Leslie Charteris - The Saint Bids Diamonds

"You are staying longer this time?" Julian asked presently.

Simon shrugged.

"I don't know. It depends on a lot of things."

"You will come up and see Simonito?" said the lad eagerly. "I will tell my wife you are coming. She will not believe me, she will be so glad."

"Yes, I will come very soon—"

The sentence died on the Saint's lips and the friendly warmth faded out of his eyes for Reuben Graner had entered the bar and was walking towards his table.

In moments of crisis the human brain flies off on curious tangents. There was one freezing moment in which Simon wondered whether Graner could have heard him talking Spanish, while the last words he had spoken re-echoed in his own ears like thunderclaps, and then he realised that the other patrons of the bar were making more than enough noise to drown what he was saying. They were only discussing the prospects for the next banana crop, but their heredity and upbringing made it impossible to lower their voices below a shout; and since they all knew that nobody else had anything to say worth listening to, they were all shouting at once. A split second later, another of those wildly disjointed flights of thought reminded Simon of something he had forgotten all day — the messages he had written and folded up in twenty-five-peseta notes in Graner's attic that morning.

Without any visible interruption, the Saint put his hand in his pocket and took out one of the notes. He could hardly have said why he did it, but it never occurred to him to hesitate. It was the only thing to do. Graner's thin-drawn yellowish face showed no warning expression that could have been read at the distance, his dandified strut was exactly the same, his eyes were the same unwinking beads behind his glasses, like the eyes of a lizard; and yet the Saint knew. He knew, by the reflex bristle of his nerves, more surely than logic could have told him, that the gong was sounding for the final round. Whatever Graner's manner might be, whatever was said between them, the curtains were going up for the last time; and at a moment like that, knowing all the odds against him, the Saint left nothing more to chance than he had to leave.

He held out the note to Julian. The lad tried to wave it away.

"Toma!" said the Saint imperatively. It was the last word he could say before Graner was within earshot. He added in English: "Get me some change."

"El señor quiere cambio," Graner interpreted, with sneering distinctness, as the bootblack stood smiling sheepishly.

The lad nodded and grinned again, and hobbled nimbly off on his one leg and his crutch; and the Saint waved his hand hospitably towards a chair.

"Sit down, Reuben," he murmured. "What are you drinking?"

"A sherry." Graner gave the order to the waiter, and fitted a cigar into his amber holder. "It was lucky I saw you as I was driving by. Where have you been?"

Simon lighted the cigar for him, and the action gave him a spare moment to consider his reply. There were half-a-dozen different approaches that he might have subconsciously expected Graner to make, but this was not one of them. It gave him an odd, ridiculous impression that Graner was feeling his ground as cautiously as he wanted to himself, and he wondered if his instincts were starting to play tricks with him.

"I hung around the Calle San Francisco for a bit," he said vaguely. "Then our friend came out, and I followed him. He's a great walker — led me a chase all over the town. He went into three or four shops and bought things. Then he went into the Casino. I stayed outside for sometime, until I got scared there might be a back way out. I went in and made enquiries, and there was. I toured all over the place, but he'd gone."

"Did you go back to Lauber after that?"

"Yes."

"What happened there?"

The Saint gave himself another breather while he lighted a cigarette. He was beginning to feel as if all his co-ordinates of reality were giving way, as if he were wading in grotesque slow motion through a sea of thick and glutinous soup, like a man on a marijuana jag. But he had made up his mind that the safest thing was to let Graner give him the lead; and meanwhile he didn't see why he shouldn't play the same game as he assumed Lauber had been playing.

He said, with deliberately measured bluntness: "It might have been the last job I could have done for you for a long time. If I hadn't been lucky you'd have been looking for a new diamond cutter."

"Why?"

"Because in any case you're going to have to look for a new chauffeur. He was the only guy I found when I got there, and he was dead."

"Manoel?"

The Saint nodded.

"Shot. Right between the eyes. He was still warm when I found him. The apartment was quite dark. I searched through it, but there wasn't anyone there, I couldn't do any more, because just then the police rolled up. I heard them coming and looked out of the window. Palermo's girl was with them, so I suppose she found Manoel and turned in the alarm. I climbed out of a back window as they came in the door, and beat it over the roofs."

Graner's face registered no emotion. He gripped the amber holder between his teeth and drew the end of his cigar to an even red. His sharp snaky eyes watched Simon intently through the smoke.

"Would you be surprised to hear that Lauber said you had shot him?" he said.

"Su cambio, senior."

The bootblack had returned. He laid five duros on the marble table in front of the Saint. Simon handed him a peseta and looked at him as he did so. Julian's smile was uncertain, and his eyes were troubled: it was enough to tell the Saint that the lad had found his message and read it. He was still afraid that Julian might try to say something to him. about it, and turned his shoulder on him quickly before that disaster could happen.

"No," he answered Graner blandly. "It wouldn't surprise me very much. But it would make me a little more sure that Lauber had done it himself."

"You don't like Lauber?"

The Saint shrugged.

"I expect you've already made up your own mind who did it. I'm just telling you what I think. What was Lauber's story?"

"He told me that when Manoel arrived with the message you were so insistent on going to the Calle San Francisco yourself that he became suspicious. When he tried to prevent you going, you hit him and knocked him out; and then he thinks you shot Manoel when he tried to stop you."

"It's a good story," said the Saint unconcernedly, "even if it is a god-damn lie. Lauber was the bloke who insisted that he wanted to wait there for Aliston. But if you believe him, why don't you call the police?"

"I'll talk about that in a minute," said Graner. He inspected his cigar for a few seconds, then looked up from it to add: "I have already seen Aliston."

A ball of lead formed in the Saint's stomach and made his diaphragm feel as if it was being dragged down out of its rightful place. He had to check himself for a moment before he spoke, to make sure that his voice was under control.

"That's something, anyway," he conceded coolly. "Was he looking pretty fit?"

"He had Christine with him."

Simon knew how Lauber must have felt when he received that shattering jolt in the solar plexus, having seen it coming and yet only having had time to realise that he couldn't possibly move fast enough to ward it off. He had had fair warning, but the shock was none the less deadly for that. He knew that he was hearing the truth — a fabrication that would have fitted so neatly into his own deductions would have been too wild a coincidence. The shock numbed every physical sense he commanded; but somehow it left his brain aloof and unshaken by the chaos of his nerves.