Leslie Charteris - The Saint on the Spanish Main

Thereafter she hoed the patches of vegetables that her father cultivated as before, and helped to grate manioc, and carried water from the spring, and went back and forth to market, like all the other young women, but the tale of her powers grew slowly and surely, and it would have been a reckless man who dared to molest her.

Then Theron Netlord came to Kenscoff, and presently heard of her through the inquiries that he made. He sent word that he would like her to work in his house, and because he offered wages that would much more than pay for a substitute to do her work at home, she accepted. She was then seventeen.

“A rather remarkable girl,” said Netlord, who had told Simon some of these things. “Believe me, to some of the people around here, she’s almost like a living saint.”

Simon just managed not to blink at the word.

“Won’t that accident this afternoon shake her pedestal a bit?” he asked.

“Does a bishop lose face if he trips over something and breaks a leg?” Netlord retorted. “Besides, you happened. Just when she needed help, you drove by, picked her up, took her to the doctor, and then brought her here. What would you say were the odds against her being so lucky? And then tell me why it doesn’t still look as if something was taking special care of her!”

He was a big thick-shouldered man who looked as forceful as the way he talked. He had iron-gray hair and metallic gray eyes, a blunt nose, a square thrusting jaw, and the kind of lips that even look muscular. You had an inevitable impression of him at the first glance, and without hesitation you would have guessed him to be a man who had reached the top ranks of some competitive business, and who had bulled his way up there with ruthless disregard for whatever obstructions might have to be trodden down or jostled aside. And trite as the physiognomy must seem, in this instance you would have been absolutely right.

Theron Netlord had made a fortune from the manufacture of bargain-priced lingerie.

The incongruity of this will only amuse those who know little about the clothing industry. It would be natural for the uninitiated to think of the trade in fragile feminine frotheries as being carried on by fragile, feminine, and frothy types, but in fact, at the wholesale manufacturing level, it is as tough and cut-throat a business as any legitimate operation in the modern world. And even in a business which has always been somewhat notorious for a lack of tenderness towards its employees, Mr Netlord had been a perennial source of ammunition for socialistic agitators. His long-standing vendetta against organized labor was an epic of its kind, and he had been named in one Congressional investigation as the man who, with a combination of gangster tactics and an ice-pick eye for loopholes in union contracts and government regulations, had come closest in the last decade to running an old-fashioned sweat-shop. It was from casually remembered references to such things in the newspapers that Simon had identified the name.

“Do you live here permanently?” Simon asked in a conversational way.

“I’ve been here for a while, and I’m staying a while,” Netlord answered equivocally. “I like the rum. How do you like it?”

“It’s strictly ambrosial.”

“You can get fine rum in the States, like that Lemon Hart from Jamaica, but you have to come here to drink Barbancourt. They don’t make enough to export.”

“I can think of worse reasons for coming here. But I might want something more to hold me indefinitely.”

Netlord chuckled.

“Of course you would. I was kidding. So do I. I’ll never retire, I like being in business. It’s my sport, my hobby, and my recreation. I’ve spent more than a year all around the Caribbean, having what everyone would say was a nice long vacation. Nuts. My mind hasn’t been off business for a single day.”

“They tell me there’s a great future in the area.”

“And I’m looking for the future. There’s none left in America. At the bottom, you’ve got your employees demanding more wages and pension funds for less work every year. At the top, you’ve got a damned paternalistic Government taxing your profits to the bone to pay for all its Utopian projects at home and abroad. The man who’s trying to literally mind his own business is in the middle, in a squeeze that wrings all the incentive out of him. I’m sick of bucking that setup.”

“What’s wrong with Puerto Rico? You can get a tax exemption there if you bring in an employing industry.”

“Sure. But the Puerto Ricans are getting spoiled, and the cost of labor is shooting up. In a few more years they’ll have it as expensive and as organized as it is back home.”

“So you’re investigating Haiti because the labor is cheaper?”

“It’s still so cheap that you could starve to death trying to sell machinery. Go visit one of the factories where they’re making wooden salad bowls, for instance. The only power tool they use is a lathe. And where does the power come from? From a man who spends the whole day cranking a big wheel. Why? Because all he costs is one dollar a day — and that’s cheaper than you can operate a motor, let alone amortizing the initial cost of it!”

“Then what’s the catch?”

“This being a foreign country: your product hits a tariff wall when you try to import it into the States, and the duty will knock you silly.”

“Things are tough all over,” Simon remarked sympathetically.

The other’s sinewy lips flexed in a tight grin.

“Any problem is tough till you lick it. Coming here showed me how to lick this one — but you’d never guess how!”

“I give up.”

“I’m sorry, I’m not telling. May I fix your drink?”

Simon glanced at his watch and shook his head.

“Thanks, but I should be on my way.” He put down his glass and stood up. “I’m glad I needn’t worry about you getting ulcers, though.”

Netlord laughed comfortably, and walked with him out on to the front verandah.

“I hope getting Sibao back here didn’t bring you too far out of your way.”

“No, I’m staying just a little below you, at the Châtelet des Fleurs.”

“Then we’ll probably run into each other.” Netlord put out his hand. “It was nice talking to you, Mr—”

“Templar. Simon Templar.”

The big man’s powerful grip held on to Simon’s.

“You’re not — by any chance — that fellow they call the Saint?”

“Yes.” The Saint smiled. “But I’m just a tourist.”

He disengaged himself pleasantly, but as he went down the steps he could feel Netlord’s eyes on his back, and remembered that for one instant he had seen in them the kind of fear from which murder is born.

In telling so many stories of Simon Templar, the chronicler runs a risk of becoming unduly preoccupied with the reactions of various characters to the discovery that they have met the Saint, and it may fairly be observed that there is a definite limit to the possible variety of these responses. One of the most obvious of them was the shock to a guilty conscience which could open a momentary crack in an otherwise impenetrable mask. Yet in this case it was of vital importance.

If Theron Netlord had not betrayed himself for that fleeting second, and the Saint had not been sharply aware of it, Simon might have quickly dismissed the pantie potentate from his mind, and then there might have been no story to tell at all.

Instead of which, Simon only waited to make more inquiries about Mr Netlord until he was able to corner his host, Atherton Lee, alone in the bar that night.