Leslie Charteris
Trust the Saint
To AUDREY
for ten wonderful years
The helpful pirate
Copyright © 1962 by Fiction Publishing Company
There were a few people — a very few — within his tight circle of friends and almost astronomical orbit of acquaintances, for whom the Saint would do practically anything. Including even things which under any other auspices would have excited him to violent and voluble revolt.
One addiction that he especially despised was the fad for antiques. He could admire and love an old house for its own sake, but he was incapable of understanding anyone who would build a house today in good or bad imitation of the architecture of a bygone age. He could respect the furnishings of a genuine old house when they were its natural contemporaries, without necessarily wanting to live with them himself, but he could only wax sarcastic about dislocated decorators, professional or amateur, who put period furniture in a steel-and-glass skyscraper apartment:
“If the Georgians had been convinced that it wasn’t smart to build anything but fake Elizabethan, there wouldn’t have been any Georgian architecture for other monkeys to imitate. If Louis Seize had refused to park his ischial tuberosities on anything but an Henri Quatre chair, there wouldn’t be any Louis Seize furniture for the fake factories to make copies of. In fact, if everyone had spent his time gazing adoringly backwards, we’d still be sleeping on stone cots in nice cozy caves. I was born in the twentieth century, and I don’t see anything wrong with living with its better experiments.”
He might have added that although he had been called the twentieth century’s brightest buccaneer, he had not found it necessary to leap around in thigh boots and ear-rings, with a cutlass between his teeth, but he still had some quite unpredictable modesties.
The bitterest focus of his prejudice, however, centered on the proliferation of the smaller shops that deal in the smaller items, the merchants of bric-a-brac rather than furniture, and their patrons.
“There’s one on every other street in Europe, down to the smallest village,” he had said. “If the non-edible contents of every trash can and junk pile for the last five centuries had been hidden away by gnomes, I doubt if the hoard would be enough to stock them all. There must be secret production lines that would make Detroit look like a medieval handicraft studio, running day and night to pour out enough antiques to meet the demand. And everywhere you can get to by jet plane or jalopy there’s some beady-eyed tourist sniffing for a treasure that all his predecessors have overlooked. He wouldn’t know a genuine William and Mary silver sugar-bowl from an early Woolworth, but so long as he’s told it’s more than two hundred years old he wants it. And if he’s a she, which most of them are, she doesn’t even want it for a sugar-bowl. She can see just how it could be re-modeled into the most darling lamp. And when she finds the most darling old lamp, she knows just how it could be eviscerated to make the cutest sugar-bowl. If Aladdin had run into one of them, the Arabian Nights would have been full of screaming genies.”
Yet there he was, Simon Templar, in exactly that type of shop on the oddly-named ABC-Strasse in Hamburg, Germany, saying to the proprietor, “I was looking for some of those old Rhine wine glasses, the kind that spread out from under the bowl to the base, so that they stand on a sort of inverted ice-cream cone instead of a stem.” He drew the shape in the air with both hands.
“Ah, yes, I know what you mean. They are called Römer glasses.”
“Do you have any?”
“I am sorry, not at the moment. The old ones are quite rare.”
“So I’ve heard. But I’m not worried about the price. Someone I want to do a special favour for is crazy about them, but he’s only got two or three. I’d like to be able to give him a set. And the rarer and more valuable they are, the more he’ll be impressed.”
While the Saint, when it was necessary to play the part, could assume an aspect of proud or unprincipled poverty that would evoke a responsive twang from any normal heartstring, his usual appearance, fortunately or unfortunately, suggested a person who was so far on the other side of having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth that he must have been seriously shocked when he first learned that gold spoons were not standard issue. It was not merely the over-all excellence of his tailoring and accessories, for they were too superlative to be ostentatious. It was perhaps primarily an air, an attitude, the easy assurance of a man who has had the best for so long that he no longer demands it: he simply expects it.
The dealer was a broad-beamed portly burgher whose name, according to the legend on the shop window, was Johann Uhrmeister. He had receding sandy-gray hair and pale blue eyes which appraised the Saint as expertly as they would have rated any marketable relic.
“I should be glad to look around for you, sir. If you will leave your name—”
“Templar,” Simon told him truthfully.
Germany was one country where he did not think he had earned much publicity, certainly not in recent years, and he did not expect his surname to elicit any reaction there, at least by itself. There was none from Uhrmeister as he wrote it down.
“And where are you staying?”
“At the Vier Jahreszeiten.”
“If I can find any, I will let you know. How long are you staying here?”
“A week, maybe.”
“It is your first time in Hamburg?”
“Yes.”
Herr Uhrmeister turned and picked up a booklet from a stack on an inlaid table which was mainly burdened with a large and horrible gilt clock. The cover described it concisely as An Introduction to Hamburg. He gave it to Simon.
“Please take one of these, with our compliments. It may help you to enjoy your stay. And I hope you will be lucky in your search.”
“Thank you,” said the Saint.
He continued his quest through the remainder of the afternoon, on the same street and others, patiently ticking off the names of the shops on a list he had made from a classified directory before he started on the undertaking after lunch the previous day, and by closing time he could conscientiously claim to have tried them all. After having been half destroyed by the saturation bombings of 1943, the city had not only rebuilt itself but had succeeded in re-stocking its antique emporia almost as completely as its newest department stores. But in spite of the surprising roster of the former, the supply of “Roman” glasses (which is the literal translation of the name, though it would be harder still to find a prototype in Italy) had apparently lagged far behind that of other venerabilia, or else their rarity was not exaggerated. At the end of his pilgrimage he had seen two slightly chipped but probably authentic specimens, which did not match, and a line of crude souvenir reproductions emblazoned with corny colored decals of local scenery, and had a more empathic if not more respectful comprehension of those dedicated souls who did that sort of thing from their own enthusiasm and for their own pleasure.
It had been, he thought, an effort of extraordinary nobility, probably unprecedented and, he devoutly hoped, not soon to be called for again — a more profoundly heroic performance, for him, than taking on a half-dozen armed gorillas barehanded.
But he was also a little footsore and extremely thirsty, and the alleviation of these conditions seemed more important for the moment than voting himself awards for altruism.
At the snug downstairs bar of the Vier Jahreszeiten — the Four Seasons Hotel, as the tourists prefer to render it — a long well-iced Peter Dawson and water soon began to assuage his most urgent aridity, an upholstered stool took the load off his metatarsals, and in a matter of minutes he had revived to the extent of being accessible to the standard civilized distractions.