telephone.

“Hello, Mother,” he said brightly.

“It’s Wade again,” replied a disconcerted, low-pitched voice.

“Just thought I’d fool any wiretappers, but now you’ve given the game away. What’s up?”

“The girl, she’s made reservations to—”

“Fly to Switzerland?” Simon suggested.

“How did you know?”

“A pal of mine decided to sing for his vinho. But I didn’t get the hour of departure.”

“She’s leaving on the Air Europe flight at four-thirty, for Geneva. I just got a call from our contact at one of the travel agencies. She seems to be travelling with that man you mentioned—Curt Jaeger. He bought a ticket on the same flight. Know anything more about him?”

“I’m afraid not,” Simon answered. I’m counting on your organization for that. In the meantime, our gal is booked on a sightseeing bus tour which leaves here at eleven. Do you think your watchdog on the spot could trail along? She’s liable to drop the whole idea if I show up and try to hold her hand, but I’d like to feel that somebody was protecting her.”

“Affirmative,” said the colonel efficiently. “Will do. What’s your next move?”

“I’ll try to catch a plane earlier in the day and pick up my gorgeous little prey and her friend again at the Geneva airport. Ill give you a ring from there to be sure nothing catastrophic happened after I left.”

“Sounds like the best program,” Colonel Wade agreed. “If nothing else happens, I’ll hear from you from Switzerland. I’m afraid you’ll have to be on your own there until I can arrange …”

“I’d prefer it that way,” Simon said. “Don’t arrange anything. Just see that Vicky gets on her plane safely. I’ll take care of the rest at the other end of the line.”

3

The Saint landed at the Geneva airport at five-twenty in the afternoon—by which time Vicky Kinian would have taken off from Lisbon in another plane headed for the same destination. As soon as he had cleared Customs he found a telephone booth and rang up Colonel Wade back in Portugal.

“The girl left on schedule,” the intelligence officer told him over the crackling fine. This Jaeger character was with her. From what my man could overhear on the sightseeing bus they’re just friends—and not very close ones at that. Jaeger’s a respectable businessman as far as we can find out up till now. Sales manager of some kind of Swiss watch export company, which explains why he’s going to Geneva.”

“But not why Vicky is,” said the Saint. “I’ll be waiting under the Welcome mat when they light here. You’ll be hearing from me.”

“Good luck, Saint!”

The first thing that impressed Simon when he emerged from finishing his business was the crisp freshness of the Swiss air as contrasted with the humid sea level atmosphere he had left behind. The second phenomenon that impressed him was a stout, bald, rather scholarly looking man whose facial topography was somewhat concealed between a Vandyke beard and a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles. He left the telephone booth which shared a common wall with the one Simon had used, and stayed in the same area of the lobby. When the Saint paused to glance over the magazines displayed at the newsstand, the white-bearded man took an interest in a display of chocolates a few feet away. When the Saint moved on to study the arrival-and-departure boards, the stout man concerned himself with the purchase of a newspaper.

Simon felt certain he had seen the man—without paying any particular attention to him—on the same plane he had taken from Lisbon. Why should he hang around the terminal building and, by chance or design, not let any great expanse of waxed rubber tile get between him and the Saint?

Simon deliberately walked off at a brisk pace towards the far end of the lobby. The other man did not follow, although it was possible that his eyes tracked Simon’s changing position from behind his thin-framed glasses. A short while later, as the building became more crowded with passengers and their friends, the bearded man turned, tucked his paper under his arm, and strode out of one of the doors towards the taxi stand as if whatever mysterious business he had had in the lobby had suddenly been consummated.

Simon relaxed more completely and tried to decide whether the episode had really been an episode or whether it had been no more than a suspicion in an alert and uncharitable mind. If Grandpa Trotsky did not reappear, well and good. If he ever materialized as an innocent lurker again, it would be time to consider countermeasures.

There was a U-Drive car rental kiosk in the lobby not far from where the Saint was standing when his bewhiskered friend left the scene. Simon went over to it and spoke to the gray-uniformed brunette behind the counter.

“Salutations, Lieutenant,” he said cheerily. “I wonder if you have anything in the motor pool that would suit me.”

The girl touched her pert forage cap self-consciously and gave him a smile that seemed to say, “If you’d like to see me in something more glamorous, just ask …” But as is usual with girls in real life, what she actually said was less exciting.

“I’m certain we do, m’sieur. What kind of automobile would you need?”

“I’d like to hire something that’s fairly fast but not too conspicuous. Bigger than a breadbox but smaller than those chrome-plated hearses you rent to couples from Miami.”

“A Volkswagen, m’sieur, or …”

“A Volkswagen is fine.”

The formalities took only a short while, and when he was putting his signature on the completed forms the counter girl asked him, “What hotel will you stay at here in Geneva?”

“I don’t know yet. Where I go depends on some friends who’ll be in a little later. As soon as I’ve settled on one I’ll phone you.”

“Can I do anything to help you?”

Simon regarded her.

“If I told you,” he said regretfully, “I’m afraid you’d tell me that your Hertz belongs to Daddy.”

When his friends did arrive, the Saint was waiting for them in his green Beetle near the terminal building’s entrance. He watched as Vicky Kinian and a tall man came out of the swinging glass doors and waited to step into a taxi. The girl’s companion—sharp-featured, with closely trimmed light hair—held the cab’s door for her, gave an order to the driver, and got into the back seat himself. Simon did not recognize him; even from a number of yards away he could be sure that their paths had never crossed before. There was no way to tell yet, then, whether Herr Jaeger’s main interest was in attractive American girls or some more negotiable and enduring embodiment of pleasure, perhaps in the form of several tons of SS gold at the bottom of an Alpine lake.

The taxi pulled away from the curb. Simon had already started his car. Now he accelerated after the cab, not hesitating to stick quite close behind it during its trip into the city.

While the Saint followed, Curt Jaeger was beginning to doubt his once considerable powers as an interrogator. All the way from the green-and-brown coats of Portugal to the white icy crags of the Alps he had been subtly trying, without the slightest success, to lead Vicky Kinian on to the subject of her treasure hunt, and in particular on to the events which he knew had taken place the night before.

He had waited in his room at the Tagus after coming back from dinner with Vicky, expecting his telephone to bestir him at any minute with a ring from Pedro reporting on his search for her letter. A great many minutes had passed—one hundred and forty-eight, by Jaeger’s own count —before the telephone did ring, and then the breathless voice which blabbered ungrammatical Portuguese over the wire did not belong to Pedro.

“This is Fano, the driver. I know where you at so I call. Pedro, he’s dead—shot by the cops!”

A moment of panic had threatened to shatter Jaeger’s usual self-control; but recalling the necessity for superior races to maintain a firm facade when dealing with such low forms of life as Portuguese cab drivers, he had managed to keep his voice completely steady.

“Do they know about me?” he asked.

“They do not know nothing,” replied the driver emphatically. “I hear Pedro was dead the minute they plugged him. So it’s all right if you pay me.”

“What did you find in the girl’s room?” Jaeger asked without optimism. Vicky’s revelation during dinner that she had memorized and destroyed the vital part of her father’s letter had already made Pedro’s search of her room seem hardly necessary.

“We didn’t go in,” was the answer. “A man come out-had a letter on him.”

“Came out?” Jaeger asked impatiently, straining to understand the difficult accent. “Out of what?”

“This man, he come out of the girl’s room. We followed him to an alley. Pedro took him and there was a big fight. Then the cops come and we run—”

“Without the letter?”

“We couldn’t get it,” the thug said excitedly. “Like I tell you, the cops come, shoot Pedro. I beat it out of there.”

“This man who came out of her room—do you know him? Who was he?”

“Don’t know. Very tall, black hair, eyes blue …”

“Thin? Fat?”

“More thin—like a matador. Strong as hell—and quick!”

The Latin began appealing to his gods and their female relatives to witness the inhuman power and swiftness of his foe in the alley fight. Jaeger interrupted him again.

“And you found out nothing else?”

“No, but we done as you told us, so you can pay me. You can pay me for Pedro too. I give to his widow.”

Jaeger had needed all his powers of self-restraint to prevent himself from screeching hysterically.

“You are a stupid idiotic oaf,” he had said coldly. “If I ever see you again or hear from you again, it will be your fortunate widow who needs a donation.”

He had slammed down the receiver and spent many feverish hours during the wakeful night raking his brain for some clue as to who the stranger might be who was threatening to interrupt his long, long climb just before he reached the pinnacle.

In the taxi with Vicky in Geneva, he tried once more. Surely, he told himself for the hundredth time, if someone had broken into her room and taken something, she would be aware of it—and eventually admit it to him. He was, after all, her only friend in a foreign land.

“I am worried about you,” he insisted. “Perhaps I can ask one question that will not seem like prying into your secrets …”

“Worried about me?” Vicky asked.

She had spent most of the flight, as well as the drive between airport and city center, in a pensive, quiet, apparently almost depressed mood.

“Yes. Is it possible that anybody else could be looking for the same thing as you may be?”

Vicky’s reaction was not at all sophisticated. She glanced at him sharply.

“What made you ask that?”