The Saint Bids Diamonds (23 page)

“Thank you,” said the Saint, when he had recovered a little from his emotion. “There was a parcel sent to me about the same time; but that was by ordinary mail. It should be getting here any week now. Will you look out for it?”

He stuffed the letter into his pocket as he crossed the square, and made for Camacho’s tourist office. The tourist trade not being what it was, the agency drummed up extra business with cigarettes and magazines.

“Holá, Jorge,” he murmured, as he strolled in; and the round face of the fat Portuguese assistant opened in a broad beam as he recognised the Saint.

“ĄHolá, senhor! żcomo ‘sta ‘ste? ż‘Te ha vuelt’ a Tenerif?”

“Yes, George, I came back. And now I want to go away again. Give me some cigarettes and then tell me what boats you’ve got.”

“ż‘Te quiere march’ se ahora?” said George incredulously. “Ą‘Te tiene que lev’ much’ mas tiemp’ aquí!”

The Saint shook his head with a smile.

“I’ve already been here too long,” he said.

George handed him a packet of cigarettes and pored for a while over the collection of shipping folders.With the vista of innumerable mańanas looming in his mind, he announced presently, in his execrable mixture of Spanish and Portuguese: “Hay un bare’ que sal’ de aquí el dío quins —”

“What, the fifteenth? Of next month? I tell you I want something at once.”

“ż ‘Te quiere salir ahora mismo?”

”The sooner the better.”

“Hay un bare’ que sal’ pasao mańan’”

“What about tonight?”

“ĄAy-ay-ay! Ą‘Te ten demasiao pris’!”

George turned back to his sailing lists with a deep sigh; and while he was at it the Saint picked up a copy of the Tarde which was lying on the counter.

Apart from its own outbursts of indignation at the advent of gangsterismo in Tenerife, and amplifications of the original episode by means of interviews with every inhabitant of the town who had been within two miles of the shooting, the newspaper told of further developments which had been too late for the morning editions. It seemed that in the small hours of the morning, on the strength of the alarm which had gone round, a sentry on duty at the gasworks had started shooting at something, for no reason which anybody could discover. All the guards had turned out to join the party, all letting off their guns as fast as they could pull the trigger; it was not known what damage had been done to the nameless menace that they were shooting at, but they had successfully riddled a taxi which was passing in a neighbouring street, killing the driver and wounding the two passengers, who were returning from a merry evening at some cabaret. The only other known casualty consisted of half of another brace of guardias who were hurrying towards the sounds of firing: it appeared that he had been so impatient to get into action that he hadn’t waited to draw his gun from its holster before he started shooting, with the result that he had shot himself neatly through the bottom.

Properly alarmed by these deplorable breaches of the peace, the civil governor had issued a ringing manifesto in the same edition, in which he proclaimed his firm intention of stamping out the aforesaid gangsterismo. With this object, he declared a state of emergency, and ordained (1) that all cafés, bars, cabarets, cinemas and other places of amusement should be closed by midnight until further notice; (2) that all private citizens must be in their homes by 12.30 A.M., and that anybody who was out after that hour would be liable to be shot without warning; (3) that in any case he would not be responsible for the lives of any persons who were out in the streets after dark; (4) that owing to the peril of their work the police would not be allowed to patrol in parejas, as heretofore, but would go out in squads of six; and (5) that it would be a criminal offence for any driver to let his car backfire.

It was an inspiring statement, which should have made the heart of any Tinerfeńo swell with pride in contemplation of the resolute and capable hands to which he had entrusted his government. To Simon Templar, an intruder from the outer darkness of the civilised world, its train of thought seemed somewhat obscure; but he could form some idea of its consequences and implications. The friendly little thieves’ picnic into which he had introduced himself was clearly developing a satellite public picnic of its own. For the time being their orbits were parallel; but at any moment they might start to converge, and when that happened the fun was likely to become a trifle breathless. It was just another factor that made a rapid ending seem even more important; and the Saint considered it seriously for several minutes.

“Hay un barc’ que sal’ esta noch’ a las diez,” George informed him at last, in a rather awed voice, as if the idea of a ship leaving as early as ten o’clock that night made him feel nervous; and the Saint regarded him admiringly.

“You ought to go to America, George,” he said. “You’ve got too much natural hustle for this place… . Fix me two single cabins on that boat, and two more on the boat the day after tomorrow.”

He wrote down the names-the two passages for that night for Joris and Christine Vanlinden, and the two on Monday to be left open-and waited while George telephoned the agents of the line and made the arrangements.

It took some time to overcome the native prejudice against such speedy action, and even longer to get the action really acting. The tickets themselves had to be sent down from the shipping offices while George was making out bills and receipts. Simon paid in cash, which involved further delays. The fares didn’t total to an even number of hundreds of pesetas, Simon was short of small change, and finding change for a hundred pesetas in Tenerife is rather more difficult than looking for brown-shirted Jews in Munich, for anybody who collects as much as twenty pesetas rushes off very quickly to put it in the bank before it melts. All the neighbouring shops had to be pressed into the search; and by the time everything had been settled and Simon had the tickets in his pocket nearly an hour had gone.

It meant that he was long overdue to return to the house where he had left Lauber, if he intended to obey Graner’s instructions; but that could be covered by some story of having followed the man he was supposed to be watching. The same excuse might serve to explain his absence if Graner had tried to telephone him meanwhile at the number he had given. For some reason it never occurred to the Saint not to go back to Maria’s apartment-he had decided that that was a risk that must be taken if he was going to try and learn something about what Lauber had done. There was also the possibility that Aliston might have left Christine somewhere else and gone back there before Lauber left.

With these reasonings going through his mind, but without any conscious volition, the Saint found himself threading his way through the streets which he had seen only twice before, and then without studying the route very closely. There were some minutes when he was afraid he had lost himself, for the brief tropical twilight was darkening as if curtains were being drawn in quick succession over the sky, and with the change of light the dingy alleys were softening like the faces of old women by the fireside at dusk. But presently, almost to his surprise, he found himself at the right door.

There was a little more life in the street now—a few straggling pedestrians, a few faces peering eerily put of open ground-floor windows in the age-old Spanish pastime of watching life go by, a few upper windows lighted up. But the window of Maria’s apartment was not lighted, and Simon saw nobody loafing near the door as he reached it.

He pushed the door experimentally, and found it unlocked. The gloomy hall was almost in complete darkness now, and the Saint took a slim pencil flashlight from his pocket to find his way to the stairs. He moved upwards with the supple noiselessness of a cat, and switched his torch off again as he reached the upper landing.

For some time he stood motionless outside the door of the apartment, as if every nerve in his body was enlisted in the one intense concentration of listening for the slightest sound of movement inside the room which might have given him warning of a trap. He believed that he would have caught even the rustle of a sleeve if a man waiting inside had cautiously moved a cramped arm; but the utter stillness remained unbroken until he felt that he had given it a fair trial. Any further investigations would have to be made by opening the door.

Simon’s hand moved instinctively to his pocket before he remembered that he had no gun, and his lips tightened with a momentary mocking grimness. So he would have to do without that asset… . He slid his knife out of its sheath and held it by the tip of the blade in his right hand, ready for use. His left hand turned the doorknob, slowly and without a rattle. As soon as he felt the latch clear of its socket, he flung the door wide open.

Nothing happened. Nothing moved in the grey gloom of the room. There was no sound after the door banged wide against the wall.

On the floor between him and the table he saw a shape that looked like a man but that didn’t move or speak. The attitude in which it lay offered no promise of speech or movement. Simon went into the room and flashed his torch on its face. It was Manoel, the chauffeur; and there was no doubt that he was extremely dead.

3
The bullet had made a neat round hole where it had entered near the middle of his forehead, but the back of his head was not so neat. Simon touched the man’s face: it still held some warmth, and his flashlight showed that the blood on the floor was still wet.

Before he did anything else he went through and searched the bedroom, but there was no one there.

He came back and turned on the lights in the living room. With their help, he made another search that covered every inch of the room, but he found nothing to indicate who had been there. The table was exactly as he had left it, with the remains of food congealing on the plates. The overturned chair that he had been tied in was still overturned. The accumulation of cigarette ends in the ash trays and on the floor yielded nothing, although Simon picked up every one of them separately and examined it. He recognised his own brand, and another equally common-that was all. If there had been a third, it might have been useful; but Palermo had smoked only his cigar, and he did not know what Lauber and Aliston used. There was hardly any doubt that one or the other of them had fired the shot which had ensured that the chauffeur would chauffe no more: Simon had his own firm conviction about which of them it was, but he would have been glad to remove the faint element of uncertainty.

There was no means of doing that except by fingerprints, and he had no apparatus for that. But he remembered that his own prints would be among those present, and he went back to the bedroom for one of the gag cloths and carefully wiped everything that he had touched, including the whiskey bottle and the glass from which he had given Joris a drink, and everything that Hoppy might have touched in the kitchenette during his quest for liquor. The other things he left as they were. If the detective force of Santa Cruz had ever heard of fingerprints they could have a jolly time playing with them, and Graner’s gang could do its own worrying.

It wasn’t so quiet now… .

Simon became aware of the fact almost subconsciously; and then suddenly he was wide awake. He stopped motionless for a second, without breathing, while he sought for an exact definition of the sound which had crept warningly into his brain while he was thinking about other things. In another instant he knew what it was.

Something was happening in the street outside. The symptoms of it, as they reached him through the closed windows, were almost imperceptible; and yet the sixth sense of the outlaw had distinguished them with unerring instinct. As his memory reached back he realised that a car had stopped outside with its engine running, but the other mutters went on-a faint increase in the volume of sound outside, a subtle alteration in the pitch and tempo of the normal noises of the street. Nothing that an ordinary man might have noticed before it was too late, but as unmistakable to the Saint as if the alarm had been sounded with bugles.

In two strides he was at the window, looking down through a corner of one of the smeary yellow panes.

The car, which had stopped at the door, was open, and the last of the party of guardias was getting out -Simon could see three others, and there might have been more of them too close under the wall of the house to be visible to him. A woman was still sitting in the back of the car: he saw the brassy flame of her hair and guessed at once that it was Mr Palermo’s fancy lady.

Then he heard the first footfall in the hall below.

The Saint’s fighting smile flickered on his lips and was reflected in the blue depths of his eyes. When something less menacing than that had happened not long ago, the thought had flashed through his mind that the upper part of the house was a dead end; and now he was in the very corner that he had avoided before. But last time he had had Joris to take care of.

He went swiftly through to the bedroom, closed the, door behind him and opened the window. Standing outside it with his toes on the sill, he could just reach the shallow parapet of the flat roof above. He drew himself up with the easy grace of a gymnast and wriggled nimbly over the edge.

By that time the last trace of the twilight had vanished altogether, and only a disheartened scrap of moon glimmering between the clouds gave him enough light to pick his way. On either side the roofs of the contiguous houses ran on in a dark plateau broken by occasional low walls. He hurried silently over them, Stopping after every few steps to listen for any warnings of pursuit. A startled milch goat tied to a shed on one of the roofs shied out of his path with a faint bleat that made him jump; and on another roof the hens in a ramshackle chicken run gargled and clucked apprehensively as he passed; Simon wondered, with a twinkle of incorrigible irrelevance, what a snooty New Yorker would think of the way Spaniards treated their penthouses and roof gardens, or conversely what a Spaniard would think of the value which was placed on them in New York.

Then a building higher than the others blocked his way, and he turned in towards the centre of the block. Below him he saw a solid-looking outhouse, and the window which overlooked it was dark. He swung himself over the parapet, hung at the full stretch of his arms, and dropped the last few feet with a prayer that the roof under him was strong. It was. He landed, on his toes with hardly a sound; below him was a sort of courtyard on to which the house on the opposite side of the block also backed, and with another short drop he reached the ground level. He tried the back door of the house opposite. It was unlocked, and let him into an unlighted kitchen. The door on the far side of the kitchen opened on to a narrow hall in which lights were burning. He had got the door open half an inch when a girl came down the stairs and went into a room beside the staircase. She had no clothes on. Simon drew a long breath and tiptoed out. The girl had almost closed the door of the room she had gone into; he could hear other girls in there, talking and laughing. From what he could hear of their conversation as he moved stealthily down the hall, he gathered that he had got into the sort of house where no Saint ought to be. He decided to get out quickly, and he was just level with the door when it opened and the girl came Out again.