“What’s the opposite of a nightmare?” she said. “It’s the word I need for the way it feels to know I don’t have to think twice about trusting you.”
“The words you’re thinking of may be ‘pipe-dream,’ ” he said sardonically.
The briefcase was brand new, so that the leather bulged stiffly over the bulk that it contained. It was equipped with a lock which Simon recognized as being much more resistant to amateur picking than the average run of such hardware, although of course it had no defense against a sharp knife in the hands of anyone who was not bothered about preserving its virginal appearance.
“I’d suggest you go on packing, and let Ramon think this is still in the bottom of that suitcase-then there won’t be any argument,” said the Saint, and got to his feet. “By the way, when are you seeing him again?”
“He’s coming here at one o’clock, for a farewell lunch- or I suppose you’d say, an hasta la vista. He has to bring my car back, anyhow-I let him take it home last night after he brought me back, because his own car is in the shop having an overhaul.”
The Saint’s very clear blue eyes searched her face with disconcerting penetration.
“You think a lot of this guy, don’t you?”
“Only because of what he’s doing, and what he stands for,” she insisted. “I’m not a middle-aged sugar-mammy who came here to look for a Latin thrill. You mustn’t believe that.”
“I don’t,” he said soberly. “And most especially the ‘middle-aged’ part.”
He stubbed out his cigarette and turned towards the door.
“Thanks to the discretion ingrained in me by a misspent youth,” he said, “I got out of my taxi two blocks away, walked over to the beach, wandered into the back of this posada by way of the swimming pool, and ambled up a service stairway. If any Gestapo gunsels do happen to be watching you, I don’t think they saw me coming and I don’t think they’ll see me leave.”
“But where’ll I see you again?” she gasped, in a sudden panic.
“If you don’t know, nobody can make you tell. But I’ll find you. Don’t worry.” He grinned, and tapped the briefcase under his arm. “Whatever happens, I shall be holding the bag.”
He had already started down the service stairs when he heard other footsteps coming up. It was too late to turn back, for whoever was coming up would have turned the corner of the half-landing and seen him before he could have retreated out of sight, and his abrupt reversal of direction would have looked guilty even to someone who was quite unsuspicious. And there was no reason why the feet could not belong to innocent guests of the hotel or its equally inoffensive employees. Simon kept on going, with his reflexes triggered on invisible needle points.
They were two men in dark suits, with a certain air about them which to the Saint was as informative as a label. They looked at him with mechanical curiosity, but he held his course without faltering, and they fell into single file to let him go by. He passed them with the smile and carefree nod of a tourist who had never consciously noticed a policeman in plain clothes in his life.
As he reached the foot of the stairs, the voice of one of them came down to him from the floor above, speaking low and tersely in Spanish.
“Hide yourself here, and take note of anyone who comes to visit her.”
3.
Out there in the Miramar district where the Comodoro Hotel is located, Havana’s Fifth Avenue (which, like Manhattan’s Sixth, has been officially re-christened “Avenue of the Americas,” and is just as stubbornly known only by its old name to every native) is far from being the city’s busiest thoroughfare, and as he reached it Simon was wondering if he would have trouble finding a taxi. He did not want to be wandering around the streets of that neighborhood for long, where not only might the plain-clothes men he had already encountered decide belatedly to investigate him, but Ramón Venino might come driving by from any direction en route to his rendezvous with Beryl Carrington.
He need have had no anxiety. He had barely taken one glance up and down the street when a taxi, drawn by the uncanny instinct for prey that achieves its supreme development in the vulture and the Havana taxi driver, made a screaming U turn and swooped in to the curb beside him.
“Where to?” asked the driver cheerily, starting off without waiting to find out. “Are you hoping to meet a girl, or is your wife here with you? I have a young sister, a lovely girl, but very naughty, who is crazy for Americanos.”
“I have a weak heart,” said the Saint, “and the doctor has ordered me to leave naughty girls alone.”
“Some sightseeing, then? I can take you to the Botanical Gardens, then to the Cathedral-“
Simon frowned at the briefcase on the seat beside him. Wherever he went, its pristine newness would be conspicuous; and to walk into his hotel with it in full view, where either policemen or friends of the man he had called Pancho might be watching for him, would be too naďve to even consider.
“How about visiting one of the rum distilleries?” Simon suggested.
“Yes, sir. I will take you to Trocadero.”
Presently they drew up beside a large low building, at an entrance with sliding doors designed for trucks to drive through. The driver waved aside the Saint’s proffered payment.
“I will be here when you come out.”
Simon stepped into the odorous interior, and was adopted at once by the nearest of a number of men who stood waiting by the entrance.
“Good morning, sir. This is where we make that famous Cuban rum. Step this way, please.” They entered one corner of a vast barn-like factory. “The sugar cane is pulped in that machine there, and then the juice is fermented in those tanks over there. Then it passes through those stills which you see there, and the rum goes into those barrels to be aged. Now this way, please.” They passed through another door into a large room conveniently at hand, where there were several tables already well populated by other visitors concluding their research into the manufacture of rum. “Here we invite you to sample our products. Sit down and be comfortable-there is no hurry.”
Each table was provided with stools on three sides and a long row of bottles on the fourth. Simon’s guide went behind the bottles and at once became a bartender, rapidly pouring samples into an inexhaustible supply of glasses, as other guides all over the room were already doing for their personal proteges.
“This is our light rum, this is our dark rum, this is our very best rum. Don’t be bashful, it’s all on the house. These are our liqueurs-apricot brandy, blackberry brandy, crčme de cacao. Have whatever you want, there is no limit. And you should try our special exotic drinks-banana cordial, pineapple cordial, mango cordial. You are allowed to take back five bottles with you free of duty. Would you like some of our Tropical Punch, or some Elixir, or a frozen Daiquiri?”
“I’ll take five bottles of plain drinking rum,” said the Saint, sipping very judiciously. “But I want ‘em in one of those fancy baskets that you give away.”
“Of course.” The man whipped out a pad and wrote the order. “I’ll get them for you right away. Help yourself to anything you want while you’re waiting.”
Simon moistened his tongue experimentally, out of academic interest, with some of the more unfamiliar flavors; but he was in no mood, as most of the students of distillation around him seemed to be, to take memorable advantage of the phenomenon of unlimited free drinks. He was not even interested in the rum he was buying, except as much of it as would be suitable ballast for the container it would come in.
The guide-salesman returned promptly, bearing a sturdy straw bag of the kind in which every island in the Caribbean makes a trade-mark of packaging the homing tourist’s duty-free quota of the local brew. Simon paid him, picked up the bag along with the briefcase which he had brought in with him, and went out to look for his driver, who had expected to rack up a nice hunk of waiting time and was disappointed to see him so soon.
“Take me to the Sevilla-Biltmore,” said the Saint.
He quietly removed the paper-wrapped bottles from the straw bag, and put the new alligator briefcase in.
“Do you drink rum, amigo?” Simon inquired.
“Sometimes,” said the driver indifferently.
Simon handed a bottle over the back of the front seat.
“Put this away for when you feel thirsty,” he said.
“Thank you, seńor,” said the driver, much more brightly. “Did you enjoy the distillery?”
“It was most educational,” said the Saint. He passed over another bottle. “Take this one home to your sister, the lovely and naughty one, with my compliments and regrets.”
“I thank you for her,” said the driver earnestly. “She would certainly be crazy for an Americano like you. It is a great pity your heart is not just a little stronger. She can be most gentle, too.”
“It would be a privilege to die in her arms,” Simon said gravely, “but it might be embarrassing for you both.”
The three remaining bottles, replaced alongside and overlapping the briefcase, adequately concealed it and left the straw bag bulging just about the same as before.
“I will wait for you,” said the driver, as Simon got out in front of the hotel.
“Not this time,” Simon told him firmly. “I may not go out again today at all.”
He let the distillery basket be snatched by a determined bellhop, and followed it up the steps to the lobby after paying off the cab.
“What room, sir?”
“Can you keep it down here for me till I check out?” Simon asked, and added for the conclusive benefit of anyone who might be listening: “I don’t want to start drinking it up before I get home.”
The bellhop took the bag to the little storeroom behind the bell captain’s desk, and gave him the stub of a tag. Simon gave him a quarter in exchange and strolled casually away towards the elevators; but as he reached the elevator alcove he swung briskly to his left around a group of visiting firemen and turned off again down the little-used passage to the side entrance on the Prado. But it was not too little used for there to be a taxi waiting outside, and Simon was in it before the driver had time to deliver more than the first four words of his sales talk.
“The Toledo,” Simon said.
“If you want a real good restaurant,” said the driver, “let me take you to-“
“I have to meet someone at the Toledo-and,” Simon continued rapidly, to forestall any further suggestions, “she happens to be a young and beautiful girl.”
This was the purest fiction; but he had nevertheless picked the Toledo for a reason. He had eaten well enough there once before, and knew it to be a small quiet place that made relatively little effort to invite the tourist trade. He thought that he might have done a fair job of throwing any possible followers off his scent for a while, and he did not want to show himself in any of the places where the bloodhounds would most naturally go sniffing first if they were trying to get back on his trail. At least he would like a chance to enjoy his lunch, and a breathing spell in which to sit still and think.
He ordered a dish of Moro crab, that big-clawed delicacy who manages somehow to be just a little more succulent down there than his brother the stone crab of the Florida keys, and a paella Valenciana, and said: “One other thing- do you think you can find a newspaper lying around anywhere?”
“I will see,” said the waiter.
Simon lighted a cigarette and sipped a glass of manzanilla, and began to take a few things apart in his mind. Just as positively as the two men he had seen at the Comodoro were of the police, the man he had called Pancho was not. Simon had yet to meet any kind of police, even Secret Police, who threatened people with knives. And if the short man had had any kind of authority, the Saint would never have got away with punching him in the nose. Simon had made no effort to disappear that night, and it wouldn’t have taken a determined search very long to locate him among Havana’s relatively few hotels.
But by the same token it wouldn’t have taken Pancho’s mob much longer to do the same thing, if they had any sort of organization.
Simon had assumed that Pancho was under orders of Venino. Had Mrs. Carrington’s argument, then, finally convinced Venino that the Saint meant no danger to him, and had Venino called Pancho off?
That was what Venino might well be hoping that the Saint would believe. But the Saint didn’t believe it for one moment. To believe it, he would have had to accept two or three much greater improbabilities that he simply could not buy.
There had to be some other explanation that would tie everything together; and whatever it was, it could only be as illegitimate as a cardinal’s daughter.
The waiter brought the Moro crab claws, and with them a slightly rumpled copy of Información.
“Lo siento, it is all we have. But if you like I can send out for a Miami paper:”
“No, this is what I wanted.” Simon looked at him with a lift of the eyebrows that was as expressive as it was calculated. “But do you mean to say that you can get Miami papers here?”
The waiter’s surprise was manifestly unfeigned.
“Yes, why not?”
“Even if they say rude things about the President?”
The waiter shrugged.
“What President is not criticized somewhere, seńor?”
“Do you ever criticize him?” Simon asked.
“I do not argue about politics,” said the other cheerfully. “It is like religion. It is easy to offend someone and very hard to convert anyone.”
“But you aren’t afraid that if you said what you thought you might land in the juzgado.”
The waiter looked honestly puzzled.
“What would the President care what a poor waiter said?”
“Then you aren’t looking forward to a revolution,” Simon said.
The waiter laughed.
“I hope not. Revolutions are bad for business.”
The Saint let him go to attend to another table, and proceeded to read the newspaper with unusual assiduousness while he ate.
For once he was uninterested in any international events, but he read every line that had any reference to local affairs. And although he did not skip any political items, he was most hopeful of finding the missing link that he needed under much more sensational headlines. A major jewel robbery would have suited him very well-or, as a supreme refinement of plot construction, it would have been almost deliriously intoxicating to read that some ingenious sportsman had actually contrived to steal from the Capitol the diamond across which he had first set eyes on Beryl Carrington and Ramon Venino. But nothing as poetic as that rewarded him-in fact, the only important larceny he found mentioned was an armored carload of bullion which seemed to have recently vanished somehow between the Banco Insular and the Treasury, which the police were still looking for. And even if some Underground of self-convinced patriots had pulled that caper, it certainly was not hidden in an alligator briefcase.