She looked out at the street again. Passing cars were using their lights and she could no longer think of any excuse to delay. She fumbled too much money on to the table and left the café without waiting for the waiter to express his appreciation. Within a few seconds she was able to hail a passing taxi. She had vaguely hoped that every means of public transport in Geneva might by some fortuitous circumstance be occupied or out of working order for the next twelve hours, thus depriving her of the opportunity of doing what she both longed to do and dreaded.
But the cab driver, against all the laws of cab drivers’ temperament, did not even twitch a querulous eyebrow when she asked him to take her to the Cimetière Internationale, much less turn her down flat as she was secretly hoping he would. He phlegmatically pushed his meter and his engine into gear, and took off towards the desired location with distressing speed by the most efficient possible route.
All Vicky’s hopes for blowouts or mechanical disasters came to naught, and within an incredibly short time she was being ferried along the almost unpopulated road on the edge of the city which led to the entrance of the cemetery.
“Cimetière Internationale?” the driver called over his shoulder, as if giving her a last chance to change her mind.
“Yes,” she answered.
A few minutes later the automobile came to a stop in front of the open gates which she had passed through earlier in the day. The area had no artificial lights, and the only illumination came from an almost full moon rising above the steep hills to the east. The many-shaped monuments in the graveyard beyond its barred fence looked like grotesque emerging creatures from an infernal world frozen in position for a moment by the sound of the car.
Again she almost changed her mind. She could simply sit where she was and tell the driver to take her back to the easy safety of the Hotel Portal. But that would also be going back to the easy dull safety of eight hours a day at the telephone office — and admitting that when her one big chance had come to make her life something more than a digit in the bottomless arithmetic of the Welfare State she had flubbed because she had the heebie-jeebies.
She got out of the taxi. She wanted desperately to ask the driver to wait, but she had already decided that that would be too risky. He could not see the shrine to German exiles from where he was parked, but the sound of breaking glass might easily carry to his ears through the quiet night, and in any case he could be a possible source of all sorts of complications. Besides he was pretending not to understand English as she questioned him about the fare, though he had understood her perfectly well when he had picked her up, which probably meant that he would have refused to comprehend that she wanted him to wait, even if she had asked him.
He took her money and drove away after giving her a final look which she was sure could only be described as pitying. She watched the red taillights disappear and then turned to face the cemetery gate. There was no sign of another living human being in any direction. On the road which circled the boundary of the graveyard there was not even the sound of an automobile to replace the frightening emptiness in her brain left by the departed taxi. Her only company was the lopsided ball of the moon which silvered the jumble of tombstones ahead of her.
Much as she disliked being alone in such a place, for strictly practical reasons she was far more worried about running into human than into ghostly interference. She thought she could safely assume that the Swiss, like most other people, had no taste for strolling in cemeteries at night.
Vicky took a deep breath and walked through the gate. She continued decisively and quickly down the gravel path towards the location of the German memorial. Something cautioned her, however, to avoid making too much noise, and as she got closer to the monument she slowed her pace and moved so quietly that she could scarcely hear her own footsteps.
Then she stopped.
She was almost within sight of the monument, and she thought that a faint scratching or scraping noise had come from its direction. Poised without breathing, she listened. The only sounds now were the background chirping and semi-musical sawing of nocturnal insects. It wouldn’t have been surprising if her imagination had tended to embellish nature a bit.
She walked on, however, more cautiously than ever. Turning a corner in the path she came within sight of the memorial silhouetted against the brilliantly moonlit sky. Its face was in deep shadow, but as she moved on towards it, approaching to within fifty yards, she saw a shadow stir. Something like true petrifaction seized her, so that she could not move even a finger. The dim shape by the monument moved again, but she could only make out that it was big enough to be human and was not a stray dog or cat.
Self-preservation almost screamed at her, urging her to run, calling in nightmare panic to set her feet moving. But Vicky Kinian had come a long way from her last schoolgirl Hallowe’en, and once having straddled life and gotten the reins in her hands she felt an even stronger instinct to hold on and not be thrown.
Suddenly anger began to replace fright. Somebody was meddling with her shrine, and she was not about to leave before she had at least seen who it was and what he was doing. She suspected that Simon Templar, true to his mystical nickname, had somehow found out the secret of the monument and was busily in the process of trying to steal her inheritance. If so, she would have no hesitation about walking up and bashing him on the head with her purse.
Her very readiness to attack the Saint in a lonely graveyard with nothing more deadly than a handbag showed a certain faith in his gallantry which she did not recognize in herself until later. But that trust did make her careless. She did not take quite the extremes of care in sneaking up for a closer look at the memorial that she might have otherwise. She tiptoed from tombstone to tombstone, working her way towards the great stone eagle that brooded on top of the exile’s monument, trying to make out what the figure at the base of the edifice was doing.
When she was within fifty feet she could make out the man’s back. The scraping noise she had heard had apparently been the sound of a glasscutter. Now, using some kind of suction device with a short handle, he was removing the whole curved sheet of glass from the memorial’s door and setting it on the ground beside him. She noticed that he did not then reach immediately for one of the metal boxes on the shelves inside, but stood there as if undecided what to do next.
Vicky decided to move nearer, and as she did the toe of her high-heeled shoe caught on a stone ridge surrounding one of the burial plots, and she almost fell. A pebble clattered. The man at the monument pivoted, stared about into the darkness, and slunk quickly away among the tombstones and scattered trees to her right.
She waited, surprised that the poacher had given up so quickly, and disturbed by a new realization: she had seen enough to know that the man beside the monument had not been the Saint. Who he was she had no idea. Nothing about him had been familiar, and though she had not seen his face as more than a shadowy blur she was sure she did not know him. Had he followed her earlier in the day, or did he have some other source of information? Crouched in the shadow of a gravestone, she turned over the possibilities in her mind while she wavered between running away as fast as she could, and waiting, as still as a terrified rabbit, until she felt the danger had passed.
The way of the rabbit seemed safer. The man had, after all, not seen her, and he might decide that the rattling stone signalled no danger to him. In that case he would come back soon and begin his work again. If he had been really frightened, though, he might leave the cemetery and give her a chance at the urns. Either way, there was no point in revealing her presence.