“I’m certain we do, m’sieur. What kind of automobile would you need?”
“I’d like to hire something that’s fairly fast but not too conspicuous. Bigger than a breadbox but smaller than those chrome-plated hearses you rent to couples from Miami.”
“A Volkswagen, m’sieur, or...”
“A Volkswagen is fine.”
The formalities took only a short while, and when he was putting his signature on the completed forms the counter girl asked him, “What hotel will you stay at here in Geneva?”
“I don’t know yet. Where I go depends on some friends who’ll be in a little later. As soon as I’ve settled on one I’ll phone you.”
“Can I do anything to help you?”
Simon regarded her.
“If I told you,” he said regretfully, “I’m afraid you’d tell me that your Hertz belongs to Daddy.”
When his friends did arrive, the Saint was waiting for them in his green Beetle near the terminal building’s entrance. He watched as Vicky Kinian and a tall man came out of the swinging glass doors and waited to step into a taxi. The girl’s companion — sharp-featured, with closely trimmed light hair — held the cab’s door for her, gave an order to the driver, and got into the back seat himself. Simon did not recognize him; even from a number of yards away he could be sure that their paths had never crossed before. There was no way to tell yet, then, whether Herr Jaeger’s main interest was in attractive American girls or some more negotiable and enduring embodiment of pleasure, perhaps in the form of several tons of SS gold at the bottom of an Alpine lake.
The taxi pulled away from the curb. Simon had already started his car. Now he accelerated after the cab, not hesitating to stick quite close behind it during its trip into the city.
While the Saint followed, Curt Jaeger was beginning to doubt his once considerable powers as an interrogator. All the way from the green-and-brown coats of Portugal to the white icy crags of the Alps he had been subtly trying, without the slightest success, to lead Vicky Kinian on to the subject of her treasure hunt, and in particular on to the events which he knew had taken place the night before.
He had waited in his room at the Tagus after coming back from dinner with Vicky, expecting his telephone to bestir him at any minute with a ring from Pedro reporting on his search for her letter. A great many minutes had passed — one hundred and forty-eight, by Jaeger’s own count — before the telephone did ring, and then the breathless voice which blabbered ungrammatical Portuguese over the wire did not belong to Pedro.
“This is Fano, the driver. I know where you at so I call. Pedro, he’s dead — shot by the cops!”
A moment of panic had threatened to shatter Jaeger’s usual self-control; but recalling the necessity for superior races to maintain a firm facade when dealing with such low forms of life as Portuguese cab drivers, he had managed to keep his voice completely steady.
“Do they know about me?” he asked.
“They do not know nothing,” replied the driver emphatically. “I hear Pedro was dead the minute they plugged him. So it’s all right if you pay me.”
“What did you find in the girl’s room?” Jaeger asked without optimism. Vicky’s revelation during dinner that she had memorized and destroyed the vital part of her father’s letter had already made Pedro’s search of her room seem hardly necessary.
“We didn’t go in,” was the answer. “A man come out-had a letter on him.”
“Came out?” Jaeger asked impatiently, straining to understand the difficult accent. “Out of what?”
“This man, he come out of the girl’s room. We followed him to an alley. Pedro took him and there was a big fight. Then the cops come and we run—”
“Without the letter?”
“We couldn’t get it,” the thug said excitedly. “Like I tell you, the cops come, shoot Pedro. I beat it out of there.”
“This man who came out of her room — do you know him? Who was he?”
“Don’t know. Very tall, black hair, eyes blue...”
“Thin? Fat?”
“More thin — like a matador. Strong as hell — and quick!”
The Latin began appealing to his gods and their female relatives to witness the inhuman power and swiftness of his foe in the alley fight. Jaeger interrupted him again.
“And you found out nothing else?”
“No, but we done as you told us, so you can pay me. You can pay me for Pedro too. I give to his widow.”
Jaeger had needed all his powers of self-restraint to prevent himself from screeching hysterically.
“You are a stupid idiotic oaf,” he had said coldly. “If I ever see you again or hear from you again, it will be your fortunate widow who needs a donation.”
He had slammed down the receiver and spent many feverish hours during the wakeful night raking his brain for some clue as to who the stranger might be who was threatening to interrupt his long, long climb just before he reached the pinnacle.
In the taxi with Vicky in Geneva, he tried once more. Surely, he told himself for the hundredth time, if someone had broken into her room and taken something, she would be aware of it — and eventually admit it to him. He was, after all, her only friend in a foreign land.
“I am worried about you,” he insisted. “Perhaps I can ask one question that will not seem like prying into your secrets...”
“Worried about me?” Vicky asked.
She had spent most of the flight, as well as the drive between airport and city center, in a pensive, quiet, apparently almost depressed mood.
“Yes. Is it possible that anybody else could be looking for the same thing as you may be?”
Vicky’s reaction was not at all sophisticated. She glanced at him sharply.
“What made you ask that?”
“A simple logic,” Jaeger said offhandedly, raising a cigarette to his lips. “There are few secrets of which rumors do not reach the wrong people. Luckily you need not worry about the little you have told me. I said I was a salesman of watches, but to be less modest, I am owner of the agencies which distribute them, and frankly I have too much money to be tempted by your story.”
“I’m not very experienced about anything like this,” Vicky began, but Jaeger went on.
“I only want to warn you to look out for some adventurer or other who may try to steal your secret or talk you out of it. If anything like that happens, would you tell me?”
Vicky stared at him for a few seconds before she answered.
“I think you’re a mindreader, Curt. As a matter of fact something did happen.” She looked out of the window rather than at him as she went on, but her entry into Geneva carried none of the glamorous charge that had excited her when she had first arrived in Portugal. She was too preoccupied with worry and indecision about what she was doing to experience any very happy sensations. “It happened last night, while you and I were out for dinner. Somebody broke into my room.”
Jaeger’s eyes narrowed.
“I was afraid of just that sort of thing,” he said gravely. “Did he — the burglar — did he take anything?”
“He took the letter my father wrote me, and—”
Jaeger allowed himself to become agitated.
“Well, did you not report this? Did the police—”
“I have to tell you the rest,” Vicky said evenly. “In the first place, you’ll remember that I’d already cut out the part that mattered from the letter. But the most fantastic thing is, the man who took it came back to see me!”
This time Jaeger did not need to squander any theatrical talents on looking astonished.
“To see you? And you never said a word?”
“He was waiting in my room when you took me home,” she explained. “And he had the nerve to offer to help me.”