The Saint in Europe by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online Page A

reverently. Everything was getting better and better.
    “And you would have vouched for Jonkheer.”
    “I never met him before,” Mr Upwater said carefully, “but I’ve known about him for years. Everyone knows him in the trade.”
    “So you’ve no idea what would turn a man like that into a thief.”
    Mr Upwater moved his hands hopelessly.
    “Who knows what makes anyone go wrong? They say that every man has his price, so I suppose every man can be tempted. And that stone was big enough to tempt anyone.”
    “Then,” said the Saint, “the same could be said about you.”
    “That’s what he’s afraid of,” Mrs Upwater said gently.
    Simon sniffed his brandy again, watching the man.
    “What does your firm think about it?”
    “I havent’ told them yet,” Upwater said dully. “I haven’t had the courage. You see-“
    “You see,” Mrs Upwater put in, and her voice began to break, “they know Mr Jonkheer, too. They’ve done business with him for a long time. My husband’s been with them for a long time too, but he’s only an employee. Someone’s got to be guilty … They can’t prove that Tom’s lying, because he isn’t; but that’s not enough. If he can’t prove absolutely that he’s telling the truth-“
    “There’d always be a doubt,” her husband finished for her. “And with a firm like I work for, in that kind of business, that’s the end. They’d let me out, and I’d never get another job. I might as well put my head in a gas oven, or jump in one of these canals.”
    He pulled off his spectacles abruptly and put a trembling hand over his eyes.
    Mrs Upwater patted his shoulder as if he had been a little boy. “There, there,” she said meaninglessly, and looked at the Saint with tears brimming in her eyes. “Mr Templar, you’re the only man in the world who might be able to do something about a thing like this. You must help us!”
    She really didn’t have to plead. For Simon Templar to have walked away from a story like that would have been as improbable a phenomenon as a terrier ignoring the presнence of a rat waltzing under his nose. There were people who thought that the Saint was a coldblooded nemesis of crime; but altogether aside from the irresistible abstract beauty of the situation that the Upwaters had set before him, he felt genuinely sorry for them.
    His human sympathy, however, detracted nothing from the delight with which he viewed the immediate future. It was true that only a few hours ago he had promised to be good; but there were limits. His evening, and in fact his whole visit to Amsterdam, was made.
    He signaled to a waiter.
    “I think we should all have a drink on this,” he said.
    The half-incredulous joy in Mrs Upwater’s tear-dimmed eyes, to anyone else, would have been enough reward.
    “You will help us?” she said breathlessly.
    “There’s nothing I can do tonight. So we might as well just celebrate. But tomorrow,” Simon promised, “I will pay a call on your Mr Jonkheer.”
    3
    The name was on the door, as Mr Upwater had said, of a narrow-fronted three-storied brick building in a narrow street of similar buildings behind the Rijksmuseum: HENнDRIK JONKHEER, and in smaller letters under it, Diamantslijter. From the weathered stone of the doorstep to the weathered tile of the peaked roof, the house had a solid air of permanence and tradition. The only feature that disнtinguished it from its equally solid neighbors was the prison-like arrangement of iron bars over the two muslin-curtained ground floor windows. Definitely it bore no stigma of a potentially flashy or fly-by-night operation.
    Simon tugged at the oldfashioned bell-pull, and heard it clang somewhere in the depths of the building. Presently the door opened, no more than a foot, to the limit of a chain fastened inside, and a thin young man in a knee-length gray overall coat looked out.
    “May I see Mr. Jonkheer?” Simon said.
    “Your business, sir?”
    “I’m a magazine writer, doing