“Heaven forbid,” said the Saint piously. “I’m only curious. What did he have in that briefcase?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“It must have been something very valuable. And yet you know nothing about it?”
“No.”
She was lying, it was as obvious as the Alps; but he tried not to make it so obvious that he saw it.
“Why did you come here?” he asked, “when you were just getting ready to move to America?”
“There were a few places we wanted to see before we left, because we didn’t know if we would ever come back.”
“And yet, on a simple vacation trip like that, your husband brought along something so valuable that he could be murdered for it — and never even mentioned it to you?”
Her dark eyes flashed suddenly hard, like jet.
“You ask more questions than the police! Are you insulting me?”
“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “I was only trying to help. If we knew what was in that briefcase, we might have a clue to the people who stole it.”
She looked down at the twisting of her hands, and made a visible effort to hold them still. The fingers were long and tapering, and faintly tipped with coral.
“Forgive me,” she said in a lowered voice. “I am on edge. It has been such a shock... You are right. The briefcase is important. And that’s really what I wanted to talk to you about. Those men — they did get it, didn’t they?”
“Why, yes. I was chasing the man who had it. I brought him down, but he kicked me in the face and got away.”
“I thought, perhaps, he might have dropped it.”
“I didn’t see it again.”
“Did the police search for it?”
“I don’t think anyone would have. Even if the man dropped it, he had plenty of time to pick it up again while I was knocked half silly. Anyway, it wasn’t around. And if the police had found it, they’d certainly have returned it to you.”
Her eyes examined him uncertainly.
“If anyone found it... anyone... I would pay a large reward.”
“If I knew where to lay my hands on it,” said the Saint, a little frigidly, “you wouldn’t have to ask for it back, or pay any reward.”
She nodded.
“Of course. I’m being stupid. It was a foolish hope. Excuse me.” She stood up abruptly. “Thank you for letting me talk to you — and again for what you tried to do. I must not bother you any more.”
She held out her hand, smiled coolly at him, and was gone.
Simon Templar stood where she had left him and slowly lighted another cigarette. Then he walked to the window. From the balcony outside he was offered a superb panorama of mountains rolling down to the sparkling blue foreground of the lake, where an excursion steamer swam like a toy trailing a brown veil of smoke; but irresistibly his eye was drawn downward and to the right, toward the corner outside the gardens where he had tackled the stocky man.
He could have persuaded himself that it was only an illusion that he could see something from where he stood; but the echoes of the false notes that Ravenna’s wife had struck were less easy to dismiss.
He put on his jacket and went downstairs. After only a short search in the bushes near where he had tangled with the stocky man, he found the briefcase.
3
He figured it out as he took it upstairs to his room. The briefcase had flown out of the stocky man’s grasp when the Saint tackled him. It had fallen in among the bushes. Then Kleinhaus had come along, shouting. The stocky man had been too scared to stop and look for it. He had scrammed the hell out of there. The police hadn’t looked for it, because they assumed it was gone. And the stocky man hadn’t come back to look, either because he was afraid to, or because he assumed the police would have found it.
And now the Saint had it.
He stood and looked at it for quite a while, behind his locked door. He only had to pick up the telephone — he presumed that Mrs. Ravenna was staying in the same hotel — and tell her to come and get it. Or perhaps the more correct procedure would be to call the police. But either of those moves called for a man devoid of curiosity, a pillar of convention, a paragon of deafness to the siren voices of intrigue — which the Saint was not.
He opened it.
It required no instruments or violence. Just a steady pull on a zipper. It opened flat, exposing its contents in one dramatic revelation, as if they had been spread out on a tray.
Item: one chamois pouch containing a necklace of pink pearls, perfectly graduated.
Item: one hotel envelope containing eight diamonds and six emeralds, cut but unset, none less than two carats, each wrapped in a fold of tissue paper.
Item: a cellophane envelope containing ten assorted postage stamps, of an age which suggested that they might be rare and valuable.
Item: a book in an antique binding, which from the title page appeared to be a first edition of Boccacio’s Amorosa Visione, published in Milan in 1521.
Item: a small oil painting on canvas without a frame, folded in the middle to fit the briefcase but apparently protected from creasing by the bulk of the book, signed with the name of Botticelli.
Item: a folded sheet of plain paper on which was typed, in French:
M. Paul Galen
137 Wendenweg
Lucerne
Dear Monsieur Galen,
The bearer, Signor Filippo Ravenna, can be trusted, and his merchandise is most reliable.
With best regards,
The signature was distinctive but undecipherable.
“And a fascinating line of merchandise it is,” brooded the Saint. “For a shoemaker, Filippo must have been quite an interesting soul — or was he a heel?... A connoisseur and collector of very varied tastes? But then why would he bring his prize treasures with him on a trip like this?... A sort of Italian Raffles, leading a double life? But a successful business man shouldn’t need to steal. And if he did, his instincts would lead him to fancy bookkeeping rather than burglary... A receiver of stolen goods? But then he wouldn’t need a formal introduction to someone else who sounds as if he might be in that line of business... And what a strange assortment of loot! There has to be a clue there, if I could find it...”
But for ten minutes the significance eluded him. And at that point he gave up impatiently.
There was another clue, more positive, more direct, in the letter to the mysterious Paul Galen; and it was one which should not be too difficult to run down.
He put the jewels, the stamps and the letter in different pockets of his coat. The book and the painting, too bulky to carry inconspicuously, he put back in the briefcase. He hid it, not too seriously, under the mattress at the head of the bed. Then, with a new lightness in his step, he went out and rang for the elevator.
It took him down one floor, and stopped again. Ravenna’s wife got in.
For the space of one skipped heartbeat he wondered whether her room too might have a balcony from which she might have watched him retrieve the briefcase from the bushes below; but he met her eyes with iron coolness and only a slight nod to acknowledge their acquaintance, and his pulse resumed smoothly when she gave back only a small, remote smile.
She had put on a small black hat and carried a purse.
“The police have asked me to go and talk to them again,” she volunteered. “They have thought of more questions, I suppose. Did they send for you too?”
“I haven’t heard from them since last night,” he said. “But I expect they’ll get around to me eventually.”
It occurred to him that it was a little odd that he had not been asked to repeat the descriptions which Oscar Kleinhaus had promised to relay; but he was too busy with other thoughts to speculate much about the reasons for it. He was grateful enough to have been dropped out of the investigation.