Trust the Saint by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online

expected a visit at precisely that moment, he was quick to put on the curmudgeonly expression which it called for.
    “Excuse me for disturbing you at such an hour,” said the Saint, when Eva had made the necessary presentation, “but I must call Hollywood tonight and give them all the information.”
    “Come in,” Kolben said grudgingly.
    “You might be interested to know that the new star we’re introducing in this picture is a German,” Simon chattered on, once they were all inside the hallway and the street door was closed again. “I wonder if you’d recognize him.”
    He took from his pocket the card with a silhouette on it which was not his own, and showed it. Kolben scarcely batted an eyelid—but to Simon Templar a much more infinitesimal flicker of reaction than that would have been enough. Without an instant’s hesitation, without even waiting for any verbal rejoinder, he brought his fist up under Kolben’s helpfully extended chin in the shortest and wickedest uppercut in the business.
    “Have you gone mad?” Eva gasped, as Kolben descended to the floor with the precipitate docility which the standard cliche compares with being poleaxed.
    “That’s what I’ll have to try to sell the jury, darling, if I’m wrong about this,” Simon answered; and as she suddenly flew at him he hit her reluctantly but accurately on the back of the neck with the minimum of essential force.
    That gave him a few minutes with nothing to worry about except the chance that they might have other friends in the house; but as he sped swiftly and softly from room to room he found no one except, at last, trussed to an iron cot in an attic, the one man he had been seeking.
    “Herr Roeding,” he said reproachfully, as he was removing the cords and adhesive tape, “it’s all right for you to poke around in antique shops and accept free guide-books, but a research chemist of your age shouldn’t escort young women to the hot spots of the Reeperbahn.”
    “They are all in it together,” spluttered the victim. “Uhrmeister who gives out the books, his daughter who wants to see all the shows, the uncle who is a pawnbroker, and her husband who owns this house. And that story about Stortebeker’s goblet—”
    “I’ve heard it,” said the Saint. “It’s very well done. And if you’d been the ordinary sucker it would only have cost you a few thousand marks. But Kolben recognized you or your name, or both, and he must have realized that you were worth more on the hoof than as just another disappointed treasure-hunter. If a pal of ours in Washington hadn’t asked me to give it a whirl before it was officially reported that you were missing and might have defected under the Wall, you would probably have been smuggled out on the next freighter to Russia.”
    Ernst Roeding massaged some color back into his hands, but his face was still gray.
    “Who are you?” he asked.
    BIGGER
    GAME
    THE BIGGER GAME
    Copyright Š 1961 by Fiction Publishing Company
    Because I once translated the autobiography of Juan Belmonte, one of the historically greatest bullfighters of them all, with what I hoped was an authoritative introduction, Simon Templar has by association been assumed by some readers to be an aficionado himself, or even a graduate practitioner of the art. In one interview an English reporter, who had received disappointing replies to a few leading questions designed to show up the Saint’s devotion to bullfighting, which could in print be either pilloried or ridiculed according to the delightful convention of most English interviewing, complained peevishly: “You sound so lukewarm about it—have you lost your aficion?”
    “I just haven’t been in any of the countries where they do it, lately,” said the Saint.
    “And you don’t miss it? I’d have expected a man like you to want to try it himself, like other people take up golf. Haven’t you ever tried to stand up to a bull with a cape?”
    “If I told you about my