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

trouble yourself. Seet at the table-here!”
    He kicked a crippled chair into place for her and she sullenly sat on it. The thick wooden slab of a table top in front of her was covered with a film of reddish dust.
    “What is it, then?” she demanded.
    The driver was standing by as dumb and motionless as a wax-museum Neanderthaler. The other man took paper and pen from his pocket and put them down for her to use.
    “Seemply a note to your woman friend at the hotel, to say you have been called away and cannot have dinner tonight.”
    Freda stared at him with incredulity and the eager hope that she might get out of the situation a lot more easily than she had imagined.
    “All this so I’ll cancel a dinner date?” she asked.
    “Si, senhorita. Just write an excuse to your girl friend so her admirer can see her alone.”
    “Why?”
    “I am not like so many questions,” the man said more harshly. “Write the letter! Tell her you have business that makes you leave Lisboa.”
    Freda pondered her situation for just a few seconds, and decided that any further resistance would be a waste of time. She took the pen and wrote a short note in deliberately overformal English saying that she had been called away suddenly to work on a flight.
    “Will that do?” she asked curtly, after scrawling her name.
    Axe-nose took the piece of paper and scrutinized it word by word. He read it a second time before he nodded.
    “Eez okay,” he granted.
    “I must say Mr Jaeger has a pretty violent way of breaking a date,” Freda said. “But now that you’ve got what he wants, you can let me out of here.”
    Her kidnapper tucked the note she had written into his jacket. Then, before he answered, he unwrapped, clenched in his teeth, and held a match to a long thin cigar—all with deliberate slowness. The silence was unnerving. The only sound in the thick-walled room was the man’s quick sucking of fire into his cheroot. When it was glowing, he snapped the wooden match in half between his fingers and flipped its pieces across the room.
    “Oh, no, senhorita,” he said softly. “I cannot let you out of here. Now that you absence weel be explained—now we can ask you some important questions.”
    He had put one foot on a rung of her chair and leaned down with his face so close to hers that she could feel the heat of the scarlet glowing coal tip of the cigar which jutted from his mouth.
    “But …”
    She was almost too frightened to say anything, and he cut her off after the first word she uttered. The big knife, which he had kept out of sight while she wrote the letter to Vicky, appeared again from behind his back. He held the blade for her to see.
    “No ‘but,’ senhorita,” he murmured. “Now you weel ans-swer questions, and you weel answer quickly, or eet weel be a long afternoon that you spend here.” He moved the knife towards her midriff until it punctured the thin fabric of her blouse, and then—like a surgeon beginning to operate—with a slow careful upward movement he slit the material open all the way to the neckline. “A very long afternoon …”
    2
    Through his half-open door, which gave him an adequately direct view of the entrance to Vicky Kinian’s room across the hall, Simon Templar had heard Freda’s parting line— “I just hope my father never writes me a cliff-hanging letter like that!”—and had been well aware of her glance into his room, and of the significant deceleration of her pace as she passed it. He would have been hardly human, or more like an authentic saint, if he had not been tempted to accept the obvious challenge to make a discreet bid for her acquaintance. He could even have twisted the rubber arm of his conscience with the specious argument that such a manoeuvre would be strictly in the line of duty, anyhow, since it could be an adroitly indirect way to sneak up on his prime target. The blonde was not one of the characters of the script that had been presented to him at the embassy, but