The Saint sipped his wine. It was a native Johannisberg Rhônegold, light and bone-dry, the perfect punctuation for the glutinous goodness into which he was dunking.
"How different?"
"He said he could not stand it any more, the way he was living and what he was doing, and he wished he could escape to the West, He asked if I would be ready to help him. Of course I said yes. But how? We exchanged several letters, discussing possibilities, quite apart from the other letters which he went on writing for the censors to read."
"How did you work that?"
"Through the travel agency, it was not so hard to find ways.
And at last the opportunity came. He was to be sent to Geneva, to a meeting of the disarmament conference — not to take part himself, but to be on hand to advise the Soviet delegate about scientific questions. It seemed as if everything was solved. He only had to get out of the Soviet embassy, here in Switzerland, and he would be free."
The Saint's gaze was no longer gently quizzical. His blue eyes, many southern shades darker than hers, had hardened as if sapphires were crystallizing in them. He was listening now with both ears and all his mind; but he went on eating with undiminished deference to the cuisine. "So what's the score now?"
"I came here to meet him with some money, and to help him. When he escaped, of course, he would have nothing. And he speaks only Russian and Finnish. But something went wrong."
"What, exactly?"
"I don't know."
Until then, she had been contained, precise, reciting a synopsis that she must have vowed to deliver without emotion, to acquit herself in advance of the charge of being just another hysterical female with helpful hallucinations. But now she was leaning across the table towards him, twisting her fingers together, and letting her cold lovely face be twisted into unbecoming lines of tortured anxiety.
"Someone betrayed us. We had to trust many people who carried our letters. Who knows which one? I only know that yesterday, when he was to do it, I waited all day up the street where I could watch the entrance, in a car which I had hired, and in the evening he came out. But not by himself, as we had planned. He was driven out in an embassy car, sitting between two men who looked like gangsters — the secret police! I could only just recognize him, from a recent photograph he had sent me, looking around desperately as if he hoped to see me, as if I could have rescued him."
Her coffee and Benedictine arrived, and Simon said to the waitress: "You can bring me the same, in about five minutes."
He harpooned a prize corner crust, and set about mopping the dish clean of the last traces of fondue. He said: "You should have got here sooner. There's an old Swiss tradition which says that when fondue is being eaten, anyone who loses the bread off their fork has to kiss everyone else at the table. It must make for nice sociable eating… So what happened?"
"I followed them. It was all I could think of. If I lost him then, I knew I would lose him for ever. I thought at first they were taking him to the airport, to send him back to Russia, and I could make a fuss there. But no. They went to Lausanne, then on to here, and then still farther, to a house on the lake, with high walls and guards, and they took him in… Then I went to the police."
"And?"
"They told me they could do nothing. It was part of the Soviet embassy, officially rented for diplomatic purposes, and it could not be touched. The Russians can do whatever they like there, as if they were in Russia. And I know what they are doing. They are keeping my father there until they can send him back to Moscow — and then to Siberia. Unless they kill him first."
"Wouldn't that have been easier from Geneva?"
"There is another airport at Zurich, almost as close from this house, and without the newspaper men who will be at Geneva for the conference."
Letting his eyes wander around the quiet little square, Simon thought that you really had to have a paperback mind to believe tales like that in such a setting. The table where they sat outside the restaurant was under the shade of the awning, but he could have stretched a hand out into the sunshine which made it the kind of summer's day that travel brochures are always photographed on. And gratefully enjoying their full advertised money's worth, tourists of all shapes and sizes and nationalities were rambling back and forth, posing each other for snapshots, plodding in and out of the domed Panorama building opposite to peer (for reasons comprehensible only to tourists and the entrepreneurs who provide such attractions for them) at its depiction of the French general Bourbaki's entry into Switzerland in 1871 on a scale that seems somewhat disproportionate to the historic importance of that event, or trudging up the hill to gawk at the Lion Memorial carved in the rock to commemorate the Swiss mercenaries who died in Paris with unprofitable heroism defending the Tuileries against the French Revolution, or to the Glacier Garden above that which preserves the strange natural sculpture of much more ancient turnings — all with their minds happily emptied of everything but the perennial vacation problem of paying for their extra extravagances and souvenirs. Not one of them, probably, would have believed in this plot unless they saw it at home on television. But the Saint knew perhaps better than any man living how thinly the crust of peace and normalcy covered volcanic lavas everywhere in the modern world.
He turned back to Irma Jorovitch, and his voice was just as tolerantly good-humored as it had been ever since she had intruded herself with her grisly reminder of what to him were only the facts of life. He said: "And you think it should be a picnic for me to rescue him."
She said: "Not a picnic. No. But if any man on earth can do it, you can."
"You know, you could be right. But I was trying to take a holiday from all that."
"If you would want money," she said, "I have nothing worth your time to offer. But I could try to get it. I would do anything —anything!"
It was altogether disgraceful, he admitted, but he could do nothing to inhibit an inward reflex of response except try not to think about it.
"Gentleman adventurers aren't supposed to take advantage of offers like that," he said, with unfeigned regret.
"You must help me," she said again. "Please."
He sighed.
"All right," he said. "I suppose I must."
Her face lit up with a gladness that did the same things for it that the Aurora Borealis does to the arctic snows. It was a reaction that he had seen many times, as if his mere consent to have a bash had vaporized all barriers. It would have been fatally intoxicating if he ever forgot how precariously, time after time, he had succeeded in justifying so much faith.
"It isn't done yet, darling," he reminded her. "Tell me more about this house."
It was on the southern shore of the Vierwaldstättersee, he learned, the more rugged and less accessible side which rises to the mingled tripper-traps and tax-dodger chalets of Bürgenstock, and by land it was reachable only by a second-to-secondary road which served nothing but a few other similarly isolated hermitages. Although it was dark when she passed it, she was sure there was no other residence near by, so that anyone approaching in daylight would certainly be under observation long before he got close. The walls around the grounds were about seven feet high, topped with barbed wire, but with slits that the inmates could peep through — to say nothing of what electronic devices might augment their vigilance. Added to which, she had heard dogs barking as she drove past.