Because gold rippled in a girl's hair, and an imp of sophisticated humour lurked Pan-like in the shadows of her eyes; because the same gaze could sometimes hold a serenity of purpose beyond measure—Simon Templar, at thirty-four, with odysseys of adventure behind him that would have made Ulysses look like a small boy playing in a back yard, found himself in the beginning of that halcyon afternoon at a loose end.
It wasn't exactly the amount of money involved. Four million, if that was a minimum estimate of the total submerged wealth which Vogel had plundered from the sea bottoms, was certainly a lot of pounds. So was ten per cent of it. Or even half that. The Saint wasn't greedy; and he had come out of each of his past sorties into the hazardous hinterlands of adventure with a lengthening line of figures in his bank account which raised their own monument to his flair for boodle. He had no need to be avaricious. There were limits—lofty, vertiginous limits, but limits nevertheless—to how much money one could spend; and he had a sublime faith that the same extravagant providence which had held him up all his life so far would keep him near enough to those limits to save him from feeling depressed. It wasn't exactly that. It was a matter of principle.
"You're getting old," he reproached himself solemnly. "At this very moment, you're trying to persuade yourself to work for an insurance company. Just because she has a body like an old man's dream, and you kissed her. An insurance company!"
He shuddered.
And then he turned his eyes to study a speck of movement on the borders of his field of vision. The speed tender was moving away from the side of the Falkenberg, heading towards the Bee de la Vallée. For a moment he watched it idly, calculating that its course would take it within a few yards of the Corsair: as it came nearer he recognised Kurt Vogel, and with him a stout grey-bearded man in a Norfolk jacket and a shapeless yellow Panama hat.
Simon began to get up from his chair. He began slowly and almost uncertainly, but he finished in a sudden rush of decision. Any action, however vague its object, was better than no action at all. He skated down the companion with something like his earlier exuberance, and shouted for Grace.
"Never mind about lunch," he said, scattering silk shirts and white duck trousers out of a locker. "I'm going on shore to take up ornithology."
2
One of the vedettes from St Malo was coming in to the jetty when the Saint scrambled back on deck, and the Falkenberg's tender was still manoeuvering for a landing. Simon dropped into his dinghy and wound up the outboard. Fortunately the Corsair had swung round on the tide so that she screened his movements from any chance backward glances from the quay, and he started off up-river and came round in a wide circle to avoid identifying himself by his point of departure. Not that it mattered much; but he wanted to avoid giving any immediate impression that he was deliberately setting off in pursuit.
He cruised along, keeping his head down and judging time and distance as the Falkenberg's tender squeezed in to the steps and Vogel and his companion went ashore. Looking back, he judged that with any luck no curious watcher on the Falkenberg had observed his hurried departure, and by this time he was too far away to be recognised. Then, as Vogel and the grey-bearded man started up the causeway towards the Grande Rue, the Saint opened up his engine and scooted after them. He shot in to the quay under the very nose of another boat that was making for the same objective, spun his motor round into reverse under a cloudburst of Gallic expostulation and profanity, hitched the painter deftly through a ring-bolt, and was up on land and away before the running commentary he had provoked had really reached its choicest descriptive adjectives.
The passengers who were disembarking from the ferry effectively screened his arrival and shielded his advance as he hustled after his quarry. The other two were not walking quickly, and the grey-bearded man's shabby yellow Panama was as good as a beacon. Simon spaced himself as far behind them as he dared when they reached the Digue, and slackened the speed of his pursuit. He ambled along with his hands in his pockets, submerging himself among the other promenaders with the same happy-go-lucky air of debating the best place to take an aperitif before lunch.
Presently the yellow Panama bobbed across the stream in the direction of the Casino terrace, and Simon Templar followed. At that hour the place was packed with a chattering sun-soaked throng of thirsty socialites, and the Saint was able to squeeze himself about among the tables in the most natural manner of a lone man looking for a place—preferably with company. His route led him quite casually past Vogel's table; and at the precise moment when the hook-nosed man looked up and caught his eye, Simon returned the recognition with a perfect rendering of polite interest.
They were so close together that Vogel could scarcely have avoided a greeting, even if he had wished to—which the Saint quietly doubted. For a moment the man's black expressionless stare drilled right through him; and then the thin lips spread in a smile that had all the artless geniality of a snake's.
"I hope you didn't think I was too unceremonious about disturbing you last night," he said.
"Not at all," said the Saint cheerfully. "I didn't leave the baccarat rooms till pretty late, so I was only just settling in."
His glance passed unostentatiously over the grey-bearded man. Something about the mild pink youthful-looking face struck him as dimly familiar, but he couldn't place it.
"This is Professor Yule," said the other, "and my name is Vogel. Won't you join us, Mr—er——"
"Tombs," said the Saint, without batting an eyelid, and sat down.
Vogel extended a cigarette-case.
"You are interested in gambling, Mr Tombs?" he suggested.
His tone was courteous and detached, the tone of a man who was merely accepting the obvious cue for the opening of a conventional exchange of small talk; but the Saint's hand hovered over the proffered case for an imperceptible second's pause before he slid out a smoke and settled back.
"I don't mind an occasional flutter to pass the time," he murmured deprecatingly.
"Ah, yes—an occasional flutter." Vogel's eyes, like two beads of impenetrable jet, remained fixed on his face; but the cold lipless smile remained also. "You can't come to much harm that way. It's the people who play beyond their means who come to grief."
Simon Templar let a trickle of smoke drift down his nostrils, and that instantaneous instinctive tension within him relaxed into a pervasive chortle of pure glee which spread around his inside like a sip of old brandy. Kurt Vogel, he reflected, must have been taking a diet of the kind of mystery story in which the villain always introduces himself with some lines of sinister innuendo like that—and thereby convinces the perhaps otherwise unsuspecting hero that something villainous is going on. In the same type of story, however, the hero can never resist the temptation to respond in kind—thereby establishing the fact that he is the hero. But the Saint had been treading the fickle tightropes of piracy when those same romantic juveniles were cooing in their cradles, and he had his own severely practical ideas of heroism.
"There's not much chance of that," he said lightly, "with my overdraft in its present state."
They sat eye to eye like two duellists baffled for an opening; and the Saint's smile was wholly innocent. If Kurt Vogel had hoped to get him to betray himself by any theatrical insinuations of that sort, there were going to be some disappointed hearts in Dinard that fine day. But Vogel's outward cordiality never wavered an iota. He gave away nothing, either—the innuendo was only there if the Saint chose to force it out.