The Saint in Persuit Read Online Free PDF Page A

distant bright blue of the estuary.
    After enjoying the view for a minute she stepped back inside the room, closed the French doors behind her, loosened her dress, and started unpacking her suitcases. It was good to be alone for the first time in many hours.
    She would have taken considerably less pleasure in her apparent solitude, and her room’s old-fashioned spaciousness and agreeable temperature, if she had known that her neighbour on the right-hand side as she faced the estuary had been either listening to or watching every move she made since the bellhop who had brought her luggage upstairs had closed her door behind him. She would have been even more troubled if she had recognized him as the same bald stout man with the hearing-aid who had been a fellow-passenger on the flight from New York.
    Now he sat in his own room, with his short legs propped up quite comfortably, as if he had been doing this sort of thing all his life—which he had—stroking his white Vandyke beard and letting a pair of ingenious mechanical contrivances do most of the work of eavesdropping for him. When Vicky had been on her balcony he had been able, while sitting just inside the doors leading to his own balcony, to see every move she made in the angled mirror of a periscope-like device attached to an extension of his walking stick. Then, when she had gone back into her room, he had turned his attention to the amplifier of his ldngsized hearing-aid. A wire from the flat metal box led to a plug in his ear, bringing him the sound of even the most lady-like cough or discreet footstep from the other side of the wall.
    For a short while he heard little more than footsteps. Then there were the relatively explosive sounds of a door opening and the eruption of female conversation. The first voice was not that of Vicky Kinian.
    “Here I am, ready or not!”
    Vicky Kinian’s words were slower paced and softer than her visitor’s.
    “Good heavens, Freda, I don’t know how you did it. You look straight out of Vogue, and I still feel as if I’d just spent three days on a roller-coaster.”
    The next few minutes of feminine chitchat held no special interest for him. He sat like a bored television viewer waiting for the “station identification” commercials to get off his screen, until the next-door conversation had turned to something less cosmically inane.
    “I can line up dates for both of us if you’re interested,” the visitor—whose voice he recognized having heard on the plane the night before—was saying. “But I suppose you’re too wrapped up in your private scavenger hunt to care about a couple of mere cork ranchers.”
    “Well, my scavenger hunt is the main thing I’m interested in at the moment, but I beat you to it in the date department: I’ve already got one for both of us—if you’re interested!”
    “Good grief, a faster worker than Oliveiros!” the other girl exclaimed. “I knew I was slipping, but maybe I’d better rush for the altar before it’s too late. Who are the lucky guys?”
    “It’s just one lucky guy,” Vicky Kinian said. “That man who sat next to me on the plane—Mr Jaeger. He invited us both to dinner.”
    “Right. I remember: tall, blond, and foxy. He seemed nice enough, and who are we to turn down a free meal?”
    The question seemed to be settled, and the listener’s ex-periencd ears detected that both women were now on their feet.
    “Well,” the visitor said, “what does your father’s letter want you to see first?”
    Vicky Kinian read in a nervous, almost awed voice, picking her way carefully over the Portuguese words that were interspersed with the English.
    “In Lisbon, go to Seguranca’s Antique Shop on Rua De Ouro at the corner of Viseli. They will remember me. Ask for the little box I paid a deposit on.”
    “And?” the other girl asked.
    “That’s all. He doesn’t explain.”
    “Well, that must be one humdinger of a box to be worth all this trouble … or else it must