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.
