“Well, naturally!” Jaeger exploded. “He stole your letter, confirmed that you were after something valuable, and since you had cut out the important part of the letter he had to come back and find out more.”
“Don’t worry. I didn’t tell him anything.”
“Don’t worry?” Jaeger exclaimed incredulously. “You’re lucky to be alive! And you let this criminal go?”
“He wasn’t a criminal,” Vicky retorted with a sudden heat that surprised even her. “In fact, he almost convinced me...”
“You sound as if you’re defending him,” said Jaeger. “Who was he? Or I should say, who did he claim to be?”
“I probably shouldn’t tell anybody — just in case I have to change my mind about him. If I’m going to be an adventuress I’ll have to learn to think like one.”
Jaeger almost glowed visibly with elder-brotherly exasperation.
“How could there be any doubt? If the man had had good intentions of any kind he would scarcely have broken into your room!” He turned in his seat to plead with her earnestly. “Vicky, have I not been a good friend to you? A new one, but one who has not given you the slightest reason to distrust his motives?”
“That’s true,” she said.
“Then you must — you absolutely must tell me who this man is! I know officials here in Geneva who can investigate him. It is utterly foolish for you to expose yourself to this kind of risk, and I won’t stand by and allow it.”
She looked at him with a new kind of fear in her eyes-one related to her own unconventional intentions.
“I don’t want any officials poking their noses into my business,” she said.
“All right,” Jaeger replied more calmly. “They won’t — if you’ll tell me who this man was.”
Vicky thought for a moment and then gave a defeated sigh.
“His name was Simon Templar — the Saint...”
4
Although the Saint’s formidable reputation was strongly in the minds of both Vicky Kinian and Curt Jaeger when their taxi stopped in front of the Portal Hotel, they would probably have experienced something like the supremely invigorating shock of a bucket of ice water on the nape of the neck if they had been aware of his actual physical proximity. Mercifully for their adrenal equilibrium, they were not subjected to this brusque exhilaration; although when they walked into the hotel, Simon was watching from his car only a hundred feet away, and when Curt Jaeger came out alone a few minutes later the Saint was able to take a long unobstructed look at his face before he got into another cab and rode away.
Simon was less impressed by Vicky Kinian’s sharp-featured boyfriend than he was by the hotel she had chosen. Apparently the prospect of future riches had completely subverted her ingrained standards, for from a one-horse elevatorless hostelry in an unpretentious quarter of Lisbon she had seen fit to remove herself to one of the finest examples of solid understated elegance in Geneva. The Portal was directly on the lake, and beyond the braid-draped doorman who stood beneath its crested marquee the Saint could watch the course of sails and speedboats across the calm water.
He did not watch for long, however. Once Curt Jaeger had been carried well out of sight by his taxi, and once Vicky Kinian had had ample time to get herself and her luggage to her room, Simon himself let the doorman usher him into the quiet bronze and gold of the lobby. Within three minutes he had signed for a room and seen his bags carried away to it. Without bothering to inspect his new lodgings more thoroughly, he used a lobby telephone to notify the car-hire agency of his whereabouts, and then went back to the Volkswagen he had rented from them, unfolded a newspaper, and prepared to wait as long as necessary for Vicky Kinian to make her next move. He could only hope that whatever she had to do next involved an actual excursion of some kind on her part, and not some such less detectable form of communication as a phone call. He was also gambling on the probability that she would be too anxious to get on with her quest to sit around the hotel for the remaining few hours of summer daylight.
While Simon waited, and while Vicky unpacked and changed her clothes, a new member of the Kinian caravan was going into underhanded action back at the Geneva airport. The Saint had, in fact, seen him not many minutes before, but he had been no more than a rather ugly face among a great many other unimpressive faces in the terminal building. The only thing which might in any way have made him memorable was his nearness to the bald man with the white Vandyke whiskers just before that dawdling character had made his abrupt departure from the airport; but there had been a host of other people in the same area too, and it would have taken a full-time paranoid to suspect them all.
The new character’s name, for the convenience of our own record, was Mischa Ruspine, and his dour countenance seemed to be suspended limply between two protrusive ears which resembled a pair of not quite identical outsized teacup handles. Sheltering that wholesome and inviting physiognomy was a display of unwashed brown hair that started thin on top, gathered momentum behind his ears, and ended in a thick climactic heap on his coat collar. He was indeed an associate of the persistent eavesdropper in the white Vandyke, and just before that latter party had forsaken the airport terminal he had muttered out of the corner of his mouth:
“The tall man with black hair down by the photograph machine.”
“Hm,” Mischa had confirmed identification.
He had received his instructions earlier, so no further dialogue was necessary. He watched his assignment stroll to the booth of a car rental agency, and managed to stand inconspicuously near enough to overhear most of his conversation with the uniformed counter girl. What he heard convinced him that he could combine pleasure with business by relaxing in the terminal bar and returning to the U-Drive agency later. There was no point in wasting energy and running the risk of losing the Saint in traffic as he followed him, when he could instead wait in comfort and then follow with perfect certainty about where he was going.
So Mischa had sipped his way through two cold lagers, stretching them over thirty minutes, and then had shuffled back to the car rental booth. His normal gait was somehow as dour as his countenance.
“I have something to deliver to a Mr Templar,” he told the girl. “He said you would know what hotel he had gone to.”
The girl looked at him with ingenuous surprise.
“Your timing is very good,” she said. “He just telephoned. He is staying at the Hotel Portal.”
“Merci, mademoiselle.”
“Do you know where that is?”
“Oui, mademoiselle. I do.”
His next stop was at a telephone kiosk near the terminal exit. He dialled a local number and within a few moments heard the voice of the man in the white Vandyke.
“Realite Foto.”
“This is Mischa. I have the information. He hired a car at the airport to drive himself, and then followed the other two when they left.”
His revelation failed to spark enthusiasm at the other end of the line.
“I could have predicted that without leaving you there to watch. But where did they go?”
“Templar has registered at the Portal,” Mischa answered. “Obviously the girl stays there too.”
“Are you sure he did not see you following?”
“I was too smart to follow. He said he would let the car renters know which hotel he chose, so I waited until he phoned them.”
In spite of Mischa’s smug self-satisfaction, the reaction of his superior was still anything but congratulatory.