Señor Saint (The Saint Series) Page 2

  Simon nodded, leaning back with his freebooter’s profile turned up impersonally to the stars. He had heard all this before, of course, but he wanted to hear it once again, to be sure he had heard it all.

  “That’s all this Tiltman wanted,” she said. “A good working diver. Percival Tiltman—what a name! I should have known he was a phony, with that name, and his old-school-tie British accent. But he knew where the richest oyster bed of all was, and it was one that the Japs had missed somehow, and he had some real pearls to prove it…Of course, he needed money too—for equipment, and a boat, and bribes. Mostly for bribes. That should have been the tip-off, all by itself.”

  “I don’t know,” said the Saint. “I can believe that the Mexican Government might take a dim view of foreigners coming down and walking off with their pearls.”

  “Well, anyway, he got it.”

  “It was about ten thousand dollars, wasn’t it?”

  “Exactly eleven thousand. Most of it was from my friends—people I’d known in the studios. Ned’s best friend put some in. And twenty-five hundred was my own savings, from what Ned had sent me while he was overseas.”

  “And Ned and Brother Tiltman took off with it all in cash?”

  “All of it. And that’s the last anyone heard of them—until I got that letter.”

  “How hard did you try to find him?”

  “What could I do? I didn’t have an address. Ned was going to write to me when he got down here. He never did.”

  “There’s an American vice-consul.”

  “We tried that, after a while. He never heard of them.”

  “How about the police?”

  “I wrote to them. They took three weeks to answer, and then they just said they had no information. Perhaps some of the money was used for bribes, at that.”

  “I mean the American police. Didn’t anyone make a complaint?”

  “How could I? And make myself the wife of a runaway crook? Our friends were very nice about it. They were sorry for me. I’ve never felt so humiliated. But it was all too obvious. Ned and Tiltman had just taken our money and run off with it. It wasn’t even worth anybody’s while to come down here and try to trace them. They’d had too long a start. By the time we realized what they’d done, they could have been anywhere in South America—or anywhere in the world, for that matter. I just waited till Ned had been gone a year, and divorced him as quietly as I could, for desertion.”

  “But,” said the Saint, “it looks now as if he’d been here all the time, after all.”

  Mrs Ormond swished the Scotch around over the ice in her glass with a practised rotary motion, brooding over it sullenly.

  “Perhaps he came back. Perhaps he spent all his share of the money, and now he thinks he can promote some more with the same gag. Who knows?”

  “It was nearly ten years ago when he disappeared, wasn’t it?” said the Saint. “If he got half the loot, he’s lived on less than six hundred a year. That’s really making it last. If he was going to try for more, why would he leave it so long? And why did he disappear when he did, without any kind of word?”

  “Don’t ask me,” she said. “You’re the detective. All I know is, there’s something fishy about it. That’s why I wouldn’t have come here alone. You’d better be careful. I hope you’re smarter than he is.”

  Simon raised an eyebrow.

  “When this started, you gave the impression that he was almost boringly simple.”

  “That’s what everyone thought. But look what he did. He must have had us all fooled. You can’t believe anything he says.”

  “I’m not exactly notorious for buying wooden nickels—or plasticine pearls. I’ll keep my guard up.”

  “Do that in more ways than one. I told you, he was a very husky guy. And he could be plenty tough.”

  “I can be tough too, sometimes.”

  She eyed him long and appraisingly.

  “Come here,” she said, in her throatiest voice.

  He unfolded himself languidly and stood beside her.

  “No, don’t tower over me. Come down to my level.”

  He squatted good humouredly on his heels, close to her chair.

  “You look strong,” she murmured, “in a lean leathery way. But I never found out how far it went. That’s why I like you. You’re different. Most men are in such a hurry to show me.”

  Her hand felt his arm, sliding up under his short sleeve. Her eyes widened a little, and became soft and dreamy. The hand slid up to his shoulder, and the tip of her tongue touched her parted lips.

  Simon Templar grinned, and stood up.

  “I’m strong enough,” he said. “And I’ll be very careful.”

  3

  He had already located the Cantina de las Flores—had, in fact, been inside it earlier in the evening. It was a small and dingy bistro in a back street of unromantic odours, and the only flowers in its vicinity were those which were painted in garish colours on the sign over the door. An unshaven bartender in a dirty shirt had informed him that Consuelo would not be there until ten. It was only a few minutes after that hour when the Saint strolled towards it again.

  He would probably have been less than human if he had not thought more about Jocelyn Ormond than about Consuelo on the way over. Consuelo was only a name, but Mrs Ormond was not easy to forget.

  He tried to rationalize his reaction to her, and couldn’t do it. According to all tradition, there should have been no problem. She not only had all the physical attributes, in extravagant abundance, but she knew every line in the script, in all its cereal ripeness. The dumbest private eye on the news-stands could have taken his cue and helped himself to the offering. Yet the Saint found a perverse pleasure in pretending to be blandly unconscious of the routine, in acting as if her incredible voluptuousness left him only amused. Which was an outright glandular lie.

  He shook his head. Maybe he was just getting too old inside…

  The bar, which had been drably deserted when he was there before, was now starting to jump. There were a dozen and a half cash customers, a few obviously local citizens but a majority with the heterogeneous look of seamen from visiting freighters—a sterling and salty clientele, no doubt, but somewhat less than elegant. There were also half a dozen girls, who seemed to function occasionally as waitresses, but who also obviously offered more general hospitality and comradeship. Instead of the atmospheric obbligato of guitars with which no Hollywood producer could have resisted backgrounding such a set, an enormous juke box blared deafening orchestrations out of its rococo edifice of plastic panels behind which coloured lights flowed and blended like delirious rainbows, a dazzling and stentorian witness to the irresistible march of North American culture.

  Simon went to the counter and ordered a beer. The bartender, only a few hours more unshaven and a few hours dirtier than at their first meeting, looked at him curiously as he poured it.

  “You are the señor who was looking for Consuelo.”

  “Is she here now?”

  “I will tell her,” the man said.

  Simon took his glass over to the juke box and stood reading the list of its musical offerings, toying with the faint hope that he might find a title which suggested that in exchange for a coin some slightly less ear-splitting melody might be evoked.

  “You were asking for me?” a voice said at his shoulder.

  The Saint turned.

  He turned slowly, because the quality of the voice had jolted him momentarily off balance. It was an amazing thing for a mere voice to do at any time and, against the strident din through which he had to hear it, it was almost incredible. Yet that was what it achieved without effort. It was the loveliest speaking voice he had ever heard. It had the pure tones of cellos and crystal bells in it, and yet it held a true warmth and a caress and a passion that made the untrammelled sexiness of Jocelyn Ormond’s voice sound like a crude rasp. Just those few words of it stippled goose-pimples up his spine. He wanted the space of a breath to re-establish hi
s equanimity before he saw the owner.

  Then he saw her; and the goose-pimples tightened and chilled as if at a touch of icy air, and the jolt he had felt turned to a leaden numbness.

  She could have been under thirty, but she was aged in the cruel way that women of her racial mixture, in that climate, will age. You could see Spanish blood in her, and Indian, and undoubtedly some African. Her figure might once have been enticingly ripe, but now it was overblown and mushy. Her black hair was lank and greasy, her nose broad and flat, her painted mouth coarse and thick. Even under a heavy layer of powder that was several shades too light, her complexion showed dark and horribly ravaged with pock-marks. She smiled, showing several gold teeth.

  “I am Consuelo,” she said in that magical voice.

  Somehow the Saint managed to keep all reaction out of his face, or hoped he did.

  “I am looking for an American, a Señor Yarn,” he said. “He wrote a letter saying that one should come here and ask for you.”

  Her eyes flickered over him oddly.

  “Sí,” she said. “I remember. I will take you to him. Un momentito.”

  She went to the bar and spoke briefly to the bartender, who scowled and shrugged. She came back.

  “Come.”

  Simon put down his glass and went out with her.

  The sidewalk was so narrow that there was barely room for them both, and when they met any other walkers there was a subtle contest of bluff to decide which party should give way.

  “It was a long time ago that he told me to expect someone,” she said. “Why did you take so long?”

  “His letter took a long time. And there were other delays.”

  “You have the letter with you?”

  “It was not written to me. I was sent by the person to whom he wrote.”

  Some instinct of delicacy compelled him to evade a more exact naming of the person. He said, cautiously, “You know what it was about?”

  “I know nothing.”

  Her high heels clicked a tattoo of fast short steps, hobbled by a skirt that was too tight from hip to knee.

  “I have never met Señor Yarn,” he said. “What kind of a man is he?”

  She stopped, looking up to search his face with a kind of vehement suddenness.

  “He is a good man. The best I have ever known. I hope you are good for him!”

  “I hope so too,” said the Saint gently.

  They walked on, zigzagging through alleys that grew steadily narrower and darker and more noisome, but the Saint, whose sense of direction could be switched on like a recording machine, never lost track of a turn. The people who shared the streets with them became fewer and vaguer shadows. Life went indoors, and barricaded itself against the night behind shutters through which only an occasional streak of yellow light leaked out. It revealed itself only as a muffled grumbling voice, a sharp ripple of shrill laughter, the wail of a baby, the faint tinny sound of a cheap radio or gramophone; and against that dim sound-track the clatter of Consuelo’s heels seemed to ring out like blows on an anvil. If the Saint had not stepped silently from incurable habit, he would have found himself doing it with a self-conscious impulse to minimize his intrusion. If he could conceivably have picked up Consuelo, or any of the other girls, in the Cantina de las Flores, without an introduction, and had found himself being led where he was for any other reason, he would have been tense with suspicion and wishing for the weight of a gun in his pocket. But he did not think he had anything to fear.

  When she stopped, a faint tang of sea smells penetrating the hodge-podge of less natural aromas told his nostrils that they were near another part of the waterfront. The shack that loomed beside them was different only in details of outline from the others around it—a shanty of crumbling plaster and decaying timbers, with a rambling roof line which could consist of nothing but an accumulation of innumerable inadequate repairs.

  “Here,” she said.

  She opened the cracked plank door, and Simon followed her in.

  The whole house was only one little room. There was a brass bedstead against one wall, with a faded chintz curtain across the corner beside it which might have concealed some sort of sanitary facilities. In another corner, there was an ancient oil cooking stove, and a bare counter board with a chipped enamel basin. On shelves above the counter, there were cheap dishes and utensils, and a few canned foods. Clothing hung on hooks in the walls, between an assortment of innocuous lithographs pinned up according to some unguessable system of selection.

  “Ned,” Consuelo said very clearly, “I have brought the Americano you sent for.”

  The man sat in the one big chair in the room. It was an overstuffed chair of old-fashioned shape, with a heavily patched slip cover, but he looked comfortable in it, as if he had used it a lot. He had untidy blond hair and a powerful frame, but the flesh on his big bones was soft and shrunken and unhealthy, although his skin had a good tan, and his clean cotton shirt and trousers hung loosely on him. His face had the cragginess of a skull, an impression which was accentuated by the shadows of the dark glasses he wore even though the only light was an oil lamp turned down so low that it gave no more illumination than a candle. He turned only his head.

  “I was afraid no one was ever coming,” he said.

  “My name is Templar,” said the Saint. “I was sent by—the party you wrote to.”

  “My wife,” the man said. “You don’t have to be tactful. Consuelo knows about her.”

  “Your ex-wife,” said the Saint.

  Ned Yarn sat still, and the dark lenses over his eyes were a mask.

  “I guess I’d sort of expected that. How did she get it? Desertion, I suppose.”

  “Yes.”

  “Is she…”

  “She was married again, to a man named Ormond.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “They’re divorced now.”

  “I see.” Yarn’s bony fingers moved nervously. “And you?”

  “Just an acquaintance. Nothing more. What with changing her name, and changing her address several times, apparently your letter took a long time to find her. And then she didn’t want to come here alone, and couldn’t decide who else to trust. Now I seem to be it.”

  “Sit down,” Ned Yarn said.

  Simon sat on a plain wooden chair by the oilcloth-covered table. Yarn looked around and said, “Do we have anything to drink, Consuelo?”

  “Some tequila.”

  She brought a half-empty bottle and three small jelly glasses, and poured a little for each of them. She put one of the glasses on the edge of the table nearest to Yarn. Yarn stretched out his hand, touched the edge of the table, and slid his fingers along it until they closed on the glass.

  “You must excuse me seeming so helpless,” he said harshly. “But you see, I’m blind.”

  4

  The Saint lighted a cigarette, and put his lighter away very quietly. He glanced at Consuelo for a moment as she sat down slowly on the other wooden chair at the table, and then he looked at Ned Yarn again.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “How long ago did that happen?”

  “Almost as soon as I got here.” The other gave a kind of short two-toned grunt that might have been meant for a laugh. “How much did she tell you about all this?”

  “As much as she knows, I think.”

  “I can figure what else she thinks. And what everybody else thinks. But you know as much now as I knew when I came down here with Tiltman. That’s the truth, so help me.”

  “I hope you’ll tell me the rest.”

  Yarn sipped his drink, and put it down without a grimace, as if he was completely inured to the vile taste.

  “We flew down here from Tijuana, and I thought it was all on the level. A chance to make some big money legitimately—that is, if we weren’t bothered about bribing a few Mexicans not to watch us too closely. I’m just a sucker, I guess, but I fell for it like all the others. I was even carrying the money myself. We checked in at a hot
el, the Perla.”

  “And yet the American vice-consul and the police couldn’t find any trace of you. That seems like an obvious place for them to have started asking.”

  “Tiltman registered for us both—only he didn’t use our names. If you want to check up on me, ask if they’ve got a record of Thompson and Young. He told me that later.”

  “How long did he play it straight?”

  “We had dinner. Tiltman was supposed to have arranged for a boat before we left Los Angeles. I was all excited and raring to go, of course. I didn’t even want to wait till morning to look it over. I wanted to see it that night. He tried to stall me a bit, and then he gave in. We set out walking from the hotel. He led me through all kinds of back streets—I haven’t the faintest idea where. Presently, in one of the darkest of them, we came to a bar, and he said, ‘Let’s stop in for a drink.’ ”

  “The Cantina de las Flores?”

  “No. I didn’t even know the name of it. But, anyway, we went in. We had a drink. And then, as calmly as anything, he said, ‘Look, Ned, I’m going to stop beating about the bush. There isn’t any boat. There isn’t any diving equipment—all that stuff we ordered sent down here from Los Angeles, I cancelled the order and got your money back.’ ”

  “And the great lost bed of pearl oysters?”

  “He said, ‘That’s just a rumour I heard when I was down here, sort of a local legend. But I don’t know where it is, and nobody else does. It just gave me the idea for a good story to pick up a nice lot of money with. All that money you’ve got in your pocket,’ he said.”

  “That must have called for another drink,” murmured the Saint.

  “At first I thought he was kidding. But I soon knew he wasn’t. He said, ‘I could’ve taken it from you tonight and left you holding the bag. But I like you, Ned, and I could use a partner. I’ve got tickets for both of us on a plane to Mazatlán. Let’s split the money and go on and make a lot more like it.’ ”