Simon pondered for long enough to calculate what the approximate value of the golden frogs that Nestor had described would be.
“I’d think you should have a medal,” he said. “And if you decide to make anyone that sort of offer, I wish you’d give me the first chance.”
She looked at him in a dazed and startled way as if a halo had literally appeared over his head like a neon light, and her big eyes swam with soft half-unbelieving tears.
“I’m afraid I shall have to desert you tonight, dear,” said Professor Humphrey Nestor, noting the artistic symptoms with approval as he returned to the table. “Some former colleagues of mine from Columbia are passing through here -they happened to be calling on the curator when I telephoned, so I had to speak to them. They insisted on me joining them for dinner, but I shall not inflict that ordeal on you. I know our shop talk would bore you to death.”
“That’s all right,” Alice said, with her eyes still on the Saint and the most tentative conspiratorial smile touching her lips. “Mr. Tombs just asked me if I could get away to have dinner with him.”
3.
She suggested the Jardín El Rancho, and as soon as he saw it he had to approve of her selection. It was like the courtyard of a Spanish hacienda, tile-roofed around three sides but uncovered to the stars in the center, and open everywhere to the perfect mildness of the night. The service was competently unobtrusive, and the lighting was artistic enough to encourage romance without causing eyestrain. But at first they were strictly practical.
“How would you work this scheme of yours?” he asked.
“Remember, I was at the cave too. I know where it is as well as Pappy.”
“You mean you’d go back there yourself-headhunters and all?”
“I would if I had to,” she said bravely.
He shook his head.
“That doesn’t sound so good.”
“I can’t say I’m crazy about it,” she admitted. “So I don’t mind telling you I had another idea.”
“Give.”
“Loro-the native guide who took us into that district.”
“Don’t tell me he’d want to go back there.”
“He might. He just about adopted Pappy as his own father, but for some weird reason he practically worships me. Probably because I’m blond and blue-eyed, and I treated him like a human being-oh, yes, and he got an infected foot once, and I fixed him up from the first-aid kit. It sounds ridiculous, but these natives are like children, and he’s at least fifteen-sixteenths Indian. And after the headhunters had chased us out, he told us we’d gone about it all wrong, and if he’d known what we were after he could have gone there alone and got it without any trouble.”
Simon tenderly impaled a pink shrimp on his fork, coated it lightly with sauce, and slid it between his teeth to confirm an earlier impression that shrimps of Panama are for some unexplored reason the most crisply ambrosial representatives of their genus in all the legendary seven seas.
“Do you know where to find this reckless warrior?”
“Yes, he’s still around. As a matter of fact, he came to our hotel a little while before you picked me up-Pappy had already left to meet his friends. He wanted to know if there was any chance of our making another expedition. I was just going to tell him that it wouldn’t be for a long time, if ever, because we’d spent all our money; and then I had this idea. I asked him to stop by here at nine o’clock, so you could meet him anyway.”
They had sancocho, the rich chicken soup with vegetables that can easily become a meal in itself, but left themselves room for some excellent beef tenderloin sliced in mushroom sauce which was entirely European in conception and flavor. He asked many more details about the finding of the cave of golden frogs and the escape from the headhunters which Professor Nestor had skipped over; but that also had been anticipated. The Professor had read many helpful books, and had schooled her so exhaustively that she was never at a loss. Simon’s admiration increased undisguisedly as the meal progressed.
“You’ll find campus life pretty tame after this, won’t you?” he remarked.
“Oh, I won’t be going back there with him. I’d hate to be a burden like that to him, poor dear, on his salary. I earn my own living-I’m a very good secretary. Of course I’ll have to look for a new job-I had to give up my old one when we came down here. But now I’ve developed a yen to see more of the world. I’m going to look for a business man who does a lot of traveling and who’d like to take a Girl Friday with him.”
“It mightn’t be easy to keep him at a strictly businesslike distance.”
“Well, that mightn’t be hard to take if I really liked him,” she said frankly. “I’m not hopelessly old-fashioned.”
It was obvious that they could have made beautiful music together.
Loro arrived when they were having coffee, and accepted a seat and a bottle of Balboa beer. He was a pudgy brown man in a clean but unpressed white shirt and trousers, with long black hair, a single gold earring, and a wide white-toothed grin. He looked like a genial brigand, which was precisely what he was. Quite early in the Professor’s exile, he had volunteered to carry the Professor’s bag from a taxi into a hotel; turning from paying off the driver, the Professor had just been fortunate enough to catch a glimpse of his suitcase and Loro disappearing around the next corner. Mr. Nestor, who could still put forth a most respectable turn of speed in an emergency, had overtaken him within two blocks; but to Loro’s even greater astonishment he had not capped his victory by calling for the police. Instead, he had given him five dollars and invited him to have a drink. Mr. Nestor had already realized that a native accomplice might be almost indispensable to whatever bunco routine he finally adapted to the locale, and the problem of finding a native with the requisite guarantees of unscrupulousness had been most happily solved.
Loro’s larcenous instinct immediately recognized a master, and he had become a very gratifying pupil. His part was relatively simple, and he brought to it an innate flak for dramatic deceit.
“I go back any time, seńor,” he said in response to Alice’s prompting. “Bring back frogs. Me indio. No trouble.”
“Then why did they have trouble before, when you were with them?” Simon asked.
“Headhunters see me with yanquis, they think me like yanqui. Much trouble. Cut off all heads.” Loro made a graphic gesture, laughing delightedly. “Yanqui heads very valuable, but they take mine for small-change. Okeh. Me go alone, wear no clothes, they see me indio. Can be friends. No trouble.”
“Why didn’t you go back by yourself, then, and get the frogs?”
“Cost much money, seńor. Too much for me.”
“But I thought they were going to be your friends.”
“Sure. All good friends. Okeh. Me go to cave. Okeh. Me take out frogs. Headhunters see. They know gold very valuable. No more friends.”
“Tell him how you thought of doing it, Loro,” Alice said.
The guide leaned over his bare forearms on the table.
“Take plenty guns, yes. But who going to shoot them? No good take soldiers, they steal everything. Take other indios, they no can shoot straight. Or headhunters come, they run away. Okeh. I got better idea.”
“What is it?”
“Sell guns to headhunters. For gold frogs.”
“Do you think they’d trade?”
“Sure. Headhunters want guns. Get more heads, more quick.” Loro chortled tolerantly. “Not our heads, we no worry.”
“How many guns would it take?” Simon asked.
“I think, fifty, with bullets-can do.”
“But that’s impossible,” Alice said. “You couldn’t bring in that many guns-the Panamanians would think you were trying to start a revolution. And you couldn’t buy that many here, for the same reason. Why, we had the worst time getting permits for our .22 and one shotgun.”
“Give me money, I get,” Loro said. “I have friends, keep guns, wait for revolution, wait too long, get tired. They take money for guns now, think maybe they buy more guns mańana. But it cost plenty. Maybe two hundred dollars each gun and bullets.”
“Then we wouldn’t save anything,” said Alice. “It would still cost ten thousand dollars.”
“Save much trouble. No fighting. Save heads.”
Simon lighted a cigarette.
“What would you want for doing this?” he asked.
Loro’s fat cheeks dimpled on each side of his jolly bandit’s smile.
“Me, for love, seńor. For the seńorita I love. But perhaps I buy some guns more cheap, not pay all two hundred dollars. Me keep some dollars for working. You will not ask me give back, okeh?”
“Okay,” said the Saint steadily.
Loro stood up, beaming. He bowed deeply to the girl.
“I go now. I tell you soon, all is ready. Buenos noches, diosa.”
He was gone, melting into the darkness of the parking lot outside the patio as he might have melted into the jungle. Professor Nestor had painstakingly taught him to do this instead of scooting out as if he had dropped a firecracker with a short fuse.
Alice was looking at the Saint with misty eyes.
“I can hardly believe that my crazy idea is all coming true,” she said.
“I wouldn’t call it so crazy,” he said. “And I like Loro’s contribution. Now that we’re more or less partners, would you risk telling me what part of the country this cache of golden frogs is in? I bought a map this afternoon to help my feeble geography.”
He took the map from his pocket and spread it on the table between them. She moved her chair around towards him until their shoulders touched, and the perfume of her hair was sweetly dose to his nostrils as she leaned over to study the tinted outlines.
“We’re here.” She pointed to the southeastern end of the Canal. “We’d have to charter a boat-the same one that Pappy and I had, if we can get it. We got out here, past Taboga Island, and down the coast to the mouth of this river. Then we go up the river-it’s quite deep, most of the time, and Loro knows all the channels-up-up around here… .” Her red lacquered fingernail traced the winding course of the stream more hesitantly, but finally settled on a definite point. “Yes, the headhunters’ territory starts here, at this third fork. So the cave would be a little farther north, about-there.”
Simon gazed at the map as if instead of its green ink he were seeing the lush rain jungle itself. Even though he was far more familiar with such stories than most men, he felt the tug of romance in it as appreciatively as the most frustrated slave to a stock market report. There could have been no higher tribute to the cunning with which Mr. Nestor had blended its ingredients.
“I’m going to enjoy this trip,” he said.
“Would you want to go along?”
She asked the question for necessary information, but he stared at her almost indignantly.
“Do I look like a guy who’d miss anything like that?”
“No-quite the contrary. That’s one thing that bothers me. You’ve got that daredevil look. So I’ll have to make a condition. You’ve got to promise me you won’t try to go beyond that third fork on the river. You’re not an Indian, like Loro, and you couldn’t pretend to be. I don’t want your head cut off and shrunk and dried. I wouldn’t want anything at that price. Promise you won’t try to go all the way-or it’s no deal.”
It was a classic touch. She acknowledged and openly hero-worshipped every valiant quality and impulse that a man would like to be credited with, and in the next breath she absolved him of any uncomfortable risk of having to live up to them, and prettily made it a command. Nobody but the Saint would have been so sincerely ungrateful;
“You’re the boss,” he said curtly, for there was no doubt that she meant it. “But we go as far as dam-yanquis can. Right?”
“Right.”
“Okeh. But how are you going to explain this to Pappy?”
“You know, we’ve got reservations to fly back tomorrow night. This has all been so sudden… . The only thing I can think of is that I’ll have to make some excuse and let him go alone. But what excuse is there? I can’t pretend to be sick, or he’d never go.” She was suddenly almost panic-stricken, groping desperately for an answer. “I’ve told him before about wishing I could be a traveling secretary. Could I tell him that you’ve offered me a job? Would you mind if I did that?”
Simon laughed.
“If it’s as easy as that, consider yourself hired.”
She clung to his arm impulsively for a moment.
“If Loro can do what he says he can, I wouldn’t hold you to it.”
“I might like being held,” he said. “But we’ll have plenty of time to talk about that. If your father goes for it. I’ll just have to keep my fingers crossed, because I won’t even be able to help you sell it.”
“Why?”
“I have to go over to Cristóbal first thing in the morning. I’ve got an old friend in the Navy who’s stationed on that side, and he’s promised to show me some sensational tarpon fishing on the Chagres River. He can only get two days off, so I’ll be back on Friday. If I find you’ve checked out, I’ll know it was just one of those things.”
“I’ll be here, I promise,” she said. “And by then Loro should have lined up those guns.”
When he left her at her hotel several hours later (Professor Nestor did not make his residential headquarters at El Panama, both for reasons of economy and because it would have been grossly out of character) she kissed him good night, not alarmingly, but with a spontaneous warmth which suggested that her full gratitude would be more than perfunctorily enjoyable.
The Professor was sitting up in bed, wearing a suit of gaudy pajamas and reading a luridly-jacketed paperback.
“We’re cooking, Pappy,” she said. “Everything went just like the script. Even better-he’s going away for a couple of days’ fishing, so there won’t be any problem about seeing you off.”
“Splendid,” said the Professor. “But I’d better go up to Santa Clara as usual until after he’s left, so there’ll be no chance of accidentally running into him.”
Santa Clara is a seaside resort on the Pacific coast which is supported mainly by Service personnel and Canal employees, and the average tourist is unlikely even to hear of it, let alone visit it. The Professor had found it a convenient and pleasant place to lie low in when he was supposed to have flown back to the States.
“This’ll be one of the long jobs,” Alice said. “He’s determined to go up the river himself as far as I’ll let him. That means I’ll have to get my hands all fishy and my shoulder sore from that blasted shotgun, and pretend I like it.”