The Saint in the Sun (25 page)

“I promise,” Rowena said. “Anything I buy I’ll carry myself.”

“And don’t think I won’t hold you to that,” Simon grinned at her.

“You’ve got a witness,” she smiled back.

Wakerose heaved a sigh of tastefully controlled depth.

“You must both rest your feet at the Jules César,” he said. “It is right in the middle of the main street, and as I recall it they serve a most edible lunch. And Rowena should appreciate a hotel named after such a genuine historical hero instead of some parvenu tycoon as they usually are in America. Come to think of it, I believe there are six or seven different towns called Rome in the United States, and I’ll wager that not one of them has even a motel called the Julius Caesar.”

The conversation continued with light and random variety through dinner.

Characteristically, Wakerose suggested Parma ham and melon for a start, followed by flamed quail and a green salad, to which Simon was quite contented to agree; but for Rowena it was foie gras to begin with, and then chicken in a cream sauce with tarragon, and pommes Dauphine.

“I would propose a glass of Chante Alouette ‘59 for all of us to start with,” Wakerose said, studying the wine list, “and Rowena can finish the bottle with her chicken. You and I, Mr Templar, can wash down our cailles with a red Rhône. Do you have any preference? They have a most impressive selection here. Or are you one of those people to whom all Châteauneuf du Pape is the same?”

“The Montredon is very good, I think,” Simon said, without glancing at the list. “Especially the ‘55.”

The meal ended with the score about even and all the amenities observed, though by the end of it the Saint thought there was an infinitesimal fraying at the edges of Wakerose’s cultivated smoothness, and thought that he could surmise the reason. It was not that Wakerose would be seriously exasperated to have encountered an adversary who could meet him on level terms in his own specialty of going one better. Something more important seemed to preoccupy him, and the strain was cramping his style.

For dessert, Wakerose chose an almost calorie-free sorbet, but clairvoyantly anticipated Rowena’s yearning for the crępes flambées which the Petite Auberge, proud of its own recipe, disdains to call Suzette. But this time the Saint decided that he had been dietetically discreet enough all day, and could afford the indulgence of leaving Wakerose alone in his austerity.

“I’m so glad you can at least pretend to dissipate with me,” Rowena said glowingly. “It makes me feel just a little less of a freak, even if you’re only doing it to be polite, I love you for it.”

Wakerose looked at her oddly.

“Mr Templar has that wonderful knack of making everybody feel like somebody special,” he commented. “It must have required superhuman will-power for him to remain a bachelor.”

“Maybe I just haven’t been lucky yet,” Simon said easily. “I’m corny enough to be stuck with the old romantic notion that for every person there’s an ideal mate wandering somewhere in the world; and when they meet, the bells ring and things light up and there’s no argument. The coup de foudre, as the French call it. Some people settle for less, or too soon, and some people never find it, but that doesn’t prove that it can’t happen.”

His gaze shifted once from Wakerose to Rowena and back again, as it might in any normal generality of discussion, but he knew that her eyes never left his face.

“One might call it the Some Enchanted Evening syndrome,” Wakerose said sardonically. “Well, each of us to our superstitions. I cling to the one which maintains that brandy or a liqueur at the end of a meal is a digestive, although I know that medical authority contradicts me. Rowena enjoys a Benedictine. What would appeal to you?”

“I shall be completely neutral,” said the Saint, “and have a B-and-B.”

They took their coffee and liqueurs outside on the terrace. Rowena ordered her coffee in a large cup, liégeois, with a dollop of ice cream in it, and used it to swallow a pill from a little jewelled box; but the caffeine was not sufficient to stop her contributions to the conversational rally becoming more and more infrequent and desultory, and Wakerose had still not finished his long cigar when she stifled a yawn and excused herself.

“I’m folding,” she said. “And I want to be bright tomorrow. Will you forgive me?” She stood up and gave her hand to the Saint, and he kissed it with an impudent flourish. “Thank you again for today-and what time does the private tour leave in the morning?”

“Shall we say ten o’clock again?”

“You’re the boss. And tonight I’ll leave my own call at the desk, so you won’t be kept waiting. Goodnight, Saville.”

Wakerose tracked her departure with elegantly lofted eyebrows, and made a fastidious business of savoring another puff of smoke.

“My felicitations,” he said at last. “You appear to have her marvellously intimidated, which is no mean feat. But I would advise you, if I may, not to presume too much on this docility. I’ve seen it before, and I feel I have a duty to warn you. Behind that submissiveness there lurks a tiger which even professional hunters have mistaken for a fat cat.”

There was an inherent laziness in the balmy Provençal evening which allowed the Saint to take a long leisurely pause before any answer was essential, which helped to cushion the abruptness of the transition he had to make.

“There was something I wanted to talk to you about,” he said, “but not quite as publicly as this.” He turned his head from side to side to indicate the other guests at adjacent tables, within potentially embarrassing earshot. “I wonder if you’d like to see my room? I don’t know what yours is like, but I think mine is exceptionally nice, and you might find it worth remembering if you ever come here again.”

Wakerose’s brows repeated their eloquent elevation, but after a pointedly puzzled pause he said: “Certainly, that sounds interesting.”

They went in through the foyer and past the stairs. Simon’s room was on the ground floor, in a wing beyond the inner lounge. He unlocked the door, ushered Wakerose in, and shut the door again behind them.

Wakerose looked methodically around, put his head in the bathroom, and said: “Very nice indeed. But you had something more than comparative accommodations to talk about, didn’t you?”

The Saint opened his suitcase, rummaged in it and took out a pack of cigarettes, and dropped the lid again. He opened the package and then put it down nervously without taking a cigarette.

“I haven’t seen you smoking before,” Wakerose said.

“I’m trying to quit,” Simon explained, and went on suddenly: “I won’t waste your time beating about the bush. I want to marry your stepdaughter.”

Wakerose rocked back on his heels, and anything he had previously done with his eyebrows became a mere quiver compared with the way they now arched up into his hair line.

“Indeed? And what does Rowena think about it?”

“I haven’t asked her yet. It may be an oldfashioned formality, but I felt I should tell you first. I thought that a gentleman of the old school like yourself would appreciate that.”

“I do. Oh, I do, most emphatically. But you can’t seriously imagine that I would be so overwhelmed that I should give my permission, let alone my blessing, to a suitor such as yourself?”

“If Rowena isn’t twentyone yet, she can’t be far from it. So she’ll be able to make up her own mind soon enough. I just wanted to be honest about my intentions; and I hoped you’d respect them, and that we could be friends.”

Wakerose widened his eyes again elaborately.

“Honest? Respect?” he echoed. “After you gave your word of honor-“

“Not to steal her jewels,” Simon said. “Her heart isn’t a diamond-I hope. We’ve only spent one day together, but I think she feels a little the same about me as I do about her.”

“I could scarcely help noticing the feeling,” Wakerose said. “But I beg to doubt if its nature is the same. Rowena is a sweet girl, but you can’t seriously expect me to believe that she is attractive in that way to such a man as yourself.”

“When I take her to a good specialist, and she loses about fifty pounds,” Simon said steadily, “I think she’ll be one of the most beautiful young women that anyone ever saw.”

Wakerose laughed hollowly.

“My poor fellow. Now I begin to comprehend your delusion. Obviously she hasn’t told you what’s the matter with her.”

“About that ‘adipochria’?” Simon said steadily. “Yes, she has. And I’m prepared to bet my matrimonial future that there’s no such disease known to medical science, and that the doctor who diagnosed it is nothing but an unscrupulous quack.”

The other’s eyes narrowed.

“That is an extremely dangerous statement, Mr Templar.”

“It’ll be easily proved or disproved when she gets an independent opinion from a first-class reputable clinic,” said the Saint calmly. “And if I’m right, I shall then go on to theorize that it was you who snuck something into her food or her vitamin pills when she tried going on a diet, to produce the symptoms which gave you an excuse to lug her off to the first bogus specialist, whom you’d already suborned to prescribe still more carbohydrates and some pills which are probably tranquillizers or something to slow down her metabolism even more. That you deliberately plotted to make her as unattractive as possible, so as to keep her unmarried and leave her mother’s fortune in your hands until you could siphon off all that you wanted.”

He had confirmation enough to satisfy himself in the long silence that followed, before there was any verbal answer.

Saville Wakerose took one more light pull at his cigar, grimaced slightly, and carefully extinguished it in an ashtray.

“One should never try to smoke the last two-and-a-half inches. Very well,” he said briskly, “how much do you want?”

“For conniving to destroy a human being even more cruelly than if you poisoned her?”

“Come now, my dear fellow, let us not overdo the knightly act. There is no admiring audience. And blackmail is not such a pretty crime, either-that is the technical name for your purpose, isn’t it?”

“Then you admit to something you’d rather I kept quiet about?”

“I admit nothing. I am merely looking for a civilized alternative to a great deal of crude unpleasantness and publicity. Shall we say a quarter of a million Swiss francs?”

“Don’t you think it’s degrading to start the bidding as low as that?”

“Half a million, then. Paid into any account you care to name, and quite untraceable.”

The Saint shook his head.

“For such a brilliant man, you can be very dense, Saville. All I want is to give Rowena a fair chance for a happy normal life, in spite of her money.”

“Don’t bid your hand too high,” Wakerose said with brittle restraint. “You are assuming that Rowena will immediately believe these fantastic accusations, regardless of who is making them and what obvious motives can be imputed to him. If it should come to what they call on television a showdown between us, although I would go to great lengths to avoid anything so unsavory, I hope she would prefer to believe my version of this tęte-a-tęte.”

Simon Templar smiled benignly.

He turned back to his suitcase, opened it again, pushed a soiled shirt aside, and extracted a plastic box no bigger than a book. A small metal object dangled from it at the end of a flexible wire, which now seemed to have been hanging outside the suitcase when the lid was closed.

“Have you seen these portable tape recorders?” he asked chattily. “Completely transistorized, battery operated, and frightfully efficient. Of course, their capacity is limited, so I had to use that cigarette routine for an excuse to switch it on when we came in. And the sound quality isn’t hi-fi by musicians’ standards, but voices are unmistakably recognizable. I wonder what version you can give Rowena that ‘ll cancel out this one?”

“How delightfully droll!” All of Wakerose’s face seemed to have gradually turned as gray as his hair, but it can be stated that he did not flinch. “I should not have been so caustic at the expense of television, but I thought that was the only place where these things actually happened. So what is your price now?”

Simon was neatly coiling the flexible link to the microphone, preparatory to tucking it away in the interior of his gadget, but still leaving it operational for the last syllables that it could absorb.

“This will be hard for you to digest, Saville,” he said, “but since anything you paid me would probably be money that you ought to be giving back to Rowena, my conscience would bother me, even if she has got plenty to spare. On the other hand, I’d like to get her out of your clutches without any messy headlines. So I’ll give you a break. If you back me up tomorrow evening when I suggest that she ought to see another doctor-whom I’ll suggest-and if you can think up a good excuse to resign voluntarily as her guardian and trustee, I won’t have to play this tape to her.”

Wakerose compressed his lips and stared grimly about the room. With his hands locked tensely behind his back, he paced across it to the open window and stood looking out into the night. The hunch of his shoulders gave the impression that if it had been on a higher floor he might have thrown himself out.

After a full minute, he turned.

“I shall think about it,” he said, and walked towards the door.

“Think very hard,” said the Saint. “Because I’m not quite sure that it mightn’t be better for Rowena to know the whole horrible truth about you and your slimy scheme. And whatever brilliant inspirations you have about how to doublecross me and retrieve the situation, I’ll always have this little recording.”

Wakerose sneered silently at him, and went out without another word.

He came back soon after three o’clock in the morning, through the open window, and crossed in slow-motion tiptoe to the bed where the covers humped over a peacefully insensible occupant. There was enough starlight to define clearly the dark head-shape buried in the pillow but half uncovered by the sheet, and he swung mightily at it with the heavy candlestick which he carried in one gloved hand …

The massive base bit solidly and accurately into its target, but with no solid crunch of bone, only a soggy resistance-which was natural, since the “head” consisted of a crumpled towel balled up inside a dark pullover and artistically moulded and arranged to give the right appearance. At the same time, a blinding luminance dispelled the treacherous dimness for a fraction of a second before the Saint switched on a less painfully dazzling light.