Leslie Charteris - The Saint Bids Diamonds

Simon let him slide to the ground; and as he folded up he revealed, like an unveiled monument, the homely but supremely happy features of Hoppy Uniatz standing behind him with an automatic in his hand. For a second the Saint's memory flashed backwards in a spurt of sobering alarm, searching for a more precise definition of the timbre of the sharp thud which had preceded his opponent's collapse.

"You didn't shoot him, did you?" he asked anxiously.

"Chees no, boss," Hoppy reassured him. "I just pat him on de roof wit' de end of my Betsy. He ain't hoit."

Simon breathed again.

"I'm not quite sure whether he'd agree with you about that," he remarked. "Although I suppose it's better than being dead… But it looked like the makings of a good fight before you butted in."

He gazed around him somewhat regretfully. The high peak of vivacity in the proceedings seemed to have gone by, leaving a certain atmosphere of anticlimax. The man with the damaged face was trying to get blindly to his feet. The man who had made the short but exciting flight through the air was leaning against the back of the sedan, holding his stomach and looking as if he would like to die. The man whose roof had been patted with the end of Mr Uniatz' Betsy appeared to sleep. What with one thing and another, a shroud of appalling tranquillity had settled upon the scene.

The Saint sighed. And then he grinned vaguely and clapped Hoppy on the shoulder.

"Anyway," he said, "let's see what we fished out of the pot."

He went over to where the old man still lay with his head in the gutter, and picked him up as if he was a child. Whatever else might develop, a strategic withdrawal from the field of victory was the first indicated move. Simon carried the old man over to the Hirondel, dumped him in the tonneau, where he told Hoppy to look after him, and opened the front door for the girl.

She hesitated with one foot on the running board; and again he glimpsed that cloud of suspicion darkening her eyes.

"Really — you needn't bother… We can walk—"

"Not with Uncle," said the Saint firmly. "He doesn't feel like walking." Without waiting for her, he slid in behind the wheel and touched the starter. "Besides, your sparring partners might start walking too — they still have some life left in them—"

Crack!

The shot whined over his head and smacked into the wall beyond, and the Saint smiled as if it amused him. He caught the girl's wrist, dragged her down into the seat beside him, slammed the door and let in the clutch more quickly than the separate movements can be described. A second shot crashed harmlessly into the night; and then Mr Uniatz' Betsy answered. Then a side turning caught the Saint's eye, and he spun the wheel and sent the Hirondel screaming round in a skidding right angle. In another moment they were coasting smoothly down into the outskirts of Santa Cruz.

A little later, he heard far behind him a ragged fusillade which puzzled him for the next twelve hours.

But the general aspect of the affair met with his complete approval. He had no fault to find with it — even if it had temporarily interrupted the urgent and fascinating business that brought him to the Canary Islands. Adventure was still adventure, and there was always room for more — that was the fundamental article of faith which had blazed the Saint's trail of debonair outlawry through all the continents and half the countries of the world. Besides which, there were points about this adventure which were beginning to make it look more than ordinarily interesting…

He glanced at the girl again as they turned out into the wide, open space fronting the harbour.

"Where do you live?" he enquired; and his tone was as casual as if he had been driving her home from a dance.

"Nowhere!" she said quickly. And then, as if the word had come out before she realised what a ridiculous answer it was and how many more questions must inevitably follow it, she said: "I mean — I don't want to give you any more trouble. You've been awfully kind… but you can drop us anywhere around here, and we'll be quite all right."

Simon turned the car slowly round into the Plaza de la Republica and tilted his head significantly towards the tonneau.

"I'm sure you will," he agreed patiently. "But I have to keep on reminding you about Uncle. Or will you carry him?"

"Is he all right?"

She turned round quickly, and the Saint also looked back as he brought the Hirondel to a stop outside the Hotel Orotava. The only person visible in the back seat was Hoppy Uniatz, who did not seem to have fully grasped his obligations as an administrator of first aid. Mr Uniatz was lighting a large cigar; and, for all the evidence to the contrary, he might have been sitting on his patient.

"Sure, de old buzzard is okay, miss," said Mr Uniatz cheerfully. "He just took a bit of massage, but dat's nut'n. You oughta seen what de cops done to me one time when dey had me in de kitchen."

Simon saw the pain in her eyes.

"We must take him to a doctor," she said.

"By all means," he assented amiably. "Who is your doctor?"

She passed a hand shakily over her forehead.

"I'm afraid I don't know one—"

"Nor do I. And from what I do know about Spanish doctors, if he's not dead yet they'll soon find a way to finish him off. I could look after him much better myself. Why not let's take him in here and see about fixing him up?"

"I don't want to go on bothering you."

The Saint chuckled and reached back to open the rear door.

"Take him inside, Hoppy," he ordered. "Pretend he's passed out, and get him up to my room — you'd better act a bit squiffy yourself to complete the picture. We'll follow in a few minutes so it won't look too much like a party."

Mr Uniatz nodded and hauled the patient out like a sack. As he started across the pavement, he lifted up his unmelodious voice in a song of which the distinguishable words made the Saint mildly thankful that no English — speaking residents were likely to be within earshot.

Again the girl made an involuntary movement of protest; but Simon took her by the arm.

"What's on your mind?" he asked quietly; and she shrugged helplessly.

He could feel the tenseness of her under his touch.

"Let me look at you," she said.

He took off his hat and turned towards her. Her eyes searched his face. They were brown eyes, he noticed, and her hair shone copper — brown under the lamplight. He realised that if her mouth had been happy it would have been very happy, a soft, red, full-lipped mouth that would have tantalised the imagination of any man whose impulses were human.

She saw a face coloured with the warm tan of unwalled horizons and lighted with the clearest blue eyes that she had ever seen. It was a face that might have leapt to life from the portrait of some sixteenth-century buccaneer; a face that managed to harmonise a dozen strange contradictions between the firm chin and finely chiselled lips and the broad artist's forehead, and yet altogether cast in such a gay and reckless mould that it took all contradictions in its stride and made them insignificant. It was the face of a poet with the dare-devil humour of a cavalier, the face of an unrepentant outlaw with the calm straightforwardness of an idealist. It was the sort of face that she thought Robin Hood might have had — and did not know then that a thousand newspapers had unanimously named its owner the Robin Hood of modern crime.

But Simon Templar opened his face for inspection in the main square of Santa Cruz without a twinge of anxiety even for the two guardias who were strolling by; though he knew that photographic reproductions of it were to be found in the police archives of almost every civilised country in the world. For at that particular time the Saint was not officially wanted by the police of any country — a fact which many citizens who had met him in the past had reason to regard with grave indignation.