“Now you’re forgetting,” Simon reminded him gently. “There aren’t going to be any more of these days for you. You’re retiring, and you’ll only read about me in the papers.”
Chief Inspector Teal swallowed.
He looked ahead into a vague Elysian vista in which there were no problems, no apprehensions — and no taunting privateer with unquenchable devilment in his eyes and an impudent forefinger pointing like a rapier at his stomach. It would be very restful, and there would be something lacking.
“That’s right,” said Mr Teal. “I was forgetting.”
He hauled himself sluggishly to his feet, and put out his hand, and for almost the first time in all those years Simon saw something very like a smile on his round pink apoplectic face.
“I’m rather glad it ends up this way,” Teal said. He glanced self-consciously around him. “But I’ve still got work to do tonight. And I think Miss Halberd has some apologizing to do which she might rather do in private. The rent’s paid on this cottage to the end of the month,” he added inconsequently. “So if you’ll excuse me—”
“Damn it, Claud Eustace,” said the Saint, “I’m going to miss you too.”
France: The reluctant nudist
1
“When do you start taking your clothes off?” Simon Templar asked, with a faint hint of malice.
George McGeorge wriggled unhappily inside his pastel blue silk shirt and sharply creased slacks. Between the crown of his stylish Panama and the soles of his immaculate suede shoes, he was almost conspicuously a young man to whom the ministrations of tailor and haberdasher were more than ordinarily important. His rather vapidly good-looking face took on a tinge of pink under its urban pallor.
“Not before everyone else does, anyway,” he said.
“Never mind about anyone else,” Simon persisted. “I think it would give Uncle Waldo a big glow to see that you were entering into the spirit of the thing right from the start.”
“In that case, he’d be still more bucked if I could introduce you in your birthday suit too, and tell him that I’d even made another convert on the way over.”
“That wasn’t in the deal, George. I offered to come with you as moral support and as an interested observer — not as a sort of trophy. And because it sounded like one of the few places left in the world where I could feel reasonably sure of not getting mixed up in some sort of crime. I’m banking on the idea that nudists couldn’t carry around much stuff worth stealing, and that murder is a lot more difficult where it would be such a problem to conceal a weapon.”
“The closer I get to it,” Mr McGeorge said darkly, “the more I wish one of ’em would strangle Uncle Waldo.”
The Saint grinned, and gazed with tranquil anticipation at the islands spread before the bow of the little ferry. There were three of them to be seen, the fourth member of the group being just below the western horizon; reading from right to left he could identify, from an earlier glance at a map, the small hump of Bagaud, the much larger bulk of Port-Cros, and finally, the longest and most easterly, the Ile du Levant, which was their destination. Lying in a corner of the Mediterranean which is still virtually terra incognita to the American tourist army, whose Riviera extends no further west than the outskirts of Cannes, they are known to prosy official cartographers as the Iles d’Hyères, but to the more flowery-minded authors of travel brochures as the Golden Isles; while one of them, to a still more specialized public, stands for the closest approximation to the Garden of Eden to be found within the borders of civilization.
For this island of about six miles in length and roughly a mile and a quarter in average width, which is separated by only nine miles of water from the unglamorized but busy little Provençal resort of Le Lavandou, is the beneficiary of an official dispensation which remains unique among the local ordinances of Europe.
“You see,” Mr McGeorge had explained it, “over there it’s perfectly legal for anyone — I mean women as well as men — to go around in a sort of triangular fig-leaf effect, and nothing else.”
This happened at the bar of the Club at Cavalière, the most exclusive hostelry on that stretch of the coast, where they had drifted into one of those usually sterile bar-stool conversations to which this was to prove a notable exception.
“Oh,” said the Saint. “A kind of semi-nudist colony.”
“Not even semi,” the other said. “That’s only in the village. When they go swimming, they’re allowed to take everything off. And the point is, it isn’t a colony or a club. It isn’t private property, and you don’t have to belong to anything, or join anything. Anybody can go there. And you don’t even have to take off your hat if you don’t want to. It’s just that there’s no law against taking off practically everything if you like — and from the pictures I’ve seen, most of them seem to like.”
“Zat is right.” Raymond Vidal, proprietor and host of the Club, who had been listening, chimed in with genially expansive corroboration. “It was about nineteen ’undred twenty, zat two docteurs from Paris, named Durvilie, very serious men, wish to bring people to be cured by ze sun, and zey start to make ze village which zey call Héliopolis. And so zat ze patient can get ze most sun wiz ze least clozing, ze ayrrange a tolérance from ze Commune of Hyères, so zat no one ’as to wear more zan ze slip minimum. But it is all quite open. It is very beautiful, very natural. You should go zaire and see it.”
“I have to go there,” said Mr McGeorge, with no echo of enthusiasm, “to see my uncle.”
He looked like a young man who should have an uncle — preferably one with a considerable fortune, a strong sense of family responsibility, and no wife or offspring of his own. Without some such source of bounty, one would only have felt sorry about his prospects in a callously competitive world. He was the first specimen that Simon had encountered in many years of a type that he had thought was virtually extinct — the spoiled butterfly of good family, a good education which had left no mark on anything but his accent, of ingenuous snobbery, impeccable manners, cultivated indolence, a gift for fairly amusing and decorative frivolity, and absolutely no conception of a world which did not revolve around the smartest clubs, the most fashionable resorts, and the most glittering parties. How he had ever managed to navigate himself that far from the languid eddies of the Croisette and the Cap d’Antibes was already a mystery, and that such a creature could have a personal link, however tenuous, with a place like the Ile du Levant, was an anomaly that no inveterate student of oddities could casually pass up.
The Saint signed to the bartender for some more Peter Dawson.
“Tell me about this uncle,” he begged, with fascinated sympathy.
“He lives there,” said McGeorge, in the same tone in which he might have admitted that his uncle was addicted to cheating at cards.
2
Mr Waldo Oddington, Simon learned, patiently probing for information as he would have extracted morsels of succulence from the shell of a cracked crab, was the brother of McGeorge’s mother, and by this time McGeorge’s only surviving kin. Brother and sister had been deeply attached to each other, in spite of Mr Oddington’s lifelong record of eccentricities, and one of the late Mrs McGeorge’s last injunctions to her son had been that he should never forget that blood was thicker than water, and that in his veins the Oddington strain of fluid was a full fifty per cent represented. George McGeorge had dutifully tried to live up to this, encouraging his uncle to regard him almost as the son which Mr Oddington, a bachelor, had never begotten for himself; although one gathered that this had been no easy task for a young man of Mr McGeorge’s highly developed respect for certain conventions.