Leslie Charteris - Señor Saint

“I told you I was a speculator, didn’t I, darling? It wasn’t only your golden frogs that intrigued me. They suggested something else which you seem to have missed. The ancient frog-worshippers who made ’em had to get the gold from somewhere, and the odds are it wasn’t so very far away. Also it isn’t likely that they used it all up. If I found the mother lode I’d have a real return on my investment.”

A time came when she felt it would not be worth going any farther for any sort of wealth.

“We should be turning back,” she said, with heroically simulated reluctance. “We ought to get back to the boat before dark.”

The boat was an old forty-foot native hull on which some intermediate owner had built an oversize deckhouse and partitioned it into a crude kind of houseboat; it was cramped and dilapidated and none too clean, but it possessed screens on the windows and a primitive form of shower bath, and from her point of suffering it was starting to resemble a luxury yacht.

The Saint was staring fixedly at the river bank, and suddenly his arm and forefinger stretched out in a compelling gesture.

“Look!”

Her eyes turned where he pointed, and even she saw the metallic yellow gleams on a rock caught by the sun.

He picked up the chunk of stone and wiped it on his shirt. There were half a dozen kernels of the yellow metal embedded in it. He was able to prise one of them out with the point of a pocket knife and lay it in the palm of her hand, a nugget the size of a small pea.

He looked around, and pointed to another rock, and another. All her wretchedness and exhaustion miraculously forgotten, she too began casting around and picked up other stones herself. She discovered that they were surrounded by a score and more of similar half-buried fragments, each crusted with the same crumbs of gold. She found herself grabbing them up wildly, trying to build a stack on one outspread hand and the arm held against her chest.

“Hey, take it easy,” he said, as the top-heavy pile slipped and most of it spilled. “A couple of souvenirs is enough for now. We’ll pick up some more when we come by in the boat, if you like.”

“The boat isn’t half big enough,” she gasped distractedly.

He was laughing, an almost soundless laughter of celestial contentment.

“Sweetheart, I’m not even thinking about what we could put in that boat. It’s what can be taken out with dredger and draglines and strings of barges. This isn’t something I’ll have to work myself with a pick and shovel.”

“Do you really think it’s that big?”

“I know it. I know a lot about mining, among a number of things. This is what every prospector dreams of blundering into. This is the end of the rainbow. When you find this exact kind of geological set-up, you know that you haven’t a thing to do but file your claim, form a company, and wait for the dividends!”

She trudged all the way back to the boat in a daze that nullified fatigue and time.

“This is one time when a long cold drink isn’t going to be merely medicinal,” he said. “This will be a legitimate celebration.”

She managed to smile somehow.

“I’d enjoy it lots more if I were clean,” she said. “Will you save it for me?”

“You’ve got the best idea. Yell when you’re through with the shower, and I’ll get clean too. Then we’ll make it a party.”

What she wanted more than anything was a chance to gather her wits without the superimposed strain of maintaining a mask. But her usually agile mind seemed to have gone numb. Soap and water, brush and comb, perfume and lipstick, and lastly a minimum of fresh cool garments, made her feel physically better but for once were inadequate to restore her mentally. She was overwhelmed by the magnitude of a complication that had never entered her dizziest dreams.

Later, when he entered the forward section of the deckhouse, which served as both wheelhouse and saloon, Simon Templar found her sitting at the table, her eyes fastened in a hypnotized way on one of the gold-studded pieces of rock which she had brought back.

“A lovely hunk of mineral, isn’t it?” he remarked, as he went to work improvising lime and soda and ice with fortification from a bottle of Pimm’s Cup which he had thoughtfully contributed to the ship’s stores. “It’s a shame you had those head-hunters sniping at you the last time you went by there, or I’m sure the Professor would have spotted that formation.”

“But what a wonderful break it was that we asked you to take our picture.”

It was all she could think of to say, a forlorn attempt to be reassured that the foreboding that chilled her to the marrow was unfounded.

He set a tall tinkling glass in front of her, and raised its duplicate to the level of his own lips.

“Here’s to Loro,” he said, and drank.

He went on measuring her with a steady gaze, while he put his glass down and placed a cigarette in his mouth.

“Forgive me if I’m off the beam,” he said, “but a moment ago it sounded just as if you were assuming that we were partners in a newly discovered gold mine.”

“Aren’t we?”

“I don’t think it’s exactly up to you to say that, darling. The only partnership deal we made was that I agreed to finance a highly speculative expedition to try and recover some golden frog idols, with the understanding that if we succeeded I could keep, say, half of them.”

“But if I hadn’t brought you here, you’d never have discovered this gold mine,” she was hot-headed enough to argue.

“That’s true,” he said coolly. “And if I hadn’t been in the bar at El Panamá I might never have met you — but does that mean the bartender is entitled to cut himself in? I’m a gambler, but I play percentages. I told you this afternoon, even before we found any gold, that it wasn’t your frogs I was betting on, but the other angle, the possible gold mine, which I had figured out all by myself. Maybe you could make me feel generous about that, but I’d be uncomfortable if I felt you were grabbing.”

She looked at him speechlessly, and only the most Spartan self-discipline inhibited her from throwing her glass in his face.

He did not appear to notice the gelid malevolence in her eyes, for through her self-inflicted silence his ear was caught and held by a new sound that had been trying to creep in through the thin bulkheads and open screens. He raised a hand, his face suddenly tense and withdrawn.

“Do you hear that?” he asked, and a well-worn behaviour pattern dragged her back rather like an automaton into the script that had been so catastrophically interrupted but which was supposed to be still unreeling itself with her help.

“The drums!” she breathed.

He thrust open the screen door and stepped out on to the scanty triangle of foredeck, and in a moment she followed him. The scrawny captain was already out there, standing rigidly in the bow, with a naked machete gleaming in his hand. Dusk had been falling when Simon and Alice reached the boat, and the brief twilight had long since passed, but now a full moon had risen above the trees and flooded the boat with a cold silver-green brilliance. The river flowed past and under it like a torpidly undulant sheet of liquid lead, but the walls of jungle on each side were by contrast impenetrably black and solid except for the luminous dappling of their topmost foliage. And out of that huge formless obscurity came the monotonous menacing thump and titter of the drums, swelling and fading, shifting and drifting, muttering endless spells and abominations out of the unspeakable night. The tympani virtuosi of the nearby village, inspired by copious libations of Loro’s rum, were truly floating it out.

“Sounds like a big fiesta for Loro,” Simon said.