Leslie Charteris - The Saint Around the World

“Yes, of course I know it isn’t so simple. But there actually is a flood of dope reaching North America on a bigger scale than it ever did before. Anyhow, that’s what I gather from the memoranda that end up on my desk. Well, a thing like that could have one simple source, which a fellow like yourself might be able to dig out, if he was lucky. You get around a lot. I suppose I’m talking out of turn. But I wish you’d try.”

Simon Templar frowned at the beading of dew on his stengah glass. It was a long time since he had been reminded of certain truths as bluntly as Major Ascony’s incongruously genuine eagerness had stated them.

“Maybe I’ll have to do that,” he said darkly.

And by the next morning he might have preferred to forget the easy boast, only some of the backwash of memories that had stung it out of him would not be so easily dismissed.

But in Hong Kong, Inspector Stephen Hao said, “If it’s coming from Red China, it isn’t shipped from here. Would you like to see how we search everybody who comes in from the mainland these days? After we get through frisking ’em, five thousand of ’em couldn’t be carrying enough dope to give an addict one good fix. Why don’t you look around in Japan?”

But in Tokyo, at his favorite tempura restaurant on Yodobashi Avenue, Master Sergeant Ben Johnson, of the Office of Special Investigations, said, “Sure, the Secret Service and the FBI have been riding our tails about it for months. They know that most of the supply these days is moving from west to east, from the Pacific Coast. But I’ll swear it isn’t coming from Nippon. Hell, we’ve got it licked here to the point where the domestic traffic is about ready to die from starvation, and the prices are out of sight. So where would anyone find that sort of quantity to export? What do you say, Nikki?”

Inspector Geichi Nikkiyama, of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, nodded owlishly over a fried shrimp breaded with golden batter.

“Ah, so. More likely criminal technician in United States having discovered how to make synthetic dope in bathtub, like so profitable Prohibition gin.”

But in San Francisco, in Johnny Kan’s restaurant on Grant Avenue, as the Saint dipped his chopsticks into a dish of tung gee bok opp , a succulent squab marinated in exotic spices and rose liqueur and dressed with a quite improbable sauce, Johnny told him: “If I were you, I’d go on up to Vancouver. From what I hear, that’s the easiest place to get it in all North America. If my name was Charlie Chan, I’d deduce that where it’s most plentiful would be the place nearest the source. I’d like to see you do something about it, Saint.”

“So would I,” said the Saint. “And it can’t be much harder than catching hold of a rainbow.”

“You might look into that too, while you’re up there,” Johnny Kan said confusingly.

Simon figured that some minor idiomatic cog had slipped somewhere between them, but wrote it off as not worth a laborious exploration. Yet for the first time he felt that he might be getting warm, and in Vancouver he made no more direct inquiries.

Most of what he did there would make rather tedious storytelling, except for certain individuals who might have nefarious motives for a too detailed curiosity about the Saint’s methods. It was quite a few years since the Saint had last slipped into the underworld and disappeared without a ripple, like an otter into a dark pool; but he did it as easily as if the last of the old days had been yesterday, and none of the persons he moved among during that time ever dreamed who it was that had passed through their stealthy lives more stealthily than their utmost caution could conceive.

He forgot all about Johnny Kan’s bland non sequitur until one day in the devious labyrinths he followed there was the echo of a name, Julius Pavan, and with it a reference to what seemed to be a stock joke about Mr Pavan’s passion for fishing. And at long last a bell had rung as Simon remembered that among truly dedicated fishermen the word “rainbow” primarily suggests a species of fish, the rainbow trout, after which the lighting phenomenon in the sky may possibly have been named.

And so a hint and a hunch had eventually led him to where he had just seen a seaplane of unfamiliar design and with no identification markings landing on the waters where Mr Pavan fished, and now it all seemed as clear and sure as Fate.

At the edge of the pines on the north shore of the cove there was a log cabin no bigger than a double garage. It was the only sign of human habitation within sight of that remote corner of the lake. It was crudely but solidly built of hand-hewn timber, and mellowed into the landscape with the weathering of many seasons. Perhaps some trapper of a generation ago had built it for his headquarters, before the swaths cut by commercial logging had driven the game even further back into the dwindling wilderness. But now it was the fishing camp of Julius Pavan, who lived alone in a big house in the heights of West Vancouver, and drove a big car and invested in buildings and real estate.

A man in a red plaid shirt and drab trousers came out of it and hurried down to a rough floating dock where a small motor-boat was tied up. He cast off and cranked it up and chugged across to the seaplane at an unspectacular but useful speed.

He stopped the boat beside the pontoon where the pilot stood, and the pilot got in. There was some discussion or explanation or argument, in which the pilot took the more gesticulatory part. Presently the pilot climbed up on the short fore-deck, and from that elevation managed to open a cowling over the plane’s single engine, while the man in the plaid shirt steadied the motor-boat by holding on to the plane’s propeller. The pilot peered and probed lengthily into the engine’s innards, and finally closed the cowling again and lowered himself back down into the boat with another outburst of gestures.

The man in the plaid shirt shrugged, and cranked his motor again, and the boat swung around and headed back towards the dock below the lonely cabin.

Their course took them within fifty yards of the Saint, and both men looked at him as they went by. But neither of them waved a casual greeting as is the friendly custom of the backwoods, and the Saint, having left it to them to make the advance, did not belatedly take the initiative. When they had finished looking at him, they returned to their private discussion, and with reciprocal indifference to their existence and their problems, Simon Templar plucked his fly from the water where it had been resting and freshened it a little with a couple of false casts and sent it floating downwind towards another imaginary target.

Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the motor-boat tie up at the dock, and the two men get out and walk up to the cabin and go in.

Simon decided to allow himself just three more casts, each to be made and properly fished without unseemly haste. Through one circumstance and another, several summers had gone by since he last practised that pin-point accuracy with a trout rod, and he was ingenuously delighted to discover that his wrist had lost little of its cunning. But on another level of his mind those three casts were only a convenient way of estimating a period of time he felt he should let go by, and simultaneously a way of occupying the time which might lull any suspicions of the two men who were now in the cabin, if perchance they were still keeping him under observation.

His third cast happened to be the first to fall several inches wide of its mark, but he disciplined himself sternly against the temptation to try just one more. He picked the line up on the reel, secured the fly, and put the rod down with the resigned air of a man who has decided to concede a temporary triumph to the caprices of the finny tribe. He even moulded exactly the right expression on his face, just in case he might be playing to an audience equipped with powerful binoculars.