Leslie Charteris - The Saint Goes On - The Case of the Frightened Innkeeper

Leslie Charteris - The Saint Goes On - The Case of the Frightened Innkeeper

"Business" took Simon Templar to Penzance, though nobody every knew exactly what he had to do there. He took Hoppy Uniatz with him for company, but Hoppy never saw him do it..

The chronicler, whose one object it is to conceal no fact which by its unfair suppression might deceive any one of the two hundred and fifty thousand earnest readers of this epic, is able to reveal that this performance had never entered Simon Templar's head; although the Saint would have done it without turning a hear if it had happened to be necessary. But he did not say so; and Mr. Uniatz, citizen of a country whose inhabitants regard a thousand-mile jaunt in much the same light as the average Londoner regards a trip to Brighton, would have been quite unperturbed whatever the Saint had announced for his programme.

He sat placidly at the Saint's side while the huge snarling Hirondel droned eastwards along the coast.. They left the rocks of Cornwall behind them and entered the rolling pastures and red earth of Devon, driving sometimes through cool shadows of a wood, sometimes catching sight of a wedge of sea sparkling in the sunlight between a fold of the hills. Simon Templar, who was constitutionally unable to regard the highways of England as anything but a gigantic road-face circuit laid out for his personal use, did nothing to encourage a placid relaxation in anybody who rode with him..

He put down his tankard untouched; for it was a girl who came through into the serving space behind the bar.

If there was to be a beauteous damsel in distress, Simon decided, the conventions insisted that it must be her role. She was tall and slender, with dark straight hair that took on an unexpected curl around her neck, steady grey eyes, and a mouth to which there was only one obvious way of paying tribute. Her skin reminded him vaguely of peaches and rose-petals, and the sway of her dress as she came in gave him a suggestion of her figure that filled his head with ideas of a kind to which he was quite amorally susceptible. She said "good evening" in a voice that scarcely intruded itself into the quiet room and turned to some mysterious business with the shelves behind her.

"What would you think," he asked, "of a girl whose name was Julia?"

Out of the corner of his eye he saw her start, and turned round to face her with that gay expectant smile coming back to his lips. He knew he had been right.

"I came right along," he said.

Her gaze flashed to Hoppy Uniatz, and then back to the Saint, in a second of frightened uncertainty.

"I don't understand," she said.

Simon picked up a burnt match-stick from the floor and leaned his elbows on the bar. As he moved his tankard to make room, it split a tiny puddle of beer on the scarred oak. He put the match-stick in the puddle and drew a moist line down from it towards her, branching out into a couple of legs. While he did it, he talked.

"My name is Tombs." He drew a pair of arms spreading out from his first straight line, so that the sketch suddenly became an absurd childish drawing of a man with the original spot of liquid from which it had developed for a head. "I booked a room the other day, by letter." He dipped the match again, and drew a neat elliptical halo of beer over the head of his figure. "Didn't you get it?" he asked, with perfectly natural puzzlement.

She stared down at his completed handiwork for a moment; and then she raised her eyes to his face with a sudden light of hope and relief in them. She picked up a cloth and wiped the drawing away with a hand that was not quite steady.

"Oh, yes," she said. "I'm sorry -- I didn't recognise you. You haven't stayed here before, have you?"

"I'm afraid not," said the Saint. "But then, I didn't know what I was missing."

Taking in the grace of her slim young suppleness as she turned away, Simon Templar was more than ever convinced that he was not wasting his time. He had been lured into no wild-goose chase. In that quiet inn at the foot of Larkstone Vale there was a man in whose eyes he had seen the fear of death, and a damsel in distress who was as beautiful as anything he had seen for many moons; that was more or less what he had been promised, and it was only right that the promise should have been so accurately fulfilled. The dreary cynics were everlastingly wrong; such joyously perfect and improbable things did happen -- they were always happening to him. He knew that he was once more on the frontiers of adventure; but even then he did not dream of anything so amazing as the offer that Bellamy Wage had made on the day when he was sentenced to ten years, penal servitude after the Neovision Radio Company failed for nearly two million pounds...

He scowled over the enigma for a few moments longer, and then he shrugged.

"Anyway, I suppose we'll find out. I'm going to do my sleeping in the daytime like the Four Horsemen -- the night has a thousand eyes, and mine are going to be two of 'em."

He got up out of the armchair into which he had thrown himself, with a quick smile that wiped the hard calculating lines out of his face in a flash of careless friendliness that was absurdly comforting. She really was rather beautiful, even if that moment found her at a loss for anything but the conventional answer.

"I don't know why you should take so much trouble ---"

"It's no trouble. Most of us have to earn our living, and if there is any useful racket working around here I shall get my percentage out of the gate. Don't worry, kid-- Hoppy and I are rough on rats, and when the ungodly think up a game that we didn't play in our cradles ..."

"Go back to your room, bright eyes," he said, and his hand touched her shoulder as she stood up. "And don't lose any sleep over it. Whatever this racket is, I'll take it apart and see what makes it go."

...

"What on earth do you mean?" demanded the Saint faintly.

"I mean I take 'em for a ride, like ya told me, boss. We take de motor-boat, an' when we're outside de harbour I haul out my Betsy an' give dem de woiks. Dey won't do nut'n." Mr. Uniatz stretched himself complacently. "Say, juse guys mind if I take dis bottle upstairs an' finish it? I just finished de last voice of a pome I was makin' up on de way back, an' I gotta tell it to Julia before I forget."

Leslie Charteris - The Saint Goes On - The Elusive Ellshaw

Leslie Charteris - The Saint Goes On - The Elusive Ellshaw

He moved round the house as soundlessly as a hunting cat. As Chief Inspector Teal knew and admitted, queer things, almost incredible things, happened to Simon Templar when he got out in the dark -- things which would never have been believed by the uninitiated observer who had only seen him in his sophisticated moods. He could leave his immaculately dressed, languidly bantering sophistication behind him in a room, and go out to become an integral part of the wild. He could go out and move through the night with the supple smoothness of a panther, without rustling a blade of grass under his feet, merging himself into minute scraps of shadow like a jungle animal, feeling his way uncannily between invisible obstructions, using strange faculties of scent and hearing with such weird certainty that those who knew him best, when they thought about it, sometimes wondered if the roots of all his amazing outlawry might not be found threading down into the deeps of this queer primitive instinct.

No living man could have seen or heard him as he passed on his silent tour, summarizing the square lights of windows in the black cube of the house. ...

He came down to the water's edge and sat with his back to a tree, as motionless as if he had been one of its own roots. Surely, he knew, the death would come; but whether it would successfully claim a victim depended largely upon him. There was a smooth speed about every move of the case which appealed to him: it was cut and thrust, parry and riposte -- a series of lightning adjustments and counter-moves which he could appreciate for its intrinsic qualities even while he was still fumbling for the connecting link that held it all together. ...

A mosquito zoomed into his ear with a vicious ping, and one of his thighs began to itch; but still he did not move. At other times in his life he had lain out like that, immobile as a carved outcrop of rock, combing the dark with keyed-up senses as delicate as those of any savage, when the first man whose nerves had cracked under the unearthly strain would have paid for the microscopic easing of a cramped muscle with his life. That utter relaxation of every expectant sinew, the supersensitive isolation of every faculty from all disturbances except those which he was waiting for, had become so automatic that he used no conscious effort to achieve it. And in that way, without even turning his head, he became aware of the black ghost of a canoe that was drifting soundlessly down the stream towards the place where he sat.

Still he did not move. A nightingale started to tune up in the branches over his head, and a frail wisp of cloud floated idly across the hazy stars which were the only light in the darkness. The canoe was only a dim black brush-stroke on the grey gloom, but he saw that there was only one man in it, and saw the ripple of tarnished=silver water as the unknown dipped his paddle and turned the craft in towards the bank. It seemed unlikely that any ordinary man would be cruising down the river at that hour alone, revelling in a dreamy romance with himself, and the Saint had an idea that the man who was coming towards him was not altogether ordinary. Unless a dead man creeping down the Thames in a canoe at midnight could be called ordinary.

The canoe slid under the bank, momentarily out of sight; but the Saint carried on the picture of what was happening. He heard the soft rustle of grasses as the side scraped the shore, the plip-plop of tiny drops of water as the wet paddle was lifted inboard, the faint grate of the wood as it was laid down. He sat on under his tree without a stif in his graven stillness, building sound upon sound into a construction of every movement that was as vividly clear to him as if he had watched it in broad daylight. He heard the scuff of a leather shoe-sole on the wood, quite different from the dull grate of the paddle; he rustle of creased clothing; the whisper of turf pressed underfoot. Then a soundless pause. He sensed that the man who had disembarked was probing the night clumsily, looking for some sign or signal, hesitating over his next move. Then he heard the frush of trodden grass again, and a sifflation of suppressed breathing that would have been quite inaudible to any hearing less uncannily acute than his.

A shadow loomed up against the stygian tarnish of the water, half the height of a man, and remained still. The prowler was sitting on the bank, waiting for something that Simon could not divine.

Leslie Charteris - Saint in the Sun - Provence: The Hopeless Heiress

Leslie Charteris - Saint in the Sun - Provence: The Hopeless Heiress

"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."

..
"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, Saville'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.

Leslie Charteris - Saint in the Sun - Lucerne: The Russian Prisoner

Leslie Charteris - Saint in the Sun - Lucerne: The Russian Prisoner

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 vaporised 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 Vierwaldstattersee, he leaned, the more rugged and less accessible side which rises to the mingled tripper-traps and tax dodger chalets of Burgenstock, and by land it was reachable only by a second-to-secondary road which served nothing but a few other similarly isolated hermitages.

..
Simon followed the shore line to Viznau before he turned away to the right. From his bag he had produced 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. The 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 facades of Burgenstock high against the star-powered 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 unalarming.

Leslie Charteris - St Tropez: The Ugly Impresario

The Saint In the Sun

Leslie Charteris - St Tropez: The Ugly Impresario

Maureen Herald was an actress. She had entered Simon's life with a letter from David Lewin of the Daily Express:

Dear Saint,
Enclosed please find Maureen Herald. I don't need to tell you who she is, but I can tell you that I wish everyone I know in show business was as nice a person. She has to go to St Tropez to talk to someone who is not so nice. She doesn't know anyone else there, and she can't go places alone, and she may well want a change of company. I've told her that you also are a good friend and comparatively nice and can behave yourself if you have to. No wonder some people think I'm crazy.

She had gray eyes and what he could only have described as hair-colored hair, something between brown and black with natural variations of shading that had not been submerged by the artificial uniformity of a rinse. It was a perfect complement to her rather thin patrician features, which would only have been hardened by any obvious embellishments. She had a gracefully lean-moulded figure to match, interestingly feminine but without the exaggerated curvature in the balcony which most of the reigning royalty of her profession found it necessary to posses or simulate. His first guess would have been that she had started out as a high fashion model, but he learned that in fact she had been a nurse at the Hollywood Hospital when a famous director was brought in for treatment of an acute ulcer and offered her a screen test before he left. Her rise to stardom had been swift and outwardly effortless.

..
This Maureen Herald," Dominique Rousse said. "She is a good friend of you?"

In French, the words "good friend" applied to one of the opposite sex have a possible delicate ambiguity which Simon did not overlook.

"I only met her yesterday," he answered. "But I think she's very nice."

...
The only possibility in between would be one of those elaborately plotted and engineered swindles which delighted the Saint's artistic soul, but for which none of the elements of the situation seemed to offer a readymade springboard.

It was quite a problem for a buccaneer with a proper sens of responsibility to his life's mission, and Simon Templar was not much closer to a solution when he walked back to his temporary home at what for St Tropez was a comparatively rectangular hour of the night, having decided that some new factor might have to be added before an inspiration would get off the ground.

He was at the entrance when the door of one of the parked cars in the driveway opened, and quick footsteps sounded behind him, and a woman said: "Pardon, Monsieur Templar--"

The voice was halfway familiar, enough to make him turn unguardedly before he fully recognized it, and then he also recognized Dominique Rousse and it was too late.

She smiled.

"So my husband was right," she said. "You are le Saint."

"He wins the bet," Simon said resignedly. "Is he here?"

"No. He is at the Casino. He will be there until dawn. For him gambling is a passion. I told him I had a headache and could not stand any more. Do you have an aspirin?"

The Saint contemplated her amiably for a profound moment.

"I'll see if I can find one."

"You are wonderful."

"I only try to oblige."

"You make this much easier for me. You know that I want something more--"

"More difficult?"

"Much more. I want to be Messalina in this film of Undine. It is the most important thing in the world."

His eyebrows slanted banteringly.

.. She stood up and came close. "If you can do nothing else, kill Undine for me."

He stared at her. Her arms went up, and her hands linked behind his neck, her eyes half closed and her mouth half open.

"I would be very grateful," she said.

"I'm sure you would," he said as lightly as possible. "And if the flics didn't pin it on me, your husband would only shoot me and get acquitted."

"Who would tell him? It is for his good, too, and what he does not know will not hurt him, any more than what I had to do before with Undine."

Simon realized, almost against credibility, that she was perfectly sober and completely serious. It was one of the most stunning revelations of total amorality that even he had ever encountered-- and ethical revulsion made it no easier to forget that it came with the bait of a face and body that might have bothered St Anthony.

He let his lips be drawn down until their lips met and clung; and then as he responded more experimentally she drew back.

"Will you do it?"

The Saint had reached an age when it seemed only common sense to avoid gratuitously tangling with the kind of woman which hell hath no fury like, but he never lied if he could avoid it.

"I'll think about it," he said truthfully.

"Do not think too long," she said. "You would do it cleverly; but another person could also do it, not so cleverly, but to be acquitted. Only then I would not owe you anything."

"You aren't offering a down payment?" he said with a shade of mockery.

"No. But I am not like Undine. I would not cheat in that way."

She looked searchingly into his eyes for some seconds longer, but the pouting mask of her beauty gave no hint of whatever she thought she found. Then abruptly she turned and walked to the door. Before he could be quite sure of her intention, she had opened it without a pause and gone out; it closed behind her, and the click of her heels went away uninterruptedly down the stone hall and ended int he metallic rattle of the elevator gate.

The Saint took a long slow breath and passed the back of a hand across his forehead.

Then he picked up his glass again and emptied it.

He knew then that his strange destiny was running true to form, and that all the apparently random and pointless incidents of the past thirtysix hours, which have been recorded here as casually as they happened, could only be building towards the kind of eruptive climax in which he was always getting involved. But now he could go to sleep peacefully, secure in the certainty that something else would have to happen and that this would quite possibly show him what he had to do.

But he never dreamed how bizarre the denouement was to be.

Leslie Charteris - The Saint in the Sun - Nassau: The Fast Women

Leslie Charteris - The Saint in the Sun - Nassau: The Fast Women

"Her name is Teresa Montesino, if you insist on a label on every tombstone."

Simon allowed his somewhat obstructed gaze to transfer itself to the exotic pulse-perturber on whom Godfrey Quillen was exerting his highest-octane charm. This was not an unbearably painful shift. The brunette had all the more obvious attractions that Mrs Quillen superficially lacked. She had the intense dark eyes and sensual lips that automatically inspire exploratory ideas, and the corporeal structure which it is always fun to explore. A hopeless cynic might have prognosticated that at some middle-aged future she could be just plain fat, but this was an unhappy conclusion that a less cautious soul did not have to envisage prematurely. At a similar age to Cynthia's, still safely under thirty, she offered the overwhelming sort of competition that any wife might reasonably have qualms about.

"You can't shoot him for having good eyesight," said the Saint soothingly.

...
"Are you so unhappy to be stuck with me?" asked Teresa.

She had enough Mediterranean accent to give her voice a fascinating different intonation, but not enough to attract too much attention or to become quickly tiresome.

"By no means," said the Saint, and gave her another thorough inspection at this more convenient range. "I mean, am I stuck? If so, I have a sensational idea. Let's throw a dinner party of our own--for disreputably unmarried couples. And just to be sure we don't insult anybody, let's not invite anyone else."

That was the beginning of an evening which he would remember for a long time. Not that he was likely to forget the important details of any adventure, but an evening with Teresa Montesino was quite an experience in its own right.

For all the tourist traffic that flows through it, Nassau is a very small town on a very very small island, so that it has no secret dispensaries of ambrosial food and/or dionysian entertainment known only to a fortunate elite.

...
"If there is an accident, you will be quite right to suspect me--but that is the most you will be able to do."

The Saint devoted himself to maintaining a sangfroid which would have been rated commendable by the sternest British standards.

...
So for a while he danced with her, as casually as it could be done with anyone of her build and cooperative zeal. Another unfriendly woman might have commented that she was not very subtle about the way she made it difficult for her partner to be unaware for a moment of her architectural assets; but to a victim with hormones it was not a completely unendurable ordeal.

"You must get tired of answering this, but why didn't those Roman talent scouts think they could get more dividends from you in a movie than a motor-car?"

"I have had those offers. And perhaps I would be as good as some others who have taken them." She was just brash enough to pull back her shoulders a trifle and take a slightly deeper breath, which on her was a seismic combination. Yet the Saint was far more devastated by the absolute certainty that he detected a downright twinkle in her gaze.

...
"I'll wave to you, Juliet."

She turned closer to him, one arm partly on the back of the seat and partly on his shoulder, her eyes big and darkly luminous in the distant light from the entrance.

..for the moment he could only fall back on the faintly flippant equanimity developed from some past experience of such challenges.

"All right, darling, what's in it for me? After I've freed Godfrey from his encumbrance, but he's inherited her money, and you've married him--"

We could console ourselves," she said, "until he had an accident."

There must be extravagances for which plain silence is ineffectual and a guffaw is inadequate. Simon decided that they were close enough to that pinnacle. He said lightly: "This, I must think over."

"Come upstairs and think."

"The management wouldn't like that. And in the morning you might be sorry too."

She leaned on him even more overwhelmingly, bringing her full relaxed lips within an inch of his mouth. He waited, well aware of the softness that pressed against him. Then she drew back sharply, and slapped his face.

"Thank you, dear," said the Saint reaching across her to open the other door. "And happy dreams."

She got out of the car. And as she did so, there was one inevitably perfect moment in which she offered a transient target that the most careful posing could never have improved. With the palm of his hand, he gave it an accolade that added an unpremeditated zip to her disembarcation and left her in stinging stupefaction for long enough for him to shut the car door again and get it moving out of range of retribution.

Almost as soon as he turned the next corner he had cooled off. He had a violent aversion to being slapped, and the smack with which he had reciprocated had been uninhibitedly meant to hurt, but he realized that she had some material for self-justification. Any woman who candidly offers all her physical potential to a man, and has as much to offer as Teresa Montesino, and is rejected with even goodnatured urbanity, can be expected to respond rather primitively.

Simon Templar had no virtuous feelings about the rejection. He was quite animal enough to be keenly aware of what she had in stock for the male animal, and he no longer had any lower-case saintly scruples about taking advantage of a grown woman whose natural impulses came more readily to the surface in the glow of certain liquid refreshments. He hadn't for one moment seriously contemplated make love to Teresa for any reward that Cynthia Quillen might have offered, but neither did that mean that he was resolved to fight to the death against letting her drag him into bed. He hadn't expected her to make any such effort, but when it happened he had found himself chilled by an unprecedented caution.

"I must be getting old," he told himself wryly. And he wondered how old you had to get before two totally differently attractive women each asked your advice about murdering the other, during the same evening. He thought that life might get really dull when there was no proposition you could afford to turn down and be satisfied with your own estimate of what you had passed up. He could see Teresa's last stunned expression as starkly frozen as a flash photo in his mind's eye, and was still laughing when he fell asleep.

Leslie Charteris - Saint in the Sun - Cannes: The Better Mousetrap

Leslie Charteris - Saint in the Sun

Cannes: The Better Mousetrap

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

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

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

"Long enough," she said

He sat down.

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

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

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

"But you don't know, I've got to explain. I'm not the kind of girl you think!"

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

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

"Natalie Sheridan," she said. "Canadian."

...

But if you would just have your drink, so that I can sit here for a little while and enjoy staring at everyone else instead of them staring at me, and let me pay for it, and then escort me out so that I can make a graceful exit--"

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

"Natalie, I love you. I thought I'd been picked up in every way there was, in the course of a misspent life, but you've shown me that there can always be new things to live for." He sat up again, still smiling, and not unkindly. "I'll tell you what. We'll have this drink, and then another, on me, and enjoy the passing show together."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was almost too good to be true.