The Saint Around the World (11 page)

The uniformed men had taken Mr. Clarron away, and a nurse had arrived to take charge of his wife. Mrs. Clarron had refused to let a doctor be called in with sedatives, but she was quietly and methodically getting drunk, which would eventually have a similar effect. The Saint couldn’t blame her.

“That’s the one ugly thing left,” he said. “She’s still got to live with the results of Reginald’s first attempt. And I’ll always wonder if it wouldn’t have been kinder to let her. eat that stew.”

“Perhaps you won’t have to,” Adrienne said. “She told me that the specialists had been talking about another operation that might fix her up.

The Saint’s eyes lightened.

“Then maybe it’s not so indecent to celebrate after all. And some celebration certainly seems called for. I suppose you did bring some beer when you thought I’d be waiting when you came back, and Claud and I should drink a parting toast.”

“You’re forgetting,” Teal said stodgily. “I don’t drink. Fat men didn’t ought to drink.”

Adrienne made him a cup of tea.

“The one thing that puzzles me,” Simon said, “is why you took so long to show up at Clarron’s, Claud, after I disappeared from here. Or, put it another way, how you were on his doorstep at the ideal moment.”

“After you left Heath Row,” Teal said reluctantly, “I came down to the Maidenhead police station and waited for Miss Halberd to get in touch with me. When she reported that Clarron had gone to London, I had a man watch the railway station let us know when he came back. Then she phoned and told me you’d left, and I hoped you meant it. I came over and joined her here. We were informed as soon as Clarron got off the train, and we started watching his house. I was afraid he might try something desperate soon, after the scare you’d given him, and I could only hope we’d be able to prevent it. As soon as he started screaming, we rushed over.”

“But you hadn’t spotted that Mrs. Jafferty was purely fictitious.”

“Not yet.”

“And if I hadn’t been there, you still wouldn’t have been in time to save Mrs. Clarron’s life.”

“We might have been able to get her to a hospital in time.”

“You wouldn’t. But even if you had, you’d only have been looking for Mrs. Jafferty. And even if you’d discovered that she was a phony, you could only have convicted Reginald of attempted murder. It took the fright I threw into him to make him confess everything.”

“That’s probably true,” Teal said grudgingly. “But it still doesn’t excuse your interfering and taking the law into your own hands.” His voice rose a little. “And one of these days–-“

“Now you’re forgetting,” Simon reminded him gently. “There aren’t going to be any more of these days for you. You’re retiring, and you’ll only read about me in the papers.”

Chief Inspector Teal swallowed.

He looked ahead into a vague Elysian vista in which there were no problems, no apprehensions—and no taunting privateer with unquenchable devilment in his eyes and an impudent forefinger pointing like a rapier at his stomach. It would be very restful; and there would be something lacking.

“That’s right,” said Mr. Teal. “I was forgetting.”

He hauled himself sluggishly to his feet, and put out his hand; and for almost the first time in all those years Simon saw something very like a smile on his round pink apoplectic face.

“I’m rather glad it ends up this “way,” Teal said. He glanced selfconsciously around him. “But I’ve still got work to do tonight. And I think Miss Halberd has some apologizing to do which she might rather do in private. The rent’s paid on this cottage to the end of the month,” he added inconsequently. “So if you’ll excuse me–-“

“Damn it, Claud Eustace,” said the Saint, “I’m going to miss you too.”

THE RELUCTANT NUDIST

i

“When do you start taking your clothes off?” Simon Templar asked, with a faint hint of malice.

George McGeorge wriggled unhappily inside his pastel blue silk shirt and sharply creased slacks. Between the crown of his stylish Panama and the soles of his immaculate suede shoes, he was almost conspicuously a young man to whom the ministrations of tailor and haberdasher were more than ordinarily important. His rather vapidly good-looking face took on a tinge of pink under its urban pallor.

“Not before everyone else does, anyway,” he said.

“Never mind about anyone else,” Simon persisted. “I think it would give Uncle Waldo a big glow to see that you were entering into the spirit of the thing right from the start.”

“In that case, he’d be still more bucked if I could introduce you in your birthday suit too, and tell him that I’d even made another convert on the way over.”

“That wasn’t in the deal, George. I offered to come with you as moral support and as an interested observer—not as a sort of trophy. And because it sounded like one of the few places left in the world where I could feel reasonably sure of not getting mixed up in some sort of crime. I’m banking on the idea that nudists couldn’t carry around much stuff worth stealing, and that murder is a lot more difficult where it would be such a problem to conceal a weapon.”

“The closer I get to it,” Mr. McGeorge said darkly, “the more I wish one of ‘em would strangle Uncle Waldo.”

The Saint grinned, and gazed with tranquil anticipation at the islands spread before the bow of the little ferry. There were three of them to be seen, the fourth member of the group being just below the western horizon; reading from right to left he could identify, from an earlier glance at a map, the small hump of Bagaud, the much larger bulk of Port-Cros, and finally, the longest and most easterly, the Ile du Levant, which was their destination. Lying in a corner of the Mediterranean which is still virtually terra incognita to the American tourist army, whose Riviera extends no further west than the outskirts of Cannes, they are known to prosy official cartographers as the Iles d’Hyeres, but to the more flowery-minded authors of travel brochures as the Golden Isles; while one of them, to a still more specialized public, stands for the closest approximation to the Garden of Eden to be found within the borders of civilization.

For this island of about six miles in length and roughly a mile and a quarter in average width, which is separated by only nine miles of water from the unglamorized but busy little Provencal resort of Le Lavandou, is the beneficiary of an official dispensation which remains unique among the local ordinances of Europe.

“You see,” Mr. McGeorge had explained it, “over there it’s perfectly legal for anyone—I mean women as well as men—to go around in a sort of triangular fig-leaf effect, and nothing else.”

This happened at the bar of the Club at Cavaliere, the most exclusive hostelry on that stretch of the coast, where they had drifted into one of those usually sterile bar-stool conversations to which this was to prove a notable exception.

“Oh,” said the Saint. “A kind of semi-nudist colony.”

“Not even semi,” the other said. “That’s only in the village. When they go swimming, they’re allowed to take everything off. And the point is, it isn’t a colony or a club. It isn’t private property, and you don’t have to belong to anything or join anything. Anybody can go there. And you don’t even have to take off your hat if you don’t want to. It’s just that there’s no law against taking off practically everything if you like—and from the pictures I’ve seen, most of them seem to like.”

“Zat is right.” Raymond Vidal, proprietor and host of the Club, who had been listening, chimed in with genially expansive corroboration. “It was about nineteen ‘undred twenty, zat two docteurs from Paris, named Durville, very serious men, wish to bring people to be cured by ze sun, and zey start to make ze village which zey call Heliopolis. And so zat ze patient can get ze most sun wiz ze least clozing, ze ayrrange a tolerance from ze Commune of Hyeres, so zat no one ‘as to wear more zan ze slip minimum. But it is all quite open. It is very beautiful, very natural. You should go zaire and see it.”

“I have to go there,” said Mr. McGeorge, with no echo of enthusiasm, “to see my uncle.”

He looked like a young man who should have an uncle— preferably one with a considerable fortune, a strong sense of family responsibility, and no wife or offspring of his own. Without some such source of bounty, one would only have felt sorry about his prospects in a callously competitive world. He was the first specimen that Simon had encountered in many years of a type that he had thought was virtually extinct—the spoiled butterfly of good family, a good education which had left no mark on anything but his accent, of ingenuous snobbery, impeccable manners, cultivated indolence, a gift for fairly amusing and decorative frivolity, and absolutely no conception of a world which did not revolve around the smartest clubs, the most fashionable resorts, and the most glittering parties. How he had ever managed to navigate himself that far from the languid eddies of the Croisette and the Cap d’Antibes was already a mystery; and that such a creature could have a personal link, however tenuous, with a place like the He du Levant, was an anomaly that no inveterate student of oddities could casually pass up.

The Saint signed to the bartender for some more Peter Dawson.

“Tell me about this uncle,” he begged, with fascinated sympathy.

“He lives there,” said McGeorge, in the same tone in which he might have admitted that his uncle was addicted to cheating at cards.

Mr. Waldo Oddington, Simon learned, patiently probing for information as he would have extracted morsels of succulence from the shell of a cracked crab, was the brother of Mc-George’s mother, and by this time McGeorge’s only surviving kin. Brother and sister had been deeply attached to each other, in spite of Mr. Oddington’s lifelong record of eccentricities; and one of the late Mrs. McGeorge’s last injunctions to her son had been that he should never forget that blood was thicker than water, and that in his veins the Oddington strain of fluid was a full fifty per cent represented. George McGeorge had dutifully tried to live up to this, encouraging his uncle to regard him almost as the son which Mr. Oddington, a bachelor, had never begotten for himself; although one gathered that this had been no easy task for a young man of Mr. McGeorge’s highly developed respect for certain conventions.

“He’s spent his life getting one bee after another in his bonnet. About the first time I can remember him visiting us, when I was a kid. he insisted on having the bed taken out of his room and sleeping on the floor. Said it was the only way to have a healthy backbone. He thought it was disgraceful that Mother was letting me sleep on a mattress and ruin my spine. Another time he had a theory that expectant mothers would have a much easier time if they went around for the last few months on all fours. He got in a bit of trouble when he started telling this to perfectly strange women that he saw in the street. He’s had a fling at vegetarianism, theosophy, yoga, folk dancing, and trying to live in a tree. Of course, he started going to nudist camps years ago. Then he finally heard about this Ile du Levant. Naturally he had to go and see it; and he’s been living there ever since. At last he’s found the one place where he can lead what he calls a normal civilized life and never needs to put any clothes on even to go out and buy a stamp. That would be fine as far as I’m. concerned, if only he hadn’t asked me to visit him.”

“Do you have to go?”

“I’ve put it off as long as I can, but I can’t make it so obvious that I’d hurt the old codger’s feelings.”

Simon could well understand that the feelings of a certain class of old codger are customarily treated with the utmost consideration. Not letting it sound too obvious, he remarked: “At least it sounds like a nice inexpensive fad. Or wouldn’t that make any difference?”

“Well, he doesn’t have to worry too much about money.” McGeorge seemed a little embarrassed and anxious to change that subject. “But lately his letters have been full of some French girl who appears to be living with him, and I’ve wondered if she’s thinking of hitching on to a good thing.”

“It couldn’t be love, could it?”

“It could be, I suppose. But he’s over sixty and she’s only twentyfive.”

“I wouldn’t think a guy like that could be sold on anything so conventional as marriage.”

“I know Free Love was another thing that he used to be steamed up about. But you never can tell,” Mr. McGeorge said pessimistically. “Anyhow, that’s another reason why I thought I’d better go and look things over.”

Simon needed no diagrams to visualize the threat that a belated romance could pose to a man in the position to which George McGeorge seemed so perfectly adapted, and he rather admired the other’s brazen candor.

It was the first time that the Saint, whose years of adventure had taken him to some of the most outlandish reaches of the globe and whose fund of uncommon lore was sometimes astounding in its range, had ever heard of the Ile du Levant and its peculiar tradition; but even for him there could still be something new under the sun, and it was just as likely to be something so close to familiar settings that he might never have noticed it if he had not stubbed his toe on it. Now that he had stumbled on it, a closer look became almost mandatory. The idea of visiting such an informally accessible Eden intrigued him, not pruriently, but with a most human curiosity. The privilege of simultaneously watching the reactions to it of such a person as George McGeorge was an added spice, while the possibility of also observing the by-play between Mr. McGeorge and his Uncle Waldo made it completely irresistible.

Simon Templar gazed dreamily out at the island, still visible beyond the terrace where they sat, and said: “I wouldn’t miss that island if I had to swim there. Maybe we could go over together.”

Which was how they came to be sitting side by side on a bench on the good ship Fleche d’Or, watching the rugged slopes of the island loom rapidly nearer over the intense blue water.

The little ferry, which still had the sturdy lines of a converted fishing boat, was dressed with gay strings of flags from the masthead to the bow and stern, which gave it a very gallant and festive air. In the pilot house, the captain, who called himself on his own handbills Loulou the Corsair, was eating breakfast with his crew of two men and a boy, all of them stripped to the waist, barefooted, and with brightly colored bandannas knotted around their heads. This meal, Simon had noted with some awe, consisted of a long loaf of bread, a wedge of blue cheese, a cylinder of salami, and a large slab of raw beef, from all of which they alternately hacked off generous hunks with their clasp knives, nibbling whole cloves of garlic between mouthfuls and washing them down with swigs from a bottle of white wine—a heroic performance which would have been a grave shock to those who have been brought up to believe that the French working man embarks on a full morning’s toil with no more sustenance than a croissant and a cup of coffee. The entire combination, with the sunlight sparkling on harmless little waves, gave the voyage a play-acting zest that could not possibly attend a ferry trip anywhere else in the world.