The Saint and the People Importers (2 page)

Simon did not at all admire illegal immigration nor the people who indulged in it, but he admired blackmailers even less. He was not a sentimental man, and he could appreciate an audacious bit of thievery with the taste of a connoisseur. He could enjoy the pricking of the pompous rich-though it was the pompous part and not the rich part that he disliked-and he could relish a duel between equals. But blackmail, by its very nature, had always struck him as especially rotten, and a blackmailer who sucked the blood of poor and defenceless people seemed to him to exist on a level approximately equivalent to the underside of a cockroach.

Simon folded the newspaper and tucked it into the pocket of his raincoat with the pleasant feeling of being no longer at loose ends but instead of having set a clear course in a promising direction. His driver was not so fortunate. In trying to take a shortcut through Soho he finally got himself bogged down near Wardour Street off Brewer Street. Here, in a notorious backwater bottleneck behind the theatre and restaurant district, the traffic jam seemed to be nearing the oft-predicted urban millennium when the only solution will be to cover the whole mess with concrete and start all over again on top of it.

“I’ll walk from here,” Simon said through the opening in The glass partition.

He got out and paid the driver.

“There’s plenty of curry restaurants around here,” the cabman said. “Must be at least one in every block.”

“I think I’ll go to the Golden Crescent anyway,” Simon told him. “They may all use the same brand of chutney, but where I’m going there’s something special about the atmosphere.”

2

To the uninitiated foreigner, London is Big Ben, double-decker buses, dazzling uniforms, and Buckingham Palace. The contrivers of English tourist brochures tend to give the central section of the city called Soho the same treatment that a respectable family gives to a fallen female relative: they get a kick out of knowing about her but they don’t go out of their way to advertise her existence very exuberantly to outsiders. Appropriately heralded by the statue of Eros in the middle of Piccadilly Circus on its southwest corner, Soho is a roughly rectangular area of about ninety acres bounded on the north by Oxford Street and on the east by Charing Cross Road; but its distinction is much more a matter of atmosphere than of physical boundaries.

Soho is, in the most far-reaching sense of the word, an entertainment district. It contains Carnaby Street, the birthplace of a contemporary form of sartorial extravagance, which for some tastes would be entertainment enough; but that is only one facet of its resources. Along its many-angled, space-starved streets and alleys the stalwart sensation-seeker can visit a pub, a penny arcade, a bookmaker’s shop, or a strip-tease show. He can buy a red hot magazine or a blue hot reel of movie film. He can eat at an Indian, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Balkan, American, Jewish, or even an English restaurant. He can get himself an expensive companion in an expensive bar, or a cheap dancing partner, or a souvenir lump on the back of his skull if he should be foolhardy enough to follow the wrong helpful little chap into the wrong obscure doorway.

Soho, regarded (for literary effect) as a painted woman, is considerably cleaner, better dressed, and brighter than what might loosely be called her counterparts in other great cities. When the Saint got out of his taxi he was standing in front of a pub as staid and wholesome as any in Oxford or Windsor. Many of the passers by would have looked at home on the most pristine boulevard in Belgravia.

But Soho, being the sort of place it is, attracts in large numbers that curious variety of human being who combines an enterprising spirit with inordinate laziness and a total lack of moral-principle. If prevented by circumstances from becoming a politician or a fiction-writer, such an individual will tend to gravitate to the kind of subsurface sources of income with which Soho abounds. The Saint saw a female of the species almost as soon as he left the kerb and set off down a short, constricted side street. She was fat and young and had curly black hair, and she was sitting in a ground floor window of a building across the road. When she saw Simon her expression of disconsolate boredom did not change, but remarkably like a clockwork toy she raised one plumpish hand and mechanically beckoned to him three times with a pudgy forefinger.

The Saint cheerfully tipped an imaginary hat and strode on. Turning into the next, more populous street, he ran a gauntlet of second rate strip-show establishments whose wares were vividly publicised by a fusillade of glossy photographs on either side of their doors-photographs whose charming bare subjects had no connection whatever with the dancing girls presumably on non-stop view inside. He edged around a ragged stoop-shouldered vendor of hot chestnuts, passed a hamburger house, a magazine shop, and an Italian delicatessen, and turned down to Shaftesbury Avenue, which was roaring with traffic and jammed with sightseers. He had to wait at a corner until he could get across the avenue to its southern side. The glow of the setting sun stained the façades of all the buildings a livid red. The day had seemed perfectly clear, but now that the sun had sunk below the roof-tops an autumn haze was filtering and deepening the tone of the light. As Simon continued on towards the Golden Crescent, he almost suddenly became aware of a wintry chill in the air, as if the sinking of the sun had revealed an underlying coldness that had been there all the time.

Or was the chill inside him-an omen of events that every deliberate step was bringing nearer?

He was approaching the Indian restaurant from its rear, and he could smell the exotic pungency of its kitchen exhaust while he was still yards away. The restaurant was on a corner, and behind it and its neighbouring shops ran a narrow alley serving their back doors. Simon would not have paid any particular attention to a medium-sized van which had backed into the alley if he had not happened to notice the two men who apparently were in charge of it. Their appearance was so startling that he paused and glanced at the side-panels of the blue van expecting to see the advertisement for a circus.

Instead he saw the words: SUPREME IMPORTS LTD., PURVEYORS OF FINEST INDIAN FOODSTUFFS.

All in a matter of seconds, he was able to take another look at the men who had attracted his attention as they lifted a crate and cartons from inside the van and carried them into the back door of the Golden Crescent. Both of them wore dirty blue workmen’s clothes, but that was where any resemblance ended.

By far the more striking of the two was a giant Indian or Pakistani, at least six and a half feet tall, with muscles and girth to match his amazing stature. The huge dome of his skull was bald, like a great gleaming egg resting in the bristling black nest of muttonchop whiskers and jutting moustaches which smothered the lower regions of his head. The bridge of his nose receded abnormally as it approached his massive brow, and his little oily eyes gave the impression of having rolled down close together in the depression like a pair of black ball-bearings.

The small cramped jet eyes fastened on Simon’s face for an instant and then flicked away to concentrate on the business of moving the wooden crate into the restaurant’s storeroom.

The other member of the blue-clad team was a European, and in no way as remarkable as his mate. It was just that his unusual smallness-jockey-like, the Saint thought-was so emphasised by the monstrous Indian’s Brobdingnagian bulk that he looked like a pigmy in comparison. He was not only rather short, but also thin, with an anxious deathshead face surmounted by a closely cut crop of coarse hair that stood rigidly up on end. He blinked rapidly as he worked, and did not notice Simon as the Saint went on past the entrance of the alley.

The Saint had no reason to think any more-for the time being-about the two oddly assorted purveyors of finest Indian foodstuffs. He was much more interested in knowing what the owner and staff of the Golden Crescent could tell him about their compatriots’ problems-if not their own-of involvement with extortioners of the kind whose bloody deed had just made the headlines.

Simon knew the Golden Crescent through half a dozen visits he had made during the past year. The only thing which differentiated it from scores of other Indian restaurants in London (distinction between Indian and Pakistani cuisine being virtually nonexistent in the British public mind) was the intensely calorific excellence of its curried lamb and the benevolent hospitality of its proprietor, Abdul Haroon. There were more lavish, and possibly better, Indian restaurants, but there was none with a more sociable and talkative owner-and talkativeness was a quality for which the Saint felt a keen desire on this particular evening.

He rounded the corner and approached the restaurant’s modest front entrance, an ordinary glass door flanked on either side by plate-glass windows, each bearing in appropriately gilt lettering the words golden cresent restaurant. Above the door, so that it could be seen by prospective customers approaching from east or west, hung another gilded announcement of the restaurant’s identity. It seemed unlikely that even the most unobservant pedestrian could feel any doubt that he was, indeed, at the portals of the Golden Crescent, but in case there should be any last-minute doubts among the exceptionally dull-witted the fact was confirmed once more by neat gold lettering on the glass of the entrance door itself.

Mr. Abdul Haroon was loquacious even in his advertising.

Before going inside, the Saint glanced through one of the windows, over a row of sickly ferns which had somehow survived the sunless and spice-laden atmosphere of the interior. It was barely six o’clock, and he was glad to see that he would be the first customer to arrive that evening.

He opened the door and stepped in. There was no entrance alcove, and he was immediately in the midst of white-covered tables packed as close together as sheep in an overcrowded fold. Along the walls were red-yellowish lamps and hand-painted murals of imaginative Eastern landscapes in which all the trees were palms and all the buildings were variations on the Taj Mahal. To the right in the rear was a small but well-stocked bar. A passageway led past the bar to the kitchen and cloakrooms.

The first thing the Saint’s senses registered as he entered was the wonderful smell of the place, dominated at the moment by cloves and saffron. The second fact that struck him was that there was not a single waiter in sight.

He tried to close the air-cushioned door as noisily as possible behind him, and picked out a table where he would be able to sit with his back to the wall and see the entrance, the bar, and the passage that gave access to the back rooms. Before he could take a seat a waiter, already known to him from previous visits as Mahmud, came rushing out around the bar from the inner sanctuary, jerking the hem of his white jacket into place over his baggy Eastern trousers.

“I am so sorry, sir!” he was exclaiming. “We have just opened our door this minute.”

“Not to worry,” Simon said. “I’d like this table, if it’s not reserved.”

“Mr. Templar!” the waiter said with sudden recognition.

He hurried to help Simon slip off his raincoat. “So long since you were here and no one to greet you!”

Mahmud, a Pakistani like Abdul Haroon, as his Muslim name indicated, was of moderate height, light-skinned, black-haired, and quick. He was in his early twenties and despite a professionally subservient manner gave the impression that he was destined for higher things than dishing up rice and poppadums and knew it.

“You have a good memory,” said the Saint. “It’s been some time since I was here-and it was usually Ali who waited on me.”

The Golden Crescent employed only three waiters and the evening paper had not made it clear which of them had been murdered. If it had been the one called Ali, a middle-aged quiet man, Mahmud gave no indication of it.

“It helps to cultivate the memory in my profession,” he said with smiling complacency.

He had pulled the table away from the wall so that Simon could sit down on the banquette. Now he pushed the table back and flicked an imaginary crumb off the clean white cloth. Like most tablecloths at restaurants of the Golden Crescent’s class, this one had a small but very neatly mended torn spot. It amused Simon to see the little white scar as soon as he looked to confirm his guess that it would be there-almost as much as it amused him that waiter Mahmud insisted on being completely unaware that one of his colleagues was even at this moment making grisly news posters all over London.

“Thank you,” Simon said coolly. “Would you please hand me that paper from the pocket of my coat before you hang it up?”

“Of course, sir.”

As the Saint took the paper he unfolded it on the table in front of him. Mahmud studiously avoided noticing the headline; but Simon refused to let him escape. When the waiter came back from hanging up the coat the Saint tapped the fat black letters.

“With your memory,” he said, “you can’t have forgotten Ali.”

Mahmud stiffened into a rigidly formal posture.

“No, sir.”

“It was the Ali who worked here then?”

“Yes, sir. Would you like a drink, sir?”

Mahmud staunchly met the Saint’s eyes through an invisible barrier as thick as the armour plating of a battleship.

“I’ll have a Peter Dawson with ice.”

“Yes, sir,” said Mahmud. “With plain water?”

The Saint nodded and smiled.

“You do have a very fine memory,” he said pleasantly. “I hope as the evening goes on you’ll find that it covers things other than customers’ names and drinking habits.”

Mahmud’s face was still expressionless but he permitted his dark eyes to glance again at the newspaper.

“You are interested in this matter?”

“Yes,” Simon said.

“For reasons of your own profession?”

For an instant Mahmud did not sound like a waiter.

“Possibly,” said the Saint.

“Thank you, sir,” Mahmud replied, sounding like a waiter again. “I will get your drink and the menu.”

3

Simon realised as Mahmud walked quickly away that the waiter’s sudden departure coincided with the advent of another more exalted personage in the dining room. It was Abdul Haroon himself, the proprietor and maître d’hotel of the Golden Crescent. He billowed in past the bar, resplendent in a red silk tunic which may or may not have resembled some mode of Pakistani national dress, and sailed towards the Saint’s table like a runaway balloon on a weakening wind.