“That’s too bad.”
“Oh well, maybe I can get his mind on to something else at least part of the time.”
“I notice your lipstick is a little smudged,” he remarked. “With a routine as good as we’ve got, I don’t think you need to develop your part quite so far in that direction as you’ve been doing.”
“Would you rather get someone else to do it?” she inquired. “I’ll play it the way I feel it, or quit. There isn’t much fun for me in this goddam place. And this is one john who isn’t a bit hard to take.”
When the following Friday morning went by without any phone call, she experienced a qualm that was almost as much personal as it was mercenary. She would have sworn that it was practically a toss-up whether Sebastian Tombs was more attracted by herself or the golden frogs, but as the afternoon wore on she began to wonder how both lures could have failed simultaneously. When her phone rang at last, after five o’clock, she was so relieved to hear his voice that her tone was quite angry.
“What ever happened to you?”
“I’ve been busy,” he said mildly. “You sound almost like a wife-or a boss.”
“I’m sorry.” She recovered herself quickly. “I guess I was getting worried. After seeing my father off and waiting here, I was starting to think how silly I’d look if you never came back.”
“Two things I never stand up, darling,” he said, “are a beautiful blonde and a chance to make easy money. How’s Loro doing?”
“He’s been calling me every hour. He’s got all the guns and ammunition, but his friends are pressing him for the money.”
“Tell him they can have it as soon as the banks open tomorrow.”
“What have you been so busy with-boss?”
“I got a tip over on the other side that should be worth a fortune,” he said. “I’ll tell you when I see you. Will you be gorgeous and hungry if I pick you up, let’s say, at seven?”
She had to struggle with an assortment of vague apprehensions until she met him. There were several facts that he might have heard or learned from someone who really knew the country that could have shaken the foundations of his belief in the Professor’s imaginative story, yet he had not sounded at all hesitant or skeptical. And when he greeted her he was unrestrainedly jubilant.
“This could be the greatest break for us,” he said. “My pal on the other side is a fly boy in the Navy, a full Commander, no less, but he’s never given up hope of getting rich some day. He thinks he has all the opportunities, and all he needs is a bit of luck. He used to dream about making a forced landing on some unheard-of mountain of gold, or a dry wash full of diamonds. Lately it’s uranium, and he never takes off without a small Geiger counter in one of his life-raft ration cans. Well, every place he goes, he studies up on the local mining laws, because when he strikes pay dirt he doesn’t intend to be hornswoggled out of it on some technicality. So I told him that I was thinking of scouting for some gold around here myself-without giving away any of your secrets, of course- and he told me that any minerals you find in Panama belong to the Government, unless you’ve bought a prospecting concession in advance for the exact area where you find ‘em. Did you know that?”
“No,” she said, with a blankness that did not have to be feigned.
“Anyway, that’s how it is. But my pal knew all the rules, so as soon as I got back here this morning I went to work to take out a prospecting concession on the area you’d shown me on the map. My trouble was, it’s such a little-known law that half the officials I talked to hadn’t heard of it themselves. Or maybe it’s just been too long since anyone did any serious prospecting around here. It took me half the day to find the right bureaucrat who could issue the concession, and it was even tougher getting him to do it on the spot, instead of mańana, or next month. But I finally made it. Look!”
He triumphantly unfolded a closely typewritten sheet of heavy paper. It was trimmed and embellished with an imposing variety of stamps, embossings, ribbons, and sealing wax, with a number of ornate signatures, but it was all written in Spanish, and about the only words that she recognized were the name of Sebastian Tombs.
“What does it say?”
“Cutting out all the gobbledegook, and the Castilian where-ases and heretofores, it simply says that I have this prospecting concession for the district you showed me, for ten days starting tomorrow. You see, to try and prevent anyone hogging a concession and doing nothing about it, they put the hell of a price on them, a hundred dollars a day, and the longest you can take ‘em for is three months. Then, if you make a strike, you can renew ‘em by the year; but then naturally you don’t mind the price. That’s why the area we’re interested in wasn’t tied up: nobody would pay that much rent for a prospecting license except for the time he’d be using it. This fancy scroll cost me a thousand bucks-from what you told me, I figured ten days should be plenty. But it gives us the right to keep all the golden frogs we can find in that time.”
The release from all her apprehensions was such a letdown that she felt slightly hysterical. It took a titanic effort at that moment to gaze at him with the awed and eager appreciation which she knew was called for, but somehow she achieved it.
“You’re wonderful,” she said. “I can see now why you must be a very successful speculator. You don’t miss anything. But we shouldn’t need anything like ten days. I’ve already arranged for the boat, and we could leave tomorrow morning if you like.”
“I like,” said the Saint.
4.
The departure of Loro on his intrepid mission to contact the headhunters was in itself almost worth the price of admission. Stripped down to a leopard-skin breechclout, his hair bound in a fillet of brocade that supported a couple of brightly-hued parrot feathers, with slashes and curlicues of paint on his face and chest, he would have satisfied any Hollywood studio wardrobe department.
Professor Nestor had had to work hard to persuade Loro that it was necessary to go to these theatrical extremes. It had been comparatively easy to convince him that when the sucker paid over his money, Loro should not simply disappear with all of it, for Loro could never hope to steal that kind of money again on his own, but by working loyally with the Professor and Alice he could expect to share in such killings at frequent intervals for an unlimited future. So, having shown the Saint a stack of oilcloth-wrapped bundles piled in one of the cabins of the boat, with Alice vouching that she had personally inspected and helped to wrap the guns, and having received a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills as promised, he had taken it docilely to the hired car in which Professor Nestor was waiting to leave for Santa Clara, receiving in return only $3000 for himself and $3500 in an envelope to be taken back to Alice.
But after the first of such divisions, Loro had taken it for granted that they would all three disappear. The Professor had explained that the victim would then complain to the police, which would be a severe handicap to any future activities. In that case, Loro had suggested cheerfully, it would perhaps be better to take the boat some distance out into the Gulf of Panama, tie the victim to some of the weighted bundles, and drop him over the side. The Professor had explained patiently that the mysterious disappearance of an American, especially a wealthy one, could hardly fail to cause an investigation which would be very likely to come embarrassingly close to them.
“The very best confidence jobs, my dear Loro,” the Professor had pontificated, “don’t even let the sucker know that he’s been taken. Isn’t it worth a little time and trouble to give our customers a real show for their money, and know that we’ll never have to worry about them hollering for the cops?”
He had eventually secured Loro’s cooperation, but had reason to doubt if he would ever completely make his point.
Even on this occasion, at the first opportunity Loro had when the Saint was at the other end of the boat, he said to Alice: “All this waste plenty time. Much better tonight I-“
He drew an expressive forefinger across his throat. He was half serious and half teasing her, she could tell from his malicious grin, but she was surprised to feel herself shudder.
“Stop it, Loro … ! Anyway,” she said, in an attempt to cover up the sharpness of her reaction, “this one is a perfect example of what we’ve tried to explain to you. He’s actually taken out a prospecting license from the Government, and he must have told a dozen people where he’s going. If he disappeared, we’d have too many tough questions to answer.”
It was only after she had said it that the fantastic thought crossed her mind that Sebastian Tombs might have done all that, and taken pains to tell her about it, as an elaborate precaution against the very thing that Loro was advocating, and a subtle warning that if perchance that was what they had in mind they had better forget it. But the implications that followed were so far-fetched that she had made herself brush the idea aside.
Now bundles of alleged rifles and ammunition had been unloaded from the boat and cached at the edge of the jungle, and Loro was ready to play out the last sequence of Professor Nestor’s ingenious script.
“You go back down river a little,” he said. “One mile, plenty, only so headhunters no see. Mańana, this time, you come back, you find me with gold frogs.”
“Be careful, Loro,” Alice said anxiously.
“Me always careful,” Loro said, with his jolly bandit’s grin. “No worry. Hasta luego, diosa.”
He spoke in rapid dialect to the boat captain, an uncle of his who had been a fairly honest fisherman before he was conscripted into the team, who was not very bright, but who had a non-speaking part which was almost foolproof since he understood no English and hardly any Spanish. Loro cast off the lines which had held the boat to the bank, and the captain started the engine as it began to drift downstream. Loro stood and waved until it vanished around the nearest bend, and then picked up one of the oilcloth packages which had been providently ballasted with a case of rum and plodded towards the next turn upstream, where there was a village of utterly harmless Indians who were always glad to see him and whose daughters were especially hospitable. He would stay there, very pleasantly, until the boat came back for him in a week or two.
Simon stood beside Alice on the narrow deck, gazing silently at the wall of tangled greenery that slid past them until the captain turned the boat in mid-stream, aimed the bow diagonally up towards the bank, cut the engine, and shuffled forward to throw a line over a leaning tree and snub the boat to a berth as nonchalantly as any airline pilot ever made a landing.
The Saint was frowning.
“I seem to be a bit confused,” he said, “I thought when you came here before you had a lot of native bearers, who got massacred. Then you fought a rearguard action for two days down the river. And yet we came here all the way from Panama in two days, and Loro is going to make a deal with the headhunters and be back with the golden frogs tomorrow.”
Again she was barely touched by a fleeting uneasiness, but she was ready with the answer.
“Last time, we were exploring. We went off on big swings through the jungle, covering as much ground as we could. We were on one of those hikes when we found the cave. We’d left the boat way down near the mouth of the river. When we fought our way back to it it was along these banks, only we were on foot. We followed the river because it was the only thing that saved us from getting lost, but you can see what rough going it was.”
(“There’s a limit to how far we can go with this,” the Professor had said, when he taught her the speech. “If we gave ‘em a full two-week safari, for that kind of money, we’d be almost legitimate.”)
Simon nodded uncritically.
“I should have figured that out for myself,” he said. “It must have been pretty rugged.”
“I’d rather not talk about it,” she said, and meant every word. She despised herself for the palpitation that his unreserved acceptance of her explanation had set at rest again, but she was in no hurry to expose herself to any more potentially devastating questions. “Shall we try some fishing? Loro says that snook come all the way up here to spawn.”
He was still studying the banks rather than the water, his keen eyes raking along the ragged edge of the forest as though searching for something more than timber and foliage.
“I’d prefer to tramp around on shore a bit, as soon as we’ve got some lunch under our belts. I wouldn’t.want to have to go back and say I’d never set foot in this wilderness. We can take the shotgun, and maybe pick up something good to eat.”
She had only her own build-up to thank for his bland assumption that she would not want to be left behind. She thought wildly of all the facile excuses she could make, but she realized that every one of them would have a hollow ring. So far he had only heard talk about her tomboy virtues, and if she seemed to wriggle out of the first opportunity to display them he could hardly help being touched by a flicker of suspicion. And once a man started to doubt, there was no forecasting where his skepticism would turn next.
She gritted her teeth and wished that lightning would strike him, but she forced herself to say: “That would be fun.”
Four hours later she was nearly ready to strike him down herself. Following the river on foot was a minor nightmare which developed its miseries cumulatively but inexorably until their weight and blackness was smothering.
Sometimes they were stumbling over tangled roots, sometimes sinking above their ankles in thick gluey mud, almost continuously warding off branches, leaves, fronds, vines, and thorns that poked and scratched and tugged at clothing and bare skin. The only respite from that harassment was when they took to the river to circumvent a particularly impassable thicket on land: then there was the treachery of invisible hazards underfoot, the haunting fear of crocodiles, and the discomfort of boots full of water for a memento. Winged and crawling things in infinite variety tickled and bit them. She was soaked with mud up to the hips and with sweat above that; her blonde hair hung in bedraggled skeins. She swore bitterly to herself that if she survived this excursion she would insist on some basic re-writing in her part next time.