Leslie Charteris - Señor Saint

He took her hand and drew her towards him.

“You must not worry about me,” he said, and a flutter of pure panic suddenly shook her.

“Why not?” asked the Saint’s coolest and most languid voice. “I’d say there was a whole lot to worry about.”

They turned like two marionettes jerked with the same string.

Beryl Carrington’s startlement was at first almost grateful — until her eyes fell on the briefcase that Simon carried, and grew round with blank dismay. But Ramón Venino’s face turned yellow with the sickly anaemia of a sceptic who for the first time believes that he is seeing an incontrovertible ghost; and then, as he too saw the briefcase, his eyes literally jolted in their sockets as if he had been hit behind the head. And the Saint strolled closer, around the side of the car which had concealed his silent approach.

“As a one-man revolution,” he remarked, “I’d say he was a lousy actuarial risk.”

Venino put forth a colossal effort that dragged his congealing stare from the briefcase to Mrs Carrington.

“What is this?” he demanded hoarsely. “I thought—”

“Yes, I gave it to him,” she said with sudden assurance. “I was afraid you were gambling too much on the police thinking I wasn’t important. And I’ve told you all about him. He promised he’d get it to Florida for me.”

“And if you insist,” Simon said earnestly, “I will. I’ll even get you a police escort for it.”

As though they had only been waiting to explode that boast, the two men in dark suits whom Mrs Carrington had temporarily lost sight of materialized from between other parked cars and hurled themselves at the Saint in a co-ordinated rush that had one of them clamped on to each of his arms before Mrs Carrington fully grasped what was happening. But the Saint seemed only inconsequentially put out.

“You’re grabbing the wrong guy,” he said, without struggling.

One of the dark-suited men turned to Mrs Carrington.

“This is the man who has been annoying you?” he said.

“Annoying me?” she repeated in complete bewilderment.

“We were called by someone who spoke for you,” explained one of the detectives. “About some lunatic who has been making telephone calls and trying to force himself into your room. We understood you did not want to complain personally, or to have a scandal, so we have only been watching to catch this man the next time he annoyed you.”

“But no one has been annoying me,” she said helplessly.

“You are Mrs Carrington?”

“Yes.”

“Mrs Beryl Carrington?”

“Yes.”

“Somebody must have been playing a joke on you,” said the Saint.

“This gentleman is a friend of mine,” she said shakily. “Please let him go.”

The two plain-clothes men looked at Venino with a sort of forlorn desperation, and one of them said, “Usted no sabe nada de esto, señor?”

With his eyes flickering back to the briefcase which Simon still held, Venino said brusquely, “ Nada . As the señor says, it is either a mistake or a stupid trick.”

The two detectives looked at each other. In unison, they raised their eyebrows, they pursed their lips, they shrugged. Their vice-like grips unhooked themselves from the Saint’s arms. They stepped back, and bowed with a sort of defeated sarcasm.

“Pardon us, Mrs Carrington,” they said, and turned stiffly on their heels.

Beryl Carrington shook her head dazedly.

“I don’t understand — any of this—”

“It is a Secret Police trick, if nothing worse,” Venino snapped.

“I think it was your trick, Ramón,” Simon said pleasantly. “You called the cops in her name and told them that cock-and-bull story to get them to keep a watch on her. Then you pointed the sleuths out to prove that they were watching you. It’s just dawned on me that that may have been the clincher that sold her on going to Europe. Did you just decide that this afternoon, Beryl?”

“Yes,” she said with unnatural steadiness. “It was exactly like that.”

“And maybe that was the only proof you ever had that anyone was after him.”

“It was. But—”

“He is trying to confuse you,” Venino said harshly. “We must get back that briefcase.”

“This?” Simon held up the alligator bag by the handle, so that the telephone directory slid out into his other hand through the seam he had opened along its underside. “Or the priceless contents?”

He showed Mrs Carrington the book, making sure that she recognized what it was.

“This,” he said reverently, “is the God-damnedest Underground you ever saw the secret list of. Every single soul in Greater Havana who can afford a telephone is a member.”

Venino snatched the directory from him.

“You fool,” he snarled. “If anyone had discovered the marks in invisible ink against each name that is one of us—”

Mrs Carrington was almost shaken out of her wavering, and even the Saint’s eyes blinked with reluctant admiration. But he shook his head slowly.

“It’s a nice try, Ramon,” he conceded. “But it won’t score. Can you think back coldly and impartially just for a few seconds, Beryl — even though it’ll hurt? Do you really believe that any Underground movement that had any hope of getting as far out of the ground as its own tombstone would have a list of members that was as easy as that for anyone to get hold of? Or that anyone who was bright enough to live long enough to become a top man in that sort of conspiracy would tell you all about it after a few rumbas, and place the life of every last member in your hands because of the sympathy he saw in your pretty eyes? I knew he was taking you for a ride the minute you told it to me that way. But I didn’t appreciate quite what a ride it was until I checked on this business about the Dictatorship. And that really knocks the underpinnings from under the whole gehoozis. Because there just ain’t no such animal.”

“He is not a fool, querida ,” Venino hissed. “He is insane.”

“Oh, I suppose it isn’t altogether our kind of democracy, Beryl,” Simon said imperturbably. “But there aren’t any downtrodden masses aching to shake off their chains. There may be a revolution some day, but it’ll just be one political faction against another, not an uprising of the people. If Ramón hadn’t scared the wits out of you, you could have asked some of ’em for yourself. You still can.”

“Are you trying to destroy us all?” Venino asked passionately.

Simon glanced over his shoulder. As he had rather anticipated, the two men in dark suits had withdrawn, but not completely out of the picture. They had retreated to a polite distance out of earshot, but not out of sight.

“We still have a couple of cops handy, Beryl,” he said. “Would you like me to walk over to them and say ‘Nuts to the President!’ so you can see if they shoot me?”

“I’m trying,” Mrs Carrington said, “not to have hysterics.”

“I’m sorry,” said the Saint contritely. “I’d better leave, before you get mad and call off our deal on the car.”

Mrs Carrington’s mouth opened, but no sound came from it. Sound came, however, from Ramón Venino.

“What deal on the car?” he demanded in a cracked voice.

“I made Mrs Carrington an offer to buy it,” Simon said calmly. “She wants to get something more sporty, like a convertible, and I’m paying a much better price than she could get on a trade-in. I’m taking this one over from her in Miami. I guess she hadn’t had time to tell you.”

“But we are taking this car to Europe,” Venino said shakily.

“That’s silly,” the Saint scoffed. “If she wants a flashy sports job, Europe’s the place to get one.”