The Saint was not given to exaggerated reactions. He did not fall over backwards in an explosion of sparks and stars like a character in the funny papers, with his eyebrows shooting up through his hair. He may have felt rather like it, but he was able to resist the inclination. In his memoirs, he would probably list it among the finest jobs of resisting he ever did.
He waved his cigarette with an aplomb that had no counterpart in his internal sensations.
“But of course,” he said cordially. “This proves that telepathy is still better than telephones.”
She stepped in just as calmly, and he closed the door.
“I could have let you work a lot longer, if I’d wanted to make it tough for you,” she said. “But I got tired of standing outside.”
Her head and eyes made an indicative movement back and upwards, and he followed their direction to the open transom above the door. He shut it.
“You must have a very big kind heart,” he said.
“It’s a pretty tedious way to track anyone down,” she said. “I know. That’s how I located you.”
“Did you make a deal or wash out with the Enriquez brothers so quickly?”
“They dropped me off first, and just took Sherman along. I think they have an old-world prejudice against having wives sit in on business conferences. So I was probably able to start calling sooner than you did. Besides, I was lucky.”
“Where, as a matter of interest, are you staying?”
“In Room six-eleven.”
The Saint sighed.
“And this is probably the last hotel I’d have tried. It would have seemed too easy. Whereas you, being a simple-minded woman, probably tried it first.”
“Correct. But let’s change that ‘simple-minded’ to ‘economical.’ This was the one place I could try before I started to run up a telephone bill.”
He cleared some things from a chair, and she sat down. He gave her a cigarette, lighted it, and sat on the end of the bed. At last he was actually as relaxed and at ease as he had contrived to seem from the beginning. He wondered why he had ever allowed himself to get in a stew about the apparent dead end he had run into. He should have known that such a fantastically pat and promising beginning could not possibly peter out, so long as there was such an obviously plot-conscious genius at work. Inevitably the thread would have been brought back to him even if he had done nothing but sit and wait for it.
But underneath his coolly interested repose he was as wary as if he had been closeted with a coy young tigress. Perhaps everything would remain cosy and kitteny; but he had no illusions about the basic hazards of the situation.
“It’s nice to feel that our hearts are so in tune,” he remarked. “I was determined to find you again, regardless of cost. You were a little thriftier about it, but no less determined. And so we meet. Fate failed to keep us apart, and at this moment is probably gnashing the few teeth it can have left. However, there’s still one small point. I had plenty of opportunities to hear your name. But how did you know mine?”
“I recognized you, Mr. Templar-as I think you knew.”
“We haven’t met before.”
“No.”
“So you’ve seen my picture and read about me.”
“Right. And now it’s time you let me ask a question. Why were you so anxious to find me?”
Simon considered his reply.
“Any mirror would tell you better than I can. But let’s say that when I first saw you alone, I was hoping you’d stay that way for long enough for us to get acquainted. I was sort of tied up at the moment, if you remember. Then, when your husband showed up, I could see you were much too good for him. After thinking it over, I decided that he’s the dull type that it’s almost a public duty to cuckold. I was planning to find out if you agreed.”
Her eyes widened a fraction but did not blink. They were a darker blue than his own, and there were smoky shadows in their depths. Blue is conventionally a cool color, but he realized that her shade could have the heat potential of a blowtorch flame.
“You don’t try very hard to be subtle, do you?” she said, and said it without any indignation.
“Not always. Especially when a gal seems to have similar ideas of her own. You didn’t track me down just to ask for my autograph, did you?”
“No. My turn again. What do you know about the Enriquez brothers?”
“That they’re big tycoons down here, and tough babies. That they’ve specialized in robbing the Mexican public through government contracts obtained by graft and corruption. That they were recently investigated and exposed by the present administration, and are temporarily out of business and facing a possible rest period in the hoosegow. That they would therefore like to see a fast change in the regime. That they are backing a fast-changer named Jose Jalisco, who has the necessary wind to rouse the rabble, and would love to buy some toys that go bang for his followers. That this makes them ideal customers for a homeless shipload of arms and ammunition.”
“You seem to have found out a lot.”
“It was poured into my ear, on what I believe to be excellent authority. Shouldn’t that make it my turn next? Why were you looking for me, if it wasn’t just to tell me how wonderful you think I am?”
“I wanted to ask how you felt about that gun deal.”
The Saint grinned.
“That’s a neat reverse,” he said appreciatively.
“Well?”
She was not smiling. The dusky warmth in her eyes was stilled and held back, perhaps like a force in reserve.
Simon gazed at her directly for several seconds while he made a decision. He snubbed out his cigarette gently in an ashtray. .
“I don’t like it,” he answered.
“Do you really care whether they have one more revolution here?”
“Yes, I do,” he said. “It may be rather dreamy and sentimental of me, but I care. If I thought it had a chance of doing some good, I might feel differently. But I know about this one. Its only real objective would be to get a couple of top-flight grafters off the hook and put them back in business. To achieve that, a lot of wretched citizens and stooges would be killed and maimed, and thousands more would be made even more miserable than they are. I wouldn’t like that.”
“Not even if it dropped a very nice piece of change into your own lap?”
His mouth hardened.
“Not even if it dropped me the keys to Fort Knox,” he said coldly. “I can always steal a few million without killing anyone, or making nearly so many people unhappy.”
She flicked her cigarette jerkily. The ash made a gray splash on the carpet.
“So if you could, you’d try to stop Sherman from making a deal.”
“I’ll go further. I intend to do my God-damnedest to louse it up.”
“I had an idea that was what you’d say.”
“If you’d read anything about me worth reading, you wouldn’t even have had to ask.”
She took a slow deep breath. It stirred fascinating contours under the soft silk of her dress.
“That’s good,” she said. “I just had to be sure. Now I know you’ll be with us. We don’t have any cargo of guns to sell. We’re just trying to clean up in the bunko racket, with a bit of that Robin Hood touch you used to specialize in. The whole pitch was just a build-up to take the Enriquez brothers.”
4.
Simon Templar stood up, unfolding his length inch by inch. He felt for the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. He drew out a cigarette and placed it between his lips. He stroked his lighter and put it to the cigarette. He exhaled a thin jet of smoke and put the lighter back in his pocket. All his movements were extremely slow and careful, as if he had been balancing on a tightrope over a whirling void. They had to be, while he waited for his fragmented coordinates to settle down, like a spun kaleidoscope, into a new pattern. But by this time his capacity for dizziness was fortunately a little numbed. The human system can only absorb so many jolts in one evening without losing some of its pristine vigor of response.
“I see,” he said. “I suppose I should have guessed it when your husband came bouncing in and spilled all the beans so loudly and clearly at the very next table to Manuel and Pablo -after you’d kept them watching you long enough to be quite sure they’d be listening.”
“He wasn’t meant to wait quite so long,” she said, “but he did get held up.”
“So there is no ship. And no guns.”
She shook her head.
“There is a ship. It’s cruising in the Gulf of Mexico right now. It has a lot of crates on board-full of rocks. There are also two or three on top which do have rifles and machine-guns in them, which can be opened for inspection. We weren’t expecting the Enriquez brothers to put out a lot of cash without being pretty convinced about what they were buying.”
“That sounds like quite an investment.”
“It was. But we can afford it. If it works out, we’ll pick up at least half a million dollars.”
The Saint rubbed his hands softly together, just once.
“A truly noble swindle,” he murmured with restrained rapture. “Boldly conceived, ingeniously contrived, unstintingly financed, slickly dramatized, professionally played-and one of the classics of all time for size. I wish I’d thought of it myself.”
For the first time in a long while, a trace of a smile touched her lips.
“You approve?”
“Especially in the choice of pigeons.”
“I’m glad of that. I picked them myself, and planned it all for them. I thought it made quite a Saintly set-up. In fact, I should really give you most of the credit. I was thinking of things I’d read about you, and the way you used to do jobs like this, all the time I was figuring it out.”
He studied her again, for the first time with purely intellectual appraisal.
“It begins to sound as if you were the brains of the Inkler partnership.”
“Sometimes I am. Of course, Sherm wasn’t doing so badly when I teamed up with him. But this one was my very own brain-child.”
“And was it all your own idea, too, to come and talk to me just now?”
“We agreed on it. I had a chance to get in a word with him alone, when they dropped me off. I told him I’d recognized you, and who you were. We both knew we’d have to do some fresh figuring, fast. He left it to me. As a matter of fact, he didn’t have much choice. The Enriquez brothers were waiting. He said whatever I did was okay with him, but for Christ’s sake do something.”
“Well,” said the Saint helpfully, “what are you going to do?”
She raised her eyes to his face.
“I’ve told you the whole story. And I’m hoping you’re not sore at me for trying to imitate your act.”
“Of course not,” Simon assured her heartily. “If you mean, for baiting such a beautiful trap to skin a pair of sidewinders like Manuel and Pablo. I wish a lot more people would take up the sport. However …” His brows drew together and his gaze slanted at her shrewdly. “I had my eye on them too, even if you saw them first.”
“And you should get a royalty for being my inspiration.” She put out her cigarette, escaping his steady scrutiny only for a moment, and looked at him again.
“All right,” she said. “Would you be satisfied if we split three ways?”
He didn’t move.
“You, me, and Sherman?” he said.
“Yes. After all, we’ve spent a lot of money, and done a lot of groundwork.”
Simon walked over to the window and looked out. It seemed to have stopped raining, but the streets below were shiny with water. He gazed over the nearer rooftops and the scattered lights to the hazy glow of illumination that hung over the city’s center. He had seldom felt that life was so rich and bountiful.
There may well be among the varied devotees of these chronicles some favored individual who has once experienced a certain feeling of elation upon learning that a hitherto undreamed-of uncle has gone to join the heavenly choir, leaving him a half-dozen assorted oil wells. Such a one might have a faint conception of the incandescent beatitude that was welling up in the Saint’s ecstatic soul. A very faint and protopathic conception. For the fundamentally dreary mechanics of inheriting a few mere fountains of liquid lucre cannot really be compared with the blissful largesse that the Saint saw Providence decanting on him from its upturned cornucopia. This had poetry; this fell into the kind of artistic pattern that made music in his heart.
He turned at last.
“Will you just mail me my share,” he asked, “or am I expected to help?”
“Is the deal okay?”
“You must remind me some day to warn you about being too generous, in this racket.”
She let out breath in an almost inaudible sigh, sinking a little deeper in the chair. It was the first proof she had given that she had been under tension before.
“You could help a lot.”
“Tell me.”
“Frankly,” she said, “the only thing I’ve been worried about is the payoff. First, they’ll want to be sure that we’ve really got the guns. That’s taken care of. They can take a motor-boat and go out a few miles from Vera Cruz or Tampico, and meet our boat. All right. Then we’ll come to the question of delivery. That cargo can’t be unloaded at a regular port. So I expect them to pick some quiet spot along the coast where it can be brought in at dead of night.”
“How do you manage to be so beautiful and have this kind of brain?” he asked admiringly.
“I’m only thinking it out the way you would.” There was nothing coy about her now: it was all business. “So we agree to do that. But we can’t count on them giving us the money and trusting that we’ll deliver. Most probably, they’ll want to payoff at the landing place, when the cargo starts coming ashore. We’d have to agree to that too. And then suppose they decided to double-cross us-to take the cargo and keep their money?”
“They’d be afraid of you tipping off the cops… . But of course, if they were going that far, they could shut you up permanently.”
“And Sherman isn’t the fighting type. Even if he had a gun, he wouldn’t know how to use it.”
“How about your crew on the boat?”
“They’re only half in on the caper. We told them we were only trying to run in a batch of illegal slot machines, and hired them for a flat price. You can imagine what a cut they’d have wanted if we’d said anything about guns. They don’t think they’re taking much of a risk, and I’d hate to rely on them in a real jam.”