Read Online Trust the Saint by Leslie Charteris - Free Book Online

the moment of truth—to borrow a phrase from the cliches of tauromachy. The inevitable preliminary chit-chat had run its course, perhaps rather rapidly, in spite of the convenient restaurant punctuations for sampling and savoring. But now he was going to be cut off from the easier evasions. It was imminent in the velvet glow of her faintly Mongolian eyes.
    He took a carefully copious sip of the rose which he had ordered for their accompaniment—it was a Chateau Ste Roseline, delicately fruity, and an uncommon find in England, where the warm weather which fosters the appreciation of such summery wines is normally rarer yet.
    “Tell me the worst,” he said.
    “I’d like to have an affair with you.”
    Simon Templar put down his glass with extreme caution.
    “Does Russell Vail know about this?” he inquired.
    “Yesterday I might have cared. Today I don’t.”
    “But he kills lions. Even elephants.”
    “But you’ve killed men, haven’t you?”
    “Not for fun.”
    “But you have. And you will again—if someone doesn’t do it to you first. That makes you bigger than either of them.”
    “I’m glad you brought in that ‘either,’” said the Saint. “Let’s not forget your husband. Sometimes there’s another angle on the ‘till death do us part’ bit, especially among Latins. Sometimes the husband provides the necessary death—and it isn’t his own.”
    “Don’t try to pretend that frightens you.”
    “Some things do. Like the idea that you must be serious.”
    “Because I don’t make any bones about it? Life is too short. This is something I want, and I hoped you might like it too. Why not make it easy for you?”
    It is of course well known to all readers of noble and uplifting fiction, if there still are any, that any self-respecting hero’s response to such a proposition is to smack the tramp sharply on the rump and tell her to go peddle her assets elsewhere. But how much saintliness can be reasonably asked of anyone, when the tramp happens to be an Iantha Lamb?
    “May I think it over?” said the Saint.
    She nodded calmly.
    “But don’t think too long—I’m leaving for Rome next week to start a picture. Unless you’re in a travelling mood.”
    He wondered long afterwards what decision he might eventually have come to—he was not hidebound by any of the usual conventions, but there was something about the manner of her offer which reminded him uncomfortably of a decadent empress requesting the services of a vassal, a request that was almost a command and at the same time a favor. The impediment to reacting with proper indignation was that she actually was a kind of empress in the echelons of the twentieth century in which he was a kind of buccaneer, and her favor was an impossible pipe dream for which millions of men would have deliriously given everything that they owned. In all honesty, he sometimes thought that the only thing that stopped him from capitulating on the spot might have been an absurd reluctance to be the pushover which she had so many good reasons to expect.
    More fortunately than he probably deserved, the dilemma was resolved for him that time at what could have been the last moment before it became crucial.
    Two evenings later when he returned to Grosvenor House from the movie where he had finished the afternoon —it was a recent Iantha Lamb picture for which a billboard had caught his eye after lunch, and the curiosity of seeing it in this peculiar context had been too much for him—he found three telephone messages in his box recording attempts by Russell Vail to reach him during the day. The latest was time-stamped only minutes before, and Simon yielded to another curiosity and called the number it asked him to directly he got to his room.
    “Glad I got you at last,” boomed the hunter. “It’s a bit late, I know, but I was hoping you could have dinner with us tonight. I mean, with Iantha and Elias. We all thought you’d make a good fourth.”
    Simon reserved