The Saint on the Spanish Main (24 page)

He took care to be waiting in his room at the right
hotel for Mr. Quire to announce his arrival from
the
lobby, and came down to the
meeting like a buccaneer
to the deck
of a prize.

It made no difference to him that the basic routine
was one of the oldest in the time-honored confidence
game. It
was the rightness, the aptness, the neatness, and
the justice of the
situation that made it worth while; and
he could no more have
withheld anything from his performance than an actor with grease paint in his
veins
could have walked through the part of Hamlet.

“Here is the list you asked for,”
said Mr. Quire, when
they were settled in a corner of the terrace
bar with a
couple
of tall frosted Pimm’s Cups.

Simon scanned through the closely typewritten
sheet
and observed that the name of Pedro Gamma was on it.

“And here,” said Mr. Quire, “is
the money.”

He produced a thick bundle of hundred-dollar
bills.
Simon
nonchalantly began to count them.

“I hope you’re not worried about giving
this to me,” he murmured.

“Not a bit,” said Mr. Quire
cheerfully. “To be honest,
I did send a wire to New York, as you
suggested, and I
had a reply from your Mr. Tantrum this morning. He gave
you a good reference.”

“Just the same,” said the Saint,
“I’d rather not be
responsible for this much cash. Let’s put it
in the hotel
safe
before anything happens to it.”

They went together to the hotel desk and
asked for a
deposit envelope. Mr. Quire himself put the money in it and
sealed it. The Saint took it for a moment to examine
the flap and press
it down more firmly, and turned very slightly to call the clerk back. In that
infinitesimal moment the envelope passed under the open front of his
jacket,
and a duplicate which he had obtained before
hand and stuffed with
a suitable number of rectangles of
newspaper took its place and was handed to the clerk.

Mr. Quire signed his name in the space
provided on
the envelope, and received the receipt. Then they went
back to
their drinks.

“It’s okay for you to keep the
receipt,” said the Saint
carelessly. “That part is only a
formality anyhow. Just
so long as we go to get the envelope back
together and
it hasn’t been touched in the meantime. That way, I can
truthfully say that your bond has
been on deposit, and
I don’t have the
responsibility for it.”

“I quite understand,” said Mr.
Quire. He took a
healthy mouthful from his glass; and Simon was almost
moved to
compassion by the prodigious effort he made to appear unconcerned as he went on:
“Er—would you
have
any idea how long it’s likely to be?”

“Before you get your money back, or
before we give
you some of ours?”

“Well, both.”

“If I don’t have too much trouble
locating the people
on your list, I might be able to make my report in a
week. As
soon as that’s done, I can release your deposit.
The board in New
York will act pretty promptly on my recommendation. Sometimes I’ve known them
to send
the first hundred thousand almost by return mail.”

Even if Mr. Quire took steps to keep in
touch with
several of the names on his list, which in his eagerness
to
see the investigation completed he would very likely do,
it would
be at least two days before he became seriously
perturbed by a gradual
realization that nobody he
checked with had yet been interviewed, and
at least
twenty-four hours more before growing uneasiness and
busier
inquiries made him suspicious enough to risk
going back for a peek
in the envelope where his deposit
was supposedly resting. Simon could
therefore figure
that he had a minimum of three days, and even longer
with a
little luck, in which to remove himself to other
hunting-grounds and
cover his back trail; and in an age
of air travel that gave him the whole
world to get lost in.
But even so, the lunch that he had to sit
through was an
ordeal, for it was not only an anticlimactic waste of
time
but it also obliged him to listen for two hours to Mr.
Quire’s
nauseating hypocrisies about the good deeds he planned to do with his
Foundation grant when he got it.

It felt more like two months before the
Saint was
gracefully able to escort Mr. Quire through the lobby on
his way
out.

“Don’t expect to see much of me for a
few days,” he said. “As a matter of fact, I noticed that some of the
references
you gave me were in Ponce and other towns,
and I’ve a good mind
to pack up and go touring. It’ll
give me a chance to see some of the island
while I look
them up. I’ll probably do that first.”

They strolled through the wide entrance. In
the drive
way outside, a girl with her back to them was saying
goodbye to a couple in a car, a middle-aged man and woman. With an exchange of
hand-waves, the car drove
off, and she turned. It was Tristan Brown.

“I’ll wait till I hear from you,”
said Mr. Quire conten
tedly. “And thanks for the lunch.”

She was hardly more than an arm’s length
away, and her momentary surprise at coming face to face with the Saint was
changing to a quick smile. The Saint had no
idea what his own
expression was but he became aware
that Mr. Quire was holding out a hand.
He took it me
chanically.

“It’s been a great pleasure meeting
you,” said Mr.
Quire, with dreadful distinctness.
“Au revoir,
Mr.
Brown.”

5

All around the Saint tourists and business
men, guests
and visitors, doormen and taxi drivers, crisscrossed and
prattled and honked about their sundry affairs; but Si
mon
Templar felt as if he was marooned in a crystal sphere of utter stillness and
isolation that shut out all
sound and bustle as if it were taking place
in another parallel dimension. He could see the name hit the girl’s
ears like
an intangible blow, see her stop dead in her
tracks with the
smile fading frozenly from her face; he could feel the physical body that had
once belonged to
him shaking Mr. Quire’s hand and muttering some commonplace
farewell, and feel her stare resting on him like
a searchlight; and
through each long-drawn second he
waited for her voice to say something,
anything, the in
evitable words that would lead inevitably into an un
predictable
morass of disaster.

But he heard nothing.

He watched Mr. Quire cross over to his large
black
Cadillac, get in, and drive away. And still she had not
spoken.

Then he had to look at her again.

She was still standing there, with a bellhop
behind her
patiently holding a light valise.

“Well,” she said. “Mr.
Brown.”

“Fancy meeting you,” he said.

“Mr.
Tristan
Brown, of course.”

“Of course,” said the Saint. He
eyed her speculatively.
“I suppose it wouldn’t even be any use telling you I
wasn’t talking to Mr. Quire about the Ogden H.
Kiel
Foundation.”

“None at all. Why perjure yourself, on
top of every
thing else?”

“All right, tell me the rest.”

“I’m only wondering how much bond he
put up, to
have himself considered as a possible administrator for
Puerto
Rico.”

“Twenty thousand dollars, to be
exact.”

“In a sealed envelope which is now full
of waste pa
per.”

“I can see you’ve read stories.”

“Dozens of them.”

The conversation was definitely lagging.

Simon searched hazily for another approach,
and sud
denly it was literally thrown at him, in the person of a
thin
excited threadbare man who erupted from some
where and practically
flung himself on the Saint’s neck.
He hugged the Saint with both arms,
slapped him on the
back, grasped his hands and wrung them, and gargled
incoherently for several seconds before he could get a
word out.

“Se
ñ
or
Brown!
Le buscaba en todos los hoteles
—I know
I will
find you somewhere—I had to tell you——
”

He went on in a torrent of yattering Spanish.

Simon listened for a while, and finally was
able to
subdue him. He turned to the girl.

“Excuse me,” he said. “May I
introduce Mr. Pedro
Gamma? I told you about him once, if you remember.
He’s just telling me that Mr.
Quire introduced him to
the vice-president
of a Stateside textile company who’s
looking
for a factory site here, and gave Pedro his mortgage back and told him to make
the deal on his own and
just pay
back the loan. So Pedro showed him the place
today, and the guy grabbed it.”

“S
é
,
se
ñ
or.
And as you tell me
something like this may
happen when you come to see me, I ask him
what you say it is worth, and he does not bargain at all. We make
the
escrow already—for fifteen thousand dollars!”

“I’m glad to hear it,” said the Saint. “But I’m
busy
right now. Why don’t you run along home
and tell your
wife?”

“S
é
se
ñ
or!”
the little man beamed
at Tristan. “I un
derstand.
Perdone, se
ñ
ora.
But I had to tell …”

He scuttled away in radiant confusion.

Simon turned to the girl again.

“You see,” he explained, “I
also told Quire that he’d
have to give us a list of all his business
deals for some
years back, and that they’d all be investigated. I
figured
that would send him rushing around to straighten out some of his old
fast shuffles.”

Then he saw that her smile had come back at
last.

“We can’t just stand here all
afternoon,” she said.

She looked around for the bellhop, but he
had long
ago put down her bag and gone off to gossip with the
doorman.
He came running back, but Simon gave him a
coin and picked up
the valise himself. He led her across
the lobby to a secluded corner, and they sat down.

“Now if the defendant may ask a
question,” said the
Saint, prodding the bag with his toe,
“what are
you
doing here—with this?”

“The people I made that trip with just
dropped me
off,
and I was going to check in.”

“We had a nice cozy hotel. This is a
gaudy and ghastly
tourist trap, where even the newsstand has its own fancy
prices on cigarettes and magazines. Why change?”

She gazed at him levelly.

“Maybe I thought I’d better stay away
from someone
I was
getting to like too much.”

“And now, to top it all, you find
you’ve got to decide
whether to turn him in to the cops.”

“I don’t know why I’m even hesitating.
Except that he
seems to manage to do such Saintly things on the side.
It’s a
hell of a spot for a lawyer to be in.” She rubbed a
suddenly
tired hand across her eyes. “I’ll have to
think… .”

“Why don’t you do that?” he
suggested. “Take a
shower—have a nap—get rested and freshened
up, and
meet me for cocktails and dinner. Let’s be as sophisticated as that,
anyway. Then you can decide whether I sleep in the hoosegow or——
”

“But shouldn’t you be, as the phrase
goes, on the
lam?”

“I’m in no hurry till tomorrow. Quire
won’t suspect anything for days; and when he does find out, there’s a
good
sporting chance that he’ll feel too foolish to
squawk. The last
thing a guy like that can face is looking
ridiculous. I’m not
gambling on it, but I’ve got plenty of
time.”