Leslie Charteris - Señor Saint

Simon had told her only the skeletal facts, omitting the amplifications and additions which were his own, and waited for her reaction, and this was it.

“I hadn’t realized it was quite so funny,” he said stonily.

“You couldn’t,” she choked. “My dear man, you don’t know the half of it. Here I come dragging myself down to this ghastly dump, just in case Yarn has really got on to something I couldn’t afford to miss, and all he’s got is a mulatto concubine and a few beads. And all the time, right here in my jewel case, I’ve got a string of pearls that were good enough for Catherine of Russia!”

Simon stood very still.

“You have?” he said.

“Just one of those baubles that Ormond used to pass out when he was indulging his sultan complex. Like I told you. I think he only paid about fifteen grand for them at an auction. And me wasting all this time and effort, not to mention yours, on Ned Yarn’s imaginary oyster bed!”

At last the Saint began to laugh too, very quietly.

“It is rather delirious,” he said. “Let me fix you another drink, and let’s go on with some unfinished business.”

“In my time, I’ve had all kinds of receptions from the police,” Simon Templar remarked. “Sometimes they want to give me a personal escort out of town. Sometimes they see me as a Heaven-sent fall guy for the latest big crime that they haven’t been able to pin on anybody else. Sometimes they just rumble hideous warnings of what they’ll do to me if I get out of line while I’m in their bailiwick. But your approach is certainly out of the ordinary.”

“I try not to be an ordinary policeman,” said Captain Carlos Xavier.

They sat in the Restaurant Larue, which has become almost as hard-worked and undefinitive a name as Ritz among ambitious food purveyors; this one was in Mexico City, but it made a courageous attempt to live up to the glamorous cosmopolitan connotations of its patronymic. There was nothing traditionally Mexican about its decor, which was rather shinily international, and the menu strove to achieve the same expensive neutrality. However, at Xavier’s suggestion, they were eating pescados blancos , the delicate little fish of Lake Pátzcuaro which are not quite like anything else in the world, washed down with a bottle of Chilean Riesling; and this, it had already been established, was at the sole invitation and expense of Captain Carlos Xavier.

“Sometimes,” Simon suggested cautiously, “I’ve actually been asked to help the police with a problem. But the build-up has never been as lavish as this.”

“I have nothing to ask, except the pleasure of your company,” said Captain Xavier.

He was a large fleshy man with a balding head and a compensatingly luxuriant moustache. He ate with gusto and talked with gestures. His small black eyes were humorous and very bright, but even to Simon’s critical scrutiny they seemed to beam honestly.

“All my life I must have been reading about you,” Xavier said. “Or perhaps I should say, about a person called the Saint. But your identity is no secret now, is it?”

“Hardly.”

“And for almost as long, I have hoped that one day I might have the chance to meet you. I am what I suppose you would call a fan.”

“Coming from a policeman,” said the Saint, “I guess that tops everything.”

Xavier shook his head vigorously.

“In most countries, perhaps. But not in Mexico.”

“Why?”

“This country was created by revolutions. Many of the men who founded it, our heroes, began as little more than bandits. To this very day, the party in power officially calls itself the Revolutionary Party. So, I think, we Mexicans will always have a not-so-secret sympathy in our hearts for the outlaw — what you call the Robin Hood. For although they say you have broken many laws, you have always been the righter of wrongs — is that not true?”

“More or less, I suppose.”

“And now that I see you,” Xavier went on enthusiastically, and with a total lack of self-consciousness, “I am even happier. I know that what a man looks like often tells nothing of what he really is. But you are exactly as I had pictured you — tall and strong and handsome, and with the air of a pirate! It is wonderful just to be looking at you!”

The Saint modestly averted his eyes.

This was especially easy to do because the shift permitted him to gaze again at a woman who sat alone at a table across the room. He had noticed her as soon as she entered, and had been glancing at her as often as he could without seeming too inattentive to his host.

With her fair colouring and the unobtrusive elegance of her clothes, she was obviously an American. She was still stretching out her first cocktail, and referring occasionally to the plain gold watch on her wrist: she was, of course, waiting for somebody. The wedding ring on her left hand suggested that it was probably a husband — no lover worthy of her time would be likely to keep such a delectable dish waiting. But, there was no harm in considering, married women did travel alone, and sometimes wait for female friends; they also came to Mexico to divorce husbands; and, as a matter of final realism, an attractive woman wearing a wedding ring abroad was not necessarily even married at all, but might wear it just as a kind of flimsy chastity belt, in the hope of discouraging a certain percentage of unwanted Casanovas. The chances were tenuous enough, but an incorrigible optimist like the Saint could always — dream...

“And now,” Xavier was saying, “tell me what you are going to do in Mexico.”

Simon brought his eyes and his ideas back reluctantly.

“I’m just a tourist.” He had said it so often, in so many places, that it was getting to be like a recitation. “I’m not planning to make any trouble, or get into any. I want to see that new sensation, El Loco, fight bulls. And I’ll probably go to Cuernavaca, and Oaxaca, and try the fishing at Acapulco. Just like all the other gringos .”

“That is almost disappointing.”

“It ought to make you happy.”

“It is not very exciting, being a policeman here. I should have enjoyed matching wits with you. Of course, in the end I should catch you, but for a time it would be interesting.”

“Of course,” Simon agreed politely.

“It would have been a great privilege to observe you in action,” Xavier said. “I have always been an admirer of your methods. Besides, before I caught you, you might even have done some good.”

The Saint raised his eyebrows.

“With anyone so efficient as you on the job, there can’t be much left to do.”

“I do my best. But unfortunately, when I make an arrest, I have not always accomplished much.”

“You mean — the court doesn’t always take it from there?”

“Much too often.”

“Your candour keeps taking my breath away.”

Xavier shrugged.

“It is the truth. It is not exactly a rare complaint, even in your country. And absolute justice is a much younger idea here. We are still inclined to accept graft as the prerogative of those in power — perhaps it is the legacy of our bandit tradition. It will change, some day. But at the present, there are many times when I would personally like to see a man like you taking the law into his own hands. You will have coffee? And brandy?”

He snapped his fingers at a waiter and gave the order, and the Saint lighted a cigarette and stole another glance at the honey-blonde young woman across the room. She was still alone, and looking a good deal more impatient. It would not be much longer before the moment would be most propitious for venturing a move — if he had only been alone himself. The thought made an irksome subtraction from his full enjoyment of the fact that a police officer was not only buying his dinner but seemed to be handing him an open invitation to resume his career of outlawry.