Trust the Saint Read Free

Montmartre, and I wanted to see it, but I can’t go there alone.”
    “Hardly, from what I’ve been reading,” he agreed. “And you want someone to chaperone you on a sightseeing tour of the dens of iniquity.”
    “Could you stand it? I’m curious, that’s all, and a woman is so handicapped in some ways, if she is a little respectable.”
    “I shall treasure the implied compliment,” he murmured. “And I’d be delighted to see the sights with you. I must admit that I’m curious too, even if I’m not as respectable as I look.”
    With his rakehell profile and impudent blue eyes, this was a statement of highly questionable validity, but she refrained from taking issue with it. Although her pink and white and flaxen allure was happily not built upon operatic proportions, she seemed to have a certain Wagnerian solemnity which was a piquant contrast to what she was proposing.
    “And you are free tonight?” she asked. “Or would you prefer another time?”
    “Tonight. If we put it off, you might lose your curiosity —or your nerve.” His gaze continued to analyze her shrewdly but not antagonistically. “But if you won’t mind my asking, what kind of tourist are you? You speak English perfectly, but you still have just a little accent, and a way of putting things—”
    “Of course. I’m half German. I was born in Munich. My mother was an American, but when the last war came she stayed here with my father. But she would talk only English to me, so I never forgot it. Sometimes when I come in a place like this I forget which language I should be talking.”
    “But you said you were a tourist here.”
    “You make me feel so foolish—like someone from Chicago who must admit she’s in New York for the first time. But in Europe everyone hasn’t always been everywhere.”
    “Nor has everyone in America,” said the Saint consolingly. “In fact, there are several people in New York who’ve never been to Brooklyn.”
    “I’d like to go to New York. And Brooklyn, too. I think I’d feel much more at home there than in Hamburg, with all I’ve heard about them and seen in American movies.”
    “Do you still live in Munich?”
    “Yes. I work there, for a shipping company. So I’m answering letters from America all the time.” It seemed to remind her of a formality that had so far been omitted from their informal acquaintance. “My name is Eva.”
    He wondered whether this limited identification was another accepted local discretion or her own idea. But by falling in step without questioning it, he could conveniently by-pass his own perennial problem.
    “Mine is Simon.”
    She was a pleasant companion in spite of her incongruous seriousness, and the Saint was especially contented to have acquired her at that hour, for he hated to eat alone. His friend had recommended the new penthouse restaurant atop the Bavaria Brewery, overlooking the port, and presently they took a taxi there to lay a foundation for the night’s work.
    “We must have eel soup,” she said as they considered the menus. “It’s one of the things Hamburg is famous for. Unless the idea shocks you?”
    “What else goes into it—besides eels?”
    “Vegetables, and herbs, and a sort of little dumpling, and prunes.”
    “It sounds frightful,” he said. “But I’ll make the experiment, if you want to.”
    Actually it turned out to be completely delectable, in an off-beat sweet-sour way. Afterwards they had the Vierldnder Mastgeflugel, a tender broiled chicken, and a bottle of Deinhard’s Hanns Christof Wein of ‘59—that greatest year of the decade for the vineyards of the Rhine. And under the combination of mellowing influences their acquaintance warmed and ripened. She didn’t become unexpectedly stimulating and exciting, but she was ab-sorbently easy to be with.
    They sat beside one of the long plate-glass windows commanding a panorama of docks and warehouses and their associated machinery to which night and artificial lights