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.
