Authors: Leslie Charteris

Tags: #English Fiction, #Fiction in English

The Saint Returns (23 page)

BOOK: The Saint Returns

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Altbergen was the kind of place whose existence is
announced to the traveller by a minute sign
pointing
from the highway up something like a glorified cow path.
Though Simon had found it on the map, he almost
passed the turning, but managed to get his brakes
down
in time to make the sudden
transition from modern highway engineering to rural improvisation.

The car bounded from boulder to pothole with
pro
testing
rattles, and it became increasingly obvious as the
angle of climb approached something like fifty degrees
that what they were on was possibly not a cow path
at
all, but an occasional river bed gouged out by the torrents
of thawing spring.

Luckily for the automobile, as well as its
occupants,
the
distance from highway to Altbergen was only seven
kilometers—straight up, it seemed at times. But the drive
was
invigorating, shaking out any last traces of sluggishness traceable to the
previous long and perhaps overin-dulgent evening.

Altbergen was as surprised to see Tanya and
Simon
as Tanya and Simon were relieved to see it. Set on the
green
slope of a tiny plateau, its site constituted the only
place within miles
where more than three houses to
gether might have clung to the ground. As it
was, there
were not many buildings, perhaps twenty, including a
small inn
and a few starkly essential shops.

“It’s beautiful,” Tanya said.
“I have seen it only in picture books. Like gingerbread houses.”

“Anyway,” Simon remarked, “if
Ivan and Igor get this
far, they won’t have much of a search to
locate us.”

He parked in front of the inn, joining company
with a
pair of Volkswagens and a squarish
deux chevaux
whose natural
tendency to look like a corrugated tin
lean-to had apparently
been well assisted by numerous
trips between Altbergen and the nearest paved
road.

From across the narrow street, the combined
grocer and
hardware merchant peered through his display window
at the
Zurich license plate. The servant girl who had been
sweeping the
threshold of the
Gasthof
with no great enthusiasm in the first place
came to a complete halt as she gaped curiously at the novelty of city
tourists—and
rich ones, too, by the looks of them—coming to the
Goldener
Hirsch and unloading baggage with the appar
ent intention of
making a stay.

Altbergen’s isolation from the conveniences of modern
life meant that checking in simply consisted of
being led up the steep stairs by the plump proprietress while the
servant girl, a slim blond creature, staggered
along be
hind with all the luggage, refusing Simon’s offers of help.
There was no surrender of passports for inspection
by
the police overnight, no filling
out of lengthy forms in
the usual European
manner, whereby one gains entry to
sleeping
quarters only by confessing in detail a large part of one’s own and one’s
relatives’ pasts, and explaining
precisely whence one has come and where
one is going.
There was not even a register
to sign, and the proprie
tress had not
asked for names.

“So
,
bitte,”
she
said, smiling as she opened the door
of what was obviously the best room,
“sch
ö
n, nicht
wahr?”

“Sehr sch
ö
n,”
Simon agreed, before Tanya
could make
any other comment.

The walls were all natural wood, with the
lingering
smell of fresh-cut lumber about them. There were two
beds, huge
and solid, with white comforters a foot thick but light as air. Beyond the
double doors was an ornate
balcony of the kind that fronted the upper
floors of al
most every house in the village.

“I didn’t want to attract more attention
by asking for
separate rooms,” Simon explained innocently to Tanya,
in English. He went on more wickedly: “The only prob
lem will be
if Ivan and Igor get here. Which of them
would you rather
double up with?”

She turned away quickly, towards the balcony.

“Supper is from six o’clock,” the
proprietress said in
leaving. “If you want hot water or
anything, the bell is
there.”

“Oh, Simon, come look.”

Tanya was outside, deeply breathing the sharp
clear
air. The view she wanted him to see was superb: the
snow-covered
Alps, the dark green meadows studded
with outcroppings of pale stone, the shingled roofs of the
houses weighted with chunks of the same rock. There was
a peace and timelessness totally unlike any other in the
world.

He turned from the view to her, and thought
that she
looked happier than he had ever seen her. There had
been very good moments, but the
kind of deep-down
contentment that he sensed
in her now was something
new and different. They seemed a long long way
from
subterfuge, treachery, and murder.

“You like it here?” he asked her.

“Very much. Yes.”

“There’s a great feeling of freedom,
isn’t there?”

She nodded, smiling at the world in general.

“Perhaps.”

“More than you could ever have in
Russia?” the Saint
said.

Such a challenge had been on his mind for
some time,
but he had hesitated again and again to put it to her for
fear she
would assume that his true mission all along
had been to tempt her
to defect from the communist
world. But if ever there was to be a moment
to risk
disrupting the rapport they had begun to achieve, this
might have
been it.

He realized his misjudgement instantly, in a
silence
that could almost be physically felt.

“I’m sorry,” he said after a
moment. “That wasn’t very
subtle
…
I suppose
in your position, especially if one
has relatives, even close friends who
might … face
some unpleasant consequences, it makes it difficult even
to think
about.”

She stood straighter, slipping her elbows
from the
broad rail of the balcony.

“I have never thought in such a way. It
is not only
difficult, it is impossible.”

“Then why are you so touchy about
it?” he asked
gently.

“I should be. You are hinting at treason,
not talking about a
…
a trip to the seaside.”

He put his hands soothingly on her shoulders.

“All right. We’ll let it pass, okay? This
is no time or
place to start arguing ideologies. We both have a job to
do.”

He could feel the tension begin to fade from
her body.
She took her lower lip between her teeth for a moment
and looked
him in the face before she answered.

“Okay,” she said, and she had to
start smiling again
just because she’d used that American expression.

“See up there?” the Saint said,
pointing. “That looks as
if it could be the monastery.”

“Where they make the liqueur.”

“Mm-hm.

And

somewhere

around here somebody’s
making
something else—and I don’t mean that stew and red cabbage you smell.”

“Booby traps, I think you call
them.”

“Yes. Well put. Now you can unpack and
freshen up
and prepare to greet me properly upon my heroic
return.”

“Where are you going?”

“Trap shooting, of course.”

She followed him back into the bedroom.

“I go with you.”

He hesitated for a moment, and shrugged.

“Okay, if you like. This is your affair
as much as mine.
We shouldn’t run into anything on the first reconnais
sance where
you’d be a liability.”

“Really! You forget who I am. In the
Soviet Union we
recognize
no difference between the sexes.”

“Well, I do,” said Simon, “but
then I’ve had my mem
ory refreshed recently.”

“That was not what I meant. My English…”

“Your English is fine, and so are you.
Now let’s get go
ing so we can be back here in time for that supper. I
have
the distinct
impression that if we don’t dine here we don’t
dine anywhere, unless you’re up to a few unrolled oats
from some farmer’s horse trough.”

They went downstairs and accosted the servant
girl,
who was
still reluctantly applying her broomstraws to the
smoothly worn wood of the entranceway, and Simon
asked her if there were any factories in the area.
He
might have asked for dinosaurs.

“Factories, sir? Like where they make
autos and
things?”

“Any kind of factories.”

The girl shook her head.

“No. The only thing we make here is
cheese, and there
is no factory for that. It is done by the farmers at
home.”

“Well,” Simon said, “in that
case, thank you very
much.”

“Bitte sehr.
If you wish to see a
factory you must go
down to Zurich.”

Tanya turned back as she and Simon started
away.

“I have a small radio that does not
work. Can someone
here fix it?”

“Nein. Es tut mir leid.
We have no
one to fix anything.
If you want things like that, why do you come
here?”

“Because I really love peace and
quiet,” said the Saint.

He set a course that took them through the
inquisitive village, across a little stream covered by a neatly built
wooden
bridge, and along a path that led straight up the
slope of the
surrounding meadow.

Tanya looked up ahead of them to the spot on
the mountainside where man-made walls of gray stone were half hidden by
evergreens.

“I hope you are not taking me on a
wild-goose hunt,”
she said, avoiding one of the manifold traces which graz
ing cows had left behind.

“‘Chase,’” Simon corrected her.
“I didn’t really expect
to find a transistor radio factory bringing
prosperity to
the peasants up here at the end of nowhere, but there
just has to
be some link with it.”

“At the monastery?”

“Yes. Think you can make it?”

“Of course. I can still be walking after
you have
dropped on your face.”

But she underestimated both the distance and
Simon’s
hard-muscled health. His sense of direction took them
briskly on
across the remainder of the Alpine meadow,
past lovely patches of
blue and yellow wild flowers, to
the foot of a rocky trail that led through the
dense forest that clung to the mountainside. A rustic sign with letter
ing carved
precisely into it said: KLOSTER ¾ St.

“Three-quarters of an hour from
here,” he said. “But
if you’re in such great shape, we should be
able to shave
that to a half.”

He set off at a pace that would not have
disgraced an energetic chamois. The slope was soon so steep that the
path, such as it was, had to
zigzag back and forth to main
tain a
reasonable gradient. Simon went on with springy
steps, smiling to
himself as he sensed Tanya’s increasing
difficulties.
He took a makeshift staff from some branches
left by woodcutters and began to sing cheerily as they
climbed on.