Leslie Charteris - The Saint and the People Importers

Simon unfolded the discarded paper and was not disappointed. The Pakistani’s lot was emblazoned across the top of the front page in a barrage of letters two inches high. Below, in small but still bold type, were details calculated to funnel the reader’s eye down into the morass of finer print that made up the body of the sheet.

“Waiter in Soho restaurant nailed to garage wall... dead when discovered this morning... believed to be victim of immigrant smuggling gang...”

Simon’s eye scanned the column from “Grim sight greeted bobbies” through “Shopkeeper heard groans” to “Did he threaten to talk?”

The unpleasant details of the Pakistani’s demise and the subsequent discovery of his spreadeagled body in a temporarily vacant garage held less interest for the Saint than another fact which made him stop and look again when he was about two thirds of the way down the page: “The murdered man was a waiter at the Golden Crescent Restaurant in Soho, where his Pakistani colleagues claimed to know little about him or his origins.”

Simon lowered his foundling journal and leaned forward. The narrow centre panel in the glass partition that separated driver from passenger was already partially lowered. The Saint spoke through the opening.

“I don’t think I’ll stop at the Hilton after all,” he said. “I’ve developed a sudden craving for curry. Do you think we can get to the Golden Crescent Restaurant before midnight even in this traffic? It’s on Newlin street, near Leicester Square.”

The driver was a small ageing ugly man with a pocked nose and a surprisingly cheerful disposition.

“We can try,” he said over his shoulder. “If you’re in a hurry, there’s a hundred other curry houses, and with all respect I don’t see how anybody can tell ’em apart unless it’s by the different kinds of indigestion you pick up from the...”

Simon was spared any more of his chauffeur’s culinary comments when the current log-jam of cars broke into motion again.

“I think I’ll make it the Golden Crescent just the same,” he said. “I’ve been there before. De gustibus, et cetera...”

“Righto,” the driver answered tolerantly. “Leicester Square it is.”

“And no hurry,” said the Saint.

“Don’t worry.”

The driver shifted very audibly into second gear. Simon let himself be jolted back into his seat again and got on with his study of the evening’s news. The front page treatment of the Pakistani’s death was more visceral than analytical, but at the bottom of the column, in bold print, was a promising announcement: EXCLUSIVE! HOW ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS FALL PREY TO EXTORTION GANG. THE INSIDE STORY, BY TAM ROWAN. SEE PAGE 3.

The Saint saw page three. His driver, in the meantime, was beginning a series of torturous manoeuvres through clogged streets that would eventually enable him to get to Simon’s new destination. The tide of the evening rush was in full flood now. Pedestrians pressed toe to heel on the sidewalks, and the earth trembled to the surge of trains through the subterranean labyrinths.

It was understandable, Simon thought, that men of the Asian lands who wanted to avail themselves in person of Britain’s advantages ran into British objections and were forced to take unofficial routes into the country, thereby putting themselves in the category of “illegal immigrants.” It would seem to anybody observing mid-London late on a weekday afternoon that the island of which it was the capital not only had no room for new inhabitants, but in fact was about to founder under the weight of the ones who were already there.

Simon shut his eyes and ears to the throngs outside his taxi and concentrated on Tam Rowan’s exclusive inside story, which got off the mark with a verbal ring: “I was threatened with death for writing this article.”

Mr. Rowan, it seemed, had taken a professional interest in illegal immigration for some time past, and now had finally managed to introduce his proboscis into circles so touchy about their privacy that they had anonymously offered to detach not only his inquisitive sniffer but also his whole head if he did not lay off immediately.

Rowan revealed these facts in dramatic, rather breathless terms not wholly unflattering to himself, and then got down to a disappointingly vague account of what he had found out in the course of his snooping. The Saint’s impression was that Tam Rowan was not quite as heroically indifferent to the well-being of his highly active nose as he made himself out to be, and that he knew a lot more than he was willing to spill in the Evening Record . Much of what he said was common knowledge: Large numbers of people, especially from Pakistan and India, wanted to come to Britain. Britain, for obvious reasons, could not accommodate and offer jobs to any but a small proportion of those non-Britons who wanted to immigrate. The British government had been forced to restrict the human influx by means of annual quota systems, and to further refine the screening process by giving priority to new arrivals who practised some profession or had some skill that would make them an asset instead of an unemployable liability to the society they wanted to enter. A Pakistani doctor could get in with no trouble. A Pakistani labourer or clerk, to whom the wages of a London Transport ticket collector would have seemed comparable to the wealth of Midas, had almost no chance at all of entering.

It was those with no special qualifications for entry, and who were refused the vital employment permit, who sometimes decided to have a try at getting in anyway. Transportation, by plane to France or Benelux and thence by boat to a deserted stretch of English coast, was the usual method. Fraudulent documents of every necessary kind could be obtained in advance for stunning prices, and once ashore the smuggled man could lose himself so completely that the government authorities admitted that they had almost no chance of locating such an offender after he was inside the country’s borders.

The illegal immigrant, however, did not feel as secure as the government’s pessimistic attitude might seem to have warranted. And that was the crux of the racket the Saint was reading about. A gang of blackmailers was raking in a rich profit from fearful, uninformed, often ignorant Pakistanis and Indians who had sneaked into the country and were vulnerable to threats of exposure. Among the blackmailers were some of the Asians’ own countrymen — and to increase the unsavoury irony, the extortion syndicate got rich both coming and going, since they ran a two-sided business and many of the people they blackmailed were men they had helped slip into England in the first place, thus ingeniously providing themselves with a prelocated flock of sheep for shearing.

Simon did not at all admire illegal immigration nor the people who indulged in it, but he admired blackmailers even less. He was not a sentimental man, and he could appreciate an audacious bit of thievery with the taste of a connoisseur. He could enjoy the pricking of the pompous rich — though it was the pompous part and not the rich part that he disliked — and he could relish a duel between equals. But blackmail, by its very nature, had always struck him as especially rotten, and a blackmailer who sucked the blood of poor and defenceless people seemed to him to exist on a level approximately equivalent to the underside of a cockroach.

Simon folded the newspaper and tucked it into the pocket of his raincoat with the pleasant feeling of being no longer at loose ends but instead of having set a clear course in a promising direction. His driver was not so fortunate. In trying to take a shortcut through Soho he finally got himself bogged down near Wardour Street off Brewer Street. Here, in a notorious backwater bottleneck behind the theatre and restaurant district, the traffic jam seemed to be nearing the oft-predicted urban millennium when the only solution will be to cover the whole mess with concrete and start all over again on top of it.