“I am sorry,” said the head waiter, “but the kräftor season does not begin until tomorrow.”
Kräftor is the fresh-water crayfish which looks exactly like a four-inch miniature northern lobster, and which is one of the most prized delicacies of Swedish gastronomy.
“I told you that when I told you about them, Ernest,” said the girl, who looked as if she should have been doing her homework instead of going to dinner with such an obviously raffish date.
“I bet you can get them in America any time — if anyone wants ’em,” said Mr Moldys, implying that few people would condescend to do so.
“In Sweden the season is very short,” said the head waiter apologetically. “It is only one month, beginning tomorrow, August the eighth.”
“So what? So I made a mistake in the date. But that’s only a few hours away. What’s the difference? Don’t tell me you haven’t got a stock in the kitchen right now, ready for opening day. So let’s have some.”
“I am sorry, but the law is very strict. We cannot serve kräftor before tomorrow.”
Mr Moldys glowered.
“That’s why you’ll be goddam square-heads all your lives,” he said loudly.
The head waiter bowed icily and moved away, but Mr Moldys continued to hold forth for some time on the shortcomings of Europe in general, Scandinavia in particular, and the Swedish nation especially, in a voice that was pitched for the attention not only of his companion but of half the other customers in the room. It went to the limits of embarrassment before he consented to let her soothe him, and switched on again the flashing smile for which too many foolish virgins had forgiven his tasteless tantrums.
Although Mr Moldys tirelessly dramatized himself to an extent which had caused his privileged associates to nickname him “The Ham,” it was one of his failings that he could not confine himself to the act of charm, but firmly believed that the paperback private-eye performance was even more important.
Simon Templar would have been glad to forget the foregoing exhibition as quickly as possible, but a hardly overstretched arm of coincidence encircling a comparatively small capital had him installed at a veranda table at lunch the very next day at the Restaurant Riche, which is one of the impeccably best in Stockholm, when it again scooped in Ernest Moldys, who was now bedazzling another potential juvenile delinquent with the same enticing figure and coloration as his admirer of the night before, but a slightly different facial arrangement.
By this time Mr Moldys had lost interest in kräftor and wanted smorgasbord, which he was told the restaurant was not serving that day.
“Are you nuts?” demanded Mr Moldys indignantly. “All Swedish restaurants have smorgasbord. They do in America, anyway.”
“In Sweden there was always smorgasbord in the old days,” said another head waiter politely. “But it is not so fashionable here any more. However, you are lucky. Today is the first day of the crayfish.”
“Oh, we must have those, Ernest,” said the nymphet. “They are wonderful—”
“I don’t want any. I heard all about them yesterday, when I couldn’t get any. Now I don’t care if I never have one. I want smorgasbord.”
“How about some herring, sir? We have several kinds, the same as you would find in a smorgasbord.”
“I had herring yesterday. I can’t eat it every day. For Chrissake, can’t you ever get anything you want, when you want it, in this broken-down country? I know back-street delicatessens in New York that’d make this joint look sick.”
Mr Moldys was talking in the same intentionally public-address voice which he had used the night before, and as he glanced around to observe what attention he was getting, he caught Simon Templar’s analytical eye on him, and was vain enough to honestly believe that he recruited himself an ally by turning on a brilliantly comradely smile.
“You know what I mean, don’t you?” he said. “I can see you’ve been around. All this olde-world tradition and doing everything by the book — they’re so far back, they don’t even know they’ve been left behind! Don’t you lose your mind sometimes?”
“Sometimes, I wonder why the natives don’t lose theirs,” said the Saint calmly. “Considering some of the things they have to put up with.”
Ernest Moldys stared at him for several seconds with a strangely increasing uncertainty, and finally threw down his napkin with thinly disguised petulance.
“Let’s get out of here, you beautiful Viking, and see if we can’t get what we want somewheres else.”
Simon saw the head waiter pick up the reservation slip that had been on their table, and beckoned him.
“What was that charming character’s name?”
“A Mr Moldys.” The man showed him the paper. “You did not know him?”
“I wouldn’t want to,” said the Saint.
But this became untrue an instant after he said it; for the name, combined with something that had been vaguely familiar about the face, suddenly rang a bell in the complex circuits of Simon Templar’s memory, which absorbed every item of criminal intelligence that touched it like a sponge, but had to be prodded in sometimes peculiar ways to squeeze the information back out again.
At this moment he recalled certain facts about Ernest Moldys which made him want very much to know more. There were, for instance, some details about the suicide of that sixteen-year-old starlet in Hollywood on which his recollection was hazy, to say nothing of the exact terms of a reward which had once been offered by the victims of one of Mr Moldys’s more remunerative depredations.
The Saint did not ordinarily feel that his mission required him to administer personal correctives to obnoxious American tourists whose misbehavior could supply gratuitous ammunition to the ever-watchful snipers at the free world, but this was a case where natural impulse and lofty objective combined irresistibly with sound business practise. Once upon an earlier time the consequent leg work might have seemed discouragingly long-drawn and complicated, but in the age of electronic communications and jet aircraft it was almost no effort at all to a man who could sleep at any hour and altitude in a reclining seat like a child in a cradle. The Saint, who had nothing else planned for the weekend, merely took an SAS plane over the North Pole from Copenhagen to Los Angeles and returned by the same route, with his errands accomplished, in less time than it took Lindbergh to hobble from New York to Paris.
Ernest Moldys had done very well out of the last exercises of his vocation, but he also had very expensive tastes. These, like his other fickle appetites, were only partly genuine, another large part being dictated by his own conception of the way a stage or movie star such as he should have been would live. But the resulting pattern had made alarmingly rapid inroads on the folios of American Express travellers’ checks into which he had contrived to convert most of his loot, and he only knew one trade that was likely to replenish them.
Therefore he listened with guarded but lively interest one evening when he was having a cocktail by himself in the bar of the Grand Hotel, and a tall and vaguely piratical-looking individual whose features were recently familiar came in with an older man who wore his dark suit and bifocals with the unmistakable patina of a high-priced attorney, and after ordering a couple of Peter Dawsons on the rocks they continued what must have been a lengthily waged discussion.
“What burns me,” said the Saint, “is that this harpy tells the court she needs all that alimony just to live on, in the style to which I’ve accustomed her. And she gets it. I have to pay her a company president’s income just to feed and clothe her, supposedly. And the next thing I know, she’s financing a season of Shakespeare. Well, if she can afford that, she obviously doesn’t need all that money to live on, and we ought to be able to get it reduced.”