“Yes.”
“Mrs. Beryl Carrington?”
“Yes.”
“Somebody must have been playing a joke on you,” said the Saint.
“This gentleman is a friend of mine,” she said shakily. “Please let him go.”
The two plain-clothes men looked at Venino with a sort of forlorn desperation, and one of them said: “Usted no sabe nada de esto, seńor?”
With his eyes flickering back to the briefcase which Simon still held, Venino said brusquely: “Nada. As the seńor says, it is either a mistake or a stupid trick.”
The two detectives looked at each other. In unison, they raised their eyebrows, they pursed their lips, they shrugged. Their vise-like grips unhooked themselves from the Saint’s arms. They stepped back, and bowed with a sort of defeated sarcasm.
“Pardon us, Mrs. Carrington,” they said, and turned stiffly on their heels.
Beryl Carrington shook her head dazedly.
“I don’t understand-any of this-“
“It is a Secret Police trick, if nothing worse,” Venino snapped.
“I think it was your trick, Ramon,” Simon said pleasantly. “You called the cops in her name and told them that cock-and-bull story to get them to keep a watch on her. Then you pointed the sleuths out to prove that they were watching you. It’s just dawned on me that that may have been the clincher that sold her on going to Europe. Did you just decide that this afternoon, Beryl?”
“Yes,” she said, with unnatural steadiness. “It was exactly like that.”
“And maybe that was the only proof you ever had that anyone was after him.”
“It was. But-“
“He is trying to confuse you,” Venino said harshly. “We must get back that briefcase.”
“This?” Simon held up the alligator bag by the handle, so that the telephone directory slid out into his other hand through the seam he had opened along its under side. “Or the priceless contents?”
He showed Mrs. Carrington the book, making sure that she recognized what it was.
“This,” he said reverently, “is the God-damnedest Underground you ever saw the secret list of. Every single soul in Greater Havana who can afford a telephone is a member.”
Venino snatched the directory from him.
“You fool,” he snarled. “If anyone had discovered the marks in invisible ink against each name that is one of us-“
Mrs. Carrington was almost shaken out of her wavering, and even the Saint’s eyes blinked with reluctant admiration. But he shook his head slowly.
“It’s a nice try, Ramon,” he conceded. “But it won’t score. Can you think back coldly and impartially just for a few seconds, Beryl-even though it’ll hurt? Do you really believe that any Underground movement that had any hope of getting as far out of the ground as its own tombstone would have a list of members that was as easy as that for anyone to get hold of? Or that anyone who was bright enough to live long enough to become a top man in that sort of conspiracy would tell you all about it after a few rumbas, and place the life of every last member in your hands because of the sympathy he saw in your pretty eyes? I knew he was taking you for a ride the minute you told it to me that way. But I didn’t appreciate quite what a ride it was until I checked on this business about the Dictatorship. And that really knocks the underpinnings from under the whole gehoozis. Because there just ain’t no such animal.”
“He is not a fool, querida,” Venino hissed. “He is insane.”
“Oh, I suppose it isn’t altogether our kind of democracy, Beryl,” Simon said imperturbably. “But there aren’t any downtrodden masses aching to shake off their chains. There may be a revolution some day, but it’ll just be one political faction against another, not an uprising of the people. If Ramón hadn’t scared the wits out of you, you could have asked some of ‘em for yourself. You still can.”
“Are you trying to destroy us all?” Venino asked passionately.
Simon glanced over his shoulder. As he had rather anticipated, the two men in dark suits had withdrawn, but not completely out of the picture. They had retreated to a polite distance out of earshot, but not out of sight.
“We still have a couple of cops handy, Beryl,” he said. “Would you like me to walk over to them and say ‘Nuts to the President!’ so you can see if they shoot me?”
“I’m trying,” Mrs. Carrington said, “not to have hysterics.”
“I’m sorry,” said the Saint contritely. “I’d better leave, before you get mad and call off our deal on the car.”
Mrs. Carrington’s mouth opened, but no sound came from it. Sound came, however, from Ramon Venino.
“What deal on the car?” he demanded in a cracked voice.
“I made Mrs. Carrington an offer to buy it,” Simon said calmly. “She wants to get something more sporty, like a convertible, and I’m paying a much better price than she could get on a trade-in. I’m taking this one over from her in Miami. I guess she hadn’t had time to tell you.”
“But we are taking this car to Europe,” Venino said shakily.
“That’s silly,” the Saint scoffed. “If she wants a flashy sports job, Europe’s the place to get one.”
“I will not allow it,” Venino said.
Mrs. Carrington looked at him wonderingly.
“Why not?” she asked, and never quite knew why she said it like that.
“It would break my heart. Yes, I am sentimental. Because of this car, we met. In this car, I showed you my home town. In this car, my heart found a new life. Call me a temperamental Latin if you like, but I do not want to see Europe with you in any other car!”
Simon lighted a cigarette, and an immeasurable artistic contentment was ripening within him.
“What he means,” he said, “is that any other car would not be worth anything like as much to him. Which isn’t surprising, because this would probably be the most valuable car in Europe, if not in the whole world. As I have it figured, it should sell for around three hundred thousand dollars any place where there’s a fairly open market for gold, which of course rules out the United States. A really fabulous buildup has gone into jockeying you into making that trip with a date to meet Ramón on the other side.”
They were both listening to him now, without interruption and in a weird kind of stillness. And the Saint put one foot up on the rear bumper and leaned a forearm lazily on his knee.
“Big-time thieves aren’t an exclusively yanqui product. They crop up all over. Down here, I guess Ramón will rank númera uno. Anyway, he and his mob knocked off an armored carload of three hundred grand’s worth of gold bars a few weeks before we got here. But they couldn’t sell it here, and the problem was to get a heavy load like that out of the country with the cops looking everywhere for it. Ramón’s brilliant idea was to watch for a likely female tourist, alone, bringing her own car over. With a simple little accident and a lot of charm, he was able to get away with the car for long enough for his mob to take impressions of suitable parts of it. They cast the gold in the molds and plated it while he was keeping you on the hook with his personality and his fairy tales, and last night when he had the car again they put on the new gold trimmings.” The knife that had been Pancho’s flashed suddenly as Simon thumbed the catch that released the blade. “For instance, I’ll bet that if we carved a notch in this bumper-“
Ramón Venino moved then, his hand going to his hip pocket and coming out with something that he kept mostly hidden under the drape of his coat.
“That is enough,” he said. “You will both come with me, now, in this car.”
Mrs. Carrington gasped as she saw the gun, but the Saint only glanced at it and then over Venino’s shoulder.
“You made one mistake when you had your fat friend try to warn me off at the Bambú,” he said. “You made another when you sent him back with a pal this afternoon to defenestrate me-meaning heave me out of a window. Because I clobbered both of them and sent for the police, but I left before the police got there. So now the police have followed me here, and teamed up with the two that we had already. You’d be making the classic mistake of all time if you shot me now, while they’re all standing behind you.”
“You must think me a fool if I would believe that,” Venino sneered.
“I assure you, compadre, he tells the truth,” one of the policemen said.
5.
“Why did he have to pick on me?” Beryl Carrington said.
“You mean, why couldn’t he have put gold bumpers on his own car and shipped it to Europe?” said the Saint. “We don’t know yet, but I’ll bet anything you like on a guilty conscience. Ramón and his mob could never be sure when they might be suspected, so they wanted to plant the loot on someone who would never be suspected.”
“But why me?” she said.
“I guess they just watched the boats from Key West, and you were the first good prospect they saw.”
“It didn’t have to be me,” she said in a queer stony voice.
“Did you hear what the gendarmes said about that twenty thousand dollars’ reward? I think we should split it down the middle.”
“I couldn’t care less.”
“You can do a lot of good things with ten thousand bucks.”
“Don’t you see?” she said. “I wish it had never happened. Or if it had to happen, I wish I’d never seen you. I wish I’d never known.”
Simon Templar looked at her shrewdly and with unwonted compassion for a while, and then he stood up.
“This isn’t the end of romance,” he said. “But if you’d gone on with Venino, one day you’d have had to find out, and that might have been the end. Now you think the most wonderful toy you ever had has been broken, and it was all you had. But it isn’t all you’ll ever have. Don’t start to believe that.”
“Please go now,” she said. But as he opened the door she raised her eyes and said: “But call me tomorrow.”
Simon went out and let the doorman earn a quarter for lifting one finger at a taxi.
“You have plans for tonight, sir?” said the driver, as the cab got under way. “You should meet a nice Cuban girl. It happens I have a niece, very young, very beautiful… .”
BOOK FOUR
The Golden Frog
1.
Professor Humphrey Nestor, it must be revealed ab initio, had never actually been a member of the faculty of any of the illustrious colleges whose names he liked to drop casually into his conversation; nor, to be utterly candid, did he possess any of the academic qualifications which could have made it even remotely possible that he might some day be offered such an appointment. In fact, some prejudiced persons had been heard to asseverate, perhaps wishfully, that the only chair of importance that Mr. Nestor was ever likely to occupy would be wired for high-voltage electricity; but this was an exaggeration. Mr. Nestor was not by nature addicted to violence.
At this time he was only fifty-five, and still spry and lean of frame; but his hair had already attained the snowy whiteness which in the minds of the gullible is simultaneously suggestive of both wisdom and benignity, and he had parlayed that fortunate coloration into a trim mustache and goatee which, combined with the bifocals that had been thrust upon him willy-nilly by the normal incipience of presbyopia, gave him an air of erudite distinction that only the most adamantine skeptic could resist. And though he had no right whatsoever to the title which he had adopted as a vocational convenience, he was by no means illiterate. He owned, among a unique collection of forgeries, an absolutely authentic degree from a minor university whose track team had been well repaid by his youthful gift of running very fast for short distances; and he had a predilection for magazines of the popular science and science-fiction type which gave him not only a useful repertoire of abstrusities but also invaluable models of what the public expected a Professor to be like. As a result, Professor Nestor was a much more convincing Professor than almost any ivied turret could produce-as a great many suckers had expensively learned.
Yet such are the vicissitudes to which a great talent may be subjected that on the day we are talking about Professor Humphrey Nestor was scraping the bottom of the barrel as literally as he was trying to suck the last drops of ice-diluted fluid through, the straws that protruded from what had once been an ambrosial beaker of Panamanian rum punch.
“I can’t think what we’ve done to deserve such miserable luck,” he lamented.
“One thing is, you’re getting old,” said the shapely blonde who passed as his daughter Alice.
Their real relationship was of course much less conventional; but since she was almost exactly half his age, the father-daughter act was far more disarming than if he had introduced her as his wife, and indeed was likely to arouse positive sympathy instead of a raised eyebrow. And there was the added advantage that this arrangement imposed no tiresome restrictions on the exploitation of her sex appeal, which was not negligible.
There were times, however, when he wished she would maintain a semblance of filial respect when they were alone, and this was one of them.
“You’re in a rut,” she said, with unsympathetic candor. “Sure, we had a good line once, but nobody’s been buying it lately. Instead of moaning about your bad luck, why don’t you start figuring out something new?”
“Because it’s still a good line,” said the Professor stubbornly. “The very best. I spent a lot of time dreaming it up. It’s worked fine for us down here-and we’re lucky to be here.”
There was much truth in that.
Some five years earlier, a purely technical error in the use of the mails had occasioned this rather abrupt deflection in a career which had long been devoted (with remarkably few interludes in jail, all things considered) to the cause of parting fools from their money with a promptness that would have gladdened the proverb-coiner’s heart. One day Professor Nestor woke up to realize that instead of a civil suit which he could have outranged by simply stepping over the nearest state line, he had laid himself open to federal retribution that would not be halted by any parochial boundaries within the United States. But he was a provident and foresighted man in other respects, and was never without an alternative identity sufficiently well documented to satisfy the liberal requirements of most Latin American countries, which are not inclined to make excessive difficulties for apparently solvent tourists: a banana boat happened to be sailing from New Orleans at a moment which it would be almost an understatement to call opportune, and in due course the Professor and Alice found themselves in Panama with an indefinite period of exile ahead of them.