Simon put away the deposit unblushingly, with the impersonal courtesy of a banker. They went out again, and he said, “I suppose one of those touts on the Reeperbahn could tell us what the chances are.”
“Let’s go this way.” She pointed. “It looks like a nice sinister street.”
He thought that its sinister air was probably only an illusion compounded of grime and bad lighting, but he automatically set himself on the alert for any flicker of a shadow or whisper of sound that would give split-second warning of a sneak attack. It seemed rather far-fetched to imagine that she would have gone through such a long and roundabout routine merely to set him up for a rendezvous with a mugger, but he had survived far beyond any reasonable expectation for a man of his proclivities largely because he never completely ruled out any such possibilities, however remote. But at the same time taking the likelier line that there was no such sordid anticlimax in store, he was trying to decide at what point he should set a limit to the depths of depravity to which a gentleman could properly escort a scientifically inquisitive lady, whilst toying with his own scientific temptation to find out how far she would go before calling off the experiment.
And then all these avenues of speculation dead-ended suddenly and electrifyingly as they came down to within a few yards of the Reeperbahn again, without any incident, and yet Eva abruptly stopped in her tracks and clutched the Saint’s arm as if she had been confronted by a rampaging ogre.
It was nothing so spectacular that she pointed at, however. Nothing but the window of a side-street pawnshop, located there to accommodate patrons of the main drag who might find themselves temporarily embarrassed for the wherewithal to prolong a promising spree. Inside the window were spread and stacked and suspended the weird miscellaneous pledges of uncounted revellers who had moved on and left their collateral unredeemed, every conceivable form of security from cuff-links to clarinets.
And near the center of the window was a tarnished pewter goblet.
On which were crudely carved the initials “KS.”
Suspended, Simon saw, as Eva dragged him closer, from the scratched outline of a gibbet...
“That’s it, isn’t it?” she breathed. “The goblet that it tells about in your guide-book!”
“It couldn’t be,” he said mechanically.
“But it is! It’s exactly like the book describes it — the initials, the gallows, everything!”
The Saint stared at it. He couldn’t go on arguing with what she said. And yet he was in the same state of incredulous shock that must stun anyone who sees the number of his ticket listed as the winner of some National Lottery or the Irish Sweep. It was the thing that everybody has day-dreamed of but recognized realistically that it will never happen. And yet, even more inescapably than a bolt of lightning, it has to strike someone, somewhere.
But in this instance, the chronicler must now reveal, the lightning was no electrical phenomenon. It was the stroke of genius of Franz Kolben, perhaps the most financially successful though inglorious author that Hamburg has ever known. A little belated background may here be necessary. Mr Franz Kolben (who formerly preferred to be known as “Frank”) was, as the Saint had somewhat intuitively divined, in fact a born native of Milwaukee, USA, an off-sprout of German immigrants who had raised him bilingually with better motives than he had ever applied to this advantage. Leaving home as soon as he could dispense with its fringe benefits, young Frank had found employment in a modern furniture factory in Grand Rapids, from which he graduated to a more exclusive atelier in Chicago which fabricated equally modern antiques. From there, since he was an ambitious and go-ahead type with wits as sharp as any chisel, it was another logical step from the manufacturing to the retailing side, which not only paid better but offered more scope to his developing ingenuity, and enlarged his vision from the limited area of phony period furniture to the entire field of bogus antiquity. He was in a fair way to becoming the beardless wonder of the racket in that region when the draft finally netted him and unfeelingly transmuted him from an operator to a number in an operation.
World War II had reached its supposedly glorious conclusion about the time Sergeant Kolben had finally convinced the arbiters of his destiny that his knowledge of German entitled him to an occupation billet in Europe rather than a combat assignment in the Pacific. To his indescribable chagrin, he had presented his case so convincingly that no subsequent effort could change his orders, and in due inexorable course he found himself in Hamburg, a very small cog in the Military Government, replacing some lucky veteran with enough points to be heading for home and honorable discharge.
With all his faults, however, Frank Kolben had never been a quitter, and he wasted less time than many more honest men in unprofitable pining. His background and knowledge inevitably trended him in one particular direction, and when he detected one of the earliest traders to come out of hiding in the act of selling a battle-happy GI a piece of cheap china guaranteed to be genuine old Dresden lovingly cached through blitz and krieg, he knew he had it made. What might have begun and ended in less talented hands as a rudimentary exercise in blackmail, blossomed under Frankie’s green-hungry thumbs into an industry which may have mulcted the warriors homing from its range of more hard-earned dollars than any temptation but sex. To this day, there are probably few communities in America where you could not find some spurious souvenir of German liberation which Kolben had helped to produce.
But there came a time at last when all the well-heeled buyers had been repatriated, and even Master Sergeant Kolben was eligible for discharge, and Frankie found to his astonishment that he was not yet ready to go home. He had done all right and he had evolved notions of doing better, and he had also formed a sentimental attachment which satisfied all his desires in that zone. He decided to stay on, and his hunch was right. Very soon the free-spending soldiery was replaced by prosperous German industrialists from the Rhineland and the South, and then they in turn were diluted by the first venturesome trickle of civilian tourists from former enemy countries, a trickle which swelled rapidly into a tide, which washed up a regular supply of suckers on the doorstep of Frankie’s very satisfied partner — whose name, we need no longer conceal, was Uhrmeister.
The Introduction to Hamburg had been one of Frankie’s sublimest inspirations, and he had worked hard on it, despite the fact that he had cribbed practically all its information from other publications. The labor of assembling, rearranging, and paraphrasing the material sufficiently to evade suit for infringements of copyright had been surprisingly arduous, for he had no natural literary inclination, but it was fully rewarded by the opportunity to inject the one sentence which was completely and incontrovertibly original with him:
“He is said to have hidden a map of its whereabouts in the base of a pewter goblet on which he carved his initials suspended from a gallows, but if has never been found.”
“Where did you read this, Franz?” asked Uhrmeister when he saw the manuscript — he could never get used to addressing his associate, who spoke German as well as he did himself, by anything but the German name. “I lived here all my life, and this is the first time I heard it.”
“I made it up, Papa,” Frankie admitted cheerfully. “But it is the most important thing in the book. Remember, to almost any tourist, a guide-book is like gospel. He may not believe what you tell him — but everything he reads in a book, he believes. So when you see a likely mark, you don’t tell him anything. You give him the book.”