He gave the letter back to her, and she took it reluctantly.
“Then why don’t you keep it and publish it?”
“I can’t.” Simon had not forgotten his promise to Stern and the editor, and he kept it scrupulously. “I hope you won’t think I’ve taken advantage of you, but I never said I was a newspaperman. I just let you assume it. My name is Templar, and I am sometimes called the Saint.”
Even though she had spent the last ten years in Belgium, the durability or the international scope of his reputation was reflected in the enlargement of her eyes.
“You... But how...”
“I have ways of hearing all sorts of things,” he said glibly. “Don’t ask me how I got interested in your brother’s case, because I couldn’t tell you the truth. But I’m going to work on it.”
“If there’s anything I can do to help you—”
“I wouldn’t be bashful about asking, believe me. But I don’t know yet what can be done.” But already, under an air of vaguely discouraged perplexity, his brain was racing. “The only thing I’m sure of is that, given enough time, I usually dream up something.”
When he phoned Elise Ashville, after lunch, she answered the ring herself, but her voice was cold and almost unrecognizable until he gave his fictitious identity. Then it became warm and languorous.
“Darling. When do I see you again?”
“What are you doing?”
“Getting ready to go to the office. Got to make a few decisions and do a few chores. But for this evening, you name it.”
“What about your Marchese?”
“He can dry up and blow away. He woke me up at nine o’clock this morning, calling to ask how my headache was. I told him I had a wonderful night but he was spoiling my beauty sleep.” She laughed, intimately. “I’ll tell him I want to be alone and go to bed early tonight, to make up for it. Whatever you say.”
“I was teasing,” he said. “I have to catch the plane to Chicago in two hours, to see about a deal there. You remember, I told you yesterday I was not entirely a gentleman of leisure.”
“I don’t remember you telling me anything about your business. We were much too busy, weren’t we?”
“For me, to mix business and pleasure is mixing champagne and vinegar. The result is all vinegar, no champagne. I prefer us to be all champagne. You will still be here next Tuesday, if I can finish talking to these dreary pill makers and fly back?”
“You’ve got a date. But what dreary pill makers?”
“I shall tell you when it is all over. Until Tuesday, then, most wonderful Elise!”
He figured that that should be just enough to keep her nagged by an intermittent but persistent bug of curiosity, which by Tuesday should have piqued her to an ideal pitch of receptivity. But just in case it should torment her into trying to beat his timing, he made one more phone call, to David Stern.
“I’ve talked to Ashville’s sister, and kept your paper out of it, as we agreed. By the same token, I haven’t anything to tell you. Except thanks.”
“But are you going to do anything?”
“If I told you what I had in mind, you mightn’t approve. I don’t want you to sprain your conscience. And another thing. If I happened to make Elise very angry with me, it’s just possible she might include you for having introduced me. Personally I think she’d swallow it and keep quiet, rather than admit that anyone got the best of her, but I’d hate to expose you to the risk. So if she checks with you again, you never saw the Count of Cristamonte before and you didn’t vouch for him. I simply came to the office, introduced myself, and started asking a lot of questions about local industrial conditions, and finally conned you into adjourning to a cool cocktail bar, and then to dinner. I said I wasn’t free yet to tell you what I might be interested in manufacturing, except that it was something sensational in the medical field.”
“That’s all very well,” protested the publisher, “but I think you owe it to me—”
“To save you from being an accessory before the fact,” said the Saint. “One day, when I’m sure there’s not going to be a squawk, I may tell you more. Meanwhile, let this be a lesson to you not to get involved with shady characters like me.”
Again he hung up, before he could be pinned down by any more questions than he was inclined to answer.
As a matter of record, he did not fly to Chicago, but drove a hundred miles in the opposite direction, down to the Gulf coast and the picturesque outpost of Grand Isle at the end of the road, to sample the fabled fishing in the bayous and out around the offshore oil rigs. He spent a very innocent and refreshing three days and drove back to New Orleans on Tuesday afternoon only because he had committed himself. It was a sacrifice for which he felt thoroughly entitled to a halo.
He called Elise Ashville as soon as he had checked in at one of the elegant new motels on the Airline Highway and was put through with flattering speed by her office secretary. Her voice, in spite of a brave attempt at complacency, confirmed that the splinter he had deliberately planted had not stopped plaguing her.
“Darling. I hope you had a very dull trip.”
“Terribly dull — but profitable.” He had not forgotten his accent. “Do we still have our date?”
“I was counting on it. I sent the Marchese to Mexico — to find out if it really isn’t too hot at this time of year. How were your dreary pill makers?”
“Very dreary, but very nice to me. If I call for you at your flat at seven, will that give you time to have relaxed and made yourself beautiful?”
“Make it seven-thirty. I must be specially fascinating. You don’t know how you’ve tortured me, and now I shall drive you mad until I find out what you’ve been up to.”
“I shall enjoy that,” he said.
She was not used to men being confident and casual enough to have that note of carefree mockery in their voices when they spoke to her, and it sent unfamiliar currents tingling through her spine.
Enjoying a soothing facial massage and a stimulating body rub from her new maid, who was a trifle clumsy but much more obsequious and uncomplaining than the last one, she wondered whether this adventure might turn into something more durable than the others. She was not naturally promiscuous so much as amoral and ambitious: the discovery that with wealth added to her considerable physical endowments she could use titled playboys as playthings had gone to her head but had not completely turned it. To pick up and discard them at a whim flattered the ego of an ex-waitress, but to marry one merely for his title, with all the world knowing as well as she that that was all she had bought, would have violated every principle of the same plebeian common sense.
But as the Countess of Cristamonte, if he was actually even solvent in his own right... She toyed lazily with the name while she wallowed lengthily in the oiled and foamed and scented water of her sunken Roman bath. It was not so bad. Of course, she had sometimes dreamed of a Prince, but there were hardly any genuine ones left whom you could meet outside of a real palace, and most of them were either too young or too old. She might do worse than this, and she certainly wouldn’t have to apologize for him physically... While she allowed herself to be fluff-dried and powdered (she had observed these symbols of supreme luxury in a movie when she was a little girl, and in a depression would have slashed her office overhead to the bone before she dispensed with any of them) she almost accepted his proposal, and abruptly recalled that he had not yet made it. But that could be arranged, if the other qualifications were in order. Tonight she would be sure to have time to probe further into that.
“You can leave as soon as you’ve tidied up, Germaine,” she said, as she sat penciling her eyebrows. “And don’t come crashing in early in the morning.”