Leslie Charteris - Señor Saint

He turned to the waiter and ordered two Martinis. The Enriquez brothers looked disappointed, but went on watching them with a kind of morbid curiosity.

“Well,” she said graciously, but after a suitable pause, “what’s the news?”

“I’m getting nowhere. I tell you, Doris, I’m about ready to give up and go home.”

“That isn’t like you, Sherm.”

“I know when I’m licked. I’ve always heard there was a trick to doing business with these South American governments. Now I can vouch for it. You’ve just got to know the right people — and I don’t know them. That seems to be the end of it.”

The Saint was not making any effort to eavesdrop, but he didn’t have to. The restaurant was quiet, and they were talking in clear normal voices, as if they were confident in the security of speaking a foreign language, but that very contrast made it easier for him to separate their conversation from the background tones of Spanish.

The waiter brought him another snifter of Rémy Martin, with the parting compliments of Captain Xavier, and went on to deliver two Martinis across the room. Simon gazed innocently into space, and let his ears receive what came to them.

“What an incredible hard-luck story it is,” the husband said glumly. “First I get a contract to supply all those rifles and machine-guns to Iran — over the heads of all the big arms companies. Then I pull all the strings in Washington to get an export permit, which everyone said couldn’t be done. Then I manage to charter a boat to carry them, which isn’t so easy these days. And then, two days after the boat sails, they have a revolution in Iran and the new government cancels the order!”

“And you’ve paid for the guns, haven’t you? Your money’s tied up.”

“It sure is. But I wasn’t worried until now. I’d gotten them legally out of the States, so I could still sell them anywhere in the world where I could find a buyer. And I thought Mexico would be a cinch. Their Army equipment is nearly all out of date anyhow. And yet I can’t even get to talk to anyone. I’ve got fifty thousand late-model rifles and five thousand machine-guns cruising around the Caribbean, with five million rounds of ammunition — and nobody seems to want ’em!”

It should be recorded as a major testimonial to Simon Templar’s phenomenal self-control that for an appreciable time he did not move a muscle. But he felt as unreal as if he had been sitting still in the midst of an earthquake. It required a conscious adjustment for him to realize that the seismic shock he experienced was purely subjective, that the mutter of other voices around had not changed key or missed a beat, that the ceiling had not fallen in and all the glassware shattered in one cataclysmic crash.

But nothing of the sort had happened. Nothing at all. Of course not.

“It’s not your fault, Sherm,” the wife was saying. “You’ll just have to try somewhere else. There are plenty of other countries, and I’ve always wanted to see them.”

“I don’t know what’d make it better anywhere else. I guess I don’t know the right way to approach these people.”

It began to dawn on the Saint that his continued immobility could eventually become as conspicuous, to a watchful eye, as if he had jumped out of his skin.

With infinite casualness, he removed a length of ash from his cigarette, and inhaled with heroic moderation.

Then he lifted his brandy glass, and let his eyes wander across the room.

The Enriquez brothers were watching the American couple too, and their expression made him think of a couple of Walt Disney wolves discovering a hole in the fence of a sheep corral.

“For two cents,” said the husband morosely, “I’d start looking around for someone who wants to organize a revolution here, and offer to sell him the guns. It might do me a lot more good.”

Manuel Enriquez spoke earnestly to Pablo, and Pablo nodded vehemently.

Manuel stood up and approached the adjacent table.

“Please excuse me,” he said in good English, “but I could not help hearing what you were saying.”

The couple exchanged guilty glances, but Manuel smiled reassuringly.

“I appreciate your problem. As you said, it is important to know the right people. I believe my brother and I could help you.”

“Gosh,” said the husband. “That sounds wonderful! Are you serious?”

“Absolutely. May I introduce myself? I am Manuel Enriquez. That is my brother Pablo.”

“Sherman Inkler,” said the husband, whipping out a wallet and a card from the wallet. “And of course this is Mrs Inkler.”

“Oh, Sherm!” Doris Inkler gasped. “This could be the break you’ve been waiting for!”

“We can soon find out,” Manuel said. “But this is not a good place to discuss business. You have not yet ordered your dinner. May I invite you to another place where we can talk more privately? My car is outside, and you shall be my guests.”

As the Inklers and Pablo stood up simultaneously, he waved imperiously to the head waiter and shepherded them towards the stairs, pausing only to take both checks and sign them on the way out. It was in that brief stoppage that the blonde turned and looked at the Saint again, so intently that he knew, with utter certainty, that something had clicked in her memory, and that she knew who he was.

The implications of that long deliberate look would have sprinkled goose-pimples up his spine — if there had been room for any more. But he had just so much capacity for horripilation, and all of it had already been pre-empted by the scene he had witnessed just previously. The Saint had long ago conditioned himself to accept coincidences unblinkingly that would have staggered anyone who was less accustomed to them: it was much the same as a prize-fighter becoming inured to punishment, except that it was more pleasant. He had come to regard them as no more than the recurrent evidence of his unique and blessed destiny, which had ordained that wherever he turned, whether he sought it or not, he must always collide with adventure. But the supernatural precision and consecutiveness with which everything had unfolded that evening would have been enough to send spooky tingles up a totem pole.

And yet the immediate result was to leave him sitting as impotently apart as the spectator of a play when the first-act curtain comes down. With the departure of the Enriquez brothers and the Inklers, he was as effectively cut off from the action as if it were unrolling in another world. The instinctive impulse, of course, was to follow, but cold reason instantaneously knocked that on the head. Manuel Enriquez had said they would go to a place where they could talk privately, and the Saint felt sure it would be just that. If any of them saw him again in their vicinity, it was a ten-to-one bet that they would have remembered him from the restaurant anyway, and drawn the obvious conclusion. But that last long look from the blonde had taken it out of the realm of risk into the confines of stark certainty.

He tried to analyse that look again in retrospect, to determine what else might have been in it beyond simple recognition, while another department of his mind reached for philosophical consolation for the quirk of circumstance that kept him pinned to his chair.

Why did he have to follow, anyhow? He could predict exactly what would happen next. The Enriquez brothers would offer to buy the shipload of guns. And Sherman Inkler, of course, would have his price...

The full significance of the blonde’s look eluded him. Each time he tried to reconstruct and reassess it, he was halted before an intangible wall of inscrutability.

He finished his cognac and coffee and stood up at last, and went down the stairs and through the bar out to the Paseo de la Reforma. It was raining, as it can do in Mexico City even in late spring, and the moist air had an exotic aroma of overloaded drains. One day, they say, the whole city will sink back and disappear into the swampy depths of the crater from which it arose. On such nights, as in any other city, there is always a dearth of taxis, but the Saint was fortunate enough to meet one unloading customers for the movie theatre next door.