Señor Saint (The Saint Series) Read online

  THE ADVENTURES OF THE SAINT

  Enter the Saint (1930), The Saint Closes the Case (1930), The Avenging Saint (1930), Featuring the Saint (1931), Alias the Saint (1931), The Saint Meets His Match (1931), The Saint Versus Scotland Yard (1932), The Saint’s Getaway (1932), The Saint and Mr Teal (1933), The Brighter Buccaneer (1933), The Saint in London (1934), The Saint Intervenes (1934), The Saint Goes On (1934), The Saint in New York (1935), Saint Overboard (1936), The Saint in Action (1937), The Saint Bids Diamonds (1937), The Saint Plays with Fire (1938), Follow the Saint (1938), The Happy Highwayman (1939), The Saint in Miami (1940), The Saint Goes West (1942), The Saint Steps In (1943), The Saint on Guard (1944), The Saint Sees It Through (1946), Call for the Saint (1948), Saint Errant (1948), The Saint in Europe (1953), The Saint on the Spanish Main (1955), The Saint Around the World (1956), Thanks to the Saint (1957), Señor Saint (1958), Saint to the Rescue (1959), Trust the Saint (1962), The Saint in the Sun (1963), Vendetta for the Saint (1964), The Saint on TV (1968), The Saint Returns (1968), The Saint and the Fiction Makers (1968), The Saint Abroad (1969), The Saint in Pursuit (1970), The Saint and the People Importers (1971), Catch the Saint (1975), The Saint and the Hapsburg Necklace (1976), Send for the Saint (1977), The Saint in Trouble (1978), The Saint and the Templar Treasure (1978), Count On the Saint (1980), Salvage for the Saint (1983)

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Text copyright © 2014 Interfund (London) Ltd.

  Foreword © 2014 John Rogers

  Introduction to “The Golden Frog” © 1965 Leslie Charteris

  Publication History and Author Biography © 2014 Ian Dickerson

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  ISBN-13: 9781477842928

  ISBN-10: 1477842926

  Cover design by David Drummond, www.salamanderhill.com

  CONTENTS

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  THE PEARLS OF PEACE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  THE REVOLUTION RACKET

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  THE ROMANTIC MATRON

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  THE GOLDEN FROG

  INTRODUCTION

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  WATCH FOR THE SIGN OF THE SAINT!

  THE SAINT CLUB

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  The text of this book has been preserved from the original edition and includes vocabulary, grammar, style, and punctuation that might differ from modern publishing practices. Every care has been taken to preserve the author’s tone and meaning, allowing only minimal changes to punctuation and wording to ensure a fluent experience for modern readers.

  FOREWORD TO THE NEW EDITION

  So here’s how Simon Templar changed my life.

  I was fourteen, in my first year of Catholic high school in a dying post-industrial city in Massachusetts. I was a Good Boy. Went to church, studied hard, joined student council—the lot. Folks used the word “clever” around me. My moral framework was set, my worldview ordered. The future was good grades, a fine college, some solid middle-class job.

  Then, on a shelf in the local library, I met the Saint.

  I’d had a little pulp experience—swung with Tarzan, travelled the world with Doc Savage—but those heroes were too large for real life. Jungle men and genetic prodigies. But Simon Templar? Simon was just very, very…what’s the word?

  Clever.

  The Saint was my introduction to the Trickster Hero. His ability to win, not by force but by manipulating men and systems to destroy themselves, fascinated me. It began my lifelong obsession with unravelling every system I encountered in life. What were its rules? How did it work? How could it be broken? I could never be Tarzan, or Doc Savage; but a smart man with a bit of nerve, oh, he could be Simon Templar.

  My interest in fiction suddenly changed to pulp and detectives, anti-heroes and crime. Heroes who didn’t just break the rules, but broke them because it was the right thing to do. Heroes who had complex morals in a complex, grey world. I could suddenly acknowledge something that had been haunting me—the secret sense that the world was not, in fact, ordered or fair or predictable. Fate is fickle and cruel. It will devour the brave and foil the virtuous…but the clever hero, he can ride Fate. He can survive in a grey world.

  I did go to college—but in a foreign city, to see a bit of the world. Then my hobby for stand-up comedy overtook my career in physics (don’t ask) and I went on the road. Ten years of nightclubs, grifters, gamblers, mobbed-up doormen, nights where the club owner offered to pay you in cocaine rather than cash. I travelled the world; picked up enough Spanish, French, and German to order drinks; learned my wines and, more importantly, my scotches; got my nose broken in a bar fight and broke a few myself. I learned that in every bad spot, there was always a man big enough to put you down. But if you were a bit faster, a bit more charming, a bit more clever, like Simon Templar, you’d come out of it okay.

  Eventually I turned to writing. I started in sitcoms (most comedians make that transition), but when I moved to one-hour dramas and movies, I made a very fine career out of writing the Trickster Hero. My heroes always won because they were smarter. They always had a plan. They did the right thing, even if it was the wrong way. There was a niche for this writing, and not a lot of screenwriters filling it. Simon Templar gave me my career.

  This culminated, of course, with Leverage, the TV show I created and ran. Four thieves led by one honest man, Nate Ford. By now, of course, Nate’s come to admit he’s not exactly an honest man anymore. He’s the Mastermind, the vicious bastard who’ll risk his neck to save a kid or bankrupt a corrupt millionaire. Nate may be from working-class Boston Irish, but I’d like to think that in the vast fictional universe he and Simon Templar butted heads once or twice, and bought each other drinks on more than one occasion.

  The theme of Leverage was spoken aloud by our thief Parker (and yes, that’s a direct homage) in the first season. Confronted by a confused Honest Citizen, she shrugs and says, “Sometimes Bad Guys are the only Good Guys you get.” Leverage is a direct descendant of the Simon Templar stories. While I can’t imagine the stories will change your life the way they did mine, I’m sure you’ll enjoy watching Simon Templar travel the world, helping the helpless, righting wrongs, ripping off the rich, and being generally very clever indeed.

  —John Rogers

  THE PEARLS OF PEACE

  1

  Before the idea becomes too firmly established that Simon Templar (or, as it usually seems easier to call him, the Saint), never bothered to steal anything of which the value could be expressed in less than six figures, I want to tell here the story of the most trivial robbery he ever committed.

  The popular conception of the meanest theft that can be committed is epitomized in the cliché of “stealing pennie
s from a blind man.” Yet that, almost literally, is what the Saint once did. And he is perhaps prouder of it than of any other larceny in a list which long ago assumed the dimensions of an epic.

  The Saint has been called by quite a thesaurus of romantic names, of which “The Robin Hood of Modern Crime” and “The Twentieth Century’s Brightest Buccaneer” are probably the hardest worked. By public officials obligated to restrain his self-appointed and self-administered kind of justice, and by malefactors upon whom it had been exercised, he was described by an even more definitive glossary of terms which cannot be quoted in a publication available to the general public. To himself he was only an adventurer born in the wrong age, a cavalier cheated out of his sword, a pirate robbed of his black flag, with a few inconvenient ideals which had changed over the years in detail but never in principle. But by whatever adjectives you choose to delineate him, and with whatever you care to make of his motives, the sober arithmetical record certainly makes him, statistically, one of the greatest robbers of all time. Estimates of the total loot which at one time or another passed through his hands, as made by mathematically-minded students of these stories, vary in their net amount: his expenses were always high, and his interpretation of a tithe to charity invariably generous. But by any system of calculation, they run comfortably into the millions.

  Such a result should surprise nobody. Simon Templar liked big adventures, and in big affairs there is usually big money involved, this being the sordid state of incentives in our day and age.

  But the Saint’s greatness was that he could be just as interested in small matters when they seemed big enough to him. And that is what the incident I am referring to was about.

  This happened around the town of La Paz, which in Spanish means only “Peace.”

  2

  La Paz lies near the southern tip of the peninsula of Baja California, “Lower California” in English—a long narrow leg of land which stretches down from the southern border of California and the United States. On account of the peculiarly ineradicable obsession of American statesmen with abstract lines of latitude and longitude as boundaries, instead of more intelligible geographic or ideographic frontiers, which accepted the ridiculous 38th-parallel partition of Korea as naturally as the quaint geometrical shape of most American state lines, this protuberance was blandly excluded from the deal which brought California into the Union, although topographically it is as obviously a proper part of California as its name implies. There is in technical fact a link of dry land south of the border connecting Baja California with the mainland of Mexico, but there is no practical transportation across it, no civilized way from one to the other without passing through the United States: for all the rest of its length, the Gulf of Lower California, or the Sea of Cortez, as the Mexicans know it, thrusts a hundred miles and more of deep water between the two.

  Thus like an almost amputated limb, Baja California hangs in the edge of the Pacific, bound to Mexico by nationality, to California by what terrestrial ligaments it has, nourished by neither and an anomaly to both. The highway artery leaps boldly across to Tijuana and contrives to keep going south to Ensenada, bearing a fair flow of tourist blood; but then almost at once it is a mere dusty trickle of an almost impassable road, navigable only to rugged venturers in jeeps, which meanders through scorched and barren waste lands for hundreds of empty miles to La Paz, which is the end of the line.

  La Paz is a port of long defunct importance, seeming to survive mainly because its inhabitants have nowhere else to go. But that was not always true. Here in the fine natural harbour, once, top-lofty Spanish galleons came to anchor, and bearded soldier-monks peered hungrily at the rocky shore, eager to convert the heathen with pax vobiscums or bonfires, but with some leaning towards the latter, and always with an eye to the mundane treasures that could be heisted from the pagans in exchange for a sizzling dose of salvation. But the gold of that region, though it was there and is still there, was too hard to extract for their voracious appetite, and they sailed on towards the richer promise of the north. Others, however, who came later and stayed, discovered treasure of another kind under the pellucid warm blue waters near by: once upon a time, the pearl fisheries of La Paz were world famous, far surpassing the product of the South Pacific oyster beds which most people think of in that connection today.

  And that is what this story began to be about.

  “It was the Japs,” Jocelyn Ormond said. “They put something in the water that killed off all the oysters. They were all up and down this coast just before the war, pretending to be fishermen, but really they were taking soundings and mapping our fortifications and getting ready for all kinds of sabotage. Like that.”

  “I know,” said the Saint lazily. “And every one of them had a Leica in his pocket and an admiral’s uniform in his duffel bag. Some of it’s probably true. But can you tell me how destroying the Mexican pearl industry would help their war plans against the United States? Or do you think it was some weird Oriental way of putting a spell on everything connected with pearls, like for instance Pearl Harbor?”

  “You’re kidding,” she said sulkily. “The oysters did die. You can’t get away from that.”

  When they were introduced by a joint acquaintance he had a puzzling feeling that they had met somewhere before. After a while he realized that they had—but it had never been in the flesh. She was a type. She was the half-disrobed siren on the jacket of a certain type of paper-bound fiction. She was the girl in the phony-tough school of detective stories, the girl that the grotesque private eye with the unpaid rent and the bottle of cheap whisky in his desk drawer is always running into, who throws her thighs and breasts at him and responds like hot jelly to his simian virility. She had all the standard equipment—the auburn hair, the bedroom eyes, the fabulous mammary glands, the clothes that clung suggestively to her figure, the husky voice, the full moist lips that looked as if they would respond lecherously enough to satisfy any addict of that style of writing—although the Saint hadn’t yet sampled them. He couldn’t somehow make himself feel like the type of cut-rate Casanova who should have been cast opposite her. He couldn’t shake off a sense of unreality about her perfect embodiment of the legendary super-floozy. But there was no doubt that she was sensational, and in a cautious way he was fascinated.

  He knew that other men had been less backward. She was Mrs Ormond now, but she had discarded Ormond some time ago in Reno. Before Ormond, there had been another, a man with the earthy name of Ned Yarn. It was Ned Yarn whose resuscitated ghost was with them now, intangibly.

  “I mean,” she said, “they were all supposed to have died—until I got that letter from Ned.”

  Simon went to the rail of the balcony which indiscreetly connected their rooms, and gazed out over the harbour and the ugly outlines of La Paz, softened now by the glamour of night lights. They were sitting outside to escape from the sweltering stuffiness of their rooms, the soiled shabbiness of the furniture and decoration, and the sight of the giant cockroaches which shared their tenancy. For such reasons as that, and because your chronicler does not want to be sued for libel, the hotel they were staying at must be nameless.

  “Let me see it again,” he said.

  She took the worn sheet of paper from her purse and gave it to him, and he held it up to read it by the light from inside the room.

  Dear Joss,

  I know you will be surprised to hear from me now, but I had no heart to write when I could only make excuses which you wouldn’t believe. You were quite right to divorce me. But now I have found the pearls I came for. I can pay everyone back, and perhaps make everything all right with you too.

  The only thing is, it may be delicate to handle. Say nothing to anyone, but send somebody you can trust who knows pearls and doesn’t mind taking a chance. Or come yourself . Whoever comes, go to the “Cantina de las Flores” in La Paz and ask for Consuelo. She will bring him to me. I won’t let you down this time.

  Always your

 
; Ned

  The writing was awkward and straggly, up hill and down dale, the long letters overlapping between lines.

  “Is this his writing?” Simon asked.

  “It wasn’t always that bad. Maybe he was drunk when he wrote it. Now that we’re here, I wonder why I came on this wild-goose chase.” She stared at the anæmic residue in her glass. “Fix me another slug, Saint.”

  He went back into the room, fished melting ice cubes from the warming water in the pitcher, and poured Peter Dawson over them. That was how she took it, and it never seemed to affect her much. Another characteristic that was strictly from literature.

  “That letter dated over five months ago,” he said. “Did it take all that time to reach you, or did you only just decide to do something about it?”

  “Both,” she said. “I didn’t get it for a long time—I was moving around, and it was just lucky that people kept forwarding it. And when I got it, I didn’t know whether to believe it, or what to do. If I hadn’t met you, I mightn’t ever have done anything about it. But you know about jewels.”

  “And I’m notorious for taking chances.”

  “And I like you.”

  He smiled into her slumbrous eyes, handing her the re-filled glass, and sat down again in the other chair stretching his long legs.

  “You liked Ormond when you married him, I suppose,” he said. “What was the mistake in that?”

  “He was a rich old man, but I thought he needed me. I found out that all he wanted was my body.”

  “It sounds like a reasonable ambition.”

  “But he wanted a bird in a gilded cage. To keep me in purdah, like a sultan. He didn’t want to go places and do things. He’d give me presents, but he wouldn’t let me have a penny of my own to spend.”

  “An obvious square,” said the Saint. “But you fixed him. What about Ned?”

  “I was very young then, just a small-town girl trying to crash Hollywood and making doughnut money as an extra. And it was during the war, and he was young too, and strong and healthy, and that Navy uniform did something for him. It happened to a lot of girls…And then the war was over, and I woke up, and he was just a working diver, a sort of submerged mechanic, earning a mechanic’s wages and going nowhere except under docks and bridges.”