The Saint in the Sun

1. CANNES: The Better Mousetrap

Until his unfortunate accident, Mr. Daniel Tench, in spite of having been christened with such an unglamorous name (though he had used others) had managed to lead what some people would consider quite a glamorous life. Born in a caravan on an English fairground, he had grown up with a traveling circus, and spent several years as a merely second-rate acrobat, by Ringling standards, before he graduated to become one of the most successful jewel thieves who ever operated in Europe.

A few small but profitable experiments during his last season under canvas had shown him that the limited athletic gifts which would never get him billing at Madison Square Garden were more than adequate for making illegal entries by various improbable routes; and when a neat second-story job in Deauville produced a pearl choker that brought a million francs even in the market where he had to sell it, Mr. Tench decided that he had found a better way to use his nerve and muscle than by swinging on a trapeze for the niggardly applause of a small crowd of yokels.

One day, someone with more patience and earnestness than this reporter may write an original monograph on the influence of architectural styles upon trends in crime. It is quite possible that the frustrations of the Victorian home were responsible for the popularity of wife‑poisoning as an indoor sport during that era. It is certain that the art of Mr. Tench could only have reached its apogee in Europe, where most of the flossiest hotels are still monuments to a period in which ornateness was a synonym for luxury, and no caravanserai was considered palatial that did not have an abundance of balconies, ledges, cornices, gables, buttresses, groovings, ornaments, and curlicues that were made to order for a man of his somewhat simian talents. On the stark facade of the latest Hilton construction he would have been as confused as a cat on roller skates.

In fact, the obvious vulnerability of such gilded barracks long ago created a specialist known in French as a souris d'hôtel, or hotel mouse, who would stealthily make off with any valuables that careless guests left unlocked in their rooms. Traditionally, this operator wore only a suit of black tights, to be able to move without rustling and to be as invisible as possible in the dark; and in the merrier myths the tights were always filled to capacity by a beauteous female who, if caught in the act, always had one last card to play against the penalty of being turned over to the police. Mr. Tench, of course, did not have the benefit of what we might call this ace in the hole, in normal situations, but he made up for it with a physical agility that consistently kept the problem from arising. Until the night when his hand slipped.

Personally he was not at all the gay and charming type that would have been portrayed in any self-respecting movie, and even his widow did not waste a minute mourning for him, though she was most annoyed to be so abruptly deprived of the loot he provided, especially the assortment that was his objective on the expedition which he concluded by falling four floors down the front of the Carlton Hotel in Cannes.

None of this might ever have concerned the Saint very much, but for the fact that the place where Mr. Tench made his spectacularly unsuccessful attempt to bounce off a slab of concrete was situated vertically underneath the window of a room in which Simon Templar happened to be registered at the time. As a result, Simon was subjected to a long and hostile interrogation by an inspector of the Police Judiciaire, who was convinced that all thieves of Tench's type had an accomplice, and could see no suspect more obvious than a person of such notoriously equivocal reputation.

"Not that I can altogether blame him," Simon said to Natalie Sheridan. "Danny-boy could have fallen right off my balcony, so to any cop's way of thinking my room could have been his headquarters. This should teach me to stay away from places where the guests have jewels."

He usually stayed at the less showy but just as comfortable Majestic, but he had backed his luck too hard by arriving without a reservation at the height of the season, and had had to take anything he was lucky enough to get. But for that he might not even have met Natalie as he had only two days ago, when he felt too lazy to go any farther than the bar downstairs for his first aperitif.

The terrace of the Carlton at cocktail time is about the busiest place in Cannes, and some of the business is not the kind that the best hotels are conventionally supposed to welcome. But in France, a country with a realistic approach to everything except politics, it is recognized that the very classiest ladies of accommodating virtue, or poules de luxe, will inevitably forgather in the very classiest places, where they can expect to meet friends of equal distinction in other fields, and nothing much can be done about it. This does not mean that they are conspicuous, except by being often better looking, better dressed, and better behaved than most of the more strait-laced customers, or that their importunities are a menace to respectable citizens; but a man who looks lonely there always has a chance of catching a not indifferent eye.

Simon Templar was not on the prowl in that way, but he never said No to anything without a second look, and his second look at Natalie was what stopped him. At the first, she was only one of the sea of faces that he automatically scanned with extraordinary selectivity while he seemed to be merely looking for a vacant table: this was the habit of a lifetime whose duration could sometimes depend on seeing everyone before anyone saw him: and her eyes were not the first in which he could sense a possibility of welcome, or her lips the only ones that seemed on the verge of a tentative smile. But these features were so exceptionally attractive that after the first comprehensive glance he had to look at them again individually. And that was when the mouth actually smiled, with a quite brazen forthrightness that was not according to protocol for that place at all, and the possibility of invitation in the eyes bared itself as almost shameless pleading.

The Saint smiled back as if he had just seen her. Dismissing with a casual gesture the intrusive attentions of a waiter who was trying to sell him a seat on the other side of the terrace, he steered as direct a course towards her as the intervening tables permitted, and watched the near-panic in her eyes relax into simple nervousness as he approached.

"Darling," he murmured. "Have you been waiting long?"

"Long enough," she said.

He sat down.

"What would you have done if I hadn't shown up?"

"I don't know," she said. "Or if you'd turned out to speak nothing but French. But why did you speak to me in English? How did you know I wasn't—"

"Us old roues have educated hunches that pay off sometimes."

Another waiter intruded himself, a disinterested mercenary concerned only with one aspect of the encounter. Simon glanced at the Martini in front of the girl, which she had scarcely touched, and ordered a St-Raphaël.

"But you don't know," she said almost feverishly, as the waiter went away. "I've got to explain. I'm not the kind of girl you think!"

"Really?" Simon offered a cigarette. "Well, I've got nothing but time. Tell me the story of your life."

It could hardly cover much more than a quarter of a century, he estimated, and any debauchery that she might have crowded into the later years had not yet left any telltale marks on her face. Even at close quarters, her flawless skin did not betray an indebtedness to artful cosmetics. A master coiffeur had done ethereal sculpture in her hair, but would have mortgaged his soul to be able to duplicate with bleach and dye and rinse its cheerfully inconsistent shades of honey-blonde. And if her figure relied on prosthetic support or increment for its extremely interesting contours, that was a remotely potential disillusionment which in these days only nudists never have to risk. From all angles that could be determined in a respectable public place, she was as promising a temptation as any buccaneer ever made no exaggerated effort to resist.

"Natalie Sheridan," she said. "Canadian. Divorced one year. No torch, but I did feel like a fling, and I'd read so much about Europe. The only thing I hadn't thought about, practically, was just how a gal would make out from day to day, traveling alone. It was all right in London and Paris, because I was with friends all the time — but then they were going to Scandinavia and I wanted to see the Riviera. It was even all right in Monte Carlo, though, because I met an English woman on the train coming down, and we sort of stuck together. But I've been here on my own now for three days, and tonight I got desperate."

"It can be a problem, I imagine."

"The first night, I had dinner here and went straight to bed. Lunch, wasn't so difficult, somehow. But the second night, I was afraid to go to any fancy place: I went into another restaurant very early, it was almost empty, and then I went to a movie and went to bed. Tonight I decided it was just silly, I could waste a whole vacation like that, and why shouldn't I act like a healthy modern gal with her own traveler's checks? So I got all dressed up and swore I would have some fun. But—"

"Other people had other ideas about the kind of fun you ought to have?"

"Over here, they don't seem to understand that a gal can be alone because she wants to. If she isn't waiting for one man, she must be waiting for any man. I've never had so many strange men trying to be so charming. Of course, most of them were just devastatingly discreet, but all the same. after a while, it gets to be like a kind of nightmare. And then when I felt the waiters beginning to worry about me, it was the end."

"So you decided that if everyone was thinking it, you might as well be it?" he asked, with lazy wickedness.

"Oh, no! But when you came in, I was about frantic, and you looked English or American or — or as if you might understand, anyway. And I did try to pick you up, and I shouldn't be wasting your time. But if you would just have your drink, so that I can sit here for a little while and enjoy staring at everyone else instead of them staring at me, and let me pay for it, and then escort me out so I can make a graceful exit—"

The Saint finally laughed, cutting off her spate of headlong clauses with a muted outburst of sheer delight. He threw back his head and shook with it irrepressibly, subduing only the sound of the guffaw, while the waiter delivered his St-Raphaël and went phlegmatically away.

"Natalie, I love you. I thought I'd been picked up in every way there was, in the course of a misspent life, but you've shown me that there can always be new things to live for." He sat up again, still smiling, and not unkindly. "I'll tell you what. We'll have this drink, and then another, on me, and enjoy the passing show together. And after that, if you can still stand the company, I'd like to introduce you to a little side-street restaurant, Chez Francis, where you can eat the best Provençal sea-foods in this town. Until you've tasted Francis' coquillages farcis, you've only been gastronomically slumming."

That had been the beginning of what looked at first like the most beautifully innocuous friendship in the Saint's life story. Her ignorance of everything European was abysmal, but her lively interest made kindergarten instruction surprisingly enjoyable. Experiencing for the first time places and foods and wines that were so familiar to him, she made them new to him again with the spice of her own excitement. He got almost a proprietary kick out of first emphasizing the murky waters and overcrowded sands of the Croisette beaches, until she was as saddened as a child with a broken toy, and then taking her on a mere fifteen-minute ferry ride to the Ile Ste Marguerite and over the eucalyptus-shaded walks to the clean rocky coves on the other side which only a few fortunate tourists ever find. And when he gave her one of the glass-and-rubber masks which are almost one of the minimum garments required of Mediterranean bathers today, and she made her personal discovery of the underwater fairyland that only encumbered divers had ever glimpsed before this generation, she clung to him with real sexless tears flooding her big hazel eyes.

Except for that one spontaneous clutch, she was neither cold nor coquettish. It must be faced — or who are we kidding? — that few women could be with the Saint for long and want to leave him alone, and that passes had been made at him in more ways than a modest man would try to remember, and that he could scarcely help revealing even in subtle ways that he was prepared for the worst and poised for evasive action. But Natalie Sheridan gave him nothing to fight. She made no overt attempt to bring him closer to her bed, while at the same time leaving no doubt that he might be very welcome there, some other night, when certain other conjunctions were auspicious. This alone was a refreshing change from more hackneyed hazards.

Nor was she asking to be rescued from any dragons or deadfalls, except the almost adolescent insecurity which had made her beseech him in the first place.

He had told her soon enough, inevitably, but with all the misgivings that could be rooted in a hundred prologues like this: "My name is Sebastian Tombs, believe it or not."

She had said: "Of course I believe it. People always do, when the Saint tells them that, don't they?"

It was at this memorable moment that he finally decided that the time had come at last when the pseudonym which had given him so much childish amusement for so many years must be put away in honorable retirement. He would never feel confident of fooling anyone with it again, and indeed he realized that he had been more than lucky to get away with it on the last several occasions when a perverse sentimental attachment had made him risk it just once more.

But even so, Natalie had surprised him again. She hadn't followed up the identification with the usual babble of silly questions, or embarrassing flattery, or the equally routine recollection of some flagrant injustice, public or private, which he simply must do something about. She seemed perfectly satisfied to enjoy his company as an attractive man, without pestering him for reminiscences or otherwise reminding him that he was a kind of international celebrity, in the most refreshingly natural camaraderie.

It was almost too good to be true.

On the third evening, she handed him a sealed envelope.

"That's for last night," she said. "I saw exactly what you spent — I've got very sharp eyes. Tonight is on you, if you like. But about every other time it has to be on me, if we're going on doing this. Now don't get on a high horse. I'm not going to insult you by offering more than my share, and don't you insult me by trying to make me a parasite. You don't have to pick up all the checks until you're married to me or keeping me, and I haven't heard you offer to do either yet."

This was altogether too much.

"What on earth did your husband divorce you for?" he asked.

"He didn't. I divorced him."

"Then put it another way. Why did he let you?"

"Why should I tell you what's wrong with me? If I don't, there's always a chance you may never find out."

Nothing else had beclouded the idyllic relationship until Mrs. Bertha Noversham had arrived. Mrs. Noversham was the English woman whom Natalie had met on the Blue Train and whose company in Monte Carlo had postponed the problems of solitude. She had been to Corsica on the yacht of some titled plutocrats whom she had met at a roulette table and adopted as old friends on the basis of having seen them several times in the most fashionable London restaurants — Natalie had already told Simon about Mrs. Noversham's steamroller methods of enlarging her circle of acquaintances.

"Yes, dear, it was utterly divine," Mrs. Noversham said, sinking massively into a chair at their table without waiting for an invitation. "It's a shame you couldn't have gone along, but they did only have the one spare berth, and even I practically had to ask myself. They're such snobs, though — Sir Oswald wasn't knighted more than five years ago, and they couldn't get over me having the Duke of Camford for a great-uncle, and calling him a silly old fool, which he is."

She was a woman with a gross torso and short skinny legs, who masked whatever complexion she may have had with an impenetrable coating of powder and rouge, and dissimulated her possibly graying hair with a tint of magenta that never sprang from human follicle. In spite of this misguided effort, she failed to look a day under fortyfive, which may have been all she was. Her dress looked as if it had been bought from a black-and-white illustration in a mail-order catalog. But like magic charms to obscure and nullify all such cheap crudities, she wore Jewels.

It was a long time since the Saint had seen jewels in quite such ostentatious quantity, even in that traditional paradise of jewel thieves. Mrs. Noversham wore them in every conceivable place and form, and a few that required a long stretch of the imagination as well. She wore them in an assortment of settings so garish that she must have designed them herself, because no jeweller with a vestige of sanity would have banked on a customer falling in love with them in his shop window. If the most casual observer was to be left in doubt as to how she was loaded, it was not going to be her fault.

"I'll have a champagne cocktail," she told the waiter. "This wasn't some itty bitty little yacht, Mr. Templar. It's a small liner. Natalie can tell you — she came to dinner on board before we sailed. But do you know, with all that money, Lady Fisbee still insists on having all the wine iced, even the claret."

"You must have been glad it wasn't a longer trip," said the Saint earnestly.

"Well, you know what did cut it short?" Mrs. Noversham said, with the unction of a born connoisseur of catastrophes. "We had a robbery!"

"What, not another?" Natalie exclaimed.

"Yes, dear. Right in the harbor at Ajaccio. Lady Fisbee had given most of the crew a day off to go ashore — it's quite ridiculous the way she pampers those people — and all of us had dinner at the Hotel so that they wouldn't have to work. She's obviously still frightened of servants and thinks that she has to make them happy instead of it being the other way round. So there were only two men on board, and they were playing cards and probably drinking, and somebody got on board and jimmied the safe in Lady Fisbee's cabin and cleaned out the two other guests who had anything worth stealing as well."

Natalie turned to Simon and explained: "There was a robbery at the Métropole in Monte Carlo, too, while we were there. We must attract them."

"One of us does, dear. Perhaps it's a good job they couldn't find room for you, after all — you might have lost that nice collar of sparklers."

Natalie fingered the exquisitely mounted string of white fire around her throat almost self-consciously, and said: "I'm not really surprised. That wall safe that Lady Fisbee showed us looked terribly flimsy to me. The best thing about it was the way it was hidden. And that Italian actress said that she'd never needed anything safer than the bottom of a wardrobe under a pile of dirty laundry. As if professional thieves didn't already know all the hiding places that anyone could think of. Some people almost deserve to be robbed."

"Not me, dear," said Bertha Noversham smugly. "You know where I keep everything I'm not wearing, and nobody could get at that even in my sleep without me raising Cain, unless I was knocked out first, and that kind of thief never goes in for rough stuff. He wants to sneak in and sneak away without anyone having a chance to see him."

"But there are stick-up men, too," Simon mentioned.

"I hope I meet one some day — I'll have a surprise for him," said Mrs. Noversham darkly. "Where are you having dinner?"

She continued to anticipate and accept unuttered invitations with an aplomb that was paralyzing, and never stopped dominating the conversation with the bland assumption that they had only been waiting for her to relieve their boredom.

Before the meal was over, she had blithely devastated a dozen other characters or reputations, some of them belonging to people whom Simon did not even know by name, always in a way that obliquely underlined the impeccability of her own status as a social arbiter. She had a trick of flattering her listeners by taking it for granted that they would sneer at the same things she sneered at, while at the same time implying ominously that they would be wise to make positive efforts to continue in her good graces.

She accompanied them from dinner to the Palm-Beach Casino, and only left them to themselves again when she spotted a famous Hollywood producer and his richly panoplied wife, to whom she was sure she had passed the sugar at tea in the Royal Enclosure at Ascot.

"I'm dreadfully sorry," Natalie said. "She's quite awful, isn't she? But I was so desperately glad to know anyone at all when I first got here, as I told you, that I didn't realize how overpowering she was."

"She has a fabulous technique," Simon admitted mildly. "I can see how anyone with the least insecurity would be a sitting duck for her. Before she's through, that popcorn potentate will be terrified of sticking the wrong fork in his caviar, in case Bertha changes her mind about introducing his wife to the Duchess of Camford, which he would never hear the last of."

"The point is, what are we going to do? If — well, if you're interested."

The Saint grinned.

"Tell her who I am. I don't think it really penetrated, when you introduced me. Rub it in. I think that'll scare her off. Of course, she'll try to scare you off too, but I'm counting on you to resist that."

"I don't think I'd be too shocked if you did steal her jewels. Somebody ought to stop her being so superior about everyone else."

"Where does she keep them, by the way?"

"She has a specially-made sort of apron with zipper pockets that she wears all the time; but with her figure, when she's dressed, it doesn't show because it hangs under the bulge, if you know what I mean."

"You couldn't be more discreetly graphic."

Natalie's lovely eyes dilated slightly with belated comprehension.

"I told you, didn't I? Just what you'd want to know, if you were a jewel thief. She was right — some people almost deserve to be robbed."

"I thought you were the one who said that, darling."

"Well, it was right anyway. Don't start to get me confused and frightened, Simon. We've had such a lot of fun, these few days. And I haven't bothered you with any silly questions, have I? Don't let me start now. But you were telling the truth, weren't you, when you told me you were strictly here on vacation?"

"Most strictly," he smiled. "As long as nobody makes the path too strait and narrow for my tottering tootsies. Talking of which, why don't we see if they can still keep time with this team of paranoiac Paraguayans, who are obviously subsidized by the local Society of Osteopaths?"

But that had been the very night during which, somewhat later, Mr. Daniel Tench made his catastrophic verification of the laws of gravity.

The Saint had been detained all morning by the skeptical inspector of the Police Judiciaire, and when he got back he had found a brief note from Natalie saying that she had gone to Eden Roc with Mrs. Noversham. By that time it was already late for lunch, and in any case he thought it might be more opportune to leave them on their own. He left an answering message for her to call him when she came in, and thus it was tea-time when she asked him to meet her at the Martinez, and it was there that he got off the wry reflection that could have been an epitaph on their brief friendship,

"This is another place where the guests often have jewels," she pointed out.

"There are so damn many of them," he complained, "Staying away from them is easier said than done."

"And you do like some of the people, don't you?"

"I never thought of you as one of the jewelled ones. Which is a compliment to someone's good taste in settings. Because now I come to think of it, the choice bits of ice I've seen you wearing could be worth twice as much as all Bertha Noversham's rocks, if they're real. You see how I must have reformed? Something like this has to happen before I even start thinking like a jewel thief."

"That isn't the way Bertha sees it."

Her voice was so cool that he stared at her.

"This is very interesting," he said. "I know it was my idea for you to give me a build-up, but could you have over-sold yourself?"

"I don't know, but I couldn't cover up for you. When Bertha called me about seven o'clock this morning, she'd just woken up and discovered that someone had taken that precious apron-bag of hers, which she was so sure couldn't be done. I almost got the giggles when I remembered that the last thing she talked about on the way home last night was how she was going to break down and take something for her insomnia. But by the time I got to her room, she'd already called the manager, and of course they'd already found that man who fell off a balcony, so the police were there, and she'd told them that I knew about her apron and so you certainly knew too. She was much more hep than you thought — she knew who you were all the time. She didn't blame me for letting you get so much out of me, but I couldn't deny that you had."

"Naturally," said the Saint, without rancor. "I gathered most of that while I was being grilled, though the inspector did his best not to let on. But it seems to be bothering you more than it does me."

She twisted her fingers together — he had not seen her so tensely defensive since their first meeting.

"How do you explain that man being on your balcony?"

"Just what the inspector asked me. I asked him if there was a French version of the English or American parable that we all know, only don't ask me where it's from, which says that 'if a man only makes a better mousetrap than his neighbor, though he lives in the heart of a wilderness, the world will beat a path to his door'. I'd hate to calculate how many billions the advertising industry has spent to prove that this is the silliest old saw that ever lost its teeth, but it still works for me. At one time in the shocking days you've heard about, I managed to become the best-known alleged crook since Raffles. Since then, there has been the dreariest procession of otherwise bright lads who could think of no more dazzling climax to their careers than to leave their tracks on my doorstep. Brother Tench was only the latest, but he won't be the last."

"He had Bertha's apron, with all her jewels — she got them all back, I suppose you know. But what would he have done with them in your room?"

"He could 've afforded to drop one piece, or even just one stone. And then with only an anonymous phone call, he could 've had all the cops concentrating on me for days, while he wrapped up his getaway. As it is, the only thing that really saved me from being stuck was that he had all the boodle on him when they scraped him up."

"Would you mind," Natalie said, in a fainting voice, "if I went back and took a little nap? I guess I'm not used to coping with things like this."

She made him walk back on the other side of the Croisette, the beach side, so that it was easy to look up at the façcade of the Carlton as they approached it. When they were almost opposite, she stopped and pointed.

"That's your balcony, isn't it, to the right of the middle, on the fourth floor?"

"Yes."

"Bertha's on the sixth floor, the corner room on the left."

"Is she?"

"And I'm on the floor below you, just a little more to the right."

"I could have figured that from your room number, although you never invited me to see."

"This man Tench had already been to Bertha's room," she said. "Suppose he was on his way to my room from there. That could just as well have taken him past your balcony, just because it was on the way, without him necessarily having the idea of planting something in your room."

The Saint frowned. He had tried hard not to be unduly sensitive, but she was making it a little more difficult with every sentence.

"I suppose so," he said. "I had a theory, but anyone else is entitled to another. I'm only the guy who was in the middle — as you've rather neatly pointed out."

"But that's the whole point, isn't it?" she said. "They don't seem to know where Tench started climbing around from. He didn't have a room of his own in the hotel, apparently. Bertha swears that her door was bolted on the inside, but once he'd got into her room he could still have gone out by the door — and why wouldn't he have done that, instead of risking his neck on the outside, if he was in cahoots with you and only wanted to bring you the jewels?"

"Thank you," murmured the Saint, with a trace of irony. "I should have had you with me when I was trying to convince that inspector."

"The only other reason that Tench would have to be on your balcony, except for your theory that he meant to try to frame you, would be if he was on his way somewhere else. To my room, perhaps."

Simon gazed at her for quite a long time.

"Did you figure all that out in your own little head?"

"You don't need to be sarcastic. Of course Bertha and I talked about — everything. And I feel rather ashamed of some of the things we said last night. She was just having a bad spell; but she isn't a bad person."

"Good. Then you don't want me to steal her jewels, after all?"

"Or mine either. I'll take all the blame, I've loved every minute of it, but Bertha reminded me of an old saying — 'Lead us not into temptation'. One can ask too much even of a Saint, can't one?" She put out her hand suddenly. "Let's just say goodbye now, and nothing else."

"If that's how you want it, darling. It's your script."

He raised her fingers to his lips, in a gesture that added a uniquely cavalier insolence to a Latin flourish, and watched her force her own way through the endlessly crawling cross-streams of traffic.

If that was how she wanted it, so be it.

He couldn't remember when he had last felt so recklessly resentful. It had become almost a standing joke, for him, to protest that he was always being driven back towards the old bad ways by the people who refused to believe that he had ever forsaken them. But seldom had his admittedly equivocal past been raised to slap him in the face as unfairly as this.

Natalie Sheridan deserved to lose her bloody diamonds.

So did Mrs. Noversham, for helping to put that bee in her bonnet. Simon would have bet anything that Natalie would never have reached the same conclusion by herself. But put two women together, and the ultimate outcome of their mutual catalysis can be predicted by no laws of chemistry or logic.

Simon scowled up again at the front of the hotel into which Natalie had already disappeared, imprinting a certain pattern on his mind.

Then he went up to his room and scowled vaguely out the other way, over the blue bay where speedboats towing aimless but tireless water-skiers cut random patterns between lazily graceful sailing skiffs and mechanically crawling pedalos; but in his mind he saw the same pattern, reversed, in which his window was still a kind of focal center.

Eventually it was the telephone which interrupted his brooding, with a strident abruptness that left him with what he recognized at once as a purely wishful flutter of hope. The uncompromisingly materialistic voice that greeted his response quickly reduced that pipe-dream to its basic fatuity.

"This is Bertha Noversham, Mr. Templar. I'd like you to have a cocktail with me."

"Well, thank you, but I'm not sure that I—"

"Don't tell me that you've got another engagement, because I'm fairly sure you haven't. Anyhow, this needn't take long, and if you'll come to my room you can be sure you won't be embarrassed in public. Just tell me what you like to drink, and I'll order it while you're getting here."

"I remember that you liked champagne cocktails," said the Saint slowly. "Get in a bottle of Bollinger, and I'll help you with it."

The Bollinger was on ice when he arrived, but it was no frostier than the self-assurance of her welcome.

"I'm quite sure you didn't think for a moment that this was just a social invitation," she said, "so I'll come to the point as soon as you've done the pouring. Please use only half a lump of sugar, and scrape it well on the lemon peel — don't put the lemon in. That small glass is cognac, in case you have the common American idea that that improves the taste."

Simon performed the dispensing with imperturbable good humor.

"All right," he said. "Start shooting."

"Very well. I find you quite a likeable person, Mr. Templar, in spite of some things that everyone knows about you. So I'd like to save you from making a serious mistake."

"What about?"

"I understand that until yesterday Natalie was amusing herself by letting you think you were showing her the Côte d'Azur. I don't know how often she's done it before, but she certainly told the same tale to the man who gave her some of her diamonds. That was last year, when I first met her. I knew him from one of the garden parties at Camford Castle — a nice old duffer, but quite senile of course."

The Saint's eyebrows did not go up through his hair-line like rockets through the ionosphere, but that was only because he had it spent more time with poker hands than ballistic missiles.

"Now I know why you thought you had to offer me a drink, anyway," he remarked.

"Bernie Kovar was at Eden Roc today — you remember, I was talking to him at the Casino last night. We had lunch together. His wife left for Rome this morning, to do the shops and the museums for a week or two, while he's supposed to be reading scripts. Of course she knows perfectly well what the old goat will be up to most of the time — the gossip columns would tell her if nobody else did — but she only brings it up if he dares to say a word about the money she spends. He didn't waste a minute inviting Natalie to dinner and asking why no one had ever offered her a screen test. It may make you feel a bit better to know that that's the real reason why she has to shake you off in such a hurry — not because she seriously thinks you might rob her."

"That does sound considerate."

"I don't know what Natalie has told you about her background, but I've heard enough contradictory fragments to believe none of them. I think of her simply as an ambitious girl who is determined to get the most out of her undoubted attractions while they last. That is what every woman does who isn't a 'career woman', God help her. That's what I was like at her age, and I'm sure you think I haven't outgrown it. The difference is that Natalie wants to get away with murder and still have everyone loving her. She's a dear girl, and I've done a lot for her, and I may go on doing it."

"Then why are you telling me all this?"

Mrs. Noversham took a very healthy, unequivocal swig at her champagne cocktail, and indicated that Simon should replenish the glass.

"Because I'm just selfish enough to want to protect myself. It's all very well for Natalie to spare your vanity by pretending she just thinks it'd be safer not to see you again. But she doesn't even want to take the responsibility for that idea. She had to make you think I put the idea into her head, I didn't care at first; until it dawned on me how dangerous that could be, with a man like you. You'd be perfectly capable of stealing my jewels, if you could, just to pay me back for a thing like that — wouldn't you, Mr. Templar?"

Simon brought the refill back to her, and lighted a cigarette.

"When you phoned, I was thinking along those lines," he said candidly.

"I was sure of it. I don't like being disloyal to Natalie, but there's a limit to how far I can go to cover up for her. My jewels mean a lot to me, and I don't want to worry about your intentions for the rest of the season."

"It's nice of you not to put it that I'd be the first person you'd remind the police about if anything happened to you again like last night."

"I'd prefer to keep this conversation entirely on a pleasant plane. And in any case, I can assure you that nobody, including Natalie, would have much chance of persuading me to take another sleeping pill unless my jewels were in a strong-room."

The Saint released smoke in a very careful ring. He had thought himself beyond being jolted by any magnitude of female duplicity, but he had never personally encountered anything as transcendent as this.

"This makes life rather difficult," he said. "Because now I'm liable to think about unkind things I might do to Natalie, rather than to you. Perhaps that hadn't occurred to you when you decided to save me from myself."

"I thought I'd made it clear that I was only trying to save myself. Or my possessions. To me, you, Natalie Sheridan, Bernie Kovar, and a lot of other people I meet, are all birds of a feather. I think you all deserve anything you do to each other. That's why I can still be amused by Natalie, in spite of what I know about her. But she shouldn't have thrown me to the wolves — or wolf, if I may call you that. If she suffers for it, she has only herself to blame."

"I'd like to put it more bluntly. Suppose she did get robbed — would you feel obliged to tell the police about this conversation?"

She looked him straight in the eye.

"Mr. Templar, if I were sure that as of now you had no grudge against me, I should think it much wiser to mind my own business. It isn't as if Natalie's loss would be irreparable. Bernie will give her plenty more jewels, if she plays her cards right."

"I wish I met more people who were so broadminded."

"However, it won't be easy," Mrs. Noversham said briskly. "Since what happened last night, she swears she'll put all her valuables in the hotel safe the minute she walks into the lobby, each and every time she comes home. There'd have to be a hold-up outside, or somewhere like Bernie's suite AA1 in the new wing of the Hôtel du Cap, where he's sure to have her reading scenes after dinner."

"It would be a rather dramatic interruption."

"I didn't hear you, Mr. Templar. But since you were obviously going to dine alone, you can take me with you to this Chez Francis place, where I have heard the chef turns himself inside out for you. Afterwards we can come back here and play Bézique for as long or as short a time as you can stand it."

"I'll make myself a little more presentable," said the Saint, "and pick you up at eight."

When he returned he was very presentable indeed, by conventional standards, having changed into a double-breasted dinner jacket of impeccably inconspicuous style and blackness, and she looked him over with visible surprise.

"Don't think I'm overdoing it," he said. "This just happens to be the most anonymous costume I know, in a place like this, for stick-ups and such jobs. With an old nylon stocking over the head, it gives nobody anything worth a damn to describe."

"You needn't have told me that," she retorted. "You almost had me believing that there could be some basis for the legend of the gentleman crook."

Otherwise they spent quite a civilized and sometimes even amusing two and a half hours, and nothing so crude as crime was mentioned again even when the Saint returned her to her sitting‑room, played one hand of Bézique with her, and then asked with deliberate expressionlessness if he might call it a night.

"I shall be up for a long time yet," she said flatly. "Probably playing Patience, since you won't finish this game."

Simon took shameless advantage of this when he returned to his own room some time after midnight and found the unfriendly inspector of the Police Judiciaire already ensconced proprietorially in the most comfortable armchair, and polluting the atmosphere with a cigar which some countries would have classified as a secret weapon.

"Alors, Monsieur Templar. Let us continue. There is a holdup reported from Cap d'Antibes. The man is tall, slender but well-built, his features disguised with a stocking, but wearing a smoking like yourself—"

"And like a few thousand other dopes who've settled for the idea that women must change their styles every season, but men have now achieved the ultimate costume which they must expect to wear from here to eternity, or until civilization comes to its glorious radioactive end."

"I am not here to discuss the philosophy of clothing," said the inspector. "I would like to finish this business and go to bed."

He was a small dark man with beady eyes and an impatient manner, as if he was perpetually exasperated by people who gratuitously wasted his time by pretending to be innocent.

"I understand your eagerness," said the Saint mildly. "But isn't it stretching things a bit for you to be waiting here even before I get home from this alleged caper?"

"That is very easy to explain. Your victims would not have waited two seconds to report the robbery. The gendarmerie at Cap d'Antibes immediately notified me, as is their duty. And electricity travels on telephone wires much faster than you could drive here, especially at this time of the season. While I only had three blocks to walk."

"Okay," said the Saint. "I'll try to finish this even faster. If you'll permit me. "

He picked up the telephone and asked for Mrs. Noversham's suite by number. She answered so promptly that she might have been waiting for the call.

"This is Simon Templar," he said. "Would you be amused to hear that I've already got a policeman in my room accusing me of a stick-up out at Cap d'Antibes?"

"Does he have any evidence?"

"None that I know of. But it's the same character who gave me such a bad time this morning. I think he's just decided to blame me for everything that happens around here, on general principles."

"How ridiculous," she said. "Have you told him that you only left me a few minutes ago, after playing Bézique with me all evening?"

"I was wondering if you'd mind telling him yourself."

She arrived in a few minutes, an overwhelming figure in her war-paint and jangling jewels, and gave Simon an alibi that was a classic of unblushing perjury, even adorning it with details of some of the hands they had played and waving a piece of paper which she said carried the complete scores for the session. In addition, her phraseology left no doubt of her majestic contempt for the intelligence of the police, and of one policeman in particular.

"Alors, mon vieux," the Saint said to him finally. "You were anxious to get home, I believe. What else is keeping you?"

The inspector stood up, looking somewhat crushed.

"It is only my job," he mumbled. "]e m'excuse—"

"Je vous en prie," said the Saint, with exaggerated courtesy, accompanying him to the small vestibule. "Et dormez bien."

He closed the outer door and returned to the room where Bertha Noversham still stood looking somewhat Wagnerian.

"I don't know how I should thank you," he began, and she cut him off unceremoniously.

"Don't bother. Just hand over those jewels of Natalie's. I think I can get as good a price for them as you can, and you'll get your share eventually, but I'll do the divvying."

He stared at her frozenly.

"It was nice of you to help me out," he said, "but I didn't think you were planning to make a career of it."

"I can scarcely believe that you're so naive, Mr. Templar. I'm sure I don't look like a starry-eyed ingenue who'd do something like this for love. I didn't even do it for love for Danny Tench."

"You mean — the man who—"

"My husband. Legally, too, though I never used his name — it sounded too frightfully common."

"But he had your jewels on him when he fell," said the Saint slowly. "No, wait a second — I get it. After the yacht job at Ajaccio, and the Métropole at Monte Carlo before that, and God knows how many others before those two, it would have begun to look suspicious if you were always around but never got robbed yourself."

She nodded.

"It's pretty easy for a gabby middle-aged frump like me to make friends with a lot of stupid women, and in no time at all we're comparing jewels and telling each other where we hide them. Danny couldn't have done half as well without me, and he was the first to admit it. But when he slipped last night — and it would never have happened if he hadn't had that clever idea of planting something in your room — I made up my mind I still wasn't going to give up on Natalie's diamonds, and you were the man to swipe them for me."

"So you actually did talk her into distrusting me."

"And I had to be pretty clever about it, too. And it was even more of a job to set up that date with Bernie Kovar. But she really is quite a babe in the woods, if that does anything for your ego. I never set eyes on her before I found her on the Blue Train a few weeks ago, of course. And now," Mrs. Noversham said coldly, "are you going to hand over those sparklers, or shall I have to tell that police inspector what you did to force me to back up your story?"

Simon turned rather sadly towards the little vestibule, at the inevitably identical instant when the inspector made his return entrance from it, on the inevitably unmistakable cue.

He was followed by two agents in uniform, one with a notebook and one carrying a small tape recorder, and both of them trying not to look as if they had strayed out of the Tales of Hoffman.

Without any need to speak, they all watched Mrs. Noversham's face whiten and sag under the crust of make-up which suddenly did not seem to fit any more.

"Now don't jump to any conclusions," she said at last, with a desperate attempt to keep the old brassy dominance in her voice. "If you had anyone listening in when he phoned me, you know that I asked if you had any evidence, and he said no, it was only suspicion. So I thought that if I pretended to give him an alibi, and made him believe I was as big a crook as he is, I'd get a confession out of him that you could use. And he was just ready for it when you busted in and spoiled it all. But you can't guillotine me for trying to help you do the job the taxpayers pay you for. If you even had the gumption to search him right now, he's probably still got those jewels on him—"

"I'm sorry, Bertha," Simon said. "But there never was any hold-up. I only asked the Inspector to act as if there had been one, and I promised him that you would do the confessing. He took quite a lot of convincing, and I hate to think what he'd 've done if you'd let me down."

Mrs. Noversham had one succinct response to that, and she squeezed it through her teeth with all the venom of the professional.

"Stool pigeon!

"It was rather against my principles," said the Saint, and he meant it. "In some ways I'd rather have stolen your jewels and called it quits. But you and Danny-boy started the routine by trying to get me in trouble, and then I wanted to get the record straight for Natalie."

The little inspector cleared his throat irritably.

"Madame, this is not a performance at the Comédie Française. You understand that you will have to accompany us?"

"Only too well, Alphonse," said Bertha Noversham insultingly.

She started regally towards the door; but as the two agents nervously made way for her she turned back.

"Mr. Templar," she said almost humbly, "why?"

"To use a phrase of your own," said the Saint, "you shouldn't have thrown Natalie to the wolves — or wolf. You made her out to be such an outrageous all-time phony that after I got over the first shock I started to think that if any woman could be such a colossal barefaced liar, so could any other. But I'd never caught Natalie in the smallest dishonesty, myself, whereas I always knew that there's no such person as the Duke of Camford. And once the question of credibility had come up, there was no doubt about which of you had done the hottest job of selling me the idea of robbing the other. There are several morals in this, Bertha, but I'd say the best one is that before you start beating a path to the door of a man who makes better mousetraps, you should be sure that you're not a mouse."

"Madame," said the inspector impatiently, "one cannot wait for you all night."

However, he had the grace to pause, albeit restively, before following his cohorts and their evidence and his prize.

"I am indebted for your assistance, Monsieur le Saint, and if perhaps some day I can—"

"I knew you'd think of that, Alphonse," Simon took him up cheerily; and the little man winced. "Mrs. Sheridan may be home already, or she should be at any moment, and I'm sure you won't mind waiting to vouch for the true story of the last twentyfour hours. There'll be so many other nights when you can go to bed early, and sleep like a cherub, once you know I've got something better to do than climb in and out of windows, at my age."