The Saint on the Spanish Main (The Saint Series) Page 8

  The Superintendent pulled out a handkerchief and wiped his face.

  “My God,” he said, “you mean you think Lucy—”

  “I think we have to go all the way back to the prime question of motive,” said the Saint. “Floyd Vosper was a nasty man who made dirty cracks about everyone here. But his cracks were dirtiest because he always had a wickedly good idea what he was talking about. Nevertheless, very few people become murderers because of a dirty crack. Very few people except me kill other people on points of principle. Vosper called us all variously dupes, phonies, cheaters, and fools. But since he had roughly the same description for all of us, we could all laugh it off. There was only one person about whom he made the unforgivable accusation…Now shall we rejoin the mob?”

  “You’d better do this your own way,” Fanshire muttered.

  Simon Templar took him up the steps to the verandah and back through the French doors into the living room, where all eyes turned to them in deathly silence.

  “A paraffin test will prove who fired that revolver in the last twenty-four hours, aside from those who have already admitted it,” Simon said, as if there had been no interruption. “And you’ll remember, I’m sure, who supplied that very handy theory about the arrow of God.”

  “Astron!” Fanshire gasped.

  “Oh, no,” said the Saint, a little tiredly. “He only said that God sometimes places His arrow in the hands of a man. And I feel quite sure that a wire to New York will establish that there is actually a criminal file under the name of Granville, with fingerprints and photos that should match Mr Gresson’s—as Vosper’s fatally elephantine memory remembered…That was the one crack he shouldn’t have made, because it was the only one that was more than gossip or shrewd insult, the only one that could be easily proved, and the only one that had a chance of upsetting an operation which was all set—if you’ll excuse the phrase—to make a big killing.”

  Major Fanshire fingered his upper lip.

  “I don’t know,” he began, and then, as Arthur Granville Gresson began to rise like a floating balloon from his chair, and the ebony-faced sergeant moved to intercept him like a well-disciplined automaton, he knew.

  JAMAICA: THE BLACK COMMISSAR

  1

  The white crescent of Montego Bay was under their wings, and most of the passengers on the Pan-American clipper who were disembarking at Kingston could be identified by a certain purposeful stirring as they straightened and reassembled themselves and their impedimenta in preparation for the landing a few minutes ahead. Simon Templar, who saw no reason for not traveling from one vacation spot to another in vacation clothes, was ready for Jamaica without further preparation, wearing nothing more troublesome than sandals, slacks, and a sport shirt tastefully decorated with a pattern of rainbow-hued tropical fish circulating through a forest of graceful corals and vivid submarine flora, but he calculated that he had time for one more cigarette before the “no smoking” sign went on, and lighted it without haste.

  The woman who had been sitting next to him, a cold-eyed and stoutly corseted dowager of the type which travel agencies so skillfully keep out of the pictures in their romantically illustrated brochures, had temporarily left her seat, presumably for basic adjustments in the privacy of the ladies’ room, and Simon thought it was only she returning when he felt someone loom over him and settle in the adjoining chair. He continued to gaze idly at the scenery below his window until a voice brought his head around—rather abruptly, because not only had that forbidding female maintained a majestic silence throughout the trip, but the voice was much deeper than even she could plausibly have possessed, and moreover it addressed him by name.

  “Excuse me, Mr Saint, sah.”

  Simon looked into a grinning ebony face that was puzzlingly familiar, but which he somehow couldn’t associate at all with the spotless white shirt, port-wine shantung jacket, hand-painted tie, and smartly creased dove-gray trousers which the young negro wore.

  “Bet you don’t recognize me, sah.”

  Simon felt a little embarrassed, more so than if a white man had posed him the same challenge, but he smiled amiably.

  “Yes, I know I’ve seen you before. But where?”

  “Johnny, sah. I was a sparrin’ partner with Steve Nelson, up in New York, the time you and he had that go with the Masked Angel. Remember now, Mr Saint?”

  “Of course.” Now it all came back. “But go easy with that name, will you? I’m trying to live a quiet and peaceful Life for a while.”

  “I’m sorry, sah.”

  “I don’t think anyone else is…Well, I’ve certainly got an excuse for not recognizing you. I don’t think I ever saw you before with anything but trunks on. What are you doing now, and where are you going?”

  “Home, sah.”

  The Saint raised his eyebrows with pleasant interest, but he could not escape a faint flicker of guilt that touched him at a deeper level. Of course he remembered Johnny: a nice, well-mannered, good-natured, hard-working colored boy around the gym, a willing but not gifted fighter…and that was all. As a being of a different race and color, his background, his past, his personal private present, and his unpredictable future, had seemed as remote and insignificant, except as they might affect any immediate contact with him, as the private life of a mounted policeman’s horse. It was strange how incurious one could be about any fellow human, especially one whose complexion made him an everlasting stranger.

  “Home?” said the Saint. “Where’s that?”

  “Jamaica, sah. I was born here.” The man added, with an odd touch of pride, “I’m a Maroon.”

  Perhaps hardly one listener in ten thousand would have had any answer but the equivalent of “What?” or “So what?” to such a statement, but Simon Templar was that one. It was one of those coincidences that were almost commonplace in his life that he not only knew what a Maroon was, but even had some elements of an immediate interest in that little-known political survival of the old wild history of the West Indies.

  Johnny, however, had already interpreted the Saint’s minuscule stiffening of surprise as a normal reaction of perplexity, and was hastening to explain, “The original Maroons were slaves who ran away, back at the beginnin’ of the eighteenth century, an’ took to the hills. When there was enough of ’em, they kept fightin’ the British troops who tried to round ’em up, till it was just like a war. They done so well that finally the British Empire had to give up an’ make a peace treaty with ’em.”

  “I’ve heard about them,” said the Saint. “They got their freedom, and a piece of the island set aside for them and their descendants for ever, sort of like an Indian reservation in the States. Only I was told that they make their own laws and appoint their own rulers and nobody can interfere with them in any way, just as if they were an independent little country of their own.”

  “That’s right,” Johnny said. “And that’s our country, right underneath you now.”

  Simon looked down through the window. Below them was a welter of steeply rounded hills, reminiscent in shape of a mass of old-fashioned beehives jam-packed together. Over almost every foot of surface the jungle grew like a coat of curly green wool above which only the tops of the tallest trees raised little knots like the mounds in a pebble-weave fabric. Only here and there was the denseness broken by a smoother slope that seemed to be open grass, a tiny brown patch of cultivation, the shiny specks of a banana patch, or the silver thread of a stream exposed on an outcropping of bare boulders, but most of it looked as wild and impenetrable as any terrain that the Saint had ever seen.

  “They call it the Cockpit,” Johnny said. “I dunno why, ’cept that it’s sure seen a lot of fightin’. Doesn’t look like it’s changed much, though I was only twelve when my dad took me away to the States.”

  “What makes you want to go back?” Simon asked.

  “Well, sah, he died soon after that, so I didn’t get to go to school much more. I was too busy hustlin’ for a livin’. Bein’ a sparr
in’ partner was just another job. When I found I didn’t have what it takes to be a top fighter, I gave that up. I done all kinds of things, from shoeshine boy to cook an’ butler. But by the time I met you, I’d decided I wanted to be something better, an’ I started savin’ my money an’ goin’ to night school. Presently I learned enough an’ saved up enough to pass the entrance exam to Tuskegee an’ afford to go there. Got me a degree a year ago. I know I’ll never talk like a college man, that’s a bad habit I’ve had too long, but I sure learned all I could.”

  “You’ve got enough to be proud of,” said the Saint. “But that still doesn’t tell me why you aren’t going on from there to something better in the States.”

  “Well, sah, you know as well as I do how it is up there. There’s a limit to what a colored man can do.” Johnny spoke with devastating candor, without inferiority or rancor. “Some of the fellows at college always think they’re goin’ to change the world. I never felt big enough for that, but I done plenty of thinkin’. After I got out an’ tried it, I knew I was always goin’ to have to just be the best I could among colored people. So then I began thinkin’, well, if that’s how it is, why don’t I go back an’ do that with my own colored people, the Maroons, where I came from? Maybe I’m needed more down here, where some negroes go to English universities, but others are more illiterate even than the poorest share-cropper in Mississippi…I dunno, I thought, maybe I can help more of ’em to be ready when that change in the world comes.”

  The sincerity in his brown eyes was so cloudless and complete that Simon found himself hopelessly assaying a medley of assorted answers, afraid to utter any of them spontaneously lest he sound smug and patronizing.

  In that paralysis of fumbling sensitivity, the Deadly Dowager herself came to his rescue. Both Simon and Johnny simultaneously became aware of her, freshly girdled and painted, lowering over her usurped seat, and transfixing them alternately with the daggers of her arctic eyes.

  Even before the Saint himself could adjust to that unexpected additional problem, Johnny was scrambling out of the chair with the ingrained quick defensive humility that not even a degree from Tuskegee had eradicated, that was somehow a subtle humiliation to both races.

  “Excuse me, ma’am. And thank you for listenin’, sah.”

  There was little that the Saint could do, the world not yet having changed. The illuminated sign on the forward bulkhead was on, and the stewardess was already intoning, “Will you fasten your seat belts, please. And no smoking, please.” But little as it was, Simon did it.

  He put out his hand, directly across the entering matriarch’s mid-section.

  “It was nice seeing you again, Johnny. Maybe I’ll run into you again—in the Cockpit.”

  Then the dame surged like a tidal wave into her seat.

  “Well!” she said, condensing innumerable volumes into a single syllable.

  The Saint’s only consolation was that for the remaining few minutes of the flight she stayed as far away from him as if he had been labeled the carrier of a contagious disease, which gave him a comfortable excess over the normally limited amount of elbow room.

  2

  David Farnham was at the airport, a sturdy and unmistakably British figure in open-necked shirt and khaki walking shorts, pipe in mouth, bright eyes and bald head shining. Under his benevolent aegis the formalities of immigration and customs passed Simon through as if on a fast-rolling conveyer belt, and in a matter of mere minutes they were in Farnham’s little English car, circling around the harbor and edging into the crowded clattering streets of the town.

  “I hope my wire wasn’t too much of a shock to you,” said the Saint. “When you talked to me at that cocktail party in Nassau, you probably never thought I’d take you up on your invitation.”

  “On the contrary, I’m delighted that you finally did. I always believed you would, and it’s nice of you to prove I was right.”

  “I didn’t expect you to meet me, though. Won’t the Government mind you taking this time off?”

  “Government has nothing to say about it,” Farnham told him sedately. “I’ve managed to retire at last. They wanted me to carry on, but having reached the age of sixty they couldn’t prevent me getting out. I’ve been looking forward to this for a long time.”

  Simon regarded him speculatively. He knew, although David by no means told everyone, that his host had been a schoolteacher before he had been practically drafted into the service of the Colonial Secretariat, on an indefinite leave of absence from his blackboard which had been extended for so long that his original calling was often forgotten. Placed in charge of almost every activity which could be classified under the broad heading of General Progress, he had brought so much honest enthusiasm and kindly wisdom to his job that the temporary appointment had drifted into a de facto permanency.

  “I still don’t see you wearing a cap and gown,” Simon remarked.

  “Not that, either. I’m too old to start that all over again. I think I did my job just the same, even without a classroom. No, I’m retired. Some years ago we were able to pick up quite a bargain in a small farm out in the hills. We rise at six and retire well before nine, and our one excitement is a weekly trip to town for shopping, golf, supper, and cinema. It’s a simple life, and we enjoy it very much…However, I can still take you to visit the Maroons, as I promised.”

  “I’m still very interested,” Simon said.

  The western outskirts of Kingston merged into picturesque Spanish Town, and then they were through that and out on the rambling highway.

  “In fact,” said the Saint, lighting a cigarette, “I seem to keep on being reminded of the Maroons, as if Fate was determined to keep prodding me into something. Even on the plane coming in here, a few minutes before we landed, a colored fellow spoke to me, whom I’d met years ago in New York, when he was earning his way towards college by working as sparring partner with a pugilist friend of mine, and it turns out he’s on his way home, which is here—and damn if he didn’t tell me he was a Maroon.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Johnny…You know, I’m ashamed to say it, but that’s still all I know. Just Johnny.”

  “It could be his last name,” Farnham said. “One of the leaders of the original Maroons was named Johnny.”

  Simon shrugged.

  “But long before that, soon after I met you, and before I left Nassau, I ran into another bloke from Jamaica. Name of Jerry Dugdale.”

  “I remember him. He was in the police here.”

  “That’s the guy. He repeated just what you’d told me, almost in the very same words, about how the Maroons had an ancient Treaty which gave them the right to make their own laws and set up their own government. Furthermore, he told me that once upon a time he was wanting to chat with a couple of natives about a slight case of murder, and he got word that they’d taken off for the Maroon country, so he went in to look for them, and the Maroon boss man complained to the Governor, and the Governor had Jerry on the carpet and chewed him out for violating their Treaty rights and almost making an international incident.”

  “It’s quite possible,” Farnham said. “The Maroons are very touchy about their privileges.”

  “Right then,” said the Saint, “I guess I knew that this was something I had to see. A little independent state left over for a couple of centuries, right inside the island of Jamaica—that’s something I could top any tourist story with.”

  “It certainly is unique, at least in the West Indies. But,” Farnham said, without taking his eyes off the road, “I hardly thought you’d be so interested in topping tourist stories. You wouldn’t perhaps have been specially intrigued by the fact that Dugdale wasn’t allowed to chase his criminals in there, would you?”

  “It does give it a sort of piquant slant,” Simon admitted cheerfully.

  He looked at his companion again and said, “But from the point of view of your Government, a situation like that could have problems, couldn’t it?”
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  “It could,” Farnham said steadily. “And before you’re much older I’ll tell you about one.”

  It had taken rather a long time, so long that the Saint felt no electrifying change, only a deepening and enriched fulfillment of his faith in coincidences and the sure guiding hand of destiny.

  But David Farnham seemed to feel as unhurried as destiny itself, and Simon did not press him. Now that he knew for certain that he had something to look forward to, the Saint could wait for it as long as anyone.

  Presently they were in the hills, winding upwards, and Farnham was pointing out the landmarks of his demesne with unalloyed exuberance as they came into view. The house itself stood on its own hilltop, an old Jamaican planter’s house, solidly welded to the earth and mellowed in its setting with graceful age, exposed and welcoming to the four winds. As Simon unwound himself from the car and stretched his long legs, the air he breathed in was sweet and cool.

  “We’re twenty-five hundred feet up,” Farnham said practically. “The ideal altitude for these latitudes.”

  He kissed his wife as she came out to greet them, and she said, “I remembered that you drank Dry Sack, Simon. And I hope you’ll excuse us having dinner at sundown, but that’s how we farmers live. Anyway, we’re having codfish and ackee, which you told me you wanted to try.”

  “You make me feel like a prodigal son,” said the Saint.

  And after dinner, when he had cleaned his plate of ackee, that hazardous fruit which cooks up to look exactly like a dish of richly scrambled eggs, but which is deathly poison if it is plucked prematurely from the tree, he said, “And now you could sell me anywhere as a fatted calf.”

  They had coffee on the verandah, and made pleasant small talk for only a short while before Ellen Farnham quietly excused herself. David filled another pipe, sitting forward with his forearms on his thighs and his head bent in complete concentration on the neat performance of the job. Simon knew that now it was coming, and let him take his time.