“Don’t try to pretend that frightens you.”
“Some things do. Like the idea that you must be serious.”
“Because I don’t make any bones about it? Life is too short. This is something I want, and I hoped you might like it too. Why not make it easy for you?”
It is of course well known to all readers of noble and uplifting fiction, if there still are any, that any self-respecting hero’s response to such a proposition is to smack the tramp sharply on the rump and tell her to go peddle her assets elsewhere. But how much saintliness can be reasonably asked of anyone, when the tramp happens to be an Iantha Lamb?
“May I think it over?” said the Saint.
She nodded calmly.
“But don’t think too long — I’m leaving for Rome next week to start a picture. Unless you’re in a travelling mood.”
He wondered long afterwards what decision he might eventually have come to — he was not hidebound by any of the usual conventions, but there was something about the manner of her offer which reminded him uncomfortably of a decadent empress requesting the services of a vassal, a request that was almost a command and at the same time a favor. The impediment to reacting with proper indignation was that she actually was a kind of empress in the echelons of the twentieth century in which he was a kind of buccaneer, and her favor was an impossible pipedream for which millions of men would have deliriously given everything that they owned. In all honesty, he sometimes thought that the only thing that stopped him from capitulating on the spot might have been an absurd reluctance to be the pushover which she had so many good reasons to expect.
More fortunately than he probably deserved, the dilemma was resolved for him that time at what could have been the last moment before it became crucial.
Two evenings later when he returned to Grosvenor House from the movie where he had finished the afternoon — it was a recent Iantha Lamb picture for which a billboard had caught his eye after lunch, and the curiosity of seeing it in this peculiar context had been too much for him — he found three telephone messages in his box recording attempts by Russell Vail to reach him during the day. The latest was time-stamped only minutes before, and Simon yielded to another curiosity and called the number it asked him to directly he got to his room.
“Glad I got you at last,” boomed the hunter. “It’s a bit late, I know, but I was hoping you could have dinner with us tonight. I mean, with Iantha and Elías. We all thought you’d make a good fourth.”
Simon reserved the observation that only an Iantha Lamb would consider herself and three men a good foursome. The breezy tone of Vail’s voice seemed to dispose of a possibility which he had been half prepared for when he returned the call, that Vail might have had the phantasmagoric notion of warning him that trespassing rights on Elías Usebio’s marital property were already bespoke. He had nothing else planned, and seeing Iantha again under the maximum conceivable chaperonage might help, somehow, to produce a solution to the problem which he had been trying to ignore.
“That’s nice of you,” he said.
“Fine. Suppose we pick you up at seven.”
“I’ll be downstairs.”
“Don’t dress up. We thought we’d drive out to a place in the country.”
“Suits me.”
“And one other thing. Could you bring along some of your professional gear — I mean, something to pick a lock with?”
The Saint’s eyebrows edged upwards.
“There’s something funny about this telephone,” he said. “It sounded exactly as if you said you wanted me to bring something to pick a lock with.”
“I did.”
“What sort of lock?”
“On a big iron gate. Don’t worry — we’re not going to steal anything. We’ll explain it all later. But bring something. See you at seven.”
Simon was waiting in the lobby when Vail came in, shook hands heartily, and looked around as if in search of some luggage that the Saint should have had with him.
“You didn’t think I was joking about that lock, did you, old boy?”
Simon touched his breast pocket.
“If this gate isn’t on a bank vault, I can probably handle it. If you’ve got a good reason.”
“Later. I think it might appeal to you. But first, dinner.”
In the back courtyard there was a shiny new Jaguar with Iantha Lamb at the wheel and a vacant seat beside her. As Simon approached it, he saw that Elías Usebio was already sitting in the back. The commissionaire opened the off-side front door with a flourish, and Vail nudged the Saint forward.
“The place of honor for the guest of honor,” he said. “No argument, old boy. That’s the drill.”
Simon had no desire to argue. He made himself comfortable beside Iantha, and hoped that her husband and Vail were equally relaxed in the back seat.
“Are you afraid of women drivers?” she asked, as they ploughed into the traffic complex of Marble Arch.
“Not so much when I’m on their side,” he replied. “And when there’s nothing to worry about but their own car — this is your own, I hope?”
“Elías just gave it to me the other day, to take to Rome. You notice it’s built for driving on the right.”
“I’m glad you’ve noticed that they drive on the left here,” he said. “Elías might have to put off his retirement to buy you another if you broke it up.”
“He wouldn’t, but I would. He’s the rich one. He’s earned a lot more than I have, and hardly spent a peseta.”
“I was not brought up to treat money like old newspapers,” said Usebio gently.
“Or pay ninety per cent income taxes,” retorted his wife.
They were heading north, and the car moved as if it held the road only because it was perfectly disciplined, not because it didn’t have the power to lift up and fly if it wanted to.
“Where are we going?” Simon inquired presently.
“St Albans, first,” said Iantha.
He thought that over.
“They’ve got some Roman ruins there,” he said, “but you’ll see much better ones when you get to Rome.”
“They’ve got a good pub, too, Russell says.”
“Is it so exclusive that we have to break into it?”
“We’ll tell you about the lock business afterwards,” said Vail. “We’ll give you a good dinner first, and then see if you feel like tackling it.”
The pub was quaintly named The Noke, but it had the air of substantial serenity which the connoisseur of English hostelries recognizes at once. They had cold dry martinis in the pleasantly timbered bar, except for Usebio, who would take nothing stronger than St Raphaël. They ordered smoked salmon and roast grouse, which were excellent, as was the Château Smith Haut Lafitte which the proprietor suggested.
The conversation was brightly enjoyable but totally unimportant; only Usebio seemed a little apart and preoccupied with serious private thoughts, though his rare responses were unfailingly courteous. It would have been a perfectly pleasant and unquoteworthy dinner party except for the enigma that went with it, the motivation under which Simon had been included, which nobody would refer to any more. He had to reach back deliberately for the first psychic hunch he had had, and remind himself that both the other men were dealers in death by training and vocation.
For Russell Vail, in the ultimate analysis, was only a kind of professional butcher glamorized by the fact that he used a rifle instead of an ax, and the word matador, in Spanish, most literally means simply “killer”...