“Be quiet, senhorita, and there weel be no trouble!” the little man said in English.
Freda, who had held her own against considerably more hefty males than this one, was more angry than scared. She got her purse on her safer side and slid over against the door.
“That’s what you think, buster!” she snapped. “Now get out of here pronto or you’ll see plenty of trouble! Driver—”
Her uninvited fellow traveller moved so swiftly that she was not sure whether the knife had been whipped from his pocket or whether it had been in his hand all the time. In any case, it was one of those very large switch knives whose butcher-shop blade stays concealed in its weighty handle until a button is pressed. The sharp silvery point flashed out at her like the head of a snake and stopped just short of her ribs.
“Do not waste your voice,” the little man said. “The driver weel only pay attention to me. I am suggest that you should pay attention to this that I am holding in my hand.”
He nuzzled the point of the blade almost affectionately against the thin material of her dress just below her breast.
“I’ll scream my head off,” she threatened with less assurance.
“And I would cut your head off and you would not scream any more.”
The man seemed to think his rejoinder was humorous, but the sharp tip of his knife pressed harder against her and assured Freda that his basic intentions were entirely serious. She was really terrified for the first time. The driver — the back view of his head reminded her grotesquely of a carved coconut with a cap on — swung his taxi around several corners and headed away from the center of the city. The neighbourhoods they passed through began to deteriorate into jumbles of warehouses, dingy-looking bars, and grubby housing.
“What do you want?” Freda asked tensely. “Where do you think you’re taking me?”
“You weel know quick,” was the answer. “Do not make trouble.”
The cab pulled into a narrow cobbled street of two-storey houses whose walls and window shutters seemed to be nearing the end of an ancient contest to decide which could flake off the most paint or plaster. Freda was so terrified by now that she took in only the vaguest impression of her surroundings. The man with the knife muttered his instructions as the driver opened the door on her side of the automobile.
“You weel get out, please, and go into that house — weethout no fuss!”
The switchblade reinforced his order, and the girl obeyed, clutching her purse tightly against her body almost as if she hoped it was all the men were really after. The car was parked within three paces of a doorway which the driver, in a parody of politeness, held open for her. He was an imbecilic-looking lout with a battered nose and cavernous bushy-browed eye sockets, one of the ugliest mortals she had ever laid eyes on. Even so, she thought she preferred him to the sinister little cutthroat behind her. As she entered the house she looked longingly back over her shoulder past the knifeman’s broad-brimmed hat at the sunlight on the wall opposite — and the last thing she saw was the long taxi, black and shining like a well-kept hearse.
The man with the knife locked the door when they were all three inside, and it took several seconds for Freda’s eyes to accustom themselves to the dimness of the room. The two windows were shuttered and the driver jerked dusty draperies across them, cutting off the light that would have filtered in through the crevices. The room itself was depressingly shabby and underfurnished, like part of a rental house that had been used by family after family for years until finally it had been closed for months because no one would have it.
“Seet at the table, senhorita.”
Freda summoned every volt of her courage in a final effort to intimidate her chief captor with sheer defiance.
“You can’t get away with this — whatever you think you want! I’m an American citizen, and...”
The moustached man’s hatchet-chop of a laugh showed just how singularly unimpressed he was by her national prestige and her threats.
“Seet down!” he ordered. “What we want ees so easy, senhorita, as you weel see. Do not trouble yourself. Seet at the table-here!”
He kicked a crippled chair into place for her and she sullenly sat on it. The thick wooden slab of a table top in front of her was covered with a film of reddish dust.
“What is it, then?” she demanded.
The driver was standing by as dumb and motionless as a wax-museum Neanderthaler. The other man took paper and pen from his pocket and put them down for her to use.
“Seemply a note to your woman friend at the hotel, to say you have been called away and cannot have dinner tonight.”
Freda stared at him with incredulity and the eager hope that she might get out of the situation a lot more easily than she had imagined.
“All this so I’ll cancel a dinner date?” she asked.
“Si, senhorita. Just write an excuse to your girl friend so her admirer can see her alone.”
“Why?”
“I am not like so many questions,” the man said more harshly. “Write the letter! Tell her you have business that makes you leave Lisboa.”
Freda pondered her situation for just a few seconds, and decided that any further resistance would be a waste of time. She took the pen and wrote a short note in deliberately overformal English saying that she had been called away suddenly to work on a flight.
“Will that do?” she asked curtly, after scrawling her name.
Axe-nose took the piece of paper and scrutinized it word by word. He read it a second time before he nodded.
“Eez okay,” he granted.
“I must say Mr Jaeger has a pretty violent way of breaking a date,” Freda said. “But now that you’ve got what he wants, you can let me out of here.”
Her kidnapper tucked the note she had written into his jacket. Then, before he answered, he unwrapped, clenched in his teeth, and held a match to a long thin cigar — all with deliberate slowness. The silence was unnerving. The only sound in the thick-walled room was the man’s quick sucking of fire into his cheroot. When it was glowing, he snapped the wooden match in half between his fingers and flipped its pieces across the room.
“Oh, no, senhorita,” he said softly. “I cannot let you out of here. Now that you absence weel be explained — now we can ask you some important questions.”
He had put one foot on a rung of her chair and leaned down with his face so close to hers that she could feel the heat of the scarlet glowing coal tip of the cigar which jutted from his mouth.
“But...”
She was almost too frightened to say anything, and he cut her off after the first word she uttered. The big knife, which he had kept out of sight while she wrote the letter to Vicky, appeared again from behind his back. He held the blade for her to see.
“No ‘but,’ senhorita,” he murmured. “Now you weel ansswer questions, and you weel answer quickly, or eet weel be a long afternoon that you spend here.” He moved the knife towards her midriff until it punctured the thin fabric of her blouse, and then — like a surgeon beginning to operate — with a slow careful upward movement he slit the material open all the way to the neckline. “A very long afternoon...”
2
Through his half-open door, which gave him an adequately direct view of the entrance to Vicky Kinian’s room across the hall, Simon Templar had heard Freda’s parting line — “I just hope my father never writes me a cliff-hanging letter like that!” — and had been well aware of her glance into his room, and of the significant deceleration of her pace as she passed it. He would have been hardly human, or more like an authentic saint, if he had not been tempted to accept the obvious challenge to make a discreet bid for her acquaintance. He could even have twisted the rubber arm of his conscience with the specious argument that such a manoeuvre would be strictly in the line of duty, anyhow, since it could be an adroitly indirect way to sneak up on his prime target. The blonde was not one of the characters of the script that had been presented to him at the embassy, but then life almost always ignored the scripts men prepared for it anyway. The important things at the moment were that Vicky Kinian was in her room and could not get out without him knowing it, and that with her — unless the blonde had a more active role than he imagined — was a fascinating epistle from her departed dad. Whether it was the same letter she had been given in Iowa or a new one that had somehow come into her hands in Lisbon did not make much difference now; in either case it was just the sort of light reading the Saint craved to while away a few minutes of his tax-supported holiday in Portugal. And from that objective he could not let himself for the moment be detoured.