Señor Saint (9 page)

“Excuse me,” said the Saint, and leaned against the wall.

“I told you I was an unusual policeman,” Xavier said. “I received word from your FBI that the Inklers were here, and what to expect from them. They have been in other Central American countries, always working on the discontented element, and usually with the story that they could influence assistance from Washington. So I knew that the Enriquez brothers would be perfect for them. I had a problem. It was my duty not to let the Inklers swindle anyone; yet I did not have much desire to protect Manuel and Pablo. That is why I was most happy that you were here. I was sure I could rely on you for a solution.”

Simon’s eyes widened in a blinding smile.

“Is anything wrong with this one?”

“It is a lot of money.” Xavier pursed his lips over it judicially. “But I have no report of any such sum being stolen. And no one has made any accusations against you. I do not see how I can prevent you leaving with it. On the other hand, I am not very well paid, and I think you owe me something.” He took out six of the neat bundles of green paper and distributed them in different pockets of his clothing. “I should like to retire, and buy a small hotel in Fortín.”

Simon Templar drew a deep breath, and straightened up.

“One day I must visit you there,” he said.

Captain Xavier closed the suitcase, and Simon picked it up. Xavier opened another door, and the Saint found himself out on the landing field. In front of him, the first passengers were boarding the plane.

BOOK THREE
The Romantic Matron
1.

She had probably celebrated at least thirty-five birthdays, but most of them must have marked pleasant years. Now she was entering the period of life at which the sophisticated European, impervious to the adolescent fixations with which Hollywood has helped to pervert the American taste, finds a woman most attractive. She could approach it with the confidence of a figure that had ripened without ever being allowed to get out of hand, a face enhanced by the distinction of maturity, and the kind of clothes and grooming that it takes experience as well as money to acquire.

She said, in a quick breathless way: “You’re Simon Templar, aren’t you? The Saint. One of the croupiers at the Tropicana told me.”

“Did he warn you not to play cards with me?” Simon asked disinterestedly.

“Silly. I’m Mrs. Carrington. Beryl, to be friendly. That’s all the introduction I can manage.”

“How do you do,” he said, with restrained courtesy.

She looked over her shoulder nervously, then back to him again.

“I’m not drunk,” she said. “Please believe that. We’ve got to have help and I thought you might be It.”

The Saint inhaled expressionlessly through his cigarette. It was getting to be a job for an electronic computer to count the number of times he had heard some similar opening to that. And “help” usually meant something basically unlawful, with a good chance of getting shot, or clapped in jail, or both, as the most obvious reward.

Which was perhaps why he had had to learn to draw a mask over the glints of purely juvenile devilment that always tended to creep into his eyes at such inspiriting prospects.

“What’s the matter?” he inquired patiently. “Did you lose your husband, or are you trying to?”

“Please be serious. I’ve only got a moment.”

He had all the time in the world, but he had been toying with the preposterous whimsy that he might be able to spend some of it in Havana without any of the things happening to him that seemed to happen everywhere else.

He flicked over in his mind the other times he had seen her. Because of course he had noticed her, as she had noticed him.

The first time, two days ago, in the Capitolio Nacional.

Simon Templar would not ordinarily have been a customer for a piece of conducted sightseeing, especially of a government building, and least of all one which from the outside promised to be just another version of the central-domed design which has become the architectural cliche of the Capitols of the New World. But a taxi driver had mentioned that set in the floor under the dome there was a diamond worth fifty thousand dollars, and this he was curious to see. After all, although the days were somewhat precariously past when he would have been thinking seriously of stealing it, he did not have to forego the intellectual exercise of casing the job and figuring out how it might be done.

That was the only reason why he happened to be one of a small group of tourists shuffling through the Salon de los Pasos Perdidos, listening with half an ear to the recitation of the guide (“The Hall of Lost Footsteps … largest in the world … four hundred feet … Florentine Renaissance style. Please notice how the pattern of the ceiling is exactly reproduced in the tile on the floor …”) and then gawking up at the immense symbolic gilt figure of The Republic (“The biggest indoor statue in the world … the spear alone weighs a ton …”) and finally clustered with them around the small roped-off square in the center of which was the diamond (“Bought with the contributions of everyone who worked on this building … It marks the exact spot from which all distances in Cuba are measured. When they say it is a hundred miles to Havana, and you wonder what part of Havana they mean, this is the place … It has thirty-two facets, the same as the number of points of the compass …”). But you had to take the guide’s word for it, for all you could see was a small circular brass grating set in the floor with a pane of glass under it, through which you could only imagine that you saw a diamond.

So the Saint let his gaze shift idly over the faces of his fellow tourists, and the one that arrested it was Mrs. Carrington’s. Hers first because it was notably easy to look at on its own merits; and then in conjunction with and emphasized by the face of the man with her, who kept a possessive hand under her arm. For just as she was unmistakably a visitor, with her Nordic features and coloring, the man with his well-oiled black hair and olive skin and rather long-nosed good looks was no less obviously a Cuban. The oddity, of course, being that you would never normally expect to find a native of Havana among such a typical clutch of rubbernecks. He didn’t look a day older than the woman, which left just enough room for cynical speculation to impress them both on the Saint’s memory. Simon found himself dawdling towards the rear of the sightseeing party as it was ushered out of the building, being vaguely inquisitive about what the couple might reveal in the manner of their departure, and saw them get into a new Mercury that was parked outside. It had Indiana license plates, but the man drove it.

And shortly after that Simon would probably have let them disappear into the limbo of all fruitless surmises. But before he could forget them, he saw them again.

The second time, the night before, at the Tropicana.

The Tropicana claims to be both the biggest and the most beautiful night club in the world. It is indeed enormously big; and its fine-weather auditorium, roofed only by the sky and colonnaded with glamorously lighted palm trees, is certainly quite a sight. But in spite of the spectacular advantage of a backdrop of living trees interlaced with spidery stairways and catwalks over which the chorus was able to make endless dramatic entrances, countermarches, and exits, the floor show was tremendous without much leavening of inspiration, and Simon was finally glad to vacate his seat at the bar and edge his way laboriously through the crowd to the Casino. And there she sat at the roulette table, with the same man standing behind her chair.

The Saint’s analytical eyes observed that she played without strain, moderately disappointed when she lost, reasonably elated when she won, but always relaxed enough to exchange a smiling word now and then with her companion. Therefore her luck was not financially important to her. But he also noted that her stakes were quite modest; and that, combined with the knowledge he already had that her car was not the most expensive make on the market, suggested that she was no more than comfortably well off, without the astronomical kind of bank balance that one automatically associates with such extravagancies as gigolos. Could it then be a more genuine romance? There were well-heeled men in Cuba, too, and she was undeniably an attractive woman. But he saw her pick up a small stack of chips and offer them to the man, clearly urging him to play with them; the man shook his head in firm but amiable refusal. Then they both seemed to feel the Saint watching them, and looked at him, and he moved away. It could never be any great concern of his, anyhow-he thought.

Until now.

The croupier had nodded to him as he passed, he remembered, saying helpfully, “Not going to Puerto Rico this winter, sir?”-and the Saint had shrugged with affable vagueness and moved on before he placed the man, but realized that they must have seen each other across a table somewhere in San Juan. So it was probably true that that was how Beryl Carrington had learned his name.

But now she had introduced herself as Mrs. Carrington; and it was at least certain, for the record, that a man with the looks of her steady companion could not possibly be Mr. Carrington.

It could well have seemed like a stretch of coincidence when the Saint strolled in to the Bambú that night and found himself seated two tables away from them. Yet the Bambú, billed as a typically Cuban night spot, was just as ineluctably as the Tropicana on the itinerary of any tourist who was stubbornly determined (as the Saint had been) to find out, regardless of the trauma to his pocketbook and eardrums, exactly what was the legendary fascination of Havana. But this time they had seen him at once, and turned to each other as unanimously as if their heads had been geared together, very evidently to talk about it.

Simon had tried his best this time to suggest innocence of any intention. Perhaps almost too studiously, he had kept his gaze from returning even approximately in their direction. And so now she was sitting beside him, asking for some nebulous kind of help.

It could do no more damage to look towards her table now, so he did, and saw that her boy friend was no longer sitting there.

“He went to the men’s room,” she said. “I can’t say much now, because I don’t want him to catch me. I’m not sure he’d like it.”

“Shouldn’t you have found that out before you risked getting a knife stuck in me?” Simon murmured.

“I’m staying at the Comodoro. Mrs. Carrington. Will you call me tomorrow? Any time. Please.” Again her eyes took a furtive glance around, and then they came back to him with an entreaty as urgent as the breathlessness of her voice. “Please, please do. I must go now.”

And before he could make any answer she was back at her own table, completely absorbed in the manipulation of mirror and lipstick. Her entire absence had been so brief that anyone who had not been watching her like a hawk might never have noticed that she had moved at all.

Simon Templar managed to look equally nonchalant as he took a long pull at his drink.

The orchestra, which had been mercifully silent during the bare minute that Beryl Carrington’s visit had taken, splintered the ephemeral lull with a blast of saxophones hurled full blast at the microphones which Cuban musical taste requires to be placed only inches away from the loudest sections of any orchestra; and in another instant a typically tuneless bedlam of brass was in full frenzied swing, amplified to bone-bruising intensity through the battery of souped-up loud speakers which Cuban custom demands for disseminating music through even the smallest room, and pounded remorselessly home with an assortment of drums, cymbals, rattles, gourds full of dried seeds, and just plain pieces of wood beaten together. Under the impact of that jungle cacophony magnified to the maximum intensity attainable through the abuse of modern electronics, the Saint found it relatively easy to keep his face a blank. In fact, about all he had to do was to let it mirror the numbness which the blare and concussion was threatening to induce in his brain. But out of the corner of his eye he saw Mrs. Carrington’s playmate return to their table, and speak to her without sitting down; and she stood up, and they moved on to the dance floor and wedged themselves in among the dedicated crowd who were wriggling and jostling through the motions of a rumba or samba or mambo or whatever the current terpsichorean aphrodisiac was being called that season with every appearance of enjoyment.

About that time Simon Templar decided that he never was likely to experience for himself the mystic rapture which is evoked in some persons by Afro-Hispanic minstrelsy. Something in his cosmogony had undoubtedly been lacking from birth, and he decided to get out while he still had a few other faculties left, before the stupefying din left permanent scar tissue among his brain cells. He had to escape from that paralyzing pandemonium to be able to make up his mind about Mrs. Carrington’s peculiar invitation anyhow, and there could be no more inconspicuous time to do it than while she and her dancing partner were submerged in the gyrating mob in front of the bandstand. He succeeded in catching a waiter’s eye, and made the pantomime of scribbling on the palm of one raised flat hand which is understood to request a bill anywhere in the world.

As he emerged into the relative quiet outside, the doorman and three loitering drivers vocally offered taxi service, but they were physically cut out by a broad butterball of a man who half encircled the Saint’s back with a brotherly arm and grinned: “I got the best car for you, sir, and the best price.”

For just long enough to let himself be steered diagonally across the driveway into the parking lot, Simon submitted tolerantly to what seemed to be merely the effective technique of the most determined salesman on the beat. Then as he realized that they had gone just a little too far from the entrance, and a corner had shut them off from the sight of anyone there, the man stopped and turned him quite violently, and Simon looked down at the gleam of a knife-blade in the gloom.

“How long do you stay in Cuba, seńor?” asked the man.

“Only as long as I can stand the noise,” snapped the Saint.

The fat man’s teeth flashed in the same dim light that glinted on the steel in his hand. Even at that distance the music was so loud that it must certainly prevent anyone around the entrance of the club from hearing almost anything that might happen in the parking lot, short of an atomic explosion.