SEŃOR SAINT
Leslie Charteris
Contents
I.
The Pearls of Peace
II.
The Revolution Racket
III..
The Romantic Matron
IV.
The Golden Frog
BOOK ONE
The Pearls of Peace
1.
Before the idea becomes too firmly established that Simon Templar (or, as it usually seems easier to call him, the Saint) never bothered to steal anything of which the value could be expressed in less than six figures, I want to tell here the story of the most trivial robbery he ever committed.
The popular conception of the meanest theft that can be committed is epitomized in the cliche of “stealing pennies from a blind man.” Yet that, almost literally, is what the Saint once did. And he is perhaps prouder of it than of any other larceny in a list which long ago assumed the dimensions of an epic.
The Saint has been called by quite a thesaurus of romantic names, of which “The Robin Hood of Modern Crime” and “The Twentieth Century’s Brightest Buccaneer” are probably the hardest worked. By public officials obligated to restrain his self-appointed and self-administered kind of justice, and by malefactors upon whom it had been exercised, he was described by an even more definitive glossary of terms which cannot be quoted in a publication available to the general public. To himself he was only an adventurer born in the wrong age, a cavalier cheated out of his sword, a pirate robbed of his black flag, with a few inconvenient ideals which had changed over the years in detail but never in principle. But by whatever adjectives you choose to delineate him, and with whatever you care to make of his motives, the sober arithmetical record certainly makes him, statistically, one of the greatest robbers of all time. Estimates of the total loot which at one time or another passed through his hands, as made by mathematically-minded students of these stories, vary in their net amount: his expenses were always high, and his interpretation of a tithe to charity invariably generous. But by any system of calculation, they run comfortably into the millions.
Such a result should surprise nobody. Simon Templar liked big adventures, and in big affairs there is usually big money involved, this being the sordid state of incentives in our day and age.
But the Saint’s greatness was that he could be just as interested in small matters when they seemed big enough to him. And that is what the incident I am referring to was about.
This happened around the town of La Paz, which in Spanish means only “Peace.”
2.
La Paz lies near the southern tip of the peninsula of Baja California, “Lower California” in English-a long narrow leg of land which stretches down from the southern border of California and the United States. On account of the peculiarly ineradicable obsession of American statesmen with abstract lines of latitude and longitude as boundaries, instead of more intelligible geographic or ideographic frontiers, which accepted the ridiculous 38th-parallel partition of Korea as naturally as the quaint geometrical shape of most American state lines, this protuberance was blandly excluded from the deal which brought California into the Union, although topographically it is as obviously a proper part of California as its name implies. There is in technical fact a link of dry land south of the border connecting Baja California with the mainland of Mexico, but there is no practical transportation across it, no civilized way from one to the other without passing through the United States: for all the rest of its length, the Gulf of Lower California, or the Sea of Cortez as the Mexicans know it, thrusts a hundred miles and more of deep water between the two.
Thus, like an almost amputated limb, Baja California hangs in the edge of the Pacific, bound to Mexico by nationality, to California by what terrestrial ligaments it has, nourished by neither and an anomaly to both. The highway artery leaps boldly across to Tijuana and contrives to keep going south to Ensenada, bearing a fair flow of tourist blood; but then almost at once it is a mere dusty trickle of an almost impassable road, navigable only to rugged venturers in jeeps, which meanders through scorched and barren waste lands for hundreds of empty miles to La Paz, which is the end of the line.
La Paz is a port of long defunct importance, seeming to survive mainly because its inhabitants have nowhere else to go. But that was not always true. Here in the fine natural harbor, once, toplofty Spanish galleons came to anchor, and bearded soldier-monks peered hungrily at the rocky shore, eager to convert the heathen with pax vobiscums or bonfires, but with some leaning towards the latter, and always with an eye to the mundane treasures that could be heisted from the pagans in exchange for a sizzling dose of salvation. But the gold of that region, though it was there and is still there, was too hard to extract for their voracious appetite, and they sailed on towards the richer promise of the north. Others, however, who came later and stayed, discovered treasure of another kind under the pellucid warm blue waters near by: once upon a time, the pearl fisheries of La Paz were world famous, far surpassing the product of the South Pacific oyster beds which most people think of in that connection today.
And that is what this story began to be about.
“It was the Japs,” Jocelyn Ormond said. “They put something in the water that killed off all the oysters. They were all up and down this coast just before the war, pretending to be fishermen, but really they were taking soundings and mapping our fortifications and getting ready for all kinds of sabotage. Like that.”
“I know,” said the Saint lazily. “And every one of them had a Leica in his pocket and an admiral’s uniform in his duffel bag. Some of it’s probably true. But can you tell me how destroying the Mexican pearl industry would help their war plans against the United States? Or do you think it was some weird Oriental way of putting a hex on everything connected with pearls, like for instance Pearl Harbor?”
“You’re kidding,” she said sulkily. “The oysters did die. You can’t get away from that.”
When they were first introduced by a joint acquaintance he had had a puzzling feeling that they had met somewhere before. After a while he realized that they had-but it had never been in the flesh. She was a type. She was the half-disrobed siren on the jacket of a certain type of paper-bound fiction. She was the girl in the phony-tough school of detective stories, the girl that the grotesque private eye with the unpaid rent and the bottle of cheap whisky in his desk drawer is always running into, who throws her thighs and breasts at him and responds like hot jelly to his simian virility. She had all the standard equipment-the auburn hair, the bedroom eyes, the fabulous mammary glands, the clothes that clung suggestively to her figure, the husky voice, the full moist lips that looked as if they would respond lecherously enough to satisfy any addict of that style of writing-although the Saint hadn’t yet sampled them. He couldn’t somehow make himself feel like the type of cut-rate Casanova who should have been cast opposite her. He couldn’t shake off a sense of unreality about her perfect embodiment of the legendary super-floozy. But there was no doubt that she was sensational, and in a cautious way he was fascinated.
He knew that other men had been less backward. She was Mrs. Ormond now, but she had discarded Ormond some tune ago in Reno. Before Ormond, there had been another, a man with the earthy name of Ned Yarn. It was Ned Yarn whose resuscitated ghost was with them now, intangibly.
“I mean,” she said, “they were all supposed to have died- until I got that letter from Ned.” “
Simon went to the rail of the balcony which indiscreetly connected their rooms, and gazed out over the harbor and the ugly outlines of La Paz, softened now by the glamor of night lights. They were sitting outside to escape from the sweltering stuffiness of their rooms, the soiled shabbiness of the furniture and decoration, and the sight of the giant cockroaches which shared their tenancy. For such reasons as that, and because your chronicler does not want to be sued for libel, the hotel they were staying at must be nameless.
“Let me see it again,” he said.
She took the worn sheet of cheap paper from her purse and gave it to him, and he held it up to read it by the light from inside the room.
Dear Joss,
I know you will be surprised to hear from me now, but I had no heart to write when I could only make excuses which you wouldn’t believe. You were quite right to divorce me. But now I have found the pearls I came for. I can pay everyone back, and perhaps make everything all right with you too.
The only thing is, it may be delicate to handle. Say nothing to anyone, but send somebody you can trust who knows pearls and doesn’t mind taking a chance. Or come yourself. Whoever comes, go to the Cantina de las Flores in La Paz and ask for Consuelo. She will bring him to me. I won’t let you down this time.
Always your
Ned
The writing was awkward and straggly, up hill and down dale, the long letters overlapping between lines.
“Is this his writing?” Simon asked.
“It wasn’t always that bad. Maybe he was drunk when he wrote it. Now that we’re here, I wonder why I came on this wild-goose chase.” She stared at the anemic residue in her glass. “Fix me another slug, Saint.”
He went back into the room, fished melting ice cubes from the warming water in the pitcher, and poured Peter Dawson over them. That was how she took it, and it never seemed to affect her much. Another characteristic that was strictly from literature.
“That letter is dated over five months ago,” he said. “Did it take all that time to reach you, or did you only just decide to do something about it?”
“Both,” she said. “I didn’t get it for a long time-I was moving around, and it was just lucky that people kept forwarding it. And when I got it, I didn’t know whether to believe it, or what to do. If I hadn’t met you, I mightn’t ever have done anything about it. But you know about jewels.”
“And I’m notorious for taking chances.”
“And I like you.”
He smiled into her slumbrous eyes, handing her the refilled glass, and sat down again in the other chair, stretching his long legs.
“You liked Ormond when you married him, I suppose,” he said. “What was the mistake in that?”
“He was a rich old man, but I thought he needed me. I found out that all he wanted was my body.”
“It sounds like a reasonable ambition.”
“But he wanted a bird in a gilded cage. To keep me in purdah, like a sultan. He didn’t want to go places and do things. He’d give me presents, but he wouldn’t let me have a penny of my own to spend.”
“An obvious square,” said the Saint. “But you fixed him. What about Ned?”
“I was very young then, just a small-town girl trying to crash Hollywood and making doughnut money as an extra. And it was during the war, and he was young too, and strong and healthy, and that Navy uniform did something for him. It happened to a lot of girls… . And then the war was over, and I woke up, and he was just a working diver, a sort of submerged mechanic, earning a mechanic’s wages and going nowhere except under docks and bridges.”
Simon nodded, leaning back with his freebooter’s profile turned up impersonally to the stars. He had heard all this before, of course, but he wanted to hear it once again, to be sure he had heard it all.
“That’s all this Tiltman wanted,” she said. “A good working diver. Percival Tiltman-what a name! I should have known he was a phony, with that name, and his old-school-tie British accent. But he knew where the richest oyster bed of all was, and it was one that the Japs had missed somehow, and he had some real pearls to prove it. … Of course, he needed money too-for equipment, and a boat, and bribes. Mostly for bribes. That should have been the tip-off, all by itself.”
“I don’t know,” said the Saint. “I can believe that the Mexican Government might take a dim view of foreigners coming down and walking off with their pearls.”
“Well, anyway, he got it.”
“It was about ten thousand dollars, wasn’t it?”
“Exactly eleven thousand. Most of it was from my friends -people I’d known in the studios. Ned’s best friend put some in. And twenty-five hundred was my own savings, from what Ned had sent me while he was overseas.”
“And Ned and Brother Tiltman took off with it all in cash?”
“All of it. And that’s the last anyone heard of them- until I got that letter.”
“How hard did you try to find him?”
“What could I do? I didn’t have an address. Ned was going to write to me when he got down here. He never did.”
“There’s an American vice-consul.”
“We tried that, after a while. He never heard of them.”
“How about the police?”
“I wrote to them. They took three weeks to answer, and then they just said they had no information. Perhaps some of the money was used for bribes, at that.”
“I mean the American police. Didn’t anyone make a complaint?”
“How could I? And make myself the wife of a runaway crook? Our friends were very nice about it. They were sorry for me. I’ve never felt so humiliated. But it was all too obvious. Ned and Tiltman had just taken our money and run off with it. It wasn’t even worth anybody’s while to come down here and try to trace them. They’d had too long a start. By the time we realized what they’d done, they could have been anywhere in South America-or anywhere in the world, for that matter. I just waited till Ned had been gone a year, and divorced him as quietly as I could, for desertion.”
“But,” said the Saint, “it looks now as if he’d been here all the time, after all.”
Mrs. Ormond swished the Scotch around over the ice in her glass with a practised rotary motion, brooding over it sullenly.
“Perhaps he came back. Perhaps he spent all his share of the money, and now he thinks he can promote some more with the same gag. Who knows?”
“It was nearly ten years ago when he disappeared, wasn’t it?” said the Saint. “If he got half the loot, he’s lived on less than six hundred a year. That’s really making it last. If he was going to try for more, why would he leave it so long? And why did he disappear when he did, without any kind of word?”
“Don’t ask me,” she said. “You’re the detective. All I know is, there’s something fishy about it. That’s why I wouldn’t have come here alone. You’d better be careful. I hope you’re smarter than he is.”