Simon barely touched his glass to his lips.
“And you said no?”
“I swear it. I told him he’d never get his hands on any of the money I had. I was taking it right back to Los Angeles, and I’d see what the police here could do about getting back the refund he’d gotten on the diving equipment. And I walked out.” Ned Yarn twisted his knuckles tensely together. “I didn’t get very far. He must have followed me and crept up behind me. Something hit me on the head, and I was out like a light. It’s been lights out for me ever since.”
“The money was gone, of course.”
Yarn nodded. He said: “You tell him, Consuelo.”
She said: “I found him. It was just outside here. I was going to work. I thought he was drunk. Then I saw the blood. I could not leave him to die. I took him in my house. Then, when he did not get well quickly, I was afraid. I thought, if I call the police, they will say I did it to rob him. I sent for a doctor I know. Together we took care of him. He was sick for a long time. And then I could not turn him out, because he was blind.”
“And you’ve looked after him ever since,” said the Saint, and deliberately averted his eyes.
“I was glad to.” He heard only her voice. “Because then I had fallen in love.”
And now the Saint understood at least a part of that strange story, with a fulness that left him for a little while without speech.
Ned Yarn had never seen Consuelo. He had met her only as a voice, a voice of indescribable sweetness, just as the Saint had first met her; but Ned Yarn had never been able to turn his eyes and have the mental vision that the voice created shattered by the sight of her coarse raddled face. And the woman who spoke with the voice had been kind to him in a way that fulfilled all the promise of its rich tenderness. Her figure would have been better then, and perhaps even her face less marred; and his fingers, when they clumsily explored her features, would not have been sensitive enough to trace them as they really were. They could easily have confirmed to him a picture that his imagination had already formed and was determined to believe. And in his perpetual darkness there could be no disillusion… .
“Maybe you think I’m a bum,” Ned Yarn said, “Maybe I am. But what could I do? I didn’t have a penny, and I couldn’t go more than a few steps by myself. Tiltman probably thought he’d killed me with that crack on the head. He might almost as well have. It was months before I really knew what was going on. And even then I still couldn’t think straight, I guess.”
“You figured by that time everyone would have decided you’d run off with Tiltman and the money,” said the Saint.
“Even Joss. I couldn’t blame her. I was just too ashamed to try to write and explain. I didn’t think anyone would believe me. I guess I was wrong; but by the time I started to think it out properly, it was later still-that much more too late. And by then …” The premature lines in his face softened amazingly. “By then I was in love too. I didn’t really want to go back.”
Ash tumbled from the Saint’s long-neglected cigarette as he put it to his mouth again.
“But you finally wrote to Jocelyn,” he said.
“I’m coming to that. After a while, I realized I couldn’t go on for ever doing nothing but being sorry for myself, letting Consuelo keep me on the money she made as a waitress.”
From the matter-of-fact way Yarn said it, Simon knew that the man could never have had any idea of the kind of place she worked in. He was aware of the woman’s eyes on him, but he gave no sign of it.
“Her doctor thought there might be a chance of getting my sight back if I could go to a first-class specialist,” Ned Yarn said. “But that would cost plenty of money. And I couldn’t go back to the States for treatment when it’d probably mean being put in jail. I needed even more money, to pay everybody back what I’d helped them to lose through Tiltman. I wanted to do that anyway. When I finally got my guts back, I knew that was what I had to do somehow-pay everyone off, and get my eyes fixed, and make a fresh start.”
“You still believed in that overlooked oyster bed?”
“It was the only chance I could think of. Eventually I talked Consuelo into helping me. She has a friend who’s a fisherman, and he’d let us borrow his boat sometimes. We went out as often as we could. We searched all over, everywhere.”
“You went diving, when you were blind?”
“No, Consuelo did that. With a face mask. She can swim like a fish, she tells me. I just sat in the boat. And then, when at last she found oysters, I’d haul up the baskets she filled, and help her to open them. And as I wrote to Joss, we finally did it. We found those pearls!”
“The jackpot?” Simon asked.
Ned Yarn shook his head.
“I don’t know. Quite a few, so far. Consuelo sold a few small ones, to get money to make us just a little more comfortable. And six months ago we bought a boat of our own, so we could go out more often. Of course she got practically nothing for them, because of the way she had to sell them. And she couldn’t show any of the big ones without attracting too much attention. That’s why I had to get in touch with someone who’d know their real value, and perhaps be able to sell them properly up north.”
At Simon’s side, the woman turned abruptly, her over-plucked eyebrows drawn together.
“Is he a buyer of pearls?” she asked. “Is that why he is here? You did not tell me, Ned.”
“I know.” The man smiled awkwardly. “I told you I was sending for someone who would help us to buy some real diving equipment, so we could really bring up those oysters after I taught you to use it. I was afraid of getting your hopes too high. But actually, that’s just what he might do.”
“If the pearls are not worth so much, you will use the money to buy diving equipment to look for more?”
“That’s right.”
“But if they’re worth enough,” said the Saint, “you want to pay back eleven thousand dollars to various people, and see if something can be done about your eyes?”
“Yes.”
“And then come back to Consuelo,” said the Saint softly.
“Oh, no,” Ned Yarn said. “I wouldn’t leave here unless she came with me.”
Consuelo stood up with a sudden rough movement that shook the table. She stood beside Yarn with a hand on his shoulder, and his hand went up at once to cover hers.
“I do not like it,” she said. “How do you know you can trust him?”
“I’ll have to risk it,” Yarn said grimly. “Show him the pearls, Consuelo.”
She stared at the Saint defensively, her eyes hot and hostile and shifting like the eyes of a cornered animal.
“I will not.”
“Consuelo!”
“I cannot,” she said. “I have already sold them.”
“What?”
“Si, si,” she said quickly. “I sold them. To a dealer I met at the Cantina. I was going to surprise you. He gave me five hundred dollars-“
“Five hundred dollars!”
“For a start. He will bring me the rest soon. I have it here.” She twisted away towards the bed and rummaged under the mattress. In a moment she was back, thrusting crumpled bills into his hands. “There! Count them. It is all there. And there will be more!”
Ned Yarn did not count the bills. He did not even hold them. They spilled over his lap and fluttered down to the floor. He had caught one of Consuelo’s wrists, and clung to it with both hands, and his blind face turned up towards her strickenly.
“What is this?” he said in a terrible hoarse voice. “I never thought you lied to me. But you’re lying now. Your voice tells me.”
“I do not lie!”
“Templar,” said Yarn, with a straining throat. “Please help me. There’s a pottery jar on the top shelf, in the corner over the stove. Look in it and tell me what you find.”
Simon got to his feet, a little uncertainly. Then he crossed to the corner in three quick strides. There was only one jar that fitted the description. With his height, he could just reach it.
Consuelo writhed and twisted in Yarn’s grip like a lassoed wildcat, so that the chair he sat in rocked, and pounded on his head and shoulders with her free fist.
“No, no!” she screamed.
But the blind man’s grip held her like an anchor, and she fell still at last as the Saint tilted the jar over one cupped hand, so that the ripple of things rolling from it could be heard over the heavy breathing which was the only other thing that broke the silence.
Simon Templar looked at the dozen or so cheap beads of various sizes brought together in the hollow of his palm, and looked up from them to the defiant streaming eyes of Ned Yarn’s woman.
“I think these are the most beautiful pearls I ever saw,” he said.
5.
The woman slid down to the floor beside Yarn and sat there with her face pressed against his thigh.
“Why did you lie, Consuelo?” Yarn asked puzzedly. “What on earth upset you like that?”
“I think I can guess,” said the Saint. “She was just trying to protect you. After all, neither of you knows me from Adam, and you are taking rather a lot on trust. Probably she wanted time to talk it over with you first.”
The woman sobbed.
Ned Yarn caressed her stringy hair, murmuring little soothing sounds as she clung to his legs.
“It’s all right, querida.” His face was still troubled. “But the money-the five hundred dollars. Where did that come from?”
“I bet I can answer that too,” said the Saint. “She’d held out two or three more small pearls and sold them, and she was saving the money for a surprise present of some kind. Is that right, Consuelo?”
She lifted her head and looked at the Saint.
“No,” she said. “It is my own money. I earned it and saved it myself. I kept it from you, Ned. I did not want to spend quite all our money on the search for pearls. I thought, perhaps we will never find any pearls, but I would keep saving, and one day perhaps I could take you myself to see if you could be cured. That is the truth,”
Yarn lifted her up and kissed her.
“How blind can a man be?” he said huskily.
“Some people would give their eyes for what you’ve got,” Simon said.
“And I wish I had mine most so that I could see it. I know how beautiful she must be, but I would like to see her. She is beautiful, isn’t she?”
“She is beautiful, Ned.”
“Please, you must both forgive me,” Consuelo said in a low voice. “Let us have some tequila.”
Simon looked down at the little heap of beads in his hand.
“What do you want me to do with the pearls?” he asked.
The blind man’s dark glasses held his gaze like hypnotic hungry eyes.
“Are they really valuable?”
“I’d say they were, but I’m not an expert,” Simon replied, improvising with infinite care. “They’d have to be sold in the right place, of course. As you may know, individual pearls don’t mean so much, unless they’re really gigantic. Most pearls are made into necklaces and things like that, which means that they have to be matched, and they gain in value by being put together. And then it’s a funny market these days, on account of all the cultured pearls that only an expert can tell from real ones. There are still people who’ll spend a fortune on the genuine article, but you don’t find them waiting on every jeweler’s doorstep. It takes work, and preparation, and patience-and time.”
“But-eventually-they should be worth a lot?”
“Eventually,” said the Saint soberly, “they may mean more to you than you’d believe right now.”
Ned Yarn’s breath came and went in a long sigh.
“That’s all I wanted to know,” he said. “I can wait some more. I guess I’m used to waiting.”
“Do you want me to take the pearls back to the States and see what I can do with them?”
“Yes. And Consuelo and I will go on fishing for more. At least we’ll know we aren’t wasting our time. Where’s that drink you were talking about, Consuelo?” She put the glass in his hand, and he raised it. “Here’s luck to all of us.”
“Especially to you two.” Simon looked at the woman over his glass and said: “Salud!”
He wrapped the beads carefully in a scrap of newspaper and tucked it into his pocket.
“Do you mind if Consuelo guides me back from here?” he asked. “I don’t want to get lost.”
“Of course, we don’t want that. And thank you for coming.”
The night was the same, perhaps a little cooler, perhaps a little more muted in its secret sounds. The woman’s heels tapped the same monotonous rhythm, perhaps a little slower. They walked quite a long way without speaking, as they had before; but now they kept silence as if to make sure that they were beyond the most fantastic range of a blind man’s hearing before they spoke.
Simon Templar was glad that the silence lasted as long as it did. He had a lot to think about, to weigh and balance and to look ahead from.
Finally she said, almost timidly: “I think you understand, seńor.”
“I think so,” he said; but he waited to hear more from her.
“When he began to be discontented, we went out in the boat and began looking for pearls. For a long time that made him happy. But presently, when we found nothing he was unhappy again. At last we found some oysters. Then again he had hope. But there were no pearls. So presently, after some more time, he was sad again. It hurt too much to see him despair. So at last I let him find some pearls. At first they were real, I think. I took them from some earrings that my mother gave me. And after that, they were beads.”
“And when you said you sold them-“
“I did sell the real ones, for a few pesos. The rest was money I had saved for him, like the five hundred dollars.”
“Did you mean what I heard you say-that if you could save enough, you meant to take him to a specialist somewhere who might be able to bring back his sight?”
There was a long pause before she answered.
“I would have done it when I had the courage,” she said. “I will do it one day, when I am strong enough. But it will not be easy. Because I know that when he sees me with his eyes, he will not love me any more.”
He felt it all the way through him down to his toes, like the subsonic tremor of an earthquake, the tingling realization of what those few simple words meant.
She was not blind, and she used mirrors. If she had ever deluded herself, it had not been for long. She knew very well what they told her. Homely and aged and scarred as she was, no man such as she had dreamed of as a young girl would ever love her as a young girl dreams of love. Unless he was blind. Even before the aging had taken hold she had discovered that, and seen the infinite emptiness ahead. But one night, some miracle had brought her a blind man… .