18 The Saint Bids Diamonds (Thieves' Picnic) Page 3

  "And now they want to replace him."

  She nodded again.

  "That's what Graner called it. We thought we might go away, somewhere like South America, where nobody would know us and we could live and be happy. But I knew we couldn't. Graner never meant us to. So long as Joris was working for them, it was all right. But they couldn't let him go with all that he knew. He'd never have said anything, but they couldn't be sure of that. I knew they'd never let him go alive. They meant to kill him. . . . Oh, Joris!"

  Her arms tightened convulsively about the old man's frail shoulders, and the Saint saw her eyes shining again.

  "Is that what they were trying to do when I butted in?" he asked doubtfully. "It didn't look quite like that to me. After all, they could have shot him in the first place, instead of keeping their guns in their pockets till we were driving away."

  "I don't know. I don't know if they meant to kill him then --"

  "But if they never let him have any money, you couldn't have got very far."

  She looked at him with her lip quivering; and again he saw that oddly watchful uncertainty creep into her gaze. He knew at once that she was weighing her an­swer, and knew also that she was going to lie.

  Then he happened to glance at the old man. Joris Vanlinden had sunk back into such a stillness, and for a time they had been so carried away by other things, that they had not been noticing him. But now Simon saw that the old man's eyes had opened, quite quietly, as if he had awakened out of a deep sleep.

  Simon touched the girl's arm.

  "Look," he said.

  He stood up and went to pour some more whiskey; and Mr Uniatz watched the performance wistfully, chewing the extinct butt of his cigar. The greater part of the dialogue had passed harmlessly over Mr Uniatz' head, which was only equipped to assimilate short and simple speeches very carefully addressed to him in the more common words of one syllable; and he had long ago started to flounder out of his depth and eventually given up the effort, seeing no reason to exhaust himself with agonising mental labour when, in the fulness of time, everything that it was good for him to know would be duly explained to him by the Saint. Besides, there was a much more urgent problem which had been occupying all his attention for some time.

  "Boss," said Mr Uniatz plaintively, as if pointing out an incomprehensible oversight, "ya left a toid of de bottle."

  "Okay," said the Saint resignedly. "You find a home for it."

  He went back to the bedside. The old man was touching the girl's face and hair with nervously twitching fingers, speaking in a weak husky voice: "Where are we, Christine ? . . . How did we get here? . . . What happened?"

  "It's all right, darling. Darling, it's all right. You've just got to rest."

  The old man's eyes went back to the Saint, and his hand clutched at the girl's arm.

  "Who are these people, Christine? I haven't seen them before. Who are they?"

  "Lie still, darling." She was comforting him with a kind of motherly tenderness, as if he was a feverish child. "They won't hurt you, Joris. They came and saved you when the others were fighting you."

  "Yes, they were fighting. I remember. I never could fight very much. You remember, Christine-that other time ? Did they hurt you, Christine ?"

  "No, darling. Not a bit."

  The old man's eyes closed again, and for a moment he relaxed, as if the strain of talking had been too much for him. And then, suddenly, his eyes opened again.

  "Did they get it?" he asked hoarsely.

  "Hush, Joris. You must be quiet."

  "But did they get it?"

  Vanlinden's voice was louder, and his eyes were staring. She tried to press him back on the bed, but he flung off her hands. He began to feel in his breast pocket, unsteadily at first, and then more wildly; then he was feeling in all his pockets, turning them out again and again, in a pitiful sort of frenzy.

  "No, no," he muttered incoherently. "Not there. No. It's gone!" His voice rose and broke on some­thing like a scream. "It's gone!" He stared at the Saint. "Did you take it?"

  "Take what?" asked the Saint helplessly.

  "My ticket!"

  "Oh, a ticket. No, I haven't seen it. D'you mean your ticket for going away from here? I shouldn't worry about that. If you go and explain things to the shipping company or whatever it is --"

  "No, no, not that!" Vanlinden's voice had a despairing shrillness that made the Saint's flesh creep. "My lottery ticket!"

  "What?"

  Christine got up suddenly from the bed. She faced the Saint like a tigress though her head barely reached his shoulder.

  "Yes," she said fiercely. "Did you take it ?"

  "Me?" said the Saint blankly. He spread out his arms. "Search me and strip me if you want to. Take me apart and put me together again. I never saw his lottery ticket in my life."

  She swung round and pointed at Hoppy Uniatz.

  "He was sitting in the back of the car with Jon's all the time. Did he take it?"

  "Did you take it, Hoppy?" snapped the Saint.

  Mr Uniatz swallowed nervously.

  "Yes, boss."

  "You took it ?" snapped the Saint incredulously.

  Hoppy gulped.

  "Yes, boss," he said apologetically. "I t'ought ya said I could take it." He pointed to the table. "Dey wasn't so much in de bottle, at dat."

  "You immortal ass!" snarled the Saint. "We aren't talking about the whiskey!"

  He turned back to the girl.

  "Hoppy didn't take it," he said. "And neither did I.

  If you don't believe us, you can go ahead and turn us inside out. I didn't even know Joris had a lottery ticket. How much was it worth?"

  "You may as well know now," she said dully. "It was a ticket in the Christmas lottery. It won the first prize-fifteen million pesetas."

  II How Simon Templar Conversed with a Porter, and a Brace of Guardias Were Happily Reunited

  THE SAINT stared at her, and then stared again at Joris Vanlinden.

  He felt rather as if it was his own stomach, and not the receptacle of petrified leather which performed the same organic function for Mr Uniatz, that had ab­sorbed the full effects of two thirds of a bottle of scotch. He knew all about the Christmas lottery, had bought tickets himself at various times, and shared the daydreams of almost every other man in Spain until the results were published. There is a Spanish national lottery three times every month; but the Navidad is the great event of the year, the time when nearly three million pounds sterling are distributed in prizes. Simon had read in the papers of men who had awakened to find themselves millionaires overnight; but he had never met one of them, and in his heart, like most other people, he could never quite convince himself that such things really did happen. The actual concrete proof of it, slapped right up in his face like that, made his head reel.

  "Did Joris have the whole ticket?" he asked, trying to ease the shock. "He didn't just have a section?"

  The girl shook her head. His blank and stunned bewilderment was so obvious that it must have satisfied her that he had been speaking the truth.

  "No, he had it all. He must have been crazy, I suppose. I thought he was. But he said it was the only way. He saved up the little money they gave him now and again until he could buy it. And it won !"

  Simon made a rapid mental calculation.

  "Why hadn't it been paid yet?"

  "Because we're in Tenerife."

  He grinned wryly, half unconsciously.

  "Of course, I'd forgotten that."

  "The draw was on the twenty-first." She was speaking almost mechanically, and yet with an intense sort of eagerness, as if talking kept her mind from dwelling on other things. "The results were cabled here the next day. That was when Graner cabled to Madrid. . . . But they don't pay on that. A few days ago they published a photographic reproduction of the official list; but they don't pay on that either. You could get a bank to discount it-they charge two per cent commission-but I don't suppose they could handle one of the big prizes
. Otherwise you have to wait till the administration chooses to send a set of official lists here."

  "It's a great piece of Spanish organisation, isn't it?" said the Saint aimlessly.

  "The lists were supposed to be coming on the boat that got in today," she said.

  Simon gazed at her for a moment longer; and then he lighted another cigarette from the butt of his last one and began to pace restlessly up and down the room, while Hoppy watched him with a kind of dog-like complacency.

  It would be unfair to say that the primitive convolutions of what, on account of the limitations of the English language, can only be referred to as Mr Uniatz' brain were incapable of registering more than one idea at a time. To be accurate, they were capable of registering two; although it must be admitted that one of them was a more or less habitual and unconscious background to whatever else was going on. And this permanent and pervasive background was his sublime faith in the infallibility and divine inspiration of the Saint.

  For the Saint, as Mr Uniatz had discovered, could think. He could concentrate upon problems and work them out without any perceptible signs of suffering. He could produce Ideas. He could make Plans. Mr Uniatz, a simple-minded citizen, whose intellectual horizons had hitherto been bounded by the logic of automatics and sub-machine guns, had, on their first meetings, observed these supernatural manifestations with perplexity and awe. When they met again in London, some years later, Mr Uniatz, who had been ruminating hazily about it ever since, had just reached the conclusion that if he could only hitch his wagon to such a scintillating star his life would hold no more worries.

  Since it fitted in admirably with his plans at the time, Simon had let him do it. Whereupon Mr Uniatz had attached himself with a blind and unshakable allegiance from which, short of physical violence, it was impossible to pry him loose for more than a few weeks at a time. Left to himself, Hoppy would wander moodily about the earth, a spiritual Ishmael, until he could place his destiny once again in the hands of this superman, this invincible genius, who could find his way with such apparent ease through the terrifying and tormenting labyrinths of Thought. Whatever the problem in hand might be, then or at any other time, Hoppy Uniatz knew that the Saint would solve it.

  He leaned forward and tapped Christine on the shoulder.

  "It's okay, miss," he said encouragingly. "De boss 'll fix it. Wit' a nut like his, he could of bin a big shot in de States."

  "I was a big shot," Simon retorted. "But there are limits."

  He was beginning to get the finer details of the situation sorted out into a certain amount of order, but without making much difference to the dizzy turmoil into which his mind had been whirled. The more he thought about it, the more fantastic it became.

  For a Spanish lottery ticket is a documento del portador, a bearer bond of the most comprehensive and undiscriminating kind in the world. Short of the most elaborate and irrefutable evidence to the contrary, combined with warrants and court orders and God knows how many other formalities, the ticket itself is the only legal claim under heaven to any prize which it may draw. There are not even any counterfoils to be retained by the original seller; so that, without that law, the administration of the lottery would be impossible. In other words, the piece of paper which Joris Vanlinden had lost, a folded sheet no more than seven inches long by four inches wide, with the thickness of the twenty sections into which a Navidad ticket is divided, was the strongest existing claim to a payment of fifteen million pesetas, two million dollars or four hundred thousand pounds at the most conservative rate of exchange-more than seven hundred pounds or thirty-five hundred dollars per square inch if you opened it out-one of the most compact and negotiable and untraceable concentrations of wealth that the world can ever have seen. The Saint had known boodle in almost every shape and form under the sun, had handled what everybody except himself would have called more than his fair share of it, but there was something about this new and hitherto tmconsidered species of it that took his breath away.

  He stopped walking and looked at Vanlinden again. The old man, shivering with nervous reaction and clinging pathetically to his daughter's hand, had sunk back exhausted on to the pillow. His weak, tired eyes stared mutely up at the Saint; but even he must have been convinced that Simon knew nothing, for the fire had died out of them and left only the anguish.

  Simon turned to the girl.

  "If Graner's idea was what you say it was, why did he let you go at all?"

  "He didn't. He said he was going to, but I never, believed him. Every day I was terrified that something -something would happen to Joris. When I knew that the official lists were supposed to arrive tonight, I was ... I was sure they . . . they would see that some­thing happened to Joris before he woke up tomorrow."

  "So you decided to make a dash for it."

  She nodded.

  "We said we were going to bed early and we got out of a window. Graner hadn't let the dogs out then. . . ."

  "There are dogs, are there?"

  He heard her catch her breath.

  "Yes. But they weren't out. . . . We got away, and we ran. But they must have missed us. They came after us and caught us on the road. That was when you arrived."

  The Saint blew two smoke rings, very carefully putting the second through the middle of the first.

  "So they took the ticket," he said. "But they didn't have to kill Joris. Or did they?" His eyes pinned her again, very clear and level and bright like sapphires. "Does anything strike you about that?"

  She pushed her fingers through her disordered hair.

  "My God," she said, "how can I think?"

  "Well, doesn't anything strike you? They may have wanted to put Joris away because he knew too much. But there may have been another reason. If he was running about loose after they'd pinched his ticket, he might make a fuss about it. It wouldn't be easy, but I suppose he could make a fuss. People don't buy a whole two-thousand-peseta Navidad ticket all to themselves so often, especially in a place like this, that the shop wouldn't be likely to remember him. If he was dead, anybody could say they bought it off him; but if he was alive and raising hell --"

  "How could he? He couldn't go near the police --"

  "That's a matter of opinion. Admittedly he'd be getting himself into trouble at the same time; but anyone who turns state's evidence can usually count on a good deal of leniency, and Joris has a lot less to lose than the others have. Just looking at it theoretically, when a bloke is in Joris' position, and a miracle has tossed him up within a finger's length of getting every­thing he wants most in the world, and then somebody snatches it away from him at the last moment and shoves him back again, it's liable to make him crazy enough to do anything for revenge. I don't know what sort of a psychologist Reuben Graner is, but I'd be inclined to look at it that way if I were in his place. What do you think, Hoppy?"

  The unornamental features of Mr Uniatz marshalled themselves into an expression of reproachful anguish. Even in their moments of most undisturbed serenity, they tended to resemble something which an amateur sculptor had beaten out of a lump of clay with a large hammer, in the vain hope that his most polite friends would profess to recognise it as a human face; but when twisted out of repose they looked even more like an unfortunate essay in ultrafuturistic art, and could probably have commanded a high price from an advanced museum. Mr Uniatz, however, was not concerned about his beauty. A man of naive and elemental tastes, there was something about the mere sound of the word "think" which made him wince.

  "What-me?" he said painfully.

  "Yes, you."

  Mr Uniatz bit another piece off the end of his cigar and swallowed it absent-mindedly.

  "I dunno, boss," he began weakly; and then, with the Saint's clear and accusing blue eye fixed on him, he returned manfully to his torment. "Dis guy Graner," he said. "Is he de guy wit' de oughday?"

  "We were hoping he had some."

  "De guy wit' de ice?"

  "That's right."

  "De guy ya tell me
about in Madrid?"

  "Exactly."

  "De guy we come here to take?"

  "The same."

  "De lottery guy?" said Hoppy, leaving no stone unturned in his anxiety to make sure of his ground before committing himself.

  Simon nodded approvingly.

  "You seem to have grasped some of it, anyway," he said. "I suppose you could call Graner the lottery guy for the present. Anyway, he's got the ticket. So the question is-what happens next?"

  "Dat looks like a cinch," said Mr Uniatz airily; and the Saint subsided limply into a chair.

  "One of two things has happened to you for the first time in your life," he said sternly. "Either the whiskey has had some effect, or an idea has got into your head."

  Mr Uniatz blinked.

  "Sure, it's a cinch, boss. All we gotta do is, we go to dis guy an' say 'Lookit, mug; eider you split wit' us on your racket, or we toin ya in to de cops.' Sure, he comes t'ru. It's a pipe," said Mr Uniatz, driving home his point.

  The Saint gazed at him pityingly.

  "You poor fathead," he said. "It isn't a racket. This is the Spanish official lottery. It's perfectly legal. Graner isn't running it. He's simply got the ticket that won it."

  Mr Uniatz looked unhappy. The Spanish government, he felt, had done him a personal injury. He brooded glumly.

  "I dunno, boss," he said at length, reverting to his original platform.

  "It looks plain enough to me," said the Saint.

  He sprang up again. To Christine Vanlinden, watch­ing him, fascinated, there was an atmosphere of buoy­ant and invincible power about him like nothing she had ever felt about a man before. Whether he could be trusted or not, whatever scruples he might or might not have, his personality filled the room and absorbed everyone in it. And yet he was smiling, and his gesture had the faint half-amused swagger which was insep­arable from every movement he made.

  "Graner has got the ticket," he said. "But we've got Joris. So long as Joris is out of sight and an unknown quantity, I think Graner will be afraid to risk trying to cash the ticket. He'll try to get hold of Joris again to find out exactly how he stands. He can afford to wait a few days, and meanwhile he'll probably be trying to figure out some other way to get round the difficulty. But I don't think he'll be on the doorstep of the lottery agent first thing in the morning asking for the prize. So we hold exactly half the stakes each. And while Graner is trying to fill his hand, we can be try­ing to fill ours. Therefore, the next move from our side is to go and have a talk with Reuben."