The Saint in Trouble

Leslie Charteris The Saint in Trouble

I The Imprudent Professor

Original Teleplay by Terence Feely

Adapted by Graham Weaver

1

Simon Templar pushed away the remains of his lobster and ordered coffee and cognac. He turned his chair sideways to the table and crossed his legs with careful attention to the crease of his trousers. The brightly colored canvas of the awning overhead offered only token protection from the early afternoon sun, and he envied the customers in the restaurant behind him as they enjoyed the cooler shade of the interior. But his choice of a place outside had been dictated not by considerations of comfort but by its strategic advantage as an observation post.

“An adventurer’s life,” he telepathically informed the fly sensibly dawdling hopefully in the shadow of his plate, “is not an easy one.”

The fly ignored him.

Simon sighed. He was aware that there was a large percentage of the world’s population who would gladly have changed places with him. People to whom the prospect of lunching at a luxury restaurant in Cannes on a summer’s day would not have seemed an unduly excruciating ordeal. But Simon Templar’s moods and opinions rarely coincided with those of the average citizen.

He was also well aware that there were a great many people who would have enjoyed a more contented and peaceful existence had he decided to follow the paths of the majority. Men who would have been happier, richer souls had they never heard of him. Some of whom were known by numbers instead of names and spent their hours sewing containers for Her Majesty’s mail.

And there were those too who, had he sought a life checking figures in a ledger, would have been alive to enjoy the sunshine. They knew him not by the names bestowed upon him at his baptism (if there ever had been such a ceremony) but by another that was capable of arousing both hatred and terror; that could start the most secure searching of their passports and the most abject coward looking for a gun. A title that was also synonymous with headaches and discomfiture to the guardians of the law and order in a dozen countries: the Saint.

There had been a time when that name alone was known and the only clue to the identity of its owner was a haloed matchstick figure that might have seemed childish had it not been for the aura of almost supernatural potency that it had acquired. It had been the standard in a private battle against those parasites the police could not touch; a visiting card that carried the same authority as a death warrant.

Official forgiveness from a grateful government for those early sins had not prevented the committing of fresh ones, but the fame that was their inevitable result made the life of a modern buccaneer more complicated than it was comfortable. His reputation brought the Saint adventures he might otherwise have missed, but it also made him the favourite in the chasing-wild-goose stakes and it was in this latter category that he was beginning to place his present business.

In front of him, on the Boulevard de la Croisette, other eaters and drinkers had left their restaurants and cafés and were beginning to pack the pavements again. The road traffic was building up and slowing to a crawl. By taming his head slightly he could forget some of the noise and movement by looking beyond it to the blue waters of the Mediterranean sparkling in the sun.

He watched as a ferry laden with day trippers ploughed from his right towards the islands of Ste. Marguerite and Ste. Honorat on his near horizon, forcing its purposeful passage between the yachts and launches that glided like white-breasted sea birds around the bay. One in particular caught his attention, and he followed its progress for a while as it cruised across his field of view.

It rode high in the water, its knife-sharp bows cutting an easy path for the trim white hull. The flying bridge sprouted enough scanners and antennae to equip a frigate, and the twin screws were using only an infinitesimal fraction of their reserves to push it on its leisured course. By local plutocratic standards it was not a large craft, no more than fifty feet, but its obviously understated power gave it an air of pent-up vitality that had a certain insolent appeal.

The Saint’s keen eyes picked out three people on board, the captain on his bridge, a crewman performing some indistinct task in the bow and a girl whose slender form was draped along a lounger on the after deck. As it turned away, perhaps headed for the Port Canto, Simon managed to pick out the name on the transom: Protege. The girl, he was tempted to fantasize, might have been more interesting to protect than the subject he was committed to.

Reluctantly he turned his gaze back along the boulevard to the flag-bedecked Palais des Festivals just across the intervening side street from where he sat. A small group of sombre-suited men stood halfway up the steps. A steady procession of cars and taxis stopped to deposit their similarly unfestive-looking passengers. Each time the same ceremony was repeated: the leader of the greeters, a small bald man with a goatee beard, stepped forward and bowed, shook the hand of the latest arrival, and introduced him to the others. That ceremony over, a uniformed attendant would appear and escort the visitor into the building. A couple of press photographers clicked their cameras without moving from the wall they were supporting. Above the entrance to the Palais was draped a white banner bearing the flaming brand emblem of the European Institute for Scientific Advancement, below which was proclaimed CONGRÈS DE RESSOURCES D’ÉNÉRGIE ALTERNATIVE.

The sight of the precise men performing their precise ritual, coupled with the words on the banner, deepened the frustration that had been building up in him during the three days since his arrival in Cannes.

It was nothing about the town that exasperated him, for it was early enough in the season for there still to be room to stroll the sidewalks, lie on the beach, or tack a sailboat across the bay. Rather it was the incongruity of the people he was watching that irritated him: they were so totally oat of place in such a resort at such a time.

Union leaders may score a proletarian point by convening in Scarborough or in Atlantic City in October. Clergymen may regard congregating in holiday camps in March as the twentieth-century equivalent of the hair shirt and derive solace therefrom. Politicians may kid their voters that they are working if they babble around tables in Brussels or Geneva at any time of year. But only scientists, their minds congested with calculus and their vision dimmed by nebulous theories, could possibly consider conducting ponderous arguments in Cannes at the end of May when the sun was bright but the temperature was at its most agreeable.

It must be admitted that the Saint had never had too high a regard for scientists as a breed. After all, he reflected, most of the really important things had been discovered by accident rather than through deliberate research. A watched kettle had boiled and heralded the Industrial Revolution, a forgotten fungus had provided penicillin, and a wine grower’s mistake had produced cognac. The Saint sniffed the dark gold liquid in his glass as he raised it in silent salute to his ignorant benefactor, and waited for the comforting glow to diffuse through his body. On the whole, his summation went, the contributions of scientists to the health and creature comforts of mankind had been pretty well offset by the Pandora’s boxload of death and destruction and pollution that they had also helped to let loose.

The era of the Saint’s anonymity has already been mentioned. A scientist’s evil discovery had been responsible, in an ultimate way, for bringing those golden days to a close, and for the death of one of the truest friends he would ever have.{See The Saint Closes the Case} Psychiatrists perhaps could have spent many happy hours pondering the significance of those events in his attitude to science and the irony of his present interest in it.