“Do you still rescue children in danger, Mr. Templar?”
She intentionally released him from any attempt at formulating a response by immediately beginning her next sentence.
“No man does what you did for me unless he loves children, treasures them, and is willing to risk his life for them. And don’t be modest, Saint. I know. And even if my memory didn’t tell me, I can read it in those old clippings.”
Simon could sense a sales pitch a mile away, but he could also discern the purity of her motive.
“If this is leading up to me buying Girl Scout cookies, I’ll gladly take a case,” offered the Saint.
“I want you to take a case, but it is not cookies.” She looked at him with an intimate directness to which she was unquestionably entitled, as if searching his ice-blue eyes for signs of the same man who cradled her under his arm that night long ago when the Saint’s game was neither media nor movies, but death and justice.
Simon Templar leaned forward, taking both her hands in his. “You are not six years old anymore, and I am certainly not thirty-one. You are a grown woman and I’m...”
“...The Saint,” asserted Viola, reciting a memorized newspaper account, “an astonishing combination of heroism and terrorism, the most mysterious figure...”
“Spare me,” Simon laughed, “I was always easy copy for adjective addicted reporters”
“Those descriptions weren’t farfetched,” she said with a slight hint of humour, “All the superlatives were well earned. I know. I was there. And what I want to know is...”
“Will I pull out a hidden knife or noisy automatic and rub out a bad guy just like in the movies?”
“No, Mr Templar. Not like in the movies, like in New York. But this time there is only one man to kill, and many children to rescue.”
She wasn’t kidding.
Simon saw Barney Malone ambling towards them from across the room.
“Cut to the chase, Ms Berkman,” said the Saint.
“I work with Seattle’s street kids. Do you know what a predatory pedophile is, Mr. Templar?”
Simon’s involuntary shudder affirmed his knowledge.
“This man is so well protected, his prey so vulnerable, that he swims upstream in the so-called ‘regular channels’.”
Malone was getting closer, and Simon didn’t feel Barney’s inclusion in this particular conversation was appropriate.
“Cops? Do they know?” Simon tossed the quick question her way as he rose to introduce her to the arriving Mr Malone.
“Yes. They know him well. He’s on the force.”
With introductions and conventional niceties evenly distributed, Simon escorted Vi Berkman to the elevator while Malone oversaw the careful packing of the valuable promotional material.
“As I assume I have perked your interest,” continued Vi as they walked, “you are invited to my Youth Service Outreach office in the Sanitary Building by the Pike Place Market tomorrow morning at ten.”
“It sounds like a clean location,” remarked Simon, wondering exactly what Vi honestly expected of him. “Why exactly are we meeting at your office?” The Saint figured he might as well simply ask.
“Because,” said Vi as she stepped into the elevator, “You will see with your own eyes why you must do what I ask you to do, and who it is that you are going to do it to.”
The Saint slid into the elevator quickly as the doors shut behind him. “I’m not about to let you make a tv-movie exit, and there is no commercial break following your last line. I may have saved your life, but I am not about to commit murder simply because you think it is a good idea.”
Vi leaned against the wall and smiled a weak, knowing smile.
“OK. Don’t kill him. But I absolutely assure you that once you understand who he is and what he does, the Saint will not let him go unpunished by any means necessary, convenient or expedient.”
The small bell announcing their arrival at the Westin’s lobby served as ringing punctuation to her final comment. She put out her hand.
“Tomorrow, ten in the morning. Sanitary Market Building. Will you be there, Mr Templar?”
Simon relinquished the affirmation as he shook her hand. Watching her walk away, his mind still sifting through the conversation, the implications, and her request, he paid scant attention to the small, dark, man stepping into the elevator.
3
“Excuse me, Sir,” remarked the gentleman. “If you are Simon Templar, you are exactly the man I am looking for.”
“Really?” Simon pressed the appropriate button commanding the elevator to return him to the reception suite. “You don’t want me to kill anyone do you?”
“Good heavens, no,” the little man’s laugh sounded like a wheezing pig. “I want to make you rich.”
“Sir,” remarked the Saint with a polite bow, “I am already rich.”
“Well, even richer, if you prefer. My card.” The tiny fellow proffered forth a white card. “Our board of directors instructed me to introduce myself and make you a most lucrative offer.”
Simon examined the card carefully. It was, even by his standards, of significant interest. The card read “SeaQue Salvage International. London — New York — Seattle.” It featured a Madison Street address for the Seattle office and identified the little fellow as Mr Salvadore Alisdare, General Agent.
“I would offer you my card, Mr Alisdare,” said the Saint pulling the invitation from his inside pocket, “but I am saving it as a souvenir.”
The tiny man chuckled and pulled an identical embossed invitation from his side suit pocket and held it up to the Saint.
“I have one, thank you. I know the party is over, but I was working late and hoped against hope that I would still find you here.”
As the door opened, both men stepped into the hall. Simon jokingly took Alisdare’s invitation and held it up to the light as if verifying it’s authenticity.
“Looks real to me,” pronounced Simon, officially depositing it in his right jacket pocket in the finest Ticketmaster tradition. “Follow me and I will show you the most incredible ice sculpture you have ever seen in your life, then you can buy me a drink in Nikko’s lounge downstairs and tell me about the fortune in my future.”
As Simon Templar led the belated guest towards the nearby empty reception room, his steps were light and his heart dilated. Suddenly, Simon stopped cold.
“Wait a minute..” The Saint’s voice had the harshness of steel on chilled steel. The little man’s dark face turned beige. “I can’t stand the thought of seeing that block of ice one more time, let’s hit Nikko’s now and get some sukiaki and tempura while we’re at it.”
Simon Templar locked his grip on Mr Alisdare’s arm as an irrefutable argument convincing the confused General Agent to accompany the Saint back towards the elevator.
“Watching all those media types devour the buffet gave me an appetite,” insisted Simon, “and your invitation entitled you to free food anyway. You, sir, will be my guest.”
The little man’s tiny feet peddled rapidly to keep up with his new friend’s impressive stride. In one quick moment, the two men were in the descending elevator.
The Saint, while silent on the ride down, was exulting to himself on his good fortune and fate’s ironic sense of humor. Several floors above him a superficial resemblance of his career’s signature was becoming a chilly puddle, but the real live Saint was just getting warmed up. His mood advanced from quizzical in the face of Vi’s direct offer of murderous mayhem to ecstatic after meeting Mr Alisdare, for the Saint was always intrigued by ineffectual liars.