The Saint in Pursuit

1

It is a philosophical observation so profound as to be platitudinous, that a man’s past is never finally past until he is buried; that any encounter, any incident in his life, though he may long since have filed it away as ancient history and for all everyday purposes forgotten it, may only be waiting with the infinite patience of a time-bomb to make violent re-entry into the peacefully lulled passage of his days.

This fact has been discovered with grave discomfiture by such diverse divisions of mankind as professional puritans, retired embezzlers, complacent bigamists, signers of petitions, devisers of unsolvable murders, and ambitious politicians who go into public life without first making sure that certain smouldering letters have been permanently extinguished.

In this episode of the chronicles of Simon Templar with which we are about to be concerned, the bomb had been planted during a war which ended a quarter of a century before the fuse ran out of its length. And if he could accept such a delayed resurrection with his equanimity ruffled by little more than a raised eyebrow, it was because he was within certain limits a resigned fatalist. If he had ever in his adventurous life been subject to wild waves of hope or unnerving attacks of apprehensiveness, he would never have survived to enjoy the fame and more importantly the fabulous fortune that his sallies as a twentieth-century Robin Hood had earned him. But ever since he had made it his vocation to prey on the world’s bullies, crooks, and pompous bloatpurses, he had accepted it as an inexplicable but incontrovertible destiny that trouble would always come to him even when he wasn’t looking for trouble, and that the only intelligent response was, in the words of the classic parable, to relax and enjoy it. Considering the antipathy he had aroused among both the Ungodly and their tax-supported official foes, most people in his place would have figured themselves stupendously successful to have stayed alive at all. Simon Templar, called the Saint, had not only survived but prospered in the greatest good humour with a Zarathustrian confidence in his ordained eventual victory over everything that the Ungodly could throw at him.

The first spark out of the past this time was a telephone call that traced him somehow to a hotel in Tokyo, and a dry voice that he had only ever known by the code name of Hamilton and an unlisted number in Washington.

“I’ve got a little job for you,” it said, “that should give you much more of a lift than those geishas.”

“I packed up my cloak and dagger in mothballs years ago,” said the Saint. “And I thought you’d have retired before you got senile.”

“This is unfinished business,” Hamilton said. “I’m having a plane ticket to Lisbon delivered to you. If you can bear to get out of your kimono, ask for Colonel Wade at our embassy there. He’ll brief you.”

“Just be sure it’s a first-class ticket,” said the Saint. “My days of patriotic economizing are over.”

It would never have seriously occurred to him to refuse, and he knew that Hamilton knew it — just as he knew that Hamilton would never have called him out of that distant past without some irresistible reason. And that was all he needed to tell him that life had made a new move in the very special game it played with him, and there was a challenge that any true buccaneer must accept.

So it was that less than two days and half a world away from that brief conversation he sat relaxed — black-haired, lean, immaculately tailored, piratically handsome — in the Lisbon Embassy, confronting a much less relaxed military attaché who was obviously inclined to fidget about incursions of civilians into his territory.

“I can’t say this is a sentimental journey, exactly,” Simon Templar said, “even if I do get a lump in my throat when I think of the American taxpayers footing my expenses. But it does take me back.”

His quizzical blue eyes glanced over the panelled room, which was protected from the glaring heat beyond its wide windows by the best imported Yankee air-conditioning, and across the spacious mahogany desk at the officer’s neat uniform. The officer fidgeted. He was a middle-aged man with reddish hair and a baritone voice whose low pitch seemed self-consciously cultivated.

“Were you here in Lisbon with the OSS during the war?” he asked with forced cordiality. “I — er — I haven’t been filled in completely on your background.”

“Nobody has,” the Saint said simply. “We were all very busy in those days, weren’t we, Colonel?”

He realized as he said it, with a certain shock, how inexorably it dated him. Time slips by with such astounding smoothness that we are seldom aware of the space it has covered until we count back. But a few of the Saint’s activities during that war have been inescapably recorded in other volumes of this saga, so that some milestones cannot be hidden from any student with a mastery of elementary arithmetic.

“Yes, we were,” was all Colonel Wade could think of to reply. He produced a salesman’s sudden depressing smile. “Well, wherever you were exactly in the forties, Washington seems to think you’re the man for this job now, and my orders aren’t to question you at all, of course...”

Most of the officer’s sentences never seemed to come to a full period, leaving the impression that he was about to say “but—” He cleared his throat and unnecessarily straightened some papers on the desk in front of him. Simon Templar waited, secure and cool in his own un-uniformed independence.

“This — er — matter involves one of our Intelligence Officers, a Major Robert Kinian, who disappeared here in Lisbon in 1944. He’d been to school in Germany for years, spoke the language perfectly, and he’d been undercover there during the first part of the war. Then in February of ’44 he came here and...” Wade flicked one of his hands. “...disappeared...”

“A lot of people disappeared in 1944,” the Saint said impassively. “But I’d have thought that by this time you’d have closed the file on an agent who disappeared on a risky mission in wartime.”

The colonel pressed his hands together in front of him, steeple-like, carefully matching the tip of each finger precisely with its opposite.

“If it was an assignment like Kinian’s — never,” he said. “There was too much involved, and there are questions we want answered because the answers could still mean a lot today. We don’t give up easily. If you see what I mean.”

The officer showed quiet pride in American intelligence’s bulldoggery. Simon let him enjoy himself for a moment before deflating him as gently as possible.

“And just what have you found out about him in these last twenty-five years?”

The Saint refrained from bearing down on the number for the sake of good civilian-military relations. Colonel Wade nevertheless betrayed embarrassment. His homemade steeple crumpled and he smoothed his already smooth papers with nervous hands.

“We — er — we haven’t found out anything, yet,” he admitted.

“No clues at all?” Simon asked.

“No,” said the colonel. “I can give you the whole story very quickly.”

He pushed back his chair, stood up, and paced the room like a university lecturer as he talked.

“We know this: Major Kinian had been underground in Germany for six months in the second half of 1943. As I said, he knew the country thoroughly and spoke German like a native. He got out to Switzerland in February ’44, but he didn’t make any report there. He came on to Portugal a few days later — about the middle of February — and made a telephone call to report his arrival in Lisbon and the hotel he was staying at.”

“Where was the call made from?” the Saint asked.

“From his hotel, presumably. The Avenida Palace. Of course we checked every possibility of tracing him through the hotel personnel years ago. His stay there was perfectly normal, it seems. Until after a couple of days he just didn’t come back, and he’s never been seen again.”

“And that one telephone call was his only contact with the OSS?”

Wade nodded.

“It was his only contact with anybody on his own team. Since he was on an underground mission he never came here or met the fellow who had my job at the time. After he telephoned, Washington waited two days for the report he was supposed to send to the embassy here. Then an agent was sent to contact him.” The colonel made an empty-handed gesture. “No dice. Nobody knows what happened to him.”

His story finished, the officer dropped back into his red-leather swivel chair and stretched his legs.

“With so much to go on I should have the riddle unravelled in half a day,” Simon said caustically. “You left out just one minor detail. What was this mission Major Kinian had been on?”

“He was trying to get a line on the escape plans of the Nazi bigwigs if they lost the war,” the colonel answered. “With Roosevelt pushing for unconditional surrender, there obviously wasn’t going to be much future for secondhand SS officers, or Nazi politicians, in Germany. It was common knowledge that the top boys were getting escape hatches ready for themselves and salting away plenty of funds to keep them comfortable in their retirement.”

The Saint tilted back his own chair and folded his arms.

“I’m afraid, Colonel, that if Kinian was working inside Germany on something as big as that, your predecessors should’ve expected him to disappear. Apparently he was on such a hot trail that he didn’t dare take his nose off it — even after he got into neutral territory.”

“Right. That’s the way we figure it.”

“But the game got his scent about the time he got here — and turned around and removed him.”

“I’m afraid that’s the most obvious possibility, Templar,” said the officer soberly.

Simon stood up to his full six-foot-two and walked over to the window. Somehow the spacious peace of the embassy’s grounds, the summer sunlight in the foliage of the trees, made the cruel deaths of the Second World War seem almost as remote as the battles of the Iliad.

“And that was the end of the trail,” he said quietly.

“The end of one trail,” Wade replied, and went on with fresh enthusiasm: “We kept an eye on other possibilities — and his daughter was one of them.”

“She must have been all of ten years old at the time,” the Saint said, turning to face the man in the uniform. “An obvious Mata Hari.”

The colonel allowed himself a disciplined smile.

“She was only one year old at the time, as a matter of fact,” he said. “But being as she’s the only member of Major Kinian’s immediate family who’s still alive — his wife died five years ago — we thought there might be a chance she’d give us a lead someday. And I think she has.”

The Saint’s interest had clearly picked up. He was following the colonel’s words intently.

“Without wanting to impugn the honour of the secret services,” he said, “I assume you’re thinking that Major Kinian may have taken the back door to the rich life by joining up with the lads he was supposed to be undoing.”

“It’s a possibility,” Wade said in his radio-announcer’s baritone. “Very remote, perhaps. But we had to consider that and a lot of other chances to be sure we were covering the field. And now, just recently, on her twenty-fifth birthday, Kinian’s daughter was given a sealed envelope by an attorney that’s bringing her straight to Lisbon.”

“From America?”

“Right. From Iowa. It wasn’t her father’s regular attorney who gave her the letter, or we probably would’ve known about it before. We checked him long ago. But we know the letter is from the girl’s father, and that it was given to her on her birthday by a lawyer we didn’t know he’d had any dealings with. A few days later, she quit her job and booked a passage to Lisbon — where he vanished.”

“It looks a little as if Major Kinian was trying to out-secrecy everybody, doesn’t it?” Simon commented. “You’ve no idea what was in that time capsule he left for his daughter?”

“I’m afraid not. Neither did the lawyer who delivered it. And we couldn’t have gotten a look at it afterwards without a search warrant or a burglary — even if she hadn’t destroyed it by then. But anything we did might have warned her that she was under surveillance, whereas the way things are it’s probably the last thing she’d think of. We don’t want to upset the apple cart at this point. Washington thinks you’re the man to follow through on this, rope the girl and give her plenty of slack without losing her until you’ve found out what it is she’s up to.”

“I do have a deft hand with apple carts,” Simon conceded, “and I’ll even admit to a certain natural aptitude for keeping my eye on girls. Where’s she staying?”

“The Tagus Hotel,” Colonel Wade said. “Here’s her picture. She only got in this morning, so she can’t have done very much yet. And by the way, we’ve got you a room reserved at the Tagus directly across the corridor from hers.”

“As travel agents you couldn’t be more efficient,” Simon murmured, as he picked up the snapshot from the desk. “And from the looks of this, even the entertainment on this tour is going to be first rate.”

The colonel smiled, this time more genuinely than he had before.

“Well, enjoy yourself. Hamilton says that’s one thing you can always be counted on to do. Call me if you need anything, but no routine reports are expected. And if you get in trouble, I never heard of you. You know the drill. The rest is up to you.” He shook the Saint’s hand briskly. “I hope we’re not moving too fast for you.”

“Not at all, Colonel,” Simon said from the doorway. “There’s nothing quite so likely to get me moving fast myself as a familiar aroma that’s emanating from somewhere around here — the sweet fragrance of vintage loot!”

2

Vicky Kinian had the kind of sweet dark-haired beauty that brings to mind orchards in the sunlight of a dewy morning, and arouses in the bosoms of mature men an almost painfully adolescent nostalgia for girls-next-door such as never really lived next door. She had the lovely youthful aura that the modern alchemists of Hollywood indebt themselves trying to transmute out of gold — and yet the closest she had ever been to Hollywood was the projection on a television set. She was, in actual fact, the perfect coral-lipped rose that poets imagine blushing unseen in the desert air of Arkansas or the more inhospitable portions of Sardinia, and when she turned twenty-five the longest trip she had ever taken had been from Des Moines, Iowa, to Yosemite.

So that for her there was none of the world-weary sense of a routine errand that a great many of her contemporaries would have experienced on the June morning when she walked into a Des Moines travel agent’s office to pick up an air ticket which was to waft her into considerably more hazardous excitement than International Airways customarily supplies along with its tournedos and Waldorf salads. And Vicky herself had known that she had more to be excited about even than a first trip to fabulous foreign shores. In her new handbag, along with her passport and vaccination certificate, was a third and more personal document — one she would show to no guardian of national borders and about which she had spoken to nobody — which promised mysterious developments in her life without giving any clue as to what those developments would prove to be.

And as she stepped into the travel agency that morning, a new disquieting ingredient had been added to the mixture of anticipation and curiosity which had kept her awake for several nights already. She stopped just inside the agency’s glass door, looked around at the dozen or so preoccupied people who were distributed on either side of the service counter, and turned to her companion, a short and shapeless, mousey-haired girl of the type that is foredoomed by an unlucky shuffle of chromosomes to play a brief walk-on bit in such affairs as this, and thereafter to be painlessly forgotten by everyone except herself. To give her at least one instant’s clear immortality, let us at least record her name, which happened to be Enid Hofstatter.

“I hate to sound like a nut,” Vicky Kinian said in a low voice, “but I can’t get over the feeling that somebody’s watching me whenever I come in this place.”

Enid, who was not going to Europe or anywhere else, and who on this day of Vicky’s initiation into the Jet Set was on the verge of strangling on her own envy, blinked at her through smartly framed glasses.

“So what? Probably some handsome hunk of man has already spotted you as a fellow passenger and can’t wait till you’re on the plane together. Is that bad?”

Vicky showed with her grimace that she did consider it bad. Like most young women, from Los Angeles to the Eastern Marches, she harbored the deep suspicion that her hometown was inhabitated by the most boring specimens of masculinity on earth.

Within five minutes she had added the stapled booklet of tickets to the other vital papers in her purse. Then as she thanked the travel agent and turned away from the counter she was once more so overwhelmed by the sensation that she was being spied on that she swept her eyes over the entire room in the hope of spotting her phantom shadow. But the other customers in the office seemed fully involved with business of their own. She said nothing to Enid this time, and tried to convince herself that she had seen too many old Hitchcock movies on the late late show.

The two girls had scarcely left the place when a tall man in an inconspicuous blue suit stepped from the doorway of a store opposite, quickly crossed the street, and entered the same travel agency.

As he approached the counter the manager noticed him and raised a hand.

“Ah, Mr Jaeger!” The travel agent paused and glanced around the room, then leaned forward across the counter and held down his voice. “Miss Kinian was just here, getting her ticket.”

The tall man smiled. His smile, momentarily tempering the sharp line of a broad thin-lipped mouth, was more aggressive than charming — the kind of smile an ambitious executive might give to a subordinate. A fierce purposefulness was stamped in his sharp features and bluish-green eyes and reflected even in the closely cropped hair, which had once been a light blond and now, tempered with grey, was like polished steel.

“I know,” he said. “I deliberately avoided her so that she can be completely surprised. You have my ticket?”

His words were precise and clipped, with a trace of an accent which any American would have vaguely assumed was regional rather than foreign.

“Here you are,” the manager answered, producing a folder. “Flight 624 to Lisbon via New York.”

Jaeger took the multiple ticket from the man and flipped through its thin sheaf of leaves.

“And my seat is definitely next to Miss Kinian’s on the transatlantic leg of the flight?”

“Yes sir. The young lady should be bowled over when her godfather shows up right next to her. How long is it since you last met her?”

The customer tucked his ticket into his jacket pocket and returned the travel agent’s professional smile.

“Not since she was a tiny little girl,” he said. “But I was very close to her father. Until he died, you would have called us inseparable.”

If he had been as nervous or as sensitive as Vicky Kinian, he would have had the same psychic impression of being followed, and he would have been just as right. He would also have been thoroughly capable of doing something about it. But unfortunately for him, he was so preoccupied with his own pursuit that he never noticed the elderly gentleman with the white Vandyke whiskers and old-fashioned pince-nez, leaning on a heavy cane at the window of an adjacent bookshop, who turned slightly to observe his departure, looking rather like a benevolent Trotsky.

For Vicky Kinian, the first part of her trip, including a hectic sightseeing stopover in New York City, had been such a frenzied medley of re-claiming and re-registering baggage, of transfers between ramps and gates and buses and airports and hotel and taxis, that she was already in a state of somewhat dazed exhaustion when she emerged from the last human maelstrom of Kennedy Airport’s waiting rooms and once more entered the clean cool hyperinsulated interior of a jet primed for the takeoff for Lisbon, and perhaps the first answer to a mystery that had obsessed her all her life. She stepped into the pale blue tunnel of the plane’s fuselage prepared to collapse in her assigned seat and thank the fates for letting her be born in the wide smog-free spaces of the American Midwest.

“Vicky Kinian!”

The sound of her own name was so unexpected that for a couple of seconds it meant no more to her than the bump of a piece of hand luggage on the floor of the plane.

“Vicky! Is it really you?”

She stared at the platinum-haired stewardess in the neat grey uniform who was speaking to her, and then she and the other girl laughed with amazement.

“Freda Oliveiros! Who would’ve thought we’d have a class reunion like this?”

The stewardess, pretty in a brittle and slightly hard-featured way, led her down the aisle, talking all the time.

“Not me. I never did go much for that old-school-garter bit. But it’s good to see that you’ve made the grade — a cash customer on a flight like this!”

“Don’t be silly! I work in a filing-cabinet prison a lot harder than you do on this gorgeous thing. I just...”

Freda Oliveiros got a dirty look from her co-stewardess as a sudden influx of passengers began to clog the plane’s entrance.

“You’ll have to tell me all about it later, Vicky. Here’s your seat. I’ll drop by as soon as I can take a breath.”

Vicky’s seat was on the aisle. The place next to the window was already taken by a light-haired man in a blue suit. He gave her a pleasant nod as she sat down but did not say anything. She was glad of that. She had dreaded the possibility of spending eight hours or so as captive audience of some dimwit whose conversational kindling had been collected from the pages of a fifty-cent joke book.

Flight phobia returned briefly as the big jet lumbered through takeoff. Once it was safely airborne, Vicky’s fear evaporated, but her hands were still unconsciously gripping the armrests on either side of her seat so tightly that her knuckles were blotchy white. The man next to her noticed and she quickly loosened her fingers.

“Quite right,” her companion said in a cultivated, faintly accented voice. “I think the plane can stay up without our help now.”

For some reason his thin-lipped smile, showing teeth that were almost too white and perfect, disconcerted her.

“I needn’t pretend I’m not a coward about this,” she said with a nervous laugh. “This is only the second time I’ve ever been off the ground.”

Vicky had half-expected everybody on the plane except herself to be at the very least a film star or a millionaire playboy. This man was no movie star she had ever seen, and something told her that he was no playboy either. Her imagination, working on his sharp tanned face and calculating narrow eyes, pictured him as the chief of some construction firm in the Middle East, or an oil geologist from Venezuela. What he confessed to her did much less to enliven her dreams.

“Don’t worry about being uneasy,” he said. “I fly constantly, and I still don’t believe these monsters can get off the ground. Let me introduce myself. I’m Curt Jaeger, a salesman of watches.”

“I’m Vicky Kinian, a bookkeeper.”

Curt Jaeger began asking all the conventional polite questions and, in answer to hers, told her about his life as a commercial traveller between Switzerland and North America, with occasional side trips to Brazil and Portugal.

“What a wonderful life,” Vicky sighed. “I’ve never even been out of America before.”

“But now you are going as a tourist, for pleasure, which is more than I can say,” Jaeger answered. “Tell me about your plans.”

He had a quiet way of inspiring confidence, but not enough to make Vicky confess to anything more than a sightseer’s interest in Europe. She enjoyed talking to him, though, and was almost disappointed when, during their early dinner, he left most of his food on his tray and swallowed two small pills.

“I’m afraid you will have to excuse me,” he told her. “I am always so afraid of airsickness that I can never enjoy the food on these trips. The best condition for me now is to be asleep.”

“I’m sorry. I never realized...”

“Nothing to worry about. I’ll be dead to the world inside of ten minutes. And if you don’t mind some advice from a traveller much more experienced than he likes to admit, get some sleep yourself. In the morning I’d enjoy giving you a few suggestions about what you should see in Lisbon.”

“I’d appreciate that,” she said. “I hope you feel better.”

“I will,” he said drowsily, and mumbled an indistinct goodnight as he turned his back towards her and settled his head on a pillow next to the window.

Many of the other passengers were settling down for the short night as their dinner trays were taken away. The cabin lights dimmed, and Vicky began to think of sleep herself.

“Hi, globetrotter,” said a low, cheerful voice. “Shall we talk a bit now?”

It was Freda Oliveiros, trim and still unwilted.

“Wonderful,” said Vicky. “I can’t get over running into you here.”

Freda perched on the arm of Vicky’s seat and kept her conversation down to a loud whisper.

“Who’d have thought it, Vicky! From that little school in Dullsville, me a flying waitress, and you part of the carriage trade.”

“If I’d had to spend another uninterrupted summer holding hands with an adding machine I’d have been completely off my rocker,” Vicky confessed. “So I decided to go for broke — and I do mean broke! I’m splurging a few bucks my father left me for me twenty-fifth birthday, and I couldn’t think of a better way to do it than seeing some of the places where he was during the war.”

“That’s right,” Freda said, “your dad was a spy, wasn’t he? Made you quite an exotic character back at Myrtle Hill.”

“German measles would’ve seemed exotic at Myrtle Hill,” Vicky replied. “But now that you mention it, there is a little more to this trip than...”

She stopped and compressed her lips. She had blurted out the words without thinking, mostly from a desire to impress an old-time confidante, and maybe to get the burden of the secret off her mind. Now Freda, sensing a confession in the offing, pounced.

“What? Don’t tell me you’ve taken up the cloak-and-dagger racket too?”

Vicky glanced at Curt Jaeger’s back; the rhythm of his breathing was slow and deep. The middle-aged man and woman on the other side of the aisle were engaged in their own low-voice conversation. Ahead of them she could see the broad gleaming dome of a baldheaded man with a hearing-aid bent close over a magazine.

“Promise you won’t tell anybody?” she asked Freda.

“Cross my heart.”

“Well,” Vicky whispered, “my father wrote a letter from Lisbon just before he disappeared and sent it to a lawyer in Des Moines, but the lawyer wasn’t to let me have it until I was twenty-five, assuming my father hadn’t come back by then. He gave it to me on my birthday.”

“And?”

“It was very peculiar, as if my father couldn’t really say what he meant. After all those years... he just said he hoped I’d come to Lisbon...”

“Sort of a slightly overdue wish-you-were-here?” prompted Freda.

“And he... he told me something to do when I got there.”

Freda waited until she could stand the silence no longer.

“For Pete’s sake, what? You’ve got me hooked now!”

Vicky looked around uneasily.

“I... I don’t want to say any more now,” she said. “But I can tell you that until I’ve done that first thing he asked me to do, the whole business is as much a mystery to me as it is to you.”

One of the other stewardesses came down the aisle and muttered to Freda “You’re wanted up front,” before she continued on.

“Just a sec,” Freda said, and turned back to Vicky. “This sounds more intriguing all the time. So it really is Kinian, the international private eye-full.”

“It probably won’t turn out to amount to anything,” Vicky said. “I know I sound silly, and I shouldn’t have bored you with it.”

“That’s a laugh. I really do happen to be the maddest spy-story fan on either side of this ocean. And I’ve also had a bit of experience finding my way around Lisbon — especially alone in the wee hours when some magnate got too big for bis girdle. Maybe I’ll be able to help you. I’ve got a two-day layover there.” She got to her feet. “If I don’t want to be stranded there, permanently, I’d better get back to my job. Sorry I’ve got to run. Catch a few winks and I’ll see you in the morning.”

Vicky thought she could go to sleep now. There was something about sharing almost anything that made it easier to live with. But in this case, if she could have known just how generously she had shared her story the effect on her would have been anything but relaxing.

Curt Jaeger’s thin lips, pressed close against his pillow, wore the faintest twist of a smirk. For the first time since finishing his dinner he allowed himself to think of going to sleep.

And two seats ahead, on the opposite side of the aisle, the baldheaded man with the white goatee and pince-nez, under cover of his magazine, slipped a curiously oversized hearing-aid microphone and amplifier unit into his coat pocket and switched off its battery.

3

Morning on the jetliner was so short and so crammed with facewashing, hairbrushing, and mass-produced breakfasts that there was only space for the shortest snatches of conversation. Vicky and Curt Jaeger, mopping up the last of their scrambled eggs, discovered they were both staying at the same hotel.

“Both of us at the Tagus!” Jaeger said. “Really? What a delightful coincidence. Now it doesn’t matter so much that I’ve not had time to give you my tips on Lisbon. I’ll be there myself for a few days and maybe you’ll even let me give you a guided tour in person...”

“I couldn’t put you to so much trouble,” Vicky said without even trying to sound as if she meant it.

Jaeger laughed.

“I’d hardly consider it trouble. When you’ve had time to catch your breath we’ll make a plan. Right now we’d better fasten our safety belts.”

When the plane had landed, the state of semi-suspended animation in which the passengers had spent most of the flight was changed to a rush of activity. With raincoats over arms and small baggage in hand they filed down the gangway into the blinding furnace of a Portuguese summer’s morning. Freda Oliveiros, saying conventional farewells to the travellers as they disembarked, had just time to give Vicky an encouraging pat on the arm and speak a few private words.

“I’ll meet you at your hotel as soon as I’ve changed into my civvies, okay? Which is it?”

“The Tagus. Couldn’t you stay with me there?”

“Thanks, but the airline keeps a couple of apartments in town for holdover crews, and I’ve got some clothes there. It doesn’t cost a centavo, so why make your bill any bigger? Ill just pop over to your place soon.”

“Great,” Vicky agreed, and hurried on down the steps and across the hot pavement to the arrival portals.

Curt Jaeger, ahead of her in the immigration line, gave up his place and joined her as they, with their fellow-passengers, filed respectfully past the uniformed inspectors to have their passports stamped. This internationally idiotic ritual, followed by the no less universally pointless struggle through a perfunctory Customs checkpoint, actually introduced only a very moderate delay before Vicky and her self-appointed protector were standing on the curb outside the terminal’s main entrance. It was only natural that they should share a taxi to their hotel, but Vicky felt worried about obligating herself to Jaeger. He had already tipped the porters who had carried out their luggage.

“If we’re going to be doing some of the same things, like this,” she said, “I really can’t let you pay. Here... for the porters.”

She thrust out a palmful of Portuguese coins that she had just obtained at the airport casa de cãmbio, and with an indulgently amused look he chose a few escudos.

“Very well, Miss Kinian, we shall keep this all very Dutch, within limits, but let me explain to you that I am on an expense account — and expense accounts, like justice, are quite blind. Or perhaps I should say, like dead men they tell no tales.”

His choice of simile seemed peculiarly unapt to Vicky, but she reminded herself that there was no way he could have known how they applied bizarrely to her own situation. She settled back and began to enjoy the indescribable excitement of knowing that she, Vicky Kinian the nobody, was for the first time in her life on foreign soil.

The taxi was soon entering the outskirts of the city, and when she leaned her head near the window on her side she could watch a fast-changing prospect of small busy shops, tree-lined walks, and above on the steep hillsides clusters and rows of colourwashed houses — pink, yellow, and green — baking like festive cakes in the sun.

“It’s beautiful!” she exclaimed.

“Maybe you’d like to see more, then,” Jaeger suggested. He leaned forward and spoke to the driver in Portuguese. “I’ve asked him to take us the long way around, by the waterfront,” he explained.

The cab followed a street which led down a valley towards the sea-like estuary of the River Tagus on which the city faces. The efficient plainness of modern commercial buildings was occasionally relieved by such a startling souvenir of gaudy Moorish extravagance that Vicky’s head was constantly kept bobbing from one side to the other.

“This stewardess on the flight,” Jaeger said, “is she a good friend of yours?”

He spoke almost too casually, but Vicky was in no frame of mind to detect subtleties of tone.

“Oh, Freda?” she said. “We were in school together when we were teen-agers, but I haven’t seen her since — until last night. She knows Lisbon quite well, of course. I’m lucky to have run into her.”

She did not take her eyes off the new views of pastel houses, water and cliffs that the taxi’s route opened to her. She was sure she had never been more thrilled in her life, and she did not think of the implications of what she had said until Jaeger spoke again.

“I hope that doesn’t mean I shall lose the privilege of helping you to enjoy Lisbon a little myself.”

Vicky turned with a quick apologetic smile.

“Of course not! I’m very lucky to have run into you, too, and I appreciate—”

He raised a hand to stop her.

“You have nothing to appreciate yet. Maybe a division of labor is the best solution, since you’re so popular. Your old school friend can guide you for the day while I make my business calls, but would you give me the pleasure of taking you to dinner tonight? As a professional salesman, I can offer the inducement that in these Catholic countries bars and restaurants don’t always welcome a woman alone.”

She had already thought of that.

“Well, thank you. I’d love to.” Then she thought of something else. “Oh, dear!”

“Is something wrong?” her companion asked.

“Well, I was just thinking. If I go with Freda during the day and then go out with you in the evening it might seem as if I was just making use of her and then leaving her on her own.”

Jaeger deliberated for just a few seconds, looking ahead over the taxi driver’s shoulder.

“I agree,” he said at length. “That would not be nice, so by all means let her come with us. Let her show you inside the churches and shops. I think I can be a better guide to a good dinner, and I should be happy to have you both as my guests.”

Although that was what she had wanted him to say,Vicky had to make a perfunctory protest, but he interrupted after her first word.

“Remember,” he said, “the expense account.”

She laughed.

“All right. You win. You’ve got yourself a date with a couple of jabbering American females. I hope you won’t be sorry.”

“I think I can promise you,” Jaeger said smoothly, “that I won’t be.”

Their circuit of Lisbon’s waterfront and center seemed finished so soon that Vicky was amazed when she looked at her watch and realized that it had been almost an hour since they had left the airport.

“I’d better get on to the hotel,” she said reluctantly. “Freda is supposed to meet me there, and she may beat me to it at this rate.”

“Don’t worry,” said Jaeger. “We’re almost there now, and I won’t delay you any more. Ill call for you and your friend at seven o’clock this evening.”

As soon as they arrived and registered at the Hotel Tagus — whose relationship to Lisbon’s River Tagus existed more in its christener’s imagination than in geographical fact-Vicky had thanked Jaeger and gone straight to her room. It was larger than she had expected, and because of its thick outer walls was as cool as a limestone cave. A small private balcony — there was one for every room in the four-storey building — looked from her third-floor vantage point out over the red-tiled roofs and peacefully tinted walls that sloped away towards the distant bright blue of the estuary.

After enjoying the view for a minute she stepped back inside the room, closed the French doors behind her, loosened her dress, and started unpacking her suitcases. It was good to be alone for the first time in many hours.

She would have taken considerably less pleasure in her apparent solitude, and her room’s old-fashioned spaciousness and agreeable temperature, if she had known that her neighbour on the right-hand side as she faced the estuary had been either listening to or watching every move she made since the bellhop who had brought her luggage upstairs had closed her door behind him. She would have been even more troubled if she had recognized him as the same bald stout man with the hearing-aid who had been a fellow-passenger on the flight from New York.

Now he sat in his own room, with his short legs propped up quite comfortably, as if he had been doing this sort of thing all his life — which he had — stroking his white Vandyke beard and letting a pair of ingenious mechanical contrivances do most of the work of eavesdropping for him. When Vicky had been on her balcony he had been able, while sitting just inside the doors leading to his own balcony, to see every move she made in the angled mirror of a periscope-like device attached to an extension of his walking stick. Then, when she had gone back into her room, he had turned his attention to the amplifier of his kingsized hearing-aid. A wire from the flat metal box led to a plug in his ear, bringing him the sound of even the most lady-like cough or discreet footstep from the other side of the wall.

For a short while he heard little more than footsteps. Then there were the relatively explosive sounds of a door opening and the eruption of female conversation. The first voice was not that of Vicky Kinian.

“Here I am, ready or not!”

Vicky Kinian’s words were slower paced and softer than her visitor’s.

“Good heavens, Freda, I don’t know how you did it. You look straight out of Vogue, and I still feel as if I’d just spent three days on a roller-coaster.”

The next few minutes of feminine chitchat held no special interest for him. He sat like a bored television viewer waiting for the “station identification” commercials to get off his screen, until the next-door conversation had turned to something less cosmically inane.

“I can line up dates for both of us if you’re interested,” the visitor — whose voice he recognized having heard on the plane the night before — was saying. “But I suppose you’re too wrapped up in your private scavenger hunt to care about a couple of mere cork ranchers.”

“Well, my scavenger hunt is the main thing I’m interested in at the moment, but I beat you to it in the date department: I’ve already got one for both of us — if you’re interested!”

“Good grief, a faster worker than Oliveiros!” the other girl exclaimed. “I knew I was slipping, but maybe I’d better rush for the altar before it’s too late. Who are the lucky guys?”

“It’s just one lucky guy,” Vicky Kinian said. “That man who sat next to me on the plane — Mr Jaeger. He invited us both to dinner.”

“Right. I remember: tall, blond, and foxy. He seemed nice enough, and who are we to turn down a free meal?”

The question seemed to be settled, and the listener’s experienced ears detected that both women were now on their feet.

“Well,” the visitor said, “what does your father’s letter want you to see first?”

Vicky Kinian read in a nervous, almost awed voice, picking her way carefully over the Portuguese words that were interspersed with the English.

“And?” the other girl asked.

“That’s all. He doesn’t explain.”

“Well, that must be one humdinger of a box to be worth all this trouble... or else it must have something pretty fancy in it.”

“Do you know where this place is?” Vicky Kinian asked.

“I thought I knew every antique shop in Lisbon, but that’s a new one on me. I can lead you to the spot with no trouble, though. Let’s go have a look-see.”

The goateed man had listened to the parting close of the door, placed his hearing-aid in his jacket pocket, and made a few notes on a small pad. Then he had hauled in his cane, slipped off its contrivance of angled mirrors, telescoped it back to its normal length, put on his hat, and set out for a bit of sightseeing in the vicinity of Rua De Ouro and Viseli.

4

Vicky Kinian and Freda Oliveiros stepped out of their taxi on to a sidewalk bordering a broad uncrowded intersection. During the ride from the hotel they had chattered about everything under the sun except the riddle they were on their way to solve, and now that they were brought face-to-face with the question mark they seemed to have nothing to say at all. Standing in the cool shadow of a large tree they let their eyes survey the complete three hundred and sixty degrees of the panorama. To the left was a café — round wrought-iron tables in the open air beneath a blue and yellow awning. Opposite where they stood was an apartment house, and then an office building of some kind. To their right was a bank. Behind them was a park.

“Something must be wrong,” Vicky said. “Are you sure this is the right corner?”

“Check your letter again.”

Vicky confirmed the address: Segurança’s Antique Shop on Rua De Ouro at the corner of Viseli.

“Well, there’s the corner, but there isn’t any antique shop,” Freda said. “Maybe it went out of business, unless it’s in a back room somewhere. Or maybe...”

“Wait a minute,” Vicky broke in. “Look at the name on that bank.”

In large letters carved into the stone pediment above the bank’s columned entrance were the words, BANCO ANTIGO DE SEGURANÇA.

“Segurança,” Vicky read carefully. “It’s the same word.”

“And antigo,” Freda carried on. “There’s your ‘antique’ shop all right. Segurança means something like ‘security’.”

Vicky was frowning as she glanced from the letter to the marble portico of the bank.

“But if it’s the bank why didn’t he just say so? Now that we’ve seen what he meant, it sounds like something out of a mystery story.”

“Well, at least we’ve solved the first clue,” Freda said cheerfully.

“We just followed his directions, but I’d hardly say we’d found any answers,” Vicky rejoined. “Why be so cryptic about a perfectly respectable-looking bank?”

“Search me, Vicky. But let’s face it — nothing about this whole deal is exactly on the up-and-up, or your father would just have left you a nice traditional will to his estates and acres, not to mention his millions.”

They were walking almost cautiously towards the bank as they talked. Vicky felt a strange reluctance to get too near the place. Somehow its marble massiveness reminded her of a mausoleum.

“He never had acres or millions,” she said. “He hardly even had thousands.”

“Well,” said Freda, “if you’ll excuse my delicacy, let’s be charitable and assume dear old dad handled things this way because he was in the cloak-and-dagger business and not because he was some kind of a nut. How does that letter go on?”

“They will remember me. Ask for the little box I paid a deposit on.”

They were at the foot of the wide stone stairway leading into the bank. Simultaneously they both stopped and exchanged looks of sudden realization.

“A safe deposit box!” they said almost simultaneously.

“Things are looking up, girl!” continued Freda. “Let’s go.”

They climbed the steps quickly and walked into the bank’s ornate cavernous main floor. Vicky questioned a woman at the first barred window. She was asked, in hesitant English, to wait. A few moments later an old man with rimless round spectacles perched on his pointed beak walked stiffly across the tiled floor to meet them. Against the background of bars and barrel-vaulted stone ceiling he looked very appropriately like some gnomish custodian of long-interred wealth.

“Senhorita,” he said as Vicky stepped towards him. “I am Valdez, Assistant Manager. May I help you? I am told it is a matter which goes back many years, and I am most qualified on such matters.”

If he smiled, the event was obscured by a hanging garden of white moustache which covered his mouth entirely except for a bit of central lower lip.

“I’ve come to ask about a safe deposit box my father rented here in 1945,” Vicky told him. “His name was Kinian — Major Robert Kinian.”

Assistant Manager Valdez squinted briefly and shook his head.

“I do not remember him myself, senhorita, but it is easy to look him up. Come into my office, please.”

He led the way with a stiff-legged brisk gait to a private office rich in waxed wood and leather. Vicky gave more details. Shortly Valdez sat at his massive desk and opened a bound volume of records with the date 1945-46 on its spine. As he was going over one of the pages with a magnifying glass Freda made a sotto voce comment to Vicky, who was sitting next to her in a huge wooden chair.

“If George Washington ever banked here, I bet this place would still have his checks.”

“Senhorita,” said Valdez unexpectedly without looking up from his magnifying glass, “this bank still holds an unpaid note signed by Christopher Columbus.”

Again, if the Assistant Manager’s drollery was accompanied by any trace of a smile, he was the only one who could have known it, and Vicky and Freda glanced at one another like two schoolgirls trying to stifle giggles.

“Ah!” said Valdez suddenly, “here is the name Kinian, with a special notation. The box was taken by Robert Kinian on February 8, 1945, and the rent paid in advance for thirty years.

When he looked up from the minuscule pen scratches of his ledger Vicky was leaning forward so tensely that he paused and blinked.

“Do not fear, senhorita, the box is certain to be here, quite secure. The vault is even safe against earthquakes. We have learned from unhappy experience.”

“I wasn’t worried about that,” Vicky assured him. “I’m just anxious to see the box.”

Valdez stood up.

“Good,” he said briskly. “All that is needed from you is some identification.”

Vicky opened her purse.

“Here’s my passport.”

“Very good.” Valdez took the green booklet and inspected its first pages. “‘Victoria Eileen Kinian.’ Yes, that is correct. I am authorized to give you a key to this box. Now, if you will follow me, please...”

They went with him out of the office, across the main floor again, and into a crypt-like stone chamber behind one of the counters. Armed with a ring of jangling keys, Valdez left the girls, shuffled off down a tunnel, and returned after an almost unbearable delay carrying a large metal box in his arms. He put the box on a table in the center of the room, handed Vicky a key, and held a chair for her and then for Freda.

“Regard the box as your own now, senhorita,” he said. “I shall leave you alone.”

“Our own private dungeon,” Freda said with a shiver when he had gone, gazing around at the forbidding walls of the room. “Solid granite three feet thick. Open that thing and let’s get out of here. What are you waiting for?”

Vicky was sitting with the key in her hand, hesitating to use it. Freda’s question broke the spell, and she inserted the key carefully into the lock at the end of the box.

“I don’t know,” she confessed. “For some reason, this is all giving me the creeps. I feel a little like — who was that girl in the old story who opened a box and discovered too late what she’d let out?” She turned the key. “Pandora,” she remembered aloud. “Pandora.”

The only sound in the bank’s inner sanctum was the faintly echoing click of a lock which had not been used for twenty-five years. Vicky touched the cold metal cover of the container as though it might give her an electric shock and then lifted it.

Looking very much alone on the bottom of the box was a white envelope, slightly yellowed with age like the letter that the lawyer had given her in Iowa.

“It doesn’t seem like much,” she said huskily.

She was staring down at it without showing any sign of intending to pick it up.

“Well, for goodness’ sake, it’s not going to bite you!” Freda encouraged her.

Vicky finally reached in and lifted it out. It was somewhat bulkier than she had thought at first glance.

“I think it’s just a letter,” she said appraisingly.

Freda sat back with a shake of her platinum-blond head.

“Your old man must’ve eaten wild goose every day and twice on Sundays. Okay, read us the next installment.”

Vicky had started to tear open the envelope, but then she stopped, weighing it in her palm.

“I’d rather not — here,” she said. “This feels like a regular project. Let’s go back to my room where we can settle down — in case there’s a shock that’s going to knock me flat.”

Freda stood up with a shrug of suffering resignation.

“It’s your snipe hunt, sweety. My lot is but to follow and hope you drop a few golden crumbs when you finally hit the jackpot. The prize must be pretty big if it was worth putting up this much of a smokescreen to cover it.”

They left Senhor Valdez with thanks and an empty coffer, and took a taxi back to the Tagus Hotel. Vicky was subdued during the drive and avoided saying a word about her father or the trail he had left behind him. Outside the quiet entrance of the hotel, which seemed almost completely deserted in comparison with its more typically central hostelries, Freda stopped and held Vicky back.

“I know all this is none of my business,” she said. “My only excuse is that you got me hooked on this awful suspense. I won’t come in if you don’t want me to.”

“Of course you should come in!” Vicky shook herself out of her abstracted state enough to put some sincere warmth into her answer. “I got you interested in this, and I might never even have found that bank without you. Let’s get upstairs and have a look.”

They walked into the low-keyed interior of the Tagua’s lobby, past potted palms and overstuffed sofas. Freda, taking everything in like a nervous bird as usual, focussed on the reception desk and nudged Vicky.

“Half-step, comrade,” she whispered. “Dig the gorgeous chunk of senhor.”

Vicky looked, and as she did so the tall blackhaired man who had been talking to the receptionist happened to glance up and look right at her. He was so unbelievably handsome, so easily and effortlessly elegant, and carried such magnetism in his steady gaze that she felt a quick shiver pass completely through her body.

“With those blue eyes I don’t think he’s a senhor,” she muttered inadequately.

“I may fight you for him,” Freda rejoined under her breath. “He’s the best-looking devil I’ve seen in ages.”

Vicky peeked back over her shoulder at the cleanly honed hawkish profile as she climbed the stairs.

“Oh well,” she sighed, “why fight? We’ll never see him again anyway.”

Everyone who has ever read any other story about Simon Templar, alias the Saint, will infallibly identify that as one of the most hard-worked errors of prophecy in the Saga. But this chronicler cannot fiddle with the record merely to avert a cliché.

That’s what the girl said. Honestly.