The Saint on the Spanish Main (34 page)

Sibao stood before him again.

“Why did you want to kill him?”

“He was—he was a bad man. A thief.”

“He was good.”

“No, he was clever.” Netlord had
had no time to pre
pare for questions. He was improvising wildly, aware of
the
hollowness of his invention and trying to bolster it
with truculence.
“He must have been waiting for a
chance to meet you. If that had not
happened, he would
have found another way. He came to rob me.”

“What could he steal?”

Netlord pulled out his wallet, and took from
it a thick
pad of
currency. He showed it to her.

“He knew that I had this. He would have
killed me for
it.” There were twenty-five crisp hundred-dollar
bills, an
incredible fortune by the standards of a Haitian
peasant, but only the amount of pocket money that Netlord nor
mally
carried and would have felt undressed without.
The girl’s dark
velvet eyes rested on it, and he was quick
to see more
possibilities. “It was a present I was going to
give to you and your
father tonight.” Money was the
strongest argument he had ever known.
He went on with
new-found
confidence: “Here, take it now.”

She held the money submissively.

“But what about—him?”

“We must not risk trouble with the
police. Later we
will take care of him, in our own way… . But we must
go now, or we shall be late.”

He took her compellingly by the arm, but for
a mo
ment she still held back.

“You know that when you enter the
sobagui
to be
cleansed, your
loa,
who sees all things, will know
if there
is any untruth in your heart.”

“I have nothing to fear.” He was
sure of it now. There was nothing in voodoo that scared him. It was simply a
craft that
he had set out to master, as he had mastered
everything else that
he made up his mind to. He would
use it on others, but it could do nothing to
him. “Come
along,
they are waiting for us.”

Simon heard their voices before the last
extinguishing
wave of darkness rolled over him.

7

He woke up with a start, feeling cramped and
bruised
from lying on the floor. Memory came back to him in
full flood
as he sat up. He looked down at his shirt.
There was a
black-rimmed hole in it, and even a gray
scorch of powder
around that. But when he examined
his chest, there was no hole and no
blood, only a pro
nounced soreness over the ribs. From his breast pocket
he drew
out the metal plaque with the
v
ê
ver
of
Erzulie. The bullet had scarred and bent it, but it had struck at
an angle
and glanced off without even scratching him,
tearing another hole
in the shirt under his arm.

The Saint gazed at the twisted piece of tin
with an
uncanny tingle feathering his spine.

Sibao must have known he was unhurt when she
touched him. Yet she seemed to have kept the knowl
edge to herself. Why?

He hoisted himself experimentally to his
feet. He
knew that he had first been drugged, then over that low
ered
resistance almost completely mesmerized; coming
on top of that, the
deadened impact of the bullet must have knocked him out, as a punch over the
heart could
knock out an already groggy boxer. But now all the ef
fects
seemed to have worn off together, leaving only a
tender spot on his
chest and an insignificant muzziness
in his head. By his watch, he had been
out for about two
hours.

The house was full of the silence of
emptiness. He
went through a door to the kitchen, ran some water, and
bathed his face. The only other sound was the ticking of
a cheap
clock.

Netlord had said that only the two of them
were in the
house. And Netlord had gone—with Sibao.

Gone to something that everything in the
Saint’s
philosophy must refuse to believe. But things had hap
pened to
himself already that night which he could only
think of
incredulously. And incredulity would not alter
them, or make them less true.

He went back through the living room and out
on to
the front verandah. Ridge beyond ridge, the mysterious
hills fell
away from before him under a full yellow moon
that dimmed the
stars; and there was no jeep in the
driveway at his feet.

The drums still pulsed through the night, but
they
were no longer scattered. They were gathered together,
blending
in unison and counterpoint, but the acoustical
tricks of the
mountains still masked their location. Their
muttering swelled
and receded with chance shifts of air,
and the echoes of it cam from all around
the horizon,
so that the whole world seemed
to throb softly with it.

There was plenty of light for him to walk
down to the
Ch
â
telet des
Fleurs.

He found Atherton Lee and the waiter
starting to put out the lights in the bar. The innkeeper looked at him in
a rather
startled way.

“Why—what happened?” Lee asked.

Simon sat up at the counter and lighted a cigarette.

“Pour me a Barbancourt,” he said
defensively, “and
tell me why you think anything happened.”

“Netlord brought the jeep back. He told
me he’d
taken you to the airport—you’d had some news which
made you
suddenly decide to catch the night plane to
Miami, and you just
had time to make it. He was com
ing back tomorrow to pick up your things and
send
them after
you.”

“Oh, that,” said the Saint blandly.
“When the plane came through, it turned out to have filled up at Ciudad
Trujillo.
I couldn’t get on. So I changed my mind again.
I ran into someone
downtown who gave me a lift back.”

He couldn’t say: “Netlord thought he’d
just murdered me, and he was laying the foundation for me to disap
pear
without being missed.” Somehow, it sounded so
ridiculous, even with
a bullet hole in his shirt. And if he were pressed for details, he would have
to say: “He was
trying to put some kind of hex on me, or
make me a
zombie.” That would be assured of a great
reception.
And then the police would have to be brought in. Per
haps Haiti
was the only country on earth where a police
man might feel
obliged to listen seriously to such a story;
but the police were still the police. And
just at those
times when most people
automatically turn to the police, Simon Templar’s instinct was to avoid them.

What would have to be settled now between him
and
Theron Netlord, he would settle himself, in his own way.

The waiter, closing windows and emptying
ashtrays,
was singing to himself under his breath:

“Main pral
é
nan Sibao,
Chach
é
, chach
é
, lol
é
-o——
”

“What’s that?” Simon asked sharply.

“Just Haitian song, sir.”

“What does it mean?”

“It mean,
I
will go to Sibao
—that
holy place in
voodoo, sir.
I
take oil for lamp,
it say.
If
you eat food of
Legba you will have to die:

“Si ou mang
é
mang
é
Legba,
Ti ga
ç
an on
à
mouri, oui.
          
Moin pral
é
nan Sibao——
”

“After spending an evening with Netlord, you should
know all about that,” Atherton Lee said.

Simon downed his drink and stretched put a
yawn.

“You’re right. I’ve had enough of it for
one night,” he
said. “I’d better let you go on closing up—I’m ready
to
hit the sack myself.”

But he lay awake for a long time, stretched out on his
bed in the moonlight. Was Theron Netlord merely in
sane, or was there even the most fantastic
possibility
that he might be able to
make use of things that modern
materialistic science did not understand?
Would it work on Americans, in America? Simon remembered that one
of the books he had read referred to a certain
American
evangelist as
un houngan
insuffisamment instruit;
and it
was
a known fact that that man controlled property
worth millions, and that his followers turned over all
their
earnings to him, for which he gave them only food,
shelter, and sermons. Such things
had
happened, and
were as unsatisfactory to explain away as flying
saucers… .

The ceaseless mutter of the distant drums
mocked him
till he fell asleep.

“Si ou mang
é
mang
é
Legba,
Ti ga
ç
on
on
à
mouri, out!”

He awoke and still heard the song. The moonlight had
given way to the gray light of dawn, and the first
thing
he was conscious of was a
fragile unfamiliar stillness left void because the drums were at last silent.
But the voice went on—a flat, lifeless, distorted voice that was never
theless recognizable in a way that sent icy
filaments
crawling over his scalp.

“Moin pral
é
nan Sibao,
Main pral
é
nan Sibao,
Moin pral
é
nan Sibao,
               
Chach
é
, chach
é
, lol
é
-o
…”

His window overlooked the road that curved
up past
the inn, and he was there while the song still drifted up to it. The two
of them stood directly beneath him—
Netlord, and the slender black girl
dressed all in white.
The girl looked up and saw Simon, as if she
had ex
pected to. She raised one hand and solemnly made a pattern in the air, a
shape that somehow blended the
outlines of a heart and an ornate letter M,
quickly and intricately, and her lips moved with it: it was curiously
like a
benediction.

Then she turned to the man beside her, as
she might
have turned to a child.

“Venez,”
she said.

The tycoon also looked up, before he
obediently followed her. But there was no recognition, no expression
at all, in
the gray face that had once been so ruthless and
domineering; and all
at once Simon knew why Theron Netlord would be no problem to him or to anyone,
any
more.

WATCH FOR THE SIGN OF THE SAINT!

HE WILL
BE BACK !