“If you’re really determined to pop off that little cannon, wouldn’t you rather have the window shut so it’ll make less noise outside? I could even draw the curtains.”
“Your thoughtfulness touches me deeply,” said Jaeger. “But you must take me for an idiot.”
“A natural mistake,” Simon said apologetically. “All I really had to judge by was your face.”
Any hint of amusement which might have been on Jaeger’s lips had completely evaporated, and his voice was hard and biting.
“I am not here to waste time talking. Open it!”
The Saint opened it. As the glass swung outward, a breeze sharp with the feel and taste of Alpine ice swept into the room, rustling the heavy drapes. Even in summer the peaks which towered not far from the city let nobody forget their snowy domination. Death and the white glaciers high above clouds in the moonlight seemed brothers at this moment, and the Saint sensed that the dark wind which swept down from them had coursed through his whole life, filling every instant with the crystalline tingle of supernal frost.
The barrel of the black pistol was levelled at his chest.
“Turn around,” Jaeger said softly.
“Maybe we can make a deal,” the Saint said without moving. “Has it occurred to you that I might have some information you could use?”
“No, it has not,” Jaeger answered, “and I don’t believe that anything you say could convince me. I’ve done well enough so far on my own, and I don’t need any deals with anybody. Turn around and face the window.”
“If you shoot,” Simon said calmly, “there’ll be people all over you before you can get out of the door.”
Jaeger’s voice crackled with a tension like static electricity.
“Turn around immediately!”
The Saint obeyed, shifting his position so that he stood facing the open window. Ahead of him, across a wide void of empty air, was the tall apartment building that faced the Hotel Portal from the far side of a traffic circle. Below, just beyond the window ledge but a long way beneath it, were the canopy of the hotel’s marquee, the taxis with headlights like flashlight beams, and foreshortened views of miniature people.
Behind him, Simon could hear Curt Jaeger moving, stepping very quietly across the carpet towards the window. A sensation of warming confidence began to spread through the Saint’s veins.
“You wouldn’t be thinking of saving ammunition, would you, Curt?” he inquired. “Considering something even sneakier than a shot in the back — and less noisy?”
Jaeger, predictably, made no reply, and just as predictably he came on towards Simon’s back. The Saint’s acute hearing measured each step the other man took, plotted his distance, noted the rustle of the material of his jacket as he raised his gun arm above Simon’s head, poising the heavy barrel before smashing it down on the back of his skull.
Then, with a timing that allowed only the shaving of a second’s error, the Saint exploded into action. His whole body ducked and whirled just as Jaeger chopped down with the automatic, and it was only Jaeger’s wrist that landed on Simon’s shoulder — a harmless blunting of the blow that was to have cracked his head with a handful of steel.
In the same tornado of movement that saved him from being knocked out of the window, Simon turned from defence to offence. One of his elbows smashed into Jaeger’s ribs and sent him staggering away. With a speed and balance that left his adversary in total confusion, he continued his pivot, snatched Jaeger’s gun arm, and with a bone-shattering chop of his straightened right hand bashed the pistol out of the man’s fingers to the floor.
Jaeger gave a yelp of pain and struck out wildly with his other fist. It caught Simon harmlessly on a protective forearm, but his own fist was more effective. It made forceful contact with Jaeger’s anatomy in the vicinity of his private beer-cellar, doubling him up and flinging him back against the wall not far from the open window.
“Give up, chum,” Simon said. “You didn’t figure on having to fight for your loot, and you’ve gone too soft to handle anything tougher than a lightweight female.”
Jaeger, wheezing for breath, grabbed up a sharp-edged glass ashtray and hurled it at the Saint. It flew past Simon’s ear and thumped on to the sofa.
“If you mistreat the crockery I’ll have to ask you to leave,” said the Saint.
He went after his opponent again, and Jaeger countered by trying for a clinch, tangling Simon’s arms with his own and using all his weight to push him back towards the window. The Saint balked, braced himself, and freed a hand. He cocked back his fist and unleashed a short jab at Jaeger’s nose. Jaeger staggered, letting go his grip on Simon, and launched a vicious kick.
The Saint caught the flying foot in midair.
“Sorry to behave badly for a host,” he said, “but I’ll have to ask you to leave.”
With both hands on Jaeger’s ankle he whipped him around in a perfectly timed swing that sent the other man not against the wall this time, but straight at the open window...
And suddenly there was only one man left in the room.
Simon braced himself on the window frame and looked down, secure in the knowledge that there were no lights on to reveal his interest to anybody in the street below or in the neighbouring buildings. There was a hole in the glass outcrop of the marquee six storeys down, and great excitement among the people on the sidewalk. Jaeger’s sudden ungainly appearance in front of the hotel was already public knowledge, but nobody — unless someone had happened to be looking directly upwards as he made his unsuccessful attempt to defy the force which controlled Newton’s apple — would know from which window he had fallen.
The Saint felt no remorse. Jaeger had taken precisely what he had intended to dish out, no more and no less, and nothing could have been fairer than that.
Simon checked to make sure that his double purpose chess box was still in his jacket pocket, and went to the door — a means of egress he much preferred to the one the late Curt Jaeger had planned for him. He would be out of the hotel before the police could begin to unfurl their clumsy nets, and Curt Jaeger’s Luger — the only thing which could connect the Saint’s room with the fallen man — would go with him.
2
“Ghou!” Vicky Kinian said accusingly to herself.
“An aperitif, mademoiselle?” the white-haired waiter asked.
Vicky looked up from the spotless surface of her small table. Outside the sidewalk café of the Beau Rivage the Quai du Mont-Blanc was almost dark. Within half an hour she could safely proceed with the task ahead of her. In the meantime, she wondered, what would be the best booster for a girl who was about to do her first job of grave-robbing?
“An Old Fashioned,” she said, and then remembered she was in Switzerland and not in the Kit Kat Steak House in southern Des Moines. “Oh, I don’t guess you’d have that...”
“Of course, mademoiselle. Immediately.”
The aged cupbearer limped away to fetch her drink, and Vicky continued to meditate nervously on her immediate future. She told herself that she was not really a grave-robber, of course, since her father’s instructions clearly specified which of the urns in the cemetery shrine contained not human ashes but something — just what she still did not know — much less necromantic and much more valuable. All she had to do was break through the monument’s glass door and take the metal box marked Josef Meier, and then run — no, walk — out of the graveyard. It was not really so ghoulish, and it would all be over in a matter of minutes.
The old waiter came back with her Old Fashioned. She bypassed the vegetation and gulped down the whisky, gratefully feeling the warmth hit her stomach all at once and begin to filter through her bloodstream.