Thanks to the Saint

The good medicine

“Don’t you ever feel foolish about telling people you’ve retired and don’t want to get in any more trouble?” David Stern asked.

“About as foolish as I feel when I’m asked whom I’m planning to swindle or slaughter next,” Simon Templar admitted.

“That’s a fine way to talk to an influential newspaper owner who is also buying you a magnificent dinner.”

“I’ve never asked you to use your influence for me, Dave. And I also notice that you apparently didn’t want to be seen with me in one of the more widely advertised food foundries that bring tourists to New Orleans from every corner of the continent, according to the guidebooks.”

The newspaper owner grinned.

“If you lived here, you might like a change from that fancy cooking too. And I can’t imagine you acting like a tourist anywhere.”

They were in Kolb’s, on St Charles Street, a restaurant whose cuisine favors (as the name implies) a tradition Teutonic rather than Creole. Thus, by a paradox of environment, what might have been commonplace in Leipzig became actually more exotic in Louisiana than the famous establishments that emphasize their French background.

“Don’t think I’m complaining,” said the Saint, making happy inroads on some tenderly baked duckling bedded in sauerkraut. “But you should know better than to introduce an Ulterior Motive into this pleasant session — unless it is young, beautiful, and of course uncooked.”

“Like, for example, the specimen at the corner table that you have so much trouble keeping your eyes off?”

“Well, for example.”

“I think he calls himself the Marchese di Capoformaggio, or some such name. But I only know what I read in the columns I buy. Possibly he’s as phony as any Balkan prince of the pre-war crop. But she seems to like him — at least as of the last press releases.”

“Thank you,” said the Saint politely. “You are a salt mine of information. And now, as a purely incidental item, who is she?”

“As if I didn’t know that was the one you were interested in. That is Elise Ashville.”

“The Elise Ashville?”

“Of course.”

“Hell,” said the Saint with great patience, “who the hell is the Elise Ashville?”

Stern was honestly surprised.

“You really don’t know? She owns Ashville Pharmacal Products, Inc. — one of our bigger local industries. They make patent medicines. Juven-Aids. VervaTonique. Dreemicreem. You must have seen them advertised, at least.”

“Gawd, who could help it? But I never had any reason to notice who made ’em.”

Simon looked towards the corner table again. The woman who sat there with the pale-blond, delicate-featured, expensively tailored and shirted and accessoried type, for which a previous generation’s graphic term “lounge lizard” has never been bettered, was not constructed to the conventional specifications of a female tycoon. Even to refer to her as a “woman” seemed slightly heavy, although the much-abused word “girl” was equally inapplicable. She could easily have passed for much less than thirty and could not have ranked forty by the most vicious estimate: the Saint would have personally favored the lower estimate, being a man and vulnerable to certain figures, of which she had a honey, unless the couturiers had cooked up some new gimmicks which could falsify even such a candid décolleté as she was wearing. Incontrovertibly above that she had a face of petulant but exciting beauty, capped by a casque of darkly burnished copper hair. If she could have walked many blocks outside without eliciting an appreciative whistle, it would only have been in a blackout that coincided with a dense fog.

She was completely aware of the boldly appraising way that Simon had been looking at her, he knew, and he did not have any impression that it displeased her at all. He observed that she did not seem to have brought it to her escort’s attention, as a woman will when she is annoyed by such a scrutiny.

“I’d never have visualized her in a dispensary,” Simon remarked. “Or at an industrial board meeting, for that matter.”

“Don’t let that Vargas build fool you. As I hear it, she did most of the originating of those concoctions. And as a business woman, by all accounts, she’s sent some big wheels back with their kingpins wobbling.”

“Tell me more.”

David Stern hospitably refilled the Saint’s glass from the bottle of Alsace-Willm Gewurztraminer in the ice bucket beside them.

“I don’t go in much for gossip, but this seems to be pretty factual...”

Whatever else she was rumoured to have been before, or on the side, Mrs Elise Ashville had certainly been a waitress at the soda fountain of Richard Ashville’s modest neighborhood drugstore until she married him and began to infuse her ambitious energy into his humble business. Until then, reportedly, he thought he had already attained his personal pinnacle when he became the proprietor of a store of his own (subject to a reasonable mortgage) and had been prepared to bumble placidly through his declining years retailing the standard nostrums, scraping the standard profit off cokes and comic books, and compounding such prescriptions as came his way. He was a gentle and unassuming man whose ailing mother had successfully monopolized him until she died shortly before Elise came to work for him, by which time he was well into an unsophisticated middle age, and he had been mildly astonished when this gorgeous creature accepted the proposal which his glands forced through his shyness.

It was not long after an exhausting honeymoon, however, that he discovered that her concept of a woman’s part in a partnership was more vigorous than his mother’s in more ways than one. Browsing along the shelves while he was taking stock after closing one night, she said, “I was reading an article about what a terrific profit there is in some of this stuff, how the ingredients in a bottle that people pay more than a dollar for are worth maybe only five cents. But you only make a little bit of that profit. Why don’t we put up our own mixtures and make all of it?”

Mr Ashville painstakingly explained to her that the public would not come in and ask for these mixtures unless it had first been conditioned to think it needed them, by lavish promotion and advertising, on which the manufacturers spent a fantastic amount of the apparent gravy.

“Phooey,” said the dynamic Elise. “They’ve got a lot of overhead and stockholders to pay, too. We can put a small ad in the local papers for a few bucks and bottle the stuff ourselves.”

From there on it was the kind of homespun success story beloved by Reader’s Digest, except that the end products would never have earned the endorsement of that periodical. Not that there was anything actively poisonous or even especially deleterious about the pills and potions put out by the Ashville Pharmacal factory — the Food and Drug Administration would have seen to that, even without the help of Mr Ashville’s unreconstructed conscience — but neither would they do anyone much good, other than psychologically. This trivial imperfection, however, did no perceptible harm to the sales.

Juven-Aids (“To help restore that youthful feeling”) contained, for instance, only a few B-vitamins, harmless amounts of phosphorus and nux vomica, and minimal quantities of a common ataraxic, but hundreds of thousands were swallowed, three times a day after meals, by customers who were convinced that they felt better for them, or at least that they would have felt worse without them.

Dreemicreem (“For the skin a queen might envy”) was something that Elise herself whipped up, literally with an egg beater, in the beginning, out of a detergent, an astringent, some mayonnaise that had gone rancid, and a cheap perfume to disguise it: smeared on myriads of hopeful faces, just before washing with plain cold water, according to the instructions, it undoubtedly cleansed their pores as effectively as any soap and could not have left any more wrinkles than were there to start with.

VervaTonique (“Blended from the same herbs and fruits to which many ancient philosophers attributed the secret of long life and vigour”) also assayed twenty-five per cent alcohol by volume, if you could read the smallest print on the label, so that any of its highly respectable addicts, which included staunch supporters of the WCTU, who knocked back an ounce of it whenever they felt enervated, as the directions suggested, were benefited by the same jolt as if they had belted a good highball down to the halfway mark, without any moral qualms to detract from the resultant euphoria.

Elise turned out to have an unsuspected executive instinct, as well as a positive genius for skirting the law by juggling words into the kind of advertising claim that hinted exuberantly at miracles and only on the closest analysis could be proved to have promised practically nothing. In three breathtaking strides the local enterprise had grown to state-wide, to regional, and finally to national dimension, with the assistance of some frightening financial parlays, but it rode such an unbroken run of luck that in only five years it was in what Dun & Bradstreet called “a sound progressive condition” and could let its managing directrice draw a lavish stipend and a lush expense account with no protest from its creditors.

“So what’s wrong with that?” Simon inquired. “It’s hardly retailing gossip to say that they started on a shoestring and boiled it into oceans of slop that they’re selling at the price of soup. Maybe their ethics are dubious, but I can’t help feeling that the suckers they sell to are almost fair game.”

“Without getting into that argument,” said the publisher, “the rest of it is a bit less equivocal.”

Mrs Ashville, whose personality and tastes had been expanding as rapidly as her business, had begun to find the time and inclination for a more glamorous social life, which she indulged with increasingly frequent and protracted visits to New York, Palm Springs, and Miami Beach, where she became a regular feature of the café society columns, which reported her holding hands with a number of different squires whose impressive-sounding titles were usually better known than their credit ratings. When even the diffident Mr Ashville rebelled against being thus publicly cuckolded, at least by inference, and suggested a divorce, she obliged him promptly. It was only then that he was reminded, by coldly practical lawyers, that she owned outright the controlling percentage of stock in Ashville Pharmacal Products, which had been founded almost indulgently as a toy for her to play with, that he had even laughingly signed a document that she brought him in the early days specifically declaring that he did not in any way regard it as community property, and that the most he could claim from the Corporation, aside from his rights as the personal holder of one paid-up share, would be the few hundred dollars he had advanced to get it started.

“So she got everything,” said the Saint. “That seems to be the story in most American divorces. But for a change, there almost seems to be some justification for it. As you tell it, she was the brains of the act. She dreamed it up and put it over. He was only the first stepping-stone. If she outgrew him after that, and wants to prove she’s arrived by splurging on aristocratic gigolos, it may be deplorable, but I guess it’s her privilege.”

“I understand they paid him two thousand dollars.”

“She might have been more generous,” Simon admitted.

“He’d sold the drugstore long ago, of course, when the medicine business began to take all their time. But that was already community property, and whatever it fetched went into expanding the business. When the break-up came, he was several years older, and he wasn’t young to start with. To be exact, he was fifty-five at the time. And that was two years ago. Not the ideal age to make a fresh start, with no capital.”

“Tough,” Simon said reluctantly. “But—”

“Soon after that he came down with TB. Then it wasn’t even a matter of starting over. When his money ran out, he had to become a charity patient in the State hospital. He’s there now.”

The Saint blinked.

“Don’t look up,” Stern said, “but she seems to have signed the check, and they’re headed this way. Do you want to be introduced?”

“Yes,” Simon said, assiduously finishing his plate. “If you can bring yourself to gamble your good repute on my alias.”

“Who do you want to be — Sebastian Tombs?”

“I think the Count of Cristamonte might appeal to her more.”

He was only just able to say it in time, and then she was at the table. Even before he raised his eyes with carefully measured nonchalance, his senses were aware of a perfume, a warmth, a physical presence that seemed to send out vibrations from its own high-voltage charge.

“Relax, darling,” she said, as the newspaper proprietor stood up. “I’m not going to slap you, or even make a scene.”

“It never occurred to me that you would,” Stern said with easy courtesy.

“I don’t mean for some of those scandalous columns you’ve published — I know you only print what the syndicates send you. I mean, though, I hope you don’t think I’m sore at you for picking on me in that editorial the other day. How did it go? — ‘Louisiana’s industrial potential should not be judged solely by the unfortunate publicity earned by the personal antics of certain of our prominent commercial citizens!’ And everyone knows that I’ve had more publicity than any other commercial citizen of this town. That was a little bit snide, darling.”

She had a naturally husky voice, and she had adapted to herself some of the mannerisms of a famously mannered Southern actress, but an interpretation of her own softened and sugared them.

“It’s all right, I know you can’t admit you were referring to me,” she went on before the other could admit or deny anything. “Especially before witnesses. But you know the Marchese isn’t my attorney.” For the first time she made a show of noticing the Saint. “What about your friend?”

“The Count of Cristamonte,” Stern said with the obligatory gesture. “Mrs Ashville.”

The momentary widening of her eyes might have been hard to measure without a micrometer, but Simon did not miss it. They were brown eyes with flecks of green, and there were hardly any telltale wrinkles around them. Even at close quarters her skin had the clear and silky texture coveted by the users of Dreemicreem. There was no doubt that simply as a female she was what almost any male would have classified to himself as a Dish.

She put out her hand with more than conventional cordiality and said, “Oh, a distinguished visitor getting the VIP treatment. Please don’t be scared by anything I was just saying, about Mr Stern. You couldn’t be in better hands. I was only kidding him, in our crude American way.”

“You don’t have to explain,” smiled the Saint, with the barest trace of some vaguely European accent. “I’ve been in America before. And for the pleasure of meeting you, I would forgive David anything.”

She had left her hand with him when he bent over it, and it took her that long to withdraw it, as if it were something she had forgotten. She had not bothered to present the Marchese to anyone, and he was trying to appear elegantly inscrutable and aristocratically bored in the near background, to which he was strategically relegated by Mrs Ashville’s uncooperative back and the space limitations of the aisle which burdened waiters and bus boys were trying to use as a thoroughfare.

She continued to look the Saint over, not a whit less candidly than he had been studying her a few minutes earlier.

“How long are you here for?”

“To my sorrow, only a few days.”

“I’m sorry too. Very sorry.” She turned back to Stern at last with a smile. “Don’t worry about losing my advertising, darling. As long as your circulation figures hold up, you can make all the jokes you want to about me. Just don’t knock the product... And be careful where you take your handsome friend. He should go back to Europe remembering nothing but the best of this town.”

With a last flashing glance at the Saint she swept on. Her pallidly aesthetic escort followed like a reactivated toy towed by a string, with a coldly perfunctory inclination of his head towards the table that had interrupted their progress, as he went by.

“That’s a lot of woman,” Simon observed as they sat down again. “She transmits like a long-range radio station — and it isn’t only music. I can see where a little guy in a corner drugstore wouldn’t have had much chance.”

“She’s progressed quite a bit since then.”

“Sure. And there are movie stars who graduated just as recently from slinging hash. Some of ’em were smothered with sables before they were quite used to wearing shoes. But more women are natural actresses than end up in Hollywood. If they’re born with the spark, and given the opportunity, they don’t take long to learn the princess routines. Cinderella had to have a fairy godmother, but all the modern gal needs is the confidence that comes with a little success and a lot of money. And I say the performance can be just as much fun if you forget the pedigree.”

“You turn a fine phrase, my friend. But you sound as if you were trying to sell yourself.”

“If she threw herself at me, I can’t pretend it wouldn’t be nice to have an excuse not to duck.”

“And forget the discarded husband in the charity ward? I must have had a wrong impression, but I didn’t know you were as tough as that.”

Simon lighted a cigarette.

“Have you printed that story? It doesn’t seem like it, or she’d’ve mentioned it.”

“Frankly, we only got the tip yesterday. We sent someone out to check on it today, and Ashville begged him to drop it. Said Mrs Ashville didn’t know, and he didn’t want her to.”

“Then where did the tip come from?”

“A sister of his who phoned us. She said Mrs Ashville knew all about it and didn’t care.”

“Do you know if this sister could be bitter about something else? If Mrs Ashville really doesn’t know, you can’t score it against her. Has anyone asked Mrs Ashville? You had a chance to ask her yourself just now,” said the Saint.

“I have a top-notch editor and some excellent reporters,” said his host urbanely. “I don’t try to do all their jobs myself. I was only telling you as much as I happened to know. You’ll have to read the rest of it in the paper — if they decide it’s worth printing. And I’m sorry if I spoiled the romance you didn’t have.”

The Saint had to laugh.

“And I’m sorry I can’t make you a story, after you’ve tried so hard to feed me the ingredients. But things don’t happen to me that way.”

He was wrong, of course — any time he made a categorical statement like that, his peculiar Fate usually took it as a personal challenge and set out to make a liar of him.

An hour later, after pancakes and coffee and Benedictine, the headwaiter who was bowing them out deftly slipped a folded piece of paper into the Saint’s hand while seeming to almost ignore him in the exchange of compliments and banalities with the important local patron. But Simon felt the warning pressure that went with this professional legerdemain and slid the note into his pocket without a visible flicker of attention.

He managed to read it under the street lighting, with the most unostentatious casualness, while waiting for their car at the parking lot, as if it had been a list of Things To Do In Town. In a vigorous sprawling hand, it said:

“Where would you like me to drop you off?” Stern asked cagily. “I’m afraid I have an important meeting first thing in the morning, but—”

“Don’t worry, I don’t want to be shown the Vieux Carré,” said the Saint. “As a matter of fact, I took the Bourbon Street promenade last night, for old times’ sake. Maybe it’s old age creeping up on me, but the honky-tonks seem to get honkier and tonkier every year. Let’s have a quiet digestive dram at my hotel and call it a day.”

Thus a little time passed quickly and painlessly, and a few minutes after eleven he was able to dial a pay phone in the lobby.

The voice that answered the ring had none of the charm of the traditional Southern servitor as it snapped: “Mrs Ashville’s residence. Who’s calling?”

“The Count of Cristamonte,” Simon said, with the accent.

“Hold on.”

Then after a moment it was the voice he had been expecting, electrically rich with suggestive overtones.

“Please excuse my maid’s tone of voice. I think she thinks she’s working too late, or something. Are you ready for that nightcap?”

“I would like to see you again.”

“Ask any taxi driver for the Elysée Apartments. The new building. I had it named for me. You work the elevator yourself. On top of all the floor buttons there’s one small green button with no number. That’s my penthouse. Will you be long?”

“No longer than this taxi will take,” he said.

One reason why Simon Templar’s nervous system had survived his extraordinary life with so little damage by strain and fraying was that he had an amazing gift of closing his mind to unprofitable speculation. When there was obviously nothing to be gained by trying to foreguess a situation that would soon supply its own answers, he was able to simply switch off the futile circuit and wait with only philosophical anticipation for the future to unroll itself. He saved his prophetic energy for the occasions when life and death might depend on how many moves he could stay ahead of the game, but he felt reasonably sure that this was not that kind of game.

He was even more sure when she unlocked the inside door at which the automatic elevator stopped in obedience to the small green button and let him step out into a room that could only have been designed by an interior decorator who had studied his subject by watching old movies on television. It cried aloud for a sinuous slumber-eyed siren in a long clinging robe, possibly fondling a tame ocelot. Elise Ashville was too palpably charged with corpuscles and vitamins for that rôle, and she had not even conceded to the diaphanous négligée which any writer of a certain modern school would have considered a formal necessity for such an occasion, but the suggestion of untrammeled nakedness under the demurely neck-high and ankle-deep housecoat she had changed into was no less positive and even more effective. And her approach had a refreshing time-saving candor.

“I’m glad you weren’t too tied up with Mr Stern, since you aren’t going to be here long.”

“I think he was rather relieved that he didn’t have to take me on a tour of the strip-tease joints.” The Saint held his accent down to an intriguing cosmopolitan minimum, just enough to add spice to the personality he was projecting. “And your Marchese?”

“I told him I had a terrible headache.”

She led the way to a long, wide, deep, and unlimitedly functional couch, flanked by a coffee table burdened with bottles of almost anything except coffee, together with glasses and an ice bucket.

“Then the only one who must be unhappy is your maid,” he remarked. “She sounded quite annoyed about answering the phone.”

“She was sore because I took her away from her TV set to give me a rubdown and fix me a bath and a few things like that, and then I made her wait up until you called — that was in case anyone else called first, she could say I was out. So she’ll be fired as soon as she’s fixed my breakfast. I can’t stand servants who think they ought to have union hours and rules. If a servant isn’t a servant, what are you paying for? That’s the European angle, isn’t it?”

“Well, it was like that once. But today—”

“I’m going to ask the employment agency for a good hungry refugee. I couldn’t do worse than with what I’ve been getting. But I won’t bore you any more with that. Do you mind fixing your own nightcap?”

“I thought that was a figure of speech.”

She met the intentional challenge of his gently insolent gaze without the flicker of one mascara’d eyelash.

“I suppose in Europe no lady would have sent you a note like mine?”

“No, it could happen. But a gentleman would only take it as a most generous compliment.”

“You’ve got a nice line, darling, but you don’t have to strain it. Mr Stern must have told you a little about me. I expect you’re used to getting a lot of breaks because of your title. I get them because I can pay for anything I want. And I couldn’t let you get away, because I think you’re the most exciting-looking man I’ve ever seen.”

“Then you would not misunderstand my impatience to kiss the most exciting woman I have seen in America?”

It was a purely Arabian Nights kind of episode that the Saint would never have dared to relate to anyone who he did not already know to be convinced that in this amazing world anything can happen, but this subtracted nothing from his enjoyment of it, since he was not in the habit of telling that kind of story.

Churlish as it may seem to some readers, however, he did not wake up the next morning completely bemused by exquisite if implausible memories. In fact, after reviewing everything through a third cup of breakfast coffee, he found nothing more incredible than one recklessly premature pontification of his own. To retrieve that one he had to brazen out an unexpected call at a local newspaper office.

“I thought you decided last night that there was no story in it for you,” Stern said, not without malice. “What happened to change your mind?”

“Nothing,” Simon replied mendaciously, “except that I began to wonder if you’d think I just couldn’t be bothered. Would you care to get me those other details that you didn’t know last night?”

“Let’s go and talk to the editor.”

The editor was a composed and genial man who puffed a pipe in a relaxed manner that would have horrified any well-trained casting director. He said, “No, I haven’t sent anyone to talk to this sister. Since Ashville himself was so definite about not wanting the story printed, I decided to drop it. After all, if his pride is all he’s got left, and it means that much to him, we don’t have to strip him of that last shred of dignity to get out an interesting edition.”

“Did the sister leave any address?” Simon asked.

“Yes. I’ve got a note of it somewhere.” The editor rummaged through the papers in a tray. “Here it is. 4818 Alamanda Street. I think that’s out towards the hospital.”

“I’d like to talk to her. I won’t pretend that you sent me or even let her know where I got the address. On the other hand, if I don’t think you can do any good by printing anything she tells me, I won’t pass it on to you. Fair enough?”

The gentlemen of the press exchanged glances.

“Well,” said the editor philosophically, “since he seems to have got the address anyhow, we could call that an extravagantly generous offer.”

Alamanda Street proved to be a channel of grimy and uninspired façades that ran for only two blocks — the impressive numbering of the houses was simply scaled to match the corresponding numbers on the boulevard which it paralleled. The buildings were old without having acquired any antique elegance and somewhat oversized without stateliness. Several of them had signs offering rooms or apartments for rent, as the owners tried to eke out some revenue from their outmoded dimensions. Number 4818 was one of these, and the Saint found Miss Ashville’s name on a card over one of the mailboxes in the hall with a penciled note in the corner, 2nd floor back.

She came to the door as soon as he knocked, and he accepted that as a good omen, having been prepared to wait all day if she had been out.

“Good morning,” he said. “Could I talk to you about the call you made to the paper, about your brother?”

“You’ve been long enough getting here,” she said. “Come in.”

The room to which she admitted him was large but airless, shabbily furnished but meticulously tidy. One couch had an unmistakable air of being convertible into a bed, and he suspected that the barest essentials of a kitchenette were crowded behind an anachronistic concertina door in one corner. The contrast with the penthouse which he had left less than twelve hours ago could hardly have been starker.

“A reporter went to see Mr Ashville at once, but he said he didn’t want anything printed.”

“I know. And he may never forgive me for making that call.”

She had waved Simon to a chair, but she remained standing, her hands folded together at her waist. She had black hair with gray strands in it that she must have washed and set herself, very accurately and unbecomingly, and she was probably not more than a year or two past forty, but she had the kind of untended face that any casual observer would say belonged to a nice homely middle-aged woman — without even a thought of the heartbreaks and frustrations that might be buried behind that callous classification.

“Before you called the paper,” he said, “did you try to see Mrs Ashville?”

“I did. More than once. But at the office she was always in a meeting. I went to her apartment, and I know she was in, because the maid took my name, but she came back and said Mrs Ashville was not at home. Just like that. Then I wrote her a letter.”

“A rude one?”

“No, a very nice one. I said that I wondered if she was avoiding me because she was afraid I was going to be a nuisance, either by blaming her for the divorce or trying to patch things up. I told her I could understand that, but I wasn’t the meddling kind, and I didn’t want anything from her, either. Not for myself. But I thought she ought to know about Richard. And I told her just how it was with him.”

“How bad is it?”

“The doctors don’t give him more than a year. Of course, with new drugs being tried all the time, you never give up hope... But even if he hasn’t got long, it might be a little longer, and it’d certainly be a lot less horrible, if he could be taken to Arizona or Colorado or one of those places.”

“Didn’t she answer that?”

“Yes,” said Miss Ashville grimly. “She answered. That’s what I want to show you.”

She went to a drawer in the battered but carefully polished bureau and brought back a letter. It was on the very heaviest pearl-gray stationery, with a very large engraved monogram in gold in one corner surrounded by a corona of twinkling effects which at the first glance would have been taken for stars but on closer scrutiny proved to be tiny coronets. It must have betrayed a powerful fixation, he thought.

The aggressive but agreeable perfume that still clung to the paper and the impetuous self-indulgent sprawl of writing both connected with still very lively memories, but the tone was altogether different.

“Brrr,” said the Saint.

“You see?” said the homely sister. “Of course I’m prejudiced, but she just can’t be a nice person.”

“Did you ever talk to the lawyers?”

“I did not. You know very well I’d have been wasting my time. That’s what people like her have lawyers for. Besides, Richard hasn’t any legal claim. I know it, and she knew it when she said that.”

Simon glanced at the letter again.

“Had you quarreled before? ‘Dear Miss Ashville... Yours truly’ — as if you’d never even met.”

“We haven’t. Not to this day. I was abroad when they got married. I went to work for the Berlitz school in Brussels not long after the war, teaching American English — did you know that they teach both kinds? I only gave it up and came back when I realized that Richard might need someone to take care of him. I’m glad I did, but I wish I’d saved up more money. What I had put away didn’t go very far.”

“Have you talked to a lawyer of your own? I should think any sharp operator could cook up a case that’d at least be good enough to get into court and that wouldn’t be good publicity. Her lawyers might easily advise her to fork out something just to avoid that.”

She shook her head definitely.

“That couldn’t be done without Richard signing complaints and summonses and knowing all about it, and he’d never do that. He’s that kind of fool, but I love him for it.”

“Then what did you think the paper could do?”

“There’s a kind of pride that wouldn’t ask for charity, like Richard’s,” she said, “and another kind that can’t bear to think of a wicked woman getting away with what she’s done, without letting everyone know the rottenness of her. That’s my kind. I’ve read about her in the gossip columns since I’ve been back, going to the parties and the fancy restaurants, and always with some prince or baron or something, and it makes me boil over inside. If you print those stories, I think you ought to print the other things that are just as true. Perhaps it won’t do Richard any good, I’ve got to resign myself to that anyhow, but it’d be an eye opener to some of her fine friends.”

“I’m afraid,” said the Saint cynically, “that nothing would shock most of them, except if she ran out of money.”

“Do you think I’m just being vindictive?”

He considered her levelly.

“Yes. And I thoroughly approve. I often think the world could use a lot more vindictiveness — only I’d rather call it righteous indignation. I had to see you to make up my mind, but you’ve convinced me — you and this letter — that something has to be done.”

He gave the letter back to her, and she took it reluctantly.

“Then why don’t you keep it and publish it?”

“I can’t.” Simon had not forgotten his promise to Stern and the editor, and he kept it scrupulously. “I hope you won’t think I’ve taken advantage of you, but I never said I was a newspaperman. I just let you assume it. My name is Templar, and I am sometimes called the Saint.”

Even though she had spent the last ten years in Belgium, the durability or the international scope of his reputation was reflected in the enlargement of her eyes.

“You... But how...”

“I have ways of hearing all sorts of things,” he said glibly. “Don’t ask me how I got interested in your brother’s case, because I couldn’t tell you the truth. But I’m going to work on it.”

“If there’s anything I can do to help you—”

“I wouldn’t be bashful about asking, believe me. But I don’t know yet what can be done.” But already, under an air of vaguely discouraged perplexity, his brain was racing. “The only thing I’m sure of is that, given enough time, I usually dream up something.”

When he phoned Elise Ashville, after lunch, she answered the ring herself, but her voice was cold and almost unrecognizable until he gave his fictitious identity. Then it became warm and languorous.

“Darling. When do I see you again?”

“What are you doing?”

“Getting ready to go to the office. Got to make a few decisions and do a few chores. But for this evening, you name it.”

“What about your Marchese?”

“He can dry up and blow away. He woke me up at nine o’clock this morning, calling to ask how my headache was. I told him I had a wonderful night but he was spoiling my beauty sleep.” She laughed, intimately. “I’ll tell him I want to be alone and go to bed early tonight, to make up for it. Whatever you say.”

“I was teasing,” he said. “I have to catch the plane to Chicago in two hours, to see about a deal there. You remember, I told you yesterday I was not entirely a gentleman of leisure.”

“I don’t remember you telling me anything about your business. We were much too busy, weren’t we?”

“For me, to mix business and pleasure is mixing champagne and vinegar. The result is all vinegar, no champagne. I prefer us to be all champagne. You will still be here next Tuesday, if I can finish talking to these dreary pill makers and fly back?”

“You’ve got a date. But what dreary pill makers?”

“I shall tell you when it is all over. Until Tuesday, then, most wonderful Elise!”

He figured that that should be just enough to keep her nagged by an intermittent but persistent bug of curiosity, which by Tuesday should have piqued her to an ideal pitch of receptivity. But just in case it should torment her into trying to beat his timing, he made one more phone call, to David Stern.

“I’ve talked to Ashville’s sister, and kept your paper out of it, as we agreed. By the same token, I haven’t anything to tell you. Except thanks.”

“But are you going to do anything?”

“If I told you what I had in mind, you mightn’t approve. I don’t want you to sprain your conscience. And another thing. If I happened to make Elise very angry with me, it’s just possible she might include you for having introduced me. Personally I think she’d swallow it and keep quiet, rather than admit that anyone got the best of her, but I’d hate to expose you to the risk. So if she checks with you again, you never saw the Count of Cristamonte before and you didn’t vouch for him. I simply came to the office, introduced myself, and started asking a lot of questions about local industrial conditions, and finally conned you into adjourning to a cool cocktail bar, and then to dinner. I said I wasn’t free yet to tell you what I might be interested in manufacturing, except that it was something sensational in the medical field.”

“That’s all very well,” protested the publisher, “but I think you owe it to me—”

“To save you from being an accessory before the fact,” said the Saint. “One day, when I’m sure there’s not going to be a squawk, I may tell you more. Meanwhile, let this be a lesson to you not to get involved with shady characters like me.”

Again he hung up, before he could be pinned down by any more questions than he was inclined to answer.

As a matter of record, he did not fly to Chicago, but drove a hundred miles in the opposite direction, down to the Gulf coast and the picturesque outpost of Grand Isle at the end of the road, to sample the fabled fishing in the bayous and out around the offshore oil rigs. He spent a very innocent and refreshing three days and drove back to New Orleans on Tuesday afternoon only because he had committed himself. It was a sacrifice for which he felt thoroughly entitled to a halo.

He called Elise Ashville as soon as he had checked in at one of the elegant new motels on the Airline Highway and was put through with flattering speed by her office secretary. Her voice, in spite of a brave attempt at complacency, confirmed that the splinter he had deliberately planted had not stopped plaguing her.

“Darling. I hope you had a very dull trip.”

“Terribly dull — but profitable.” He had not forgotten his accent. “Do we still have our date?”

“I was counting on it. I sent the Marchese to Mexico — to find out if it really isn’t too hot at this time of year. How were your dreary pill makers?”

“Very dreary, but very nice to me. If I call for you at your flat at seven, will that give you time to have relaxed and made yourself beautiful?”

“Make it seven-thirty. I must be specially fascinating. You don’t know how you’ve tortured me, and now I shall drive you mad until I find out what you’ve been up to.”

“I shall enjoy that,” he said.

She was not used to men being confident and casual enough to have that note of carefree mockery in their voices when they spoke to her, and it sent unfamiliar currents tingling through her spine.

Enjoying a soothing facial massage and a stimulating body rub from her new maid, who was a trifle clumsy but much more obsequious and uncomplaining than the last one, she wondered whether this adventure might turn into something more durable than the others. She was not naturally promiscuous so much as amoral and ambitious: the discovery that with wealth added to her considerable physical endowments she could use titled playboys as playthings had gone to her head but had not completely turned it. To pick up and discard them at a whim flattered the ego of an ex-waitress, but to marry one merely for his title, with all the world knowing as well as she that that was all she had bought, would have violated every principle of the same plebeian common sense.

But as the Countess of Cristamonte, if he was actually even solvent in his own right... She toyed lazily with the name while she wallowed lengthily in the oiled and foamed and scented water of her sunken Roman bath. It was not so bad. Of course, she had sometimes dreamed of a Prince, but there were hardly any genuine ones left whom you could meet outside of a real palace, and most of them were either too young or too old. She might do worse than this, and she certainly wouldn’t have to apologize for him physically... While she allowed herself to be fluff-dried and powdered (she had observed these symbols of supreme luxury in a movie when she was a little girl, and in a depression would have slashed her office overhead to the bone before she dispensed with any of them) she almost accepted his proposal, and abruptly recalled that he had not yet made it. But that could be arranged, if the other qualifications were in order. Tonight she would be sure to have time to probe further into that.

“You can leave as soon as you’ve tidied up, Germaine,” she said, as she sat penciling her eyebrows. “And don’t come crashing in early in the morning.”

“Oui, madame. At vat hour do you vish me to be ’ere?”

“Not a minute before ten-thirty.” The maid might have to get used to some highly bohemian goings-on eventually, but there was no point in shocking her into a dither in the first few days. “I know I’ll be up very late tonight, and I won’t want to be disturbed.”

“I understand, madame.”

By the time she opened the door herself to the Saint’s ring, she had an excited feeling that the wheel of Fortune was spinning into a pattern loaded with her numbers — which only proves how misleading such hunches can be.

“Darling,” she said. “You’re terribly punctual.”

“Should I have pretended I did not care if I waited another hour to see you?” He kissed her hand with a flourish but went no farther except with eloquent eyes, and she thought that only a truly sophisticated gentleman would have had the gumption, in the circumstances, not to try to muss up a lady’s freshly perfected makeup at the very start of the evening. “I cannot play these games, especially after the games I have had to play since I was here.”

“You look very healthy for a man who’s spent a weekend in Chicago.”

“Only because on Saturday and Sunday I have to go out to the country clubs, or the yacht clubs,” he said quickly. “I have only one thing against America: when a business man wants to take you away for a change from the office atmosphere — be careful! When he gets you to take off your coat, he is planning to take your shirt.”

“Is that what those dreary pill makers did to you?”

“Yes. No. That is, they tried, but they didn’t. I think I made a good deal.”

“Darling. You’re at home here, remember? Make us a cocktail.” She settled into her corner of the oversize couch. “The very driest Martini, for me.”

He stirred up some Romanoff vodka with ice and allowed four drops of Cazalis & Prats to fall in the pitcher.

“You see? I am learning all the tricks of an American business man.”

“Why do you want to be an American business man?”

“Because, alas, I don’t have the temperament of a gigolo. When I compliment a beautiful woman, I want her to believe me and not think I am complimenting her bank account. Here’s an American compliment for you: you look good enough to eat. Is that why I would be called a wolf?”

She laughed.

“Well, you won’t have to prove it that way. I’ve made a reservation for us at Antoine’s.”

“No.”

Her head went back a fraction of an inch, as if jolted by a tiny invisible blow, and her eyebrows went up.

“Why not? It’s the most famous place in New Orleans.”

“That is the first reason. I have seen nothing but famous places for so many days now that I’m bored with them. Second” — he ticked the list off on his fingers, smiling disarmingly — “where I come from, it is the custom for a man who is taking a woman to dinner to choose the place. Unless she is paying, which I’ve told you does not agree with me. Third, I did not plan to go to any restaurant, which would be crowded and noisy and either too stuffy or too air-conditioned. For us, this time, I wanted something quite different.”

“Don’t tell me you want to cook something here!”

“Do I already look so domesticated?” he said reproachfully. “No, I am thinking much more romantically. It came to me while I was on the plane, thinking of you and of our first real date. What would be quite different, I thought, from the first date to which anyone else would invite her? So I had an idea. I remembered I noticed last night it was almost a full moon. I had time after I got here to hire a car, to make inquiries, to drive around. I found a place beside the lake, at the end of a road, fifteen or twenty miles out of town, away from all the traffic and the people, with the most beautiful big trees and nice ground to park, and there I decided we would have a picnic.”

She stared at him with mounting incredulity.

“A picnic? Are you kidding?”

“Ah, but you are thinking of the American or the English picnic. The blanket spread on the ground, the sand in the sandwiches, the ants in the warm beer. I shall show you how a civilized Frenchman picnics.”

“In these clothes? And after you told me to get all dressed up for you—”

“Certainly. In the car I have folding chairs, a folding table, even a tablecloth. I have knives and forks and plates and napkins. In a large box of ice I have caviar, vichyssoise, prawns in aspic, pheasant glazed with truffles — all from one of the best kitchens in town — a salad needing only to be mixed, and a magnum of Bollinger. For music, I provide some of the world’s greatest orchestras — on records. You will be served as well as you could be in the finest restaurant, if only I don’t spill anything. But all this, and the moon on the water, we shall have all to ourselves.”

“You and me and the mosquitoes,” she said, though his dramatic enthusiasm was so enchanting that her tone of voice was softened in spite of herself. “Darling. We’d be eaten alive!”

He shook his head.

“I have already thought of that too.”

He reached for her hand and held it open, and took a small gold box from his pocket and tipped out a pill into her upturned palm. The pill was a little larger than an aspirin tablet, pink and sugar-coated. Then he poured her a glass of water.

“Take it.”

“What’s the idea?” she demanded suspiciously. “Is this one of those happy-dope pills that you think’ll make me agree to anything, or just not care how much I get bitten?”

“No, it isn’t. I give you my word of honor that it cannot possibly harm you, or upset you, or affect your good judgment. It isn’t an aphrodisiac, or a drug that will place you at my mercy.”

“Well, these are two things I wasn’t worrying about.” She raised the pill to her lips and stopped again. “If I take it, will you promise to answer my next question?”

“I promise.”

She put the tablet in her mouth and washed it down.

“Now,” she said, “tell me what your business was with those pill makers in Chicago.”

“It was about this pill.”

“Don’t cheat. A full answer.”

He grinned ruefully.

“Now you have cheated me. I was looking forward so much to having you try to seduce the answer from me. Instead, I am trapped... Very well. They were bargaining for the formula of this pill, which will keep all mosquitoes and gnats and such nuisances away from you for the rest of the night. So do you have any more arguments against my picnic?”

“You’re crazy, but you did make it sound exciting and different,” she said slowly. “But this pill business — that’s the craziest of all.”

“You see how important it will be? No more people dabbing themselves with sticky, smelly things to chase the bugs, and never doing it quite enough. Just one little pill two or three times a day, and you can forget that they exist. A little aroma comes through all your pores, nothing that you or your best friends could detect, but to the nose of a bug — ppheuw!”

“I’d heard of them trying to find something like that, but I didn’t know they’d got it yet.”

He freshened the remains in the pitcher and refilled their glasses.

“I am lucky to have it first. Let me finish this full answer quickly, so that we can be gay again. My father’s hobby was exploring. He made many expeditions in South America, but because he was only a titled amateur, with no scientific qualifications, his discoveries were not taken seriously and often they were not even believed. Even the books he wrote he had to pay to have published — and of course they were not even translated in English. He was writing another when he died a few years ago. I read it, as a duty. He told how he had wondered how natives could live naked in a jungle with bugs that would drive an unprotected white man insane in a few hours, and how he could not believe the white men who thought it was only because the savages were used to it or didn’t feel it. He searched for another answer and found it in the nut of a certain tree that they eat.”

“It sure sounds nutty to me — but I’m listening.”

Simon shrugged.

“Being his son, I am a little nutty too. I went back up the Amazon where he had been — of course, it’s much easier today. I found the tribe he had visited, and the tree, which he described very well. I tried the nuts, which are so horrible that after one bite you would prefer the mosquitoes, but no mosquitoes came near me. Then I knew how I could make an honest living. Is that enough, and do we go for a picnic?”

“I suppose I should have my head examined,” she said inventively, “but this I have got to see. Only if it doesn’t live up to the billing, it could be the end of a beautiful friendship.”

“Agreed. At the very first bite of a bug, we shall throw everything in the lake and drive back to Antoine’s.”

But on the drive out to the place he had picked, she could no more resist pumping him with other questions than she could have cut out her own tongue. What was the tree? He didn’t know, he wasn’t a botanist. He’d simply gambled on having several tons of the nuts husked and powdered by cheap Indian labor, and rafted down to the coast at Belem, where he stored the sacks in a warehouse. But the pills? He’d taken a few pounds of the flour back to Europe, had tablets handmade by a pharmacist friend, even telling him that they were only supposed to be a kind of general tonic. However, he had decided that the pills could be most profitably manufactured and exploited in the United States, and he had been negotiating with four of the biggest drug companies.

“It has not been quite as easy as I expected,” he said. “You see, I couldn’t give them a regular formula, and I dared not give them samples to make their own tests, because they could analyze them, and your modern chemists are so clever that they might quickly find a way to make the same thing synthetically without even identifying the tree. So I had to make my own demonstrations and see that every pill I gave out was swallowed. It made many problems. But this company in Chicago was most interested.”

“Then what brought you to New Orleans?”

“I’d also wondered about starting a small factory myself, and I thought I might be at home here with its Continental traditions. That is why I was talking to Mr Stern. But when I went back to Chicago, these people were ready to discuss a deal, and I decided it might be wiser to let them have the headaches with the Government and the unions.”

“But Mr Stern must have told you who I was, after he introduced us the other night.”

“Yes, naturally.”

“And you never told me a word about it.”

“We were too busy, weren’t we?” he quoted her naughtily. “And if I had started trying to sell you my pills the first moment we were alone together, what would you have thought?”

She had no reply to that, but her active mind kept on working all the rest of the way to the place where he took her. Beyond any doubt he had the kind of presence and personality she had sometimes dreamed of, but she had not created and become the queen-pin of Ashville Pharmacal Products merely by dreaming.

When he stopped the car, she got out at once and strolled and stood around while he deftly and cheerfully set up lanterns, unfolded chairs and table, and unloaded boxes of utensils and provender. It was indeed a lovely spot, cool and clean-smelling, framed in ancient trees bearded with Spanish moss, with the dark mysterious expanse of Lake Pontchartrain lapping sleepily up to the shore and a round yellow moon rising high, but all she was interested in was the insect life.

Innumerable flying things fluttered and dived drunkenly around the lamps, and from the shadows came myriads of mosquitoes with a ceaseless hum of tiny tireless wings. She could even see them flickering speckily past her eyes, and hear the rise and fall of individual hungry hoverings around her, while even tinier gnats whined thinly past like diminutive rockets. But not once did the whine build into the typical infuriating crescendo of a gnat’s kamikaze plunge directly into the earhole, and she could watch her bare gleaming arms without seeing them darkened by the settling of a single mote of disrespectful voracity. Her expectant shoulders and back and legs waited for the hair-touch of an almost weightless landing and the microscopic stab of the first probing sting, but time went on and they felt nothing. And she knew that to be first on the market with a pill that would accomplish such a miracle would make what by any standards could be literally called a fortune.

There was soft music coming from the portable players and he was spooning caviar onto the first plates on the neatly laid table.

“Come, Elise, sit down and relax,” he said. “You know by now that nothing is going to bite you.”

“It’s amazing,” she said as she let him seat her. “I must know — did those pill makers give you a good deal?”

“Not too bad,” he answered with no embarrassment. “It will be a royalty of ten cents a hundred, with a guarantee of fifteen thousand dollars a year, and they pay ten thousand at once for the stuff I have in Belem — that is, if there is no hitch.”

“How do you mean? Isn’t it signed yet?”

“The president of the company has to give the final okay, and he’s been on vacation in Honolulu. He will be back tomorrow, and it will be one of the first things they put up to him. They wanted me to wait, but I told them I had a date here that I could not break. Anyway, they can phone me, and I can fly back in a few hours.”

“They’re robbing you,” she said intensely. “I’m a pill maker myself, and I know. If your pills are worth anything, they’re worth twice as much. I’ll prove it to you. I’ll double their offer right now.”

The cork popped from the bottle he was working on. “Please,” he said with a gesture. “No vinegar.”

“Baloney. If you won’t give me a business break, you’re robbing me as well as yourself, and that’d make anything sour.”

“But I’ve practically given my word—”

“They haven’t given theirs, have they? They can still back out and not owe you a nickel. So if they can’t close a deal because somebody’s on vacation, that’s their bad luck. Be an American business man. Send ’em a wire tonight and tell ’em all bets are off.”

“Elise, suppose you are only talking from the Martinis, or the moon, or because you like me a little? Suppose in the morning you wake up and decide you have been foolish? You tell me all bets are off. Then where am I?”

“You don’t know me very well, Buster, but I get your point. All right. When we get home, I’ll give you my personal check for twenty thousand. You take it to the bank as soon as they open—”

“And they immediately call the police.”

“Not with the note I’ll give you. There’ll be a code word that tells them it’s okay. And then right away you put in a long-distance call to Chicago and tell those jerks you already made a better deal. We’ll talk to my attorneys about the contract later in the day. Is that good enough for you?”

It was easily as good as anything he could have proposed himself, but he let her spend most of an exceptionally delightful meal selling it to him.

When Mrs Elise Ashville let herself wake up by sybaritically easy stages the next morning, and finally focused her eyes on the bedside clock, it showed ten minutes past eleven.

She squirmed, yawned, stretched, and sprawled again in the enormous bed, draining the last raptures of sleepy recollection, until she suddenly realized that some faint sounds of activity in the apartment should have aroused her somewhat before that. Either the new maid was going to prove as unreliable as her predecessors, or she was a potential jewel who crept in and moved around like a mouse.

Mrs Ashville yawned again and sat up, in an unwontedly agreeable and optimistic mood which could not have been solely due to the single pink vitamin-complex pill that Simon Templar had persuaded her to take the night before.

“Germaine,” she called — quite dulcetly, at first.

There was no response, even after louder repetitions. Germaine Ashville, having done her part by giving her sister-in-law a facial with almost pure ethylhexanediol, and pouring two full quarts of it into her bubble bath, and even spiking all her colognes and perfumes with the same popular odorless insect repellent, was already boarding a plane to Denver with her brother, and the Saint was seeing them off.