The Saint in Persuit (5 page)

“You had better remember what happened to Tico,” Jaeger concluded.

Pedro looked thoroughly unhappy as he remembered what had happened to Tico those many years ago.

“It shall be as you say,” he promised.

“Good. Everything is in order, then? Your friend who drives a taxi, is he ready?”

“He waits just around the corner now.”

“Very well. Tell him no more than you have to—and meet me here this evening at six-thirty to let me know what you have learned from the blonde.”

“Bem!” Pedro said, concluding the consultation. “We shall be waiting to welcome her when she comes out.”

Feeling safe at last in her hotel room, all thought of the glamorously Mephistophelean stranger whom she had seen in the lobby passed out of her mind for the moment as she hurried to open her father’s delayed-action envelope. She almost dropped her purse in her eagerness to get the envelope out of it, but then she hesitated before tearing the sealed paper; in spite of her feverish curiosity she would almost have preferred that a ghostly wind would tear the missive out of the fingers and whip it out of the window.

“Just let me read it to myself first,” she said to Freda. “Then if I can tell you all about it, I will.”

“If you don’t mind I’ll take the strain off my stays in the meantime,” Freda said accommodatingly.

She spread herself out in an easy chair as Vicky tore open the envelope. Inside were six hand-written pages.

Still standing, Vicky unfolded them, and as she read her anxious expression turned to one of amazed shock. She sank slowly to a sitting position on the edge of the bed as she read on.

At long last she mumbled: “This is fantastic …”

Freda could control herself no longer.

“What is, Vicky, for heaven’s sake?”

Vicky skimmed quickly through the last two pages before answering. Then, her face drained of colour, she clutched the disordered leaves of the letter in her hands and stared dizzily out at the sky.

“I can’t tell you, Freda,” she said in a trance-like monotone. “At least, not now.”

Freda stood up. Determined good humour veneered a note of understandable disappointment when she replied.

“I shouldn’t be here now anyway. I should have kept my long nose out of your private affairs in the first place.”

Vicky, realizing that she could not possibly tell Freda what the letter said, pretended to be more badly shaken than she was.

“Please forgive me, Freda,” she breathed. “But I’ve got to think it out before I can talk about it.”

Freda had recovered, at least superficially, all of her usual bounce.

“Forget it, honey! I’ll go take me a siesta at the communal pad and be back for our dinner date. How’s that?”

“Fine. I’m so sorry, but you can’t imagine what a shock I’ve had.”

“Don’t worry your pretty little bean about me. Get some rest yourself, and I’ll join you at seven.”

“Thanks so much.”

Freda turned back from the doorway and said: “I just hope my father never writes me a cliff-hanging letter like that!”

For a second or two she hesitated in the corridor, turning over the idea of going back into the room and cancelling out the three-cornered evening with Vicky and Curt Jaeger, which promised to be about as titillating as last night’s lettuce salad. She was slightly irritated already to have wasted half a day for nothing but a quick brushoff when Vicky finally found her goodies. But her alternatives in evening revelry happened to be fairly uninspiring—and besides, plain old-fashioned nosiness made her want to drag out the class reunion bit until she had been let in on Vicky’s secret.

She was turning away from Vicky’s room when she noticed that the door of the room opposite was ajar. Through the opening she caught just a glimpse of the breathtakingly handsome dark-haired man she had spotted beside the reception desk a few minutes before. She slowed her pace hopefully, but he seemed not to have seen her, and the door closed. That, apparently, was going to be typical of her luck on this particular Lisbon layover. With a philosophical jerk of her shoulders, she walked briskly away to the stairs.

If she had dreamed how strongly the man called Curt Jaeger shared her lack of enthusiasm for a triangular dinner date, and to what extremes he had already gone to ensure the reduction of the company to a more intimate number, the last thing she would ever have willingly done was to walk down the steps of the Tagus Hotel, but she was not a morbidly hyper-imaginative type. Although the Tagus was not the sort of place that ambitious cabmen would choose as a waiting post, she felt no suspicion at seeing one parked in the street. She assumed that a small man with the large nose and bristling black moustache, his face shadowed by a ludicrously broad-brimmed hat, had just paid the taxi driver for his own ride and that he now bustled to open the door of the car for her out of pure Latin gallantry.

“Senhorita,” he hissed with a bow as she stepped into the back seat of the automobile.

Then, when she was seated, he suddenly hopped in beside her and slammed the door shut. Instantly the driver pulled away from the curb so fast that she was bounced back against the upholstery.

“Be quiet, senhorita, and there weel be no trouble!” the little man said in English.

Freda, who had held her own against considerably more hefty males than this one, was more angry than scared. She got her purse on her safer side and slid over against the door.

“That’s what you think, buster!” she snapped. “Now get out of here pronto or you’ll see plenty of trouble! Driver—”

Her uninvited fellow traveller moved so swiftly that she was not sure whether the knife had been whipped from his pocket or whether it had been in his hand all the time. In any case, it was one of those very large switch knives whose butcher-shop blade stays concealed in its weighty handle until a button is pressed. The sharp silvery point flashed out at her like the head of a snake and stopped just short of her ribs.

“Do not waste your voice,” the little man said. “The driver weel only pay attention to me. I am suggest that you should pay attention to this that I am holding in my hand.”

He nuzzled the point of the blade almost affectionately against the thin material of her dress just below her breast.

“I’ll scream my head off,” she threatened with less assurance.

“And I would cut your head off and you would not scream any more.”

The man seemed to think his rejoinder was humorous, but the sharp tip of his knife pressed harder against her and assured Freda that his basic intentions were entirely serious. She was really terrified for the first time. The driver —the back view of his head reminded her grotesquely of a carved coconut with a cap on—swung his taxi around several corners and headed away from the center of the city. The neighbourhoods they passed through began to deteriorate into jumbles of warehouses, dingy-looking bars, and grubby housing.

“What do you want?” Freda asked tensely. “Where do you think you’re taking me?”

“You weel know quick,” was the answer. “Do not make trouble.”

The cab pulled into a narrow cobbled street of two-storey houses whose walls and window shutters seemed to be nearing the end of an ancient contest to decide which could flake off the most paint or plaster. Freda was so terrified by now that she took in only the vaguest impression of her surroundings. The man with the knife muttered his instructions as the driver opened the door on her side of the automobile.

“You weel get out, please, and go into that house— weethout no fuss!”

The switchblade reinforced his order, and the girl obeyed, clutching her purse tightly against her body almost as if she hoped it was all the men were really after. The car was parked within three paces of a doorway which the driver, in a parody of politeness, held open for her. He was an imbecilic-looking lout with a battered nose and cavernous bushy-browed eye sockets, one of the ugliest mortals she had ever laid eyes on. Even so, she thought she preferred him to the sinister little cutthroat behind her. As she entered the house she looked longingly back over her shoulder past the knifeman’s broad-brimmed hat at the sunlight on the wall opposite—and the last thing she saw was the long taxi, black and shining like a well-kept hearse.

The man with the knife locked the door when they were all three inside, and it took several seconds for Freda’s eyes to accustom themselves to the dimness of the room. The two windows were shuttered and the driver jerked dusty draperies across them, cutting off the light that would have filtered in through the crevices. The room itself was depress-ingly shabby and underfurnished, like part of a rental house that had been used by family after family for years until finally it had been closed for months because no one would have it.

“Seet at the table, senhorita.”

Freda summoned every volt of her courage in a final effort to intimidate her chief captor with sheer defiance.

“You can’t get away with this—whatever you think you want! I’m an American citizen, and …”

The moustached man’s hatchet-chop of a laugh showed just how singularly unimpressed he was by her national prestige and her threats.

“Seet down!” he ordered. “What we want ees so easy, senhorita, as you weel see. Do not trouble yourself. Seet at the table-here!”

He kicked a crippled chair into place for her and she sullenly sat on it. The thick wooden slab of a table top in front of her was covered with a film of reddish dust.

“What is it, then?” she demanded.

The driver was standing by as dumb and motionless as a wax-museum Neanderthaler. The other man took paper and pen from his pocket and put them down for her to use.

“Seemply a note to your woman friend at the hotel, to say you have been called away and cannot have dinner tonight.”

Freda stared at him with incredulity and the eager hope that she might get out of the situation a lot more easily than she had imagined.

“All this so I’ll cancel a dinner date?” she asked.

“Si, senhorita. Just write an excuse to your girl friend so her admirer can see her alone.”

“Why?”

“I am not like so many questions,” the man said more harshly. “Write the letter! Tell her you have business that makes you leave Lisboa.”

Freda pondered her situation for just a few seconds, and decided that any further resistance would be a waste of time. She took the pen and wrote a short note in deliberately overformal English saying that she had been called away suddenly to work on a flight.

“Will that do?” she asked curtly, after scrawling her name.

Axe-nose took the piece of paper and scrutinized it word by word. He read it a second time before he nodded.

“Eez okay,” he granted.

“I must say Mr Jaeger has a pretty violent way of breaking a date,” Freda said. “But now that you’ve got what he wants, you can let me out of here.”

Her kidnapper tucked the note she had written into his jacket. Then, before he answered, he unwrapped, clenched in his teeth, and held a match to a long thin cigar—all with deliberate slowness. The silence was unnerving. The only sound in the thick-walled room was the man’s quick sucking of fire into his cheroot. When it was glowing, he snapped the wooden match in half between his fingers and flipped its pieces across the room.

“Oh, no, senhorita,” he said softly. “I cannot let you out of here. Now that you absence weel be explained—now we can ask you some important questions.”

He had put one foot on a rung of her chair and leaned down with his face so close to hers that she could feel the heat of the scarlet glowing coal tip of the cigar which jutted from his mouth.

“But …”

She was almost too frightened to say anything, and he cut her off after the first word she uttered. The big knife, which he had kept out of sight while she wrote the letter to Vicky, appeared again from behind his back. He held the blade for her to see.

“No ‘but,’ senhorita,” he murmured. “Now you weel ans-swer questions, and you weel answer quickly, or eet weel be a long afternoon that you spend here.” He moved the knife towards her midriff until it punctured the thin fabric of her blouse, and then—like a surgeon beginning to operate—with a slow careful upward movement he slit the material open all the way to the neckline. “A very long afternoon …”

2

Through his half-open door, which gave him an adequately direct view of the entrance to Vicky Kinian’s room across the hall, Simon Templar had heard Freda’s parting line— “I just hope my father never writes me a cliff-hanging letter like that!”—and had been well aware of her glance into his room, and of the significant deceleration of her pace as she passed it. He would have been hardly human, or more like an authentic saint, if he had not been tempted to accept the obvious challenge to make a discreet bid for her acquaintance. He could even have twisted the rubber arm of his conscience with the specious argument that such a manoeuvre would be strictly in the line of duty, anyhow, since it could be an adroitly indirect way to sneak up on his prime target. The blonde was not one of the characters of the script that had been presented to him at the embassy, but then life almost always ignored the scripts men prepared for it anyway. The important things at the moment were that Vicky Kinian was in her room and could not get out without him knowing it, and that with her—unless the blonde had a more active role than he imagined—was a fascinating epistle from her departed dad. Whether it was the same letter she had been given in Iowa or a new one that had somehow come into her hands in Lisbon did not make much difference now; in either case it was just the sort of light reading the Saint craved to while away a few minutes of his tax-supported holiday in Portugal. And from that objective he could not let himself for the moment be detoured.

He had gone directly from the American Embassy to the Tagus Hotel after his briefing on the case of the errant Major Kinian, who had somehow neglected to report to his superiors for the past quarter of a century. And as he entered the modest foyer, which was a pleasant but nevertheless gently jolting contrast to those of the chain-store caravanserais to which he had latterly become accustomed, the Saint had been musing on the stupendous changes that had subvened in the two-and-a-half decades since the missing major had last been heard from. That most popular puppet of the newspaper cartoonist, the black octopus with the swastika on its head, had long since withdrawn its tentacles from the borderlands of the abdicated British Empire and disappeared even from children’s nightmares. Former heroic allies had become sour antagonists, and one of those which had most cynically played both ends against the middle had spread its web over the world on a scale that made the reach of the black octopus seem puny in comparison.