Saint Errant (11 page)

“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 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 naive 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.

V. Lucia
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 ad venture 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 be fore 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.”

She laughed quietly, and left him as a man’s voice called her testily from indoors. Simon took another draught of the cool beer and stretched out his long legs contentedly.

He was in the state of happy vagueness in which an artist may find himself when confronted with a virgin canvas: for a modern privateer who modestly rated himself a supreme technician in the art of living, the situation was almost identical. Anything might take shape-dragons, murder, green hippopotami, bank robbers, damsels in distress, blue moons, or an absconding company promoter. Straight ahead of him as he sat there, if he cared to take that direction, he might come at last to Denver. He could turn east and follow the coast round to New Orleans and Miami. Or, in the fullness of time, he could wake up to the excitements of Chicago, New York, or San Francisco. Or he could stay right where he was with his beer in this forgotten border town of Saddlebag; and as a matter of fact, he was just preparing to discard the last alternative when he was privileged to witness the arrival of Mr Amadeo Urselli.

Urselli came on the bus, which went rattling past in a cloud of dust while Simon sat on over his refreshment. The same cloud of dust, halting to poise itself aridly over the roofs of the houses below, indicated that the bus had stopped some where in the village; and a few minutes later Mr Urselli him self came into view, toiling up the road toward the hotel with three or four inquisitive urchins following in his wake and apparently offering comment and counsel. Simon immediately admitted that there was some excuse for them-in his own early youth he would probably have been their ringleader. For Mr Urselli-whose name the Saint had yet to learn– was indeed a remarkable and resplendent sight in that setting.

His gray check suit fitted him so tightly, particularly around the waist, that he would probably have found it necessary to take his coat off in order to tie his shoelaces. His pearly hued felt hat looked as if it had come straight from a shopwindow; his tie had the gorgeous flamboyance of a tropical sunset; the pigskin suitcase which he carried in his right hand shone with a costly luster. The gesticulations which he made with his left hand in the attempt to rid himself of his juvenile escort flashed iridescent gleams of jewelry on his fingers.

He crested the slope leading up to the veranda and dumped his bag with a sigh. The escort gathered round him in an ad miring circle while he mopped his brow with a large silk hand kerchief.

“Say, will you sons of bandmasters scram?” he rasped-not, Simon gathered, for anything like the first time.

“Give them their fun, brother,” murmured the Saint. “They don’t get many chances to see the world.”

The newcomer turned toward him, and his sallow face slowly lightened to the gregarious gleam with which the exile in foreign climes recognizes another who speaks the same language.

“This is a helluva place,” he said emotionally.

It may be acknowledged at once that Simon Templar did not like the face, which was thin and pointed like a weasel’s, with flat brown eyes that shifted restlessly in their orbits; but Simon nodded amiably, and the traveler sank into a chair beside him.

“My name’s Urselli,” he volunteered. “I came out here to look at the neck of the woods where I was born. Ain’t there anyone around in this jernt?”

Simon glanced casually round, and was answered by the re appearance of the girl in the doorway. Mr Urselli stood up.

“Where’s Mr Intuccio?”

The girl turned and called, “Papa!” into the dark room be hind her, and presently the innkeeper clumped out-a big black-bearded man in grimy shirt sleeves. Urselli held out a white manicured hand.

“You may not remember me, Salvatore,” he said in halting Italian. “I am Amadeo.”

The innkeeper’s sunken eyes surveyed him impassively, and held the hand with a callused paw.

“I remember. You will drink something?”

“Thank you,” said Mr Urselli.

He flopped back in his chair as the other left them after dispersing the enraptured audience with a hoarse “Git out side!” and a menacing lift of his arm which sent the urchins scampering. The girl followed the old man in.

“What I call a royal welcome,” observed Mr Urselli, when they were alone. He winked, craning his neck, “But the girl ain’t so bad, at that. It mightn’t be so dull here. If she calls him Papa she must be some kinda cousin of mine-Intuccio is. Since I’m here I guess I better like it.”

“Are you on a pleasure trip?” asked the Saint, turning his glass reflectively.

“You might call it that. Yes, I thought I might come back and take a rest in the old home town. I haven’t seen it for twenty years, and I guess it ain’t changed at all.” Urselli studied his expensive-looking hands. “I’m in the joolry trade. Look at that piece of ice.”

He slipped a ring from one of his fingers and passed it over.

“Very nice,” Simon remarked casually, examining it.

“I’ll say it’s nice,” affirmed Mr Urselli. “There ain’t a flaw in it, and it was a cheap buy at five grand. You gotta know your business with diamonds.”

Simon handed the ring back, and Mr Urselli replaced it on his finger. There was a tinge of mockery in the depths of the Saint’s sea-blue eyes, unperceived by Mr Urselli. It seemed a fantastic place for any practitioner of that ancient spiel to come with his diamonds; and Simon Templar’s curiosity never slept. He debated within himself, lazily interested, whether he should offer some ingenuous lead which would help the sales talk into its next phase, or whether he should leave the whole onus of its development on Mr Urselli’s doubtless capable shoulders; but at that moment the black-bearded innkeeper re turned with a bottle and two glasses.

He poured out two drinks in silence, and sat down. Every movement he made was heavy and stolid, as his greeting had been. He raised his glass with a perfunctory mutter, and drank. His daughter came and leaned in the frame of the door.

“What brings you home, Amadeo?”

The voice was dull and apathetic; and Urselli seemed to make* an effort to retain his full expansiveness of geniality.

“I felt I needed a holiday. After all, there’s no place like home. And what’s home without a woman?” Urselli jerked his thumb slyly towards the girl. “I didn’t know you had a family.”

“There is only Lucia. Her mother died when she was born.”

“Pretty girl,” said Urselli approvingly.

Intuccio drank again, moving only his arm.

“This is a long way from Chicago,” he said. “Where do you go now?”

“I thought I’d stay here for a while,” said Urselli comfortably. “It looks restful. Can you find room for me?” He looked at the girl as he spoke.

“There is always room,” she said.

Intuccio raised his deep-set eyes to her face, and lowered them again.

“What we have is yours,” he said formally.

“Then that’s settled,” said Urselli jovially. “It’ll be great to sit around and do nothing, and talk over old times.” He unbuttoned his coat and fanned himself energetically. “Jeez, is it always as hot as this? I’ll have to copy your costume if I’m making myself at home.”

Intuccio shrugged, watching him dispassionately; and Urselli took off his tight-waisted coat and hung it over the back of his chair. Something clunked solidly against the wood as he did so, and the Saint’s eyes turned absently towards the sound. One pocket was gaping under an unusual weight, and Simon looked into it and saw the gleaming metal of a gun butt.

Mr Urselli remembered him as his glass was refilled.

“Are you stayin’ here too?” he asked.

“I think I will,” said the Saint.

There was something bizarre about the home-coming of Amadeo Urselli. During the afternoon, with no more effort than was called for by attentive listening, Simon learned that both men were the scions of local families, immigrants to the United States at the beginning of the century. Not long afterwards their paths had separated. The Ursellis had taken to the big cities, merging themselves flexibly into the pace and turmoil of a rising civilization; the Intuccios, unyielding peasants for as many generations as the oldest of them could remember, had naturally sent down their roots into the soil, preferring to find their livelihood in the surroundings to which they had been born. The divergence was summed up almost grotesquely in the two men; if the Saint’s hypersensitive intuition had not been startled into alertness by the other oddities that had struck him about Urselli, he might have found himself staying on for nothing but the amusement of the human comedy which they were acting.