Leslie Charteris - Señor Saint

“I will not allow it,” Venino said.

Mrs Carrington looked at him wonderingly.

“Why not?” she asked, and never quite knew why she said it like that.

“It would break my heart. Yes, I am sentimental. Because of this car, we met. In this car, I showed you my home town. In this car, my heart found a new life. Call me a temperamental Latin if you like, but I do not want to see Europe with you in any other car!”

Simon lighted a cigarette, and an immeasurable artistic contentment was ripening within him.

“What he means,” he said, “is that any other car would not be worth anything like as much to him. Which isn’t surprising, because this would probably be the most valuable car in Europe, if not in the whole world. As I have it figured, it should sell for around three hundred thousand dollars any place where there’s a fairly open market for gold, which of course rules out the United States. A really fabulous build-up has gone into jockeying you into making that trip with a date to meet Ramón on the other side.”

They were both listening to him now, without interruption and in a weird kind of stillness. And the Saint put one foot up on the rear bumper and leaned a forearm lazily on his knee.

“Big-time thieves aren’t an exclusively yanqui product. They crop up all over. Down here, I guess Ramón will rank numero uno. Anyway, he and his mob knocked off an armoured carload of three hundred grand’s worth of gold bars a few weeks before we got here. But they couldn’t sell it here, and the problem was to get a heavy load like that out of the country with the cops looking everywhere for it. Ramon’s brilliant idea was to watch for a likely female tourist, alone, bringing her own car over. With a simple little accident and a lot of charm, he was able to get away with the car for long enough for his mob to take impressions of suitable parts of it. They cast the gold in the moulds and plated it while he was keeping you on the hook with his personality and his fairy tales, and last night when he had the car again they put on the new gold trimmings.” The knife that had been Pancho’s flashed suddenly as Simon thumbed the catch that released the blade. “For instance, I’ll bet that if we carved a notch in this bumper—”

Ramón Venino moved then, his hand going to his hip pocket and coming out with something that he kept mostly hidden under the drape of his coat.

“That is enough,” he said. “You will both come with me, now, in this car.”

Mrs Carrington gasped as she saw the gun, but the Saint only glanced at it and then over Venino’s shoulder.

“You made one mistake when you had your fat friend try to warn me off at the Bambú,” he said. “You made another when you sent him back with a pal this afternoon to defenestrate me — meaning heave me out of a window. Because I clobbered both of them and sent for the police, but I left before the police got there. So now the police have followed me here, and teamed up with the two that we had already. You’d be making the classic mistake of all time if you shot me now, while they’re all standing behind you.”

“You must think me a fool if I would believe that,” Venino sneered.

“I assure you, compadre, he tells the truth,” one of the policemen said.

“Why did he have to pick on me?” Beryl Carrington said.

“You mean, why couldn’t he have put gold bumpers on his own car, and shipped it to Europe?” said the Saint. “We don’t know yet, but I’ll bet anything you like on a guilty conscience. Ramón and his mob could never be sure when they might be suspected, so they wanted to plant the loot on someone who would never be suspected.”

“But why me?” she said.

“I guess they just watched the boats from Key West, and you were the first good prospect they saw.”

“It didn’t have to be me,” she said in a queer stony voice.

“Did you hear what the gendarmes said about that twenty thousand dollars reward? I think we should split it down the middle.”

“I couldn’t care less.”

“You can do a lot of good things with ten thousand bucks.”

“Don’t you see?” she said. “I wish it had never happened. Or if it had to happen, I wish I’d never seen you. I wish I’d never known.”

Simon Templar looked at her shrewdly and with unwonted compassion for a while, and then he stood up.

“This isn’t the end of romance,” he said. “But if you’d gone on with Venino, one day you’d have had to find out, and that might have been the end. Now you think the most wonderful toy you ever had has been broken, and it was all you had. But it isn’t all you’ll ever have. Don’t start to believe that.”

“Please go now,” she said. But as he opened the door she raised her eyes and said, “But call me tomorrow.”

Simon went out and let the doorman earn a quarter for lifting one finger at a taxi.

“You have plans for tonight, sir?” said the driver, as the cab got under way. “You should meet a nice Cuban girl. It happens I have a niece, very young, very beautiful...”

For the benefit of readers who may not be familiar with the names of too many scientists, I should like to mention that the Dr Zetek who is mentioned in this story is not a fictitious character, and the yarn should really be dedicated to him. For, while I was in Panama, it was he who arranged for me the rare experience of a visit to Barro Colorado, the island in Gatun Lake which the Smithsonian Institute with the cooperation of the Panamanian Government has been able to preserve as virgo intacta for the study of tropical ecology, and where in the mess hall maintained for visiting naturalists I saw a brilliant color photo and learned description of his equally non-fictitious discovery, Atelopus zeteki, the golden frog (the real jumping one, that is) which started the Saint on the following adventure.

— Leslie Charteris

Professor Humphrey Nestor, it must be revealed ab initio , had never actually been a member of the faculty of any of the illustrious colleges whose names he liked to drop casually into his conversation, nor, to be utterly candid, did he possess any of the academic qualifications which could have made it even remotely possible that he might some day be offered such an appointment. In fact, some prejudiced persons had been heard to asseverate, perhaps wishfully, that the only chair of importance that Mr Nestor was ever likely to occupy would be wired for high-voltage electricity, but this was an exaggeration. Mr Nestor was not by nature addicted to violence.

At this time he was only fifty-five, and still spry and lean of frame, but his hair had already attained the snowy whiteness which, in the minds of the gullible, is simultaneously suggestive of both wisdom and benignity, and he had parlayed that fortunate colouration into a trim moustache and goatee which, combined with the bifocals that had been thrust upon him willy-nilly by the normal incipience of presbyopia, gave him an air of erudite distinction that only the most adamantine sceptic could resist. And though he had no right whatsoever to the title which he had adopted as a vocational convenience, he was by no means illiterate. He owned, among a unique collection of forgeries, an absolutely authentic degree from a minor university whose track team had been well repaid by his youthful gift of running very fast for short distances, and he had a predilection for magazines of the popular science and science-fiction type which gave him not only a useful repertoire of abstrusities but also invaluable models of what the public expected a Professor to be like. As a result, Professor Nestor was a much more convincing Professor than almost any ivied turret could produce — as a great many suckers had expensively learned.