The Saint on the Spanish Main (25 page)

“All right,” she said.

She stood up. He picked up her bag again and
walked
with her
towards the desk.

“You’ve taken my name,” she said.
“Now what can I register as?”

“How about something nice and
feminine,” said the
Saint, “like Isolde?”

She looked up at him, so shameless and
debonair, so
reckless and impudent even with the shadow of prison
bars
across his path and her own hand empowered to
drop the gate on him,
a careless corsair with nothing but
laughter in his eyes; and her white
teeth bit down on her
lip.

“Oh, damn you,” she said. “Damn you, damn
you!”

THE VIRGIN ISLANDS:

The Old Treasure Story

162

The Virgin Islands are named together as one
geograph
ical
group, but some of them belong to Great Britain
and some to the United States. And thereby hangs this
tale.

“You see, the treasure is right in the
middle,” April
Mallory
told the Saint.

“How awkward of it,” murmured Simon
Templar.

Christopher Columbus discovered the islands
east of
Puerto Rico on his second voyage, in 1493, but Spain
did
nothing about them. The British occupied Tortola in
1666, and enlarged their claim to the
islands east of
there. The islands of St.
Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John
changed
hands several times, but were held longest by
the Danes, until Denmark sold them to the United
States in 1917.

Now between the island of St. John and the
island of
Tortola to the northeast of it runs a strip of water
once
called, rather pompously, Sir Francis Drake Channel,
known to
the buccaneers more picturesquely as the Virgin’s Gangway, and shown on modern
charts, in a
dull modern way, as The Narrows. But today’s comparatively
dull name, like many prosaic modern things,
is unarguably
efficient, at least as a description; for the
channel is most
certainly very narrow, as such straits go,
being in places less
than two miles across.

“So what you might call the frontier
runs somewhere through there,” April Mallory explained. “But even the
maps only show a dotted line which they call ‘approx
imate.’ Apparently
England and America never had a
full-dress meeting to decide exactly where to
draw it.
They got along fine anyway, the English on one island
and the
Americans on the other, with nothing to squab
ble about in between.
Until now, when it’s a question of
whose sea bottom the treasure is on.”

The Saint sipped his Dry Sack.

“That isn’t in the script,” he
objected.

“What script?”

“The one Jack Donohue lent me.”

“And who’s he?”

The Saint sighed.

“Someone has to be kidding somebody,”
he said. “But I’ll play it straight, if you like.”

“1 wish you would.”

“From the very beginning?”

“Please.”

“All right. Columbus named them the
Virgin Islands
because
there seemed to be an awful lot of them.”

“That was in 1493.”

“Christopher was thinking specifically
of the legend
of St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins from Brit
ain,”
said the Saint reprovingly. “Who were massacred
by the Huns somewhere
around Cologne in stalwart de
fense of their virtue.”

“What were they doing there?”

“I believe they’d been on a trip to
Rome, among other things. A sort of medieval Girl Scouts’ junket.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, more than a thousand years before
Christ
opher.”

“I don’t suppose England will ever
replace them
now,” April said. “But you don’t need to go
back quite
that far. Let’s get more contemporary.”

“Meaning around the time we picked each
other up?”

“If you can’t make it sound any more
romantic.”

It was true, however. An hour ago they had
set eyes
on each other for the first time, seated on adjacent
stools
at the bar of the Golden Galleon, a newly opened place
of
refreshment in the town of Charlotte Amalie, which is the town of the island of
St. Thomas; and it can be stipu
lated that all eyes were taken with what they
saw. She
had clear blue eyes and light red-gold hair and a face
and figure that any pirate who
ever trod those islands
would have rather
captured than any galleon; and with
the
same clear blue eyes and bronze swashbuckler’s face the Saint looked every inch
as much a pirate as any man
ever
could have, even in such an imitation galleon as
that. So that it had been very easy to strike up the con
versation which just lately seemed to have gotten
slightly
out of hand.

“Okay,” he said. “I know
there’s an outfit from Hollywood on location here, shooting footage for an
epic
entitled
Perilous Treasure,
in gorgeous Technicolor and
colossal
Cinemascope.”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“Jack Donohue is the director. He happens to be an old pal of
mine. As a matter of fact, he wants me to
double
for the star in some skin-diving shots, on account
of the hired hero is worried about sharks or
something.
That’s why he let me read
the script.”

“How interesting.”

“So if you’re trying to hook me for some
gag, darling,
for
publicity or anything else, I’m the wrong fish.”

“I’m not talking about any movie script, and it’s no
gag,” she said. “This is a real
treasure.”

Simon blinked. He could see now that she was
completely serious.

“From pirates, yet?”

“In a way. It was a Spanish ship, the
Santa
Cecilia,
loaded with gold from Mexico. Blackbeard the pirate
got wind
of her somehow, and he was waiting for her when she left Puerto Rico. He chased
her around these
islands and overtook her in the Narrows. Either his
gunners
hit her in the powder magazine with an unlucky
shot, or the Spanish
captain decided to sink her rather
than be captured. Anyway, she blew up
and sank before
the pirates could get their hands on any of the
loot.”

“You look very young to remember all
this so clear
ly.”

“One of my
great-great-etcetera-grandfathers sailed
with Blackbeard for
a while. He kept a diary, and he
drew a chart in it that shows exactly where
the
Santa Cecilia
went down.”

“Didn’t Blackbeard or anyone else try
to fish up her
cargo
before it got barnacles on it?”

“She sank in about eighty feet of
water, and they
couldn’t swim down that far. They didn’t have any div
ing
apparatus in those days.”

“But since then.”

“The diary was handed down from father
to son, and
someone was always going to do something about it, but I
suppose they got a little more skeptical with each gen
eration, and somehow
nobody ever quite got around to
it. Until me.”

“And you spill the whole thing to the first stranger you meet
in a bar,” Simon remarked pensively.

She shook her head.

“I’m not quite that dumb. I heard you
give your name
in that last shop you were in, and I followed you.”

“I didn’t see you.”

“I hope not. I was trying on a bathing
suit in the back
room. But they told me which way you’d gone. The
pick-up
was entirely mutual. I thought a damsel in dis
tress could trust the
Saint.”

Simon nodded, and lighted a cigarette. His
astonish
ment was already little more than a memory. An or
dinary man
would probably have still been gasping and
goggle-eyed, if he
were able to believe the girl at all; but
to Simon Templar
there was nothing too fantastic about a tale of sunken pirate treasure, or that
it should be told
to him. In fact, the really extraordinary thing was that
in
all the time he had spent among those islands of the
Caribbean
which history and fiction had adorned with
all the trappings of
the Spanish Main, he had waited so
long for his first direct contact
with such an obvious
story.

“What’s your trouble?” he asked.

2

The other ingredients were almost standard for
that
kind of situation.

April was the last direct descendant of the
Mallory
who had sailed with Blackbeard. Her father had been
shot down
in Libya. April grew up and went to business school, after various experiments
had risen to be an edi
torial assistant in a publishing house, where
for forty
hours a week in the office and uncounted hours at home
she
wrestled with strictly literary if not always literate adventure. When her
mother had died not long ago, and April had found herself not only relieved of
the respon
sibility of a partial dependent but the heiress to a
nest
egg of almost eight thousand dollars, she had realized
that such
an opportunity was never likely to knock
again, and had
decided to take one reckless fling at real
adventure before
resigning herself to the relatively hum
drum alternatives of
marriage or career or their com
bination.

“So here I am,” she said,
“with a couple of aqualungs,
and a boat that I chartered here, and
that old chart. And
it’s true, Saint. The wreck’s exactly where it’s
supposed
to be. I saw it!”

“What did it look like?” Simon asked
casually.

“Not a bit like they’d do it in the
movies. But I was
ready for that. You know, there’d be nothing left of a
wooden
hull that was sunk in these waters as long ago as that. The marine worms would
have eaten it all up. And
the iron rusts and gets covered with coral.
I’d read all
about that in books.”

She could have done that; but at least she
wasn’t
trying to sell him the description of a picturesque movie-studio wreck,
as one sizable category of inventors would
have done. He could
still swallow the story.

“But you were able to recognize
something.”

“The shapes of some guns, and cannon
balls, things
like that—even with coral growing on them. When you
see it yourself, you’ll
know.”

“But now,” said the Saint,
“there has to be a villain.”

“There is.”

“Name?”

“You may know it. Duncan Rawl.”

Simon did know it. Duncan Rawl was a
professional
world traveler and self-styled adventurer who had made
a very
comfortable living out of his own tall tales. He had been almost everywhere and
done almost everything, at least according to himself; and although there were
certain spoilsports who claimed to know that his
familiarity with the
far places and his role in the stirring
incidents which he
recounted had been a lot less rich and
glorious than the
way he told it, their voices were prac
tically drowned in
the acclaim of the largely feminine
audience which bought his books and
subscribed to his
profitable lecture tours.

Simon also recalled other anecdotes about Mr.
Rawl’s inclination to believe in and enlarge upon his own pub
licity,
which had brought him into several news stories
of unquestionable
authenticity and somewhat less glam
orous implication, which had prompted one sharp-tongued
columnist to suggest revising his name to
Drunken
Brawl… . Yes, Mr. Rawl had the makings of
a most
 
acceptable heavy.

“You’d met him through your job with the
pub
lisher,” he said. “So when you decided to shoot your roll
on this
treasure hunt, you thought he was just the guy to
go to for some expert advice.”