Señor Saint (The Saint Series) Read online

  He ordered a dish of Moro crab, that big-clawed delicacy who manages somehow to be just a little more succulent down there than his brother the stone crab of the Florida Keys, and a paella Valenciana, and said, “One other thing—do you think you can find a newspaper lying around anywhere?”

  “I will see,” said the waiter.

  Simon lighted a cigarette and sipped a glass of manzanilla, and began to take a few things apart in his mind.

  Just as positively as the two men he had seen at the Comodoro were of the police, the man he had called Pancho was not. Simon had yet to meet any kind of police, even Secret Police, who threatened people with knives. And if the short man had had any kind of authority, the Saint would never have got away with punching him in the nose. Simon had made no effort to disappear that night, and it wouldn’t have taken a determined search very long to locate him among Havana’s relatively few hotels.

  But by the same token it wouldn’t have taken Pancho’s mob much longer to do the same thing, if they had any sort of organization.

  Simon had assumed that Pancho was under orders of Venino. Had Mrs Carrington’s argument, then, finally convinced Venino that the Saint meant no danger to him, and had Venino called Pancho off?

  That was what Venino might well be hoping that the Saint would believe. But the Saint didn’t believe it for one moment. To believe it, he would have had to accept two or three much greater improbabilities that he simply could not buy.

  There had to be some other explanation, that would tie everything together, and whatever it was, it could only be as illegitimate as a cardinal’s daughter.

  The waiter brought the Moro crab claws, and with them a slightly rumpled copy of Informacion.

  “Lo siento, it is all we have. But if you like I can send out for a Miami paper.”

  “No, this is what I wanted.” Simon looked at him with a lift of the eyebrows that was as expressive as it was calculated. “But do you mean to say that you can get Miami papers here?”

  The waiter’s surprise was manifestly unfeigned.

  “Yes, why not?”

  “Even if they say rude things about the President?”

  The waiter shrugged.

  “What President is not criticized somewhere, señor?”

  “Do you ever criticize him?” Simon asked.

  “I do not argue about politics,” said the other cheerfully. “It is like religion. It is easy to offend someone and very hard to convert anyone.”

  “But you aren’t afraid that if you said what you thought you might land in the juzgado.”

  The waiter looked honestly puzzled.

  “What would the President care what a poor waiter said?”

  “Then you aren’t looking forward to a revolution,” Simon said.

  The waiter laughed.

  “I hope not. Revolutions are bad for business.”

  The Saint let him go to attend to another table, and proceeded to read the newspaper with unusual assiduousness while he ate.

  For once he was uninterested in any international events, but he read every line that had any reference to local affairs. And although he did not skip any political items, he was most hopeful of finding the missing link that he needed under much more sensational headlines. A major jewel robbery would have suited him very well—or, as a supreme refinement of plot constructions it would have been almost deliriously intoxicating to read that some ingenious sportsman had actually contrived to steal from the Capitol the diamond across which he had first set eyes on Beryl Carrington and Ramón Venino. But nothing as poetic as that rewarded him—in fact, the only important larceny he found mentioned was an armoured carload of bullion which seemed to have recently vanished somehow between the Banco Insular and the Treasury, which the police were still looking for. And even if some Underground of self-convinced patriots had pulled that caper, it certainly was not hidden in an alligator briefcase.

  Suddenly the Saint realized that it no longer made sense to be so coy about that briefcase.

  He watched the waiter place beside his coffee cup the complimentary glass of coffee liqueur topped with cream which is the custom of the country, and said, “You have converted me, amigo. I have decided against the revolution. My bill, please.”

  “Sí, señor.”

  Fifteen minutes later he was at the Prado entrance of the Sevilla-Biltmore again, this time on his way in. He turned immediately towards the elevators, and caught one that was just about to start up. Out of an ingrained habit of preparedness he had his key in his pocket and had not needed to go to the desk for it, and there was nobody lurking around his landing that he could see as he let himself into his room. He went straight to the telephone and called the bell captain.

  “Have the goodness to send up the bag of rum which I left down there,” he said, and gave the number of his claim check.

  He hung up, and as he did so he heard the sound behind him, though it was no more than the faintest scuff of fabric or the catch of an over-restrained breath. But it made the difference that he was turning as the blanket fell over his head, and the man who threw it did not clamp him quite solidly in the bear-hug that was meant to pinion it over his arms. Another pair of arms clutched him around the knees in the next instant, and he was lifted off his feet and being carried swiftly across the room; he could feel the direction and an involuntary chill went through him, but he went on squirming and lifting his elbows outwards and freed his arms enough to drive one fist after another into something that sobbed and yielded. The grip around his shoulders weakened, and he brought his knees up towards his chest and kicked out again savagely and felt his heels crunch satisfyingly against flesh and bone, and then he was free and falling only a little way to the floor.

  The blanket fell off him as he thrashed up, and he saw that he was right beside the open window and in another moment no doubt would have been falling out of it. A queasy horror in his stomach transformed him into a bolt of berserk lightning that completed the annulment of the two men who would have done it to him before they could comprehend the catastrophic extent of their failure. The big man who had thrown the blanket, who was still bent double over what the Saint’s punches had done to his mid-section, took a kick in the face that dropped him in an inert heap; and Pancho the fat boy, who was holding his ribs with one hand and bringing out his switch-knife with the other, only felt the first of the two teak-like fists that bounced his head off the wall until his folding knees took it down below easy reach…

  Simon Templar stood breathing slowly and deeply, and gradually became aware of a prosaic but persistent knocking on the door.

  He walked over to it, past the open closet where he realized Pancho and his taller pal must have been waiting for him, and flung the door open. A bellboy with the rum basket in one hand stared at him and then beyond him with bulging eyes.

  Simon took the bag from him before he dropped it, and acknowledged the two facsimiles of corpses on the floor with a deprecatory gesture.

  “They attacked me and tried to rob me,” he said casually. “Send for a policeman to take them away, por favor.”

  The lad turned and scooted away like a startled rabbit.

  Simon sat on the bed and picked up the telephone again. While he waited for the operator to answer, he extracted the briefcase from under the bottles in the bag.

  “The Hotel Comodoro,” he requested.

  Reaching out a long leg, he raked Pancho’s knife across the floor towards him, and picked it up. He held the telephone between his ear and his hunched shoulder while he turned the briefcase over and inserted the point of the knife delicately into a seam.

  “Mrs Carrington, please,” he said to the Comodoro operator.

  It was like a cue for background music when she answered almost at once.

  “Beryl,” he said, “this is Simon Templar. Just answer yes or no. Is Ramón with you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I just finished packing.”

  “Pretend I’m your travel agency checkin
g with you. Does he still think you’ve got the briefcase?”

  “Yes. I’ll be driving straight to New York, and then probably going to Europe.”

  Simon gazed down at what the briefcase had spilled into his lap through the seam he had slit open. It was nothing but an old Havana telephone directory.

  “Don’t move from there, and keep Ramón with you,” he said. “Tell him I have to verify your engine number before I can get you a boarding pass for the ferry. Don’t try to argue. The click you will hear will be me taking off.”

  He put the phone down in its bracket and was on his way.

  4

  He went down a back stairway which he had taken note of the very first time he left his room—it was another habit he would probably never lose, that in any new surroundings he automatically and unconsciously observed the alternative and less obvious exits. The police would inevitably ride up in an elevator, and even though he might never have a better chance to play the outraged innocent victim, he would inevitably pay for it with an involvement in red tape that might keep him tied up for hours, and he figured that that could wait. The police would catch up with him soon enough now.

  Pancho and his big brother had caught up with him, after all. In a hotel with the Grand Central atmosphere of the Sevilla-Biltmore no one would have noticed them going up to the Saint’s floor; the old-fashioned lock on his door would not have delayed them for more than ten seconds, and, but for their grievous miscalculation of his superlatively vigilant senses and tigerish fighting power, no one would have noticed them leaving after the Saint had become a splash on the pavement seventy feet down from his window.

  So for a little while he could give a shocking surprise to anyone who was relying on the efficiency of Pancho and Pal.

  He slipped through the service crypts of the hotel without encountering anybody but one belatedly perplexed camarero, and with no trouble found a door that let him out into an alley lined with garbage cans, and thus in a few more steps he was on a side street looking for a taxi, and as usual there was a taxi waiting for him.

  In her room, Mrs Carrington put down the phone and said, “That was the travel agency. They have to send someone over to verify the engine number of my car so I can get a pass to go on the ferry.”

  “Is that all?” Venino said. “You looked so troubled, I thought it was something serious.”

  “It’s just a nuisance.”

  “It will be all right.” He frowned. “But it seems so foolish. They could check your engine number at the dock.”

  She shrugged.

  “Anyway, the agency’s taking care of it. But when your people take over, you should make them fire all the bureaucrats who invent stupid regulations. Just think, you could go down in history as the man who created the first government in the world to abolish red tape.”

  “What I am doing is nothing to joke about.”

  He spoke so roughly that it was like being physically pushed aside.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Forgive me,” he said quickly. “I am on edge. I am more afraid all the time that something is going wrong. Those men…”

  When Ramón Venino had arrived and called up from the lobby to announce himself, and she had left her room to go down and meet him, she had quite accidentally looked directly at a face that was looking directly towards her through the two-inch opening of a door at the end of the corridor. It was more discomfiting because the man did not move or look away before she did, apparently believing himself invisible, and she could feel his eyes on her back all the way to the elevator.

  Then, when they went to the bar for a cocktail, there was a man in a dark suit who followed them in, and when they moved to the terrace outside for lunch, he came out immediately after them and sat down a few tables away. There he was joined presently by another man in a similar dark suit, the two of them having none of the seaside vacationing air of the other guests, and the two put their heads together and kept looking at her and Ramón as they talked. And though the glimpse she had had upstairs had been far too narrow for positive recognition, she felt utterly certain that the second man was the one who had been watching when she left her room.

  She had hesitantly asked Ramón what he thought of them.

  “I’d already noticed them,” he said. “Did you ever see two more obvious detectives?”

  She told him about what had happened upstairs.

  “It looks very bad,” he said grimly. “He was not watching you, of course, but watching for me. I am still sure you have nothing to fear. Because you are leaving, they will not believe you are important. But I think you are going just in time.”

  “But if they’re watching you, it means you’ve been betrayed.”

  “Perhaps not so badly. We do not know who our traitor is—or we should have dealt with him. So we do not know how much he can betray. Perhaps very little. Then the Secret Police would not know enough yet to arrest me; they would only be watching.”

  “But then it’s only a question of time—”

  He nodded, tight-lipped.

  “I begin to think that everything may have to be postponed. For a while only, but at least until they are off guard again. And I shall go abroad—then they will be certain that I am not in mischief. I could not be organizing a revolution on the Riviera. Would you like to go there?”

  “If you’d promise to meet me there, I’d go.”

  “I must think about it,” he had said.

  Now, two hours later, he strode to her window and stood gazing out unseeingly, with his hands gripping nervously together behind his back. Finally he said, “Yes, querida, I have decided. When I heard you say on the phone just now that you might go to Europe, I knew it was right. Will you think me a coward if I go?”

  “Oh, no, Ramón! I want you to be a hero, but you wouldn’t help anyone by throwing your life away.”

  He turned to her and kissed her hands.

  “Then it is settled. You will drive to New York, as you said, and book a passage on the first good boat. You will take your car for us to drive around, because it is much newer than mine, but of course I will pay the expenses. I shall book myself on a plane in about a week, so that I do not seem in too big a hurry, but I shall be there in France when you land.”

  “You don’t know what a load you’ve taken off my mind,” she said, and yet as she said it she felt inexplicably as if something else had been taken from her also.

  He glanced at his watch.

  “We should have your bags taken to the car before they want to charge you another day for the room,” he said practically. “We can wait downstairs for your travel agent.”

  They went downstairs together with her luggage and watched it stowed in the trunk of her sedan. Venino tipped the bellboys and dismissed them.

  Beryl Carrington felt a strange vague uncomfortableness as they faced each other alone again, with nothing to do but to kill time and nothing special to talk about. Nothing, that is, except something most personal. Everything else had been wrapped up so quickly and finally. But right up until then, the kisses he had recently pressed on her hands were the nearest approach to emotion there had been between them. In the beginning she had been charmed and relieved by his correctness. But she had always been convinced that at the proper time, when it could be done without crudity and disrespect, his attentions would become warmer. It could not be any other way, with such a romantic enterprise binding their lives together. Yet now that he could scarcely avoid making some declaration about themselves, she found herself desperately unready to receive it.

  He took her hand and drew her towards him.

  “You must not worry about me,” he said, and a flutter of pure panic suddenly shook her.

  “Why not?” asked the Saint’s coolest and most languid voice. “I’d say there was a whole lot to worry about.”

  They turned like two marionettes jerked with the same string.

  Beryl Carrington’s startlement was at first almost grateful—unt
il her eyes fell on the briefcase that Simon carried, and grew round with blank dismay. But Ramón Venino’s face turned yellow with the sickly anaemia of a sceptic who for the first time believes that he is seeing an incontrovertible ghost; and then, as he too saw the briefcase, his eyes literally jolted in their sockets as if he had been hit behind the head. And the Saint strolled closer, around the side of the car which had concealed his silent approach.

  “As a one-man revolution,” he remarked, “I’d say he was a lousy actuarial risk.”

  Venino put forth a colossal effort that dragged his congealing stare from the briefcase to Mrs Carrington.

  “What is this?” he demanded hoarsely. “I thought—”

  “Yes, I gave it to him,” she said with sudden assurance. “I was afraid you were gambling too much on the police thinking I wasn’t important. And I’ve told you all about him. He promised he’d get it to Florida for me.”

  “And if you insist,” Simon said earnestly, “I will. I’ll even get you a police escort for it.”

  As though they had only been waiting to explode that boast, the two men in dark suits whom Mrs Carrington had temporarily lost sight of materialized from between other parked cars and hurled themselves at the Saint in a co-ordinated rush that had one of them clamped on to each of his arms before Mrs Carrington fully grasped what was happening. But the Saint seemed only inconsequentially put out.

  “You’re grabbing the wrong guy,” he said, without struggling.

  One of the dark-suited men turned to Mrs Carrington.

  “This is the man who has been annoying you?” he said.

  “Annoying me?” she repeated in complete bewilderment.