The Saint and the People Importers (6 page)

“Why?”

“It would boost circulation, for one thing.”

Once more a bit of sun threatened to break through her cloudy expression, but she fought it back and with mock symptoms of muscular anguish perched on the arm of an overstuffed chair opposite him. The pretence of pain struck him as a fascinating plea for sympathy beneath her granite outer layers.

“You may be the Saint,” she said, “but I’ll bet you’re here spying for another newspaper, trying to nose in on all my research.”

“Even you don’t believe that,” Simon responded casually. “Or else you’re the wildest romantic since Richard Strauss. I’ll tell you why I’m here: you’re an expert on the immigrant-blackmail racket …” He stopped and nodded towards the television set, which had been on the periphery of his mind for some time. “And speaking of racket, couldn’t we cut down the volume of that mayhem?”

“It’s my telly and I’ll play it as flaming loud as I please!” she retorted defiantly.

Simon sighed.

“I’m sure you will. I assume that an obnoxious pugnaciousness is a permanent part of your character?”

She got up and turned the volume of the television down and-even more unexpectedly-actually smiled.

“Impertinence is the word,” she said. “I’m impertinent, because my face is impertinent. It’s my nose and mouth.” She prodded those features with her fingertips as if they were made of soft clay. “My nose is too small and my mouth is too big. They make me look impertinent even when I’m not, so I always used to get the blame for everything no matter what I did, so I reckoned if I were going to be accused of being impertinent anyway I might as well be impertinent.”

“And pugnacious,” the Saint insisted.

“Right.” She gave him a silent tigerish snarl. “Now tell me what you’re doing here before I gobble you up.”

“Fine,” said Simon. “Much to my subsequent regret I got interested in this immigration mess, read your article, and got involved. I came over here to see if you could help me. That’s it.”

“Just like that?” she asked sceptically. “Why are you interested? What got you involved? I thought you never got yourself into messes unless you were sure you could come out with a profit.”

“The rewards of virtue have a way of not guaranteeing themselves until after you’ve committed yourself. I’m a speculator, you see, as well as a friend of the downtrodden. Now let’s make this a two-way interview: since you obviously couldn’t have known I was coming for a little tete-a-tete, how come you were hiding behind the door with the welcome mat ready to toss over my head?”

The girl glanced at the blessedly silent television screen, where an almost perfectly cubical blackbearded man was bouncing a rubber boned African to and fro across the ring. Then she sat down.

“If you did read my article today you know the gang that killed that Pakistani last night threatened to cut me up if I said too much.” She shrugged. “I thought you might be one of them.”

“Now that you know different, how about telling me all about the rest of your singlehanded campaign against these thugs? I assume it’s singlehanded.”

“It is,” she replied, “but I don’t see why I should tell you anything. This is my living, friend, and even if you are the Saint how do I know you’re not working for somebody who’s not on my side?”

“As you grow to know and love me I’m sure you’ll realise just how ludicrous that suggestion is. For one thing, why should anybody with my ill-gotten riches want to become an undercover agent for anybody-especially some tight-fisted scandal sheet?”

She shrugged uneasily.

“Why should anybody with the loot you’re supposed to have stashed away want to do anything-except spend it?”

“Because life is action,” Simon said. “Is that good enough for you?”

“No.”

“You’re hard to please.”

“You’re right. If I wasn’t I’d still be juggling paper clips in some back office-and I wouldn’t be single at the ripe old age of twenty-six.”

“Getting worried about that?” Simon asked with a grin.

“No,” she said with determined carelessness. “I didn’t say I couldn’t please, I said I was hard to please.”

“Granted. Now, how about some kind of a deal between the two of us? You tell me what you know, I give you exclusive publishing rights to anything we find out, and I’ll even undertake to keep you alive until the story’s finished.”

She was seriously considering his words now.

“It sounds like you get most of the benefits,” she said after a few seconds. “I can keep myself alive and I’ve already got exclusive publishing rights on anything I find out.”

“That’s rather debatable,” the Saint opined. “I wouldn’t bet one moulting Bombay duck on your chances of being alive this time next week if you keep on the way you’re going-and if I have to go into this thing without you I might have to ally myself with some rival of yours who’s just as interested in a hot scoop as you are.”

She sat up stiffly and stared at him in appalled outrage.

“Why, you… . you …”

“Cad?” suggested Simon.

“Crook!” said the girl.

“Businessman,” Simon amended. “Why fight it? We both stand to benefit.”

She decided not to blast off, and settled into her chair cushions again.

“All right,” she agreed reluctantly. “With one more condition: if we’re going into this together we’re really going into it together. You have to promise me you’ll take me with you wherever you go and always tell me what’s happening … especially that you’ll take me everywhere you go and don’t do anything without me.”

“Sounds like an intriguing proposal,” the Saint said.

His hostess flushed slightly, opened her mouth and closed it again before she finally spoke.

“When there’s a line to draw, I’ll draw it,” she said. “Do you agree?”

He hesitated just a few seconds before answering, then he raised his hands briefly in a gesture of acquiescence.

“Whither I go thou shalt go,” he said. “It’s a deal. And now, since we’re going to become inseparable, may I ask what your intimates call you? ‘Slugger?’ ‘Killer?’”

“Tammy,” she said. “Any objections?”

“Not if I’m admitted to the club. So now let’s get down to facts. Just how much do you really know about this immigration gang?”

“More than I had the nerve to print,” she stated.

“I noticed you didn’t name names. Do you know any?”

“Names?” she asked. “Yes, a couple. I don’t know who’s at the top of the whole thing, but I know who does the dirty work and I’ve got a pretty complete picture of the way the extortion side of the business operates.”

“As part of our bargain, how about giving me the names of the thugs you do know?”

Tammy Rowan looked at him with a peculiar mysteriousness and then said something that rang an alarm through every fibre in his body.

“I’ll do better than that: in just about ten seconds you can see one of them.”

3

Tammy saw the Saint tense, and her turquoise eyes glinted with amusement. She pointed at the television screen.

“On there,” she said. “Believe me, I haven’t invited him up for supper.”

She got out of her chair and turned up the volume of the television. One of the. wrestling matches had ended and another was about to begin. The ring was empty except for the announcer, who was stepping into the centre with his microphone in hand. Tammy spoke before he did.

“The charming character you’re about to see is the highest man on the totem pole that I know about,” she said. “He’s made himself a pile of money off the racket and you almost never see him wrestle any more.”

The crowd was cheering happily as a muscular sandy-haired young man with a face out of a toothpaste advertisement bounded into the wrestling ring.

“Cleancut rat,” Simon commented.

“That’s not him,” said the girl. “Here he comes.”

The new arrival was accompanied down the aisle by a wave of jeers and boos which swelled to a crest as he climbed stolidly up on to the canvas in his corner. Even before he came from the aisle into the lights and turned so that the TV camera could catch his face Simon more than suspected who he was. Suddenly in close-up on the screen flashed the muttonchop-whiskered beady-eyed countenance of the huge man Simon had seen outside the Golden Crescent.

“We have a mutual acquaintance,” he murmured with a quiet satisfaction.

She looked at him sharply. The announcer was introducing the sandy-haired wrestler, who drew cheers.

“You know him already?” she asked.

“The one with the weedy jowls? Yes. I haven’t had the pleasure of a chat with him, but I saw him this evening for the first time.”

The Saint and Tammy both paused and looked at the screen as the announcer pointed to the giant, silk-robed Pakistani.

“And in this corner, from London, weighing seventeen stone five, Kalki the Conqueror.”

To coincide with his formal presentation to the unadoring public, Kalki the Conqueror stripped off his robe and raised both massive arms and flexed his muscles. The bombardment of the arena with eight tons of excruciatingly aromatic decayed eggs would have produced a more gleeful response in the crowd than did the unveiling of Kalki the Conqueror. Their collective howl rattled the loudspeaker, and several of their number ventured to stand up and shriek insults from the safety of the fourth, seventh, and tenth rows.

Kalki, in what was apparently a trademark combination of gestures, faced the crowd, and rubbed the bald top of his head vigorously with his left hand while he grimaced and roared at the mob.

“Popular chap,” the Saint remarked.

“He might be funny if I didn’t know what he did in his spare time,” Tammy said. She forced her eyes from the spectacle on the television screen. “You saw him?” she asked. “When? Where?”

Simon told her about his arrival at the Golden Crescent—the van and the two men in the alley.

“Yes!” she interrupted eagerly. “That’s him. And the little one with him, that was Shortwave!”

“Shortwave?” asked Simon.

“Yes. He’s the other one whose name I know.”

The wrestling match began with conventional circling and chary grappling, but Simon was more interested in his conversation with Tammy.

“What’s the little one’s real name?” he asked.

“How would I know his real name?” she asked impatiently. “My sources know people by what they’re called, not by their birth certificates.”

“So Kalki is just plain Kalki?”

“Right. That’s his stage name, or whatever you call it, and that’s how he’s known.”

“If he wrestles on TV he must have had to sign his real name on quite a few papers.”

“Of course,” she said with self-defensive impatience. “I could have found out his name. Anybody could have, and it would be just one more Pakistani-Moslem name. I’m interested in what he does, not in what his middle initial is.” She leaned suddenly towards a side table and snatched a pack of cigarettes. She never did anything slowly. “Smoke?” she asked.

Simon shook his head and she lit one and left it between her lips as she talked.

“Of course I was going to find out his name,” she said. “And Shortwave’s, too, but I haven’t been on this story as long as that article of mine today might imply. I haven’t had time yet to go combing through other people’s files, and I don’t think I’ll find out anything very useful when I do.”

The Saint was watching the wrestling match as he listened to Tammy. Like other such displays it showed every symptom of being a preplanned ham performance which would be seen by the relatively sophisticated as a sadistically spiced athletic exhibition and by the dull-witted as an horrific battle between pure good and pure evil.

Kalki the Conqueror was, of course, pure evil. While his wholesome opponent remained calm in adversity, patient with every provocation, and obedient to the referee’s commands, Kalki brutally raked his foe’s neck over the ropes, twisted his ears, hit him in the lumbar region with his fist, tried to smother him by lying on his face and indulged in a multitude of other illegal atrocities. But even the most minute successful use of force on Cleancut’s part was enough to throw Kalki into titanic tantrums of lunatic rage.

The crowd adored hating him, and when suddenly Robin Goodfellow appeared to lose his temper and grabbed Kalki by his grandiose side-whiskers and hurled him over the ropes and out of the ring, the plebs went wild with delight. One righteous but emotional lady leapt from her seat and indignantly smote Kalki about the back and shoulders with her handbag as he crawled back onto the platform.

“You were going to tackle that with your 007 gas ring?” Simon asked, as the giant roared and shook his mighty fists at the audience.

“He’s all hot air,” Tammy said contemptuously. “Anyway, I knew he was on television tonight.”

“Three hundred pounds of hot air is a lot of hot air,” the Saint said. “A couple of hours ago I saw what it could do to a man’s right arm.”

She turned her head to look at him.

“How? What do you mean?”

“I didn’t finish telling you what happened after I saw Kalki and his pal outside the restaurant this evening. Do you know anything about a waiter at the Golden Crescent named Mahmud?”

“No;” said Tammy.

She got out of her chair and turned off the TV set, at the same time keeping her eyes intently on Simon as he went on with his story.

“Apparently he incurred the displeasure of the gang because one minute he was serving me a Peter Dawson and the next minute he was lying in the back room of the restaurant with a broken arm.”

“Good grief!” Tammy exclaimed, and grabbed for the telephone at the end of the sofa.

“What are you doing?”

“Calling my paper, of course. You haven’t told anybody else, have you?”

Simon jumped up and clamped his hand over the telephone dial before she could spin it more than once.

“No, I haven’t,” he said, “and you’re not telling anybody, either.”

She was aghast.

“Why not? They killed one man last night and broke another one’s arm this evening. That’s news, boyo!”

“I’m sure that with big enough headlines it could be made to look like news, but if you implied that Mahmud had run into anything more malignant than an unbalanced crate of beans you’d be letting yourself in for a lawsuit.”