Trust the Saint Read Free Page A

lent an obviously meretricious but seductive glamor; and once when an attentive head waiter came by, Eva gestured outwards and asked: “What is that?”
    “It is all part of the harbor of Hamburg. Just over there it is called the Grasbrook Hafen.”
    Simon sat up.
    “Not the place where good old Klaus Stortebeker got it in the neck—if I may use the expression?”
    “Yes, that is the same place. But it would have looked much different then.”
    “What are you talking about?” Eva asked, as the head waiter moved on.
    “An old-time pirate in these parts,” said the Saint. “I was reading about him in a guide-book just before we met. He left a buried treasure somewhere, too.”
    “How romantic!” Her cornflower-blue eyes danced with more animation than they had previously revealed. “Tell me about it.”
    He brought out the little book and read her the passage which had captivated him.
    “But I’m afraid,” he concluded, “that if you want to get rich quick you’ll have to think of something faster than looking for a goblet with a gallows on it.”
    “I suppose so.” She was almost as crestfallen as if the goblet had been on the table and a commis had whisked it away with the soup plates. “There are no adventures of that kind any more.”
    Of all men alive, few could have produced better grounds to contest that assertion; but for the moment Simon Templar preferred not to cite them. Instead, he said: “We’ll have to do the best we can with our own adventure. Is there anything special you want to see on the Reeperbahn?”
    “Everything.”
    “That might be a rather wide order.”
    “I’ve heard they have women who wrestle in a tank full of mud.”
    “Well, that might be a fairly romantic start,” he admitted. “I guess we could try that for an hors doeuvre, and play it by ear from there.”
    The Reeperbahn in Hamburg (which once meant “The Street of Rope-Workers”) has long since lost its nautical connotation, except as regards the transient sailors who have made it the essential symbol of their port of call. It has become to Hamburg what Montmartre became to the tourist in Paris—who has no relationship with the Parisian. Along its few short blocks and up some of the side streets which lead off it is clustered a variety of establishments catering to the most generally deplored forms of human indulgence which even the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah might have contemplated with some respect. But unlike those classic citadels of depravity, the Reeperbahn, which was also destroyed by fire from the heavens delivered by the air raiders of World War II, has risen again from the ashes with still more reprehensible vigor and the added modern advantages of coruscating neon.
    There is available every gratification traditionally craved by the male animal on a toot, from the brassy ballroom to the dim-lighted cabaret, from the costumed chorus to the table-top strip-tease, from the extrovert’s parade of flesh to the introvert’s pornography, literate or pictorial, still or motion picture, with companionship from overdressed to undressed, with all the necessary alcohols to make everything enticing, if you take enough of them— or, if you are harder to intoxicate, and want to seek just a little harder, more costly but more powerful narcotics. It is all there, with the effort of search scaled down to the minimum which any aspiring debauchee should be able to muster, or he should give up and stay home. Everything from the oldest sensations to the newest variations —down to such exotic eccentricities as the principal attraction at the Jungmuhle, where they had agreed to start their sampling.
    Simon and Eva sat at a front table in an auditorium like a small converted theater, in which the side walls near the stage were smeared and stained with peculiar splash marks which suggested that past performers had pelted an unappreciative audience with unsavory tokens of their indignation, instead of being thus