Trust the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 7

  “I’m better,” Simon said calmly. “But the main entrance would just be stupid. There are keepers’ cottages all around there. The only animals we’d be likely to get near would be watchdogs.”

  “There speaks the expert. But I’m sure he’d know how to cope with the problem.”

  “I was there once, years ago,” said the Saint slowly. “I remember that on the far side of the grounds, that would be to the north-east, there were some enclosures that ran downhill, and you could walk around them, and then you were outside on a long slope with a fine view but only fields and pastures between you and a road I could see at the bottom. I think, since we’ve got to walk anyhow, if we found that road, there wouldn’t be much to stop us hiking up the hill and into the back of the park.”

  Iantha handed him the map, and he studied it under the dashboard light.

  Then he drove on again.

  Nobody spoke another word before he stopped a second time. He got out and studied the skyline over a gate.

  “This ought to do it,” he said.

  Usebio opened the trunk of the car and took out a folded bundle of cloth, and a short leaf-bladed spear which he handed to Vail. Simon unlatched the gate, and they followed Iantha through.

  It was a steady climb of about three-quarters of a mile over rough grass. Simon set a pace which was intentionally geared to his estimate of the legs of Usebio, whom he didn’t want to exhaust before his trial; he figured that no exertion of that kind should bother Vail. Iantha Lamb, who had worn a loose peasant skirt and flat-heeled shoes which he now realized must have been chosen less for modest simplicity than in shrewd preparedness for any eventuality, kept up without complaining. They negotiated three wire fences on the way, without much difficulty: after the first fifty yards, the moonlight seemed bright enough for a night football game.

  Then presently it was not so bright as they approached the black shadows of the trees and shrubbery that capped the last acres of the rise, and suddenly, startlingly close, belled out a fabulously guttural warning that reverberated in the deepest chords of the human fear-instinct.

  “A lion.” Russell Vail whispered lightly. “We picked a good guide.”

  “I got you in,” said the Saint. “Now you take over.”

  In a moment they were on a narrow road, one of the painlessly macadamized trails on which safaris of short-winded suburbanites and their spoiled progeny were permitted, for an additional fee, to cruise among the fauna in their own little cars.

  “I know where I am now,” said Vail. “I came up this morning to look around.”

  He led them briskly along the road and then off to the right on another path that branched off it. The going was slower for a while under the shade of some trees and presently of a building from which came the grunts and rustlings of unseen beasts; then quite soon they were in the open again, and next to them was a fence of massive timber. The fence enclosed a very uncertain oblong about a hundred yards in its greatest length and half of that at its widest, on one side of which was an equally massive rough-hewn structure like a stable.

  And standing out in the full glare of the moon, rotund, enormous, glistening, primeval, motionless, but evidently sensing their presence, was the animal.

  Vail waved his hand towards it.

  “There you are, Elías,” he said. “Let’s see what you can do with him.”

  “A rhinoceros,” Iantha breathed.

  “A beauty. Just arrived last week, and still not housebroken.”

  “But that isn’t—”

  “It has horns,” Vail pointed out. “Two of ’em. You can see ’em from here. Just arranged tandem, instead of sideways like a bull. That might even make it easier. But it fits the terms of the dare. Of course, if Elías is scared to take it on…”

  The matador stood looking at it, as immobile as the monster itself. The moonlight could not have shown any change of color, and his thin hawk’s face was like a mask of graven metal in which the eyes gleamed like moist stones.

  Then he climbed carefully over the barrier and began to walk slowly forward, opening his cape.

  In the stillness, Simon could hear the breathing of his companions.

  The rhinoceros allowed Usebio to advance several yards, with its glinting porcine stare turned directly towards him. Simon thought he had read somewhere that rhinos were nearsighted, but if so this one had certainly caught a scent that told it which way to look. Yet it stood for seconds like a grotesque prehistoric relic, with no movement except a stiffening of its absurdly disproportionate little piggy tail.”

  Usebio stopped with his feet together, turned partly sideways, and spread the cape, holding it up by the shoulders, in the classic position of citing a bull.

  And with a snort the rhino exploded into motion.

  Its short chunky legs seemed to achieve no more than an ungainly trot, but the appearance was deceptive. There was barely time to realize what an acceleration it generated before it was right on top of Usebio. And Usebio stood his ground, turning harmoniously with the cape and leading the brute past him, gracefully but a little wide. Iantha gasped, almost inaudibly.

  The rhino blundered on a little way, turning in an astonishingly tight circle, and charged again. And again Usebio led it past him, a trifle closer, as if its nose were magnetized to the cloth, in a formal verónica.

  The rhino scrambled around again, it seemed even faster, and launched itself at the lure a third time without a pause.

  And suddenly Iantha Lamb screamed, a small sharp cry as if something clammy had touched her.

  It may have been that Usebio started to turn his head at the sound, or that it only divided his concentration for a fractional instant; certainly he was trying to work still closer to his animal, and he had not yet perfectly judged or adapted himself to the dimensions of a three-ton beast that was as broad as a boat. He carried the horns and the head safely past him, but it caught him solidly with its shoulder and flung him aside much as the fender of a speeding truck might have done. He fell eight feet away and lay still with his face in the dirt.

  There are things that happen in decimals of the time that it takes to report or read them. Like this:

  Simon looked at Vail and said, “Your cue?”

  Vail showed his teeth and said, “Not me, old boy. I only bet I’d take on claws.”

  Simon grabbed the spear with one hand and smashed Vail’s lips against his teeth with the other. Vail stumbled back, falling. Iantha’s face was enraptured. Simon vaulted the rails, and came down running. And all that had happened while the rhinoceros hesitated imperceptibly over renewing its assault on an object that had become limp and prostrate.

  Then it caught sight of the Saint racing towards it, yelling insanely, and found a more interesting target for its fury. With a slobbery whroosh! it veered to meet him.

  Simon tried the trick that he had seen banderilleros use when planting their darts in a bull during their phase of the fight. He swerved a little to his right, Usebio and the fallen cape being to his left, and then at the last moment that he dared he dug in his heels and broke back diagonally to the left, at the same time hurling the spear towards the oncoming rhino’s left jowl. The point could have made no more than a pinprick in the pachyderm’s vulcanized hide, but it added its distraction to the surprise of the Saint’s change of course, and the behemoth thundered by him with a momentum that even its own colossal power needed time to check.

  In that dreadfully evanescent respite the Saint reached the cape, snatched it up, and spread it as he had been taught to do by friendly toreros at the testing of calves. In the one sideways glance that he could spare, he saw Usebio rolling over and struggling to rise up on his hands and knees.

  “A la barrera!” Simon shouted, and went on in Spanish, which would most clearly penetrate Usebio’s daze, “I will keep him off. But hurry!”

  Then the rhino was bearing down on him like an express train. He would not have apologized for the cliché. It seemed to shake the earth like th
e biggest locomotive that ever ran on rails. But somehow he led it past him with the cape, not stylishly, but as best he recalled the movement.

  It lurched and grunted and skidded around and came again. And again he made it follow the cloth instead of his body.

  If Iantha Lamb had screamed again he would have laughed without a flicker of his eyes.

  But he did get a glimpse of Usebio crawling painfully but with increasing strength towards the fence, and knew that he hadn’t misinterpreted the collision which had felled the matador. Usebio had only been winded by a glancing blow, perhaps with a couple of cracked ribs, but nothing worse. If he could only get out of the corral.

  Three, four, five, six more times the Saint gave his best simulated verónicas to a rampaging homicidal quadruped which whirled and came back for more with a terrifying swiftness and relentless persistence that even the bravest Andalusian bull never matched. But neither would his technique and configurations have brought olés from the captious critics in the Plaza de toros at Seville. This was a reproach that Simon had no leisure to fret about. He was busy enough keeping the most mean-tempered Diceros africanus that ever had the privilege of an introduction to European culture from eviscerating him with one of its anachronistic horns.

  Somehow he was able to keep the performance going until Usebio had rolled under the low bar of the stockade, safely to one side of the segment towards which Simon was baiting the rhino, until he knew everything was all right and he shamelessly dropped the cape over its head and sprawled over the top banister just as his paleolithic playmate crashed into the posts like a berserk baby tank.

  There were many more people outside than he had left there—men in uniforms and parts of uniforms and other clothes. He had been distantly aware of their arrival during his last passes but had been far too occupied to take much note of it.

  “What d’you think you’re doing?” demanded the ranking one unnecessarily.

  “Settling a silly bet,” Simon replied placatingly. “I know it was naughty of us, but there’s no harm done.”

  The keeper turned his flashlight from Usebio who was now standing up brushing off his clothes, to Vail, who was dabbing his mouth with a red-stained handkerchief.

  “Oh, no? What about him?”

  “He slipped trying to get over the fence first, when he saw the other fellow in trouble. It’s nothing serious.”

  The beam swung on to Iantha Lamb and rested there, and someone sucked in his breath sharply.

  “Why, isn’t that—”

  “Yes, it is,” said the Saint. “And I’m sure you wouldn’t want to get her a lot of bad publicity. Now if we made up to you for the trouble we’ve given you, couldn’t we forget the whole thing?”

  There was no conversation whatever on the way back to town, after Simon had walked down the hill and brought the car around to the main entrance. Iantha drove, again with the Saint beside her, though he had tried to offer the seat to Usebio.

  “No,” said the matador. “I shall be quite comfortable. The front is better for you, with your long legs.”

  He said nothing about the long legs of Russell Vail. He may have felt instinctively that it would be diplomatic not to make Vail and the Saint sit together, though he had asked no questions about Vail’s puffy mouth. And Vail seemed to think it best not to reopen the subject in front of Usebio.

  “You can drop me off at my sister’s.” Vail said, as they came down Abbey Road, and Iantha obviously knew where that was. Vail got out and said, “Goodnight. I’ll call you tomorrow.” He looked in at the Saint and said, “I hope I see you again soon.”

  “Any time,” said the Saint, exactly as he had once said to Iantha.

  She drove to Claridge’s, and Usebio said, “I will get out, but you must take Mr Templar home.”

  “Nonsense,” said the Saint. “I’ll get a taxi. Or I’d just as soon walk. She has to take care of you.”

  “To that, I say nonsense,” said Usebio. “I am all right. Only a few bruises. I will sit in a hot bath and tomorrow I am all right. It is nothing like a cornada.” He was out of the car already, and put his hand in at Simon’s window. “I insist. Tonight you saved my life. Is it so much to take you home? Va con Diós, amigo.” The thin lips smiled coldly, but the dark eyes glowed like hot coals. “You would have made a good bullfighter. You understand what is pundonor.”

  The Jaguar pulled away, and Simon Templar leaned back at the fullest length that his seat would let him.

  “Do you understand what is pundonor?” she asked at length.

  “It’s a sort of romantic-chivalric concept of an honor that’s bigger than just ordinary honor, or honesty,” he said very quietly and remotely. “A sort of inflexible pride that would make you go through with a bet to dive off the Brooklyn Bridge even after you found out that the East River was frozen solid.”

  She said, “Or that would make you try to live up to your reputation because a hero was needed, and there was nobody else around?”

  “Russell isn’t a coward,” said the Saint. “Don’t sell him short.”

  “Then why didn’t he fight you after you hit him?”

  “Because it was safer to be consistent, and go on looking like someone who couldn’t have helped Elías. Why did you scream?”

  “I couldn’t help it. Something touched me, and with all those jungle creatures around I naturally thought of snakes, and—”

  “And that was all you could think of.”

  “Russell must have goosed me.”

  The Saint sighed.

  “It’s possible. I wouldn’t ask him, because he’d deny it anyhow. But somebody must have wanted Elías to die. It was thrilling, wasn’t it?”

  “You were wonderful.”

  “Morituri te salutamus—we who are about to die salute you. I think I said you were born in the wrong century. And if Elías had been killed, Russell and I could have fought it out. And if I killed him, some day some new young upstart would be challenging me. Just like the cave men.”

  They turned into the Grosvenor House courtyard off Park Street and she braked the Jaguar and said, “Ask me in.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t want to be one of your gladiators.”

  In one smooth movement he was outside the car and she was staring out at him like a perplexed and perverse pixie.

  “Nobody,” she said in a low unbelieving voice—“nobody ever turned me down.”

  “That’s why I’ll be the one man in your life that you’ll never forget,” he said wickedly. “And there’s one other thing I want you to remember.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s none of my business how you work out your personal problems with Elías. But if I ever hear of him having a fatal accident, it had better be very convincing. Or you can be sure that whatever the jury says, I shall take the trouble to arrange another accident for you. Please never forget that—darling.”

  He blew her a kiss off his fingertips, and smiled, and walked into the hotel.

  THE CLEANER CURE

  Simon Templar suffered neither fools nor pests gladly, but he was never too stubborn to admit that even the most obnoxious person could have something to offer him that might be useful at some remote time in some odd way.

  He did not like Dr Wilmot Javers, whom he met at a cocktail party in London for which the occasion has no bearing on this story, but he talked with him. Or, rather, he listened and made a few conventionally encouraging noises while Dr Javers talked.

  “I came across a case recently that would interest you,” Dr Javers stated, in a tone that defied contradiction. “I said to myself at the time, this would be one for the Saint.”

  “Did you?” responded the Saint politely.

  “Of course, I never dreamed I’d have the chance to find out whether you could solve it. But now you’ll have to show me whether you’re as clever as they say you are.”

  “I couldn’t be,” Simon responded promptly.

  But Dr Javers was
not to be diverted. As a medico, he may have been extremely competent and conscientious, sympathetic and indefatigable in affliction, dedicated to his profession and his patients, but as an individual he was one of those opinionated and aggressive types that can only assert themselves by reducing somebody else.

  There are physical specimens of the same mentality who, with a certain reinforcement of alcohol, upon spotting a former or even current boxing champion in a bar, are impelled to try their best to pick a fight with him—an occupational hazard of which every career pugilist is acutely aware. What can they lose? If he declines the challenge, he is yellow. If the loud mouth can score with a sneak punch, he can boast about it for ever. But if the pro gives him the beating that he deserves, then the champ is nothing but a big bully picking on a poor helpless amateur. Even actors who portray tough-guy parts before movie or TV cameras, merely to support their wives and children, are the recurrent targets of hopped-up heroes who feel inspired to prove that these actors are not as tough as the script makes them.

  The Saint was exposed to this psychosis on two planes—not merely the physical, but also the intellectual, which in several ways was harder to cope with, requiring more patience than muscular prowess. But he had learned to roll with the abstract punches as well as the other kind.

  “Here’s the situation,” said Dr Javers. “The subject is a man thirty-eight years old, married, two children, more than averagely successful in business. Never had a serious illness in his life, but is somewhat overweight. His business calls for a lot of expense-account wining and dining. His only trouble is that the wining is often too much for him. He isn’t an alcoholic, and he holds it like a gentleman, but he goes to bed drunk two or three nights a week, regularly. I mean, when he lies down, it’s a fine question whether he falls asleep or passes out.”

  “So?”

  “One night, after taking a foreign buyer out to dinner and a couple of night clubs, he comes home and goes to bed in his dressing-room, as he always does when he’s out late. His wife is an understanding soul, and she doesn’t wait up for him. The next day, he has the usual hangover, only it’s much worse than usual.”