Leslie Charteris - The Saint Around the World

The young trout, perhaps pardonably thinking it had left something unfinished, must have turned in its own length to rectify the omission. The fly went under in another little swirl, and instantly Simon set the hook. He felt his line become taut and alive, and the fish somersaulted into the air, the blade of its body shimmering in the clear morning light.

The drone of the plane had grown rapidly louder, and it seemed to the Saint’s sensitive ear that there was a kind of syncopated unevenness in its pulse. Almost as soon as he had localized it somewhere behind him and to his left it was bearing down lower, but he was too busy for the moment to turn and look at it. For a few minutes he was entirely absorbed in balancing the vigor of the fish against the strength of a filament that one sharp tug would have snapped. The struggle of the fish came through the fragile line and limber rod all the way into his hand, as if he were linked to it by an extended nerve. And the airplane engine roared in an approaching crescendo and then suddenly stopped, but the rush of its wings through the air went on, coming closer still, blending with the whine of a dead propeller and punctuated by an occasional spastic hiccup of erratic combustion. It wooshed over his head suddenly like a gigantic bird, seeming to swoop so low over him that involuntarily he ducked and crouched lower in the boat.

That momentary distraction and the slack that it put into his line were all that the spunky young trout needed. It was gone, with a last flashing leap, to await some other rendezvous with destiny, and Simon ruefully reeled in an unresisting hook as the cause of the trouble touched down a little further on, striking two plumes of spray from the water with its skimming pontoons.

He laid his rod down and lighted a cigarette, looking the seaplane over in more detail as it coasted towards the nearby shore. It was painted a dark gray that was almost black, its lines were not those of any make that he could identify, and it seemed to carry no identification numbers or insignia of any kind — he made those basic observations in approximately that sequence, although in less sharply punctuated compartments than the summary suggests.

Also it had definite engine trouble, as had been hinted by the irregular thrumming sound of its approach and the bronchitic coughs it had emitted as it glided down. Now the propeller was turning again, making strained uneven revolutions with recoils and pauses in between: the pilot was forcing it with the starter, but the motor refused to fire. Already the seaplane had lost the momentum of its landing speed; it needed power to steer and taxi even on the water, but it was not producing any, and a breeze that had barely started to ripple the smoothness of the lake was beginning to waft it sideways in undignified but inexorable impotence.

The Plexiglas canopy opened, and the pilot squirmed out and wriggled down onto one of the pontoons. He reached under into a trapdoor in the plane’s sternum and hauled out a light anchor with a line already attached and let it drop with a splash, and presently the plane stopped drifting and slewed around at the end of the line with its nose pointed aloofly at the playful zephyr.

The pilot stood on the pontoon and looked around with a kind of studied nonchalance, almost pointedly refraining from more than a glance in the direction of Simon Templar in his skiff. It was as if he intended to disclaim in advance even the suggestion of an appeal for help — as if, in fact, he would have denied that anything was wrong.

If that was the way he wanted it, Simon was in no hurry either. He snipped off the fly which the escaped trout had mauled severely in the tussle, and concentrated profoundly over the selection of another from the assortment in his pocket case. Finally he settled on one with gray hackles, a red body, and a yellow-brown wisp of tail, and began to tie it on to his leader with leisured care.

There was no outward change in his demeanor, any more than there is any visible change in the exterior of a radio when it is switched on. But already the mysterious circuits which had made the Saint what he was had awakened to silently busy life, telling him with dispassionate certainty that even in those last few moments, with no more overt symptoms than the facts which have just been narrated, the delicate tendrils of adventure had made contact with him again, even in that placid Shangri-La of the Northwest.

From the city of Vancouver on the west coast of Canada it was two hours and a quarter by ferry to Nanaimo on the east coast of Vancouver Island, from Nanaimo it was a roundabout sixty miles to where the Cowichan Lake road ended at the Youbou lumber settlement; beyond that, it was almost ten more miles by boat to the cove near the northwest tip of the lake where Simon Templar had been fly-casting when the gray-black seaplane swooped down to shatter the peace of the spring morning with its spluttering engine and drag him rudely back out of his own brief moment of tranquillity. Even there at the very edge of outright wilderness, it seemed, the Saint’s destiny could not spare him for long. Adventure was still as near as it had ever been. It was only up to him whether he should answer or ignore its beckoning finger.

But of course it was no accident that the invitation met with him there. The first pass had been made weeks ago, on the other side of the Pacific.

At the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, Major Vernon Ascony, the Assistant Commissioner of Police, said, “It isn’t coming through here, old boy. If it were, I couldn’t help getting a whiff of it. I personally don’t believe it’s even coming from India. From what I hear, the new governments of India and Pakistan have pretty well snuffed it out. And I don’t think it’s coming down from Indo-China either. We’d have been bound to find a link somewhere along the route. I just don’t think it’s our pidgin at all. But you can’t tell that to the international bigwigs. They’re still stuck with the ideas they got from Fu Manchu. Drugs are peddled by sinister Orientals, Singapore is one of the Orient’s gateways, therefore this must be one of the ports it clears from. So when an unusual amount of the stuff turns up in Los Angeles or Toronto, this here is one of the most likely places it came from. Then everyone wants to know why I don’t bloody well personally put a stop to it.”

The Saint smiled.

“A policeman’s lot is not a happy one,” he murmured. “Could that be set to music, or has someone already done it?”

“Don’t be too disappointed if someone got ahead of you, old chap. At least you’ve done more than almost anyone else to make it true.”

“Have I given you any trouble?”

“No. But I’m jolly well keeping my fingers crossed till your plane takes off… Seriously, old man,” Ascony said, “why don’t you do something about it? I don’t mind telling you, when I was a bit younger you were quite a hero of mine. You know, the Robin Hood of modern crime, the knight in shining armor — all that sort of rot. A lot of us in England used to think of you like that, when we read about you in the papers. But lately, you seem to have become rather different.”

“The world has become a little different too,” said the Saint.

“I know. And I’m sure that everything you’ve been doing has been important enough, in its own way. But I can’t help wishing that once in a while you’d take on something more like the old times, I mean some simple racket that we all understand and agree about, and do it up good and proper without making a dollar out of it for yourself, just because it ought to be done. Like this dope racket, for instance.”

“You’re not a boy now,” said the Saint, almost harshly. “You’re a policeman. You know how big and complicated the dope racket is. You know how many man-hours and dollars, how many elaborate organizations in how many countries, are trying to fight it. But you just want me to fix it all by myself, by tracking down one dastardly master-mind and punching him in the nose.”