The Saint Returns Read Free Page B

innocence. “Why shouldn’t I believe you?”
    She sniffled, wiping her eyes with the backs
of her hands. It was growing dark now, and the increasing traffic
glared with headlights.
    “You believe me?” she asked.
    “I didn’t say that, exactly. I said why
shouldn’t I be lieve you? What else can I do? I was going to suggest that when
we got to my hotel we could telephone your parents, but I guess that’s out of
the question.”
    She looked at him indignantly.
    “You’re callous,” she said.
“Making fun of an orphan.”
    Simon, because he was driving, could not
devote a really
effective squelching look to her.
    “Now listen to me, young lady,” he
said with impres sive firmness. “I am not making fun of you. I have
not even questioned your fantastic identity. I have lost a world-record trout because of
you, scuffed my shoe kick ing your enemies
into the river, and am now in the proc ess
of further saving your neck. So if you start pulling female temperament on me, I’m going to lose patience and give you a spanking.”
    She stared at him, her big eyes getting
rounder.
    “Spanking?” she
squeaked.
    “Yes. You look very spankable, and just
the right size to fit across my knee. And I can’t say I wouldn’t enjoy it… for
more reasons than one.”
    With compressed lips, she smiled in spite of
herself.
    “I’m too old for a spanking,” she
said without defiance.
    “Not you,” said the Saint.
“Let’s see, your father died in 1945. That makes you about …
twenty-two at the least.”
    “Twenty-three,” she said.
    “Before we go any more into your earlier
history, tell me something: why are those men trying to kill you?”
    She shook her head.
    “Oh. They weren’t. They were trying to capture me.”
    “You said they were killers.”
    “Well, that wasn’t exactly the truth. I
couldn’t tell you the whole story right then, and I had to make you take me away
in a hurry, so that seemed the best thing to say.”
    Simon nodded.
    “Who are they, then?” he asked.
    “They’re SS men. They slipped into
Ireland on a sub marine with me during the last weeks of the war. There were four originally, sworn
just to protect me, but one died and another
one killed himself when somebody discovered his real identity.”
    “And where have you been all this
time—since the end of the war?”
    “In a convent. And those men have lived
nearby on a little farm.”
    “What did the nuns think about all
this?” Simon asked, slowing as Emmet Road took them in toward the
heart of Dublin.
    “Only the Mother Superior knew who I
really was. She was a close relative of one of the high party members— the Nazi Party, I mean. The
other nuns were given the story that I was
the illegitimate daughter of a bishop.”
    Simon covered his mouth with one hand and
appeared to cough.
    “The illegitimate daughter of a
bishop?” he repeated, solemnly, more for confirmation of the sound
than as a question.
    “Yes. But I wasn’t to be raised as a
nun. That way I’d have been lost to the world forever. Instead I was given my own little apartment—if you can call it that—in a wing of the
convent. What a lonely life that was! I had tutor ing, and all the books
I wanted …”
    “And nice clothes,” the Saint said,
glancing at her fashionable suit.
    “Oh … this? I bought this after they
took me out. In fact
that’s how I gave them the slip. I was in the changing room of the shop to try it on, and I discovered a way out the back. So
then I went along an alley to the main street and borrowed that Volkswagen.
Unfortunately they re alized I was
taking too long and came after me, and I never managed to shake them completely.”
    She was sitting bolt upright in her seat,
hands folded in
her lap, completely absorbed in her own words, chat tering at a rate that would have shamed an auctioneer.
    “Lucky thing they taught automobile
driving at the convent,” Simon said.
    She didn’t bat even one eye.
    “Oh, they didn’t teach me