Leslie Charteris - Señor Saint

“Yes, I do,” he said. “It may be rather dreamy and sentimental of me, but I care. If I thought it had a chance of doing some good, I might feel differently. But I know about this one. Its only real objective would be to get a couple of top-flight grafters off the hook and put them back in business. To achieve that, a lot of wretched citizens and stooges would be killed and maimed, and thousands more would be made even more miserable than they are. I wouldn’t like that.”

“Not even if it dropped a very nice piece of change into your own lap?”

His mouth hardened.

“Not even if it dropped me the keys to Fort Knox,” he said coldly. “I can always steal a few million without killing anyone, or making nearly so many people unhappy.”

She flicked her cigarette jerkily. The ash made a grey splash on the carpet.

“So if you could, you’d try to stop Sherman making a deal.”

“I’ll go further. I intend to do my God-damnedest to louse it up.”

“I had an idea that was what you’d say.”

“If you’d read anything about me worth reading, you wouldn’t even have had to ask.”

She took a slow deep breath. It stirred fascinating contours under the soft silk of her dress.

“That’s good,” she said. “I just had to be sure. Now I know you’ll be with us. We don’t have any cargo of guns to sell. We’re just trying to clean up in the bunko racket, with a bit of that Robin Hood touch you used to specialize in. The whole pitch was just a build-up to take the Enriquez brothers.”

Simon Templar stood up, unfolding his length inch by inch. He felt for the packet of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. He drew out a cigarette and placed it between his lips. He stroked his lighter and put it to the cigarette. He exhaled a thin jet of smoke and put the lighter back in his pocket. All his movements were extremely slow and careful, as if he had been balancing on a tightrope over a whirling void. They had to be, while he waited for his fragmented coordinates to settle down, like a spun kaleidoscope, into a new pattern. But by this time his capacity for dizziness was fortunately a little numbed. The human system can only absorb so many jolts in one evening without losing some of its pristine vigour of response.

“I see,” he said. “I suppose I should have guessed it when your husband came bouncing in and spilled all the beans so loudly and clearly at the very next table to Manuel and Pablo — after you’d kept them watching you long enough to be quite sure they’d be listening.”

“He wasn’t meant to wait quite so long,” she said, “but he did get held up.”

“So there is no ship. And no guns.”

She shook her head.

“There is a ship. It’s cruising in the Gulf of Mexico right now. It has a lot of crates on board — full of rocks. There are also two or three on top which do have rifles and machine-guns in them, which can be opened for inspection. We weren’t expecting the Enriquez brothers to put out a lot of cash without being pretty convinced about what they were buying.”

“That sounds like quite an investment.”

“It was. But we can afford it. If it works out, we’ll pick up at least half a million dollars.”

The Saint rubbed his hands softly together, just once.

“A truly noble swindle,” he murmured with restrained rapture. “Boldly conceived, ingeniously contrived, unstintingly financed, slickly dramatized, professionally played — and one of the classics of all time for size. I wish I’d thought of it myself.”

For the first time in a long while, a trace of a smile touched her lips.

“You approve?”

“Especially in the choice of pigeons.”

“I’m glad of that. I picked them myself, and planned it all for them. I thought it made quite a Saintly set-up. In fact, I should really give you most of the credit. I was thinking of things I’d read about you, and the way you used to do jobs like this, all the time I was figuring it out.”

He studied her again, for the first time with purely intellectual appraisal.

“It begins to sound as if you were the brains of the Inkler partnership.”

“Sometimes I am. Of course, Sherm wasn’t doing so badly when I teamed up with him. But this one was my very own brain-child.”

“And was it all your own idea, too, to come and talk to me just now?”

“We agreed on it. I had a chance to get in a word with him alone, when they dropped me off. I told him I’d recognized you, and who you were. We both knew we’d have to do some fresh figuring, fast. He left it to me. As a matter of fact, he didn’t have much choice. The Enriquez brothers were waiting. He said whatever I did was okay with him, but for Christ’s sake do something.”

“Well,” said the Saint helpfully, “what are you going to do?”

She raised her eyes to his face.

“I’ve told you the whole story. And I’m hoping you’re not sore at me for trying to imitate your act.”

“Of course not,” Simon assured her heartily. “If you mean, for baiting such a beautiful trap to skin a pair of sidewinders like Manuel and Pablo, I wish a lot more people would take up the sport. However...” His brows drew together and his gaze slanted at her shrewdly. “I had my eye on them too, even if you saw them first.”

“And you should get a royalty for being my inspiration.” She put out her cigarette, escaping his steady scrutiny only for a moment, and looked at him again. “All right. Would you be satisfied if we split three ways?”

He didn’t move.

“You, me, and Sherman?” he said.

“Yes. After all, we’ve spent a lot of money, and done a lot of groundwork.”

Simon walked over to the window and looked out. It seemed to have stopped raining, but the streets below were shiny with water. He gazed over the nearer rooftops and the scattered lights to the hazy glow of illumination that hung over the city’s centre. He had seldom felt that life was so rich and bountiful.

There may well be among the varied devotees of these chronicles some favoured individual who has once experienced a certain feeling of elation upon learning that a hitherto undreamed-of uncle has gone to join the heavenly choir, leaving him a half-dozen assorted oil wells. Such a one might have a faint conception of the incandescent beatitude that was welling up in the Saint’s ecstatic soul. A very faint and protopathic conception. For the fundamentally dreary mechanics of inheriting a few mere fountains of liquid lucre cannot really be compared with the blissful largesse that the Saint saw Providence decanting on him from its upturned cornucopia. This had poetry; this fell into the kind of artistic pattern that made music in his heart.

He turned at last.

“Will you just mail me my share,” he asked, “or am I expected to help?”

“Is the deal okay?”

“You must remind me some day to warn you about being too generous, in this racket.”

She let out breath in an almost inaudible sigh, sinking a little deeper in the chair. It was the first proof she had given that she had been under tension before.

“You could help a lot.”

“Tell me.”

“Frankly,” she said, “the only thing I’ve been worried about is the payoff. First, they’ll want to be sure that we’ve really got the guns. That’s taken care of. They can take a motor-boat and go out a few miles from Veracruz or Tampico, and meet our boat. All right. Then we’ll come to the question of delivery. That cargo can’t be unloaded at a regular port. So I expect them to pick some quiet spot along the coast where it can be brought in at dead of night.”

“How do you manage to be so beautiful and have this kind of brain?” he asked admiringly.

“I’m only thinking it out the way you would.” There was nothing coy about her now: it was all business. “So we agree to do that. But we can’t count on them giving us the money and trusting that we’ll deliver. Most probably, they’ll want to pay off at the landing place, when the cargo starts coming ashore. We’d have to agree to that too. And then suppose they decided to double-cross us — to take the cargo and keep their money?”