She trod water, the slow swell lifting her small brown face against the intense sky, her eyes fixed on him inexorably.
“What was the idea — lashing out at Maurice like that?”
“Did you see what he did?”
“I heard about it. But you didn’t have to paste him that way.”
“I just slapped him,” said the Saint calmly. “Isn’t he on the beach today? Well, if I’d really pasted him he’d’ve spent the next six weeks in a hospital — getting his face remodeled.”
The Saint steered himself neatly around a drifting jellyfish seeking for its mate. “My dear, if you’re really upset about my slapping a conceited daffodil like Walmar for carrying a joke to those lengths, you haven’t the good taste I thought you had.”
There was a certain chilliness about their parting that the Saint realized was unavoidable. He swam back alone, floating leisurely through the buoyant sea and meditating as he went. He knew well enough that a set of diamonds like those displayed by Mrs Porphyria Nussberg are rarely obtained without some kind of inconvenience, but those incidental troubles were merely a part of the most enchanting game in the world.
Back on the sands, he stretched himself out beside Mrs Nussberg’s chair and chatted with no more than ordinary politeness. On the following morning he did the same thing. There was no hint of a pressing advance about it — it was simply the way in which any normal holiday acquaintance would have been expected to behave — but the Spanish Cow’s soured belligerence had lost its sting. Sometimes she looked at him curiously, with the habitual suspicion hesitating in the background of her beady eyes, as if the impact of a more common courtesy was still too strange to be taken at its face value.
That evening he walked with her along the beach. It was well into cocktail time, and the young brown bodies had taken themselves off the sands to refresh themselves at the Casino or the Perroquet, or to dance before dinner at Maxim’s. The last survivor was a shabby mahogany-tanned old man with a rake, engaged in his daily task of scratching the harvest of cigarette-ends and scraps of paper and orange peel out of the sand to leave it smooth and clean for the morrow’s sacrifices — a sad and apocryphal figure on the deserted shore.
They went by the almost empty Fregate, and Simon recalled the caricature in the entrance. It was still there — a brutal, sadistically accurate burlesque. Mrs Nussberg stared fixedly ahead, as if she had forgotten it, but he knew that she had not.
The Saint stepped aside. A lounging waiter realized what was happening too late, and started forward with an outraged yap, but the picture was out of the frame and shredded into small fragments by that time.
Simon held them out on his open hand.
“Do these belong to you?” he inquired gently, and the man suddenly looked up and found the Saint’s blue eyes fastened levelly upon him, as hard and wintry as frosted sapphires.
The eyes were quite calm, utterly devoid of open menace, but there was something in them that choked his instinctive retort in his throat. Something in the eyes, and the tuned softness of the voice that spoke past them.
He shook his head mutely, astounded at his own silence, and the Saint smiled genially and dropped the torn relics at his feet.
On the front of the Casino there were banners and posters proclaiming the regular weekly gala.
“Are you going?” asked Simon casually.
The bright defensive eyes switched to him sidelong.
“Are you?”
“I hadn’t thought about it.”
They walked a few steps, and then she said, sharply, “Would you come with me?”
Simon did not hesitate for an instant.
“I’d love to,” he said easily, and she said nothing more until he left her at the
Provençal.
Before climbing into white shirt and tuxedo, the Saint packed a bag. He was travelling very light, but he still preferred not to leave his preparations for a getaway to the last minute. And he had decided that the getaway should take place that night. He did not want to delay it any longer. He was a little tired of Juan-les-Pins, and, even in that brief time, more than a little tired of the part he had to play.
But when he collected Mrs Nussberg again there was no hint of that in his manner. Her dyed hair had been freshly waved into desperate undulations, and the powder was crusted thickly on her face and arms. Her hands and neck were a blaze of precious stones.
He saw her hard painted lips smile for the first time.
“You are very kind,” she said, as they walked down to the Casino.
The Saint shook his head.
“This gala business is a wonderful racket,” he murmured lightly. “The same place, the same food, the same music, the same floor show — but they charge you double and let out a few colored balloons, and everyone thinks they’re having a swell time.”
As a matter of strict fact, it went a little further than colored balloons — Simon, who had attended these events before, had expected it and balanced the factor into his plans. There were rag dolls, for instance — those long-legged sophisticated puppets with which some women love to clutter up their most comfortable chairs. Simon was also able to add a large bouquet of flowers, an enormous box of chocolates, and three of the aforesaid colored balloons to the bag. When at last he escorted a supremely contented Mrs Nussberg home, he looked rather like an amateur Santa Claus.
Therefore he had a sound excuse for going into the hotel with her, and when she asked for her key at the desk he deftly added that also to his burden.
“You don’t want to lug all this stuff upstairs,” he said. “Let me take them for you.”
She was studying his face again, with that watchful half-suspicious wonderment, as they rode up in the elevator. The elevator boy thought his own cynical thoughts, and under cover of the trophies with which he was laden the Saint pressed Mrs Nussberg’s key carefully into a plaque of soft wax, and wrapped the wax delicately in his handkerchief before he put it away.
He went just inside the sitting-room of her suite, and decanted the souvenirs on a side table.
“Won’t you have a drink?” she asked.
“Thanks,” said the Saint, “but I think it’s past my bedtime.”
She must have been pretty once, it occurred to him as she put down her bag with unaccustomed hesitancy. Pretty in a flashy common way that had turned only too easily into the obese overblown frowsiness that amused Walmar and his satellites so much.
She held out her hand.
‘Thank you so much,” she said, with a queer simplicity that had to struggle through the brassy roughness of her voice.
He went back to his own hotel with the memory of that parting in his mind.
She was the Spanish Cow. So he had christened her, and so she would always be. A fat, repulsive, noisy, quarrelsome, imbecile vulgarian — with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar collection of jewels. And it was a part of his career to take those jewels away and apply them to a better use than encircling her billowy neck. To make that possible he had had to play her like a fish on a line, and it had so happened that the fish had taken the line for a lifeline. It had ceased fighting — had brought itself to a wild grotesque travesty of coyness. When it discovered how it had been hoodwinked, it would fight again — but with other anglers. It would be bitter, coarse, obstreperous again, pulling faces and putting out its tongue. And that also was in the game.
In his room, he took a small case of instruments from a drawer, and selected a key blank that matched the impression on his wax plaque. It took him a full hour and a half to file a duplicate to his rigorous satisfaction, and then he changed his clothes and picked up an ordinary crook-handle walking stick and went out again.