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

business to know things like that, and it ought to be yours.”
    Upwater swallowed.
    “Can’t we call it quits?” he said desperately. “There’s plenty for both of us.”
    “Thank you,” said the Saint, “but this time I’ll be happy to collect a legitimate reward, with no headaches.”
    “Nobody’ll believe you,” Upwater said viciously. “I’ll say you were in it with me, right up to now.”
    “I’m sorry,” said the Saint, “but I’ve taken care to prove otherwise.”
    There was a sudden rush of feet, and the lights went on. Two uniformed men stood in the doorway, with Pieter Liefman crowding in past them. Pieter put an arm around the Saint’s shoulders and spoke rapidly to the policemen in Dutch, and Upwater wilted as he realized that the trap was closed.
    Some time later, as they all went out into the street, with Upwater handcuffed between the two officers, Simon looked for the car that had been parked on the far corner. It was no longer there.
    Pieter intercepted the glance.
    “It took off when I came back with the flatfeet,” he said.
    Simon read the mute entreaty in Upwater’s white face, and shrugged.
    “Okay,” he said. “We won’t say anything about Mabel. After all, she was the one who really brought me into this.”
    On second thought, after he saw Mr Upwater’s next expression, he wondered if that was quite the right thing to mention.
    III. THE RHINE:
The Rhine Maiden
    Simon Templar always thought of her as the Rhine Maiden for the simple reason that he met her on his way down the Rhine. He had never found the time or the inclination to sit through Wagner’s epic on the subject, but he surmised that the Rhine Maidens of the operas would probably have been in keeping with the usual run of half-pint Siegfrieds and 200-pound Brunnhildes. The girl on the train was what Simon, in a mood of poetic fancy, would have liked a Rhine Maiden to be; and he didn’t care whether she could sing top F or not.
    Simon took the tram because he had made the trip from Cologne to Mainz by boat before, and had announced himнself a Philistine unimpressed. Reluctantly, he had summarнized that much-advertised river as an enormous quantity of muddy water flowing northwards at tremendous speed unнder a fitter of black barges and tugboats and pleasure steamнers, with a few crumbling ruins on its banks shouldering awkwardly between clumps of factory chimneys. Scenically, it had been scanned and found wanting by the keen and gay blue eyes that had reflected every great river in the world from the Nile to the Amazon, even though he found the ruins a little pitiful, as if they had only asked to be left in the peace of years and had been refused. Also Simon took the train because it was quicker, and he had unlawful business to conclude in Stuttgart; which was perhaps the best reason of all.
    For the saga of any adventurer take this: an idea, a scheme, action, danger, escape, and perhaps a surprise somewhere. Repeat indefinitely, with irregular interludes of quiet. Flavor it with the eternal discontent of unattainable horizons, and the everlasting content of an eagle’s freedom. That had been Simon Templar’s life since the day when he was first nicknamed the Saint, and it was his one prayer that he might be spared many years more in which to demнonstrate the peculiar brand of saintliness which he had made his own. With valuable property burgled from an unsavoury ex-collaborationist’s house near Paris in his valise, and his fare paid out of a wallet picked from the pocket of a waiter who had made the mistake of being rude to him, the Saint lighted a cigarette and leaned back in his corner to be innocently glad that the lottery of travel could still shuffle a girl like that into the compartment chosen by a voyaging buccaneer.
    She was very young-about seventeen or eighteen, he guessed-and her eyes were the bright greenish-blue that the waters of the Rhine ought to have been. She had pulled off her hat when