Leslie Charteris - Señor Saint

“Someone might go for that as a straight business gamble, in return for a fair share of the loot.”

It was not so much a statement as the thinly veiled basis for an offer, but she shook her head.

“That’s the trouble. Pappy would never allow it to be treated as loot. All those frogs would have to go into museums. He’d rather they stayed lost for ever than see any of them melted down, or even put up for sale.”

“Then you certainly are looking for a philanthropist.”

“I know, it isn’t realistic. But who could mistake my Pappy for a realist? Now, I’m different. If I could get him just a few of those frogs — enough to make one museum exhibit and a lot of pictures, and prove his theory and make him famous — I wouldn’t care what happened to the rest.”

Simon regarded her contemplatively, and suddenly she leaned closer and impulsively put a hand on his arm.

“Tell me something,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m talking to you like this, except that I feel you’re a terribly wise person. But I’ve got to ask you. Suppose I managed to find some business man who was a bit of a gambler, and made a deal with him on my own.” It was consummate artlessness that continued to keep the discussion impersonal, so that she was absolved of any suspicion of propositioning him. “If I got just a few of those golden frogs for Pappy, he needn’t even know what happened to the rest, the head-hunters might have found the cave after we left and taken most of them away, but what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. He could write his articles and be famous and die happy. Would you think I’d done something very wrong or very good?”

Simon pondered for long enough to calculate what the approximate value of the golden frogs that Nestor had described would be.

“I’d think you should have a medal,” he said. “And if you decide to make anyone that sort of offer, I wish you’d give me the first chance.”

She looked at him in a dazed and startled way as if a halo had literally appeared over his head like a neon light, and her big eyes swam with soft half-unbelieving tears.

“I’m afraid I shall have to desert you tonight, dear,” said Professor Humphrey Nestor, noting the artistic symptoms with approval as he returned to the table. “Some former colleagues of mine from Colombia are passing through here — they happened to be calling on the curator when I telephoned, so I had to speak to them. They insisted on me joining them for dinner, but I shall not inflict that ordeal on you. I know our shop talk would bore you to death.”

“That’s all right,” Alice said, with her eyes still on the Saint and the most tentative conspiratorial smile touching her lips. “Mr Tombs just asked me if I could get away to have dinner with him.”

She suggested the Jardín El Rancho, and as soon as he saw it he had to approve of her selection. It was like the courtyard of a Spanish hacienda, tile-roofed around three sides but uncovered to the stars in the centre, and open everywhere to the perfect mildness of the night. The service was competently unobtrusive, and the lighting was artistic enough to encourage romance without causing eyestrain. But at first they were strictly practical.

“How would you work this scheme of yours?” he asked.

“Remember, I was at the cave too. I know where it is as well as Pappy.”

“You mean you’d go back there yourself — head-hunters and all?”

“I would if I had to,” she said bravely.

He shook his head.

“That doesn’t sound so good.”

“I can’t say I’m crazy about it,” she admitted. “So I don’t mind telling you I had another idea.”

“Give.”

“Loro — the native guide who took us into that district.”

“Don’t tell me he’d want to go back there.”

“He might. He just about adopted Pappy as his own father, but for some weird reason he practically worships me. Probably because I’m blonde and blue-eyed, and I treated him like a human being — oh, yes, and he got an infected foot once, and I fixed him up from the first-aid kit. It sounds ridiculous, but these natives are like children and he’s at least fifteen-sixteenths Indian. And after the head-hunters had chased us out, he told us we’d gone about it all wrong, and if he’d known what we were after he could have gone there alone and got it without any trouble.”

Simon tenderly impaled a pink shrimp on his fork, coated it lightly with sauce, and slid it between his teeth to confirm an earlier impression that the shrimps of Panama are for some unexplored reason the most crisply ambrosial representatives of their genus in all the legendary seven seas.

“Do you know where to find this reckless warrior?”

“Yes, he’s still around. As a matter of fact, he came to our hotel a little while before you picked me up — Pappy had already left to meet his friends. He wanted to know if there was any chance of our making another expedition. I was just going to tell him that it wouldn’t be for a long time, if ever, because we’d spent all our money, and then I had this idea. I asked him to stop by here at nine o’clock, so you could meet him anyway.”

They had sancocho , the rich chicken soup with vegetables that can easily become a meal in itself, but left themselves room for some excellent beef tenderloin sliced in mushroom sauce which was entirely European in conception and flavour. He asked many more details about the finding of the cave of golden frogs and the escape from the head-hunters which Professor Nestor had skipped over, but that also had been anticipated. The Professor had read many helpful books, and had schooled her so exhaustively that she was never at a loss. Simon’s admiration increased undisguisedly as the meal progressed.

“You’ll find campus life pretty tame after this, won’t you?” he remarked.

“Oh, I won’t be going back there with him. I’d hate to be a burden like that to him, poor dear, on his salary. I earn my own living — I’m a very good secretary. Of course I’ll have to look for a new job — I had to give up my old one when we came down here. But now I’ve developed a yen to see more of the world. I’m going to look for a business man who does a lot of travelling and who’d like to take a Girl Friday with him.”

“It mightn’t be easy to keep him at a strictly business-like distance.”

“Well, that mightn’t be hard to take if I really liked him,” she said frankly. “I’m not hopelessly old-fashioned.”

It was obvious that they could have made beautiful music together.

Loro arrived when they were having coffee, and accepted a seat and a bottle of Balboa beer. He was a pudgy brown man in a clean but unpressed white shirt and trousers, with long black hair, a single gold earring, and a wide white-toothed grin. He looked like a genial brigand, which was precisely what he was. Quite early in the Professor’s exile, he had volunteered to carry the Professor’s bag from a taxi into a hotel; turning from paying off the driver, the Professor had just been fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of his suitcase and Loro disappearing around the next corner. Mr Nestor, who could still put forth a most respectable turn of speed in an emergency, had overtaken him within two blocks, but to Loro’s even greater astonishment he had not capped his victory by calling for the police. Instead, he had given him five dollars and invited him to have a drink. Mr Nestor had already realized that a native accomplice might be almost indispensable to whatever bunco routine he finally adapted to the locale, and the problem of finding a native with the requisite guarantees of un-scrupulousness had been most happily solved.

Loro’s larcenous instinct immediately recognized a master, and he had become a very gratifying pupil. His part was relatively simple, and he brought to it an innate flair for dramatic deceit.