If he smiled, the event was obscured by a hanging garden of white moustache which covered his mouth entirely except for a bit of central lower lip.
“I’ve come to ask about a safe deposit box my father rented here in 1945,” Vicky told him. “His name was Kinian — Major Robert Kinian.”
Assistant Manager Valdez squinted briefly and shook his head.
“I do not remember him myself, senhorita, but it is easy to look him up. Come into my office, please.”
He led the way with a stiff-legged brisk gait to a private office rich in waxed wood and leather. Vicky gave more details. Shortly Valdez sat at his massive desk and opened a bound volume of records with the date 1945-46 on its spine. As he was going over one of the pages with a magnifying glass Freda made a sotto voce comment to Vicky, who was sitting next to her in a huge wooden chair.
“If George Washington ever banked here, I bet this place would still have his checks.”
“Senhorita,” said Valdez unexpectedly without looking up from his magnifying glass, “this bank still holds an unpaid note signed by Christopher Columbus.”
Again, if the Assistant Manager’s drollery was accompanied by any trace of a smile, he was the only one who could have known it, and Vicky and Freda glanced at one another like two schoolgirls trying to stifle giggles.
“Ah!” said Valdez suddenly, “here is the name Kinian, with a special notation. The box was taken by Robert Kinian on February 8, 1945, and the rent paid in advance for thirty years.
When he looked up from the minuscule pen scratches of his ledger Vicky was leaning forward so tensely that he paused and blinked.
“Do not fear, senhorita, the box is certain to be here, quite secure. The vault is even safe against earthquakes. We have learned from unhappy experience.”
“I wasn’t worried about that,” Vicky assured him. “I’m just anxious to see the box.”
Valdez stood up.
“Good,” he said briskly. “All that is needed from you is some identification.”
Vicky opened her purse.
“Here’s my passport.”
“Very good.” Valdez took the green booklet and inspected its first pages. “‘Victoria Eileen Kinian.’ Yes, that is correct. I am authorized to give you a key to this box. Now, if you will follow me, please...”
They went with him out of the office, across the main floor again, and into a crypt-like stone chamber behind one of the counters. Armed with a ring of jangling keys, Valdez left the girls, shuffled off down a tunnel, and returned after an almost unbearable delay carrying a large metal box in his arms. He put the box on a table in the center of the room, handed Vicky a key, and held a chair for her and then for Freda.
“Regard the box as your own now, senhorita,” he said. “I shall leave you alone.”
“Our own private dungeon,” Freda said with a shiver when he had gone, gazing around at the forbidding walls of the room. “Solid granite three feet thick. Open that thing and let’s get out of here. What are you waiting for?”
Vicky was sitting with the key in her hand, hesitating to use it. Freda’s question broke the spell, and she inserted the key carefully into the lock at the end of the box.
“I don’t know,” she confessed. “For some reason, this is all giving me the creeps. I feel a little like — who was that girl in the old story who opened a box and discovered too late what she’d let out?” She turned the key. “Pandora,” she remembered aloud. “Pandora.”
The only sound in the bank’s inner sanctum was the faintly echoing click of a lock which had not been used for twenty-five years. Vicky touched the cold metal cover of the container as though it might give her an electric shock and then lifted it.
Looking very much alone on the bottom of the box was a white envelope, slightly yellowed with age like the letter that the lawyer had given her in Iowa.
“It doesn’t seem like much,” she said huskily.
She was staring down at it without showing any sign of intending to pick it up.
“Well, for goodness’ sake, it’s not going to bite you!” Freda encouraged her.
Vicky finally reached in and lifted it out. It was somewhat bulkier than she had thought at first glance.
“I think it’s just a letter,” she said appraisingly.
Freda sat back with a shake of her platinum-blond head.
“Your old man must’ve eaten wild goose every day and twice on Sundays. Okay, read us the next installment.”
Vicky had started to tear open the envelope, but then she stopped, weighing it in her palm.
“I’d rather not — here,” she said. “This feels like a regular project. Let’s go back to my room where we can settle down — in case there’s a shock that’s going to knock me flat.”
Freda stood up with a shrug of suffering resignation.
“It’s your snipe hunt, sweety. My lot is but to follow and hope you drop a few golden crumbs when you finally hit the jackpot. The prize must be pretty big if it was worth putting up this much of a smokescreen to cover it.”
They left Senhor Valdez with thanks and an empty coffer, and took a taxi back to the Tagus Hotel. Vicky was subdued during the drive and avoided saying a word about her father or the trail he had left behind him. Outside the quiet entrance of the hotel, which seemed almost completely deserted in comparison with its more typically central hostelries, Freda stopped and held Vicky back.
“I know all this is none of my business,” she said. “My only excuse is that you got me hooked on this awful suspense. I won’t come in if you don’t want me to.”
“Of course you should come in!” Vicky shook herself out of her abstracted state enough to put some sincere warmth into her answer. “I got you interested in this, and I might never even have found that bank without you. Let’s get upstairs and have a look.”
They walked into the low-keyed interior of the Tagua’s lobby, past potted palms and overstuffed sofas. Freda, taking everything in like a nervous bird as usual, focussed on the reception desk and nudged Vicky.
“Half-step, comrade,” she whispered. “Dig the gorgeous chunk of senhor.”
Vicky looked, and as she did so the tall blackhaired man who had been talking to the receptionist happened to glance up and look right at her. He was so unbelievably handsome, so easily and effortlessly elegant, and carried such magnetism in his steady gaze that she felt a quick shiver pass completely through her body.
“With those blue eyes I don’t think he’s a senhor,” she muttered inadequately.
“I may fight you for him,” Freda rejoined under her breath. “He’s the best-looking devil I’ve seen in ages.”
Vicky peeked back over her shoulder at the cleanly honed hawkish profile as she climbed the stairs.
“Oh well,” she sighed, “why fight? We’ll never see him again anyway.”
Everyone who has ever read any other story about Simon Templar, alias the Saint, will infallibly identify that as one of the most hard-worked errors of prophecy in the Saga. But this chronicler cannot fiddle with the record merely to avert a cliché.
That’s what the girl said. Honestly.
II: How Freda Oliveiros shared a Taxi, and Curt Jaeger’s appetite was Strained.
1
Without even waiting to open his suitcase, once he had seen it deposited in his room and taken possession of his key, Curt Jaeger had left the hotel again and completed a swift and efficient rendezvous with a business associate of long standing, whose interest in Swiss watches was basically limited to those that he fancied to wear himself, and those that in commercially viable quantities might be smuggled or stolen for sale in some underground market.