The Saint in Pursuit

1

Without even waiting to open his suitcase, once he had seen it deposited in his room and taken possession of his key, Curt Jaeger had left the hotel again and completed a swift and efficient rendezvous with a business associate of long standing, whose interest in Swiss watches was basically limited to those that he fancied to wear himself, and those that in commercially viable quantities might be smuggled or stolen for sale in some underground market.

What this invaluable local contact really specialized in was methods of population control which are viewed by the temperal powers of Portugal with as much disfavour as they are by the Vatican, since they do not go to work until many years after the critical instant of conception. But on order, and against sufficient cash payment, this unobtrusive handyman could guarantee the removal, permanent or temporary, of unwelcome members from one’s circle of acquaintance. His professional name was simply Pedro; he was small as a jockey, and he had the black blinking eyes of a myopic rat.

He watched with Jaeger from one of the outdoor tables of a café down the street as Freda and Vicky returned to the Tagus after their trip to the bank. Pedro’s unlovely facial structure was overhung by a nose of stunning amplitude shaped like a headsman’s axe. In the shadows of this massive outcropping dwelt a pencil-thin moustache which jutted on either side directly out from its moorings to quiver its tips just beyond its cultivator’s high cheekbones. When Pedro squinted at the two American girls as they walked from their taxi into the hotel, his Stygian eyes blinked more rapidly than usual down the slopes of his nose, and his pilous antennae vibrated like the feelers of a roach sensing feasts beneath the kitchen sink.

“The dark one is prettier, but the blond one did not look so bad either,” he said in hissing Portuguese. “It seems a pity you cannot... avoid her in some other way.”

“I am not hiring you to think for me, Pedro,” Jaeger retorted. “I am hiring you to do two things, and to do them quickly and efficiently. Get the blonde out of the way immediately, and before you dispose of her learn all she has been told by the dark girl about letters or other information from the dark girl’s father. Is that understood?”

“Bem,” assented Pedro. “I understand.”

Jaeger’s hard turquoise eyes were capable of projecting a threat which made even Pedro squirm and nervously suck his two prominent front teeth.

“And if,” Jaeger said, “you should get any romantic Latin ideas about keeping her hidden away for yourself, or selling her to Arab slave traders, or some other nonsense, you had better remember...”

“Senhor!” Pedro interjected, with a look of reproachful innocence.

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

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

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

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

“He waits just around the corner now.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Freda could control herself no longer.

“What is, Vicky, for heaven’s sake?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thanks so much.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Seet at the table, senhorita.”

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

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

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

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

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

“What is it, then?” she demanded.

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

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

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

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

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

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

“Eez okay,” he granted.

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

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

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

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

“But...”

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

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

2

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

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

And yet, through it all, certain denizens of the Pentagon, part of a species which could easily misplace whole shiploads of bulldozer axles and misdirect trainloads of snow-boots to Equatorial Africa, had managed to keep a sharp eye out for Major Kinian — and not only that, but also to know when his daughter decided to take her summer holiday. Such atypical cases of bureaucratic alertness were enough to arouse the curiosity of the most skeptical buccaneer — or even of a Saint.

“There is a young American lady staying here whom I would like very much to meet,” Simon had said to the desk clerk in clear Portuguese as he took up the pen to sign the register. “Her name is Victoria Kinian.”

“Ah, si,” the clerk said promptly. “She has just arrived this morning.”

“Bem. But please say nothing to her. There is always a tactful way to arrange these things.”

The clerk smiled understandingly, and then came to sudden attention.

“Senhor!” he whispered, scarcely moving his lips. “You have good fortune. There comes the lady now. The dark-haired one. The blonde one does not stay here.”

At a single glance the Saint had discovered at least one superficial reason why the men of American Intelligence need not have been excessively pitied for the close watch they had kept on Major Kinian’s daughter. Unconsciously beautiful in a modest white-and-yellow summer dress, she made her bare-shouldered flashier companion look like the late night shift at a hamburger stand. For just a moment she had met his gaze with interest but without encouragement, and then had turned her head and gone on up the stairs.

“A most lovely young lady,” the desk clerk said discreetly.

“Most lovely,” Simon agreed. “Have she and her friend been out long?”

“No, senhor. Less than two hours.”

The Saint thanked him, and followed the bellhop who came to carry his bags. There was no elevator in the building, and they used the same broad stairway which the girls had just climbed.

“Desculpe-me, faca o favor!” puffed a voice just behind them, and a small bald roundish man in Vandyke whiskers chugged between Simon and his burdened porter with such urgent speed that he knocked one of the suitcases against the railing. “Pardon!” he called back without turning, and bounded out of sight at the top of the stairs like an animated rubber ball.

Pardon, in French pronunciation, being a universal European term of public apology, its use by the bearded man did not give Simon any clue to his nationality, but he made a careful mental note of the stair-hog’s personal appearance. It could have been that the man’s headlong rush up the steps was due to his being late for an appointment or uncontrollably eager for a cool bath, but it was also just possible that his enthusiasm for climbing was connected with an interest in the comings and going of Vicky Kinian, who had preceded him by just a few minutes. However, there had been no sign of him during the rest of the climb to Simon’s room, and the Saint had soon had less remotely speculative things to think about.

Such as the mysterious letter, or letters, upon which Vicky Kinian’s enigmatic odyssey seemed to hinge. The immediate problem was to get a look at it, or them, by some means less crude than bursting into the room opposite while the girl was there and hoping to attain his objective by force or menace, with an odds-on risk of hashing up the rest of the game even if that play succeeded. Therefore he would have to wait until she went out — while trying meanwhile to decide whether it would be better to gamble on her having hidden the documents in her room, or having them with her in a purse that might be snatched or rifled somewhere without identifiably involving himself.

It was an exercise in patience which only a most unusual mission could have commanded of him, for the Saint was not by nature a patient man. And it should say enough for the old-time bond between him and the man called Hamilton that he embarked upon it at all.

An hour after the blonde had left, a waiter delivered a tray to the room. Late lunch. Simon followed suit. Then, when long after he had finished his cold chicken and wine nothing more had happened across the hall, he was forced to assume that the lovely object of his watch was taking a siesta — a natural part of the first-day schedule of a transatlantic traveller for whom waking-up time on landing in Portugal would have been three in the morning at home.

Simon, who had flown in the opposite direction, had not suffered the same bashing of his biological clock, and through plenty of firsthand experience with the relativity of time and space had learned to adapt himself automatically to the most bizarre antics of chronometers and shifting dawns. All the same, a hot afternoon in Lisbon was not ideal for guard duty, and the Saint fought drowsiness as he resigned himself to his vigil.

If he had had any notion of what had happened, and was happening, to Freda Oliveiros, his enforced inaction would have been infinitely harder to endure; but mercifully that knowledge was for ever spared him.

Curt Jaeger, who knew, was emotionally perturbed only by the inevitable native unpunctuality of his temporary deputy. Freshly bathed, shaved, and changed into a newly pressed dark suit, in complete readiness for his date with Vicky Kinian, he was sitting at a table at the café down the street at exactly six twenty-nine. At a quarter to seven he was still nursing a small glass of Robertson’s Port and checking his watch every two or three minutes, with progressively increasing irritation. A deadline was rapidly approaching when, through no fault of his own, he could be late to pick up his dinner engagement. Curt Jaeger did not like lateness — his own or other people’s — and he sat stiffly, cursing the congenital incompetence of inferior races.

Finally, at almost ten minutes to, Pedro came scurrying around the comer blinking at the red sunset and twitching his thin black antennae. He dropped into a chair opposite Jaeger and began to hiss words so rapidly that even one of his own countrymen might have had trouble understanding him.

“You are late!” Jaeger cut him off. “I always make it a practice to arrive at any appointment at least a minute ahead of tune.”

Pedro only ducked briefly as if to dodge that bit of uplifting advice, and went on hissing.

“Slow down, at least, so I can understand you!” Jaeger snapped. “Although I have no doubt that what you have to tell me is disappointing.”

“The news is bad, senhor,” Pedro whined.

“Naturally,” Jaeger said without emotion. “What did she tell you?”

“Her name — Freda Oliveiros, a stewardess with International Airways. That she was once at school, long ago, with the dark one, Victoria Kinian. But they had not met since, until by chance they were on this flight from New York.”

“What else?”

“She could only tell us that the dark one’s father had a strong box at the bank. They went to the bank this morning and opened the box and found a letter in it.”

Jaeger pushed his port aside and unconsciously tensed forward.

“Well-and what did the letter say?”

“The dark one read it but would not tell the blond one what was in it, except that it seemed very important.”

“Idiot!” Jaeger barked. “You believe one girl could keep such a thing from another? You must keep on until you make her talk.”

Pedro twisted his feet around the legs of his chair and rubbed his hatchet nose with the back of his hand in an embarrassed gesture.

“We tried very hard, until she died,” he grumbled. “I think perhaps she truly did not know.”

Jaeger had no rebuttal for that. He sat with his jaw clamped shut for a moment while the muscles in his gaunt cheeks worked nervously.

“You tried everything?” he finally asked, wanting to be sure his dissatisfaction was quite clear.

Pedro’s black eyes glittered as he remembered some of the things he had done during the long hours of the hot afternoon.

“Everything,” he said.

He spoke the word with such evident sincerity that even Jaeger had to be contented.

“So!” he said, slapping the table in front of him with his palms. “That matter is concluded then. I assume you have taken care of the — final details.”

Pedro nodded.

“We went by the waterfront on our way here. I have a friend with a trapdoor in the bottom of his boathouse which...”

“Never mind telling me the tricks of your filthy trade,” Jaeger said coldly. “I am in a hurry. Would you like to earn some more money for an easy job?”

“What is the job?” asked Pedro sensibly.

“I am taking the dark girl out to dinner. When we have left the hotel, go to her room — number 302 — and see if you can find the letter they got from the bank.”

“Si,” Pedro said. “I go to the room. But how do I know which is the letter?”

“Bring anything that looks like a letter,” Jaeger said impatiently. “Take your time. I shall have the girl out with me for at least two hours from now.” He stood up. “But you have made me late and I must go. I can rely on you?”

“Si! Room number 302.”

“Correct. Telephone me at my room at the Tagus later tonight, and we can arrange a meeting so you can give me what you have found.”

“And settle accounts,” Pedro said practically.

“Of course,” Jaeger replied. “Até logo.”

“Va com Deus,” said Pedro, with no perceptible trace of irony.

His employer did not return the sentiment, but hurried away to keep his appointment with Vicky Kinian. He called her on the house phone, apologized profusely for not being earlier, and tried to compose himself while he waited. It was now more vital than ever that Major Kinian’s daughter should continue to accept him as only a friendly businessman with no more worrisome thought in his head than selling an order of wristwatches or choosing the best wines for dinner.

To Simon Templar, sitting where the open few inches of his door, angled in the dressing-table mirror, were directly in line with the top of the book he was reading, it seemed like a budding eternity before Vicky Kinian finally came out. She looked stunning in a shoulderless black dress and long white gloves, and he briefly wavered again between visiting her empty room, as he had decided, and investigating her in person. But girls going out at the dinner hour in shoulderless black dresses were likely to have plans of their own which would not make them welcome last-minute invitations from total strangers, and furthermore the small beaded bag which he had seen she now carried hardly looked as if it would hold anything momentous in the way of documents. The room was now a more logical and certainly less reckless first possibility to try, and if he drew blank there the alternative would still be open.

He waited until she had had time to get all the way down the stairs. Then he pocketed a small metal implement he had already chosen from a selection in his suitcase after inspecting his own door lock, and armed with this modern open-sesame, prepared to find what treasures or terrors lay hidden in the cave of Major Kinian’s disappearance.

3

“It’s fortunate there are no cannibals in Lisbon,” Curt Jaeger said, coming to meet Vicky as she appeared on the last flight of stairs. “Because, as they say in America, you look good enough to eat. But it’s so nice of you to consent to eat with me instead.”

He bent to kiss her hand, feeling her fingers tense as he held them, but noting as he straightened up that her cheeks had a pleased glow. She was, in her innocence, as he had assumed, a pushover for what the Americans called the Continental touch. A heavy dose of gallantry with no alarming passes: that should be the most effective formula.

“It’s nice of you to invite me,” she said, “but I’m afraid that Freda seems to have let us down.”

“Perhaps she’s expecting us to call for her at her own hotel,” he said with a frown of mild concern.

“No. She was supposed to come back at seven, and she hasn’t called or anything. I don’t understand it.”

Jaeger looked around the lobby, and then at the clock behind the desk clerk’s counter.

“I’m sorry I am late myself,” he said. “I had business at the last minute. Maybe she will show up soon. In the meantime, we could ask if she has sent a message.”

They walked to the desk, and in response to Vicky’s question the clerk promptly produced an envelope. Before she read the short note inside she glanced at the bottom to confirm that it really was from Freda Oliveiros.

“I don’t understand this,” she said. “Why ever wouldn’t she have phoned me? When did this note come?”

“Half an hour ago, senhorita,” said the man behind the counter.

“Would she like us to pick her up?” Jaeger asked helpfully.

“No. She says she’s been called to replace another stewardess on a flight leaving at once. That was late this afternoon, I guess.” Vicky looked up from the paper, her eyes puzzled. “So of course she won’t be joining us.”

Jaeger shrugged and gestured towards the main exit.

“Well, I am sorry for her, but for myself, this is one case in which a loss is no real loss.”

He held the door for her and they walked out on to the tranquil darkening street.

“I just hope you will feel safe with me even though your friend cannot be with us,” he said sympathetically.

Vicky was already beginning to cast off any worry she felt about Freda’s not showing up.

“Oh, I’m not thinking of that, Mr Jaeger. But I had to disappoint Freda about something earlier today, and I hope she isn’t just making an excuse because she’s mad at me.”

“I’m sure she isn’t,” Jaeger said with mature assurance. “Now let us eat, drink, and be merry because... because that’s what one ought to do in Lisbon!”

On that cheerful note he took her away by taxi to one of the golden dining rooms of the Restaurant Avis, and waited until she was semi-steeped in champagne before gently continuing his research into the more secret aspects of her private life.

“I can’t help wondering,” he began — “Would it be too inquisitive to ask what you did that might have angered your girl friend so much?”

Vicky wished he hadn’t brought the subject up again; she had been trying to forget it completely.

“Oh, it was nothing much,” she said. “It’s hardly worth talking about.”

Jaeger sat back in his chair and raised his champagne glass to his lips.

“I see,” he said gently. “I thought maybe you were still worrying about it. You looked a thousand miles away.”

Vicky realized that she had been staring beyond Jaeger without really seeing anything. She quickly put down her glass and turned all her attention to him.

“I’m so sorry!” she hurried to say. “I suppose there is something on my mind, and it is tied up with Freda. I might as well tell you, since it’s bound to make me act a little funny, and I don’t want you to think I’m rude.”

“I hope it was nothing so momentous as the fact that both you girls were wearing the same dress when you met to go shopping,” Jaeger said with a smile.

Vicky forced herself to laugh and took up her champagne again with relief. She was bursting to share her secrets — and the burden of the tremendous decision her father’s second letter asked her to make — just as she had been eager to confide in Freda when they had talked on the plane.

“Nothing as bad as that,” she said. She imbibed a large sip from her glass and took the plunge. “It was about a rather mysterious letter that she partly helped me to find. And then when I’d gotten it, I couldn’t tell her what was in it. At least I couldn’t tell her at the time without thinking it over first. She was hurt, I think — and that was the last I saw of her.”

The wine was making her feel more indifferent than disconsolate when she remembered Freda’s reaction. She hoped the waiter would bring the Vichyssoise before she started getting dizzy. One cocktail before dinner had always been her limit — and when she had last drunk champagne, at a wedding reception, she had found the whole world swooping and dipping around her head like a carnival run wild.

“This letter — it indeed sounds very mysterious,” Jaeger said, with no sign of unseemly curiosity. “Are you sure it would not help to talk it over with a friend?”

“I’m sure it would,” she admitted.

To her relief, the soup arrived just then to preserve her higher cerebral processes from alcoholic annihilation.

“Many problems that seem impossible alone become much easier if one talks about them,” Jaeger observed in the most fatherly of tones.

“But this is such a special problem!”

“All problems are special to the person who has them. But I am a special kind of friend.”

“But I hardly know you at all,” Vicky blurted. Then she lowered her spoon and earnestly added, “Not that I mean anything by that. It’s just...”

Curt Jaeger raised a reassuring hand.

“Don’t apologize. What you say is quite true. On the other hand, the fact that we aren’t old friends is my greatest advantage. I’ve often thought, in fact, that a stranger is the best friend one can have, assuming that he — or she — is particularly simpático. Because you can believe a stranger to be anything you like. For a little while, at least, a stranger can be one’s ideal.” He tapped a cigarette from a pack and added ironically, “Which probably explains love-at-first-sight — and the fact that one falls very easily in love with people one doesn’t really know, but has a devil of a time becoming, or staying, infatuated with people who’ve been around for quite a while.”

“You’re right,” said Vicky, impressed with the exposition but a little confused about what he was driving at.

“So, in brief,” her companion said, “it’s just because you don’t know me that you can consult me about anything as impersonally as a doctor or a confessor. My disapproval — which I guarantee you won’t have to face — couldn’t bother you, but you could be sure that my advice would be quite impartial.”

A waiter topped up their wineglasses while another took away the soup bowls.

“I’m not trying to pry, of course. If you want to tell me anything, put it in general terms, and I won’t possibly be able to guess what you are referring to.”

Vicky settled back against her cushion.

“Well, suppose you had a clue that might lead you to a fortune, like a buried treasure, but you didn’t really have a right to it. I mean, it didn’t really belong to you or anybody at the moment, but the only people who would have a legal right would be some government or other. What would you do?”

“You mean like these cases of sunken ships, where divers do all the work and then the government that controls the coastline steps in and scrapes off most of the profits? I assure you I would help myself to the treasure and let the government worry about its own welfare. They would certainly hear nothing from me.”

Vicky smiled and raised her moisture-beaded glass to her lips with both hands.

“Well, that’s a straight answer,” she said. “I think I can probably swing my conscience around to that point of view.”

“Yes,” Jaeger concurred. “What could be less worthy of your guilty conscience than a government?”

“Especially when I don’t even know which government,” said Vicky, feeling more lighthearted than she had since leaving Iowa. “You’re right. Why turn over anything to a bunch of stuffed-shirt bureaucrats?”

“Bravo!” Jaeger applauded. “And naturally you couldn’t show your stewardess friend the mysterious letter telling about the pirate’s gold, because then she would have been able to use the map to find her way there before you.”

“She might, I suppose,” Vicky said. “But...”

Suddenly Jaeger seemed struck by a disturbing thought that fitted aptly into her hesitation.

“I’m just thinking,” he said. “Your friend, with all respect, probably has the same weaknesses as the rest of us, and her disappearance was rather abrupt. You don’t suppose she could somehow have taken the letter — or perhaps be planning to take it while you’re out?”

“Oh, no, Freda wouldn’t have thought of such a thing! And even if she had, it wouldn’t do her any good to try to find the letter.”

“You hid it well?” Jaeger asked. “Or better still, put it in the hotel vault for safe-keeping?”

“Even better than that,” Vicky said proudly. “I cut out the paragraph with all the important things in it — with all the directions — and memorized it, and burned it!”

Curt Jaeger’s admiration was so very far from boundless that only the longest swig of champagne could quench the fire of rage and disappointment that rose unbidden into his face.

“That was really brilliant of you,” he commented, with grim honesty hardening his smile. “I’m glad I am not some kind of foreign agent trying to pick your brain.”

4

For Simon Templar, entering Vicky Kinian’s hotel room was about as difficult an operation as sliding a hot spoon into a dollop of ice cream. But only paranormal powers of observation or intuition could have warned him that the girl whose private correspondence he intended to investigate was already being orbited by such a galaxy of variegated snoopers that it would have been impossible to approach within visiting range of her or her lodgings without entering the purview of at least one of them.

From the moment when he left his own room and crossed the corridor, he was, in fact, under the surveillance of the white-whiskered bald man who made such practical use of the aids to his infirmities: the cane was already fitted with its periscope extension, and the oversized hearing-amplifier was already switched on when the door to Vicky Kinian’s dark room swung quietly inward. It had been partially by luck that the plump eavesdropper had detected Simon’s movement across the passage; but now, with his gadgets fully activated, he set about systematically following the Saint’s explorations.

Once in Vicky Kinian’s room Simon turned on the lights, glanced at the general layout, and began his search as coolly as if he were paying the bill for room 302 himself. First, the obvious: empty suitcases, underneath the underclothes in the chest-of-drawers... Success already amongst the lacy silks. His hand brought forth an envelope slightly yellowed with age. There was a typed directive on the front which read: For Victoria Kinian, on her 25th birthday, c/o William F. Grey, Attorney-at-Law. Inside was a cryptic note telling daughter Vicky to visit Portugal and pick up a box at an antique shop in Lisbon. Hardly what could be called a cliff-hanging letter. Almost certainly Vicky Kinian had already gone there in the morning and come back to the Tagus Hotel with something much more informative.

Simon kept on looking. Underneath the mattress of the bed there was nothing but a chewing-gum wrapper. His attention turned then to the massive mahogany wardrobe which seemed to loom over the rest of the room as if it considered itself immeasurably superior. Such old-fashioned examples of the cabinetmaker’s art, with double doors surmounted by a carved cornice, had flat recessed tops ideally designed for concealing dust, dead flies, and highly personal correspondence.

The Saint drew up a chair, stood on it, and looked down on to the upper surface of the armoire. There his search ended. Another envelope, larger and much fatter than the first one, lay waiting for his attention. He took it, stepped down, and pulled out the folded pages. There were nine in all, closely written by hand, and sections had been cut out of two of them.

Darling Vicky, he read. What I am going to tell you can make you a multimillionaire, but it may also lead you into great danger. Others will be after the same prize, and they aren’t playing for fun...

Certain that he had found what he was looking for, Simon decided that there was no need to push his good fortune by lounging there while he waded through the whole long missive. Even if there was very little chance of Vicky Kinian herself returning so soon, a maid might come in to turn down the bed. He could continue reading in his own room. He moved towards the door and turned out the lights.

And behind him — without his ever having been aware of it — an angled combination of mirrors was quietly withdrawn from Vicky Kinian’s balcony...

There had seemed to be no need to sneak furtively into the hotel’s public corridor, and Simon stepped boldly out, intending to cross straight over to his own room. Then he quickly changed his plans, for coming down the hall towards him, and looking momentarily surprised when they saw him, were two of the most unsavory-looking beings ever to scuff the carpets of a respectable inn. One was small and scrawny, with moustaches like black stilettoes and a nose like the operational end of a poleaxe. His crony was bigger and more unwieldy, with overhanging brows and an under-slung lower lip giving the middle portion of his countenance a positively recessive look, as if an impatient parent had once reprimanded him with a well-aimed billiard ball.

Neither of them said anything to the other as they approached, and Simon did not think that they recognized him, but at the same time he was sure that his appearance had startled them. They trooped on past him, looking dourly unconcerned, perhaps intent on some petty knavery which — so long as it did not involve him — the Saint did not have the time or inclination to worry himself about. But just in case they did have some special interest in him or in Vicky Kinian, he decided not to open his own door, which would have marked him as an obvious room-hopper, but instead to continue down the hall and downstairs into the lobby. If the two creeps he had just encountered had other business to attend to, they would assume that he had been just another guest leaving his own quarters.

He became aware even as he walked from the stairs into the lobby that he was being followed. Reflected in the glass door which led on to the street, he could see the same two worthies keeping what they must have considered a discreet distance behind him.

Simon went ahead out the door. He would walk around the block and see just how persistent his escort was.

Outside it was dark except for an occasional street light, and the sidewalks glinted with a sprinkling of rain just beginning to fall. There was thunder not far away out over the estuary, and a fresh breeze accompanied the summer shower. Sticking close beneath awnings and architectural outcroppings, the Saint could stroll casually without getting too wet. Then when he reached the corner the rain started to build towards its climax. He stood under a stone archway in deep shadow, watching the drops dance on the pavement. Half a block away, two other men, a small one and a bulkier one, stopped and waited in the shelter of a doorway. There was a five-minute pause, a silence relieved by rumbles of thunder and the occasional hiss of the tires of a passing car, and then the shower was over as abruptly as it had begun. Simon sauntered on his way, turning into a darker side street. In the strip of sky which showed overhead between rows of tiled eaves, the stars were already appearing between patches of scudding cloud.

Behind the Saint there was a distinct sound of footsteps.

“If those characters are just out for an innocent stroll, I’ll give them a chance for a little more privacy,” he mused.

He turned under an archway which led into a short alley which opened at its opposite end on to another dimly lit street. About halfway along the deserted arcade, he paused to listen.

After a few seconds’ silence, a single pair of footsteps came quickly along behind him.

Without showing any visible indication, the Saint’s body and mind went on combat alert. His muscles were relaxed and ready for swift movement in any direction, to meet any threat — including the rather clumsy threat that immediately became an actuality.

The man with the hypodermic-needle moustache and the Hallowe’en nose was holding the point of a knife in the immediate vicinity of his jugular vein.

“At once, senhor!” the little man ordered hoarsely. “Give me what you have in your pockets!”

The Saint, wishing to keep his blood to himself, thought it wise to eliminate the threat of the knife-tip before proceeding to deal with the comedian who was aiming it. He pretended to acquiesce, reached into one of his jacket pockets, and brought out the letter he had taken from the top of Vicky Kinian’s wardrobe. With a sudden dramatic gesture he flung the white envelope aside into the shadows.

“Is that what you were after?” he asked mildly.

In the first instant that this enemy’s attention was distracted, Simon struck like a snake. The rigid edge of one of his hands smashed the knife arm of the other man aside, and then with a twisting swinging combination of movements he flipped his opponent into the air, yanked him through a completely graceful somersault, and helped him to as ungentle a landing as possible flat on his face on the cobblestones.

As might have been predicted, the second attack wave lumbered on to the field as soon as the first had crunched to a temporary standstill. Arms flying, the bigger of the two strangers — obviously bringing into play all the subtle chivalric skills learned in a lifetime of a dockyard brawls — hurled himself into the combat. Hoping to achieve an outflanking triumph he lunged to whip a thick arm around the Saint’s throat from behind. But the Saint caught the arm before its trap-like action was completed, brought the elbow joint against the fulcrum of his shoulder, and all in one magnificently flowing gesture levered his huge assailant up and over and dropped all two hundred pounds of him flat on the pavement not far from the site of his colleague’s plunge.

The said colleague, in the meantime, was dazedly scrambling to his feet, clawing at the Saint’s coat. The bigger thug gasping for breath, grabbed for Simon’s ankle. The battle, though now distinctly onesided in favor of the outnumbered force, was far from over, and it swayed and thudded along the whole length of the dark arcade.

There was a fourth, unseen, participant in the episode, who then moved in to take advantage of the confusion for his own purposes. Only a single element in the drama interested him at all, and that was the white envelope which now lay abandoned in the deep shadows where the fight had begun. He waited his chance, then sidled swiftly along the stone wall, snatched the letter off the ground, and darted away again with an agility amazing in a man of his stout build.

He emerged into one of the side streets on which the alley opened, and the faint rays of a street lamp fell across the whiteness of his Vandyke beard. At the opposite end of the alley he could see the combatants silhouetted in an archway. One of them fell heavily and cried out, and in a moment of sudden alarm the plump man with the beard was afraid he had been seen. He turned and ran, and was still running when he rounded the corner leading on to the main street and ran almost directly into the unsuspecting arms of a pair of damp-shouldered policemen whose minds, until that moment, had been on nothing more violent than the latest international football match.

The bald and bearded runner, so obviously in full flight, knew that he had to come up with an instant explanation.

“Policia!” he cried breathlessly. “In there! Murder! Men fighting!”

His Portuguese left much to be desired so far as elegance of phrase was concerned, but the gist of his meaning was quite clear. The cops propped their caps more firmly into place and took off at a run, while the public-spirited civilian who had given the alarm was left behind shouting and pointing.

“In there! Someone is being killed!”

The policemen disappeared into the arched alley, and the bearded man, tucking the white envelope into an inside pocket, could not suppress a smile of unmitigated smugness. Then, like a busy fat crab, he scuttled away into the shadows.

The gendarmerie, meanwhile, had arrived on the scene of the crime with billy clubs waving, only to find a single tall unruffled man turning from two groaning hulks prostrated at his feet. Sizing up the situation instantly, they each grabbed one of the arms of the tall man and pulled him away from his victims.

“Villain!” keened one of the officers indignantly. “What are you doing assaulting these citizens?”

Simon was able to reply in faultlessly colloquial Portuguese.

“You’ve got it upside down, boys,” he answer calmly. “I’m the one who was getting assaulted.”

On the face of it his assertion was not obviously credible, and the guardians of public order can perhaps not be censured for escorting him into the light at the end of the alley and demanding to inspect his papers.

“You’ll see from my passport that I’m a simple tourist,” Simon assured them, with injured innocence. “Those thugs attacked me and tried to rob me. I’d suggest you grab hold of them instead of...”

He looked towards the men he had left polishing the cobblestones with their shirt fronts. They were strugging to their feet and setting a course which would take them as fast as possible from any opportunity to congratulate their uniformed rescuers.

The Saint pointed commandingly.

“As you’ll notice,” he said, “they aren’t waiting like honest characters to register a complaint. Personally, I intend to report your behavior to my embassy.”

The aristocratic appearance of their captive, as well as the evident justification of what he was saying, was enough to convince the policemen that they might very well be making a mistake of the sort that can have most embarrassing consequences. Without waiting to hear any elaboration of the details with which he would regale his embassy, they ordered him to wait where he was while they chased his attackers. He was only too glad to oblige, and as soon as the cops had taken off around the corner after their rapidly limping quarry he pulled out his fountain-pen flashlight and hurried to the spot where he had thrown Vicky Kinian’s letter.

He expected to see the envelope immediately, and it took him only a few seconds to realize that it was nowhere in the section of the alley where he had thrown it. And yet there was no chance that one of his sparring partners could have grabbed it; he was certain that he had kept them too occupied during the whole melee.

Simon whirled quickly and sprinted after the two policemen. Now that the rainstorm had passed there was no wind to have blown the envelope away, and the only other obvious possibility was that one of the cops had noticed it and snatched it up on the run.

In the narrow street beyond the alley, down to the left, the sounds of the chase were still near, and took the form of sharp shouts and a confused skidding of feet, at least some of them flat.

“In there! He can’t get out!”

“That way! The other one!”

As Simon raced on to the dimly lit scene it became clear that the two fugitives had split up, and that only one of them had had the foresight — or good luck — to pick a route which might conceivably lead to a prolongation of his malodorous career. The second one had made the error of getting himself cornered in a cul de sac full of garbage bins. The Saint arrived in time to see him — the little roach-like entity with the moustache — caught in the powerful beam of one of his pursuers’ electric torches, struggling with the closed rear door of an apartment building which formed the end of the architectural trap. He was shielding his face with one hand and clutching his long knife in the other.

The policemen immediately showed signs of recognition, if not of joy.

“Halt, you unprintable unspeakable!” yelled one of them.

“Halt or I’ll shoot!” shouted the other, snatching out an automatic, but still keeping a respectful distance.

The prodigal obviously anticipated that the Lisbon police force would stop depressingly short of barbequing a fatted calf in honor of his return to the land of the Godly, and in fact were more likely to barbeque him, and this no doubt caused him to panic. Instead of obeying the commands of his pursuers, he took the ungentlemanly and imprudent step of throwing his knife at them, hoping to make his getaway through the apartment building’s back entrance before they could recover their balance.

But there are days in everybody’s life when little things seem continually to go wrong, and it was such a day in the life of Pedro the Population-Adjuster. Little things like a wrong turning and a tightly locked door added up to a moment of acute inconvenience as a cop’s finger squeezed a trigger twice and caused two notable perforations in Pedro’s anatomy just above his hammered-silver belt buckle.

Pedro writhed to the ground and twitched to grotesquely sprawled stillness as the policemen strode to his side to pronounce their benediction.

“Misbegotten swine!”

“He should have had it long ago.”

The Saint intervened.

“I hate to intrude on your sorrow, boys,” he said, “but I wonder if either of you picked up a letter I dropped in the alley back there?”

The two officers became aware of his presence once again.

“Senhor!” one of them hailed him in congratulatory tones. “You were quite right. There is no blame on you. This pig is known to us, and we have finally caught him in one of his crimes!”

“To say the least,” Simon concurred, looking down at the bloodsoaked body at their feet. “I wonder why he was after me?”

“Oh, senhor, he would do anything — stick you up in a back street, kidnap your children, kill! Anything it would pay him to do, he would do. He has been in jail four times — since he was a boy.”

“Five times,” the other officer corrected.

“No, it was four. The last time—”

“And probably it ought to have been forty-five,” Simon cut in pacifically. “But now that he’s no longer a problem, I’m more interested in my letter. Did you happen to find it as you passed through the alley?”

“Letter? No, senhor. No letter.”

Both men shook their heads, confirming to each other that they had found nothing.

“But if you will come to the station with us, senhor, you can describe the other villain and answer questions that may produce...”

Simon declined politely and gave them a half-salute of farewell.

“I have already seen justice done,” he said. “I am satisfied — and there is a lady waiting for me who will be most unsatisfied if I am much later in meeting her.”

“But if you are wanted as a witness, senhor?”

He calmed them down by showing them a passport with a genuine photograph of himself on it and giving them the name of a hotel at which he was not staying. Having no complaint against him, and perhaps preferring to recite the epic of their deeds to their superiors without any burdensome touches of realism from a stranger, they let him go then, and as he walked away the last words that reached him were: “I will bet you a bottle of Ferreirinha that it was four times!”

Actually the Saint scarcely heard them. He was too preoccupied with the sudden new spine-tingling awareness that he was no longer a free-roving agent circling the perimeter of a situation and leisurely debating his own possible points of entry. Someone even farther outside and still beyond his ken was watching him.