Leslie Charteris - Señor Saint

“Mrs Carrington, please,” he said to the Comodoro operator.

It was like a cue for background music when she answered almost at once.

“Beryl,” he said, “this is Simon Templar. Just answer yes or no. Is Ramón with you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I just finished packing.”

“Pretend I’m your travel agency checking with you. Does he still think you’ve got the briefcase?”

“Yes. I’ll be driving straight to New York, and then probably going to Europe.”

Simon gazed down at what the briefcase had spilled into his lap through the seam he had slit open. It was nothing but an old Havana telephone directory.

“Don’t move from there, and keep Ramón with you,” he said. “Tell him I have to verify your engine number before I can get you a boarding pass for the ferry. Don’t try to argue. The click you will hear will be me taking off.”

He put the phone down in its bracket and was on his way.

He went down a back stairway which he had taken note of the very first time he left his room — it was another habit he would probably never lose, that in any new surroundings he automatically and unconsciously observed the alternative and less obvious exits. The police would inevitably ride up in an elevator, and even though he might never have a better chance to play the outraged innocent victim, he would inevitably pay for it with an involvement in red tape that might keep him tied up for hours, and he figured that that could wait. The police would catch up with him soon enough now.

Pancho and his big brother had caught up with him, after all. In a hotel with the Grand Central atmosphere of the Sevilla-Biltmore no one would have noticed them going up to the Saint’s floor; the old-fashioned lock on his door would not have delayed them for more than ten seconds, and, but for their grievous miscalculation of his superlatively vigilant senses and tigerish fighting power, no one would have noticed them leaving after the Saint had become a splash on the pavement seventy feet down from his window.

So for a little while he could give a shocking surprise to anyone who was relying on the efficiency of Pancho and Pal.

He slipped through the service crypts of the hotel without encountering anybody but one belatedly perplexed camarero , and with no trouble found a door that let him out into an alley lined with garbage cans, and thus in a few more steps he was on a side street looking for a taxi, and as usual there was a taxi waiting for him.

In her room, Mrs Carrington put down the phone and said, “That was the travel agency. They have to send someone over to verify the engine number of my car so I can get a pass to go on the ferry.”

“Is that all?” Venino said. “You looked so troubled, I thought it was something serious.”

“It’s just a nuisance.”

“It will be all right.” He frowned. “But it seems so foolish. They could check your engine number at the dock.”

She shrugged.

“Anyway, the agency’s taking care of it. But when your people take over, you should make them fire all the bureaucrats who invent stupid regulations. Just think, you could go down in history as the man who created the first government in the world to abolish red tape.”

“What I am doing is nothing to joke about.”

He spoke so roughly that it was like being physically pushed aside.

“I’m sorry.”

“Forgive me,” he said quickly. “I am on edge. I am more afraid all the time that something is going wrong. Those men...”

When Ramón Venino had arrived and called up from the lobby to announce himself, and she had left her room to go down and meet him, she had quite accidentally looked directly at a face that was looking directly towards her through the two-inch opening of a door at the end of the corridor. It was more discomfiting because the man did not move or look away before she did, apparently believing himself invisible, and she could feel his eyes on her back all the way to the elevator.

Then, when they went to the bar for a cocktail, there was a man in a dark suit who followed them in, and when they moved to the terrace outside for lunch, he came out immediately after them and sat down a few tables away. There he was joined presently by another man in a similar dark suit, the two of them having none of the seaside vacationing air of the other guests, and the two put their heads together and kept looking at her and Ramón as they talked. And though the glimpse she had had upstairs had been far too narrow for positive recognition, she felt utterly certain that the second man was the one who had been watching when she left her room.

She had hesitantly asked Ramón what he thought of them.

“I’d already noticed them,” he said. “Did you ever see two more obvious detectives?”

She told him about what had happened upstairs.

“It looks very bad,” he said grimly. “He was not watching you, of course, but watching for me. I am still sure you have nothing to fear. Because you are leaving, they will not believe you are important. But I think you are going just in time.”

“But if they’re watching you, it means you’ve been betrayed.”

“Perhaps not so badly. We do not know who our traitor is — or we should have dealt with him. So we do not know how much he can betray. Perhaps very little. Then the Secret Police would not know enough yet to arrest me; they would only be watching.”

“But then it’s only a question of time—”

He nodded, tight-lipped.

“I begin to think that everything may have to be postponed. For a while only, but at least until they are off guard again. And I shall go abroad — then they will be certain that I am not in mischief. I could not be organizing a revolution on the Riviera. Would you like to go there?”

“If you’d promise to meet me there, I’d go.”

“I must think about it,” he had said.

Now, two hours later, he strode to her window and stood gazing out unseeingly, with his hands gripping nervously together behind his back. Finally he said, “Yes, querida , I have decided. When I heard you say on the phone just now that you might go to Europe, I knew it was right. Will you think me a coward if I go?”

“Oh, no, Ramón! I want you to be a hero, but you wouldn’t help anyone by throwing your life away.”

He turned to her and kissed her hands.

“Then it is settled. You will drive to New York, as you said, and book a passage on the first good boat. You will take your car for us to drive around, because it is much newer than mine, but of course I will pay the expenses. I shall book myself on a plane in about a week, so that I do not seem in too big a hurry, but I shall be there in France when you land.”

“You don’t know what a load you’ve taken off my mind,” she said, and yet as she said it she felt inexplicably as if something else had been taken from her also.

He glanced at his watch.

“We should have your bags taken to the car before they want to charge you another day for the room,” he said practically. “We can wait downstairs for your travel agent.”

They went downstairs together with her luggage and watched it stowed in the trunk of her sedan. Venino tipped the bellboys and dismissed them.

Beryl Carrington felt a strange vague uncomfortableness as they faced each other alone again, with nothing to do but to kill time and nothing special to talk about. Nothing, that is, except something most personal. Everything else had been wrapped up so quickly and finally. But right up until then, the kisses he had recently pressed on her hands were the nearest approach to emotion there had been between them. In the beginning she had been charmed and relieved by his correctness. But she had always been convinced that at the proper time, when it could be done without crudity and disrespect, his attentions would become warmer. It could not be any other way, with such a romantic enterprise binding their lives together. Yet now that he could scarcely avoid making some declaration about themselves, she found herself desperately unready to receive it.