Salvage for the Saint

1

Morning brought Simon Templar a large manilla envelope, which he soon had cause to wish had been in his possession a day sooner.

It was from Beaky. The Saint opened it and took out three photographs and two typewritten sheets of paper. He glanced at the photographs briefly, then put them aside. He picked up the typewritten sheets and read.

Photographs you sent of man on boat are of Maurice Tranchier (France). Born Lyons, age 43. Three convictions France for armed robbery, latest 11 years ago for international bullion robbery when French launch carrying 20 million francs in gold bars was seized en route to Morocco from Marseille.

Tranchier released three years ago after serving 8 years of a 10-year sentence; likewise three accomplices in same crime: Jacques Descartes (France), Enrico Bernadotti (Italy), Pancho Gomez (Spain).

Fourth accomplice and probable ringleader believed to be Karl Schwarzkopf (Switzerland). Escaped with launch and gold. Schwarzkopf remains untraced; gold remains unrecovered. Suspected fifth accomplice, on Algerian side, also never traced.

Descartes, Bernadotti and Gomez known to be living in village of St Martin-du-Marais in Camargue region of S. France. Descartes regarded as most dangerous. Owns several properties, hotel and stud farm; believed to practise local intimidation/protection. French police so far unable to obtain adequate evidence.

Karl Schwarzkopf: Born Bern, age (if living) 48. Graduated Geneva at 22 with highest linguist honours. Native language Swiss German dialect; known to be completely fluent in High German, French and English. No criminal record. Was employee of international bank involved in bullion transfer; based Paris, 6 years, vanished at time of robbery.

The Saint picked up the three photographs. One had the name Jacques Descartes on the back; it was of the fat man he had seen in the courtroom. Another was of the swarthy, lizard-like man who had been with him; and it was marked Enrico Bernadotti. And the third photograph was of Pancho Gomez; it showed a sullen thick-lipped face with tiny piggy eyes buried deep beneath the overhanging brow of a markedly asymmetrical head. The Saint had never seen Senor Gomez before; nor did the photograph make him long for Senor Gomez’s acquaintance.

The absence of a photograph of the missing man was of no real significance. The Saint needed no photograph; the name was enough. It sprang out at him from the typewritten sheet: Karl Schwarzkopf. The surname, not uncommon in German, translated directly into English made only the ridiculous “Blackhead”, with its inescapable associations with acne. But in French it came out as “Tête noire”. And it took no great effort of imagination, once you had got that far, to see “Tatenor” as an English derivative of that French translation of the German original... Tatenor the man was certainly linguistic sophisticate enough to have arrived at Tatenor, the name, by that circuitous trilingual route.

So much of the story fitted that Simon had no doubt at all in his mind. Tatenor was — or had been — the missing man Schwarzkopf. As soon as the trick with the names had come clear, some of Simon’s other rambling half-awake thoughts of the night before fell likewise into place, and he saw that a similar piece of linguistic juggling could plausibly explain the name of Tatenor’s boat. If you started with the German for speedboat (or race-boat), which was Rennboot, and translated that literally into French, you got canot de course; and from there it was an easy step to probably the simplest abbreviation, Candecour.

So Schwarzkopf the Swiss had vanished after the bullion robbery, leaving his accomplices to take the rap while he took the gold. And then Schwarzkopf the Swiss had become Tatenor the Englishman — if anything, a more English Englishman than most of the native-born kind. That he had been able to pull it off was a remarkable testimony to his linguistic talent — added to the national advantage the Swiss have in that respect.

And then, eleven years later, one of those accomplices — Tranchier, calling himself Fournier — had caught up with him. And it took little imagination to guess that he had come for his — or their collective — share of the loot.

And on the evidence the Saint had discovered, it looked as if he might have got what he had come for. And yet — why were the others here? Had Tranchier now run out on them? One thing was certain: if the loot was still in the form of gold bars, Tranchier was not carrying it with him.

Simon tried to put himself in Schwarzkopf’s place after the robbery. He would almost certainly have aimed to keep the gold and convert it into cash gradually, rather than raise suspicions by trying to sell off that quantity all at once. He would have reckoned to “spend” the gold over a period of years. And he would have needed a safe place to stash it away, gold being far too heavy to lug about. So, Schwarzkopf would most likely have hidden the gold somewhere and returned at intervals to draw from his private “bank”. The odds were, then, that Tranchier, before he had killed Schwarzkopf, had extracted from him the necessary information and means of access to the remaining gold.

But again Simon came back to the other two he had seen. What did they want? Not Tranchier, presumably. They had no reason not to accept his death as fact — as far as the Saint knew. Therefore they must be there to continue what, as far as their knowledge could be presumed to go, Tranchier had failed to accomplish...

And then it came to Simon with the blinding clarity of the newly obvious. There was only one person left from whom they might expect to discover where that gold was.

That person was his widow.

Arabella.

Already uneasy, the Saint was climbing into the silver Aston Martin almost before he drew that final inference.

He drove straight to Arabella’s house.

At the back of his mind ever since the court hearing had been that nagging discomfort he had still not managed to explain to himself, the first seeds of which had been sown when he had seen the two men he now knew as Descartes and Bernadotti. As he now saw, his reaction to them had amounted to an instinctive awareness that their interest in Tatenor’s death was somehow more than casual. Now, Simon cursed himself for not listening much earlier, and with closer attention, to that inner voice of disquiet; and it was with a definite foreboding of trouble ahead that he drove up the crunching gravel approach to the house.

Mrs Cloonan was pottering about in the front garden.

“Why, bless me, sir, if you haven’t missed her by a day,” she told him. “She’s gone to France. The south of France. Marseilles.” She pronounced it “Mahsales”.

Simon was not altogether surprised to find her gone. Arabella was an independent-minded woman and there was no reason she shouldn’t shoot off to France if the fancy took her. But he was curious, nevertheless, about the rather abrupt manner of her departure — especially as they had had at least a half-arrangement to meet within a day or two.

“The South of France,” he repeated, with raised eyebrows. “Rather a spur-of-the-moment young widow, isn’t she? Did she take her black bikini?”

Mrs Cloonan did her best to look shocked.

“Oh, sir! I do declare, I never heard such a thing!” She clucked reprovingly, but with a twinkle in her eye. “But truth be told, well...” She looked around conspiratorially, satisfied herself that the nearby bushes contained no obvious eavesdroppers and continued almost in a whisper: “...what with Mr Tatenor passing away as he did, and all — I gather she had to go down to try and sell her yacht, sir.”

“Her yacht,” murmured the Saint. “Poor thing.”

“Yes, sir. But she does seem in better spirits. She phoned me from France last night. She was staying in a nice little hotel, she said, near Orleans. Playing backgammon, she said — with some great blimp of a Frenchman.”

For an instant the Saint’s heart stopped; and then a ghostly millipede with icicles for feet scuttled up his spine. It was thanks only to an automatic self-control, bred in him over long years of practice, that neither of these two events produced more than the merest ripple on the outer surface of his casual demeanour.

“A fat Frenchman who likes to play backgammon? Well, he sounds harmless enough to the ladies, as Frenchmen go,” he quipped.

Mrs Cloonan beamed.

“Exactly what I thought myself, sir. And she said he’d been most civil, and entertaining, and helpful. Oh, and tonight, she’s going to be staying at his hotel, in the South... Why, is something wrong, Mr Templar?”

Even the Saint’s aforementioned self-control must have let him down fractionally when he heard that final piece of news. He hastily assured Mrs Cloonan that there was nothing to worry about, and then took his leave of her.

He had been, he knew, careless. He could have thought of at least a dozen past occasions in his life when a like degree of carelessness would have cost him that life. And his life was a possession he did not regard lightly.

“Simon Templar, old son,” he told himself sternly as he drove back to the hotel, “you’re getting careless.”

He certainly couldn’t excuse himself for failing to foresee at least the possibility of developments involving Arabella, nor for playing his cards so close to the chest and giving her the impression that he regarded the whole affair as closed.

There was only one practical course of action open to him now; and that was to pack a few things of his own and set off after her.

He was a whole day behind, but the likelihood was that Arabella would be safe at least until she checked into Descartes’ hotel in the south that evening. That “come into my parlour” establishment had to be the Saint’s immediate and direct destination.

Ten minutes on the telephone to travel agents was enough to establish that there was no available combination of air and surface transport that would get him to the village of St Martin-du-Marais in under eighteen hours. He knew he should be able to do it by car and ferry in several hours less than that.

Minutes later he was skimming across the water in the Privateer towards Vic Cullen’s boatyard at Bursledon, on Southampton Water, where he had left the Hirondel; and within another half hour he was weaving the big red-and-cream car skillfully and at a highly illegal speed along the south coast road towards Newhaven. It was almost eleven, and the ferry was due to leave at one. Drivers had to be at the quay half an hour beforehand. Simon reckoned that he might still get on if he arrived as late as 12.45, but that still gave him only an hour and three quarters to travel those seventy-five miles, in far from open-road conditions.

First the outskirts of Portsmouth loomed up, with an infuriating succession of dawdling drivers in wood-trimmed Morris Minors; then Havant and Chichester, then Worthing and Brighton. He drove with tremendous verve and skill, with the needle nudging up beyond sixty on every brief occasion when a burst of speed was possible. But there was a limit to what even the Saint and the Hirondel together could do in the thick and almost constant traffic, and he arrived at the Newhaven quay at three minutes to one, just as the ferry, its loading completed, was preparing to leave.

There was nothing he could do but sit and watch helplessly as it slowly backed out of its berth, announcing its departure with a single prolonged trump of what sounded, in the circumstances, very much like derision.

2

After another rapid investigation of options, the Saint had to conclude that there was nothing else for it but to wait there for the next boat — four hours later.

It was after 9 o’clock that night when he finally drove the Hirondel off the boat at Dieppe and started on the long haul south. Not for the first time, he was glad that he still had the Hirondel to rely on, after the years of service it had given him. Now, with long distances to cover at speed on fairly open and deserted roads, the car would come into its own with a vengeance. The great flamboyant vehicle thrived on a challenge, and it was for the sake of times like these, remembered and anticipated, that Simon Templar had kept it, year after year, despite the blandishments and the sometimes real temptations offered by newer and discreeter vehicles.

There never had been a car quite like the Hirondel, and there never would be again. That magnificent monster, that opulent and now splendidly dated conveyance that drew every eye back for a second ogle — and a third — went, if possible, even better than its looks promised. From the low-throated throb of its eight cylinders to the deep muted rasp of its near-racing exhaust, it promised, and delivered, the exhilaration of sheer power. Unstoppably, tirelessly, it carved its way through the air, its huge-tyred wheels thrusting mile after mile of road and countryside behind it. The Saint met little traffic on that five-hundred-and-fifty-mile drive south, and he covered the distance in an astonishing eleven hours, including a couple of essential stops. For most of the distance the Hirondel’s powerful headlamps sliced a bright wedge through the Gallic dark; for the last hundred miles or so the sky lightened through a grey-and-pink dawn.

It was just about eight o’clock when he pulled up in the Camargue village of St Martin-du-Marais. The hotel was easy enough to find, being slap in the middle of what was anyway a small village. It was a compact hotel and had doubtless once been unimposing; now, its exterior had some of the incongruous flamboyance of its owner himself, an effect achieved mostly by the use of large, elaborately curlicued, multicolored lettering for the name: Hotel Descartes.

Simon opened the front door and went in. The cramped lobby smelt of the morning’s coffee and croissants, and a hint of last night’s bourguignonne still hung on the air, along with the fumes from a cigarette the concierge was smoking.

The concierge, a small weedy cynical-looking man in rolled-up shirtsleeves, looked as though he had been on duty all night and had stayed awake some of the time. When Simon opened the door from the street, he was standing by the reception counter scanning the morning paper. A cleaning cloth and water bucket were by his feet.

“I’m looking for Madame Tatenor,” Simon said in French.

The concierge looked up.

“Madame Tatenor?” he said. “She is departed. Perhaps one hour since.”

Simon started counting to ten, and got as far as five.

“Any idea where she’s heading?”

The weedy concierge shook his head, tapped an inch off his Gauloise, and shrugged.

“Marseille — maybe. I do not know.”

“What about the proprietor, Monsieur Descartes?” Simon persisted. “I believe she is a friend of his — a guest. Would he perhaps know where—”

“M Descartes is not here,” the man cut in. “I cannot help you any further.” His manner had changed from the merely offhand to the definitely truculent. “And now, I have work to do, Monsieur.”

He stubbed out the remains of the Gauloise, picked up the bucket and cleaning cloth, and shuffled off through one of the doorways leading from the lobby. Simon turned to go, his mouth set in a grim line. But then unexpectedly a hoarse voice, like a stage whisper, reached him.

“Monsieur!”

He turned in the direction of the sound. It came from somewhere in the short main corridor from the lobby, from a doorway that was now being held fractionally ajar.

The Saint covered the distance to the doorway in two noiseless seconds. The door was opened wider, and he saw a young woman who might well, in normal circumstances, have been pretty. But it appeared that circumstances for her had recently been far from normal, and she was a far from pretty sight. Her face was a mass of welts and bruises; both her eyes were blackened, and her lips were cut and swollen. She was wearing a nightdress which, though by no means in the negligee class, exposed enough of her neck and shoulders to reveal bruising there too. She spoke with difficulty.

“You... you look for the English woman?”

Simon nodded.

“Madame Tatenor, yes. She is a friend of mine.” Simon kept his own voice to a whisper and motioned his wish to join her inside the room.

She let him in and closed the door quietly behind them.

“I am Genevieve. Chambermaid in the hotel. I think, Monsieur,” she croaked painfully, “you will not find her on the road to Marseille.”

Simon spent approximately the next two and a half seconds digesting the information.

“Is she still here?” he asked.

Genevieve shook her head.

“No, Monsieur... she left perhaps half an hour ago.”

“Alone?”

Genevieve nodded.

“In her own car?”

“Yes... but they have done something to her car. This morning, before it was fully light. I heard a sound, and from the window I saw him, the lizard one, Bernadotti.” She made a mime of spitting in disgust, and Simon’s lips came together in a hard line.

“The lizard one — Bernadotti. Did he do this to you?”

She nodded.

“I found him last night, searching Madame Tatenor’s room, while she was having dinner.”

The Saint said to himself, with feeling: “That’s one I owe you for her, Enrico old chum.” For the moment he preferred not to speculate how many he might owe Enrico for Arabella by the time he caught up with her.

“Where do you think they’ll have taken her?” he asked tersely.

Genevieve rummaged in a drawer.

“I will draw a plan for you so that you can look for her where you are most likely to find her,” she said in that painful whispering croak. “At the haras of Monsieur Descartes.” She paused and looked at Simon appraisingly. “I think you are a good man. Please remember, worse will happen to me if it is know that I assisted you against them.”

“I understand,” Simon told her. “I shall say nothing.”

“They are very bad men.” She gave a shudder. “And no one in the village would help you to find the way quickly if they thought you were no friend of these men. They have fear of these three. We all have fear of them... the sadique, the deaf one with the knife always, and that great fat cochon. For two years or more they have lived here. They loan money to the farmers, rent to us the equipment. Now we do not exist except as they wish.”

She had found a pencil and a piece of paper which she spread on the table with trembling fingers.

“Monsieur — you will have to be very careful. And do not hope too much. I think they will want something from her. If once they have it, they will kill her.”

3

Arabella had risen early and left the hotel at seven because she was chafing to get to Marseille and see the Phoenix — her yacht. Three nights had passed since she had first learnt of the Phoenix’s existence, and by this time her curiosity was definitely getting the better of her normal preference for late rising. Add to that the fact that the hotel itself was a reminder of two evenings spent in Descartes’ ultimately wearing company, and she had a strong double reason for wanting to get on her way.

But she had got no further than a kilometre or so when the MG began behaving like a bucking bronco. Its engine seemed to have been visited by a malady of galloping indecision; it changed its mind ten or twelve times, in the space of less than a minute, about whether it wanted to run or not. Arabella pulled off the road, put the gearstick in neutral and revved the engine a few times, whereupon it made up its mind. It did not want to run. It stopped, and would not start again.

Arabella knew nothing about the tinkering her car had suffered earlier that morning at the hands of Enrico Bernadotti; she only knew that the car had broken down.

She had left the village well behind her. Traffic was virtually nonexistent — she recalled one car passing her, in the opposite direction — and there was no telephone in sight. She started walking towards a house a couple of hundred yards away, but had only covered a quarter of the distance when she heard a truck coming.

Not being one to do things by halves, she ran into the road and waved her arms excitedly in a way that left her predicament in no doubt.

The effort, as it turned out, was unnecessary. It was a breakdown truck — complete with winch. It stopped some way in front of the MG and then backed up close. Out of it jumped a short muscular blob of a man in mechanic’s overalls and a cap. He was munching a sandwich, which she took to be the reason for his failure to offer a cordial greeting, or indeed any greeting at all.

Arabella’s French, while it might be just about up to the simpler transactions of life, was completely unequal to the task of describing the salient details of a mechanical breakdown. She resorted to sign language and a single, far from French, word.

“Kaputt!”

She operated the starter a few times to demonstrate the car’s recalcitrance. The mechanic said nothing; he simply attached the grappling-chains of his winch to the underside of her car and wound it up on to the back of the truck with Arabella still in the driver’s seat. Then the truck, painted with the name Garage Soustelle Freres, turned around and headed back towards the village.

It went straight past the garage of that name, which she had noticed earlier, and left the village by the opposite route. After a moment’s unease, Arabella settled down to wait, supposing that there must be other premises belonging to the Soustelles. But when the breakdown truck pulled right off the main road, and began following a rough dirt-track across mixed pasture land and marshy, boggy ground, she became definitely and substantively uneasy.

She leant on the horn. Nothing happened. She switched on the ignition and leant on it again. The penetrating paa-aa-aarp punctuated the calm of the countryside but produced no apparent effect on the breakdown driver. He continued to transport her, and her car, farther off the beaten track: through a farm gateway, along a still-rougher and less-beaten track than before; then between some trees to a stony yard between farm buildings.

The truck stopped and the driver got out, wiping the remains of his meal from his blubbery lips with the back of an oily hand.

“What the hell is this place?” Arabella began angrily. “Why have you brought me here?” She looked around at the timber fences, gates, corrals, horses; and back at the still-silent driver.

He had taken off his cap, and now his lips parted in something like a sadistic smile, revealing unpleasant-looking yellow teeth to go with his unpleasant-looking putty-nose and squinting piggy-eyes. Arabella regarded him disgustedly.

“My, but aren’t you an ugly one!” she declared, hoping to provoke some response. But he only beckoned her to follow as he set off for one of the adobe farm buildings.

He opened the door and stood aside for her to enter; then he followed her inside, shut the door, and stood firmly against it.

Arabella looked around. She was in a large farm office, well furnished in an old-fashioned heavy style, the walls liberally decorated with bullfight posters and photographs of horses — hefty brutes, many of them accoutred and padded for the bullring, some with picadors astride. At the far end was another closed door. Between Arabella and that other door, at a huge roll-top desk, sat a big man in a sombrero, with his back to her. Nearby sprawled a sallow-skinned man dressed all in black, who was picking at the strings of a guitar. His features were lizard-like, his shirt open halfway to the waist, revealing a black doormat of a torso decorated with a heavy gold chain.

The man with the guitar struck a sudden sharp chord, and the large figure at the desk swivelled to face Arabella.

Under the broad sombrero, that luxuriant bandit moustache and the huge bulk of chins beneath were unmistakable. It was Descartes.

“Bonjour, Madame Tatenor,” he said softly. “You see, I could not bear the parting from you!”

He smiled expansively, but now, in these new surroundings, there was something menacing in that gold-fringed smile. Arabella struggled to grasp the situation.

“But what... what are you doing here?” she finally said. “I mean, what am I doing here?”

The black-clad lizard had put down his guitar, and now he came forward, hissing through wolfish white teeth, to favour Arabella with a close inspection.

“And who the hell are you!” she snapped without ceremony, disliking him on the instant, whoever he might be.

Descartes chuckled.

“Let me introduce my associates... Enrico Bernadotti, who arranged your little mechanical trouble. And your guide here,” — he inclined his head towards the blubbery-lipped man who had driven the truck — “Pancho Gomez. You may have observed, his conversational powers are limited. He is a deaf-mute.”

She glanced around as Descartes’ words registered.

“Arranged my breakdown? You seem to have been to a lot of trouble to get me here. What do you want?”

Descartes shifted his bulk in the chair, causing the huge convexity of his midriff to wobble noticeably.

“The answer to that, Madame Tatenor,” he said very sternly and seriously, “is simple.” Then more silkily: “I think you know already what we want.” And then his voice cracked through the air with whiplash force: “So let us get down to business!”

“What business?” she said calmly. “I really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

She might be putting a brave front on it; but the fact was that underneath the moderately composed exterior was an interior that was not only indignant but more than a little scared. This was certainly the first time in her life that anything of the kind had happened to her, and she didn’t at all like the way things were shaping up.

Descartes sighed impatiently.

“Madame Tatenor, please let us not play games. You are the widow of Charles Tatenor. The widow of our ex-partner in crime. Only that we knew him under another name.”

“Crime? Another name? What is all this? Are you people crazy?”

Descartes suddenly propelled himself towards her at speed on his castored chair.

“We want to know where is the gold!” he boomed, his large face reddening with anger. “Now does the little bell ring?”

“No, it doesn’t,” Arabella said firmly. “And now, I think I’d like to go home.”

Unexpectedly, his motion lithe and sudden as a cat’s, Bernadotti sprang forward and slapped her resoundingly across the face — sending her sprawling back, only to be caught by the lurking Gomez and shoved forward again.

“I think we should start all over again, Mrs widow-honey,” Bernadotti hissed in an oily Italian-American accent. “You gotta understand, we don’t mess around.”

Arabella was furious, almost murderous, but temporarily numbed into silence by the ferocity and suddenness of the blow from Bernadotti.

“Where is the money?” Descartes demanded.

“What money? What gold? Please... I don’t know. I don’t know about any money.”

“Our other associate, Monsieur Fournier as he was known, did finally locate our old partner Karl... your husband, Mrs Tatenor. But he died before he was able to tell us where to find the money, or the gold, if it remains as gold. If indeed he ever did extract the secret from your husband before he died... before they both died. We cannot now discover from Karl, from your Charles, where he secreted our mutual ill-gotten gains. Therefore, we must discover it from you.” Descartes paused and waggled a solemn forefinger at Arabella. “Be assured, you will tell us before a long time has passed. You might save yourself pain by telling us now.” He emphasised his final words with that plump stabbing forefinger: “Where — is — the — gold?”

She repeated herself firmly, but with an edge of desperation now: “I tell you I don’t know about any gold, or money. My problem is, Charles didn’t leave me any — only debts. That’s why I’ve come here — to France, to Marseille. I’ve got to sell this yacht — my yacht, the Phoenix...”

Descartes put his head on one side and studied her for a few moments. Arabella tried again.

“I don’t have any money. No money. No gold. Comprenez-vous?”

Descartes shook his head sadly.

“Then you are no use to us. Your memory is too bad.”

“Listen, lady,” Bernadotti hissed suddenly, “we know the gold or the money is here in France, where your husband once did business. All you have to do is tell us where.”

“What money? What gold? I don’t know about any money or gold!” Arabella was near snapping-point now.

Again Descartes looked at her aslant for a moment.

“Let me remind you of the facts,” he began, “since you have such a poor memory, it appears. Four of us endured eight years in prison for a robbery of gold bullion in which your ‘Charles’ also took a part — and from which he escaped with the gold, all of the gold, while we were caught. Now we want that gold, or whatever remains of it.”

“All this is news to me. If Charles had any gold he certainly didn’t tell me about it,” Arabella said firmly. “Now let me out of here.”

She stood up; and Descartes, unexpectedly, rose from his own seat and made a sweeping, bowing gesture towards the door as if inviting her to leave. She compressed her lips determinedly and marched to the door. Pancho had been watching the conversation, his piggy eyes darting from mouth to mouth; but now he became absorbed in an old penknife, its blade much worn and sharpened, which he was honing patiently with a stone.

“Do you mind?” Arabella demanded.

Pancho didn’t move or look up.

“Our friend Pancho — he only lip-reads,” Bernadotti remarked.

Arabella clicked her fingers repeatedly under his eyes; but still he didn’t respond.

“It is not always easy to catch his attention,” Descartes explained.

“I see,” said Arabella slowly, as she turned back. “Perhaps if you... well, can you perhaps tell me a bit more about this money or gold, I’m supposed to know about?”

Suddenly, having edged into the middle of the room, she made a dash for the far door. But as she reached it, so did Pancho’s knife. One second it wasn’t there; the next, that well-worn blade was buried deep in the door, inches from her face.

She stared at the quivering knife and collapsed to a sitting posture on the floor, all the fight temporarily shaken out of her.

“If I knew where this gold was, I’d tell you,” she pleaded helplessly.

Bernadotti stood up abruptly.

“Let’s stop wasting time,” he hissed. “We’re gonna have to introduce you to some of our... livestock. The horned variety that helps people remember things they pretend they forgot, or that they pretend they never knew.”

He laughed uproariously as his words sank in and Arabella turned several shades paler. He was still chuckling as, after two quick strides to reach her, he grasped her arm in a powerful and painful grip and propelled her towards the door.

“Let’s go, Mrs high-class widow-lady. Toro is waiting for us!”

She searched Descartes’ features hopefully for some sign of dissension in the camp. But his expression was stonily impassive, and she was led off with her arm in that pincer grip from the black-shirted and be-chained Bernadotti.

Thus is was that, not long after, Arabella Tatenor found herself in a bullring for the first time in her life.

It was a small bull-ring as bull-rings go, and clearly designed for training rather than public entertainment. But it did seem to possess most of the usual features — approximately circular, with a wooden perimeter, though with only a minimal two tiers of what would have been seating if actual seats had been present, and a few breaks around the circumference of the perimeter fence. There was the door she had been pushed through into the ring, a heavy iron latticework gate on the opposite side, and a similar gate at right angles to both. Only one conventional feature was lacking — and that deficiency, her hearing told her, was about to be remedied.

There was a bull, now revealed as big, black, and ugly, pawing the ground impatiently on the other side of the heavy iron gate facing her.

Descartes’ voice floated fatly across to her.

“Have you decided to confide in us, Madame?”

Her eyes turned from side to side in despair and mute appeal.

“Please. Be reasonable. How can I tell you what I don’t know?”

“I think you do know,” came the fat voice. “And you will tell us — or else you are no further use to us. But you have very little time remaining.”

There was a short pause followed by a sharp mechanical click. The bull-gate swung slowly open.

Arabella pressed back against the fence behind in horror as the powerful snorting animal pushed its way through the gate. It trotted a few paces into the ring, and stopped. The morning sun reflected glossily off the perfect black muscularity of its back, and for a moment she was oddly, dispassionately aware of the beauty in that sheer animal power, before the parlousness of her own situation crowded in upon her again. She made a sudden panic-stricken dash for the door through which she had been propelled a minute before.

The bull lumbered into the middle of the ring, stopped, and seemed to see Arabella for the first time. He put his head down to charge. She rattled frantically at the door, tried to wrench it open by the heavy iron ring. It was locked. She hammered on it frenziedly with both fists.

“Let me out! Let me out!”

Descartes’ voice carried across the ring again.

“The gold, Madame. For the last time, where is the gold?”

“For the last time,” she gasped, “I don’t know.”

The bull began his charge towards her, and with a shriek she started to run along the perimeter fence. The bull turned to follow, began to bear down. She reversed direction and managed to increase her distance from the snorting animal, but then he skidded, turned, and came after her with renewed interest. She just succeeded in reaching a solitary board partition — a burladero shelter set close against the perimeter fence and threw herself behind its meagre protection.

The bull thundered headlong into the partition, hitting it from an oblique angle. It shuddered and shook, but held. And the bull drew back, cantering around in a tight circle for another assault as Arabella crouched terrified behind the board, which she could now see was rotten in parts.

“You can still be saved,” came the voice of Descartes. “Quickly!”

Arabella saw that she had only one chance.

“All right, all right!” she gasped. “I’ll tell you!”

But the bull had already begun to charge the board again. This time it crashed into it with frontal force. Some of the wood splintered away and those horns at their nearest were less than a foot and a half from where she crouched.

She heard the sounds of the door being unlocked — the door to at least temporary freedom. That last time-gaining bluff had been her only hope; she had only to invent some plausible location for the gold, which would have bought her a day or two in which, possibly, to find some other way out of this whole mess. But she had left it too late. She was trapped behind the burladero, and there was no way she could get to that door past the bull, which was already beginning the charge that would surely now take him through the rotting board which was her only remaining protection. All of this was borne in upon her, not by any calm process of ratiocination, but by the directly experienced realities of that September morning in the bull-ring of Jacques Descartes. There was the sun, not yet hot, but already warm as it climbed in the east; the dust of the ring; the snorting of the bull as it thundered towards her; the flimsy board that would not, could not, hold out. And most of all, there was the painful physical reality of that door to freedom only yards away; of the infinitely tantalising noise it had made, a rusty metallic scraping noise; and of the fact that there was no way she would ever reach it.

And so she gave up the fight, stood up bravely, crossed her arms in front of her eyes, and waited for annihilation.

4

Arabella smelt the bull’s hot breath, and heard the final splintering of the board which was all that stood between her and those lethal horns.

And in the same instant, and abruptly, she felt herself gripped by some altogether miraculous force that hoisted her straight up into the air, and she heard, as in a dream, the horns of the bull smashing into the perimeter fence only inches below the point in space where her feet now seemed to be dangling. After which the same miraculous force performed a second-stage hoist and she found herself standing on the first tier of the bull-ring stand, blinking at the realisation that she had just not been battered to smithereens.

“May I interest you in living?” enquired the miraculous force — which wore the outward semblance of Simon Templar.

Arabella was far too shaken and shattered and dumb-struck and relieved to attempt a reply. Besides which, even as she began to make sense of what had happened, she became more definitely aware that her escape was as yet far from being a complete fait accompli. An outraged bellowing from the opposite side of the ring reminded her that Descartes and the others were only yards away. Arabella made a feeble, dazed gesture towards the bellowing voices, and the Saint nodded.

“I think that’s a very intelligent suggestion,” he said earnestly. “Shall we?”

He grabbed her hand and jumped down the eight-foot drop off the outside of the bull-ring, from the upper tier, pulling her after him and helping to ease her landing. As they began to run, the bellowing crystallised itself into two urgent syllables in Descartes’ voice.

“Get them!”

Simon and Arabella had only the few seconds’ start given to them by the element of surprise. Simon knew they had to exploit that slender advantage for all it was worth; Arabella herself was in no state to know anything, and was more than content to take her cue from him. He paused just long enough to face her for a moment, with his hands on her shoulders and the gaze of his level blue eyes holding hers.

“Sorry, sweetheart,” he said. “I know you’ve just had the scare of a lifetime, but now you’re going to have to find the strength for the run of a lifetime.” And then the Saint’s long legs took him skimming across the stony courtyard with Arabella in tow, somewhat unsteadily on her shorter ones.

They made straight for the rough track leading to the main road. He had left his car about halfway along that track, well short of the haras itself, to be sure of making a discreet approach. Now, with several hundred yards between them and the Hirondel, he wished he had risked bringing it nearer.

As they sped past one side of a high-fenced corral, they caught a glimpse of Bernadotti and Pancho entering hurriedly by a gate on the other side. Within seconds they heard the sound of several sets of hooves giving chase behind them.

They glanced behind as they ran. Bernadotti, Pancho and another man, presumably one of the haras hands, were the pursuers. They were mounted on hefty picador horses; and they were armed with the murderous-looking eight-foot lances known as pics.

The Saint knew at once that they would not make it in a straight dash for the car. A lightning piece of strategic thinking was needed, and as usual when the chips were down, Simon Templar delivered.

He had three resources to work with, and he used them all to the full. The first was their lead, no more than thirty seconds, over the pursuers; the second was a godsent bend in the scrub-edged track; and the third was the rough mental map of the surrounding territory with which he had thoughtfully forearmed himself on his arrival.

As soon as they had rounded the bend and were out of sight, Simon ducked off into the narrow belt of scrub, still pulling Arabella by the hand.

“I’m afraid we’re going to have to separate for a while,” he told her in an urgent whisper, his mouth against her ear. “You’ll have to decoy long enough for me to get to the car, farther along.”

He pointed. She nodded her understanding, and he pointed again.

“Skirt the swamp, then strike back to the road.”

“Swamp?” She silently mouthed the word. Simon grinned and nodded. Then he picked up a large rock and lobbed it, in a high trajectory, into the undergrowth on the far side of the driveway. By now their mounted pursuers would have rounded the bend and realised that the fugitives had left the track.

They heard the horses take off after the sound of the falling rock, and Simon grinned again.

“The old tricks are sometimes the best.” He signalled her to go; and she saw in his eyes that steely light of battle which many had seen before her, and many had feared, and some had loved. And then he was gone, like a fluid shadow melting into the undergrowth, and she found herself doing, almost automatically, what he had told her. She ran as quickly and noisily as she could out into the open and marshy terrain that bordered the haras, following a line away from the buildings but at an oblique angle to the track.

They heard her at once. Bernadotti and Pancho and the other man came crashing through the bushes on their powerful mounts. Arabella glanced behind as she ran. She had perhaps a fifty-yard advantage. She saw those great horses with their lanced riders thundering after her like some unarmoured jousters of a longpast age; and she ran as she had never run before.

The ground was rankly swampy with patches of somewhat higher grassy ground at intervals, and she found she could mostly judge her paces to land on these higher stepping-stones — whereas the horses were slowed somewhat by having to plunge and plop their way though the viscous ooze of the swamp. There were bushes and young trees at intervals, too, so that she followed a zigzag course in which pursuers and pursued lost sight of each other for a few seconds at a time.

But the snorting and splashing of the horses grew steadily louder, and she knew that they were inexorably catching her up. Then came the moment when she had to change direction and head for the track farther along, striking it, with luck, beyond the point where Simon should have rejoined his car.

If it had been only Bernadotti and Gomez pursuing, she would certainly have made it. But the other man was clearly a far better horseman; he was well ahead of them and now bearing down on her at speed.

She made the change of direction abruptly, taking advantage of the cover given by some bushes. Still she heard the horses coming after her. But she heard another sound, too — one that sang in her ears as no sound of that kind ever had before.

It was the engine of the Saint’s Hirondel springing into throbbing life.

Arabella made straight for it, the endurance of her legs and lungs now close to their limits. The car must be, from the sound, a good fifty yards away, and that horseman, with his pic poised, could be no more than a few paces behind her. And then, still running with a speed and surefootedness that astonished her, she was suddenly out of the swamp and back into that narrow strip of scrubby undergrowth bordering the track. She could feel her legs giving way as she ducked and swerved between the bushes in a last desperate endeavour to evade the thundering hooves and the murderous-looking lance. But the horseman crashed straight on through, simply flattening the bushes in his path.

Now she could see the car ahead, the engine still running...

And there was no one at the wheel.

The horseman was now so close behind that she could all but feel the point of the lance already impaling her through the small of her back. And then her legs buckled under her, and she tripped — exhausted, gasping, and covered in muddy slime. She must have passed out for a few moments; but through a kind of fog she heard a sharp crack, followed by the sort of heavy thud that might be made by a man falling off a horse.

The fog cleared, and she saw that a man had indeed fallen off a horse. And she saw Simon Templar standing in front of her, an automatic in his steady hand and a smile of admiration in his equally steady gaze.

Ten seconds later she found herself, somehow, in the passenger seat of the Hirondel and travelling rapidly towards the main road.

The Saint grinned at the pathetically dirty and dishevelled figure beside him, and wrinkled up his nose.

“Nice perfume,” he remarked.

“Ho bloody ho!” she snorted, between gasping breaths. “Just look at me. And look at you! No dirt, no gook, no gunge — you’re not even puffed!”

The Saint, cool and debonair, grinned again.

“Sorry. It was the only way. It was you they wanted. They were bound to take off after you once they spotted you.”

“But just look at me!” she repeated. She grabbed the driving mirror and turned it to gaze in horror at her face. “All my things, my bag—” She wailed: “—they’re back there somewhere in my car. You found me. You could at least have found my bag.”

“Oh, you’re quite welcome,” Simon said cheerfully. “Think nothing of it. I’m always saving people’s lives.”

She digested that for a while.

“I guess I am incredibly lucky you found me,” she said finally, with conciliation in her voice. “But come to think of it, how on earth did you find me? What are you even doing in France, anyway?”

“Oh, you know, this and that,” he told her. “I thought I’d see if I couldn’t look up your husband’s murderer.”

“My husband’s — murderer?” She looked at him aghast. “Are you mad? Is everybody mad?”

Simon recoiled fastidiously as she leaned rather too near. He waved her away.

“Uh... would you mind? I’m still fairly clean.”

Her eyes blazed with anger at that.

“Yes, I sure damn well would mind,” she exploded. “And what on earth makes you think Charles was murdered?”

The Saint said: “There was a third person on the boat with him and Fournier. One who survived.”

“And who was that third person?”

“That remains to be seen. But one thing we can be pretty certain of. Charles must have talked before he was killed. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been killed. So the survivor — the murderer — is at least one person who knows where the gold is.”

“But how can you be so sure—” She stopped short, now very thoughtful. “Now you’re talking about this ‘gold’. Simon, how do you know all this? If Charles had some gold, how come they, and you, know all about it and I don’t? And how come you were able to turn up back there, in the proverbial nick of time?” Arabella stopped again, with suspicion clouding her features. “What is all this, Simon? I can’t even be sure of your part in it any more. So where’s the nearest police station around here?”

The Saint sighed patiently.

“Dear lovely Arabella, you’re understandably overwrought and suspicious, especially as I’ve had all the clean and heroic bits of the action today and you’ve had all the dirty, dangerous and the strenuous ones. But wouldn’t you like to know where there’s several million dollars in gold bullion?”

“Several mill—” She sat back and thought for a minute, as they sped through the landscapes of southern France, now on the main road for Marseilles. Then, looking no less confused, she shrugged and said: “I could get used to bullion.”

“Then you see why we’re not going to the police just yet.”

“I’m working on it.”

“Plenty of time to think — while you’re bathing.”

After they had installed themselves in twin communicating suites in one of the better hotels of Marseille, Arabella lost no time in making the acquaintance of the bathroom, while Simon went out on a rapid shopping trip.

He came in carrying assorted feminine garments in both the under- and the outerwear categories, as well as sundry toiletries. There was no end to the surprising range of knowledge he had picked up in his adventurer’s life, and the fact that he was capable of choosing well-matched feminine accoutrements to suit a woman’s taste should occasion neither surprise nor indelicate enquiry.

He dropped the clothing on the bed and knocked on the door of Arabella’s bathroom, from which issued forth exuberant sounds of splashing.

“All right if I come in? I promise not to look. Unless you insist, of course.”

He went in, face half-averted.

“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “You can look.”

Simon looked.

She was lying in a bath full of completely opaque brownish liquid covered with suds.

“Lovely, isn’t it? Like Lake Erie.”

“Anything you find in there,” he said gravely, as he deposited some appropriate toiletries on the end of the bath, “—spray it with this. Or better yet, you might let that water out before you take root.”

As she turned to go, she called out softly.

“Simon?”

“Yes?”

“You’re a very attractive man.”

The Saint grinned, and indicated the bath water.

“I’m the one who should be doing the flattering — you filthy rich widow, you. I almost wish we were here for a dirty weekend instead of on dangerous business.” His face was suddenly serious and intent. “You’ve been through enough already to know that gold, in the quantities we’re talking about, is very dangerous business. Make no mistake — Descartes and his less philosophical cronies aren’t going to give up easily. Don’t run away with the idea, even when you finally get out of that water, that we’ve got clean away from them.”

Even as the author of this paronomastic caution, Simon was unaware of quite how timely it was. For as he drove away from the hotel shortly after, he was observed from a black Citroen that lurked not fifty yards along the street. The obese body of Jacques Descartes oozed comfortably across the back seat, while in the front Enrico Bernadotti and Pancho Gomez exchanged small smiles of satisfaction as the Hirondel disappeared around the next corner.