The Saint Around the World

1

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2

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

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

“Do you have to go?”

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

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

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

“It couldn’t be love, could it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The other passengers, some thirty of them on that early run, could mostly be separated without much difficulty into two broad groups. One, which could be distinguished by generally paler skins, a subtle tendency towards superfluities of apparel or ornament, and a state of ill-concealed trepidation or excitement, consisted of the inevitable sightseers and perhaps a few tentative recruits. The others, usually marked by a deep tan, a simpler carelessness of costume, and a more earnest or relaxed demeanour, could be picked out with relative certainty as habitués or at least full-fledged initiates. The Saint, with his bronzed skin, in the cotton shirt and old shorts and espadrilles which he had sensibly chosen to wear, could easily have passed for one of the latter. McGeorge, on the other hand, was easily the most conspicuous example of the first category. Anyone seeing them together would have assumed at once that it was the Saint who had business on the island, and that McGeorge was the one who had decided on the spur of the moment to come along for the ride — and was now vainly regretting the impulse. It was a switch that Simon found highly diverting.

None of the passengers had yet disrobed to any unorthodox extent, but McGeorge did not seem to derive much solace from the delay. His eyes had become fixed on a flattish promontory of rock that stood out a little towards them from the body of the island. On it, tiny figures could be seen lying or strolling and sometimes plunging into the water like seals.

“Would you,” McGeorge asked huskily, at last, “say that they had anything on?”

Simon kept his eyes focused as the point drew steadily nearer.

“No,” he said at last. “I wouldn’t.”

“Oh, Lord,” said McGeorge, as if right up until that moment he had been clutching a wisp of hope that all the reports about the Ile du Levant might still somehow prove to be a myth.

The ferry headed into the narrow gap between Levant and Port-Cros, and began to swing in towards the eastern island. Loulou personally took the wheel again and tooted a cheerful annunciatory blast on the ship’s horn, while his fellow Corsairs dispersed efficiently fore and after to make ready the mooring lines.

From the water, dusky green slopes of brush and stunted pine rose steeply to a rounded summit some four hundred feet above. All over the hillside, the tile roofs and tinted walls of villas and more considerable buildings broke through the scrub at decent intervals, while near the peak, somewhat unexpectedly, stood out the unmistakable lines of a modern chapel. The ferry kept turning still more sharply in towards a little cove that opened suddenly ahead of it, with the rusty hull of an old ship sunk across part of the entrance for a breakwater, and the reassuringly normal-looking windows and terrace of a typical small restaurant overlooking it from a ledge just a short climb above the jetty. To the right of the port as they approached it, the lower slopes were dotted with white and orange glimpses of scores of little tents, and on the rocks below the outlines of basking campers could be made out in just enough detail to establish that they were letting no artificial obstructions come between them and the health-giving rays of the sun.

“Does your uncle live in one of those?” Simon asked, indicating the canvas settlement.

“I’m sure he’d prefer to,” said McGeorge glumly. “But he moved all his belongings here, most of them being books, so he had to break down and put a roof over them.”

To make his aspect even more incongruous, he was clutching a large and sinister-looking weapon which resembled a cross between an ancient arquebus and something out of a science-fiction armoury. From one end of it protruded the sharp end of a wickedly barbed spear, which the rest of the contraption was apparently designed to propel.

“What can you take for a present to a simple-life maniac?” he had explained plaintively, when he showed up with it at their embarcation. “It seems that about their only entertainment here is swimming around in diving masks and shooting at wretched little fish. So I went to a tackle shop and asked them what was the latest tool for it, and they sold me this beastly thing.”

A sizeable and lively congregation stood waiting on the quay. Some of them who were more or less conventionally clothed, but sun-scorched, could be identified by their baggage as visitors who were waiting to end their stay with the return trip of the ferry. The rest were obviously residents or at least seasoned sojourners who had come to meet newly arriving friends, to collect packages from the mainland, or simply to inspect the latest specimens from the outside world. A few of those wore bikinis that would have satisfied the modest requirements of any ordinary French beach, but as the distance lessened from yards to feet and eventually to inches, it became eye-fillingly manifest that the majority were fully content with the minuscule G-string confection prescribed for wear within the city limits.

“This is just like landing on one of those South Sea islands you used to read about,” Simon remarked, surveying the reception committee with interest. “Only these natives are a hell of a lot better-looking.”

It was indeed hard to realize that they had voyaged less than an hour from Le Lavandou, and already Loulou’s assistant Corsairs had jumped ashore and were pushing through the array of bare breasts and buttocks to make fast their lines with all the indifference of long familiarity. Mr McGeorge stood gripped in a kind of paralysis in which only his eyes moved, and they swiveled frantically as if torn between the compulsion to see everything and a terror of being caught staring at anything. But at last they found something that they seemed to feel they could safely rest on.

“There’s Uncle Waldo,” he croaked.

Simon followed him on to the dock without the slightest forboding of what that innocent visit was to lead to.

3

Mr Waldo Oddington was a rather tall wiry man whose age was not too evident even to the extremely complete scrutiny which his nominal garment permitted. His hair, which was scanty, was an indefinite gray, and although his nut-brown body might have been rated on the scrawny side by some esthetic standards, its muscles looked hard and his abdomen was as flat as a board. He wrung his nephew’s hand with a vigor that made Mr McGeorge wince.

“Good to see you, my dear boy! And it’s about time. I thought you’d never run out of excuses.” His very bright hazel eyes examined McGeorge more closely. “What’s the matter with you? Have you just been sick?”

“No, we had a perfectly smooth crossing.”

“Then why are you so pale?”

“London, you know,” said McGeorge vaguely. “And New York before that.”

“Terrible places,” pronounced Mr Oddington. “Millions of imbeciles making themselves neurotic with the noise and bustle, and poisoning themselves with all the fumes they breathe. Why do you think their insanity rate and their lung cancer rate keep rising in almost parallel lines on a graph?”

Not having any ready answer to this, McGeorge somewhat desperately proffered the spear gun he had been holding.

“I brought this along for you, Uncle,” he said. “I hope you like it.”

“Now that’s what I call using your head.” Mr Oddington hefted the weapon and beamed over it like a ten-year-old who has just been presented with the newest model Space Patrol disintegrator. “I really appreciate it, dear boy. We’ll try it out this afternoon… But I know you’ve been dying to meet Nadine.”

He pushed forward a fair-haired golden-skinned girl who had been standing near him. She smiled, making dimples in a mischievous pretty face.

“How do you do,” she said, with only a little accent.

Mr McGeorge did not look as if he had been dying to meet her, but as if he might well die from doing it. His savoir faire, which probably no normal contretemps could have ruffled, was plainly unequal to the requirements of being presented to a shapely young woman who seemed quite unconscious of wearing nothing above the waist. A crimson flush swept over his face, and he groped blindly for her outstretched hand with his eyes fixed glazedly on a point just over the top of her head.

As hastily as possible, he turned to grab the Saint’s arm, as if it had frantically occurred to him that Simon might escape.

“I’d like you to meet a friend of mine — Mr Templar. I brought him with me. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Delighted!” Mr Oddington surveyed the Saint’s lean broad-shouldered lines with undisguised approval. “You look very fit, sir. I’m sure we’ll have a lot in common. And you must meet Mademoiselle Zeult.”

Simon shook hands with the girl, without especially restricting himself on where he looked. It seemed to him that she was no more displeased than any fully clothed woman would have been who sensed that her figure was being admired.

“Well, we don’t have to stand around here,” Mr Oddington said briskly. “I expect you’re dying to get out of those clothes.”

“Oh, no,” said McGeorge faintly. “I mean, we’re in no hurry. I mean, if there’s anything else you want to do…”

“We have to pick up a few groceries in the village, but that’s on our way. And of course, you’ll want to buy your slips.”

“Our what?”

“These things.” Mr Oddington indicated his own peculiarly tailored kind of sporran.

“We don’t really need those, do we?” McGeorge said.

“I’m afraid you do. It’s strictly against the law to go around the village stark naked. Damned nonsense, I think, but there it is.”

“I mean, I’ve already got trousers, and Templar’s got shorts—”

“You don’t want to be taken for tourists and have everyone staring at you, do you?” asked Mr Oddington incredulously.

He shepherded them away up a narrow deeply rutted road along which some of the crowd were already dispersing, while others were stringing out along a footpath that led along the shore in the direction of the clustered tents. The road curved up the hill without any serious attempt at easing its slant. A battered truck laden with miscellaneous cargo and with a half-dozen grinning riders perched on top slowly overtook them, and they had to step off the edge of the lane to let it by. It groaned past them in four-wheeled drive, leaving a fine haze of dust in its wake.

“Our only piece of mechanical transportation,” Mr Oddington said. “It hauls heavy stuff up from the ferry — and people who are too lazy to walk.”

“How far do we have to go?” McGeorge asked.

“It’s only half a mile from the port to the village center, and my place is just a little further up.”

Mr Oddington’s stringy legs maintained a remarkably youthful pace, and his bare feet did not even seem to notice the stony roughness of the slope on which McGeorge frequently stumbled in his elegant shoes. But when McGeorge fell behind, Nadine Zeult moved in front of him, looking from that angle as if she were wearing nothing whatever except a piece of string. The Saint saw McGeorge shudder and turn on a panicky burst of speed that took him safely ahead of the sight, and Simon found himself walking beside the girl.

“How long have you been here?” he asked, to make conversation.

“Since May, this year. Is it your first time here?”

“Yes.”

“I came first in August last year, only because a boy I was with wanted to see it, and I have been here ever since. Perhaps you will be the same.”

“It’s a little early to think about that,” Simon murmured.

“I think you will enjoy it.” She looked at McGeorge’s back, to which the shirt was already clinging sweatily. “But I do not think Mr Oddington’s nephew will. Do you know him well?”

“As a matter of fact, I hardly know him at all.”

“They are not a bit alike. I can tell. Already I’m wondering why Mr Oddington is so fond of him,” she said with astonishing frankness.

Before Simon could decide on a suitable answer, Mr Oddington announced, “Here we are. This is Héliopolis!”

A stranger might not have recognized it at once as the village center if he had not been told. Since leaving the shadow of the restaurant that overlooked the harbor, they had passed signs indicating other restaurants and hotels, and a shop, on other equally rough roads that branched off to their left to follow the contours of the hill and which doubtless served the villas which had been more visible from the sea. Now there was only a very slightly increased concentration of commercial activity: a few yards above another restaurant and bar which they had just passed there was a grocery store on the right, and opposite that a stall festooned with an indeterminate variety of merchandise ranging from pottery to postcards, while facing them was a hotel rather poetically named the Pomme d’Adam, with another shop a little above it on the hill to the right, and another hotel farther along in the same direction. The fact that all these enterprises were loosely grouped around a fairly large bare open space where three roads met still fell rather short of making it a kind of sun city’s Times Square.

Mr Oddington led the way into the grocery store, where he and Nadine chatted and chaffered with sociable lengthiness over the purchase of a disproportionately small quantity of victuals. The proprietor and his wife, Simon noticed, were completely and conventionally clad, but entirely uninterested in the condition of their customers. When the goods had been collected in a string bag, and the total added up on the margin of an old newspaper, Mr Oddington opened a horizontal zipper near the upper margin of his cache-sexe. George McGeorge, who now had a rosy flush from no other cause than the exertion of the recent climb, at this point reversed his system of color changes and turned pale. Mr Oddington, unaware of having provoked any consternation, extracted from the unzippered pocket a tightly folded wad of paper money, counted out enough to cover his bill, replaced the remainder together with his change, and calmly zipped the pocket up again.

“After all, George,” Simon observed reasonably, “even in this Garden of Eden they use money, and where else could he have a pocket?”

Mr Oddington picked up the string bag and herded his party across the street. He waved an expansive hand towards a string of fragments of fancifully printed cotton hanging over the proscenium of the stall, which at first glance would have been taken for a row of ornamental pennants.

“Now,” he said, with a twinkle that was faintly suggestive of a challenge, “you can choose your minimums.”

The young woman behind the counter leaned forward to spread out a wider choice of patterns. She was herself modeling one of her own skeletal creations — apparently the working and trading personnel of the village were freely divided between those who took the maximum advantage of their legal liberty and those who preferred to ignore it. McGeorge grabbed blindly for the nearest piece of cloth, and the girl pointed out to him, giggling, that he had picked out a female model. With the air of a Greek philosopher accepting a cup of hemlock, he took the first alternative she offered and turned rapidly away.

“You pay,” he said to the Saint. ‘I’ll settle up with you later.”

Simon did not mind being stuck with the trivial cost, as he expected to be, with the almost certain compensation of seeing McGeorge forced to wear the article. He selected for himself a scrap of cotton print with an interesting motif of bees and flowers and the built-in zippered pocket whose utility he had seen demonstrated, and resolved that for McGeorge’s benefit he would wear it as if he had been doing it all his life.

Mr Oddington glanced around to reassemble his flock, and Simon discovered that Nadine was no longer with them. He saw her in a moment, across the street, talking to a young man of about her own age, who kept looking across at them. The young man had rather long well-oiled black hair and the build of a Greek statue; from the way he posed, and the rather spoiled set of his handsome face, one got an instant impression that he had familiarized himself with all his own natural assets in a great many mirrors.

“Nadine,” Mr Oddington called, somewhat peremptorily.

The girl smiled and waved back.

“Go on — I’ll catch up with you.”

Mr Oddington frowned, but led the way up the hill to the left. They climbed for a few more minutes, then turned down a still narrower side road.

“If you’re so fond of swimming, Uncle Waldo,” McGeorge said, with a slight edge in his voice, “why don’t you live near the water?”

“Much better view up here,” Mr Oddington said cheerfully. “And it’s wonderful exercise walking back and forth.”

He suddenly ducked down a winding path through a thicket of oleanders, and in another moment they were at the back door of a house. He opened it without recourse to a key, and they entered a little vestibule with an open kitchen on one side. Mr Oddington stopped there to put down his string bag of provisions and transfer some of them to the refrigerator.

“I see you don’t object to some modern conveniences,” Simon remarked.

“Why should I?” said Mr Oddington. “Science offers good things and bad things impartially. The test of intelligence is to take the good things and not feel that that obligates you to accept everything. Some people here have their own electric plants, but I get along nicely with bottled gas. It does nearly all the same things, except running a water pump. There’s a rain-water storage tank under the house: it fills up in the winter, and it’s big enough to last me all summer.” He pointed to a large lever on an exposed pipe in one corner. “We use that to fill a gravity cistern under the roof. It’s better than an electric pump. It never gets out of order, and it’s good for the biceps.”

He took them through an archway on the other side of the vestibule into the living room. It had a bare tile floor, bookshelves lining two walls, a desk with a typewriter, and a few cane chairs. Opposite the archway, big French windows stood open on to a terrace beyond which there was indeed a fabulous view over the sapphire sea, with a corner of Port-Cros at one side and the coast of the mainland in the distance.

Mr Oddington steered them off to the right into a short passageway, where he exhibited a tiled bathroom on one side and two small bedrooms on the other, both of them with French windows on to the same terrace that ran along the whole front of the villa. The bedrooms contained a Spartan minimum of furniture, but they did have beds.

“Don’t you sleep on the floor any longer, Uncle?” McGeorge inquired.

“Nadine pointed out to me that even birds build nests and line them with feathers,” Mr Oddington said. “I have been giving her argument a fair trial, and so far I have felt no ill effects.”

They went on out to the terrace and gazed at the panorama.

“How did you meet this girl?” McGeorge asked.

“Well,” Mr Oddington said, almost as if their relationship had been reversed, “I hate having to clean house, and also I needed someone to help me with the typing on my book—”

“What book?”

“I am writing a book about everything I have discovered which will enable anyone to live to be hale and hearty at a hundred. Of course, I won’t be able to publish it with real authoritativeness until I’m a hundred myself, but that gives me another thirty-six years to get all my facts and principles systematized.”

“I see. But how did you find Nadine?”

“I stuck an advertisement on the bulletin board at the Mairie, and she happened to see it. She was only over for the day, but the place had got her — it does that to some people, you know, like love at first sight, when they realize that there’s something here that they’ve always unconsciously wanted. But to stay here for more than a short holiday, she had to be able to earn a living. It was Fate, of course — a perfect example of it. She came to see me, and I liked her at once.”

“But you told me yourself that it was more than a business arrangement.”

“Later on, yes. She’s a very attractive girl, as you’ve seen for yourself by this time, and the idea that a man of over sixty is practically decrepit has only been built up by burlesque comedians on the strength of the type of specimens they see in their audience. I think we shall have a very happy marriage.” The Saint, who had been leaning on the balustrade and trying to look as though he were politely ignoring the conversation, turned in time to see McGeorge flinch as if he had taken a tap in the solar plexus.

“You haven’t done this already?”

“No, but we were only waiting till you could be here. After all, you’re the only family I have.”

“It’s as serious as that, is it?”

“You know my views about motherhood for women. I certainly mustn’t deprive Nadine of such a vital function. And to complete my studies of every phase of the natural life, I should have the experience of being a father.”

“All right,” McGeorge said, in a slightly strangled voice. “But you used to say that marriage was a barbaric formula — I can quote you — designed originally to perpetuate the servitude of women, and developed by modern courts to achieve the enslavement of man.”

“My dear boy, that is still true,” replied Mr Oddington blandly. “However, since we still live in a semi-barbaric society, we sometimes have to bow to its tabus. Nadine has reminded me that a child of unmarried parents, I refuse to call it illegitimate, is subject to an endless series of petty embarrassments which it would only be selfish to inflict on it when they can be averted merely by submitting to a few minutes of mumbo-jumbo and signing a piece of paper.”

Whether McGeorge would have found a ready answer to that remained unsettled, for he still seemed to be recovering from a state of shock when Nadine Zeult herself came out from the living room to join them.

“You are all so serious,” she said, taking them in with her impish amber eyes. “That is what always happens when men are left alone.”

“You were the one who left us,” Mr Oddington said, his mouth tightening irritably as at an unfortunately revived recollection.

The girl laughed, and went over to cuddle his arm and kiss him on the cheek.

“You are pretending to be jealous, Waldo,” she said blithely, “and it makes you adorable. Now I am here, what do you want us to do?”

Mr Oddington graciously allowed himself to recover his good humor while portentously studying a sundial set in a stone table permanently built into the terrace.

“We’ve used up so much of the morning that it’s hardly worth going to the beach now,” he said. “Let’s have an early lunch and go for a swim afterwards.”

“I will bring you a drink while I fix it.”

The girl left, and came back in a few minutes with a bottle of St Raphael and three glasses with ice in them. She disappeared again, humming light-heartedly, and Mr Oddington uncorked the bottle.

“How about an apéritif?”

“You’re full of surprises, Uncle Waldo,” said McGeorge, who had recovered some of his self-possession at last. “I didn’t think you approved of that sort of thing.”

“I have not changed my principles, but I am capable of expanding them,” Mr Oddington said severely. “It took me a long time to realize that wine and such beverages were strictly vegetarian products and therefore did not conflict with my views on diet, I admit it, and I am not ashamed to have discarded a baseless prejudice. But I still do not drink the blood of animals or decoctions of dead bodies.”

Simon tentatively eased a package of Pall Malls from his pocket.

“Would you mind,” he ventured, “if I smoked a strictly vegetable cigarette?”

Mr Oddington chuckled with great good humor.

“Nobody maintains that all vegetables are good. Some are even poisonous — such as tobacco. I’m quite sure you know that. But the first law of this island is tolerance, and if you wish to gamble with your own health I can be sorry but I have no right to object.”

The Saint offered his pack to McGeorge, who took one defiantly, and lighted one for himself with an unfamiliar feeling that Mr Oddington had somehow come out disconcertingly ahead on points.

Lunch was a much better meal than he had expected. There was a minestrone so thick with vegetables and so heavily crusted with grated cheese that it was almost as satisfying as a meat stew, and a pilaff of rice and peanuts and mushrooms with a smothering of fried onions that was surprisingly tasty. With a bottle of Ste Roseline rosé to wash it down, and a fresh peach to finish it off, it was not too inadequate for a hot day.

“I shall now take a siesta for exactly half an hour,” announced Mr Oddington, when they had all helped with the dishes. “One day some pompous nincompoop of a physician will get himself a great reputation by officially prescribing what the Mediterranean people have always done by instinct.”

Simon found himself in the other bedroom, taking off his shirt, while George McGeorge sat and watched him morosely.

“Well, Templar, what do you think?”

“Me?” said the Saint. “I love your Uncle Waldo. He’s probably one of the few completely happy people in this complicated world. He’s found his Bali H’ai.”

“And the girl to go with it,” McGeorge said. “I heard her telling you on the way up about how she came here the first time with a boyfriend. And you saw the gigolo type she was talking to in the village, and the way Uncle Waldo felt about it. How much would you like to bet that that isn’t the same boyfriend? And that they haven’t had everything figured out all along?”

Simon pursed his lips.

“Yes, I had thought about that. I can see why it would bother you.”

“Don’t think I’m just going to sit and let it happen,” McGeorge said.

His habitually weary and rather querulous voice had such a cold-blooded intensity that the Saint realized for the first time, with an odd thrill of indefinable apprehension, how seriously he might have mis-estimated that effete and stuffy young man.

4

The walk to the beach at Rioufrède was mostly downhill, across the central intersection of Héliopolis and down a road that started at right angles to the one they had trudged up from the port, so that Mr Oddington’s energetic pace was easy even for McGeorge’s unconditioned legs to keep up with. Mr Oddington, whose siesta seemed to give him the fire to start an afternoon as if it were a whole new day, drew their attention to the rusty barbed wire on one side of the road and an occasional faded sign posted behind it, and held forth trenchantly about the recent invasion by the French Navy and its attempt to take over the whole island as a base for guided missile experiments, and the stubborn struggle of the residents to retain their foothold.

“Bureaucracy’s the same everywhere. As if they didn’t have half the Sahara desert doing no good to anyone, this was the only place they could pick on to play with their stupid toys. They couldn’t set up shop in a place like Timbuktu, which nobody would have missed. It was more fun to destroy a place that stood for just a little more freedom from regulations than anywhere else. But they got a surprise when they found that they’d stirred up a hornets’ nest!”

From the pugnacious thrust of jaw that went with that, Simon added to his observations the awareness that Mr Oddington was capable of fully as much stubborn aggressiveness as his nephew had unexpectedly revealed, and the new-born conviction grew on him that the inevitable conflict might not be pretty at all. But it was not easy to pursue that thought with the sun baking scent from the pines and the mellow air more consciously experienced by his skin than he would have thought possible. He was wearing his “minimum” with all the aplomb he could muster, as he had promised himself, but the white stencil left by his regular swimming trunks was something that no mere resolve could obliterate.

“Don’t feel like a freak,” Mr Oddington said sturdily. “Every one of us has been through the same stage. But did you ever have a more comfortable walk?”

“It’s certainly the perfect costume for a hot day,” Simon admitted. “But what’s it like here in the winter?”

“Hardly anyone stays, but I like it. We have heat in the house, and it never gets so cold outside that you can’t keep warm if you walk fast enough.”

Presently they turned off the road, down a well-worn footpath to the right. The path started mildly, grew rapidly steeper, and finally became precipitous. When it was little more than a goat-track slanting down the side of a cliff, the stunted bushes thinned out to unmask the first sudden view of the cove it was leading down into. It was a deep little bay enclosed between two steep slopes of rock, hardly big enough to contain a football field, and reaching back to a broad crescent of pebbly beach. There were half a dozen heads bobbing in the water and three or four dozen people lying or sitting or walking about on the beach; and the actuality of their freedom from inhibition, which could be basically established at the first glance, was a momentary jolt even to the Saint. He thought it was merciful for McGeorge that the condition of the path made it extremely hazardous for the eyes to wander for most of the remainder of the descent.

But that took no longer than a few flights of stairs, and then they were down on the beach themselves, with the astonishing display of epidermis all around them. Apparently this cove was a little too far for the ambition of the majority of merely curious sightseers, who probably felt that they had worked hard enough for a sensation by the time they had struggled up to the village center, or else the route was not too well publicized, for the Saint fascinatedly counted exactly one scattered handful, two men and three women, who were even technically over-dressed for a game of Adam and Eve.

“Well, now we can make ourselves comfortable,” said Mr Oddington.

And, untying the string, he stepped gratefully out of his irksome habiliment.

“Aren’t you coming for a swim, George?” he demanded. “You look dopey. It’ll wake you up.”

“It still isn’t quite a full hour since we finished lunch,” said McGeorge, clutching even at that swiftly vanishing straw.

“Nonsense,” scoffed Mr Oddington. “An old superstition. Look at seals. They swim while they’re eating.”

McGeorge somehow managed to refrain from mentioning that he was not a seal.

“I… I’m not so used to the sun as the rest of you,” he pleaded. “I don’t think I should have too much all at once. Besides” — he grabbed at another inspiration — “we’ve still got lots of things to talk about.”

“We’ll have the whole evening for that, my boy.”

“The last ferry leaves at five, doesn’t it?”

“But you weren’t thinking of going back today, were you?”

“Obviously. You know we didn’t bring any luggage.”

“I thought you might have a toothbrush in your pocket. You’d know I could lend you a razor. You knew that we didn’t wear clothes here. What on earth would you put in your luggage?” asked Mr Oddington, in devastating perplexity.

The Saint had been gazing around, inventorying details of the general scene with unabashed interest and studiously keeping aloof from the argument. At that moment his eyes came to rest on the statuesque figure of a man standing on a ledge of rock about thirty feet up the trail down which they had recently scrambled, staring steadily down at them. Simon recognized him at once as the self-satisfied Adonis whom Nadine had been talking to in the village. It seemed unnecessarily imaginative to assume that the man had followed them there, but the Saint automatically re-scanned the walk through his mind like a film and confirmed that he had not had any occasion to look back. However, it would probably have been equally easy for anyone who knew Mr Oddington’s habits to foresee where he would go in the afternoon.

“I feel like talking now, Uncle Waldo,” McGeorge said stubbornly.

He put on the shirt which he had brought with him and sat down firmly, with his knees drawn up, huddling the shirt around him like a small tent.

Mr Oddington glanced wistfully at the new spear-gun which he had brought along with him. His jaw tightened, and then, surprisingly, he also sat down.

“All right, George, if that’s how you feel. We’ll talk a bit.”

Simon could not tell who else had seen the man on the rocks above.

Nadine Zeult touched his arm.

“Will you come for a swim with me?” she suggested tactfully.

A little triangle of cloth fluttered down onto the beach as she ran into the water.

The Saint ran in after her. Much as he would have given to find an excuse to stay and listen, there was nothing else he could do about it. He stumbled into a plunging dive and swam violently for about twenty yards without lifting his head, until the effort had neutralized the first cool contrast of the water. Then he turned over and pushed his hair back, treading water, and found the girl not far away.

“It’s good, isn’t it?” she said.

“Very good.” He smiled.

He had an idea she was referring to something more than just the ordinary goodness of a temperate sea, but his reply was safe and would have been the same anyway. Somehow it was always a new surprise, because the opportunities were so rare, to re-discover the fantastic difference between swimming in the raw and swimming in anything else at all. Perhaps it was not only the unfamiliarity of total physical liberation, but a throwback of memory to old swimming holes and boyhood truancies and golden days of innocence that could never come again.

She swam idly along for a while, drifting towards one side of the bay, and the Saint paddled lazily beside her because it was the most natural thing to do. Presently they were close to a smooth step of rock, and the girl climbed out onto it and sat there, shaking the water out of her yellow hair, like a sea-nymph. After a moment, the Saint pulled himself up beside her.

“Tell me now what you think,” she said.

“I’m enjoying myself,” he told her.

“You should stay a long time.”

“That’s another matter. This is quite an experience, sort of out of this world — and there aren’t a lot of things I haven’t done. But I was never curious to go to the ordinary kind of nudist colony. There was something that didn’t appeal to me about the secretiveness, about having to join up, and the feeling that you’d be somehow committed to a Cause. I’ve had my own crusades, but I hate being organized. This is different, I admit. This is a lot of people being allowed to do what they want to do, and taking advantage of it, and yet really doing it on their own. But—”

“You think there is something queer about us?”

“To be honest, I half expected to see a rather freakish-looking bunch of people. I was wrong about that. As a matter of fact, I’d say that on the whole they’re a hell of a lot better-looking than the average of what you’d find on any ordinary beach. I’m glad there’s a place like this for them, since this is what they want. But as a way of life, it doesn’t mean the same to me that it does to Uncle Waldo.”

“Then if we are not queer, we are foolish.”

“Not that, either.” He crossed his arms over his knees and rested his chin on them, frowning into the glare. “Maybe the rest of the world would be a lot better if it learned your kind of tolerance — about minding your own business and letting everyone do what they like as long as they aren’t hurting anyone else. But I couldn’t settle for just that simple Utopia. Perhaps that’s my loss.”

“At least you don’t despise Mr Oddington for liking it.”

“Not a bit. I think he’s very lucky to only want what he can have, and to be able to have it.”

“His nephew despises him.”

“I’d just say, he disapproves.”

“He disapproves of me, too.”

“I don’t think he can figure you out. If it comes to that, I’ve been trying to figure you myself. You speak English very well—”

“I taught in a school in England for three years.”

“Then you also have a better than ordinary education. And you have much better than ordinary looks, and an attractive personality. There must be plenty of other things you could do — things that most girls would like better.”

“But I like it here,” she said simply. “And Mr Oddington likes it. And what he likes, I like even more. Is that so unusual where you come from?”

He nodded.

“Sometimes.”

“Why don’t you say that you think there must be something wrong because he is so much older?”

“Even if I did, it wouldn’t be any of my business. But you can understand why it might worry George.”

She looked at him without a trace of the coquettish mischief that played so easily on her face.

“Mr Oddington is a very good man. He is different from other people in his way, but he does nobody any harm. I have known young men who were not good at all.”

Simon held her eyes steadily for a few seconds. If anyone had ever predicted that he would one day hold a conversation like that with a sea-nymph sitting on a rock without a stitch on her, he wouldn’t have believed it. This was what you could get for striking up conversations with strangers in bars, he thought.

He looked back towards the beach where he could see Mr Oddington and his nephew still sitting together. McGeorge was still firmly enveloped in his shirt, while Mr Oddington poked restively at the stones with his spear-gun. It was too far to see any expression on their faces, but the abruptness of an occasional gesture suggested restrained violence in the discussion.

“I wish you luck,” said the Saint. “But I don’t think George will give you any blessing.”

“Then,” she said, with a toss of her head, “it’s what you call too bad about him.”

She stood up, straight and lovely, and then sprang from her toes and arrowed into the water.

The Saint watched her come up and start swimming towards the shore. The breeze which springs up in the Mediterranean almost every summer afternoon was chasing turbulent riffles even into the sheltered bay; and in the dancing water an increasing number of swimmers, nearly all of them equipped with the diving masks and snorkel breathing tubes without which even a nudist might have felt undressed for Mediterranean swimming in those days, cruised in all directions like a fleet of miniature submarines. Simon stayed on the rock and wondered whether he should follow her, not knowing exactly how he was meant to take her parting retort.

Then, as her blonde head drew near the beach, she found a footing and came upright with her shoulders clear of the water, and at the same time one of the swimmers near her also stopped and stood. The swimmer pushed his mask up onto his forehead to talk, but even without that distant sight of his face, by the development of his shoulders and the carriage of his head, Simon recognized the same persistent male whose arrival at the cove he had already noticed.

Even the Saint had a limit to how long he could curb his discretion, and at that point he reached it. No matter if that meeting was entirely accidental or to what extent it might have been engineered, Nadine and the man were talking again, and the Saint had to hear something of it. One word, or even a look passed between them, might be enough to decide whether he would agree or disagree with McGeorge’s estimate of the situation. This time he couldn’t help it if he seemed crudely intrusive. Nothing in the whole set-up was any of his business anyway, but curiosity had always been one of his major vices.

He dived in and swam towards them, as quickly as he could without too noticeable a churning of water, and keeping his head down as much as possible. But in that way, because of the rustle of water around his ears, he heard nothing until he stopped swimming a yard from them. And then he only heard Nadine say the one word: “Demain.”

Then Nadine saw him.

“I wish I’d brought one of those masks,” he said conversationally. “The water here must be wonderful for them.”

“Yes, it is,” she said.

She was angry — it was easy to see that, although she had it under control. But whether it was because of the interruption, or because of what had been interrupted, he had no way to tell. He let his feet down to the bottom and stood smiling as if he were unaware of any tension at all, and looked at the other man in such a way that it would have been almost impossible for her to avoid making the introduction.

“This is Monsieur Pierre Eschards,” she said. “Mr Templar.”

Eschards extended a hand, flexing his biceps.

“Enchanté,” he said, but he did not look enchanted. The stare that he gave the Saint was cold and insolent. Then, as if Simon had already passed out of his life again, he turned back to the girl and took her hand. The way he looked at her was quite different in its intensity. “J’attendrai,” he said.

He touched her fingers to his lips, pulled down his mask, and swam away.

Nadine followed him a little distance with her eyes, biting her lip.

Simon took a chance.

“That’s the fellow you first came to the island with, isn’t it?” he said casually.

“I suppose Mr Oddington told you.” The frown stayed on her brows. “It makes him very cross that Pierre has come back. He does not even think I should speak to him.”

“You can’t altogether blame him for that.”

“Pierre is my cousin. We have known each other since we were children. I cannot suddenly pretend not to know him.”

“But didn’t you say you were — sort of engaged?”

“For a while. I cannot undo the past. But that is all over. It was over when I began to go with Mr Oddington. He should believe that.”

Simon shrugged.

“He might find it easier to believe if Pierre stayed away.”

“I did not ask him to come. He just came here, from Antibes, where he likes to spend the summer. He said that he wanted to see how it was with me. He should have stayed there. It is a much better place for him.”

“And full of consolations, if you can afford them.”

She gave him a slow measuring look.

“There are plenty of rich women who can afford them,” she said.

It fell into place with a click. The Saint knew now why something about Pierre Eschards had seemed vaguely familiar. He was a type. You could find three or four of his duplicates any day of the season at a place like Eden Roc — sleek and handsome young men, wearing their hair rather esthetically long but with carefully cultivated and tanned physiques, lounging around like well-fed cats, with bold and calculating eyes.

“But I thought you couldn’t afford to stay here unless you had a job. What attracted him to you?”

“Everyone thought my grandfather was rich, and would leave me money. But that summer he died, and he had lost it all in the stock market. After that, Pierre was not so much in love. I did not believe it at first, but I know now that he was only waiting for an excuse for us to break up.”

“But you said he came back to see how it was with you.”

“I did not say he was not fond of me at all. He said I should not be wasting my life here — that presently Mr Oddington would die, and I would not be so young, but I would have nothing. I told him that Mr Oddington had thought of that in his will, even before we are going to be married… You ask a lot of questions, don’t you?”

The Saint needed no one to tell him that he had been grilling her almost like a prosecuting attorney, and only a feat of personality had let him get away with it that far. But he couldn’t stop now.

“I can’t help being interested in people’s problems,” he said disarmingly. “I’m afraid Pierre was rather upset when I butted in. You’d just been telling him something, hadn’t you? I only heard you say, ‘Tomorrow.’  ”

“I told him that Mr Oddington and I were going to be married tomorrow.”

Simon raised his eyebrows.

“Well, congratulations! I didn’t know it was as close as that.”

“We gave our notice at the Mairie long ago. But only when we went to our siesta this afternoon, he said we must do it tomorrow, while his nephew is still here.”

“That ought to have made Pierre happy, if he was worried about you. But I thought he looked mad.”

“He pretends he is still in love with me,” she said slowly. “He says if anything goes wrong I can still come to him. You heard what he said when he left: ‘I shall wait.’  ”

She did not waver under the Saint’s quietly judicial scrutiny, but the Saint knew exactly how little that could mean. It is only in fiction that no liar can look an interrogator in the eye. But everything she said seemed to hold together — or he had consistently failed to trip her up. He began to feel embarrassed about the impulse that had started him probing at all. Of all the places in the world where he should have been out of range of trouble, let alone looking for it, the Ile du Levant should have been the nearest to a foolproof bet.

He looked around to see what had happened to George McGeorge and his Uncle Waldo. They were not on the beach where he had last seen them.

It took him a little while to locate them, and ultimately it was a flash of McGeorge’s white skin that ended the search. The family confab must have ended, with or without a decision, and Mr Oddington had finally succeeded in bullying or cajoling his nephew into the water to join him in trying out the new spear-gun. Whether McGeorge had also been coaxed or coerced into surrendering his last stronghold of modesty could not be determined from there, for both men had waded in above their waists and the surface of the water was choppy enough to interrupt its transparency.

“Well, if George hasn’t decided to give you his blessing, at least he seems to have called off his sulk for the moment,” said the Saint, with an indicative movement of his head.

Nadine put a light hand on his shoulder.

“I suppose I should try to make him like me,” she said. “If you really do care for people’s problems, I think you could help.”

She began to walk through the water towards the shore and at an angle towards the other end of the beach where Mr Oddington and McGeorge were. As the water shallowed, her breasts came above it, full and yet taut. The ripples dropped to her hollow waist, then to her hips, and Simon, Templar, wading up beside her, found that he still had to make an occasional conscious effort to keep his attention up to the levels that the philosophy of the island took for granted.

He disciplined himself to keep looking at Mr Oddington, who had fitted his own diving mask on to McGeorge and was urging him to put his head down in the water and enjoy it. McGeorge also had the spear-gun in one hand, which seemed to be an added liability to a natural clumsiness. He eventually achieved a more or less horizontal position, in which he floundered rather like a drowning beetle.

“If Uncle Waldo is still a vegetarian, why does he want to spear fish?” Simon wondered idly.

“For the sport,” she said. “It is not a moral thing, only because he thinks vegetables are better for health. When he catches anything, he gives it—”

Her voice broke in a gasp.

Out of the water where McGeorge was thrashing something lanced like a streak of quicksilver, and then froze in the form of a slim shaft of steel that stood rigidly, grotesquely, out of Mr Oddington’s chest. Simon saw it at the same time, very clearly and horribly, before Mr Oddington rolled over and fell with a soggy splash.

5

“It is only to be expected that he would say it was an accident,” said the gendarme. “Not many murderers are so ready to follow their victims that they confess at the first moment.”

The memory of McGeorge’s statement was etched on the Saint’s mind in especially sharp detail, for it had fallen to him to act as interpreter.

“I haven’t the faintest idea what happened,” McGeorge had said. “I heard him give a sort of yell, and looked up, and there he was with that spear thing sticking in his chest. I dropped the gun and struggled over to him — he was only a couple of yards away — and dragged him out on the beach. The gun came trailing after him because the spear’s attached to it with a short length of line. It must have gone off all by itself.”

“Were you on good terms with your uncle?” the gendarme had asked.

“I was very fond of him. But I suppose you’ll soon find out that we’d been having an argument today.”

“It was about something personal?”

“Yes.”

“Yet soon afterwards you were swimming with him, and playing with this arbalète which you had brought him as a present.”

“The argument was over.”

“I shall have to ask what it was about.”

“All right. I’m sure everyone knows that he was going to marry Mademoiselle Zeult. I told him I thought she was only marrying him for his money. He didn’t think so. Finally I suggested a way to settle it. I dared him to tell her that he’d deceived her and he didn’t have any money at all, and see if she still wanted to marry him. If she did, I’d apologize and lick her boots — if she had any. He agreed. In fact, he was so sure of her that he was as happy as if he’d already won a bet. So he insisted on me playing with his toy, as if he wanted to show that he didn’t bear any grudge. He was so eager that I had to give in.”

Simon could still hear McGeorge’s clipped precise accents and see his blanched tight-lipped face. Without pretending to any inhuman nervelessness, he had handled himself with a cool competence that any lawyer would have applauded, neither evading nor protesting too much. But in spite of that, McGeorge was now locked away somewhere in the building, while the gendarme sat in his little office scanning the notes he had written in an official ledger in an extraordinarily neat and rapid longhand.

Simon gave him a cigarette.

“Do you always treat an accident as if it were a murder?” he inquired.

“When there are grounds to suspect that it could be, yes,” said the gendarme politely. “That is the law.”

He was, Simon had gathered, the only civilian officer of the law on the island. He was quite a young man, with a pleasant face, but very serious. He wore a semi-military khaki shirt with informal tan shorts and sandals, but had not gone so far as to try to maintain the dignity of his commission in a G-string. The Saint had not been unhappy to be able to change back into the clothes he had worn on the ferry, and had also brought a grateful McGeorge his trousers; it was twilight now, and cool enough for the light clothing to be no hardship.

“Figure it to yourself, monsieur,” said the gendarme. “You have a man of some means, because he lives here all the time in a good villa and does not have to work. He has a young girl who is his secretary and housekeeper and no doubt other things. That is all right. But then he is going to marry her. Alors, very soon comes his nephew, who does not want this. That, too, is natural. If the uncle is married, perhaps there is no more money for the nephew. He tries to tell the uncle that the girl is only marrying for money. They argue. At last, they agree on a test. But then, at once, the uncle is so happy that the young man is afraid. The uncle seems to be so sure, that suddenly the nephew thinks that the girl could love the old man after all — such things have happened — and the test will fail, and he will have lost everything. Perhaps, he thinks, an accident would be much more certain. And in his hand he has the weapon. It takes only the touch of a finger.”

“Just like that, on the spur of the moment.”

“The thought of murder may have been in his mind before. It needed only the opportunity, the right circumstance, to send a message down his arm to the trigger. A very carefully planned murder may be good, if it succeeds, but the more elaborately it is prepared, the more risk there is that the preparation may be discovered. A murder on impulse can be just as good, and even harder to prove. But it is still murder. I have thought a lot about these things.”

“But Mademoiselle Zeult told me that Oddington had already made a will in her favor. So killing him would get McGeorge nowhere.”

“Can you swear that McGeorge knew that? If not, the proof remains that he had motive.”

The muscles in the Saint’s jaw flickered under the skin. It was all presumptive, all circumstantial, and yet under the French criminal code which requires the accused to prove his innocence rather than the prosecution to prove his guilt, it could be a wicked case to beat.

“What happens next?” he asked.

“I have telegraphed to Toulon. I do not have the equipment or qualifications to do any more here. In the morning an Inspecteur of the Police Judiciaire will arrive and take charge. If you wish to help your friend, I would suggest that you send for an attorney.”

“I’m not interested in helping anyone,” said the Saint grimly. “I only knew Monsieur Oddington a few hours, but I liked him very much. If he was murdered, I want someone to go to the guillotine for it.”

The gendarme nodded.

“He was perhaps a little eccentric, but I think everyone loved him. And I am employed to serve justice, monsieur.”

Simon doubled his right fist into a tight knot and ground it slowly into the palm of his left hand. The exasperation that found an outlet in that controlled gesture went all the way up his arms into the muscles of his chest. His eyes were narrowed between a crinkle of hard lines.

It was a cut-and-dried case… and yet something was wrong with it. The instinctive understanding of crime which was his special peculiar gift told him so, brushing aside superficial logic. The infuriating frustration came from trying to pinpoint the flaw. It wasn’t a straightforward problem like listening to a musical recording with in expert ear and spotting one or two false notes that had been played. It was more as if one or two whole instruments were micrometrically off key, playing perfectly consistently as units and yet infinitesimally out of tune, so that the entire performance was elusively discordant.

“There are still inconsistencies,” he said, groping. “I heard McGeorge disagree with his uncle quite openly. Once or twice he was almost rude. He made sarcastic remarks that Monsieur Oddington might easily have resented. Would he have risked that if he was so anxious to stay in his uncle’s good graces?… And about Mademoiselle Zeult. A man who is really infatuated is just as likely to fly into a rage with anyone who says derogatory things about his girl as he is to wonder if they might be true. Perhaps more likely. Why would McGeorge risk running her down so openly when he could have been much more subtle?”

“Perhaps because he was stupid.”

“But just now you thought he was rather clever.”

The gendarme lifted his shoulders and arms and opened his hands in the Latin gesture which says everything and commits itself to nothing.

“The investigation will decide which is true, monsieur.”

“Listen,” said the Saint. “You told me you did a lot of thinking about these things. So I imagine that being the village cop in a place like this is not your idea of a life’s career. You may never have a chance like this again. Instead of waiting for the boys from Toulon to investigate and decide everything, suppose you could hand them a case that was all wrapped up and tied with ribbons. Would that help you to get a transfer to some place where you could find some serious detecting to do?”

The gendarme studied him shrewdly.

“Because I am interested in crime, I know who you are, Monsieur le Saint. I will hear what you suggest, so long as it is not against the law.”

“I only want you to let me play a hunch,” Simon said, “and stand by to cash in on it if it pays off.”

A new exhilaration surged into him like a flood as he walked back to Oddington’s villa in the failing dusk. It was a lift of spirit with no more sober foundation than the fact that at last he had stopped being a spectator and had something to do. But there was an energy of wrath in it too, for he could not think of the death of Waldo Oddington as the mere impersonal data in an abstract problem. It is more common in stories that the murder victim is an evil character whom many people have good reason to hate. In real life, it is more often the well-meaning innocent who has the bad luck to stand in the way of some less worthy person’s greed or ambition, and who dies without even realizing that he had an enemy. But if only villains got knocked off, Simon thought savagely, there wouldn’t be much incentive to try to convict murderers.

He went in at the unlocked door of the villa and fumbled for a light switch inside the living room before he remembered that there was no electricity. He took out his lighter and struck it. From a chair near the terrace, Nadine Zeult looked at him unblinkingly.

“There is a lamp on the table,” she said.

He went over to it, raised the glass chimney, and tilted his lighter. Illumination spread out to fill the room as the lamp flame took over and he adjusted the wick.

The girl continued to watch him without expression. She had put on a plain black dress with only a touch of white at the collar. There were no tears on her cheeks, but her eyes were puffy and shadowed.

“Are you all right?” he said. “The gendarme kept me answering so many questions.”

“What could you tell him?”

“I had a job to convince him that I scarcely know McGeorge at all.”

“Why did he do it?” she said, in a dry and aching monotone. “Why?”

The Saint used his lighter again, on a cigarette. There was still one crevice in which a wedge could be started, which could open a split through which anything might fall. He saw nothing to be gained by waiting another moment to strike there. Win or lose, there would be no better time to try it — the test that Waldo Oddington had agreed to, but which had not been made.

“One thing came out,” he said flatly. “It seems that everybody was wrong about Uncle Waldo — just like they were about your grandfather. He wasn’t a rich man at all. It turns out he didn’t have a dime.”

Her eyes stayed on him so fixedly that they seemed hypnotized. And then, faintly and hollowly, she began to laugh.

It was a thin racking laughter, almost soundless, that shook her whole body and yet had nothing to do with mirth.

“So you are just like the others,” she said. “I expect you would believe that I wanted someone to kill him. Perhaps even that I somehow helped to arrange it. I thought better of you. Oh, you fool!” She stood up suddenly, straight and quivering. “Let me show you something.”

She crossed the room to the desk and jerked open a drawer. If she had brought out a gun he would hardly have been surprised, she was shaken with such an intensity of passion, but instead it was only a cheap cardboard file that she spilled out on the top of the desk. The papers scattered under her hands as she skimmed through them, until she found what she wanted. She brought it back and thrust it at him.

“Read that!”

Simon took it. It was on a chastely discreet letterhead that said only “INFINITE ENTERPRISE CORPORATION,” above the address, with the words engraved even smaller in the left-hand corner: “Office of the Chairman.” He read:

There was more of it, but the Saint’s eyes were already plunging to the foot of the page, where it ended:

Simon Templar was conscious of seconds that crawled by like snails before he regained his voice.

Images unscrambled themselves and reassembled in their proper place as if a complex of distorting prisms that overlaid them had been snatched away.

“Of course,” he said huskily, almost to himself. “May God forgive me if I ever let myself think in clichés again. In books it’s always the rich uncle and the no-good pampered nephew whose only idea of a career is to keep putting the bite on Uncle. So everything that George said, I had to take the wrong way. I couldn’t even hear him properly when he told me how fond his mother was of Uncle Waldo, and how she’d made George promise practically on her death-bed that he’d try to be like a son to the old boy. I was too clogged-up in the brain to be able to remember that there could also be such a thing as a penniless uncle with a rich nephew.”

“Yes,” Nadine said, with the resentment still burning in her voice. “George is very rich. Waldo told me all about him. He buys and sells companies and manipulates shares. He is called some kind of boy wonder in finance.”

“My second feeble-minded fatuity,” Simon went on scarifying himself ruthlessly. “Because George is young, and snotty, and stuffy, and in every way the type of jerk I long to stick pins into, it never dawned on me that he could be fabulously brilliant in some racket of his own. Or that anyone I personally disliked could be extravagantly loyal and generous to his family.”

“He was. Very generous.”

“But when you came along, he wanted to be sure that he wasn’t going to be fleeced at second hand, by way of Uncle Waldo. You can’t blame him for wondering what he might have had to bail Uncle Waldo out of.”

“Waldo could have told him in a minute that I knew everything, and that we wanted nothing extra from him.”

“But you’ve seen what George’s personality is like. I can imagine how it would rub Uncle Waldo the wrong way. Only he couldn’t show it — he had to try to keep George happy, instead of it being the other way around. But when George proposed that corny and pretty insulting test, Uncle Waldo must have nearly bust a gut. It would have been a crime to tell him then that you already knew. It was much more fun to look forward to seeing George’s red face when you told him yourself.”

“So,” she said, “now you believe me.”

He nodded.

“That was my third blind spot. When one sees a pretty young girl like you with a man of over sixty, it’s so easy to think of another cliché. I humbly apologize.”

She gazed at him for a long time, while the last of the fire slowly died down in her and was spent.

“It isn’t your fault,” she said in a low voice. “It would be hard for you to understand. But I told you how I had been disgusted with young men, through Pierre — and perhaps others. I loved Waldo — no, not in the romantic way that you would think of love, but with a full heart. With him I felt protected, and safe, and sure, and that was right for me.”

The Saint lowered his eyes to the piece of paper which he still held, and after a moment got it back in focus.

“Who else knew about this?” he asked.

“No one,” she said. “He told me, because that was his kind of honesty. But he did not want anyone else to know, because that was his one harmless little pride, to let it be thought that what he had was his own.”

“And when you told Pierre that Waldo had made you his heiress—”

“It was partly to try to stop Pierre bothering me, and partly to build up Waldo. Pierre is the last person to whom I could tell the truth. How he would sneer!”

Simon’s cigarette reminded him of itself when it burned his fingers. He crushed the stump into an ashtray.

The door opened at the front of the house, and Pierre Eschards came through the archway. He had on a pair of very short shorts that displayed his muscular thighs, and a dark mesh shirt open to the waist. His hair glistened with brilliantine. He gave the Saint a glance that barely condescended to recognition, and went straight across to Nadine and put an arm around her.

“I could not go to bed without being sure that you were all right,” he said in French. “Is there anything I can do?”

“No.” she said quietly.

“Pauvre petite.” His lips brushed the top of her head. “But you are young. It will pass. You must not let it spoil the rest of your life. And when you want me to help you forget, I shall be at your service.”

The Saint put McGeorge’s letter down with the other papers strewn on the desk, slipping it sideways so that it would not be staring anyone in the face. All the rest of what he had to do seemed suddenly so straightforward.

“I was just going to tell Nadine the latest development,” he said, now speaking in fluent French himself. “There are no fingerprints of McGeorge’s on the spear-gun that shot Oddington.”

They both turned to him with sharply widening eyes.

“Fingerprints?” Eschards repeated. “But of course there would not be any. It was in the water.”

“A greasy fingerprint wouldn’t wash off so quickly,” said the Saint. “And where people are using sun-tan oil, they usually have greasy fingers. There were other fingerprints on the gun, but none of his. And because he was new here and afraid of a burn, he had oil all over him.”

There were times when the Saint’s facility of invention was almost incredible, but now he was hardly touching its resources. It was more like describing things that came to his mind by extrasensory perception, which were separated from actuality only by a slight displacement of time and would soon become authenticated facts even if he took the liberty of anticipating them.

“Then they have not searched well enough,” Eschards said. “In any case, why do they want fingerprints? The spear that killed Oddington was attached to the gun by a cord, so it was not fired from any other gun.”

“But the gun was not attached to McGeorge,” Simon said calmly. “In his statement, McGeorge said that when his uncle was shot, he dropped the gun he was holding and went to help him. The gun was pulled in afterwards by the cord. Now, there are many arbalètes exactly like that, because the experts consider it the best. Suppose somebody with an identical gun swam beside McGeorge and shot his Uncle Waldo, and then, when McGeorge let go his gun, exactly as one could expect, and went to help his uncle, this other person grabbed McGeorge’s gun and swam away with it under water — it would look, as if McGeorge did it. And even McGeorge might believe that he had had an accident, n’est-ce pas?”

Nadine said, “But the water was so clear—”

“No,” said the Saint. “If you remember, it had turned a little choppy.”

“But it is absurd anyway,” Eschards broke out. “Who else would have a reason to do that?”

Simon shrugged.

“That may be harder to answer. But the first thing is to find the other gun. My guess is that the man who did it would have hidden it somewhere around the beach, because with his guilty conscience he would be nervous about being seen with the same type of gun so soon after the killing. If we find it, it will have McGeorge’s fingerprints on it besides the other man’s, and that will be the proof. I came here to borrow a flashlight, and I’m going back to search.”

“Tonight?” Eschards objected. “You will find nothing. Wait till tomorrow, and I will help you.”

“By tomorrow the murderer may have gone back himself and taken it away.” Simon addressed himself to the girl. “Is there a flashlight here?”

Nadine seemed to be straining to read his eyes.

“Yes,” she said. “In the top drawer on the left.”

Simon took it out and tested it.

“Just wish me luck,” he said, with a brief grin at them both, and went out quickly.

He walked out on the road over which Mr Oddington had led him so happily that afternoon, not dawdling but not rushing it. The night was full of a massed chirping of cicadas that could have practically drowned any other sound further from his ears than his own footsteps; but he was not worried until he had turned off the road on the side path, and picked his way rather gingerly down the steepening slope, and come out at last on the narrow trail that edged down the sheerest stretch of the final cliff. That was where he heard the tiny scuff of sound that he had steeled himself to wait for, exactly where he had expected it, and he twisted to one side as something grazed the side of his head and thudded with sickening heaviness into the blackness beyond.

Then a weight clamped on his shoulders and an arm around his neck, and he was borne irresistibly down, but he was set for it, and he dropped the flashlight and threw all his strength into turning so that at the last instant it was his assailant who hit the rocky path first and the Saint was on top and cushioned. The attacker had the strength of a young lion, but the Saint was powered by a cold fury such as few crimes had ever aroused in him, a pitiless hate that could only be slaked by doing personal violence to the wanton destroyer of one simple happy man. He got one forearm solidly across his opponent’s throat, clamping the neck to the ground, and drove his fist like a reciprocating piston into the upturned face…

“Ça suffit,” said the gendarme.

With a flashlight in his hand, he forced himself between the Saint and another potential corpse, and metal clicked on the wrists of the man underneath.

“I told you this was where someone would jump me, if my scheme worked out,” said the Saint exultantly. “I only had to be found at the bottom there with my skull caved in on a rock, and it would look as if I slipped and fell in the dark. Another fortunate accident. Shall we really hunt for that other spear-gun now, or wait till tomorrow?”

“I saw him following you, and then I saw him attack you.” said the gendarme judicially. “That requires a motive, and there is only one that is plausible.”

“You have the rest of it,” Simon said. “It was only the kind of impulse, or inspiration, that you spoke of this afternoon, but he saw how to kill Monsieur Oddington so that McGeorge would surely be convicted of it, and therefore would not be able to inherit anything. And in that way Nadine would become rich, and he was sure that after a while he would be able to win her again and marry her.”

The swollen eyes of Pierre Eschards glared up into the flashlight beam out of his bruised and bloody and no longer handsome face.

“It is not true,” he croaked. “It was my gun that killed Oddington, and then I was frightened and I let go of it and took the gun that McGeorge dropped and swam away with it so that he would be accused instead of me. But I had not meant to fire the gun. It was an accident!”

“I think it is you, instead of Monsieur McGeorge, who will now have to convince the juge d’instruction of that,” said the gendarme.

6

They buried Waldo Oddington in a shaded corner of the tiny flower-grown cemetery on the island.

“That is what he would have chosen,” Nadine said.

Later after they had walked most of the way back to the village in silence, George McGeorge said, in his stiff awkward way, “I suppose you’ll soon be wanting something to occupy yourself. I’ve been getting involved in one or two deals with European connections lately, and I’ll need a secretary here who speaks languages. Perhaps you’d like to think about the job.”

She looked at him uncertainly for a moment, and then put out her hand.

“Thank you,” she said, with a very small smile. “I think I would like it.”

Simon wondered if there might be some unforeseen changes in the future of Mr McGeorge.