Leslie Charteris - The Saint Around the World

“This is very nice of you,” he said. “I shall enjoy them for lunch.”

“I hope you choke on a bone,” said the Saint pleasantly.

Netchideff chuckled with great good humor. He could not have made it plainer that he knew that he could afford a robust invulnerability to mere verbiage.

He took the fish to the sink and began to clean them, humming to himself in a rich voice that swallowed up the last receding mutter of the departing motor-boat. He seemed to have forgotten about sex as capriciously as a child might have been distracted from a toy.

Simon tried tentatively to keep it that way.

“I guess it’s a lot better than the lunch you’d get on your submarine,” he remarked.

The pilot stopped humming.

After a moment he said, “The Russian Navy is the best fed in the world. But did you know I came from a submarine, or did you guess?”

“It was a fairly simple deduction,” said the Saint. “Your clothes have a sea-going look. Your seaplane is painted a naval color. But all the insignia and identification marks have been painted out. Therefore you’re on a secret mission. Your seaplane is a type that could be launched from a large submarine. The safest craft to come sneaking close enough to this coast to launch it would be a submarine. So I bet on the submarine.”

“You are most intelligent.”

“The secret mission, of course, isn’t so glorious. The great well-fed Russian Navy is bringing supplies to a common dope peddler. But it isn’t so easy to deduce why.”

“I was told that he had a good organization, and he pays well.”

“Does he pay you?”

“Of course not. I do not know how that is done, but I suppose he pays one of our agents here. Then I am told when to make delivery.”

“And that doesn’t bother you a bit.”

“I am a good officer. I do what I am told.”

“I forgot. I’m sorry. Where you come from, you’re not encouraged to think.”

Netchideff had finished cleaning the fish. He washed his hands under the faucet and came towards the Saint, drying them on a dish towel.

“ I think,” he stated complacently, “it is not my business, but I think I know why we supply Pavan. This dope is a popular vice in the bourgeois democracies. It is one of the vices that weakens them. So it is good for us to encourage. Anything that helps to keep you weak is good, because it will be harder for you to make the attack on us that your Wall Street leaders are planning. And the money we get helps to pay our friends and agents who keep us informed of your imperialist plans. So in all ways this is very good for us.”

“I begin to see the advantages,” Simon admitted. “Only you can’t help getting the aggressive and defensive angles reversed.”

Netchideff frowned.

“I do not quite understand that, but what you say is not important anyhow. Because of your bourgeois education, you cannot think clearly and correctly like a Russian.”

“But you just said I was most intelligent.”

“When you make a correct deduction, you are intelligent. When you repeat capitalist lies, you show that you are too stupid for anything except fishing.”

The pilot’s eyes drifted towards Marian again.

“Now you’re really talking as if you’d been hit on the head with a hammer and sickle,” Simon said desperately. “Maybe you invented everything from Ford cars to fleas, but I’ll bet there isn’t one good fisherman in the whole Soviet Union.”

Netchideff turned back to him with a sort of irritated incredulity.

“Now you are merely ridiculous. How do you think we make the caviar that even your Wall Street bankers will pay any price for?”

“By catching a poor pregnant sturgeon in a net,” Simon scoffed. “That isn’t what we call fishing. I mean with a rod and line.”

“We have people who catch fish with a rod and a hook too. I have done it myself, often.”

“And what did you use for bait?”

“A piece of bread, or meat, or a worm.”

“That’s what I thought. You wouldn’t even know what to do with a rig like mine.”

Netchideff glared at him in an uncertain way. Then he stomped over and snatched the Saint’s rod out of the corner where Pavan had stood it. He shook it as if it were an inadequate club, then pored over it from end to end like an inquisitive ape.

He unfastened the fly from where it was hooked into a little keeper ring near the butt, and held it up in his huge paw to squint at it.

“This is what you catch fish with?” he demanded.

“That’s right,” said the Saint. “It’s an artificial fly.”

“It is only some little feathers on a hook.”

“That’s all. But you see, the kind of fisherman I’m talking about would be ashamed to catch a fish with anything that a fish could actually eat. You don’t have to be very clever to make a fish take a bite at a good meal. The only time you prove that you’re really smarter than a fish is when you can fool it into taking a bite at a piece of tin, a few feathers, or an old shoelace — anything that no fish would dream of eating if it wasn’t for the way you offered it.”

Netchideff shook his head puzzledly.

“But why do you want to do that when it is much easier with a worm?”

“A Communist couldn’t begin to understand,” answered the Saint. “But the idea is to give even a poor fish a sporting chance.”

The pilot’s glower darkened.

“I do not believe you. It is some kind of bourgeois propaganda.”

“Comrade, you’ve just cleaned three fish that swallowed it.”

“How do you make fish eat these feathers?”

“You cast the fly out on the water, and if you do it right a fish comes and takes it. But as I said, no Russian could ever do it.”

“A Russian can do anything that you can,” Netchideff said violently.

“One ruble will get you fifty dollars that you can’t.”

Netchideff hefted the rod, as if he had a mind to hit Simon across the face with it. Then he looked at it again, and at the little red-bodied fly dancing at the end of the leader. A confused sort of anger twisted his face in a way that was incongruously suggestive of a baby preparing to cry.

“I will show you,” he said. “I will catch more fish than you with this thing. If I do not, it will prove you are lying!”

He flung open the door and went out.

Marian Kent and the Saint looked at each other without daring to speak.

The door opened again and Netchideff stood there.

“I do not want you to think that you have changed anything for yourselves,” he said. “I have to pass the time, that is all. It does not suit me to kill you, Templar, until Julius returns and I am ready to leave. So it is good that you have time to think of your mistakes. As for this pretty and foolish girl” — his yellowish cat’s eyes shifted to her with the naked directness of an animal — “I am not in a hurry for her because I do not need to be. I am going to take her back to my submarine where I can enjoy her better, and when I have enough my comrades will be glad to have their turn, until we get home and give her to other comrades who will ask her questions about the Canadian Police.”

“If I live to be a hundred,” Marian said at last, and giggled a little hysterically, “I don’t suppose I’ll ever listen to a more fantastic argument.”

“It worked, though, didn’t it?” Simon grinned tightly.

“I still can’t believe it. I can’t think why.”

“I gambled on a psychological gimmick. Haven’t you noticed the formula in all the Communist purges, how they can’t be satisfied with just erasing the opposition, as every other dictatorship has been? Their heretics have got to confess, and acknowledge how wrong they’ve been and how richly they deserve their punishment. I don’t know how a psychiatrist would explain it, I just know how it works. So I figured Igor mightn’t be able to resist the chance to make me eat crow before he kills me.”