Leslie Charteris - The Saint on the Spanish Main

“Did your legal beagle produce his brainstorm?” he asked.

“No. Did you?”

“Yes.”

She was silent for a moment.

“I’m too tired to be teased, darling.”

“And I don’t want to give you any false hopes, baby. It might work, but it’s only a wild gamble. So I won’t say anything now. Get some sleep, and I’ll see you on the dock.”

But when they had met, before dawn, and the cabin cruiser droned out through Pillsbury Sound under the paling stars, he still refused to tell her any more.

“Let’s face it,” he said. “You’re prettier than most actresses, but you may not be one. And if you just act naturally, it’ll be better than any performance.”

“I think I’d rather not know, anyway,” she said listlessly. “I’ve been trying to get used to the idea that I’m licked, and it wouldn’t be much fun to start hoping and be let down all over again.”

Now, as they stood on the cutter’s deck watching Duncan Rawl preparing for his first dive, Simon could feel that she was somewhat less stoical than she might have wished to be, and he was scarcely surprised. He was aware of more than a mild tingle of anticipation himself, although it was necessarily in a different key from hers. Stripped down to his swimming trunks, Duncan Rawl looked like a heroic if slightly debauched and hung-over Norse god. He had declined to board the cutter or to tie up to her, cutting his engine a few lengths away and letting the launch drift by to the separate focal spot befitting the star of the show. He had ignored April and the Saint in his greetings as he passed as if he had not even seen them. He sat with his feet dangling over the side, scowling down at the water, while his helpers hung the air tanks on his shoulders and put a weighted belt around his middle.

The sun was barely high enough to send light under the water when he pulled down his mask, put on the breathing mouthpiece, and let himself down till he sank out of sight.

“I suppose it’d be wicked to hope that a shark bites him,” April said.

“Could be,” said the Saint. “But let’s hope it anyway.”

He lighted a cigarette and forced himself to smoke it unhurriedly. In that way, disciplining himself against the temptation to look at his watch every few seconds, he could estimate fairly accurately that it was less than ten minutes before Rawl surfaced again, and his spirits leapt as he saw it.

Rawl’s men helped him aboard and lifted off his air tank. There was a brief excited colloquy, and then one of the men took the wheel and the engine coughed and started. Rawl sprang up on to the foredeck as the launch eased over to the cutter, and as it drew alongside he was tall enough to grasp a stanchion on the cutter and hold on, mooring the launch with his own arm.

“Ahoy there, Captain, or whoever’s in charge!”

The Coast Guard skipper came to the rail, but the two Governors were at his elbow, and April and the Saint were close beside them.

“What is it, Mr Rawl?”

“You’d better get these boats moved away. I’m going to dynamite.”

“Already?” April gasped.

Simon cleared his throat, and moved in still closer.

“Pardon me, Your Excellencies,” he said to the two Governors, “but Miss Mallory asked me to come as her adviser because her attorney had to be in court this morning. And I think she has a right to protest against what Mr Rawl proposes to do.”

“On what grounds?” asked the British Governor.

“To use dynamite now, before the bottom has been thoroughly examined as it is, could obliterate a lot of treasure that otherwise might be quite easy to locate and bring up — for someone who really knows what he’s doing, I mean. Of course nobody would mind Mr Rawl making a mess down there if he were the only person concerned. But he should be obliged to leave Miss Mallory a fair chance to find something when her turn comes tomorrow.”

“What would you suggest?” asked the American Governor.

“I think it would only be fair to let each party make a thorough search of the bottom, without any blasting, before letting one party change the situation so drastically.”

“I’m not dynamiting to see what it uncovers, sir,” Rawl said. “I’ve got to do it to kill something that wouldn’t let anyone do any searching.”

Simon stared down at him clinically.

“You look rather pale, Duncan, old grampus,” he observed. “What was it frightened you down there?”

“Only the biggest damned octopus that anyone here will ever see,” snarled Rawl. “It’s thirty feet across if it’s an inch — and it’s sitting right where the treasure is supposed to be!”

The Saint’s expression was a masterpiece of derisive disbelief.

“Was it a pint one,” he inquired, “wearing a green top-hat and tartan pants, and playing a duet with itself on two piccolos?”

Rawl’s face turned dusky under his tan, and his muscles tensed as if to haul himself aboard the cutter by the stanchion he held.

And then a light of hellish inspiration overspread the darkness of rage, and his snarl modulated into a sneer.

“Maybe you’d like to go down and see for yourself,” he said.

“I’d love to,” Simon said calmly. “Can we take that as an official offer — that since you’re scared to go on without blowing that poor little squid to bits, you’ll step aside while I try it for April?”

“You’re goddam right you can,” Rawl said triumphantly. “And I’m going to laugh myself sick watching the great Saint run away from that poor little squid.”

April was clinging to the Saint’s arm.

“I won’t let you,” she said.

“You will, honey,” he said out of the side of his mouth. “You’ve got to. It’s your only chance.”

“Just one more thing, though,” Rawl said. “If I let you in ahead of your turn, time’s being wasted, and after the Saint comes back with his tail between his legs we’ll have to dynamite anyway, and then it’ll be hours before the water settles down again so anyone can see anything, so I should have tomorrow to myself as well.”

“We’ll accept that,” Simon said grimly.

The two Governors stepped aside and conferred together, but not for long. The American announced their decision:

“Since our main object is to eliminate or avoid a dispute, any compromise that Miss Mallory and Mr Rawl agree upon must have our approval.”

The Saint sank gently into the cool peacock depths, twisting and turning like a fancy high diver in slow motion to extract the utmost sensual delight from the feeling of three-dimensional freedom which only aqualung swimmers can experience, the nearest thing to the sensation of true flying that man has yet been able to achieve. The twin cylinders of compressed air on his back, so heavy and cumbersome on a deck, were such a negative burden under water that a belt of small lead weights was necessary to help him sink. Thus counterbalanced, his body felt almost weightless, so that he could turn in any direction or rest relaxed in any position without effort, or if he wished to move anywhere he only had to make lazy movements with his legs, and the rubber flippers on his feet would propel him as smoothly as the fins of a fish. Breath came to him through the mouthpiece gripped in his teeth, as much and as often as he wanted, so that there was none of the strain and struggle inseparable from ordinary swimming, no irksome reminder that he was in a foreign element. It was a strange rapture which he would discover anew every time he did it: to feel literally almost as much at home in the water as a fish, yet with a buoyant exultation more like the ecstasy of flight that a poet would attribute to a bird.

And like a bird he soared and glided through water almost as crystal clear as air, but more clinging and resistant so that all movements were more languorous, over the hills and valleys, the fantastic groves and gardens, of a strange silent world. Coveys of striped and tinted small fry scattered and circled as he planed through them, and among the submarine trees larger fish moved more sluggishly, and down in the bluer deeps, sprawling torpid and obscene, was the ultimate monster — the finest plastic octopus, Jack Donohue had assured him, that any Hollywood prop department had yet constructed.