The Saint in the Sun (20 page)

He turned back to Irma Jorovitch, and his voice was just as tolerantly good-humored as it had been ever since she had intruded herself with her grisly reminder of what to him were only the facts of life. He said: “And you think it should be a picnic for me to rescue him.”

She said: “Not a picnic. No. But if any man on earth can do it, you can.”

“You know, you could be right. But I was trying to take a holiday from all that.”

“If you would want money,” she said, “I have nothing worth your time to offer. But I could try to get it. I would do anything -anything!”

It was altogether disgraceful, he admitted, but he could do nothing to inhibit an inward reflex of response except try not to think about it.

“Gentleman adventurers aren’t supposed to take advantage of offers like that,” he said, with unfeigned regret.

“You must help me,” she said again. “Please.”

He sighed.

“All right,” he said. “I suppose I must.”

Her face lit up with a gladness that did the same things for it that the Aurora Borealis does to the arctic snows. It was a reaction that he had seen many times, as if his mere consent to have a bash had vaporized all barriers. It would have been fatally intoxicating if he ever forgot how precariously, time after time, he had succeeded in justifying so much faith.

“It isn’t done yet, darling,” he reminded her. “Tell me more about this house.”

It was on the southern shore of the Vierwaldstättersee, he learned, the more rugged and less accessible side which rises to the mingled tripper-traps and tax-dodger chalets of Bürgenstock, and by land it was reachable only by a second-to-secondary road which served nothing but a few other similarly isolated hermitages. Although it was dark when she passed it, she was sure there was no other residence near by, so that anyone approaching in daylight would certainly be under observation long before he got close. The walls around the grounds were about seven feet high, topped with barbed wire, but with slits that the inmates could peep through-to say nothing of what electronic devices might augment their vigilance. Added to which, she had heard dogs barking as she drove past.

“Nothing to it,” said the Saint-“if I hadn’t forgotten to bring my invisible and radar-proof helicopter.”

“You will think of something,” she said with rapturous confidence.

He lighted a cigarette and meditated for almost a minute.

“You say this house is right on the lake?”

“Yes. Because at the next turning after I passed, my headlights showed the water.”

“Do you think you could recognize it again, from the lake side?”

“I think so.”

“Good. Then let’s take a little boat ride.”

He paid his bill, and finished his coffee while he waited for the change. Then they walked down the Löwenstrasse and across the tree-shaded promenades of the Nationalquai to the lake front. Just a few yards to the left there was a small marina offering a variety of water craft for hire, which he had already casually scouted without dreaming that he would ever use it in this way. With the same kind of companionship, perhaps, but not for this kind of mission …

The Saint chose a small but comfortably upholstered runabout, the type of boat that would automatically catch the eye of a man who was out to impress a pretty girl-and that was precisely how he wanted them to be categorized by anyone who had a motive for studying them closely. Taking advantage of the weather and the informal customs of the country, he was wearing only a pair of light slacks and a tartan sport shirt, and Irma was dressed in a simple white blouse and gaily patterned dirndl, so that there was nothing except their own uncommon faces to differentiate them from any other holiday-making twosome.

And as he aimed the speedboat diagonally southeastwards across the lake, with the breeze of their own transit tousling her short white-blond hair and moulding the filmy blouse like a tantalizing second skin against the thrusting mounds of her breasts, he had leisure to wish that they had been brought together by nothing more pre-emptive than one of those random holiday magnetisms which provide inexhaustible grist for the world’s marriage and divorce mills in self-compensating proportions.

She had put on a pair of sunglasses when they left the restaurant, and out on the water the light was strong enough for Simon to take out a pair of his own which had been tucked in his shirt pocket. But they would be useful for more than protection against the glare.

“Get the most out of these cheaters when we start looking for the house,” he told her as he put them on. “Don’t turn your head and look at anything directly: just turn your eyes and keep facing somewhere else. Behind the glasses, anybody watching us won’t be able to tell what we’re really looking at.”

“You think of everything. I will try to remember.”

“About how far did you drive out of Lucerne to this house?”

“I cannot be sure. It seemed quite far, but the road was winding.”

This was so femininely vague that he resigned himself to covering the entire southern shore if necessary. On such an afternoon, and with such a comely companion, it was a martyrdom which he could endure with beatific stoicism. Having reached the nearest probable starting point which he had mentally selected, he cut the engine down to a smooth idling gait and steered parallel to the meandering coast line, keeping a distance of about a hundred yards from the shore.

“Relax, Irma,” he said. “Any house that’s on this stretch of lake, we’ll see. Meanwhile, we should look as if we’re just out for the ride.”

To improve this visual effect, he lowered himself from his hot-water-rodder’s perch on the gunwhale to the cushion behind the wheel, and she snuggled up to him.

“Like this?” she asked seriously.

“More or less,” he approved, with fragile gravity, and slipped an arm around her shoulders.

It was only when they had passed Kehrsiten, the landing where the funicular takes off up the sheer palisade to the hotels of Bürgenstock on its crest, that he began to wonder if she had overestimated her ability to identify the house to which Karel Jorovitch had been taken from an aspect which she had never seen. But he felt no change of tension in her as the boat purred along for some kilometers after that, until suddenly she stiffened and clutched him-but with the magnificent presence of mind to turn towards him instead of to the shore.

“There, I have seen it!” she gasped. “The white house with the three tall chimneys! I remember them!”

He looked to his right, over her flaxen head which had a disconcertingly pure smell which reminded him somehow of new-mown hay, and saw the only edifice she could have been, referring to.

The tingle that went through him was an involuntary psychic-somatic acknowledgement that the adventure had now become real, and he was well and truly hooked.

In order to study the place thoroughly and unhurriedly, he turned towards Irma, folded her tenderly in his arms, and applied his lips to hers. In that position, he could continue to keep his eyes on the house whilst giving the appearance of being totally preoccupied with radically unconnected pursuits.

It was surprisingly unpretentious, for a diplomatic enclave. He would have taken it for a large oldfashioned family house-or a house for a large oldfashioned family, according to the semantic preference of the phrase-maker. At any rate, it was not a refurbished mansion or a small re-converted hotel. Its most unusual feature was what she had already mentioned: the extraordinarily high wire-topped garden walls which came down at a respectable distance on both sides of it-not merely to the lake edge, but extending about twelve feet out into the water. And for the further discouragement of anyone who might still have contemplated going around them, those two barriers were joined by a rope linking a semicircle of small bright red buoys such as might have marked the limits of a safe bathing area, but which also served to bar an approach to the shore by boat-even if they were not anchored to some underwater obstruction which would have made access altogether impossible.

And on the back porch of the house, facing the lake, a square-shouldered man in a deck chair raised a pair of binoculars and examined them lengthily.

Simon was able to make all these observations in spite of the fact that Irma Jorovitch was cooperating in his camouflage with an ungrudging enthusiasm which was no aid at all to concentration.

Finally they came to a small headland beyond which there was a cove into which he could steer the boat out of sight of the watcher on the porch. Only then did the Saint release her, not without reluctance, and switched off the engine to become crisply businesslike again.

“Excuse the familiarity,” he said. “But you know why I had to do it.”

“I liked it, too,” she said demurely.

As the boat drifted to a stop, Simon unstrapped his wrist watch and laid it on the deck over the dashboard. He held his pen upright beside it to cast a shadow from the sun, and turned the watch to align the hour hand with the shadow, while Irma watched fascinated.

“Now, according to my boy scout training, halfway between the hour hand and twelve o’clock on the dial is due south,” he explained. “I need a bearing on this place, to be able to come straight to it next time-and at night.”

From there, he could no longer see anything useful of Lucerne. But across the lake, on the north side, he spotted the high peaked roof of the Park Hotel at Viznau, and settled on that as a landmark with multiple advantages. He sighted on it several times, until he was satisfied that he had established an angle accurately enough for any need he would have.

“This is all we can do right now,” he said. “In broad daylight, we wouldn’t have a prayer of getting him out. I don’t even know what the odds will be after dark, but I’ll try to think of some way to improve them.”

The beautiful cold face-which he had discovered could be anything but cold at contact range-was strained and entreating.

“But what if they take him away before tonight?”

“Then we’ll have lost a bet,” he said grimly. “We could hustle back to Lucerne, get a car, come back here by road-I could find the place now, all right-and mount guard until they try to drive away with him. Then we could try an interception and rescue—supposing he isn’t already gone, or they don’t take him away even before we get back. On the other hand, they might keep him here for a week, and how could we watch all that time? Instead of waiting, we could be breaking in tonight… It’s the kind of choice that generals are paid and pilloried for making.”

She held her head in her hands.

“What can I say?”

Simon Templar prodded the starter button, and turned the wheel to point the little speedboat back towards Lucerne.

“You’ll have to make up your own mind, Irma,” he said relentlessly. “It’s your father. You tell me, and we’ll play it in your key.”

There was little conversation on the return drive. The decision could only be left to her. He did not want to influence it, and he was glad it was not up to him, for either alternative seemed to have the same potentiality of being as catastrophically wrong as the other.

When he had brought the boat alongside the dock and helped her out, he said simply: “Well?”

“Tonight,” she replied resolutely. “That is the way it must be.”

“How did you decide?”

“As you would have, I think. If the nearest man on the dock when we landed wore a dark shirt, I would say ‘Tonight’. It was a way of tossing up, without a coin. How else could I choose?”

Simon turned to the man in the blue jersey who was nearest, who was securing the boat to its mooring rings.

“Could we reserve it again tonight?” he inquired in German. “The Fräulein would like to take a run in the moonlight.”

“At what time?” asked the attendant, unmoved by romantic visions. “Usually I close up at eight.”

“At about nine,” said the Saint, ostentatiously unfolding a hundred-franc note from his wad. “I will give you two more of these when I take the boat, and you need not wait for us. I will tie it up safely when we come back.”

“Jawohl, mein Herr!” agreed the man, with alacrity. “Whenever you come, at nine or later, I shall be here.”

Simon and Irma walked back over the planking to the paved promenade where natives and visitors were now crisscrossing, at indicatively different speeds, on their homeward routes. The sun had already dropped below the high horizons to the west, and the long summer twilight would soon begin.

“Suppose we succeed in this crazy project,” he said. “Have you thought about what we do next?”

“My father will be free. I will book passage on a plane and take him back to Sweden with me.”

“Your father will be free, but will you? And will I? Or for how long? Has it occurred to you, sweetheart, that the Swiss government takes a notoriously dim view of piratical operations on their nice neutral soil, even with the best of motives? And the Russkis won’t hesitate to howl their heads off at this violation of their extra-territorial rights.”

Her step faltered, and she caught his arm.

“I am so stupid,” she said humbly. “I should have thought of that. Instead, I was asking you to become a criminal, to the Swiss Government, instead of a hero. Forgive me.” Then she looked up at him in near terror. “Will you give it up because of that?”

He shook his head, with a shrug and a wry smile.

“I’ve been in trouble before. I’m always trying to keep out of it, but Fate seems to be agin me.”

“Through the travel agency, perhaps I can arrange something to help us to get away. Let me go back to my hotel and make some telephoning.”

“Where are you staying?”

“A small hotel, down that way.” She pointed vaguely in the general direction of the Schwanenplatz and the older town which lies along the river under the ancient walls which protected it five centuries ago. “It is all I can afford,” she said defensively. “I suppose you are staying here? Or at the Palace?” They were at the corner of the Grand National Hotel and the Halderistrasse.

“Here. It’s the sort of place where travel bureaux like yours send people like me,” he murmured. “So you go home and see what you can organize, and I’ll see what I can work out myself. Meet me back here at seven. I’m in room 129.” He flagged a taxi which came cruising by. “Dress up prettily for dinner, but nothing fussy-and bring a sweater, because it’ll be chilly later on that thar lake.”