Leslie Charteris: The Saint Around the World

Exquisite agony needled the pilot’s face as the hook set, and lanced blindingly through his vision as the Saint put pressure on the rod. A reflex spasm contracted Netchideff’s forefinger on the trigger of the automatic, but he had already lost sight of its mark in the sharp bright flash of pain, and even as the shot exploded another reflex was jerking both his hands up to clutch at the focal center of his anguish.

There was a remorseless pulling in the pain, a thin pitiless traction that redoubled his torture at the least resistance and offered surcease only from yielding to the pull and leaning in its direction so as to reduce the agonizing tension. He leaned into the pull until his feet had to follow his tottering balance and he stumbled against something with his shins and the boat rocked and he was suddenly weightless and then the water struck him and closed over him. Somewhere in that flurry he let go the gun.

But even when he came up again, choking and spluttering, the pain was still under his eye, drawing him steadily towards itself. His clawing hands touched a thread too frail to grasp, yet their own pressure on it only increased the agonizing drag on the embedded hook. But the line would not break: the limberness of the rod was a spring that refused to allow a solid resistance against which the line could have been snapped. There was still no relief except in following that fragile but inexorable pull, half swimming and half floundering in the direction it dictated.

With a heart-stopping delicacy that no angler has probably been called upon to match before or since, the Saint played him like a fish, until he was close enough to the dock to be knocked cold with an oar.

9

In Johnny Kan’s restaurant in San Francisco, Simon Templar said, “You’ll meet her. She should be here in a few minutes. But the Mounties still wanted her for a lot of dull routine work, digging out the roots of Pavan’s distributing organization as far as possible, and that kind of mopping-up bores me. Is everything ready? The gai yung yee chee —”

“Yes, we have your shark’s fin soup. And gum buoy ngun jon , and the chicken with wing nien sauce. What about the Russian pilot?”

“I think they’re still trying to decide what sort of protocol to apply to him. When the politicians and diplomats get into the act, I’d rather be included out. So we made a date to celebrate here as soon as she could get away.”

“That was nice of you.”

“Besides, I had to find out how much you really knew when you let out a hint about fishing that was what finally put me on the track — when I got the point.”

“You can hear a lot of things through the Chinese grapevine,” Johnny Kan said. “For God’s sake don’t tell anyone, or I’ll never be left alone. It was just a rumor that I hoped might do you some good. When I was a kid there were so many lousy stories written about opium dens run by sinister Orientals that it gives me a special kick to think I did something personally to help smash a dope racket.”

“Well, we dented it anyhow,” Simon said. “Although I don’t suppose it’ll be long before the ungodly are trying again.”

“If they ever gave up, what would you do for excitement? Go fishing?”

The Saint grinned, and lighted a cigarette.

“I’ve been wondering if I could claim some sort of record. He must have been damn nearly the biggest thing ever landed with a fly rod. He was about seventy inches long and would have weighed easily two hundred and twenty pounds. I was using HCH line with a four-pound-test leader, and by the happiest coincidence I hooked him with a fly called a Red Ant.”

See “The Last Hero.”