The Saint Abroad: The Art Collectors/ the Persistent Patriots Read Online Free PDF Page B

leave them on all night.
With a million and a half dollars you canafford to run up an
electric bill.”
    The chauffeur bowed briefly and went out.
    “I am grateful, Simon,” Annabella
said warmly. “I realize that it is not very … conventional to ask
this of you, but the
fact is, I am not a very conventional female. I have led my life as it pleased me, not wanting to be
tied—at least not until I had
enjoyed myself. And I knew, from my father, that I would have money coming, though I was not sure until after he died just where it was expected to
come from. But I have always been independent, perhaps partly because of the idea that I would have a great deal of money
some day. My relationships with men
have not had to be on the careful practical basis that most women worry
about. In a word, I haven’t learned to give
a damn what people think of me. You
are shocked?”
    “I’m favorably impressed,” Simon
said. “It doesn’t sound like a typically Italian attitude.”
    “I am not typically Italian.” She
waved him toward a chair. “Sit down, please. My father was from the
Italian Tyrol, and my mother was from Munich. I was sent to Sweden
when I was a little child, during the war. My mother was killed in an air
raid in Munich. My father was in the Italian army on the Russian front. He
disappeared com pletely, like so many others, as the Russians moved on
Europe, but he survived as a prisoner until he was released and found me years
later. I was fifteen years old by then … and yet I still remembered
him.”
    The Saint nodded as she paused.
    “And then you came to live in
France?” he said. “You’ve led quite a cosmopolitan life.”
    “I’ve never really lived here for
long,” she said. “I suffer from Wanderlust, you might say. In fact I have every
in tention of taking my money when I’ve
sold these paintings and going to
California and building myself a gorgeous house and living like a movie star … and marrying for love.”
    “Like a movie star?” said the Saint
cynically.
    She smiled and went to the door.
    “Would you care for some sherry before
dinner? It’s all we have. The supply of alcohol is rather limited. It’s a
strange feeling, living on nothing but appearances one day and ex pecting
millions the next.”
    Simon said he would like the sherry. When his
hostess came back with it, after a delay caused by starting a leg of lamb
roasting in the oven, she found him inspecting the sliding bookcase—which was not sliding,
but still in place.
    “Clever,” he said. “I assume you press one of the
shelves to open it?”
    Annabella handed him a bottle of Dry Sack,
and put down the two glasses she carried.
    “You are interested in carpentry?”
she asked, arching an eyebrow.
    “Was it one of your father’s hobbies?”
the Saint countered, uncorking the bottle and pouring for both of
them.
    He left the shelves and sat down near the
woman on the sofa. She looked beautiful and he liked her—and for
those reasons among others he had no intention of swiping her paintings
and keeping all the loot for himself, although of course he did
anticipate a reasonable material reward for the troubles he had
already gone through as well as those he probably still had in
store.
    “I don’t know who built it,” she
said. “I know very little about my father, really.”
    “And the paintings?”
    “Even less. My father was from an aristocratic family. Before the war they were rich and owned property
in many countries. This house, for example, had been in the family for
several generations. During the war, things fell apart. These paintings, as I understand it, had been in the family for a
long time. To my father, they were not an investment —a way of making money. They were a trust. He made certain they were hidden before he went to fight
the Com munists. Then he told me as he
saw the war was going to be lost, he
was afraid that the Communists very possibly would take over Austria and Italy, and of course