Leslie Charteris - The Saint on the Spanish Main

The Saint gazed at the twisted piece of tin with an uncanny tingle feathering his spine.

Sibao must have known he was unhurt when she touched him. Yet she seemed to have kept the knowledge to herself. Why?

He hoisted himself experimentally to his feet. He knew that he had first been drugged, then over that lowered resistance almost completely mesmerized; coming on top of that, the deadened impact of the bullet must have knocked him out, as a punch over the heart could knock out an already groggy boxer. But now all the effects seemed to have worn off together, leaving only a tender spot on his chest and an insignificant muzziness in his head. By his watch, he had been out for about two hours.

The house was full of the silence of emptiness. He went through a door to the kitchen, ran some water, and bathed his face. The only other sound there was the ticking of a cheap clock.

Netlord had said that only the two of them were in the house. And Netlord had gone — with Sibao.

Gone to something that everything in the Saint’s philosophy must refuse to believe. But things had happened to himself already that night which he could only think of incredulously. And incredulity would not alter them, or make them less true.

He went back through the living room and out on to the front verandah. Ridge beyond ridge, the mysterious hills fell away from before him under a full yellow moon that dimmed the stars, and there was no jeep in the driveway at his feet.

The drums still pulsed through the night, but they were no longer scattered. They were gathered together, blending in unison and counterpoint, but the acoustical tricks of the mountains still masked their location. Their muttering swelled and receded with chance shifts of air, and the echoes of it came from all around the horizon, so that the whole world seemed to throb softly with it.

There was plenty of light for him to walk down to the Châtelet des Fleurs.

He found Atherton Lee and the waiter starting to put out the lights in the bar. The innkeeper looked at him in a rather startled way.

“Why — what happened?” Lee asked.

Simon sat up at the counter and lighted a cigarette.

“Pour me a Barbancourt,” he said defensively, “and tell me why you think anything happened.”

“Netlord brought the jeep back. He told me he’d taken you to the airport — you’d had some news which made you suddenly decide to catch the night plane to Miami, and you just had time to make it. He was coming back tomorrow to pick up your things and send them after you.”

“Oh, that,” said the Saint blandly. “When the plane came through, it turned out to have filled up at Ciudad Trujillo. I couldn’t get on. So I changed my mind again. I ran into someone downtown who gave me a lift back.”

He couldn’t say, “Netlord thought he’d just murdered me, and he was laying the foundation for me to disappear without being missed.” Somehow, it sounded so ridiculous, even with a bullet hole in his shirt. And if he were pressed for details, he would have to say, “He was trying to put some kind of hex on me, or make me a zombie.” That would be assured of a great reception. And then the police would have to be brought in. Perhaps Haiti was the only country on earth where a policeman might feel obliged to listen seriously to such a story, but the police were still the police. And just at those times when most people automatically turn to the police, Simon Templar’s instinct was to avoid them.

What would have to be settled now between him and Theron Netlord, he would settle himself, in his own way.

The waiter, closing windows and emptying ashtrays, was singing to himself under his breath:

“What’s that?” Simon asked sharply.

“Just Haitian song, sir.”

“What does it mean?”

“It mean, I will go to Sibao — that holy place in voodoo, sir. I take oil for lamp, it say. If you eat food of Legba you will have to die:

“After spending an evening with Netlord, you should know all about that,” Atherton Lee said.

Simon downed his drink and stretched out a yawn.

“You’re right. I’ve had enough of it for one night,” he said. “I’d better let you go on closing up — I’m ready to hit the sack myself.”

But he lay awake for a long time, stretched out on his bed in the moonlight. Was Theron Netlord merely insane, or was there even the most fantastic possibility that he might be able to make use of things that modern materialistic science did not understand? Would it work on Americans, in America? Simon remembered that one of the books he had read referred to a certain American evangelist as un houngan insuffisamment instruit, and it was a known fact that that man controlled property worth millions, and that his followers turned over all their earnings to him, for which he gave them only food, shelter, and sermons. Such things had happened, and were as unsatisfactory to explain away as flying saucers...

The ceaseless mutter of the distant drums mocked him till he fell asleep.

He awoke and still heard the song. The moonlight had given way to the gray light of dawn, and the first thing he was conscious of was a fragile unfamiliar stillness left void because the drums were at last silent. But the voice went on — a flat, lifeless, distorted voice that was nevertheless recognizable in a way that sent icy filaments crawling over his scalp.

His window overlooked the road that curved up past the inn, and he was there while the song still drifted up to it. The two of them stood directly beneath him — Netlord, and the slender black girl dressed all in white. The girl looked up and saw Simon, as if she had expected to. She raised one hand and solemnly made a pattern in the air, a shape that somehow blended the outlines of a heart and an ornate letter M, quickly and intricately, and her lips moved with it: it was curiously like a benediction.

Then she turned to the man beside her, as she might have turned to a child.

“Venez,” she said.

The tycoon also looked up, before he obediently followed her. But there was no recognition, no expression at all, in the gray face that had once been so ruthless and domineering, and all at once Simon knew why Theron Netlord would be no problem to him or to anyone, any more.