Leslie Charteris - Señor Saint

But after the first of such divisions, Loro had taken it for granted that they would all three disappear. The Professor had explained that the victim would then complain to the police, which would be a severe handicap to any future activities. In that case, Loro had suggested cheerfully, it would perhaps be better to take the boat some distance out into the Gulf of Panama, tie the victim to some of the weighted bundles, and drop him over the side. The Professor had explained patiently that the mysterious disappearance of an American, especially a wealthy one, could hardly fail to cause an investigation which would be very likely to come embarrassingly close to them.

“The very best confidence jobs, my dear Loro,” the Professor had pontificated, “don’t even let the sucker know that he’s been taken. Isn’t it worth a little time and trouble to give our customers a real show for their money, and know that we’ll never have to worry about them hollering for the cops?”

He had eventually secured Loro’s co-operation, but had reason to doubt if he would ever completely make his point.

Even on this occasion, at the first opportunity Loro had, when the Saint was at the other end of the boat, he said to Alice, “All this waste plenty time. Much better tonight I—”

He drew an expressive forefinger across his throat. He was half serious and half teasing her, she could tell from his malicious grin, but she was surprised to feel herself shudder.

“Stop it, Loro... Anyway,” she said, in an attempt to cover up the sharpness of her reaction, “this one is a perfect example of what we’ve tried to explain to you. He’s actually taken out a prospecting licence from the Government, and he must have told a dozen people where he’s going. If he disappeared, we’d have too many tough questions to answer.”

It was only after she had said it that the fantastic thought crossed her mind that Sebastian Tombs might have done all that, and taken pains to tell her about it, as an elaborate precaution against the very thing that Loro was advocating, and a subtle warning that if perchance that was what they had in mind they had better forget it. But the implications that followed were so far-fetched that she had made herself brush the idea aside.

Now bundles of alleged rifles and ammunition had been unloaded from the boat and cached at the edge of the jungle, and Loro was ready to play out the last sequence of Professor Nestor’s ingenious script.

“You go back down river a little,” he said. “One mile, plenty, only so head-hunters no see. Mañana , this time, you come back, you find me with gold frogs.”

“Be careful, Loro,” Alice said anxiously.

“Me always careful,” Loro said, with his jolly bandit’s grin. “No worry. Hasta luego, diosa. ”

He spoke in rapid dialect to the boat captain, an uncle of his who had been a fairly honest fisherman before he was conscripted into the team, who was not very bright, but who had a non-speaking part which was almost foolproof since he understood no English and hardly any Spanish. Loro cast off the lines which had held the boat to the bank, and the captain started the engine as it began to drift downstream. Loro stood and waved until it vanished around the nearest bend, and then picked up one of the oilcloth packages which had been providently ballasted with a case of rum and plodded towards the next turn upstream, where there was a village of utterly harmless Indians who were always glad to see him and whose daughters were especially hospitable. He would stay there, very pleasantly, until the boat came back for him in a week or two.

Simon stood beside Alice on the narrow deck, gazing silently at the wall of tangled greenery that slid past them until the captain turned the boat in mid-stream, aimed the bow diagonally up towards the bank, cut the engine, and shuffled forward to throw a line over a leaning tree and snub the boat to a berth as nonchalantly as any airline pilot ever made a landing.

The Saint was frowning.

“I seem to be a bit confused,” he said. “I thought when you came here before you had a lot of native bearers, who got massacred. Then you fought a rearguard action for two days down the river. And yet we came here all the way from Panama in two days, and Loro is going to make a deal with the head-hunters and be back with the golden frogs tomorrow.”

Again she was barely touched by a fleeting uneasiness, but she was ready with the answer.

“Last time, we were exploring. We went off on big swings through the jungle, covering as much ground as we could. We were on one of those hikes when we found the cave. We’d left the boat way down near the mouth of the river. When we fought our way back to it, it was along these banks, only we were on foot. We followed the river because it was the only thing that saved us from getting lost, but you can see what rough going it was.”

(“There’s a limit to how far we can go with this,” the Professor had said, when he taught her the speech. “If we gave ’em a full two-week safari, for that kind of money, we’d be almost legitimate.”)

Simon nodded uncritically.

“I should have figured that out for myself,” he said. “It must have been pretty rugged.”

“I’d rather not talk about it,” she said, and meant every word. She despised herself for the palpitation that his unreserved acceptance of her explanation had set at rest again, but she was in no hurry to expose herself to any more potentially devastating questions. “Shall we try some fishing? Loro says that snook come all the way up here to spawn.”

He was still studying the banks rather than the water, his keen eyes raking along the ragged edge of the forest as though searching for something more than timber and foliage.

“I’d prefer to tramp around on shore a bit, as soon as we’ve got some lunch under our belts. I wouldn’t want to have to go back and say I’d never set foot in this wilderness. We can take the shotgun, and maybe pick up something good to eat.”

She had only her own build-up to thank for his bland assumption that she would not want to be left behind. She thought wildly of all the facile excuses she could make, but she realized that every one of them would have a hollow ring. So far he had only heard talk about her tomboy virtues, and if she seemed to wriggle out of the first opportunity to display them he could hardly help being touched by a flicker of suspicion. And once a man started to doubt, there was no forecasting where his scepticism would turn next.

She gritted her teeth and wished that lightning would strike him, but she forced herself to say, “That would be fun.”

Four hours later she was nearly ready to strike him down herself. Following the river on foot was a minor nightmare which developed its miseries cumulatively but inexorably until their weight and blackness was smothering.

Sometimes they were stumbling over tangled roots, sometimes sinking above their ankles in thick gluey mud, almost continuously warding off branches, leaves, fronds, vines, and thorns that poked and scratched and tugged at clothing and bare skin. The only respite from that harassment was when they took to the river to circumvent a particularly impassable thicket on land: then there was the treachery of invisible hazards underfoot, the haunting fear of crocodiles, and the discomfort of boots full of water for a memento. Winged and crawling things in infinite variety tickled and bit them. She was soaked with mud up to the hips and with sweat above that; her blonde hair hung in bedraggled skeins. She swore bitterly to herself that if she survived this excursion she would insist on some basic re-writing in her part next time.

The Saint was equally hot and muddy, but his good humour seemed to feel no strain. He could be fascinated by a sloth which they came upon suspended from a cecropia bough, too sluggish to stir even when he touched it, and he could exclaim delightedly over a toucan taking off before them and speculate earnestly as to why its enormous yellow bill didn’t send it immediately into a fatal nose-dive. At other times he seemed to continue seeking for something, picking up a small rock to examine it or taking a handful of loam and gravel from the bank and crumbling it between his fingers, until she had had to ask what he was doing.