Señor Saint (The Saint Series) Page 12

  “If we don’t find a mark very soon indeed,” he said, “I’m going to have to borrow something from our retirement fund.”

  “Then you’d better find a mark very soon, Pappy,” she said promptly. “Because our retirement fund is not lending.”

  “But this would be an emergency,” he argued. “After all, we’ve both lived off the half share that doesn’t go into your fund, and all the other expenses came out of it too. You can’t do any good in this racket without capital.”

  “Then I hope you connect while you’ve still got some,” she said. “But if I let you get your fingers into that fund on one excuse, pretty soon you’d have another, and before long there’d be no more fund, and we’d be on our way to the poorhouse in a Cadillac just like when I met you.”

  “You haven’t done badly since we teamed up,” he reminded her tartly. “For a B-girl who never did anything bigger on her own than roll a drunk—”

  “That’s why I went for you, Pappy,” she said sweetly. “I knew you had what it takes. Only I don’t know how I’d feel if I thought you’d lost it.”

  “I could do fine if only we got a break,” he said. “I had that rich Australian solidly hooked last week, didn’t I? And then his daughter has to get polio and he turns around and flies home and that’s probably the last we’ll hear of him.”

  “Anyhow, he got away,” she said. “And we didn’t get a cent out of him.”

  The Professor sighed over the remorseless inflexibility of feminine logic, and looked glumly around in search of some happier conversational diversion.

  They were sitting in the bar of what unschooled tourists will always call, redundantly, “The El Panamá”—at that time the newest and most luxurious (and most expensive) hotel in the Republic. Built and operated by Americans for Americans, it was the counterpart of fifty kindred air-conditioned caravanserais which had raised their uniformly modernistic façades of glass and concrete and aluminium during that generation amid every conceivable skyline from mud huts to minarets and Spanish tile to Norman towers, all dedicated to the proposition that since air travel had brought the farthest corners of the globe into everybody’s back yard, no traveller should be allowed to feel that he had ever left home. Sooner or later an inevitable nine-tenths of the best-heeled travellers were bound to stroll at least once through its patios and lobbies, and Professor Humphrey Nestor was a regular customer for reasons which happily combined business with pleasure.

  “As the great Barnum said, there’ll be another along in a minute,” he remarked bravely. “Now suppose we had one more drink—”

  “We’ll have six more, if you can pay for them,” said Alice accommodatingly. “Only don’t try to stick me with the tab, because you’d look awful undignified trying to race me to the door.”

  They might have continued indefinitely with another bout of these genial exchanges, but at that very moment a new patron strolled into the bar whose aspect called a truce to recriminations as abruptly as a soundless bomb.

  His supremely comfortable costume of featherweight slacks, sandals, and a shirt that appeared to have been designed with the help of a kaleidoscope, plus the inevitable camera slung over one shoulder, branded him frankly and cheerfully as a tourist. But not just any tourist. There were graduations in these markings for which the Professor and Alice had eyes that would have sent a vulture looking for an oculist. The slacks were tailored of the lightest Italian shantung, the shirt was a still finer silk, even the sandals were of beautiful leather and finished like expensive shoes. The camera was the newest and most costly model Leica. And his face and arms had the bone-deep kind of tan, subtly different from the superficial browning of a brief vacation, which marks a man who habitually spends most of his time out of doors. True, there are humble labourers who share that privilege with the leisured wealthy, but although this man was slim-waisted and wide-shouldered he moved with a casual grace and assurance that left no possible doubt which category he belonged in. And although an indefinable keenness of eye and rakishness of feature suggested that he might at some time have known a ruggeder form of outdoor life than a golf course or a fashionable beach, a certain spirit of adventure in the victim was a contribution rather than an obstacle to the ideal dénouement of the plot in which the Professor and Alice had so often played their profitable roles. In fact, if they had been given some kind of supernatural carte blanche to design the type of character that they would have most liked to see walk into the bar at that moment, it might well have turned out to be a recognizable facsimile of the newcomer whom we have just described.

  For almost half a minute they were too distrustful of this apparently divine dispensation to be able to speak.

  It was Mr Nestor who recovered his voice first. The new arrival, he finally convinced himself, was no mirage of the kind which is reported to torment the thirst-crazed wanderer in the Sahara. Mr Nestor could see him quite normally and three-dimensionally through the upper part of his bifocals. And Alice had seen the same thing at the same moment. He could tell by the pure spirituality that had descended on her rather childish face, and by the fact that she had not taken advantage of his own silence to get in any more shrewd licks.

  “Well,” he said heavily, at last, “will you trust me to start this one in my old-fashioned way, or would you rather take over?”

  “Go ahead, Pappy,” she said, and added almost affectionately, “Just don’t ham it up too much like you do sometimes.”

  He waited with agonizing patience until his quarry’s drink was almost finished, and then he picked up his modest box camera and ambled over to the bar.

  “Pardon me, sir,” he said bashfully, “but I see that you’re a photographer, and I wondered if I could impose on you—if you’d be so kind as to snap a picture of my daughter and myself with our camera?”

  “Why, of course,” Simon Templar said amiably.

  “There’s no hurry. Whenever you can spare a moment.”

  “I’ve nothing but moments to spare right now.”

  Simon laid a dollar bill on the bar and slid off his stool. The Professor turned back towards the table where he had been sitting.

  “Alice, dear,” he said, “the gentleman very kindly says he’ll oblige us right away.”

  As she came to join them, he said shyly, “My name is Professor Humphrey Nestor, and this is my daughter, Alice. Might I know whom we are indebted to?”

  Simon had a preposterous alias which in some circumstances came almost instinctively to his lips.

  “Sebastian Tombs,” said the Saint, without hesitation.

  2

  “It’s terribly sweet of you,” Alice said, looking up at him with big blue eyes as if he had volunteered to bring her the moon in a platinum casket. “You know how it is—usually Pappy takes a picture of me, and then I take a picture of him, but we never have one of the two of us together.”

  “I know how it is,” said the Saint sympathetically.

  “Really, I should get one of those timer gadgets that let you get into your own pictures,” the Professor reproached himself.

  They went out into the glaring shade under the umbrella trees, and the two Nestors stood rather stiffly and naively side by side, smiling at the camera, while Simon clicked the shutter.

  “We ought to have one with the Frog,” Alice said.

  “Yes, yes,” agreed the Professor, frowning. “If we aren’t taking up too much of Mr Tombs’s time…”

  “Not at all,” said the Saint agreeably.

  It would have been almost a psychological impossibility for anyone with a shred of human curiosity to have torn himself away without waiting to see that last shot.

  Alice opened her capacious purse and took from it a soft leather pouch with a drawstring. From the pouch she took a package wrapped in tissue, about the size of an orange. The Professor fussed around helping her to unwrap it, until the contents was revealed on a nest of loosened paper.

  It actually was a frog. A rather slender, long-bodied
frog. Or to be more accurate, a carving or moulding of a frog, very simply but excellently done. And the most startling thing was that it looked as if it might have been made of pure gold.

  “Could you come a little closer,” said the Professor, “and get a good picture of the frog, perhaps with just our faces looking at it?”

  Simon moved on obligingly, while they held the frog up on its wrapping between them, and clicked the shutter again.

  “Hold it a moment,” he said, unslinging his Leica. “I’d like to get one for myself, for a souvenir.”

  They held still briefly while he took the picture again, and then quickly helped each other to re-wrap the figurine.

  “We’re very, very grateful,” said the Professor, with unsophisticated earnestness.

  “We took Mr Tombs away from a nice cool drink,” Alice said. “I think we ought to get him another.”

  “Of course—how stupid of me! Won’t you let us do that, Mr Tombs?”

  “I was hoping you’d say that,” Simon replied, with a beatifically disarming smile which made it seem unthinkable that he could actually have meant it.

  They went back into the cool dimness of the bar, and a round of Panamanian punches was ordered. After which there was a kind of conversational hiatus, as if in spite of his sincerity and good intentions the Professor’s social gifts had been exhausted by the providing of refreshment. He seemed to withdraw into an unworldly introspection, and his daughter only seemed to be able to look at him devotedly and rather anxiously, as if she knew what was on his mind and would have liked to help him with it but did not know how to.

  It was obviously up to the Saint to break this awkward pause, and it would have taken a positive effort to refuse the handiest and most natural gambit.

  “That frog of yours,” he remarked. “That’s quite an unusual piece.”

  “It is,” said the Professor, coming a few miles closer in interstellar space.

  “Not that it’s any of my business, but it almost looked as if it was made of gold.”

  “It is.”

  “Pappy,” Alice said gently, “aren’t you being a little rude? I can see why Mr Tombs would be curious. After all, we made him take our pictures with it.”

  “Yes, so we did. Pray accept my apologies, Mr Tombs,” said the Professor contritely. “I was only afraid of boring you. You couldn’t really care about our scientific troubles.”

  “Never mind our scientific troubles,” Alice said. “Tell him the interesting part.”

  Mr Nestor pursed his lips.

  “Well,” he ventured diffidently, “did you ever hear of Atelopus zeteki?”

  “Do you catch it on a rod and line,” Simon asked, “or from going barefoot in hotel bathrooms?”

  “It’s the Golden Frog of Panama,” Alice explained.

  The Professor dredged an inner pocket of his sagging seersucker and came out with an ancient and shabby wallet of portfolio dimensions. He fumbled, blinking nervously, through an assortment of beat-up snapshots, newspaper clippings, old envelopes, and tattered palimpsests on all kinds of paper, which bulked it to the thickness of a light novel, and extracted a documentary relic which on being gingerly unfolded proved to be a page from an old issue of Life. It carried a single photograph in full colour which centred on a large tropical leaf on which was crouched a long-bodied frog that was almost entirely a bright yellow from nose to toe.

  “That’s the Golden Frog,” said the Professor. “It’s one of Nature’s oddities, which could only have evolved in the tropical rain forest around here. A beautiful creature, isn’t it? You’ll notice that that one has a certain mottling of black on it. Some of them have polka dots. The ones that are all gold are quite rare. But it’s such a fragile product of its environment that just a few minutes’ exposure to ordinary sunlight are enough to kill it!”

  He was simply paraphrasing, quite accurately, the caption under the picture, but he had a way of doing it so authoritatively that he made it sound more as if the caption was quoting him. Letting the dupe handle and read that indisputably genuine page of Life at the same time was a trick that invariably clinched the acceptance of his own scientific standing, and even more subtly it extended an aura of veracity over the fable that he had to pyramid on that one fact.

  “That’s very interesting,” said the Saint respectfully. “Did you discover it?”

  “Oh, no. It was discovered by a former colleague of mine, Dr Zetek. That’s why it carries his name. What I discovered was the frog that you saw—what we might call Atelopus nestori.”

  Professor Nestor chuckled coyly over his scholarly little joke.

  “Of course, our golden frog was modelled from the real one,” Alice said.

  “You can easily see how it would happen,” said the Professor. “Long before Dr Zetek or any of us came here, the real golden frog was naturally known to the aborigines. And it was the sort of phenomenon which could hardly help striking the imagination of a primitive and superstitious people. The transformation of a tadpole into a frog of any kind is almost like seeing a miracle of evolution take place under your very eyes. Then think how still more awed they must have been when they saw that some tadpoles apparently no different from the others turned into frogs that seemed to be made out of the same precious metal that they would find in rare nuggets among the gravel of their river beds. Add to that the peculiarity that these frogs were so delicate that if captured, no matter how gently they were handled, they would die for no reason that a savage could understand—and to anyone who knows anything about primitive psychology, you have all the necessary ingredients for the origination of a religious cult.”

  “You mean your golden frog is a museum piece?”

  “Well, at least five hundred years old. Perhaps a great deal more. The only other one that I had ever seen—before I came here—was brought to me when I was lecturing on pre-Columbian artefacts at Michigan State University, by a tourist who picked it up on the San Blas Islands. He wanted to know if it had any antique value apart from the metal in it. Of course, I recognized at once that it was not San Blas workmanship, but he could tell me no more about its history. Naturally it hadn’t occurred to him to ask the Indian who sold it to him how he had come by it. I could only tell, from certain technical indications, that it was very old, perhaps even contemporary with the Mayan culture. I tried to buy it, but the owner was much too wealthy: the cash value meant nothing to him, but he wanted it as a souvenir, and an antique to boast about as well if he could have obtained an official pedigree for it.”

  “But you don’t give up so easily, do you, Pappy?” said Alice adoringly.

  “I must say, I went on thinking about it. And then, quite by chance, I happened to hear of Dr Zetek’s golden frogs. One glance at a picture was enough to show me that they must have been the model for the little metal frog that I had been shown. After that, to a scientific mind with my special background, the other deductions were almost elementary. Some prehistoric culture in Panama must have made a fetish of the golden frog and used images of it in their rites…But I must be boring you.”

  “Not in the least,” said the Saint truthfully. “This is something they don’t have in the guide books.”

  The Professor nodded complacently.

  “Not yet. I was not foolish enough to discuss my deductions with anyone at that point—except Alice.”

  “You wouldn’t believe how careful a scientist has to be these days,” Alice explained. “It’s almost as bad as being an inventor. There’s so much competition for the only college jobs that pay a living wage, and so many colleges seem to hire professors just for their box-office value, according to the books they’ve written and the things they’re supposed to have discovered—so when a professor thinks he’s on the track of something really big he has to guard it like an atomic bomb so that somebody else won’t steal it.”

  “You can’t blame them, considering how few decent salaries a university can pay, except to a football coach,” said the Professo
r, with an unworldly resignation that would have tweaked the heartstrings of the most indurated cynic. “Let’s just say that I had enough human vanity to hope that my own name might go down in history along with some discovery that I’d made all by myself. I had a little money that I’d saved up to give Alice a start in life, but she insisted we should spend it on this. Finally I took my sabbatical, and we came down here to try to find the evidence of this cult. We made three different expeditions into parts of the country that had never been explored. Some of it was really rough—especially for Alice.”

  He paused to glance admiringly at his daughter, and Simon followed the glance with a raised eyebrow.

  “Did you go along too?”

  “I wouldn’t have missed it for the world,” Alice said. “Even when I was a little girl I was always pestering the boys to take me hunting and fishing with them. I only wish I could live like that all the time.”

  This was one of Mr Nestor’s deadliest inspirations. He had found that the time-honoured bait value of a blue-eyed blonde with the face and the figure of a Hollywood starlet was multiplied ten-fold by the revelation that she would honestly prefer a fishing camp to a night club. In the presence of such devastating credentials, strong men became misty-eyed and indeed were sometimes hard to bring back to mundane preoccupations. Mr Nestor observed an unmistakable hint of reverence in the way Mr Tombs was looking at Alice, and hurried on before he lost his audience completely.

  “I won’t bore you with all the details. But we succeeded—more than I’d even dared to hope. We not only found proof of the cult of the Golden Frog, we found perhaps all the relics of it that will ever be found.”

  Simon removed his gaze from Alice with undisguised reluctance.

  “You mean you found more than that one frog I took a picture of?”

  “To be exact, we found thirty-seven. And we found them all at once, in a cave that we literally stumbled into by the sheerest accident.”

  “Some defunct witch-doctor’s Olde Frogge Shoppe?”