Pedro writhed to the ground and twitched to grotesquely sprawled stillness as the policemen strode to his side to pronounce their benediction.
“Misbegotten swine!”
“He should have had it long ago.”
The Saint intervened.
“I hate to intrude on your sorrow, boys,” he said, “but I wonder if either of you picked up a letter I dropped in the alley back there?”
The two officers became aware of his presence once again.
“Senhor!” one of them hailed him in congratulatory tones. “You were quite right. There is no blame on you. This pig is known to us, and we have finally caught him in one of his crimes!”
“To say the least,” Simon concurred, looking down at the bloodsoaked body at their feet. “I wonder why he was after me?”
“Oh, senhor, he would do anything — stick you up in a back street, kidnap your children, kill! Anything it would pay him to do, he would do. He has been in jail four times — since he was a boy.”
“Five times,” the other officer corrected.
“No, it was four. The last time—”
“And probably it ought to have been forty-five,” Simon cut in pacifically. “But now that he’s no longer a problem, I’m more interested in my letter. Did you happen to find it as you passed through the alley?”
“Letter? No, senhor. No letter.”
Both men shook their heads, confirming to each other that they had found nothing.
“But if you will come to the station with us, senhor, you can describe the other villain and answer questions that may produce...”
Simon declined politely and gave them a half-salute of farewell.
“I have already seen justice done,” he said. “I am satisfied — and there is a lady waiting for me who will be most unsatisfied if I am much later in meeting her.”
“But if you are wanted as a witness, senhor?”
He calmed them down by showing them a passport with a genuine photograph of himself on it and giving them the name of a hotel at which he was not staying. Having no complaint against him, and perhaps preferring to recite the epic of their deeds to their superiors without any burdensome touches of realism from a stranger, they let him go then, and as he walked away the last words that reached him were: “I will bet you a bottle of Ferreirinha that it was four times!”
Actually the Saint scarcely heard them. He was too preoccupied with the sudden new spine-tingling awareness that he was no longer a free-roving agent circling the perimeter of a situation and leisurely debating his own possible points of entry. Someone even farther outside and still beyond his ken was watching him.
III: How the Saint continued the pursuit, and was observed in his turn.
1
“I hope you won’t think I’m rude,” Vicky Kinian said. “It sounds ridiculous to turn down an invitation to a night club on my first night in Portugal, but I’m absolutely bushed. I feel as if I hadn’t slept in a week.”
Curt Jaeger was as sympathetic as ever.
“I don’t blame you,” he said as he escorted her across the lobby of the Tagus. “And from the sound of what you told me at dinner you have an even more exhausting time ahead of you.”
Vicky nodded and wearily started up the stairs.
“I’m getting worn out just arguing with my conscience about the whole thing.”
“If I were you,” Jaeger told her, “I would go on and find this treasure while I was arguing with my conscience. It might be an amusing adventure, and if in the end you decide not to keep it, you should at least be entitled to a finder’s reward.”
His reasoning appealed to Vicky, since it allowed her to do what she wanted to do while telling herself that she was really not doing it.
“I’ll think about it,” she said when they had come to the door of her room. “Anyway, I’ll be going on as soon as I can arrange it.”
“Going on?” he asked.
“I might as well tell you, it’s such a coincidence and you’ve been so nice. I have to go to Switzerland next. I can’t see any harm in telling you that.”
Jaeger almost laughed.
“You do lead a merry chase,” he said. “But the fates seem to be conspiring to keep us together. Of course I too will be going to Switzerland, to my head office, when my business is finished here — which it almost is.”
“Well, I’m glad the fates brought us together here,” Vicky said. “The dinner and the champagne were delicious. And you were very kind to listen to my troubles.”
“Not troubles — opportunities,” he said. “And in case you should worry, let me assure you again that as a point of honour I am as anxious as you that no one else will ever learn what you have told me.”
They shook hands then and said goodnight. Jaeger went back down the stairs to his own room, while Vicky, faint with tiredness, unlocked her door and pushed on the light switch just inside.
For an instant she thought that the strain of the past few days was making her see things, for lounging perfectly relaxed in an armchair half-facing the door was the tall devastatingly magnetic man she had noticed downstairs in the lobby that afternoon.
She froze, stared, and her next thought was that she had walked into the wrong room.
“I’m so sorry...” she began, but before she could even start to retreat she collected her wits enough to notice a pair of her own shoes on the floor near the bed, and her cosmetics on the dressing table.
By now the visitor had risen unhurriedly to his feet.
“You needn’t be sorry,” he said in a soothing tone. “Please come in.”
Vicky’s impulse was to turn back and call for help, but the man’s manner and the almost supernatural holding-power of his blue eyes — as clear and bright as a tropical sea even in the yellowish illumination of the hotel room-kept her where she was, poised on the threshold.
“This is my room,” she said unnecessarily. “What are you doing here?”
The man seemed to resist the temptation to make some lighthearted joke.
“I’ll be glad to answer that question, Vicky, but it’ll take a little while,” he told her. “If you’ll please come in and sit down I’ll tell you. Right now you look like a doe ready to bolt for her life.”
“I am ready to bolt,” Vicky assured him. “You tell me what you want, and I’ve got plenty of wide open spaces behind me in case I don’t like what I hear.”
He shrugged.
“At least you’re willing to listen,” he said. “We’re making progress.”
“I think I’ll get the manager,” the girl said uncertainly.
The lean, towering man looked around innocently.
“If you need help, I’ll be glad to oblige. What’s the problem?”
She did not return his glimmer of a smile, but she was no longer quite so tensed for flight.
“All right,” she said. “So you’ve given me a chance to scream or make a run for it, and if you’d wanted to hurt me you could have hidden somewhere and grabbed me after I closed the door. But that still doesn’t mean we’re old buddies. Who are you?”
“My name is Simon Templar, sometimes called the Saint, and I’m not dangerous if taken as directed. Why don’t you shut the door and let me start convincing you that I’m on your side?”
She had reacted sharply to the sound of his name, and now she studied his face with heightened interest.