Señor Saint (15 page)

“That’s very interesting,” said the Saint respectfully. “Did you discover it?”

“Oh, no. It was discovered by a former colleague of mine, Dr. Zetek. That’s why it carries his name. What I discovered was the frog that you saw-what we might call Atelopus nestori.”

Professor Nestor chuckled coyly over his scholarly little joke.

“Of course, our golden frog was modeled from the real one,” Alice said.

“You can easily see how it would happen,” said the Professor. “Long before Dr. Zetek or any of us came here, the real golden frog was naturally known to the aborigines. And it was the sort of phenomenon which could hardly help striking the imagination of a primitive and superstitious people. The transformation of a tadpole into a frog of any kind is almost like seeing a miracle of evolution take place under your very eyes. Then think how still more awed they must have been when they saw that some tadpoles apparently no different from the others turned into frogs that seemed to be made out of the same precious metal that they would find in rare nuggets among the gravel of their river beds. Add to that the peculiarity that these frogs were so delicate that if captured, no matter how gently they were handled, they would die for no reason that a savage could understand-and to anyone who knows anything about primitive psychology, you have all the necessary ingredients for the origination of a religious cult.”

“You mean your golden frog is a museum piece?”

“Well, at least five hundred years old. Perhaps a great deal more. The only other one that I had ever seen-before I came here-was brought to me when I was lecturing on pre-Columbian artifacts at Michigan State University, by a tourist who picked it up on the San Blas Islands. He wanted to know if it had any antique value apart from the metal in it. Of course, I recognized at once that it was not San Blas workmanship, but he could tell me no more about its history. Naturally it hadn’t occurred to him to ask the Indian who sold it to him how he had come by it. I could only tell, from certain technical indications, that it was very old, perhaps even contemporary with the Mayan culture. I tried to buy it, but the owner was much too wealthy: the cash value meant nothing to him, but he wanted it as a souvenir, and an antique to boast about as well if he could have obtained an official pedigree for it.”

“But you don’t give up so easily, do you, Pappy?” said Alice adoringly.

“I must say, I went on thinking about it. And then, quite by chance, I happened to hear of Dr. Zetek’s golden frogs. One glance at a picture was enough to show me that they must have been the model for the little metal frog that I had been shown. After that, to a scientific mind with my special background, the other deductions were almost elementary. Some prehistoric culture in Panama must have made a fetish of the golden frog and used images of it in their rites… . But I must be boring you.”

“Not in the least,” said the Saint truthfully. “This is something they don’t have in the guide books.”

The Professor nodded complacently.

“Not yet. I was not foolish enough to discuss my deductions with anyone at that point-except Alice.”

“You wouldn’t believe how careful a scientist has to be, these days,” Alice explained. “It’s almost as bad as being an inventor. There’s so much competition for the only college jobs that pay a living wage, and so many colleges seem to hire professors just for their box-office value, according to the books they’ve written and the things they’re supposed to have discovered-so when a professor thinks he’s on the track of something really big he has to guard it like an atomic bomb so that somebody else won’t steal it.”

“You can’t blame them, considering how few decent salaries a university can pay, except to a football coach,” said the Professor, with an unworldly resignation that would have tweaked the heartstrings of the most indurated cynic. “Let’s just say that I had enough human vanity to hope that my own name might go down in history along with some discovery that I’d made all by myself. I had a little money that I’d saved up to give Alice a start in life, but she insisted we should spend it on this. Finally I took my sabbatical, and we came down here to try to find the evidence of this cult. We made three different expeditions, into parts of the country that had never been explored. Some of it was really rough-especially for Alice.”

He paused to glance admiringly at his daughter, and Simon followed the glance with a raised eyebrow.

“Did you go along too?”

“I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” Alice said. “Even when I was a little girl I was always pestering the boys to take me hunting and fishing with them. I only wish I could live like that all the time.”

This was one of Mr. Nestor’s deadliest inspirations. He had found that the time-honored bait value of a blue-eyed blonde with the face and figure of a Hollywood starlet was multiplied ten-fold by the revelation that she would honestly prefer a fishing camp to a night club. In the presence of such devastating credentials, strong men became misty-eyed and indeed were sometimes hard to bring back to mundane preoccupations. Mr. Nestor observed an unmistakable hint of reverence in the way Mr. Tombs was looking at Alice, and hurried on before he lost his audience completely.

“I won’t bore you with all the details. But we succeeded- more than I’d even dared to hope. We not only found proof of the cult of the Golden Frog, we found perhaps all the relics of it that will ever be found.”

Simon removed his gaze from Alice with undisguised reluctance.

“You mean you found more than that one frog I took a picture of?”

“To be exact, we found thirty-seven. And we found them all at once, in a cave that we literally stumbled into by the sheerest accident.”

“Some defunct witch doctor’s Olde Frogge Shoppe?”

“I think there’s a better explanation. As you’ll remember, the Spanish conquistadors were here, as they were all over Central and South America. And as you know, the main thing the Spaniards were looking for was gold. It can’t have taken the priests of the Frog very long to find that out, but they must have been smarter than most of the other Indian tribes. They must have rounded up as many of the images as they could and hidden them in this cave-the entrance was so well hidden that no one could ever have found it unless he accidentally fell into it like I did. The specimen that the tourist brought to me must have been one that some individual hid on his own or that got lost somewhere, but the main collection was never found. Probably all the priests who knew where it was died under the tortures of the Inquisition without betraying the secret. Anyhow, no one can have set eyes on their treasure again until we found it.”

“Are the other frogs all the same size?”

“More or less, most of them. My hypothesis is that they were in the nature of icons, issued to minor priests or chieftains as a symbol of authority. But there were three images as big as footballs which must have presided over important lodges or perhaps their equivalent of cathedrals, and one absolute whopper, nearly as big as Alice, which must have been the original idol that all the others were modeled from.”

The Saint’s lips took the shape of an awed whistle.

“You don’t say they were solid gold?”

“I have seen no evidence that those Indians knew the arts of plating, or making alloys,” answered the Professor dryly.

“And to think I once started to feel sorry for you,” said the Saint. “I should apologize. If I’d known an archaeologist could hit that kind of pay dirt, I might have gone in for it myself.”

The Professor smiled faintly.

“Would it be impertinent to ask what your business is, Mr. Tombs?”

“I suppose you’d have to call me a speculator,” said the Saint, with studious honesty. “I dabble in anything that looks interesting at the time. I may say I’ve done pretty well at playing my hunches.”

If there could be any more mouth-watering description of the type that Professor Nestor prayed every night that Providence would send him on the morrow, the Professor had yet to hear it. Only a lifetime of professional discipline enabled him to sigh with the convincing tinge of envy that was called for at this point.

“I wish I could say the same, Mr. Tombs. I suppose I just wasn’t born under a lucky star.”

“With a cave full of golden idols, you’ve certainly got problems. Like income tax, I suppose.”

“But the idols are still there in the cave, Mr. Tombs.”

“Till you go back for them.”

“Yes, yes. That, of course, is the problem.”

“And we don’t want to lose our heads over it,” Alice said.

Simon frowned interrogatively.

“We’d just about taken it all in,” elaborated the Professor, “and we were heading back to camp for the cameras and flash bulbs to make a proper record before we disturbed anything, when the headhunters attacked. It would be hard for you to believe, Mr. Tombs, sitting here; but in less than an hour’s flying time you could parachute into a jungle world as untamed as it was before Columbus sailed… . We’d been hearing the drums for days, but hoped they were only trying to scare us. It was a tragic underestimate. The native bearers we’d left in camp never had a chance, poor devils, but the uproar told us what had happened. We managed to cut across to the river and push off in one of the canoes before we were spotted. We fought a rear-guard action downstream for two days before they gave up the chase.”

“Just you and Alice?” Simon asked, open-mouthed.

“And Loro, our half-caste guide and interpreter. A wonderful fellow. I only hope nothing happens to him before we go back. That is,” said the Professor, coming hollowly back to earth, “if we ever do go back.”

“If I knew where there was a cave full of golden idols,” said the Saint, “I’d like to see any drum-beating headhunters stop me.”

“Probably you can afford to say that,” Alice said gently. “But it costs a lot of money to organize the only kind of expedition that’d stand a chance. We’re going back to try to raise the money, of course-“

“That shouldn’t be difficult.”

“I hope you’re right,” said the Professor dubiously. “But as I told you, you remember, we didn’t even get any pictures. We haven’t anything to show except the one golden frog that you saw. It all depends on how much my scientific reputation is worth. Well, time will tell.”

“They’ve got to believe you, Pappy,” Alice said.

“Yes, indeed, my dear.” The Professor patted her hand. He had put on one of his most polished performances, not hamming it any more than the part called for, and if the audience wasn’t well hooked he should start learning his business all over again. Now it was up to her to carry the ball. “But we’ve bored Mr. Tombs enough with our problems.” He consulted his watch. “And I have to call the curator of the Museum. Will you excuse me?”

He got up and pottered vaguely out into the lobby. He had practised that gait until it had become almost a part of him-it suggested a kind of ingenuous and earnest helplessness which was peculiarly convincing. Alice’s eyes followed him protectively.

“Poor darling,” she said. “It means so much to him.”

Simon offered her a cigarette.

“There’s no real chance that you won’t raise the money, is there? I should think he’d only have to wire his University-“

“It isn’t as easy as that. You see, no one even heard of the Frog cult before he deduced that it must have existed. And you’ve no idea how skeptical scientists can be, especially about someone else’s discovery. It’s not only scientists, either. There’s a man who has a desk out in the lobby who calls himself Jungle Jim: he organizes jungle trips for tourists. If you asked him, he’d tell you there aren’t any headhunters in Panama. Of course he doesn’t take his parties anywhere near the headhunter country, and he doesn’t want them scared off, but you can imagine what someone who was checking up on our story might think.”

Simon nodded.

“Have you tried already and been turned down?”

“No. As a matter of fact, we’ve hardly told anyone. We have to be awfully careful. If the Panamanian government heard about it and believed it, they’d claim it and send a company of soldiers to get it. That wouldn’t matter to Pappy, so long as he got the scientific credit, but you can guess how many of the frogs would mysteriously disappear on the way back. In fact, the expedition would be just as likely to come back and swear they hadn’t found anything at all-or maybe never even come back, if you see what I mean.”

The Saint decided that it was not up to him to dispute this libelous estimate of the Panamanian militia.

“How much would it cost to go in and get those frogs?” he asked.

She had the figure ready, arrived at by an intuition that had seldom failed her: it had to be small enough, compared with her assessment of his means, for him to consider without undue anxiety, but it should also encompass every last dollar that the operation might be good for.

“About ten thousand dollars,” she said, and he didn’t blink.

“Someone might go for that as a straight business gamble, in return for a fair share of the loot.”

It was not so much a statement as the thinly veiled basis for an offer; but she shook her head.

“That’s the trouble. Pappy would never allow it to be treated as loot. All those frogs would have to go into museums. He’d rather they stayed lost for ever than see any of them melted down, or even put up for sale.”

“Then you certainly are looking for a philanthropist.”

“I know, it isn’t realistic. But who could mistake my Pappy for a realist? Now, I’m different. If I could get him just a few of those frogs-enough to make one museum exhibit and a lot of pictures, and prove his theory and make him famous-I wouldn’t care what happened to the rest.”

Simon regarded her contemplatively, and suddenly she leaned closer and impulsively put a hand on his arm.

“Tell me something,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m talking to you like this, except that I feel you’re a terribly wise person. But I’ve got to ask you. Suppose I managed to find some business man who was a bit of a gambler, and made a deal with him on my own.” It was consummate artlessness that continued to keep the discussion impersonal, so that she was absolved of any suspicion of propositioning him. “If I got just a few of those golden frogs for Pappy, he needn’t even know what happened to the rest, the headhunters might have found the cave after we left and taken most of them away, but what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. He could write his articles and be famous and die happy. Would you think I’d done something very wrong or very good?”