Leslie Charteris - Saint Errant

“Meaning,” said the Saint, “that we mightn’t have to spend quite so much of our youth on the rock pile?”

“Maybe.”

The Saint took his time over lighting a cigarette.

“All my life,” he said, “I’ve been allergic to hard labor. And it’s especially bad” — he glanced at the girl — “for what the radio calls those soft, white, romantic hands. In fact, I can’t think of any pearls that would be worth it — particularly when you don’t even get to keep the pearls... So — I’m afraid there ain’t going to be no poils.”

“You’re nuts!” Wendel exploded. “Don’t you know when you’re licked?”

“Not till you show me,” said the Saint peaceably. “Let’s examine the facts. Miss Roger handled the necklace. Tomorrow a jeweler may say that the string that Lady Offchurch still has is a phony. Well, Lady Offchurch can’t possibly swear that nobody else ever touched that rope of oyster fruit. Well, the substitution might have been made anywhere, anytime, by anyone — even by a chiseling maharajah. What’s the only proof you could use against Jeannine? Nothing short of finding a string of genuine pink pearls in her possession. And that’s something you can never do.”

“No?” Wendel barked. “Well, if I have to put this whole building through a sieve, and the two of you with it—”

“You’ll never find a pearl,” Simon stated.

He made the statement with such relaxed confidence that a clammy hand began to caress the detective’s spine, neutralizing logic with its weird massage, and poking skeletal fingers into hypersensitive nerves.

“No?” Wendel repeated, but his voice had a frightful uncertainty.

Simon picked up a bottle and modestly replenished his glass.

“The trouble with you,” he said, “is that you never learned to listen. Last night at dinner, if you remember, we discoursed on various subjects, all of which I’m sure you had heard before, and yet all you could think of was that I was full of a lot of highfalutin folderol, while I was trying to tell you that in our business a man couldn’t afford to not know anything. And when I told you this afternoon that Jeannine and I were cooking up oxtails, you only thought I was trying to be funny, instead of remembering among other things that oxtails are cooked in wine.”

The detective lifted his head, and his nostrils dilated with sudden apperception.

“So when you came in here,” said the Saint, “you’d have remembered those other silly quotes I mentioned — about Cleopatra dissolving pearls in wine for Caesar—”

“Simon — no!” The girl’s voice was almost a scream.

“I’m afraid, yes,” said the Saint sadly. “What Cleopatra could do, I could do better — for a face that shouldn’t be used for launching ships. “

Lieutenant Wendel moved at last, rather like a wounded carabao struggling from its wallow, and the sound that came from his throat was not unlike the cry that might have been wrung from the vocal cords of the same stricken animal.

He plunged into the kitchen and jerked open the oven door. After burning his fingers twice, he took pot holders to pull out the dish and spill its contents into the stoppered sink.

Simon watched him, with more exquisite pain, while he ran cold water and pawed frantically through the debris. After all, it would have been a dish fit for a queen, but all Wendel came up with was a loop of thread, about two feet long.

“How careless of the butcher,” said the Saint, “to leave that in.”

Lieutenant Wendel did not take the apartment apart. He would have liked to, but not for investigative reasons. For a routine search he had no heart at all. The whole picture was too completely historically founded and cohesive to give him any naïve optimism about his prospects of upsetting it.

“I hate to suggest such a thing to a respectable officer,” said the Saint insinuatingly, “but maybe you shouldn’t even let Lady Offchurch think that her necklace was switched. With a little tact, you might be able to convince her that you scared the criminals away and she won’t be bothered any more. It may be years before she finds out, and then no one could prove that it happened here. It isn’t as if you were letting us get away with anything.”

“What you’re getting away with should go down in history,” Wendel said with burning intensity. “But I swear to God that if either of you is still in town tomorrow morning, I’m going to frame you for murder.”

The door slammed behind him, and Simon smiled at the girl with rather regretful philosophy.

“Well,” he said, “it was one way of giving those pearls back to the Indians. One day you’ll learn to stop being so smart, Jeannine. Can I offer you a ride out of town?”

“Whichever way you’re going,” she said with incandescent fascination, “I hope I’ll always be heading the other way.”

It was too bad, Simon Templar reflected. Too bad that she had to be so beautiful and so treacherous. And too bad, among other things, that his crusade for the cultivation of more general knowledge seemed to make so few converts. If only there were not so much ignorance and superstition in the world, both Wendel and Jeannine Roger would have known, as he did, that the story of pearls being dissolved in wine was strictly a fable, without a grain of scientific truth... Nevertheless, the pearls in his pocket were very pleasant to caress as he nursed his car over the Huey Long Bridge and turned west, towards Houston.

Simon Templar might easily have passed the “hotel.” For reasons known only to itself, it stood outside the town, perched aloofly on a stony slope that rose above the rudimentary road. But as he went by he saw the girl on the veranda, and admitted to himself that he was thirsty. He climbed the rough path and unslung his pack in the shade.

“If I were a millionaire,” he said, smiling at her, “I might offer you half my fortune for a drink.”

She had a rather pale, thoughtful face, delicately featured, almost too classically oval to have a character of its own, like one of those conventionalized portraits of the Italian seventeenth-century school. The sunlight struck blue-black glints from her hair as she wiped the table.

“What would you like?” she asked.

“What would you recommend?”

“We have some beer.”

“It was revealed to me in a vision,” said the Saint.

He leaned back and lighted a cigarette while he waited for her to bring it, gazing out across the sun-baked vista of granite and sandstone, ramshackle houses slumbering in the midday heat with their boards cracked and scarred and the tinted plaster peeling from their walls like the skin of a Florida sun-worshiper; sage, mesquite, violet-shadowed mesas, sparse trees powdered with dust, and the blue hint of mountains in the far distance. The same dust was thick on his bare brown arms, and the narrowing of his gaze against the glare creased dry wrinkles into the corners of his eyes. His clothes made no attempt to hide the fact that they had seen many weeks of vagabondage, and yet in some indefinable way they still rode his lean, wide-shouldered frame with a swashbuckling elegance that matched the gay lines of his face, for Simon made an adventure of all journeys.

“There you are.” The girl set a beaker of liquid gold before him, and watched while he drank. “Where are you from?” she asked.

Simon gestured toward the south.

“Cuautia,” he said. “Before that, Panama. A long time before that, Paris. And once upon a time I was in a place called Pfaffenhausen.”

“Looking for work?”

He shook his head.

“I’m an outlaw,” he said, with that smiling veracity which sometimes was so immeasurably more deceptive than any untruth. “I steal from the rich and wicked, and give to the poor and virtuous. I’m quite poor and virtuous myself,” he remarked parenthetically. “There has been some talk of making me a Saint.”