He lighted a cigarette and stared out of the elaborately lace-curtained windows through which he could see practically nothing, listening to the vague rumbles and beeps and blended voices and sporadic clatters of the city without hearing them, and wondered if some miracle would ever earn him a reprieve from the reputation to which he had dedicated himself.
He could no longer have been flippant about soap operas, but he was beginning to think that a magnificent soap opera could have been built around him, except that hardly anyone would have believed the plot material except himself.
“Tell me some more about this charmer, Pierrot-le-Fût,” he said.
The details he was mainly interested in were the haunts and habits of the specimen. He wrote down certain addresses that Yvonne Norval gave him, and when he had finished asking questions she stood up with quiet dignity.
“I apologize for taking so much of your time, Monsieur,” she said. “But since you have heard it all, may I dare to hope a little?”
“I will try to think of something,” he said. “But whatever happens, when you leave this room, you must forget that you ever spoke to me, or told me anything. This may be our last meeting, but in any case, we never met.”
“C’est entendu, Monsieur le Saint.”
It was the most natural thing for him to offer his hand as he opened the door for her, but he was somewhat stunned and embarrassed when she bent over it and touched it to her lips. Then, before he could protest, she was gone.
It was quite a while since the Saint had tackled such a relatively basic and elementary problem as this. Regardless of the visions of starry-eyed spiritual or psychological idealists, he had never believed in the redemption or rehabilitation of such creatures as Pierrot-le-Fût: he believed in one fast, thrifty, and final cure for what ailed them, a treatment which eliminated all risk of a relapse. The fact that he had not administered this remedy so often of late was not due to any loss of faith in the efficacy of death as a disinfectant, but to the distracting pressure of too many more intriguing and more profitable claims on his attention. He realized now how much he had missed some of the old simple pleasures. But it had taken a pustule of such almost incredible stature as Pierrot-le-Fût to remind him of them.
The next evening he headed for the area near Montmartre which was frequented by the self-baptized Pierre Norval and his ilk, not to sample any of the garish boîtes clustered around the Place Pigalle where pilgrims from all over the world pay their traditional respects to the symbols of mammalian reproduction, but to sift through some of the unglamorous outlying cafés where the parasites on the by-products of this activity met to scheme, drink, boast, connive, gamble, and trade every kind of illicit merchandise — vegetable, mineral, and human. And without any elaborate disguise, using only a few of those subtle shifts of dress and demeanor which were his own inimitable masterpieces of camouflage, he was able to do it without ever incurring the kind of attention that would have greeted an ordinary tourist who had strayed so far from the time-honored tourist trap-line.
He found Pierrot-le-Fût quite quickly, at the third of the addresses he had jotted down, an unattractive bistro off the Boulevard Clichy, and without evident nausea he sipped some extraordinarily foul and bitter coffee while he browsed slowly and exhaustively through the same edition of Match that he had mauled through each of the other stops he had made.
His purpose at that time was no more vital than to satisfy a student’s curiosity to observe this excrescence with his own eyes, to verify certain aspects which Yvonne Norval’s prejudice might have distorted, and to make a few observations of his own, in much the same way as a professional executioner discreetly assesses the weight and musculature of the man he is to hang.
Pierrot-le-Fût was a big man, built somewhat along the lines of the barrel which was only one of the possible meanings of his sobriquet, but in spite of his tubby shape he also looked hard as a cask is hard. He had small piggy eyes and a sadistic mouth from which a loud voice blustered mechanical obscenities. He had a flushed face and an equally ruddy nose which bespoke other habitual intemperances. He drank cognac from a large glass which was frequently refilled, and although it did not seem to be having any devastating effect on him at the time, this was still early in the night’s probable span for him.
From what he saw and overheard, Simon Templar decided that the picture that had been drawn for him was not exaggerated, and he paid for his noxious coffee and folded his magazine and went out. The entire excursion would hardly have been worth mentioning in this anecdote at all, if it had not been for the totally unexpected complication which it unluckily led to.
The Saint had only walked a block or so along the Boulevard Clichy, and caught the attention of a prowling taxi, and discussed his destination with the chauffeur according to the protocol established by modern Paris taxi drivers (who must first be assured that the travel plans of a potential passenger fit in with their own, which they almost never do, which calls for a special bonus above the metered fare to be agreed on to compensate the driver for the inconvenience), when there was a nudge at his elbow and he turned, with a standard formula of polite but firm rebuff ready on the tip of his tongue. But instead of the painted or the pandering nonentity that he expected, he looked into a mournful emaciated-spaniel face that he knew only too well, for it belonged to Inspector Archimède Quercy of the Police Judiciaire.
“You will permit me to ride with you?” said the Inspector, making the question mark barely perceptible. “The George Cinq is not far out of my way, and it would be agreeable to rest my feet.”
“But of course,” said the Saint, with a delighted geniality which he did not feel. “After all the jokes I’ve made about that occupational malady of policemen, it’s about time I did something to alleviate it.”
In the cab, he closed the glass partition that separated them from the driver.
“And which of the nude spectacles have you been checking on?” he continued quizzically. “I had no idea it was one of the duties of the Police Judiciaire to go around making surprise examinations of show girls’ costumes, to catch anyone trying to chisel a millimeter off the legal minimum of eight centimeters tapering to four.”
“And I,” said Quercy, with the utmost composure, “had no idea that the Saint was interested in such canaille as Pierrot-le-Fût.”
Simon’s bantering gaze did not waver, in spite of the leaden feeling that sagged within him as his premonition was so bluntly confirmed.
“Then how did you acquire this extraordinary notion?”
“Purely by observation. I give you my word, I have not been having you watched. By accident, I happened to see you in a café as I passed. I was about to cross the street to speak to you, when I noticed that in certain small ways you were not comporting yourself as I am used to seeing you. These were not things that would have caught the eye of anyone else — indeed, they were things that would help you to escape attention. It was clear, then, that you did not want to be seen.”
“Which naturally made you want to see.”
“It is a professional instinct,” said the other calmly. “You soon left this first café and went to another, which was equally unlike the kind of place where one is accustomed to find the elegant Simon Templar. But again, you were trying not to appear elegant. And since you did not trail anyone there, it became evident that you were looking for someone. This was substantiated when, after a while, you walked to the third bistro, again not following anyone, again trying to efface yourself, and again devoting yourself to a magazine which I had already seen you read twice.”