Trust The Saint

The uncured ham

Copyright © 1961 by Sales Publications, Inc.

Once upon a time there was in Sweden a Stallmästar, a master of the royal stables, whose lodge and dependencies were situated at the edge of a wooded park and a pretty lake only two miles north of the center of Stockholm. But even as far back as the middle of the seventeenth century such a choice location could not escape the covetous attention of more mercenary enterprise, and he was abruptly dispossessed in favor of an inn which, while still commemorating him sentimentally by calling itself Stallmästaregarden, today features the hors d’oeuvre table instead of the horse trough.

Once upon a much later time there was a thief in the United States who would have preferred to be an actor — or, if he had been giving his own version, an actor who was forced by lack of appreciation to become a thief. His name was Ernest Moldys, and it was the opinion of every producer for whom he had auditioned that he was a very bad actor indeed. It was, however, the consensus of many police departments that he was an excellent appraiser of jewels and a first-class burglar of houses, apartments, and hotel suites. These contradictory assessments had never convinced him, or discouraged him from declaiming long passages of Shakespeare whenever he could command an audience, which was usually in some tavern where he was buying drinks. Surmises were less unanimous as to whether he was obsessed with The Theatre for its own sake, or whether he was more lured by the putative fringe benefits of the profession — the international glamor queens whom he would professionally embrace and publicly escort, the swooning fans who would offer him their all for an autograph. He was certainly a dedicated dazzler of girls, the younger and more innocent the better; in fact, it was his too brilliant fascination, seduction, impregnation, and desertion of a teen-age beauty whom he found in a drama school which had achieved what a dozen detective bureaus had failed to do and put him to flight across the Atlantic to settle tentatively in Sweden, a country which will not extradite Americans on such locally incomprehensible complaints.

Once upon a yet more recent time, Simon Templar, who was known in many circles but fortunately for him not everywhere as “The Saint,” chanced to be dining at an adjacent table at Stallmästaregarden on the same night as Ernest Moldys had elected to take fodder at that hostelry.

“What I want,” said Mr Moldys aggressively, “is some of these ‘crayfters.’ ”

He was then still in his mid-thirties, and handsome enough in the pseudo-rugged way that appeals to advertising photographers commissioned to prove that even hairy-chested tattooed he-men can enjoy after-shave lotions. In lieu of personality he affected an aggressive manner developed from watching certain old television films and designed to impress his masculinity upon his consorts of the moment, whom he carefully selected for their youthful impressionability, like the round-faced flaxen-haired girl who accompanied him that evening.

“I am sorry,” said the head waiter, “but the kräftor season does not begin until tomorrow.”

Kräftor is the fresh-water crayfish which looks exactly like a four-inch miniature northern lobster, and which is one of the most prized delicacies of Swedish gastronomy.

“I told you that when I told you about them, Ernest,” said the girl, who looked as if she should have been doing her homework instead of going to dinner with such an obviously raffish date.

“I bet you can get them in America any time — if anyone wants ’em,” said Mr Moldys, implying that few people would condescend to do so.

“In Sweden the season is very short,” said the head waiter apologetically. “It is only one month, beginning tomorrow, August the eighth.”

“So what? So I made a mistake in the date. But that’s only a few hours away. What’s the difference? Don’t tell me you haven’t got a stock in the kitchen right now, ready for opening day. So let’s have some.”

“I am sorry, but the law is very strict. We cannot serve kräftor before tomorrow.”

Mr Moldys glowered.

“That’s why you’ll be goddam square-heads all your lives,” he said loudly.

The head waiter bowed icily and moved away, but Mr Moldys continued to hold forth for some time on the shortcomings of Europe in general, Scandinavia in particular, and the Swedish nation especially, in a voice that was pitched for the attention not only of his companion but of half the other customers in the room. It went to the limits of embarrassment before he consented to let her soothe him, and switched on again the flashing smile for which too many foolish virgins had forgiven his tasteless tantrums.

Although Mr Moldys tirelessly dramatized himself to an extent which had caused his privileged associates to nickname him “The Ham,” it was one of his failings that he could not confine himself to the act of charm, but firmly believed that the paperback private-eye performance was even more important.

Simon Templar would have been glad to forget the foregoing exhibition as quickly as possible, but a hardly overstretched arm of coincidence encircling a comparatively small capital had him installed at a veranda table at lunch the very next day at the Restaurant Riche, which is one of the impeccably best in Stockholm, when it again scooped in Ernest Moldys, who was now bedazzling another potential juvenile delinquent with the same enticing figure and coloration as his admirer of the night before, but a slightly different facial arrangement.

By this time Mr Moldys had lost interest in kräftor and wanted smorgasbord, which he was told the restaurant was not serving that day.

“Are you nuts?” demanded Mr Moldys indignantly. “All Swedish restaurants have smorgasbord. They do in America, anyway.”

“In Sweden there was always smorgasbord in the old days,” said another head waiter politely. “But it is not so fashionable here any more. However, you are lucky. Today is the first day of the crayfish.”

“Oh, we must have those, Ernest,” said the nymphet. “They are wonderful—”

“I don’t want any. I heard all about them yesterday, when I couldn’t get any. Now I don’t care if I never have one. I want smorgasbord.”

“How about some herring, sir? We have several kinds, the same as you would find in a smorgasbord.”

“I had herring yesterday. I can’t eat it every day. For Chrissake, can’t you ever get anything you want, when you want it, in this broken-down country? I know back-street delicatessens in New York that’d make this joint look sick.”

Mr Moldys was talking in the same intentionally public-address voice which he had used the night before, and as he glanced around to observe what attention he was getting, he caught Simon Templar’s analytical eye on him, and was vain enough to honestly believe that he recruited himself an ally by turning on a brilliantly comradely smile.

“You know what I mean, don’t you?” he said. “I can see you’ve been around. All this olde-world tradition and doing everything by the book — they’re so far back, they don’t even know they’ve been left behind! Don’t you lose your mind sometimes?”

“Sometimes, I wonder why the natives don’t lose theirs,” said the Saint calmly. “Considering some of the things they have to put up with.”

Ernest Moldys stared at him for several seconds with a strangely increasing uncertainty, and finally threw down his napkin with thinly disguised petulance.

“Let’s get out of here, you beautiful Viking, and see if we can’t get what we want somewheres else.”

Simon saw the head waiter pick up the reservation slip that had been on their table, and beckoned him.

“What was that charming character’s name?”

“A Mr Moldys.” The man showed him the paper. “You did not know him?”

“I wouldn’t want to,” said the Saint.

But this became untrue an instant after he said it; for the name, combined with something that had been vaguely familiar about the face, suddenly rang a bell in the complex circuits of Simon Templar’s memory, which absorbed every item of criminal intelligence that touched it like a sponge, but had to be prodded in sometimes peculiar ways to squeeze the information back out again.

At this moment he recalled certain facts about Ernest Moldys which made him want very much to know more. There were, for instance, some details about the suicide of that sixteen-year-old starlet in Hollywood on which his recollection was hazy, to say nothing of the exact terms of a reward which had once been offered by the victims of one of Mr Moldys’s more remunerative depredations.

The Saint did not ordinarily feel that his mission required him to administer personal correctives to obnoxious American tourists whose misbehavior could supply gratuitous ammunition to the ever-watchful snipers at the free world, but this was a case where natural impulse and lofty objective combined irresistibly with sound business practise. Once upon an earlier time the consequent leg work might have seemed discouragingly long-drawn and complicated, but in the age of electronic communications and jet aircraft it was almost no effort at all to a man who could sleep at any hour and altitude in a reclining seat like a child in a cradle. The Saint, who had nothing else planned for the weekend, merely took an SAS plane over the North Pole from Copenhagen to Los Angeles and returned by the same route, with his errands accomplished, in less time than it took Lindbergh to hobble from New York to Paris.

Ernest Moldys had done very well out of the last exercises of his vocation, but he also had very expensive tastes. These, like his other fickle appetites, were only partly genuine, another large part being dictated by his own conception of the way a stage or movie star such as he should have been would live. But the resulting pattern had made alarmingly rapid inroads on the folios of American Express travellers’ checks into which he had contrived to convert most of his loot, and he only knew one trade that was likely to replenish them.

Therefore he listened with guarded but lively interest one evening when he was having a cocktail by himself in the bar of the Grand Hotel, and a tall and vaguely piratical-looking individual whose features were recently familiar came in with an older man who wore his dark suit and bifocals with the unmistakable patina of a high-priced attorney, and after ordering a couple of Peter Dawsons on the rocks they continued what must have been a lengthily waged discussion.

“What burns me,” said the Saint, “is that this harpy tells the court she needs all that alimony just to live on, in the style to which I’ve accustomed her. And she gets it. I have to pay her a company president’s income just to feed and clothe her, supposedly. And the next thing I know, she’s financing a season of Shakespeare. Well, if she can afford that, she obviously doesn’t need all that money to live on, and we ought to be able to get it reduced.”

“I know how you feel, Mr Hurley,” said the legal type. “But it’s her income now, and she can do what she likes with it.”

“If she wants to play at being a producer, she could cash in some of her jewels. Must be more than a quarter of a million dollars I spent on them — and of course she kept ’em all. There was ninety thousand just for a string of little rocks to hang where she should have a rope. Why doesn’t she hock them for capital?”

“They were part of the divorce settlement, Mr Hurley. There’s no law that says she has to dig into her capital for anything she can pay for out of income.”

“Does that include gigolos? This big nance that she’s backing — with my money — nobody ever heard of him before. But she’s going to make him a star. Even a California divorce-court judge couldn’t be stupid enough not to see that she must have some other motive besides giving young genius a break.”

“But you yourself called him a ‘big nance’ — and that’s pretty common gossip. You don’t seriously think you could convince anyone that they were having an affair.”

“Frankly, that part of it baffles me. Enid has always been queer for actors, but at least she only flipped for the virile kind. When the next one of those comes along that queen is going to wonder what hit him.”

“Perhaps you should look forward to that, Mr Hurley. She might marry the next one, if he’s virile enough.”

“She’d never be stupid enough to do that unless he earned more than she’s getting from me. Not that that’d stop her having her fun... It still gripes me. Enid Hurley, the great impresario, preparing to stand Copenhagen on its ear, dazzling ’em with my diamonds, taking over Kronborg Castle, yet, with my money!”

“Try not to think about it. Go down to Cannes and look at the bikinis.”

“That’s not what I interrupted your vacation for. I want you to try and do something.”

“I’ve told you—”

“But she doesn’t have a lawyer here, telling her. Go to Copenhagen and see her. Bluff her. Try to throw a scare into her. Tell her we’re going to court to ask for a revision of the settlement. Tell her this proves she doesn’t need so much alimony, which tell her the Court wouldn’t give her for immoral purposes like subsidizing this swishy ham. Dress it up in all the phony legal gobbledygook, and if you do it well enough you might worry the hell out of her. Then offer to call it off if she’ll agree to accept a nice fat cut.”

“I don’t think you’ve got a chance.”

“Well, let me take that chance, will you? I can’t let it go without trying. You might be able to convince her that she stands a good chance of ending up with nothing, if she fights it. She might even be tried for perjury or promoting vice or something. The arguments are your business. You’ll be paid for it.”

“It’s not that I mind earning a fee, Mr Hurley, but I can’t conscientiously encourage you to spend your money with such a small prospect of getting anything in return.”

“I’d rather do that than give it all to Enid without a struggle. And if you do swing it, you can bill me for a twenty-thousand-dollar bonus.”

“Well,” said the lawyer, glancing at his watch, “let’s go to lunch and see if we can’t improve our case just a little.”

They paid their bill and departed, leaving Mr Moldys with his ears still tingling, but not from the traditional eavesdropper’s embarrassment. It was, rather, a warm glow of satisfaction that they had served him well, with a not inconsiderable assist from some possible guardian devil — a sensation that harmonized well with an equally symbolic itching of the fingers.

Mrs Enid Hurley, a rich divorcée with jewels and a weakness for actors — it was a situation that might have been made for him. The only thought that failed to occur to him was that it had.

About all that was left for him to find out for himself was the name of the hotel where this pre-cooked goose was laying its golden eggs, and in a city as small as Copenhagen this would normally have taken no more than a few phone calls after his arrival. For him, the catastrophic obstacle was in the word “arrival.” The cynical counsellor who had advised him to take a cure overseas had handed him, for a disproportionate fee, a list of countries warranted to be salubrious for his ailment, but Denmark was not one of them. And thus, after only a few minutes’ contemplation of this windfall that had been so extravagantly dumped in his lap, he found himself glaring at it with the obsessive acerbity of a shark which has discovered a succulent skin-diver cavorting in its dining depths, only to learn from an unpredicted bump on the nose that this mouth-watering morsel is protected inside a plastic bubble installed by the anti-shark experts of some camera crew shooting scenes for another submarine superscoop.

What this trauma might have done to the psyche of Ernest Moldys (he had tried to crash the marquees with more euphonious and star-sounding appellations, but had lately settled on the theory of honest down-to-earthiness: if Ernest Borgnine could win Academy Awards and Ernest Hemingway could cop Pulitzer Prizes, who could make cracks about Ernest Moldys?) is an interesting speculation, but it was not put to the final test, for after three days and nights of agonized frustration his sufferings were ended by precisely the kind of miracle he had been reduced to dreaming about.

As he entered his hotel and headed for the desk to ask for his key that auspicious afternoon, a woman hurried in front of him with a preoccupied flash of apology and commanded the attention of the uniformed incumbent with the bulldozing confidence of five generations of spoiled American wives behind her.

“I’m Mrs Hurley,” she proclaimed, with the clarity of royalty announcing itself. “Have you got me a driver yet?”

“A driver, Mrs Hurley?” The attendant looked blank. “What kind of driver did you want?”

“Do I have to go over all that again? I told you last night—”

“I was not on duty last night, madame.”

“Well, whoever was here on the desk. I told him I needed someone to drive my car to Hälsingborg tomorrow, and he promised me he’d arrange it.”

The attendant thumbed through a large ledger of scrawled notes and began a muttered consultation with an assistant, and the woman looked at Moldys again.

“I’m sorry — don’t let me hold you up. This is obviously going to take time!”

He gave her the most dazzlingly good-natured smile that he could achieve with his heart in his mouth, without letting it fall out. He was so staggered by his good fortune that he almost lost all the savoir-faire on which he prided himself.

“Please — I’m not in any hurry.”

“This is so aggravating, I thought I’d drive across from Hälsingborg and see some of the country, instead of flying, so yesterday I have to slip in the bathtub and fall down and crack my wrist.” She raised a left hand which protruded from a small cast which had been hidden by the foulard sling in which she carried it. “Now I’ve got the problem of taking my car back. I suppose I could get along by myself somehow, but I might get into trouble, and it seems foolish to take a chance.”

“I am sorry, madame,” said the man behind the desk, “but I can find nothing about a driver. Perhaps when the night porter comes on duty—”

“But if I’m going to leave at all, I’ve got to leave first thing in the morning. If he hasn’t done anything about it, somebody else had better get on the ball. Are you sure you looked under the right name? It’s H-U-R-L-E-Y. Mrs Enid Hurley.”

“Yes, madame. But there is nothing here. Would you like me to try to find you a driver?”

At long last, Ernest Moldys regained full possession of his wits, and simultaneously of his voice. Although he was still finding it hard to believe that this was not all a wonderful dream, he knew exactly what had to be done and how to do it.

“Mrs Hurley,” he said, “if you won’t think I’m being presumptuous, you have no problem. I’d be honored if you’d let me drive you to wherever you were going.”

“Oh, but I couldn’t possibly take up your time!”

Thus, after a little perfunctory argument and an interval of a few hours, she was seated with him at a window table on the Strand Hotel’s roof terrace, overlooking the lights of half the city, while they toasted each other in various experimental flavors of brännvin over the prawn pancakes and debated amiably on the merits of each. It was not even an ordeal for Mr Moldys, for although she was considerably older than his usual choice, she was in such a superbly groomed and pampered state of preservation that she did not look a day older than himself. She had classic features and a Vogue-model figure, and her personality would have made the local chick whom he had sidetracked for the occasion look insipid beside her.

The only fault he had to find was that the diamonds he had heard so much about were not in evidence. As if sensing something critical in the way he had studied her evening finery, she fingered the costume necklace and bracelet set she was wearing, and said, “I’m afraid I’m not very dressy, for a place like this. But I only came for a couple of days, and since I was driving alone it didn’t seem very smart to load all my baubles in the car, so I left them in the hotel safe in Copenhagen.”

Moldys gallantly concealed his disappointment, although it seemed as if the luck which he thought had changed was turning dangerously coy again.

“A woman like you doesn’t need jewels as much as they need her,” he said, omitting to credit the writer from whom he had swiped the line.

Later in the meal, he learned for the first time that Hälsingborg, their destination on the west coast of Sweden, lay only two and a half miles across a narrow strait from the similarly named Danish town of Helsingör which was practically a suburb of Copenhagen, a mere thirty miles from the Danish capital.

“Both sides used to be fortified,” explained Mrs Hurley, “and King Erik of Pomerania, who owned all the Scandinavian countries too, in those days, five or six hundred years ago, charged a toll on all the ships going through the Sound. It must have been quite a racket, because when Frederik II got to be King of Denmark he rebuilt the fort on his side into a fancy castle which he called Kronborg. It was finished about 1585, only fifteen years before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet and made it the scene of a practically prehistoric legend. That’s what they call poetic license, I guess.”

“You sound as if you’d made a real study of it,” he said admiringly.

“Well, naturally I’m interested. You see, I’m putting on a production of Hamlet there — of course, Helsingör is the place that Shakespeare called ‘Elsinore.’ ”

“What a wonderful idea, to do Hamlet right in the very place where it happened!”

“It probably never happened at all, and it certainly couldn’t have happened there, as I’ve told you. But even the Danes have probably convinced themselves by now that it did. It isn’t a new idea to put on the play there — people have been doing it since 1816. The challenge is to do it better.”

“You know, I’d never have taken you for a producer.”

“Because I’m not chewing a cigar? But I’m as tough as any of them, I hope.”

“I refuse to believe it. At least, not like most of the ones I came across.”

“Don’t tell me you’re an actor!”

“I used to be, sort of.” He was ad-libbing furiously now, not sure where he was going, but inspiredly sure that he was on the right track. “Nothing very important, you know. But some kind critics predicted a great future for me.”

“What did you do?”

“I quit while I was ahead. I was on the verge of getting somewhere, when I inherited quite a bit of money, and the incentive to keep struggling was gone. But even now I can feel what it would mean to speak those lines in the place that Shakespeare himself was actually thinking of.”

“Lots of ’em have done it — from Sir Laurence Olivier, way back in 1937 with Vivien Leigh, to Sir John Gielgud in ’39. Sir Michael Redgrave in 1950, and Richard Burton in ’54. He doesn’t need to be knighted since they made him the King in Camelot. But I still see the part differently from any of them.”

Mr Moldys saluted her with another heartening measure of aromatic alcohol followed by the traditional beer chaser, and said:

She looked at him with thoughtful interest.

“That was a nice reading,” she said. “I’ve always thought Hamlet should be played something like you would naturally do it — as a real he-man trying to break out of a neurotic tradition, not a tormented introvert himself.”

“Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,” he said.

“And thus the native hue of resolution

Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”

“Exactly,” she agreed. “Now, I’ve got a young actor who’s physically just the way I visualize a Hamlet type, but temperamentally I’m beginning to worry about him.”

Moldys was astute enough not to crowd his luck any harder at that moment, and in any case he wanted time to decide what to drive for. But he was exultantly certain that he had made a tremendous impression, and it was unthinkable that such a sequence of breaks could fail to climax somehow in a perfect pay-off.

The Saint had a privileged insight into that psychology, having been the subject of it on several occasions himself.

Moldys played it with creditable restraint for the rest of the evening and through the following day’s long drive, devoting as much time as possible to the rôle of intelligent listener, sympathetic but disinterested, agreeable but authoritative, which demanded a minimum of effort but gave him the maximum space in which to wait for the decisive opening.

But in spite of all that, when they sat at dinner again the following night on the terrace of the newly completed Kärnan Hotel on the sea front of Hälsingborg, he began to experience some of the classic emotions of the mythical giant Tantalus (of whom he personally had never heard) whose name is immortalized in the word “tantalize,” whose doom it was to be parched by eternal thirst while chained beside a pool which always playfully receded a millimeter beyond the utmost reach of his tongue. He had even developed a confident belief that he was attractive to her on the most downright sexual plane, and that was an angle from which he knew unlimited approaches. But between consummation and salvation, between all his tactical advances and her jewels, still lay those two-and-a-half miles of international water and the whimsies of international treaties. His lawyer, who was highly conscientious within his limits, had been most insistent on those technicalities.

Thus they looked at each other in a farewell atmosphere across a table which commanded the narrow strait separating them from the romantic turrets of Kronborg Castle, which was accommodatingly floodlit, and sighed with appropriate appreciation, and she could say, “I just hope everything will work out all right. I’m taking on such a big thing on my own. I mustn’t even begin to doubt what I’m doing.”

Ernest Moldys took a big chance, from desperation, and leaned forward to try another quote, in his best voice:

“You must believe in what you’re doing, Mrs Hurley,” he covered himself hastily.

“Sometimes that isn’t so easy.” She continued to stare at him with an air of discovery. “I talk very big and independent, but it’s a lonely business.”

“I’ll be waiting to read the notices, and I’m sure they’ll be great.”

“Don’t talk as if you’d be a million miles away. You’ve got to come to the opening. In fact, since you’ve come this far, why don’t you come over with me and see what we’re doing?”

“I can’t.” He had to think of a reason quickly, and perhaps automatically clutched at a recent memory for inspiration. “My attorney is arriving from New York tomorrow to see me about some important business, and I must be back in Stockholm to meet him.”

She grimaced.

“Don’t talk to me about lawyers — I left Copenhagen to get away from one who was trying to blackmail me, in a strictly professional way. Packed an overnight bag and drove on to the ferry at Helsingör without telling anyone where I was going. I’m hoping by this time he’ll’ve gotten tired of cooling his heels in my hotel waiting for me to come back.”

Unlike Moldys, she did not have to improvise any of her explanations, for the creation of cover stories was one of the Saint’s greatest specialties, and when he had polished one there was seldom a crevice in it for any question that had not been anticipated and prepared for.

He found her more attractive than ever that night, even if his primary impetus was provided by the magnetism of the diamonds which still reposed in a hotel safe a few infinite miles away, and his wooing might have become troublesome if she had not been able to plead that her cracked wrist was aching and throbbing in a way that would have completely inhibited her from responding with all the enthusiasm that such an occasion deserved. The Saint had not overlooked that hazard either.

The restless night that Moldys spent, however, was due to less romantic discouragement. In spite of all the auspices, the chariot of fortune seemed to have ended its delirious gallop in a morass of pure glue.

He was finishing a gloomy breakfast in the dining room next morning when Enid Hurley came in, and even across the room her face told him that something new and dire had been added to the situation.

“You’ll never guess,” she said incontrovertibly, as she reached his table.

“What?”

“You remember that lawyer I mentioned last night? Well, he was hired by my ex-husband to pester me. So this morning I thought, before I actually went back, it might be smart to call my secretary in Copenhagen and find out if he was still hanging around. And you know what I find out?”

“No.”

“He’s gone, all right. But while I’ve been away, since he couldn’t work on me, it seems he went to work on my actor, and got him so scared that he’s quit and flown back to Hollywood. So here I am, scheduled for an opening in ten days, with no leading man.”

“That’s terrible,” said Moldys uncertainly.

“It’s worse than that! It’s such a cheap victory for that bastard I was married to. He’s made me look ridiculous in front of the whole world. And there’s nothing I can do about it. You don’t replace a sensational Hamlet overnight.”

She stared at him as if she were going to burst into tears. But instead of saline solution, her eyes slowly filled with a strange inspirational light. Suddenly she pointed a finger like a sword.

“You,” she breathed.

“What?” said Ernest Moldys, drawing a total blank in what should have been his climactic moment.

“You could play Hamlet,” she said. “The way I visualized it. Better than that weak-kneed fop who walked out. You must do it, Ernest!”

Moldys moistened his lips and swallowed hard to hold down his bouncing aorta. He had a buzzing in his ears and a feeling of vertigo that made him hold on to the table to keep the room from spinning.

It is not for nothing that an over-enthusiastic actor is vulgarly referred to as a “ham.” In the opinion of this etymologist, the term has neither anatomical nor dietetic connotations, but is simply an abbreviation of “Hamlet,” the part which supposedly symbolizes the pinnacle of histrionic ambition. And if the perfect illustration of this theory was called for, no better example could be cited than Mr Ernest Moldys.

And now it seemed as if the miracle in which he had almost lost faith had at the last moment answered its last mysterious cue and handed him the ultimate rôle on what would have been conventionally called a silver platter by anyone who was not more practically fascinated by its incrustation of diamonds.

“You must do it,” Enid Hurley was pleading. “For me. You can start rehearsing tomorrow. You know the lines already, I’m sure. You can phone your attorney in Stockholm, and tell him to fly over and meet you in Copenhagen instead. If it means any extra expense, I’ll take care of it. Between us, we’ll show ’em. Please, Ernest, tell me you will!”

With her impassioned eagerness and stark-naked need, it was not hard for Mr Moldys to forget that she was a comparatively old bag. Perhaps, he reflected (if he was capable just then of reflecting so coherently) he had too long been squandering his talent for seduction. At any rate, with everything else considered, the prospective change of pace was in no way deterrent.

Rising at last to his moment of truth, he leaned forward and covered her hand caressingly.

“Enid,” he said, “for you, I’ll do it. ‘The play’s the thing...’ ”

Simon Templar was unable this time to take the usual bows for the script he had written, because he thought it advisable to stay well out of sight until Ernest Moldys was far off the ferry and irrevocably committed to Danish soil.

Moldys was allowed to drive a little way from the dock before a uniformed guard stopped him and asked for his passport.

The guard handed the passport to a large dour individual in plain clothes who loomed up behind him.

At the same moment, a spectacled American legal type whom Moldys abruptly recognized appeared on the other side of the car and opened the door. Before he had finished resolving the conclusion that this could only be the attorney of Mrs Hurley’s ex-husband who had not given up after all but had been lying in wait with some new scheme of harassment, Mrs Hurley had slipped nimbly out of the adjoining seat and was hurrying away, with the supposed pestering lawyer making no attempt to detain or follow her.

The plain-clothes man put the passport in his pocket and said stiffly, “Mr Moldys, I am of the Danish State Police. We have been asked by the American Government to hold you for extradition. You are under arrest.”

The American lawyer leaned over to exhibit an identification card in a small plastic case. It bore his photograph and the insignia of the Department of Justice. He said, “I expect I’ll be taking you back, Hambo.”

Mr Moldys was too devastated even to feel insulted.

“Who set me up?” he croaked.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the Federal agent virtuously.

Ernest Moldys would have been prematurely enlightened if he had witnessed the reunion of Mrs Hurley with the piratical-looking man who had last been heard speaking of her so vindictively, around the corner of an adjacent building.

“You must have been magnificent,” Simon Templar said, and hugged her. “At this point I’ve a good mind to bow out and let you collect all of the reward.”

“I wouldn’t want that,” she said. “I only tried to lead up to everything exactly the way you coached me. I never thought I could do it. I told you I never did any professional acting myself. It was my daughter who had all the talent. I’m the one who’d be very happy to bow out now.”

The Saint shook his head.

“I’m afraid that’s impossible. You’ll certainly have to testify on the charges involving her. And frankly, it should be worth something to see the Ham’s performance when he finds out why he shouldn’t have avoided meeting the parents of that girl in the drama school that he gave such a shoddy deal to. At the very least, he would have known your real name was different from the stage label she was using.”