The Saint in the Sun

6. LUCERNE: The Russian Prisoner

"Excuse me. You are the Saint. You must help me."

By that time Simon Templar thought he must have heard all the approaches, all the elegant variations. Some were amusing, some were insulting, some were unusual, most were routine, a few tried self-consciously to be original and attention-getting. He had, regrettably, become as accustomed to them as any Arthurian knight-errant must eventually have become. After all, how many breeds of dragons were there? And how many different shapes and colorations of damsels in distress?

This one would have about chalked up her first quarter-century, and would have weighed in at about five pounds per annum — not the high-fashion model's ratio, but more carnally interesting. She had prominent cheek-bones to build shadow frames around blindingly light blue eyes, and flax-white hair that really looked as if it had been born with her and not processed later. She was beautiful like some kind of mythological ice-maiden.

And she had the distinction of having condensed a sequence of inescapable cliches to a quintessence which could only have been surpassed by a chemical formula.

"Do sit down," Simon said calmly. "I'm sure your problem is desperate, or you wouldn't be bringing it to a perfect stranger — but have you heard of an old English duck called Drake? When they told him the Spanish Armada was coming, he insisted on finishing his game of bowls before he'd go out to cope with it. I've got a rather nice bowl here myself, and it would be a shame to leave it."

He carefully fixed a cube of coarse farmhouse bread on the small tines of his long-shafted fork, and dipped it in the luscious goo that barely bubbled in the chafing dish before him. When it was soaked and coated to its maximum burthen, he transferred it neatly to his mouth. Far from being an ostentatious vulgarity, this was a display of epicurean technique and respect, for he was eating fondue—perhaps the most truly national of Swiss delectables, that ambrosial blend of melted cheese perfumed with kirsch and other things, which is made nowhere better than at the Old Swiss House in Lucerne, where he was lunching.

"I like that," she said.

He pushed the bread plate towards her and offered a fork, hospitably.

"Have some."

"No, thank you. I meant that I like the story about Drake. And I like it that you are the same — a man who is so sure of himself that he does not have to get excited. I have already had lunch. I was inside, and I could see you through the window. Some people at the next table recognized you and were talking about you. I heard the name, and it was like winning a big prize which I had not even hoped for."

She spoke excellent English, quickly, but in a rather stilted way that seemed to have been learned from books or vocal drill rather than light conversation, with an accent which he could not place immediately.

"A glass of wine, then? Or a liqueur?"

"A Benedictine, if you like. And some coffee, may I?"

He beckoned a waitress who happened to come out, and gave the order.

"You seem to know something about me," he said, spearing another piece of bread. "Is one supposed to know something about you, or are you a Mystery Woman?"

"I am Irma Jorovitch."

"Good for you. It doesn't have to be your real name, but at least it gives me something to call you." He speared another chunk of bread. "Now, you tell me your trouble. It's tedious, but we have to go through this in most of my stories, because I'm only a second-rate mind reader."

"I am Russian, originally," she said. "My family are from the part of Finland where the two countries meet, but since nineteen-forty it has been all Soviet. My father is Karel Jorovitch, and he was named for the district we came from. He is a scientist."

"Any particular science, or just a genius?"

"I don't' know. He is a professor at the University of Leningrad. Of physics, I think. I do not remember seeing him except in pictures. During the war, my mother was separated from him, and she escaped with me to Sweden."

"You don't have a Swedish accent."

"Perhaps because I learnt English first from her, and I suppose she had a Finnish or a Russian accent. Then there were all sorts of teachers in Swedish schools. I speak everything like a mixture. But I learnt enough languages to get a job in a travel agency in Stockholm. My father could not get permission to leave Russia after the war, and my mother had learned to prefer the capitalist life and would not go back to join him. I don't think she was too much in love with him. At last there was a divorce, and she married a man with a small hotel in Göteborg, who adopted me so that I could have a passport and travel myself. But soon after, they were both killed in a car accident."

"I see. or do I? Your problem is that you don't know how to run a hotel?"

"No, that is for his own sons. But I thought that my father should be told that she was dead. I wrote to him, and somehow he received the letter — he was still at the University. He wrote back, wanting to know all about me. We began to write often. Now I didn't even have a mother, I had nobody, it was exciting to discover a real father and try to find out all about him. But then, one day, I got another letter from him which had been smuggled out, which was different from all the others."

The Saint sipped his wine. It was a native Johannisberg Rhônegold, light and bone-dry, the perfect punctuation for the glutinous goodness into which he was dunking.

"How different?"

"He said he could not stand it any more, the way he was living and what he was doing, and he wished he could escape to the West, He asked if I would be ready to help him. Of course I said yes. But how? We exchanged several letters, discussing possibilities, quite apart from the other letters which he went on writing for the censors to read."

"How did you work that?"

"Through the travel agency, it was not so hard to find ways.

And at last the opportunity came. He was to be sent to Geneva, to a meeting of the disarmament conference — not to take part himself, but to be on hand to advise the Soviet delegate about scientific questions. It seemed as if everything was solved. He only had to get out of the Soviet embassy, here in Switzerland, and he would be free."

The Saint's gaze was no longer gently quizzical. His blue eyes, many southern shades darker than hers, had hardened as if sapphires were crystallizing in them. He was listening now with both ears and all his mind; but he went on eating with undiminished deference to the cuisine. "So what's the score now?"

"I came here to meet him with some money, and to help him. When he escaped, of course, he would have nothing. And he speaks only Russian and Finnish. But something went wrong."

"What, exactly?"

"I don't know."

Until then, she had been contained, precise, reciting a synopsis that she must have vowed to deliver without emotion, to acquit herself in advance of the charge of being just another hysterical female with helpful hallucinations. But now she was leaning across the table towards him, twisting her fingers together, and letting her cold lovely face be twisted into unbecoming lines of tortured anxiety.

"Someone betrayed us. We had to trust many people who carried our letters. Who knows which one? I only know that yesterday, when he was to do it, I waited all day up the street where I could watch the entrance, in a car which I had hired, and in the evening he came out. But not by himself, as we had planned. He was driven out in an embassy car, sitting between two men who looked like gangsters — the secret police! I could only just recognize him, from a recent photograph he had sent me, looking around desperately as if he hoped to see me, as if I could have rescued him."

Her coffee and Benedictine arrived, and Simon said to the waitress: "You can bring me the same, in about five minutes."

He harpooned a prize corner crust, and set about mopping the dish clean of the last traces of fondue. He said: "You should have got here sooner. There's an old Swiss tradition which says that when fondue is being eaten, anyone who loses the bread off their fork has to kiss everyone else at the table. It must make for nice sociable eating… So what happened?"

"I followed them. It was all I could think of. If I lost him then, I knew I would lose him for ever. I thought at first they were taking him to the airport, to send him back to Russia, and I could make a fuss there. But no. They went to Lausanne, then on to here, and then still farther, to a house on the lake, with high walls and guards, and they took him in… Then I went to the police."

"And?"

"They told me they could do nothing. It was part of the Soviet embassy, officially rented for diplomatic purposes, and it could not be touched. The Russians can do whatever they like there, as if they were in Russia. And I know what they are doing. They are keeping my father there until they can send him back to Moscow — and then to Siberia. Unless they kill him first."

"Wouldn't that have been easier from Geneva?"

"There is another airport at Zurich, almost as close from this house, and without the newspaper men who will be at Geneva for the conference."

Letting his eyes wander around the quiet little square, Simon thought that you really had to have a paperback mind to believe tales like that in such a setting. The table where they sat outside the restaurant was under the shade of the awning, but he could have stretched a hand out into the sunshine which made it the kind of summer's day that travel brochures are always photographed on. And gratefully enjoying their full advertised money's worth, tourists of all shapes and sizes and nationalities were rambling back and forth, posing each other for snapshots, plodding in and out of the domed Panorama building opposite to peer (for reasons comprehensible only to tourists and the entrepreneurs who provide such attractions for them) at its depiction of the French general Bourbaki's entry into Switzerland in 1871 on a scale that seems somewhat disproportionate to the historic importance of that event, or trudging up the hill to gawk at the Lion Memorial carved in the rock to commemorate the Swiss mercenaries who died in Paris with unprofitable heroism defending the Tuileries against the French Revolution, or to the Glacier Garden above that which preserves the strange natural sculpture of much more ancient turnings — all with their minds happily emptied of everything but the perennial vacation problem of paying for their extra extravagances and souvenirs. Not one of them, probably, would have believed in this plot unless they saw it at home on television. But the Saint knew perhaps better than any man living how thinly the crust of peace and normalcy covered volcanic lavas everywhere in the modern world.

He turned back to Irma Jorovitch, and his voice was just as tolerantly good-humored as it had been ever since she had intruded herself with her grisly reminder of what to him were only the facts of life. He said: "And you think it should be a picnic for me to rescue him."

She said: "Not a picnic. No. But if any man on earth can do it, you can."

"You know, you could be right. But I was trying to take a holiday from all that."

"If you would want money," she said, "I have nothing worth your time to offer. But I could try to get it. I would do anything —anything!"

It was altogether disgraceful, he admitted, but he could do nothing to inhibit an inward reflex of response except try not to think about it.

"Gentleman adventurers aren't supposed to take advantage of offers like that," he said, with unfeigned regret.

"You must help me," she said again. "Please."

He sighed.

"All right," he said. "I suppose I must."

Her face lit up with a gladness that did the same things for it that the Aurora Borealis does to the arctic snows. It was a reaction that he had seen many times, as if his mere consent to have a bash had vaporized all barriers. It would have been fatally intoxicating if he ever forgot how precariously, time after time, he had succeeded in justifying so much faith.

"It isn't done yet, darling," he reminded her. "Tell me more about this house."

It was on the southern shore of the Vierwaldstättersee, he learned, the more rugged and less accessible side which rises to the mingled tripper-traps and tax-dodger chalets of Bürgenstock, and by land it was reachable only by a second-to-secondary road which served nothing but a few other similarly isolated hermitages. Although it was dark when she passed it, she was sure there was no other residence near by, so that anyone approaching in daylight would certainly be under observation long before he got close. The walls around the grounds were about seven feet high, topped with barbed wire, but with slits that the inmates could peep through — to say nothing of what electronic devices might augment their vigilance. Added to which, she had heard dogs barking as she drove past.

"Nothing to it," said the Saint—"if I hadn't forgotten to bring my invisible and radar-proof helicopter."

"You will think of something," she said with rapturous confidence.

He lighted a cigarette and meditated for almost a minute.

"You say this house is right on the lake?"

"Yes. Because at the next turning after I passed, my headlights showed the water."

"Do you think you could recognize it again, from the lake side?"

"I think so."

"Good. Then let's take a little boat ride."

He paid his bill, and finished his coffee while he waited for the change. Then they walked down the Löwenstrasse and across the tree-shaded promenades of the Nationalquai to the lake front. Just a few yards to the left there was a small marina offering a variety of water craft for hire, which he had already casually scouted without dreaming that he would ever use it in this way. With the same kind of companionship, perhaps, but not for this kind of mission.

The Saint chose a small but comfortably upholstered runabout, the type of boat that would automatically catch the eye of a man who was out to impress a pretty girl — and that was precisely how he wanted them to be categorized by anyone who had a motive for studying them closely. Taking advantage of the weather and the informal customs of the country, he was wearing only a pair of light slacks and a tartan sport shirt, and Irma was dressed in a simple white blouse and gaily patterned dirndl, so that there was nothing except their own uncommon faces to differentiate them from any other holiday-making twosome.

And as he aimed the speedboat diagonally southeastwards across the lake, with the breeze of their own transit tousling her short white-blond hair and moulding the filmy blouse like a tantalizing second skin against the thrusting mounds of her breasts, he had leisure to wish that they had been brought together by nothing more pre-emptive than one of those random holiday magnetisms which provide inexhaustible grist for the world's marriage and divorce mills in self-compensating proportions.

She had put on a pair of sunglasses when they left the restaurant, and out on the water the light was strong enough for Simon to take out a pair of his own which had been tucked in his shirt pocket. But they would be useful for more than protection against the glare.

"Get the most out of these cheaters when we start looking for the house," he told her as he put them on. "Don't turn your head and look at anything directly: just turn your eyes and keep facing somewhere else. Behind the glasses, anybody watching us won't be able to tell what we're really looking at."

"You think of everything. I will try to remember."

"About how far did you drive out of Lucerne to this house?"

"I cannot be sure. It seemed quite far, but the road was winding."

This was so femininely vague that he resigned himself to covering the entire southern shore if necessary. On such an afternoon, and with such a comely companion, it was a martyrdom which he could endure with beatific stoicism. Having reached the nearest probable starting point which he had mentally selected, he cut the engine down to a smooth idling gait and steered parallel to the meandering coast line, keeping a distance of about a hundred yards from the shore.

"Relax, Irma," he said. "Any house that's on this stretch of lake, we'll see. Meanwhile, we should look as if we're just out for the ride."

To improve this visual effect, he lowered himself from his hot-water-rodder's perch on the gunwhale to the cushion behind the wheel, and she snuggled up to him.

"Like this?" she asked seriously.

"More or less," he approved, with fragile gravity, and slipped an arm around her shoulders.

It was only when they had passed Kehrsiten, the landing where the funicular takes off up the sheer palisade to the hotels of Bürgenstock on its crest, that he began to wonder if she had overestimated her ability to identify the house to which Karel Jorovitch had been taken from an aspect which she had never seen. But he felt no change of tension in her as the boat purred along for some kilometers after that, until suddenly she stiffened and clutched him — but with the magnificent presence of mind to turn towards him instead of to the shore.

"There, I have seen it!" she gasped. "The white house with the three tall chimneys! I remember them!"

He looked to his right, over her flaxen head which had a disconcertingly pure smell which reminded him somehow of new-mown hay, and saw the only edifice she could have been, referring to.

The tingle that went through him was an involuntary psychic-somatic acknowledgement that the adventure had now become real, and he was well and truly hooked.

In order to study the place thoroughly and unhurriedly, he turned towards Irma, folded her tenderly in his arms, and applied his lips to hers. In that position, he could continue to keep his eyes on the house whilst giving the appearance of being totally preoccupied with radically unconnected pursuits.

It was surprisingly unpretentious, for a diplomatic enclave. He would have taken it for a large oldfashioned family house — or a house for a large oldfashioned family, according to the semantic preference of the phrase-maker. At any rate, it was not a refurbished mansion or a small re-converted hotel. Its most unusual feature was what she had already mentioned: the extraordinarily high wire-topped garden walls which came down at a respectable distance on both sides of it — not merely to the lake edge, but extending about twelve feet out into the water. And for the further discouragement of anyone who might still have contemplated going around them, those two barriers were joined by a rope linking a semicircle of small bright red buoys such as might have marked the limits of a safe bathing area, but which also served to bar an approach to the shore by boat — even if they were not anchored to some underwater obstruction which would have made access altogether impossible.

And on the back porch of the house, facing the lake, a square-shouldered man in a deck chair raised a pair of binoculars and examined them lengthily.

Simon was able to make all these observations in spite of the fact that Irma Jorovitch was cooperating in his camouflage with an ungrudging enthusiasm which was no aid at all to concentration.

Finally they came to a small headland beyond which there was a cove into which he could steer the boat out of sight of the watcher on the porch. Only then did the Saint release her, not without reluctance, and switched off the engine to become crisply businesslike again.

"Excuse the familiarity," he said. "But you know why I had to do it."

"I liked it, too," she said demurely.

As the boat drifted to a stop, Simon unstrapped his wrist watch and laid it on the deck over the dashboard. He held his pen upright beside it to cast a shadow from the sun, and turned the watch to align the hour hand with the shadow, while Irma watched fascinated.

"Now, according to my boy scout training, halfway between the hour hand and twelve o'clock on the dial is due south," he explained. "I need a bearing on this place, to be able to come straight to it next time — and at night."

From there, he could no longer see anything useful of Lucerne. But across the lake, on the north side, he spotted the high peaked roof of the Park Hotel at Viznau, and settled on that as a landmark with multiple advantages. He sighted on it several times, until he was satisfied that he had established an angle accurately enough for any need he would have.

"This is all we can do right now," he said. "In broad daylight, we wouldn't have a prayer of getting him out. I don't even know what the odds will be after dark, but I'll try to think of some way to improve them."

The beautiful cold face — which he had discovered could be anything but cold at contact range — was strained and entreating.

"But what if they take him away before tonight?"

"Then we'll have lost a bet," he said grimly. "We could hustle back to Lucerne, get a car, come back here by road — I could find the place now, all right — and mount guard until they try to drive away with him. Then we could try an interception and rescue — supposing he isn't already gone, or they don't take him away even before we get back. On the other hand, they might keep him here for a week, and how could we watch all that time? Instead of waiting, we could be breaking in tonight. It's the kind of choice that generals are paid and pilloried for making."

She held her head in her hands.

"What can I say?"

Simon Templar prodded the starter button, and turned the wheel to point the little speedboat back towards Lucerne.

"You'll have to make up your own mind, Irma," he said relentlessly. "It's your father. You tell me, and we'll play it in your key."

There was little conversation on the return drive. The decision could only be left to her. He did not want to influence it, and he was glad it was not up to him, for either alternative seemed to have the same potentiality of being as catastrophically wrong as the other.

When he had brought the boat alongside the dock and helped her out, he said simply: "Well?"

"Tonight," she replied resolutely. "That is the way it must be."

"How did you decide?"

"As you would have, I think. If the nearest man on the dock when we landed wore a dark shirt, I would say 'Tonight'. It was a way of tossing up, without a coin. How else could I choose?"

Simon turned to the man in the blue jersey who was nearest, who was securing the boat to its mooring rings.

"Could we reserve it again tonight?" he inquired in German. "The Fräulein would like to take a run in the moonlight."

"At what time?" asked the attendant, unmoved by romantic visions. "Usually I close up at eight."

"At about nine," said the Saint, ostentatiously unfolding a hundred-franc note from his wad. "I will give you two more of these when I take the boat, and you need not wait for us. I will tie it up safely when we come back."

"Jawohl, mein Herr!" agreed the man, with alacrity. "Whenever you come, at nine or later, I shall be here."

Simon and Irma walked back over the planking to the paved promenade where natives and visitors were now crisscrossing, at indicatively different speeds, on their homeward routes. The sun had already dropped below the high horizons to the west, and the long summer twilight would soon begin.

"Suppose we succeed in this crazy project," he said. "Have you thought about what we do next?"

"My father will be free. I will book passage on a plane and take him back to Sweden with me."

"Your father will be free, but will you? And will I? Or for how long? Has it occurred to you, sweetheart, that the Swiss government takes a notoriously dim view of piratical operations on their nice neutral soil, even with the best of motives? And the Russkis won't hesitate to howl their heads off at this violation of their extra-territorial rights."

Her step faltered, and she caught his arm.

"I am so stupid," she said humbly. "I should have thought of that. Instead, I was asking you to become a criminal, to the Swiss Government, instead of a hero. Forgive me." Then she looked up at him in near terror. "Will you give it up because of that?"

He shook his head, with a shrug and a wry smile.

"I've been in trouble before. I'm always trying to keep out of it, but Fate seems to be agin me."

"Through the travel agency, perhaps I can arrange something to help us to get away. Let me go back to my hotel and make some telephoning."

"Where are you staying?"

"A small hotel, down that way." She pointed vaguely in the general direction of the Schwanenplatz and the older town which lies along the river under the ancient walls which protected it five centuries ago. "It is all I can afford," she said defensively. "I suppose you are staying here? Or at the Palace?" They were at the corner of the Grand National Hotel and the Halderistrasse.

"Here. It's the sort of place where travel bureaux like yours send people like me," he murmured. "So you go home and see what you can organize, and I'll see what I can work out myself. Meet me back here at seven. I'm in room 129." He flagged a taxi which came cruising by. "Dress up prettily for dinner, but nothing fussy — and bring a sweater, because it'll be chilly later on that thar lake."

This time he didn't have to take advantage of a situation. She put up her lips with a readiness which left no doubt as to how far she would have been willing to develop the contact in a less public place.

"See you soon," he said, and closed the taxi door after her,thoughtfully.

He had a lot to think about.

Without unchivalrously depreciating the value of any ideas she might have or phone calls she could make, he would not have been the Saint if he could have relied on them without some independent backing of his own. He had softened in many ways, over the years, but not to the extent of leaving himself entirely in the hands of any female, no matter how entrancing.

By seven o'clock, when she arrived, he had some of the answers; but his plan only went to a certain point and he could not project beyond that.

"I think I've figured a way to get into that house," he told her. "And if the garrison isn't too large and lively we may get out again with your father. But what happens after that depends on how hot the hue and cry may be."

She put down her sweater and purse on one of the beds — she had found her way to his room unannounced, and knocked on the door, and when he opened it she had been there.

"I have been telephoning about that, as I promised," she said. "I have arranged for a hired car and a driver to be waiting for us at Brunnen — that is at the other end of the lake, closer to the house than this, and just about as close to Zürich. He will drive us to the airport. Then, I have ordered through the travel agency to have a small private plane waiting to fly us all out."

"A private charter plane — how nice and simple," he murmured. "But can you afford it?"

"Of course not. I told them it was for a very rich invalid, with his private nurse and doctor. That will be you and I. When we are in Sweden and they give us the bill I shall have to explain everything, and I shall lose my job, but my father will be safe and they cannot bring us back."

He laughed with honest admiration.

"You're quite amazing."

"Did I do wrong?" She was crestfallen like a child that has been suddenly turned on, in fear of a slap.

"No, I mean it. You worked all that out while you were changing your clothes and fixing your hair, and you make it sound so easy and obvious. Which it is — now you've told me. But I recognize genius when I see it. And what a lot of footling obstacles disappear when it isn't hampered by scruples!"

"How can I have them when I must save my father's "life? But what you have to do is still harder. What is your plan?"

"I'll tell you at dinner."

In an instant she was all femininity again.

"Do I look all right?"

She invited inspection with a ballerina's pirouette. She had put on a simple wool dress that matched her eyes and moulded her figure exactly where it should, without vulgar ostentation but clearly enough to be difficult to stop looking at. The Saint did not risk rupturing himself from such an effort.

"You're only sensational," he assured her. "If you weren't, I wouldn't be hooked on this caper."

"Please?"

"I wouldn't be chancing a bullet or a jail sentence to help you."

"I know. How can I thank you?" She reached out and took his right hand in both of hers. "Only to tell you my heart will never forget."

With an impulsively dramatic gesture, she drew his hand to her and placed it directly over her heart. The fact that a somewhat less symbolic organ intervened did not seem to occur to her, but it imposed on him some of the same restraint that a seismograph would require to remain unmoved at the epicenter of an earthquake.

"Don't I still have to earn that?" said the Saint, with remarkable mildness.

When they got to the Mignon Grill at the Palace Hotel on the other side of the Kursaal ("I promised Dino last night I'd come in for his special Lobster Thermidor, before I had any idea what else I'd be doing tonight," Simon explained, "but anyhow we should have one more good meal before they put us on bread and water.") he told her how he was hoping to carry out the abduction; and once again she was completely impersonal and businesslike, listening with intense attention.

"I think it could work," she said at the end, nodding with preternatural gravity. "Unless. There is one thing you may not have thought of."

"There could be a dozen," he admitted. "Which one have you spotted?"

"Suppose they have already begun to brain-wash him — so that he does not trust us."

Simon frowned.

"Do you think they could?"

"You know how everyone in a Soviet trial always pleads guilty and begs to be punished? They have some horrible secret method… If they have done it to him, he might not even want to be rescued."

"That would make it a bit sticky," he said reflectively. "I wonder how you un-brain-wash somebody?"

"Only a psychologist would know. But first we must get him to one. If it is like that, you must not hesitate because of me. If you must knock him out, I promise not to become silly and hysterical."

"That'll help, anyway," said the Saint grimly.

The baby lobster were delicious, and he was blessed with the nerveless appetite to enjoy every bite. In fact, the prospect that lay ahead was a celestial seasoning that no chef could have concocted from all the herbs and spices in his pharmacopeia.

But the time came when anticipation could not be prolonged any more, and had to attain reality. They walked back to the Grand National, and he picked up a bag which he had left at the hall porter's desk when they went out. It was one of those handy zippered plastic bags with a shoulder strap which airlines emblazon with their insignia and distribute to overseas passengers to be stuffed with all those odds and ends which travellers never seem able to get into their ordinary luggage, and Simon had packed it with certain requisites for their expedition which would have been fatal to the elegant drape of his coat if he had tried to crowd all of them into various pockets. The boat was waiting at the marina, and in a transition that seemed to flow with the smoothness of a cinematic effect they were aboard and on their way into the dark expanse of the lake.

Simon followed the shore line to Viznau before he turned away to the right. From his bag he had produced a hiker's luminous compass, with the aid of which he was able to set a sufficiently accurate course to retrace the makeshift bearing he had taken that afternoon between his wrist watch and the sun. He opened the throttle, and the boat lifted gently and skimmed. Irma Jorovitch put on her cardigan and buttoned it, keeping down in the shelter of the windshield. They no longer talked, for it would only have been idle chatter.

The water was liquid glass, dimpling lazily to catch the reflection of a light or a star, except where the wake stretched behind like a trail of swift-melting snow. Above the blackness ahead, the twinkling façades of Bürgenstock high against the star-powdered sky were a landmark this time to be kept well towards the starboard beam. Halfway across, as best he could judge it, he broke the first law by switching off the running lights, but there were no other boats out there to threaten a collision. Then when the scattered lights on the shore ahead drew closer he slackened speed again to let the engine noise sink to a soothing purr that would have been scarcely audible from the shore, or at least vague enough to seem distant and un-alarming.

He thought he should have earned full marks for navigation. The three tall chimneys that he had to find rose black against the Milky Way as he came within perception range of curtained windows glowing dimly over the starboard bow, and he cruised softly on beyond them into the cove where he had paused on the afternoon reconnaissance.

This time, however, he let the boat drift all the way in to the shore where his cat's eyes could pick out a tiny promontory that was almost as good as a private pier. He jumped off as the bow touched, carrying the anchor, which he wedged down into a crevice to hold the boat snugly against the land.

Back in the boat, he stripped quickly down to the swimming trunks which he had worn under his clothes. From the airline bag he took a pair of wire-cutting pliers, and one of those bulky "pocket" knives equipped with a small tool-shop of gadgets besides the conventional blades, which he stuffed securely under the waistband of his trunks. Then came a flashlight, which he gave to Irma, and a small automatic pistol.

"Do you know how to use this, if you have to?" he asked.

"Yes. And I shall not be afraid to. I have done a lot of shooting — for sport."

"The safety catch is here."

He gave her the gun and guided her thumb to feel it.

She put it in her bag, and then he helped her ashore. "The road has to be over there," he said, "and it has to take you to the gates which you saw from your car. You can't possibly go wrong. And you remember what we worked out. Your car has broken down, and you want to use their phone to call a garage."

"How could I forget? And when they don't want to let me in, I shall go on talking and begging as long as I can."

"I'm sure you can keep them listening for a while, at any rate. Is your watch still the same as mine?" They put their wrists together and she turned on the flashlight for an instant. "Good. Just give me until exactly half-past before you go into action. Good luck!"

"Good luck," she said; and her arms went around him and her lips searched for his once more before he turned away.

The water that he waded into was cold enough to quench any wistful ardor that might have distracted his concentration from the task ahead. He swam very hard, to stimulate his circulation, until his system had struck a balance with the chill, out and around the western arm of the little bay; and then as he curved his course towards the house with the three chimneys he slackened his pace to reduce the churning sounds of motion, until by the time he was within earshot of anyone in the walled garden he was sliding through the water as silently as an otter.

By that time his eyes had accommodated to the darkness so thoroughly that he could see one of the dogs sniffing at a bush at one corner of the back porch, but he did not see any human sentinel. And presently the dog trotted off around the side of the house without becoming aware of his presence.

Simon touched the rope connecting two of the marker buoys enclosing the private beach, feeling around it with a touch like a feather, but he could detect no wire intertwined with it. If there were any alarm device connected with it, therefore, it was probably something mechanically attached to the ends which would be activated by any tug on the rope. The Saint took great care not to do this as he cut through it with the blade of his boy-scout knife. But hardly a hand's breadth below the surface of the water, making the passage too shallow to swim through, his delicately exploring fingers traced a barrier of stout wire netting supported by the buoys and stretched between their moorings, which would have rudely halted any small boat that tried to shoot in to the shore. He could feel that the wire was bare, apparently not electrified, but just in case it might also be attached to some warning trigger he touched it no less gingerly as he used his wire-cutters to snip out a section large enough to let him float through.

The luminous dial of his watch showed that he still had almost five minutes to spare from the time he had allowed himself. He waited patiently, close to the projecting side wall, until the first dog barked on the other side of the house.

A moment later, the other one chimed in.

A man came out of the back door and descended the verandah steps, peering to left and right in the direction of the lake. But coming from the lighted house, it would have to take several minutes for his pupils to dilate sufficiently for his retinas to detect a half-submerged dark head drifting soundlessly shore-wards in the star-shadow of the wall. Secure in that physiological certainty, the Saint paddled silently on into the lake bank, using only his hands like fins and making no more disturbance than a roving fish.

Apparently satisfied that there was no threat from that side, the man turned and started back up the porch steps.

Simon slithered out of the water as noiselessly as a snake, and darted after him. The man had no more than set one foot on the verandah when the Saint's arm whipped around his throat from behind, and tightened with a subtle but expert pressure.

As the man went limp, Simon lowered him quietly to the boards. Then he swiftly peeled off his victim's jacket and trousers and put them on himself. They were a scarecrow fit, but for that nonce the Saint was not thinking of appearances: his main object was to confuse the watchdogs' sense of smell.

The back door was still slightly ajar, and if there were any alarms wired to it the guard must have switched them off before he opened it. The Saint went through without hesitation, and found himself in a large oldfashioned kitchen. Another door on the opposite side logically led to the main entrance hall. Past the staircase was the front door of the house, which was also ajar, meaning that another guard had gone out to investigate the disturbance at the entrance gate. The Saint crossed the hall like a hasty ghost and went on out after him.

The dogs were still barking vociferously in spite of having already aroused the attention they were supposed to, as is the immoderate habit of dogs, and their redundant clamor was ear-splitting enough to have drowned much louder noises than the Saint's barefoot approach. One of them did look over its shoulder at him as he came down the drive, but was deceived as he had hoped it would be by the familiar scent of his borrowed clothing and by the innocuous direction from which he came; it turned and resumed its blustering baying at Irma, who was pleading with the burly man who stood inside the gate.

The whole scene was almost too plainly illuminated under the glare of an overhead floodlight; but the man was completely preoccupied with what was in front of him, doubtfully twirling a large iron key around a stubby forefinger, as Simon came up behind him and slashed one hand down on the back of his neck with a sharp smacking sound. The man started to turn, from pure reflex, and could have seen the Saint's hand raised again for a lethal follow-up before his eyes rolled up and he crumpled where he stood. The dogs stopped yapping at last and licked him happily, enjoying the game, as Simon took the key from him and put it in the massive lock. Antique as it looked, its tumblers turned with the smoothness of fresh oil, and Simon pulled the gate open.

"How wonderful!" she breathed. "I was afraid to believe you could really do it."

"I wasn't certain myself, but I had to find out."

"But why—" She fingered the sleeve that reached only halfway between his elbow and his wrist.

"I'll explain another time," he said. "Come on — but be quiet, in case there are any more of them."

She tiptoed with him back to the house. The hallway was deathly still, the silent emptiness of the ground floor emphasized by the metronome ticking of a clock. Simon touched her and pointed upwards, and she climbed the stairs behind him.

The upper landing was dark, so that a thin strip of light underlining one door helpfully indicated the only occupied room. The Saint took out his knife again and opened the longest blade, holding it ready for lightning use as a silent weapon if the door proved to be unlocked — which it did. He felt no resistance to a tentative fractional pressure after he had stealthily turned the door-knob. He balanced himself, flung it open, and went in.

The only occupant, a pale shock-headed man in trousers and shirtsleeves, shrank back in the chair where he sat, staring.

"Professor Jorovitch, I presume?" said the Saint unoriginally. Irma brushed past him.

"Papa!" she cried.

Jorovitch's eyes dilated, fixed on the automatic which Simon had lent her, which waved in her hand as if she had forgotten she had it. Bewilderment and terror were the only expressions on his face.

Irma turned frantically to the Saint.

"You see, they have done it!" she wailed. "Just as I was afraid. We must get him away. Quick — do what you have to!"

Simon Templar shook his head slowly.

"No," he said. "I can't do that."

She stared at him.

"Why? You promised—"

"No, I didn't, exactly. But you did your best to plant the idea in my head. Unfortunately, that was after I'd decided there was something wrong with your story. I was bothered by the language you used, like 'the capitalist life', and always carefully saying 'Soviet' where most people say 'Russian', and saying that hearing my name was 'like winning a big prize' instead of calling it a miracle or an answer to prayer, as most people brought up on this side of the Curtain would do. And being so defensive about your hotel. And then when we came over this afternoon I noticed there was no Russian flag flying here, as there would be on diplomatic property."

"You're mad," she whispered.

"I was, rather," he admitted, "when I suspected you might be trying to con me into doing your dirty work for you. So I called an old acquaintance of mine in the local police, to check on some of the facts."

The gun in her hand levelled and cracked.

The Saint blinked, but did not stagger. He reached out and grabbed her hand as she squeezed the trigger again, and twisted the automatic out of her fingers.

"It's only loaded with blanks," he explained apologetically. "I thought it was safer to plant that on you, rather than risk having you produce a gun of your own, with real bullets in it."

"A very sensible precaution," said a gentle new voice.

It belonged to a short rotund man in a pork-pie hat, with a round face and round-rimmed glasses, who emerged with as much dignity as possible from the partly-open door of the wardrobe.

Simon said: "May I introduce Inspector Oscar Kleinhaus? He was able to tell me the true story — that Karel Jorovitch had already defected, weeks ago, and had been given asylum without any publicity, and that he was living here with a guard of Swiss security officers until he completed all the information he could give about the Russian espionage apparatus in Switzerland. Oscar allowed me to go along with your gag for a while — partly to help you convict yourself beyond any hope of a legal quibble, and partly as an exercise to check the protection arrangements."

"Which apparently leave something to be desired," Kleinhaus observed mildly.

"But who would have thought it'd be me they had to keep out?" Simon consoled him magnanimously.

The two guards from the back and the front of the house came in from the landing, looking physically none the worse for wear but somewhat sheepish — especially the one who was clad only in his underthings.

"They weren't told anything about my plan, only that they were going to be tested," Simon explained, as he considerately shucked off and returned the borrowed garments. "But they were told that if I snuck close enough to grab them or slap them they were to assume they could just as well have been killed, and to fall down and play dead. We even thought of playing out the abduction all the way to Zurich."

"That would have been going too far," Kleinhaus said. "But I would like to know what was to happen if you got away from here."

"She said she'd arrange for a car to pick us up at Brunnen, and there would be a light plane waiting for a supposed invalid at the Zürich airport — which would have taken him at least as far as East Germany."

"They will be easy to pick up," Kleinhaus sighed. "Take her away."

She spat at the Saint as the guards went to her, and would have clawed out his eyes if they had not held her efficiently.

"I'm sorry, darling," the Saint said to her. "I'm sorry it had to turn out like this. I liked your story much better."

The irony was that he meant it. And that she would never believe him.