Saint Overboard by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online

essence?”
    “Yessir. Then I tried to get some ice.
They ‘adn’t got no ice, but they tried to sell me some glass. I
gave it up an’ brought the dinghy rahnd in case yer didn’t wanter swim
back. Barmy?” said O race sizzlingly.
    It was nearly one o’clock when the fuel tanks
had been replenished from the cans which Orace had acquired at the cost of so
much righteous indignation, and the Saint had cleaned him self up and put a comb through
his hair. Orace produced a drink —freshened,
in spite of gloomy prophecies, with ice—and re quired to know whether he should get lunch.
    “I don’t know,” said the Saint,
with unusual brusqueness.
    He had no idea what he wanted to do. He felt
suddenly restless and dissatisfied. The day had gone flat in prospect. They might have lazed through the long afternoon, steeping themselves in
sunlight and romping through the light play of words. They might have plunged together
through the cool rapture of the sea, or drifted out under spread sails to
explore the Ile de C é zembre and picnic under the cliffs of St Lunaire. They
might have en joyed any of a dozen trivial things which he had half
planned in his imagination, secure in a
communion of pagan understanding that
made no demands and asked no promises. Instead of . which …
    Because gold rippled in a girl’s hair, and an
imp of sophisti cated humour lurked Pan-like in the shadows of her eyes;
be cause the same gaze could sometimes hold a serenity of purpose beyond
measure—Simon Templar, at thirty-four, with odysseys of adventure behind
him that would have made Ulysses look like a small boy playing in a back
yard, found himself in the beginning of that halcyon afternoon at a
loose end.
    It wasn’t exactly the amount of money involved. Four million, if that was a minimum estimate of the total
submerged wealth which Vogel had
plundered from the sea bottoms, was certainly a lot of pounds. So was ten per cent of it. Or even half that. The Saint wasn’t greedy; and he had come out of each of
his past sorties into the hazardous
hinterlands of adventure with a lengthening
line of figures in his bank account which raised their own monument to
his flair for boodle. He had no need to be avaricious.
There were limits—lofty, vertiginous limits, but limits nevertheless—to how much money one could spend; and he had a sublime faith that the same extravagant
providence which had held him up all
his life so far would keep him near enough
to those limits to save him from feeling depressed. It wasn’t exactly
that. It was a matter of principle.
    “You’re getting old,” he reproached
himself solemnly. “At this very moment, you’re trying to persuade yourself
to work for an insurance company. Just because she has a body like an old man’s dream, and you kissed her. An insurance company!”
    He shuddered.
    And then he turned his eyes to study a speck of movement on the
borders of his field of vision. The speed tender was moving away from the side of the Falkenberg, heading
towards the Bee de la Vall é e. For a moment he watched it idly,
calculating that its course would take it within a few yards of the Corsair: as it came nearer he recognised Kurt
Vogel, and with him a stout grey-bearded
man in a Norfolk jacket and a shapeless yellow Panama hat.
    Simon began to get up from his chair. He began slowly and almost uncertainly, but he finished in a sudden
rush of decision. Any action, however
vague its object, was better than no action at all. He skated down the
companion with something like his earlier
exuberance, and shouted for Grace.
    “Never mind about lunch,” he said, scattering silk
shirts and white duck trousers out of a
locker. “I’m going on shore to take up ornithology.”
    2
    One of the vedettes from St Malo was coming
in to the jetty when the Saint scrambled back on deck, and the Falkenberg’s tender was
still manoeuvering for a landing. Simon dropped into his dinghy and
wound up the outboard. Fortunately the