Send for the Saint Read Free

asked casually, and Ariadne’s head swung suddenly around to face him.
    “How did you — ?”
    The hazel eyes had widened.
    “It could hardly be anyone else, sweetheart.”
    The Saint was conscious of the exaggeration, but he had something of the showman and the conjuror in his make-up, and like any producer of unexpected rabbits he relished the effect upon his audience. Likewise he noted with satisfaction that when he had pronounced the name Patroclos — placing the stress correctly on the first syllable — even Big Spiro had shown visible surprise, and for all the Saint knew he might well have swallowed his dentures.
    “Whoever was behind that stunt at the airport more or less had to own the place,” Simon went on. “I’d guess you were on stage for only a few minutes, while I and the other passengers came through. But even that could have been long enough for you to be spotted by someone on the real airport staff.”
    “Unless they had been paid not to notice,” Ariadne pointed out reasonably.
    “And the customs men ? No, this had to be more than ordinary bribery. This Johnny had to have really special influence. And I can’t think of anyone in Greece who’d come anything like as close to that as our Diogenes, bless his puissant heart.”
    The girl hesitated for a moment.
    “Well, it will do no harm to confirm your guesswork. Mr Patroclos wishes to see you on an important and confidential matter. But I cannot tell you what it is. You’ll meet him soon enough.”
    2
Diogenes Patroclos …
    (The first name, which English speakers, for their own peculiar reasons, vocalise as ” Dye-odgen-eez”, was pronounced by his compatriots as ” Thee-o-yen-ess”, abbreviated by his familiars — by irreverent journalists to “Thee-o”.)
The Saint was already scanning his card-index memory for everything he could remember about the man who was indisputably the wealthiest and most powerful living Greek, a man who controlled a vast and many-tentacled business empire, who was reputed to be among the world’s shrewdest manipulators, and in whom the Saint, for certain reasons, had sometimes been tempted to take a sharpened interest.
    He had read somewhere that Patroclos had come of a poor fishing family who had lived a few miles outside the capital. At fourteen, it was said (admittedly mostly by his critics) that he was the leader of a gang of young Athens pickpockets. At seventeen he was a seasoned merchant seaman, and besides piling up a tidy heap of drachmae, which he won in gambling with his shipmates, he had begun to get a grasp of the logistics of the business on which he later founded his fortune. His talent for figurework and planning was exceptional; and he managed before long to manoeuvre himself into an office job with the same shipping company, and soon began climbing what is known as the management ladder. By the time he was twentyone and fluent in three foreign languages he had already begun to amass capital by astute investment. At twentythree or thereabouts, he launched out, so to speak, on his own, with one -battered cargo steamer and an equally battered wharfside office in the Piraeus; and only a few years later he bought out his original employer. In the next twenty years he was in his element — assembling and consolidating a vast complex web of companies, mainly in shipping, air transport, investment, and insurance.
    By all accounts Patroclos was a man of immense personal magnetism. His financial touch was a byword among his business contemporaries, and the timing of his acquisitions and divestments was generally regarded as next to uncanny. He was a Midas-figure who pulled strings and then — so it seemed — amused himself by watching the golden marionette-future respond exactly as he had willed.
    That was Diogenes Patroclos, as pieced together from the Saint’s mental file of the information scraps he had accumulated on the subject. But colossal and diversified as the Patroclos interests were,