The Saint in the Sun

7. PROVENCE: The Hopeless Heiress

Simon Templar saw her again as he was sampling the Chausson du Roi at La Petite Auberge at Noves.

A chausson means, literally, a bedroom slipper; hence, in the vocabulary of French cuisine, it is also the word for a sort of apple turnover, which bears a superficial resemblance to a folded slipper with the heel tucked into the toe. The Chausson du Roi, however, as befits its royal distinction, is not a dessert, and contains nothing so commonplace as apples. It envelops sweetbreads liberally blended with the regal richness of truffles, and it is one of the specially famous entrees of the Petite Auberge, whose name so modestly means only "the little inn", but which is one of the mere dozen restaurants in all France decorated by the canonical Guide Michelin with the three stars which are its highest accolade. Noves is in the south, not far from Avignon of the celebrated bridge, and is a very small village of absolutely no importance except to its nearest neighbors, which hardly anyone else would ever have heard of but for the procession of gourmets beating a path to a superior munch-trap. And she personified one rather prevalent concept of the type to be expected in such company.

She had truly brown hair, the rare and wonderful natural color of the finest leather, styled with careless simplicity, with large brown eyes to match, a small nose, a generous mouth, and exquisitely even teeth, all assembled with a symmetry that might have been breath-taking — if it had been seen in a slightly concave mirror.

Because she was fat.

Simon estimated that she probably scaled about 180 pounds bone dry, the same as himself. Except that his pounds were all muscle stretched over more than two yards of frame, whereas she had to carry too many of them horizontally, with a head less height, in billows of rotundity that might have delighted Rubens but would have appalled Vargas. It was a great pity, he thought, for without that excess weight even her figure might have been beautiful: her ankles were still trim and her calves not too enlarged, and her hands were small and shapely. But from the way she was tucking into the provender on her plate there seemed to be little prospect of her central sections being restored to proportion with her extremities.

She wore no ring on the third finger of her left hand, and the man with her was certainly old enough to be her father, but there was no physical similarity between them. He was gray-haired and gray-eyed, with a thin, meticulously sculptured, gray mustache; and the rest of him was also as thin as she was obese. But nothing else about him confirmed the ascetic promise of his slenderness. To mitigate the warmth of the summer evening, his dark gray suit had been custom tailored of some special fabric, perhaps even custom woven, which combined the conventionally imperative drabness of correct male attire with the obvious lightness of a tissue of feathers; his snowy shirt was just solid enough to be opaque without pretending to be as substantial as the least useful handkerchief; his cuff-links were cabochon emeralds no bigger than peanuts, and his wrist watch was merely one different link in a broad loose bracelet which anyone without Simon Templar's assayer's eye would have dismissed as Mexican silver instead of the solid platinum that it was. In every detail, examined closely enough, there was revealed a man who craved nothing but the best of everything — but with a discrimination refined to the ultimate snobbery of modesty.

Simon seized a chance to satisfy his curiosity when the dining-room hostess (he had noted an increasing number of personable and competent young women in such posts of recent years, and wondered if it would be correct to call them maîtresses d'hôtel came by to inquire whether everything was to his pleasure.

"At the corner table?" she said, answering his return question. "That is Mr. Saville Wakerose. I should have thought you would know him. Isn't he one of your greatest gourmets?"

The Saint had never set eyes on Mr. Wakerose before that summer, but the name was instantly familiar, and at once it became hardly a coincidence at all that they should have been eating in the same restaurants on three consecutive days — the Côte d'Or at Saulieu, the Pyramide at Vienne, and now the Petite Auberge at Noves. For each one was a three-starred shrine of culinary art, and they were spaced along the route from Paris to the Mediterranean at distances which could only suggest an irresistible schedule to any gastrophilic pilgrim with the time to spare. In which category Simon Templar was an enthusiastic amateur when other obligations and temptations permitted; but Saville Wakerose was a dean of professionals. In twenty years of magazine articles, newspaper columns, lecture tours, and general publicity, he had established his authority as a connoisseur of food and wine and an arbiter of general elegance at such an altitude that even princes and presidents were reported to cringe from his critiques of their hospitality. And he had not merely parlayed his avocation into a comfortable living in which the best things in life were free or deductible, but he had climaxed it some four years ago by marrying the former Adeline Inglis, the last scion of one of those pre-welfare-state fortunes, who in her debutante days had inspired ribald parodists to warble:

Since then she had had five or six husbands, in spite of whom she still had plenty of dough left when Saville Wakerose added himself to the highly variegated roster. He was to be the last of the list; for a couple of years later, before the habitual rift could develop in their marital bliss, a simple case of influenza followed by common pneumonia suddenly retired her for all time from the matrimonial market, leaving him presumably well consoled in his bereavement.

"He has a very young wife," Simon observed, with intentional discretion.

The hostess smiled.

"That is not his wife. She is his belle-fille, Miss Flane."

Belle-fille does not mean what it might suggest to anyone with a mere smattering of French. The fat girl was Wakerose's stepdaughter. And with that information another card spun out of the Saint's mental index of trivial recollections from his catholic acquaintance with all forms of journalism. One of Adeline Inglis' earliest husbands, and the father of her only experiment in maternity, had been Orlando Flane, a film star who had shone in the last fabulous days before Hollywood became only a suburb instead of the capital of the moving picture world.

That, then, would have to be the one-time photographers' darling Rowena Flane, whose father had never had much talent and was rated nothing but an alcoholic problem after the divorce, and who blew out what was left of his brains soon afterwards, but who had left her those still discernible traits of the sheer impossible beauty which had made him the idol of millions of sex‑starved females before their fickle frustrations transferred themselves to the school of scratching, mumbling, or jittering goons who had succeeded him.

Adeline Inglis, Simon seemed to recall, searching his memory for the imprint of some inconsequential news photo, had taken advantage of the best coiffeurs, courturiers, and cosmeticians that money could buy to succeed in looking like a nice well-groomed middle-class matron dolled up for a community bridge party. Her daughter, fortuitously endowed with a far better basic structure, had not given it a fraction of that break. But he wondered why somebody close to her hadn't pointed out that even if she suffered from some glandular misfortune, there were better treatments for it than to indulge her appetite as she seemed inclined to do. Most especially somebody like Saville Wakerose, who through all his professional gourmandizing had taken obvious pride in preserving the figure of an esthete.

And from that not so casual speculation began an incident which brought the Saint to the brink of a fate worse than. But let us not be jumping the gun.

Although he had never been so crude as to even glance towards Rowena Flane and her step-father while making his inquiries, Simon knew that the recognition had been mutual; and when the hostess's peregrinations took her to the corner table he had no doubt that some equally sophisticated inquiry was made about himself. But he would not have predicted that it would have the result it did.

It was one of those mild and ideal evenings in May, when summer often begins in Provence, and after succumbing to an exquisite miniature Soufflé au Grand Marnier he was happy to accede to the suggestion of having his coffee served outside under the trees. Wakerose and Rowena had started and finished before him, and were already at a table on the front terrace which Simon had to pass in search of one for himself; and Mr. Wakerose stood up and said: "Excuse me, Mr. Templar. We seem destined to keep crossing paths on this trip. Why not give in to it and join us?"

"Why not?" Simon said agreeably, but looked at the fat girl for his cue.

She smiled her indorsement with a readiness which suggested that the invitation could actually have been her idea.

"Thank you," Simon said, and sat down beside her.

Liqueurs came with the coffee — a Benedictine for her, a Chatelaine Armagnac for Mr. Wakerose. Simon decided to join him in the latter.

"It makes an interesting change," said Mr. Wakerose. "And I like to enjoy the libations of the territory, whenever they are reasonably potable. And after all, we are nowhere near Cognac, but much nearer the latitude of Bordeaux."

"And those black-oak Gascon casks make all the difference from ageing in the limousins," Simon concurred, tasting appreciatively. "I think it takes a harder and drier brandy to follow the more rugged wines of the Rhône — like this."

As an exercise in one-upmanship it was perhaps a trifle flashy, but he had the satisfaction of seeing Saville Wakerose blink.

"Are you just on the trail of food and drink?" Rowena asked. "Or is it something more exciting?"

"Just eating my way around," said the Saint carelessly, having accustomed himself to these gambits as a formality that had to be suffered with good humor. "That can be exciting enough, in places like this."

"You sound as if you'd evolved a formula for handling silly questions. But I suppose you've had to."

It was Simon's turn to blink — though he was sufficiently on guard, from instinct and habit, to permit himself no more than a smile. But it was a smile warmed by the surprised recognition of a perceptivity which he had been guilty of failing to expect from a poor little fat rich girl.

"You've probably had to do the same, haven't you?" he said, and it was almost an apology.

"It appears that we all know each other," Mr. Wakerose observed drily. "Although I did forget the ceremonial introductions. But I'm sure Mr. Templar made the same subtle inquiries about us that we made about him."

Simon realized that Wakerose was also a gamesman, and nodded his sporting acknowledgement of the ploy.

"Doesn't everybody?" he returned blandly. "However, I was telling the truth. The only clues I'm following are in menus. I stopped looking for trouble years ago — because quite enough of it started looking for me."

Saville Wakerose trimmed his cigar.

"We haven't only been eating our way around, as you put it, in all those places where you've been seeing us," he said. "We've also been seeing all the historic sights. Are you familiar with the history of these parts, Mr. Templar?"

Simon joyously spotted the trap from afar.

"Only what I've read in the guide-books, like everyone else," he said, skirting it neatly and leaving the other to follow.

Wakerose just as gracefully sidestepped his own pitfall.

"Rowena loves history, or at least historical novels," he explained, "and I prefer to read cook books. But I let her drag me around the ancient monuments, and she lets me show her the temples of the table, and it makes an interesting symbiosis." It was a stand-off, like two duellists stopped by a mutual discovery of respect for the other's skill, and accepting a tacit truce while deciding how — or whether — to continue.

Simon was perfectly content to leave it that way. He turned to Rowena again with a new friendliness, and said: "Historical novels cover a lot of ground, between deluges — from the Flood to Prohibition. Do you like all of 'em, or are you hooked on any particular period?"

"It's not the period so much as the atmosphere," she said. "When I want to relax and be entertained, I want romance and glamor and a happy ending. I can't stand this modern obsession with everything sordid and complicated and depressing."

"But you don't think life only started to be sordid and depressing less than a hundred years ago?"

"Of course not. I know that in many ways it was much worse. But for some reason, when writers look at the world around them they only seem to see the worst of it, or that's all they want to talk about. But when they look back, they bring out the best and the happiest things."

"And that's all you want to see?"

"Yes, if I'm paying for it. Why spend money to be depressed?"

"I could see your point," Simon said deliberately, "if you were a poor struggling working girl with indigent parents and a thriftless husband, dreaming of an escape she'll never have. But if we put the cards on the table, and pretend we know who you are — why do you need that escape?"

Wakerose had suddenly begun to beam like an emaciated Buddha.

"This is prodigious," he said. "Mr. Templar is putting you on, Rowena."

"I didn't mean to," Simon said quickly, but without taking his eyes off her. "It was meant as an honest question."

"Then you tell me honestly," she said, "why a rich girl with no worries shouldn't prefer to dream about knights in shining armor or dashing cavaliers, instead of the kind of men she sees all the time."

"Because she should be sophisticated enough to know that they're the only kind she could live with — or who could live with her. The day after this historical hero swept her off her feet, she'd start trying to housebreak him. She'd decide that she couldn't stand the battered old tin suit he rescued her in, and take him down to the smithy for a new one, which she would pick for him. The cavalier who spread his coat over a puddle for her to walk on with her dainty feet would find that she expected to repeat the performance at home while he was wearing it."

"Is that really what you think about women — or just about me, Mr. Templar?"

"It couldn't possibly be personal, Miss Flane, because I never had any reason to think about you before," said the Saint calmly and pleasantly. "It's what I think about most modern women, and especially American women. They want a lion as far as the altar, and a lap-dog from there on. They think that chivalry is a great wheeze for getting cigarettes lighted and doors opened and lots of alimony, but they insist that they're just as good as a man in every field where there's no advantage in pleading femininity. So being accustomed to having the best of it both ways, they'd go running back to Mother or their lawyers if the fine swaggering male who swept them off their feet had the nerve to think he could go on being the boss after he'd carried them over the bridal threshold. The difference is that some motherless poor girls might figure it was better to put up with that horrible brute of a Prince than go back to being Cinderella, but the rich girl has no such problem."

Her big brown eyes darkened, but it was not with anger. And he was finding it a little less easy to meet her gaze.

"How do you know what other problems she has?" she retorted. "Or does being called the Robin Hood of Modem Crime make you feel you have to hate all rich people on principle?"

"Not for a moment," he said. "Some of my best friends are millionaires. I've even become fairly rich myself — not by your standards, of course, but enough so that nobody could write a check that'd make me do anything I didn't want to. Which is all I ever wanted."

"Well spoken, sir," murmured Wakerose with delighted irony.

"Rowena will be glad to know that at last she's met one man who isn't a fortune hunter."

"Thank you," said the Saint. "At this stage of my chameleon career, it's cheering to find one crime I still haven't been accused of."

"I didn't mean to be rude with that Robin Hood crack,"

Rowena said. "It was meant as an honest question, like yours."

"And an understandable one," Simon said cheerfully. "So if you're worried about all the jewels you've got with you, I give you my word of honor I won't steal them while you're here. Where is your next stop?"

Wakerose chuckled again.

"I'm afraid we're staying here for at least a week, while Rowena explores all the ruins within reasonable driving range, before and after the luncheon stops which I shall select. I have convinced her that this is a much more civilized procedure than trying to combine transit with tourism, unpacking in a different hotel every night and having to pack up again every morning to set forth like gypsies without even a bathroom to call our own. Here we are assured of modern rooms and comfortable beds and clean clothes hung up in our closets, and returning in the evening is a relaxation instead of a scramble. So you will have left long before us."

"I knew there'd be a catch somewhere. So what are you planning to see tomorrow?"

"Nothing but a very unhistoric local garage, unfortunately. The fuel pump on my car elected to break down this afternoon — luckily, we were only just outside Châteaurenard. I expect to spend tomorrow spurring on the mechanic to get the repair finished by the end of the day and pretending I know exactly what he should be doing, while hoping that he will not detect my ignorance and take advantage of it to manufacture lengthy and expensive complications."

Simon could not have told anyone what made him do it, except that in a vague but superbly Saintly way it might have seemed too rare an opportunity to pass up, to take the wind out of Saville Wakerose's too meticulously trimmed sails; but he said at once: "That sounds rather dull for Rowena. I'd be happy to take her sightseeing in my car, while you keep a stern eye on the mechanical shenanigans."

Rowena Flane stared at him from behind a mask that seemed to have been hastily and incompletely improvised to cover her total startlement.

"Why should you do that?" she asked.

He shrugged, with twinkling sapphires in his gaze.

"I hadn't any definite plans for tomorrow. And I told you I didn't have to do anything I didn't want to."

"We couldn't impose on you like that," Wakerose said. "Rowena has plenty of books to read—"

"It's no imposition. But if she'd feel very stuffy about being obligated to a stranger, and it would make her feel better, she can buy the gas."

"And the lunch," she said.

"Oh, no. You couldn't afford that. The lunch will be mine."

Suddenly she laughed.

She had an extra chin and ballooning bosoms to make a billowy travesty of her merriment; yet it had something that lighted up her face, which was in absolute contrast to her stepfather's polite and faultless smile.

And from that moment the Saint knew that his strange instinct had once again proved wiser than reason, and that he was not wasting his time.

She was half an hour late in the morning, but went far beyond perfunctory apologies when she finally came downstairs.

"I'm sure you'll think I'm always like this, and I don't blame you. But Saville promised to call me, and he overslept. I was furious. I think there's nothing more insulting to people than to make them wait for you. Who was it who said that 'Punctuality is the politeness of princes'?"

"I like the thought," Simon said. "Who was it?"

"I don't know. I wish I did."

"That makes me feel better already. Now I won't be quite so much in awe of your historical knowledge."

"Honestly, it's not as frightening as Saville tries to make out." She held up the Michelin volume on Provence. "I just read the guide books, like you."

"All right," he said amiably, as he settled himself beside her at the wheel of his car, and opened a road map. "You name it, and I'll find it."

It was a busy morning. In spite of their belated start, they were able to walk the full circuit of the Promenade du Rocher around the Palace of the Popes in Avignon, enjoying its panoramas of the town and countryside and the immortal bridge which still goes only halfway across the Rhône, before taking the hour-long guided tour of the Palace itself, which the Saint found anticlimactically dull, having no temperament for that sort of historical study. He endured the education with good grace, but was glad of the release when he could drive her over the modern highway across the river, a few kilometers out to the less pretentious cousin-town of Villeneuve-les-Avignon, for lunch at the Prieuré.

It was not that she had made the sightseeing any more painful for him, than it had to be — in fact, she had displayed an irreverence towards the more pompous exhibits which had encouraged his own iconoclastic sense of humor — but the bones of the past would never be able to compete for his interest with the flesh of the present, even when it was as excessive as Rowena Flane's.

The shaded garden restaurant was quiet and peaceful; and a Pernod and water with plenty of ice tinkling in the glass was simultaneously refreshing to the eye, the hand, the palate, and the soul.

"Of all civilized blessings," he remarked, "I think ice would be one of the hardest to give up. And you must admit that it improves even historical epics when you can watch them in an air-conditioned theater, and enjoy the poor extras sweating up the Pyramids while you sit and wish you'd worn a sweater."

"The Roman emperors had ice," she said. "They had it brought down from the Alps."

"So I've heard. A slave runner set out with a two-hundred-pound chunk, and arrived at the palace with an ice cube. I guess it was just as good as a Frigidaire if you were in the right set. But who daydreams about being a slave?"

"Unless she catches the eye of the handsome hero."

"I know," said the Saint. "The kind of part your father used to play so well."

He saw her stiffen, and the careless gaiety drained down from her eyes.

"Was anything wrong with that?" she challenged coldly.

"Nothing," he said disarmingly. "It was a job, and he did it damned well."

The head waiter came then, and they ordered the crêpes du Prieuré, the delicately stuffed rolled pancakes which he remembered from a past visit, and to follow them a gigot à la broche aux herbes de Provence which he knew could not fail them, with a bottle of Ste Roseline rosé to counter the warmth of the day.

But after that interruption, she stubbornly refused its opportunity to change the subject.

"I suppose," she said deliberately, "you were like everyone else. When he stopped playing those parts so well, you joined in calling him a drunken bum."

Simon made no attempt to evade the showdown.

"Eventually, that's what he was. It was a shame, when you remember what he did and what he looked like, before the juice wore him down. Unfortunately that was the only period when I knew him."

Her brown eyes darkened and tightened.

"You knew him?"

"So very slightly — and at the wrong time. Just before he committed suicide. I wish I'd known him before. He must have been quite a guy." {See the story Hollywood in The Saint goes west.}

She studied him suspiciously for several seconds, but he faced the probe just as frankly and unwaveringly as the preceding challenge.

"I'm glad you said that," she told him finally. "That's how I try to think of him. And I think you meant it."

"I'm glad you believe that," he answered. "Now I won't have spoiled your appetite. That would have been a crime, with what we're looking forward to. That's another department where I'd prefer to keep my history in the surroundings: food. When these walls around us were new, the spécialité de la maison was probably something like boiled hair shirts. I'd love to see the face of a Michelin inspector being served the product of an ancient French kitchen. Did you know that it was about a century and a half after the Popes took their dyspepsia back from Avignon to Rome before the French learned the elements of the fancy cooking they're now so proud of?"

"Yes, I know. And it was another Italian who brought it — Catherine de' Medici, when she married Henri the Second and became queen of France. Saville taught me that—"

The conversation slanted off into diverting but safely impersonal byways which brought them smoothly through their two main courses and surprised the Saint with more discoveries of her range of knowledge and breadth of interests.

Of course, he remembered, she had had the advantage of the best tutors, conventional schools, and finishing schools that money could buy. But she was a living advertisement for the system. Sometimes she was so fluent and original that he found himself fascinated, listening as he might have listened to some prefabricated sex-pot with a press-agent's contrived and memorized line of dialectic, completely forgetting how different she looked from anything like that.

On the other hand, having convinced herself of his sincerity, his attention seemed to draw her out to an extent that he would hardly have expected even when he had promised himself the attempt the night before. And as her defensiveness disappeared, it seemed to make room for a personal warmth towards him to grow in the same ratio, as if in gratitude for his help in letting down her guard.

A discreet interval after they had disposed of the last of the pink and succulent lamb, the head waiter was at the table again with his final temptations. Rowena unhesitatingly and ecstatically went for the Charlotte Prieure, while the Saint was happy to settle for a fresh peach.

"I'm sure you think I'm awful," she said, "finishing all my potatoes and then topping them with this rich sweet goo. You're like Saville — you can enjoy all the tastiest things, and hold back on the fattening ones, and keep a figure like a saint. The hungry kind, I mean."

By this time they were on the verge of being old friends.

"I guess we're the worrying types," he said. "Or the vain ones. A longish while ago, I took a good look at some of the characters who had the same tastes that I have, and decided that I could beat the game. I wanted to live like them without looking like them. I figured that the solution might be to have your cake and not eat all of it. Anyway, it seemed like an idea."

"So you could always be young and beautiful, like Orlando in his prime."

"I should be so lucky. But there are worse things to try for."

"Such as being a fat slob like me."

"Not a slob," he said carefully. "But why don't you do something about being fat?"

"Because I can't," she said. "I know you think it's just because I eat too much. That's how it started, of course. When I was a child I felt unwanted, so I took to desserts and candy in the same way that people become alcoholics or drug addicts. The psychologists have a word for it… Then, in my teens, because I was so fat, I didn't get any dates, and the other girls always made fun of me. They were jealous of all the other things I had, and were just looking for something to torment me with. So I just stuffed myself with more desserts and candy, to show I didn't care. And so I ended up with adipochria."

"With who?"

"It means a need for fat. Just before my mother died, I'd finally started trying to go on a diet, and I'd lost some weight, but I began to feel awful. Tired all the time, and feeling sick after meals, and getting headaches constantly. So Saville took me to a specialist, and that's what he said it was. I'd conditioned my metabolism to so much rich food and sweets, all my life, that something glandular had atrophied and now I can't get along without them."

The Saint stared at her.

"And the remedy is to keep eating more of the same?"

"It isn't a remedy — it's a necessity. If I cut them out, it's like a normal person being starved. In a month or two I'd die of anemia and malnutrition."

"And that's all he could tell you? To stay fat and get fatter?"

"Just about. Well, he gave me a lot of pills, which he hopes will change my condition eventually. But he absolutely forbade me to try any more dieting until I feel a positive loathing for any sweet taste. He said that would be the first symptom that my system was starting to become normal."

Simon shook his head incredulously.

"That's the damnedest disease I ever heard of."

"Isn't it?" she said resignedly. "That's another reason why I escape into those historical romances. They're what I'll have to be satisfied with until some hero comes along who likes fat girls."

But there was a soft moistness in her eyes that he did not want to look at, and he concentrated on peeling a second peach.

"Why not?" he said. "The Vogue model type would never have got a tumble from any of those old-time swashbucklers, to go by the contemporary prints and paintings. They didn't need skinny little waifs to make them feel robust. And yet the interesting thing is that when it came to architecture they put up buildings that were big but graceful, and full of ornament, too much of it sometimes, but always delicate. No huge lumpish monstrosities like some of the modern jobs I've seen. Talking of which, what ancient memorials are we heading for this afternoon?"

"I wanted to see the Pont du Card at Uzès, and. "

And once again the conversation was steered back into a safe impersonal channel.

He drove to Uzès and parked down beside the river, and they walked to survey the magnificent Roman aqueduct from both levels and across the span. Then it was only another fifteen miles to Nîmes, where they parked in front of the extraordinarily preserved Arenas, which could still have served as a movie set if they had backgrounded chariots instead of Citroëns, and walked on up the Boulevard Victor Hugo to visit the somewhat disappointing Maison Carrée, and then on to the Jardin de la Fontaine for the view from the Tour Magne, which — But this is not the script of a travelog. Let us leave it that they walked a lot and saw a lot which has no direct bearing on this story, and that the Saint was not truly sorry when they came to Tarascon on the way home and found it was too late to visit the Chateau, though it was picturesque enough from the outside.

"I'll have to make it another day," Rowena said. "I couldn't go away without seeing it. Tartarin de Tarascon was the first French classic I had to read in school, and I can still remember that it made me cry, I was so sorry for the poor silly man."

"Don Quijote was another poor silly man," Simon said. "And so am I, maybe. Lord, have mercy on such as we — as the song says. But thank the Lord, a few people do… Why did you feel an unwanted child?" he asked abruptly.

She took about a mile to answer, so that he began to think she was resenting the question; but she was only brooding around it.

"I suppose because I never seemed to have any parents like the other girls. I had a series of stepfathers who sometimes pretended to be interested in me, but that was only to impress Mother. They weren't really fatherly types, and they soon stopped when they found that she couldn't have cared less. Motherhood was something she had to try once, like everything else, so she tried it; but after a few years it was just another bore. So I was pushed on to governesses and tutors and all kinds of boarding schools — anything to keep me out of her hair. And yet she must have loved me, in a funny way, or else she still had a strong sense of duty."

"Why — how did she show it?"

"Well, she did leave me everything in her will. I don't get control of it until I get married or until I'm thirty — until then, Seville's my guardian and trustee — but in the end it all comes to me."

It went through the Saint's head like the breaking of a string on some supernal harp, the reverberation which is vulgarly rendered as "boinng", but amplified to the volume of a cathedral bell as it would sound in the belfry.

He didn't look at her. He couldn't.

But she had spoken in perfect innocence. His ears told him that.

His hands were light on the wheel, and the car had not swerved. The moment of understanding had only been vertiginous in his mind, exactly as its subsonic boom had sounded in no other ears.

"You get on better with Saville than the other stepfathers, I take it."

"Well, I was a lot older when he came along, so he didn't have to pretend to like children. As a matter of fact, he loathes them. But he's been very good to me."

"I'm sure there's a moral," Simon said trivially. "We're always reading about misunderstood children, but you don't hear much about misunderstood parents. And yet all parents were children themselves once. I wonder why they forget how to communicate when they change places."

"I must try to remember, if I'm ever a mother."

It was only another half-hour's drive back to the Petite Auberge, and he was glad it was no longer.

He had a little thinking to do alone, and there would not be much time for it.

As they turned in at the entrance and headed up the long driveway through the orchards, she said: "It's been a wonderful day. For me. And you must have been terribly bored."

"On the contrary, I wouldn't have missed it for anything," he said truthfully.

"I might have believed you if you'd let me pay for lunch. But that crack of yours, that I couldn't afford it — it still sticks in my mind. You meant something snide, didn't you?"

He brought the car to a gentle stop in front of the inn.

"I meant that if I let you buy my lunch you might have thought you could buy more than that, and then I'd 've had to prove how expensive I can be to people I don't like. And I'd begun to like you."

"Then do you still like me enough to join us for dinner, if Saville pays?"

He smiled.

"Consider me seduced."

She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek, and got out before he could open the door.

The Saint shaved and showered and changed unhurriedly, and sauntered out on to the terrace to find Saville Wakerose sipping a dry martini.

"Hi there," he said breezily. "How's the ailing automobile?"

"Immobile," Wakerose said lugubriously. "May I offer you one of these? They really make them quite potably here."

"Thank you." Simon sat down. "What's the trouble — did the mechanic outsmart you?"

"The mountebank took the fuel pump apart and found something broken which he couldn't repair. We went all over the province looking for something to replace it with, but being an American car nobody had anything that would fit. Finally I had to telephone the dealers in Paris and have them put a new pump on the train, which won't get to Avignon till tomorrow morning. And after he picks it up, the charlatan at the garage will probably take at least half the day to install it."

"Aren't you being a bit hard on him?" Simon argued. "You'd be liable to run into the same thing if you took a French car into a small-town American garage. Just like they say you should drink the wine of the country, I believe in driving the car of the country you're in, or at least of the continent."

"When they make air-conditioned cars in Europe," Wakerose said earnestly, "I shall have to consider one."

Simon had forgotten during the course of the day that Wakerose was a lifeman who never stopped playing, but he accepted the loss of a round with great good nature and without any undignified scramble to retrieve it. He could afford now to bide his time.

Rowena gave him the first opening, as he knew she must, when she came down and joined them.

"I suppose you've heard the news," she said. "Isn't it aggravating?"

"Not to me," Simon said cheerily.

"I know, you can take your sightseeing or leave it alone. But tomorrow is market day in Arles, and I've read that it's one of the biggest and best in all the South, and it's heartbreaking to miss it—"

"Can't you hire a car?"

"I've been trying to make inquiries," Wakerose said. "But this isn't exactly Hertz territory. And I can't send Rowena off with some local taxi-driver who doesn't speak English, in an insanitary rattletrap—"

"Which might break down anywhere, like the best American limousine," Simon said sympathetically. "I see your problem. But if Rowena could stand another day in my non-air-conditioned Common-Market jalopy, I'd be glad to offer an encore."

It was extraordinary how beautiful her face was, when you looked at it centrally and the dim light made the outer margins indefinite, especially when that luminous warmth rose in her eyes.

"It's too much!" she said. "I know how you hate that sort of thing, and yet you know I'll just have to take you up on it. How can you be such an angel?"

"It comes naturally to a saint," he drawled. "And I get my kick out of seeing the kick you get out of everything. As I told you last night, I'm not on any timetable, and another day makes no difference to me."

"A rare and remarkable attitude in these days," Wakerose said, "when anyone who claims to be respectable is supposed to have a Purpose In Life, no matter how idiotic. I envy you your freedom from that bourgeois problem. But not your marketing excursion tomorrow. Rowena will quite certainly transmute you from a cavalier into a beast of burden, laden with every gewgaw and encumbrance that attracts her fancy. You need not try to look chivalrously skeptical, Mr. Templar. I have been with her to the Flea Market in Paris."

"I promise," Rowena said. "Anything I buy I'll carry myself."

"And don't think I won't hold you to that," Simon grinned at her.

"You've got a witness," she smiled back.

Wakerose heaved a sigh of tastefully controlled depth.

"You must both rest your feet at the Jules César," he said. "It is right in the middle of the main street, and as I recall it they serve a most edible lunch. And Rowena should appreciate a hotel named after such a genuine historical hero instead of some parvenu tycoon as they usually are in America. Come to think of it, I believe there are six or seven different towns called Rome in the United States, and I'll wager that not one of them has even a motel called the Julius Caesar."

The conversation continued with light and random variety through dinner.

Characteristically, Wakerose suggested Parma ham and melon for a start, followed by flamed quail and a green salad, to which Simon was quite contented to agree; but for Rowena it was foie gras to begin with, and then chicken in a cream sauce with tarragon, and pommes Dauphine.

"I would propose a glass of Chante Alouette '59 for all of us to start with," Wakerose said, studying the wine list, "and Rowena can finish the bottle with her chicken. You and I, Mr. Templar, can wash down our cailles with a red Rhône. Do you have any preference? They have a most impressive selection here. Or are you one of those people to whom all Châteauneuf du Pape is the same?"

"The Montredon is very good, I think," Simon said, without glancing at the list. "Especially the '55."

The meal ended with the score about even and all the amenities observed, though by the end of it the Saint thought there was an infinitesimal fraying at the edges of Wakerose's cultivated smoothness, and thought that he could surmise the reason. It was not that Wakerose would be seriously exasperated to have encountered an adversary who could meet him on level terms in his own specialty of going one better. Something more important seemed to preoccupy him, and the strain was cramping his style.

For dessert, Wakerose chose an almost calorie-free sorbet, but clairvoyantly anticipated Rowena's yearning for the crêpes flambées which the Petite Auberge, proud of its own recipe, disdains to call Suzette. But this time the Saint decided that he had been dietetically discreet enough all day, and could afford the indulgence of leaving Wakerose alone in his austerity.

"I'm so glad you can at least pretend to dissipate with me," Rowena said glowingly. "It makes me feel just a little less of a freak, even if you're only doing it to be polite, I love you for it."

Wakerose looked at her oddly.

"Mr. Templar has that wonderful knack of making everybody feel like somebody special," he commented. "It must have required superhuman will-power for him to remain a bachelor."

"Maybe I just haven't been lucky yet," Simon said easily. "I'm corny enough to be stuck with the old romantic notion that for every person there's an ideal mate wandering somewhere in the world; and when they meet, the bells ring and things light up and there's no argument. The coup de foudre, as the French call it. Some people settle for less, or too soon, and some people never find it, but that doesn't prove that it can't happen."

His gaze shifted once from Wakerose to Rowena and back again, as it might in any normal generality of discussion, but he knew that her eyes never left his face.

"One might call it the Some Enchanted Evening syndrome," Wakerose said sardonically. "Well, each of us to our superstitions. I cling to the one which maintains that brandy or a liqueur at the end of a meal is a digestive, although I know that medical authority contradicts me. Rowena enjoys a Benedictine. What would appeal to you?"

"I shall be completely neutral," said the Saint, "and have a B-and-B."

They took their coffee and liqueurs outside on the terrace. Rowena ordered her coffee in a large cup, liégeois, with a dollop of ice cream in it, and used it to swallow a pill from a little jewelled box; but the caffeine was not sufficient to stop her contributions to the conversational rally becoming more and more infrequent and desultory, and Wakerose had still not finished his long cigar when she stifled a yawn and excused herself.

"I'm folding," she said. "And I want to be bright tomorrow. Will you forgive me?" She stood up and gave her hand to the Saint, and he kissed it with an impudent flourish. "Thank you again for today — and what time does the private tour leave in the morning?"

"Shall we say ten o'clock again?"

"You're the boss. And tonight I'll leave my own call at the desk, so you won't be kept waiting. Goodnight, Saville."

Wakerose tracked her departure with elegantly lofted eyebrows, and made a fastidious business of savoring another puff of smoke.

"My felicitations," he said at last. "You appear to have her marvellously intimidated, which is no mean feat. But I would advise you, if I may, not to presume too much on this docility. I've seen it before, and I feel I have a duty to warn you. Behind that submissiveness there lurks a tiger which even professional hunters have mistaken for a fat cat."

There was an inherent laziness in the balmy Provençal evening which allowed the Saint to take a long leisurely pause before any answer was essential, which helped to cushion the abruptness of the transition he had to make.

"There was something I wanted to talk to you about," he said, "but not quite as publicly as this." He turned his head from side to side to indicate the other guests at adjacent tables, within potentially embarrassing earshot. "I wonder if you'd like to see my room? I don't know what yours is like, but I think mine is exceptionally nice, and you might find it worth remembering if you ever come here again."

Wakerose's brows repeated their eloquent elevation, but after a pointedly puzzled pause he said: "Certainly, that sounds interesting."

They went in through the foyer and past the stairs. Simon's room was on the ground floor, in a wing beyond the inner lounge. He unlocked the door, ushered Wakerose in, and shut the door again behind them.

Wakerose looked methodically around, put his head in the bathroom, and said: "Very nice indeed. But you had something more than comparative accommodations to talk about, didn't you?"

The Saint opened his suitcase, rummaged in it and took out a pack of cigarettes, and dropped the lid again. He opened the package and then put it down nervously without taking a cigarette.

"I haven't seen you smoking before," Wakerose said.

"I'm trying to quit," Simon explained, and went on suddenly: "I won't waste your time beating about the bush. I want to marry your stepdaughter."

Wakerose rocked back on his heels, and anything he had previously done with his eyebrows became a mere quiver compared with the way they now arched up into his hair line.

"Indeed? And what does Rowena think about it?"

"I haven't asked her yet. It may be an oldfashioned formality, but I felt I should tell you first. I thought that a gentleman of the old school like yourself would appreciate that."

"I do. Oh, I do, most emphatically. But you can't seriously imagine that I would be so overwhelmed that I should give my permission, let alone my blessing, to a suitor such as yourself?"

"If Rowena isn't twenty-one yet, she can't be far from it. So she'll be able to make up her own mind soon enough. I just wanted to be honest about my intentions; and I hoped you'd respect them, and that we could be friends."

Wakerose widened his eyes again elaborately.

"Honest? Respect?" he echoed. "After you gave your word of honor—"

"Not to steal her jewels," Simon said. "Her heart isn't a diamond — I hope. We've only spent one day together, but I think she feels a little the same about me as I do about her."

"I could scarcely help noticing the feeling," Wakerose said. "But I beg to doubt if its nature is the same. Rowena is a sweet girl, but you can't seriously expect me to believe that she is attractive in that way to such a man as yourself."

"When I take her to a good specialist, and she loses about fifty pounds," Simon said steadily, "I think she'll be one of the most beautiful young women that anyone ever saw."

Wakerose laughed hollowly.

"My poor fellow. Now I begin to comprehend your delusion. Obviously she hasn't told you what's the matter with her."

"About that 'adipochria'?" Simon said steadily. "Yes, she has. And I'm prepared to bet my matrimonial future that there's no such disease known to medical science, and that the doctor who diagnosed it is nothing but an unscrupulous quack."

The other's eyes narrowed.

"That is an extremely dangerous statement, Mr. Templar."

"It'll be easily proved or disproved when she gets an independent opinion from a first-class reputable clinic," said the Saint calmly. "And if I'm right, I shall then go on to theorize that it was you who snuck something into her food or her vitamin pills when she tried going on a diet, to produce the symptoms which gave you an excuse to lug her off to the first bogus specialist, whom you'd already suborned to prescribe still more carbohydrates and some pills which are probably tranquillizers or something to slow down her metabolism even more. That you deliberately plotted to make her as unattractive as possible, so as to keep her unmarried and leave her mother's fortune in your hands until you could siphon off all that you wanted."

He had confirmation enough to satisfy himself in the long silence that followed, before there was any verbal answer.

Saville Wakerose took one more light pull at his cigar, grimaced slightly, and carefully extinguished it in an ashtray.

"One should never try to smoke the last two-and-a-half inches. Very well," he said briskly, "how much do you want?"

"For conniving to destroy a human being even more cruelly than if you poisoned her?"

"Come now, my dear fellow, let us not overdo the knightly act. There is no admiring audience. And blackmail is not such a pretty crime, either — that is the technical name for your purpose, isn't it?"

"Then you admit to something you'd rather I kept quiet about?"

"I admit nothing. I am merely looking for a civilized alternative to a great deal of crude unpleasantness and publicity. Shall we say a quarter of a million Swiss francs?"

"Don't you think it's degrading to start the bidding as low as that?"

"Half a million, then. Paid into any account you care to name, and quite untraceable."

The Saint shook his head.

"For such a brilliant man, you can be very dense, Saville. All I want is to give Rowena a fair chance for a happy normal life, in spite of her money."

"Don't bid your hand too high," Wakerose said with brittle restraint. "You are assuming that Rowena will immediately believe these fantastic accusations, regardless of who is making them and what obvious motives can be imputed to him. If it should come to what they call on television a showdown between us, although I would go to great lengths to avoid anything so unsavory, I hope she would prefer to believe my version of this tête-a-tête."

Simon Templar smiled benignly.

He turned back to his suitcase, opened it again, pushed a soiled shirt aside, and extracted a plastic box no bigger than a book. A small metal object dangled from it at the end of a flexible wire, which now seemed to have been hanging outside the suitcase when the lid was closed.

"Have you seen these portable tape recorders?" he asked chattily. "Completely transistorized, battery operated, and frightfully efficient. Of course, their capacity is limited, so I had to use that cigarette routine for an excuse to switch it on when we came in. And the sound quality isn't hi-fi by musicians' standards, but voices are unmistakably recognizable. I wonder what version you can give Rowena that 'll cancel out this one?"

"How delightfully droll!" All of Wakerose's face seemed to have gradually turned as gray as his hair, but it can be stated that he did not flinch. "I should not have been so caustic at the expense of television, but I thought that was the only place where these things actually happened. So what is your price now?"

Simon was neatly coiling the flexible link to the microphone, preparatory to tucking it away in the interior of his gadget, but still leaving it operational for the last syllables that it could absorb.

"This will be hard for you to digest, Saville," he said, "but since anything you paid me would probably be money that you ought to be giving back to Rowena, my conscience would bother me, even if she has got plenty to spare. On the other hand, I'd like to get her out of your clutches without any messy headlines. So I'll give you a break. If you back me up tomorrow evening when I suggest that she ought to see another doctor — whom I'll suggest — and if you can think up a good excuse to resign voluntarily as her guardian and trustee, I won't have to play this tape to her."

Wakerose compressed his lips and stared grimly about the room. With his hands locked tensely behind his back, he paced across it to the open window and stood looking out into the night. The hunch of his shoulders gave the impression that if it had been on a higher floor he might have thrown himself out.

After a full minute, he turned.

"I shall think about it," he said, and walked towards the door.

"Think very hard," said the Saint. "Because I'm not quite sure that it mightn't be better for Rowena to know the whole horrible truth about you and your slimy scheme. And whatever brilliant inspirations you have about how to doublecross me and retrieve the situation, I'll always have this little recording."

Wakerose sneered silently at him, and went out without another word.

He came back soon after three o'clock in the morning, through the open window, and crossed in slow-motion tiptoe to the bed where the covers humped over a peacefully insensible occupant. There was enough starlight to define clearly the dark head-shape buried in the pillow but half uncovered by the sheet, and he swung mightily at it with the heavy candlestick which he carried in one gloved hand.

The massive base bit solidly and accurately into its target, but with no solid crunch of bone, only a soggy resistance — which was natural, since the "head" consisted of a crumpled towel balled up inside a dark pullover and artistically moulded and arranged to give the right appearance. At the same time, a blinding luminance dispelled the treacherous dimness for a fraction of a second before the Saint switched on a less painfully dazzling light.

He stood in the bathroom doorway, holding a Polaroid camera with flash attachment in one hand.

"I was beginning to be afraid you were never coming, Saville," he murmured genially. "But I kept telling myself that you were clever enough to realize that you ought to get rid of me and my tape record, no matter what, if you ever wanted to sleep well again. Or I hoped you would; because a picture like this would clinch any ambiguities in the sound track, which you might have been just slippery enough to think you could explain away."

Wakerose stood frozen in a kind of catalepsy, while Simon deftly changed the bulb in his flash and snapped one more after-the-crime souvenir, admittedly not an action shot, but just for luck.

"Of course, this washes out the previous deal," he said. "I don't want to spoil Rowena's day tomorrow, so I'm not going to play the tape to her till we come home. By that time I hope your air-conditioned juggernaut will have been repaired so that you can have taken off, leaving behind a signed confession which I think I can persuade her not to use as long as your accounts are in order and you never bother her again. Otherwise, chum, you may find yourself trying to sell Gourmet some novel articles on prison cuisine."

"Yes," said Rowena Flane. "Yes, now I understand — everything except why you've done so much and wouldn't take anything when you could have."

"Because," Simon said, "one day I'll get so much more out of it when I see you as slim and lovely as you should be, and I can think that I made it happen."

"Like in a fairy tale. So the prince kissed the toad, and broke the spell, and it turned into a beautiful princess. Oh, it's hard to believe it's coming true." But she was sad. "Only by then you won't be threatening to marry me any more."

"Why don't we wait a couple of years," said the Saint gently, "and see whether you're still single too?"