The Saint and the People Importers (3 page)

He was, as if to advertise the bountiful nourishment he could offer, fat. His face was as nearly a perfect circle as a human countenance can be, and within it were the two nearly perfect circles of the lenses of his steel-rimmed spectacles. The roundness of his face was emphasised by the fact that before the onslaughts of time his hair had withdrawn from the area of his brow to form a secondary line of defence farther back on his scalp. His hair itself was as black as tar and glistened as if it had been copiously anointed with the same ghee in which its owner’s cook fried the chopped lamb.

There was a babyish look built into Abdul Haroon’s pliant features, and his voice had what promised to be a permanently youthful tone and lilt.

“Greetings, Mr. Simon Templar, greetings!” he declaimed, parting the air between him and his customer with a pair of beringed hands. “You do me honour. I am so sorry we have not seen you in such a long time.”

The Saint’s reputation had reached a point where he no longer stood much chance of remaining incognito anywhere in London, and he had to comfort himself over that loss of the advantages of anonymity with the knowledge that restaurant service was often considerably better when the Saint was on the receiving end than it might have been for some less distinguished, or less notorious patron. Abdul Haroon, as soon as he had found out who Simon was during one of his first visits, had asked him for a large signed portrait-photograph which would be hung in a prominent spot on the dining-room wall, but Simon had gently declined the invitation.

“And I’m sorry I haven’t been here,” he told Abdul. “I’d be happy to run through the whole menu twice a month if I could find the time.”

Abdul rotated with pleasure and glanced around hopefully to see if there were any other patrons within earshot. Unhappily, there were still no other patrons at all, but he failed to let that dampen his good spirits-good spirits which the Saint found remarkable considering the unwholesome circumstances in which Abdul had just lost one of his employees.

Mahmud brought Simon’s Peter Dawson and retreated quickly.

“You are too kind, too kind!” the rotund restaurateur declaimed. “If all customers were as appreciative as yourself it would be enough to inspire even the wretched charlatans who wheedle their way into my employment pretending to be cooks.”

It was one of Abdul’s customs to imply that all the creatures of the earth were allied in the common cause of bringing about bis financial, physical, and mental ruin. His employees, finding him otherwise kind, considerate, and even relatively generous, learned to tolerate his lamentations with resigned good humour, knowing that the more pleased he was the more likely he was to implore the heavens to witness the imminence of his downfall.

Simon tried to catch Abdul’s eyes behind the glint of his round-lensed spectacles.

“You have staff problems?” he asked pointedly.

“Always, always,” Abdul mourned. Now he was like a balloon going through a minor deflation. “They come and they go. I teach them to prepare and serve foods worthy of paradise and they take jobs as auto mechanics-or run away to trade the secrets they have learned from me for a job in some giant overdecorated mess-hall for American tourists where the tips are bigger and the management is not on the verge of bankruptcy …”

Abdul, being a balloon, seemed never to run short on his air supply, but the Saint interrupted him.

“According to this newspaper, all your ex-staff aren’t so lucky.”

For a moment Abdul looked as if he were going to ignore the Saint’s allusion altogether and go right on babbling about his own endless tribulations. But unlike his waiter, Mahmud, Abdul had not been endowed by nature with the makings of a poker face. His features were too soft. They melted and welled into an expression of still more intense distress. His ring-laden hands clung to one another for support.

“Horrible, horrible!” he whispered.

“It is,” Simon responded. “I had the impression for a minute that you hadn’t heard about it yet.”

“Oh, yes,” Abdul moaned. He shifted his eyes first to one side and then the other, this time to make sure there were no other customers in the room. “It is a tragedy. It is in all the ruddy papers. It will ruin me!”

“It certainly ruined Ali,” Simon said. “Have you seen this article?”

He opened the paper to the Tam Rowan story on page three; but in the meantime Abdul’s original distress had burgeoned into full-blown fear.

“I have not,” he answered hoarsely. “I don’t want to. If a man who works for me gets himself involved with criminals it is none of my affair! Now … I’m sorry, but you must excuse me. I … I’m needed in the kitchen.”

Abdul all but ran for cover and was replaced by Mahmud with a menu. Mahmud was no more communicative than before.

“Thank you,” he intoned professionally, and turned to leave; but the Saint called him back.

“Mahmud,” he asked with soft insistence, “who is it you’re afraid of-me, the police, or the inventive chaps who killed your friend?”

Mahmud’s eyes were now as evasive as Abdul’s had been.

“He was not my friend,” he announced curtly. “He was not a man to make friends. He never talked about himself, and I never saw him except here.”

“An unsociable type,” Simon mused, “but was that enough reason to kill him?”

Mahmud lost his aplomb for the first time.

“Kill him?” he exclaimed in a shocked whisper. “You cannot be suggesting that I or anyone here killed him!”

“I didn’t intend to suggest anything,” Simon answered. “I could hardly know, could I? You and your associates don’t seem to talk any more about yourselves than you say Ali did.”

Mahmud completed a carefully controlled deep breath.

“We are here to serve the customers,” he said stiffly.

The Saint took a deep breath of his own. He realised that he had been overoptimistic to imagine that Abdul Haroon or one of his employees would take the first opportunity to blurt out their secret troubles to his sympathetic ear, the way bullied townspeople do in Western movies as soon as the hero lopes into town. Apparently the fear of these Pakistanis was so overpowering that they were afraid even to admit that they had anything to fear. With Ali’s grisly example fresh in their minds, their attitude was not really surprising. It at least confirmed that Ali’s fate was not the handiwork of a couple of madmen who had chosen their victim more or less at random. The force that had twisted out Ali’s life had also threatened his co-workers.

“Mahmud,” the Saint said earnestly, “I am not here just to eat, and I’m certainly not here out of idle curiosity.” He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the newspaper and looked at Mahmud with disconcerting blue eyes. A little bluff seemed necessary to lubricate the wheels of confession. “I happen to know that Ali was not eliminated by a jealous husband or somebody who didn’t like the way he served the sambuls. He was killed because he got in the way of the racketeers who’re picking the bones of illegal immigrants from Pakistan and India after they get into this country. He was killed in the picturesque way he was so that other rebellious souls would feel a little less enthusiastic about shouting their complaints from the rooftops-or even whispering them to nosy characters like me. I don’t think I can put it any more clearly than that, and I don’t think I need to. My almost infallible intuition tells me that you’re already several chapters ahead of me.”

Mahmud was as unmoved as the Taj Mahal would have been by a light breeze.

“I am sorry, sir,” he said.

“So am I, but I suggest you talk this over with your boss in the back room and see if you can’t come up with something a little more helpful than cold sweat.” He handed back the menu unopened. “And while you’re back there, please order me some samosas, lamb curry, pilau rice, dhal, and all the sambuls you can crowd on the table.”

“Thank you, sir.” Simon had to admire the inappropriately arctic tones in which Mahmud uttered his next words. “And how would you like the curry, sir? Mild, medium or hot?”

“Very hot.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The Saint was left alone with his drink and his newspaper for just a few seconds. At the end of that brief interval, the street door opened and the Golden Crescent’s second customer of the early evening walked in, looked around, noted the Saint and the absence of waiters, and stood for a minute near the doorway as if wanting stubbornly to be greeted by people who were not there. He was a medium-weight tweedy man with sandy hair and moustache and ruddy cheeks. His face and the backward flow of his hair looked as if they had been sculpted to their present form by a strong headwind.

Simon would probably not have paid so much attention to the grey-suited man’s appearance if he had not already decided that his newspaper contained no other fascinating journalistic revelations, and settled back against the comfortably padded backrest to sip his iced whisky while he waited for a chance to continue his own probing. If the new customer had not come in he would have had nothing to watch but the change of light on the walls and the passage of cars in the street outside. Now he could observe Civilized Man of the insecurely pretentious sort attempting to assert his authority in a near vacuum.

“Wonderful service around here,” the newcomer remarked loudly.

“I understand they’ve had staff problems,” Simon said.

The man had moved over near him, looking down the passageway which led to the kitchen.

“Staff shortage?” he said. “I can’t understand why, with these Indian chaps pouring into the country like water into a torpedoed ship.” He stationed himself by a table nearby, refusing to sit down until he was properly greeted. “Mind,” he added with a guilty glance over his shoulder as if for the Thought Police of the Egalitarian State, “I’ve nothing against them as such, but we hardly need more people, do we?”

“We need less of some and more of others,” the Saint responded. He motioned indicatively with his glass. “If you want to stake a claim on that table I’ll be your witness.”

The other man lost some of his stiffness, gave a single-shot snorting laugh, and sat down.

“I mean, dammit, I can’t believe they’ve got a personnel problem. I should think there’d be eight men for every job. That’s what it’s coming to anyway, isn’t it? People breeding like rabbits everywhere. Be living ten to a room and eating nothing but seaweed in fifty years, won’t we?”

“I won’t,” said Simon, “but you have a point.”

“Well, I won’t either. I had my day, back when we still ruled the waves, or a good many of them. It’s the next generation that’s going to choke on these policies. I’ve spent some time out in India, and it’s damned obvious why those chaps want to get out and come here, especially since we turned tail and ran. It’s not so damned obvious why the Government welcomes ‘em here with open arms. But then it’s not obvious why the Government does anything, unless it’s to appease all the loud mouths and empty pockets in the United Nations.”

“That’s as good a guess as I’ve heard,” Simon agreed. “But you sound even more bitter than most of us.”

“I’ve got reason to be. I was professional Navy; did what I could around Malta and Cyprus and a few other holiday spots during the war. And now …”

He shrugged.

“Caught in the cutbacks?” Simon asked.

“Cutbacks isn’t the word for it,” the red-faced man said. “Massacre, I’d call it. If you want to drive a ship and you’re good at it, you’ve still got just a one in four chance of moving up, and after that it’s four-to-one against you again.” He sat back and expelled air through puffed cheeks. “So, I’m a pensioner. Fifteen quid a week for the rest of my life.” He said it like a prisoner sharing the details of his sentence. “Nothing much to look forward to but sitting out my old age in Hove with a lot of other cast-offs while the country sinks under sheer weight of foreigners and the Government distributes largesse to everybody who can work up enough steam to reproduce.” He suddenly looked at Simon. “Have you been to India?”

“Yes, but only as a private citizen.”

“Like it?”

“I like the food,” Simon said temperately. “And it seems as if you do, too.”

“Right. Burns the soot out of the system. I’ve seen men half dead of dysentery cured with a good hot curry.” He peered around the unstafied room with renewed irritation. “Looks as if we’ll be half dead with starvation before we get any.” He looked back at Simon. “What do you think of this immigration business?”

The Saint pondered the question for a few seconds, but it was a question destined to fade unanswered into nothingness along with the last dying luminescence of the evening on the walls of the buildings opposite.

In the back room of the restaurant, a man screamed.

4

The Saint came to his feet, while his neighbour sat frozen bolt upright in his chair, staring towards the passageway that led past the bar. His once garrulous lips were petrified and pale, and he did not even break his sphynx-like pose when Simon strode away towards the rear of the dining room. Just after he reached the narrow hall beside the bar his way was blocked by Abdul Haroon, who came tottering in from the kitchen area with a handkerchief pressed to the side of his face.

“No reason for alarm or upset, ladies and gentlemen!” he burbled hysterically towards a mythical audience in the dining room. “A small accident in the kitchen. Everything will be immediately all right!”

The long agonised shriek that had reached the Saint’s ears had been no result of a finger sliced along with the onions or a cheek spattered with hot fat.

“I’ll have a look,” he told Abdul. “I’ve got a Boy Scout badge in domestic first aid.”

Abdul continued to interpose his bulk between Simon and the mysteries of the scullery, where a hurried scuffling of feet implied that the fun and games were not completely over yet.

“Sorry, Mr. Haroon, but I’m afraid I’ll have to violate the regulations. You’re not hurt, are you?”

“No,” Abdul said dazedly.

“Then I’d better go and see who is hurt. Pardon me.”

Simon grasped Abdul’s round shoulders firmly and simply moved him aside. As he hurried down the short passage he heard the proprietor lumbering ponderously to catch up with him.