Señor Saint (4 page)

She had taken him in and cared for him in his sickness, finding him clean and grateful, and lavished on him all the frustrated richness of her heart. And out of his helplessness, and for her kindness and the tender beauty of her voice, he had loved her in return. She had used what money she could earn in any way to humor his obsession, to bring him back from despair, to encourage hope and keep alive his dream. And one day she believed she might be able to make at least part of the hope come true, and have him made whole-and let him go.

Simon walked slowly through a night that no longer seemed dark and sordid.

“When he knows what you have done,” he said, “he should think you the most beautiful woman in the world.”

“He will not love me,” she said without bitterness. “I know men.”

“Now I can tell you something. He has been blind for nearly ten years. There will have been too many degenerative changes in his eyes by this time. There is hardly any chance at all that an operation could cure him now. And I never thought I could say any man was lucky to be blind, but I think Ned Yarn is that man.”

“Nevertheless, I shall have to try, one day.”

“It will be a long time still before you have enough money.”

She looked up at him.

“But the beads you took away. You told him they were worth much. What shall I tell him now?”

It was all clear to Simon now, the strangest crime that he had to put on his bizarre record.

“He will never hear another word from me. I shall just disappear. And presently it will be clear to him that I was a crook after all, as he believes you suspected from the start; and I stole them.”

“But the shock-what will it do to him?”

“He will get over it. He cannot blame you. He will think that your instinct was right all along, and he should have listened to you. You can help him to see that, without nagging him.”

“Then he will want to start looking for pearls again.”

“And you will find them. From tune to time I will send you a few for you to put in the oysters. Real ones. You can make them last. You need not find them too often, to keep him hoping. And when you sell them, which you can do as a Mexican without getting in any trouble, you must do what your heart tells you with the money. I think you will be happy,” said the Saint.

6.

Mrs. Ormond, formerly Mrs. Yarn, lay back in her chair and laughed, deeply and vibrantly in her exquisitely rounded throat, so that the ice cubes clinked in the tall glass she held.

“So the dope finally found his level,” she gurgled. “Living in some smelly slum hovel with a frowzy native slut. While she’s whoring in a crummy saloon and dredging up pearl beads to kid him he’s something better than a pimp. I might have known it!”

She looked more unreally beautiful than ever in the dun light of the balcony, a sort of cross between a calendar picture and a lecherous trash-writer’s imagining, in the diaphanous negligee that she had inevitably put on to await the Saint’s return in. Her provocative breasts quivered visibly under the filmy nylon and crowded into its deep-slashed neckline as she laughed, and some of the beads rolled out of the unfolded paper in her lap and pattered on the bare floor.

Simon had told her only the skeletal facts, omitting the amplifications and additions which were his own, and waited for her reaction; and this was it.

“I hadn’t realized it was quite so funny,” he said stonily.

“You couldn’t,” she choked. “My dear man, you don’t know the half of it. Here I come dragging myself down to this ghastly dump, just in case Yarn has really got on to something I couldn’t afford to miss; and all he’s got is a mulatto concubine and a few beads. And all the time, right here in my jewel case, I’ve got a string of pearls that were good enough for Catherine of Russia!”

Simon stood very still.

“You have?” he said.

“Just one of those baubles that Ormond used to pass out when he was indulging his sultan complex. Like I told you. I think he only paid about fifteen grand for them at an auction. And me wasting all this time and effort, not to mention yours, on Ned Yarn’s imaginary oyster bed!”

At last the Saint began to laugh too, very quietly.

“It is rather delirious,” he said. “Let me fix you another drink, and let’s go on with some unfinished business.”

BOOK TWO
The Revolution Racket
1.

“In my time, I’ve had all kinds of receptions from the police,” Simon Templar remarked. “Sometimes they want to give me a personal escort out of town. Sometimes they see me as a Heaven-sent fall guy for the latest big crime that they haven’t been able to pin on anybody else. Sometimes they just rumble hideous warnings of what they’ll do to me if I get out of line while I’m in their bailiwick. But your approach is certainly out of the ordinary.”

“I try not to be an ordinary policeman,” said Captain Carlos Xavier.

They sat in the Restaurant Larue, which has become almost as hardworked and undefinitive a name as Ritz among ambitious food purveyors: this one was in Mexico City, but it made a courageous attempt to live up to the glamorous cosmopolitan connotations of its patronymic. There was nothing traditionally Mexican about its decor, which was rather shinily international, and the menu strove to achieve the same expensive neutrality. However, at Xavier’s suggestion, they were eating pescados blancos, the delicate little fish of Lake Pátzcuaro which are not quite like anything else in the world, washed down with a bottle of Chilean Riesling; and this, it had already been established, was at the sole invitation and expense of Captain Carlos Xavier.

“Sometimes,” Simon suggested cautiously, “I’ve actually been asked to help the police with a problem. But the buildup has never been as lavish as this.”

“I have nothing to ask, except the pleasure of your company,” said Captain Xavier.

He was a large fleshy man with a balding head and a compensatingly luxuriant mustache. He ate with gusto and talked with gestures. His small black eyes were humorous and very bright, but even to Simon’s critical scrutiny they seemed to beam honestly.

“All my life I must have been reading about you,” Xavier said. “Or perhaps I should say, about a person called the Saint. But your identity is no secret now, is it?”

“Hardly.”

“And for almost as long, I have hoped that one day I might have the chance to meet you. I am what I suppose you would call a fan.”

“Coming from a policeman,” said the Saint, “I guess that tops everything.”

Xavier shook his head vigorously.

“In most countries, perhaps. But not in Mexico.”

“Why?”

“This country was created by revolutions. Many of the men who founded it, our heroes, began as little more than bandits. To this very day, the party in power officially calls itself the Revolutionary Party. So, I think, we Mexicans will always have a not-so-secret sympathy in our hearts for the outlaw-what you call the Robin Hood. For although they say you have broken many laws, you have always been the righter of wrongs-is that not true?”

“More or less, I suppose.”

“And now that I see you,” Xavier went on enthusiastically, and with a total lack of self-consciousness, “I am even happier. I know that what a man looks like often tells nothing of what he really is. But you are exactly as I had pictured you- tall and strong and handsome, and with the air of a pirate! It is wonderful just to be looking at you!”

The Saint modestly averted his eyes.

This was especially easy to do because the shift permitted him to gaze again at a woman who sat alone at a table across the room. He had noticed her as soon as she entered, and had been glancing at her as often as he could without seeming too inattentive to his host.

With her fair coloring and the unobtrusive elegance of her clothes, she was obviously an American. She was still stretching out her first cocktail, and referring occasionally to the plain gold watch on her wrist: she was, of course, waiting for somebody. The wedding ring on her left hand suggested that it was probably a husband-no lover worthy of her time would be likely to keep such a delectable dish waiting. But, there was no harm in considering, married women did travel alone, and sometimes wait for female friends; they also came to Mexico to divorce husbands; and, as a matter of final realism, an attractive woman wearing a wedding ring abroad was not necessarily even married at all, but might wear it just as a kind of flimsy chastity belt, in the hope of discouraging a certain percentage of unwanted Casanovas. The chances were tenuous enough, but an incorrigible optimist like the Saint could always dream… .

“And now,” Xavier was saying, “tell me what you are going to do in Mexico.”

Simon brought his eyes and his ideas back reluctantly.

“I’m just a tourist.” He had said it so often, in so many places, that it was getting to be like a recitation. “I’m not planning to make any trouble, or get into any. I want to see that new sensation, El Loco, fight bulls. And I’ll probably go to Cuernavaca, and Oáxaca, and try the fishing at Acapulco. Just like all the other gringos.”

“That is almost disappointing.”

“It ought to make you happy.”

“It is not very exciting, being a policeman here. I should have enjoyed matching wits with you. Of course, in the end I should catch you, but for a time it would be interesting.”

“Of course,” Simon agreed politely.

“It would have been a great privilege to observe you in action,” Xavier said. “I have always been an admirer of your methods. Besides, before. I caught you, you might even have done some good.”

The Saint raised his eyebrows.

“With anyone so efficient as you on the job, there can’t be much left to do.”

“I do my best. But unfortunately, when I make an arrest, I have not always accomplished much.”

“You mean-the court doesn’t always take it from there?”

“Much too often.”

“Your candor keeps taking my breath away.”

Xavier shrugged.

“It is the truth. It is not exactly a rare complaint, even in your country. And absolute justice is a much younger idea here. We are still inclined to accept graft as the prerogative of those in power-perhaps it is the legacy of our bandit tradition. It will change, some day. But at the present, there are many times when I would personally like to see a man like you taking the law into his own hands. You will have coffee? And brandy?”

He snapped his fingers at a waiter and gave the order; and the Saint lighted a cigarette and stole another glance at the honey-blond young woman across the room. She was still alone, and looking a good deal more impatient. It would not be much longer before the moment would be most propitious for venturing a move-if he had only been alone himself. The thought made an irksome subtraction from his full enjoyment of the fact that a police officer was not only buying his dinner but seemed to be handing him an open invitation to resume his career of outlawry.

With a slight effort, he turned again to the more uncommon of the two attractions.

“Are you really wishing I’d un-refonn myself,” he asked curiously, “or are you just dissatisfied with the Government? Maybe another revolution would produce a better system.”

“By no means,” Xavier said quickly. Then, as the Saint’s blue eyes continued to rest on him levelly, he received their unspoken question, and said: “No, I do not say that because I am forced to. The change must come with time and education and growing up. I believe that the Government we have today is as good as any other we would get. No, it is better. In fact, it is already too honest for the people who are most anxious to change it. There is only one party which could seriously threaten a revolution today-and who are its sponsors!”

“You mean Jose Jalisco?”

“A figurehead-an orator who blows hot air wherever the most pesos tell him! I mean the men behind Jalisco.”

“Who are they?”

“The Enriquez brothers. But I do not suppose your newspapers have room for our scandals. For many years they were making millions, at the expense of the Mexican people, out of Government construction contracts. It was our new President who ordered the investigation which exposed them; and who threw out the officials who helped them. Even now, they may face imprisonment, and fines that would ruin them. They are the ones who would like to see a revolution for Jalisco… . They are sitting opposite you now, at the table next to the young woman you have been staring at for the last hour.”

Simon winced very slightly, and looked carefully past the blonde.

He had noticed the two men before, observing that they also had been watching the girl and obviously discussing her assets and potentialities, but he had not paid them much attention beyond that. As competition for her favor, he figured that they would not have given him too much trouble. They were excessively well groomed and tailored and manicured, with ostentatious jewelry in their neckties and on their fingers, but their pockmarked features had a cruel and willful cast that would hardly appeal to a nice girl at first sight. Now that Xavier identified them, the family resemblance was evident.

“The bigger one is Manuel,” Xavier said. “The smaller is Pablo. But one is as bad as the other. To protect their millions, and to make more, they would not care how many suffered.”

Waiters poured coffee and brought brandy, and Simon took advantage of the diversion to study the Enriquez brothers again. This also allowed him to keep track of the trim young blonde. And this time, when he was not looking directly at her, he was able to see that she was looking at him, with what seemed to be considerable interest. It was an effort for him to suppress a growing feeling of frustration. “Do you seriously believe they could start a revolution?” he asked Xavier.

“I know they have talked of it. Jalisco has a large following. He has the gift, which Hitler and Mussolini had, of inflaming mobs. But a mob, today, can do nothing without modern weapons. That is where the Enriquez brothers come in. They have the money to provide them. One day, I think, they will try to do that. They could be plotting it now, while we look at them.”

“For a couple of desperate conspirators,” Simon commented, “they don’t seem very embarrassed to have you watching them.”