The Saint Abroad Page 9

  “They’ll be coming right away,” she announced. “Mathieu has already sent Bernard for the money. I told them we’d wait here in the car.”

  “Good,” said Simon. “Hans and I were discussing old English sayings while you were gone, and this situation brings to mind another one…about not putting all one’s eggs in the same automobile.”

  “What do you mean?” Annabella asked.

  “I mean I think I’ll wait over there across the road in the shadows in case Mathieu decides that he’d prefer spending a couple of cheap bullets rather than a lot of expensive money.”

  “You think he doesn’t intend to go through with this even now?” Annabella asked in dismay.

  “I think he does,” the Saint replied, “if he has to. But it won’t hurt to give the ethical side of his nature a little encouragement.”

  He opened the door and let her into the front passenger seat of the car. Hans, at his indication, took the driver’s seat.

  “Just finish your transaction as fast as you can and get rid of him,” Simon told them.

  Annabella was groping at the dashboard of the car.

  “Where is the key?” she asked. “In case…”

  “In case you decide to leave me standing here holding an empty bag?” Simon drawled. “The ethical side of your nature needs a little encouragement, too.”

  He tossed the key in his hand, grinned, put it back into his pocket and strolled across the street to the dark schoolyard. There was a row of large chestnut trees along the sidewalk giving perfect concealment from the eyes of anyone on the lighted street. The Saint leaned against one of the tree trunks, folded his arms comfortably, and waited.

  He did not have long to wait. Apparently Mathieu’s financial resources were not only adequate but very handy. Perhaps the money had even been in his car—it was possible that Mathieu or his employers had anticipated paying for the paintings as a last resort all along. In any case, it was less than fifteen minutes until a pair of headlights flared around the corner and Mathieu’s car pulled up and stopped on Simon’s side of the street facing in the opposite direction to the car that was already there. Mathieu got out, leaving Bernard at the wheel. The engine remained running.

  Simon watched from his hiding place, not ten paces away, as the pseudo-Inspector crossed the street. Annabella got out of the Saint’s car to meet him. Mathieu opened the rear door of Simon’s car and looked over the paintings. Seeming satisfied, he turned and motioned to Bernard. Bernard got out of the car with an attaché case in one hand. While he was still hidden by the car door from the view of the people across the street, he extracted a pistol from his pocket, clicked off the safety catch, and held it close to his body.

  The Saint, like a fleeting shadow, was suddenly behind Bernard as he crossed the road and Mathieu’s assistant felt the hard cold nose of an automatic pressed very hard against his spine.

  “What a naughty boy you are, Bernard,” Simon said so that all could hear. “Now show the nice people what you’ve got in your hand, and then drop it on the street with the safety on.”

  Bernard dropped his pistol onto the pavement, and the Saint picked it up. Mathieu ground his teeth and rolled his eyes in an expression which would have fitted quite well into one of Michelangelo’s more dramatic renditions of the Last Judgment.

  “Well,” Simon said to Annabella. “What shall we do with them now?”

  “I did not tell him to do that!” Mathieu protested, waving both hands at the abashed Bernard. “I swear I did not. Show them the money, you fool!”

  Bernard sheepishly opened the attaché case, revealing stacks of banknotes.

  “To pay you with,” Mathieu said anxiously. “It is there. You can count it.”

  “Stand over there, Bernard, and give me the money,” Simon said.

  The currency was genuine. Annabella looked at it and then enquiringly at the Saint.

  “What should I do?” she asked anxiously.

  “I suggest you take it before it’s devalued,” Simon said. “And that you give the paintings to these two boobs so they’ll stay off your neck once and for all.”

  There was a general sigh of relief, particularly on the Italian side of the parlay, and Mathieu anxiously received the paintings from Hans.

  “You are going to let us go?” Mathieu asked, with an apprehensive look at Simon’s gun.

  “No fear, Garibaldi,” Simon said. “Run along and don’t come back.”

  “And good riddance!” Hans grunted after them in German.

  The two Italians hurried into their car, slammed the doors with feverish haste, and roared away.

  When they were gone Annabella sagged happily against the side of Simon’s car.

  “I am rich!” she exulted. “I’m at least a little rich!”

  “We are a little rich,” Simon corrected her.

  He took a pile of lire from the glove compartment and put them into his coat pocket. Annabella’s initial look of horror faded and relaxed into a smile as she took a deep breath.

  “Fair enough. You’ve earned it.” She took Hans’s hand in one of hers and Simon’s in the other and squeezed them both. “We’ve all earned it. Let’s form a team. Is Reubens bringing good prices?”

  “Quite,” said Simon. “Why?”

  “Well, darling, these Leonardos and things were just the beginning! There’s lots more where they came from!”

  Simon looked slack-jawed at Hans, who ducked his head in affirmation and smiled modestly through the pale lamplight.

  THE PERSISTENT PATRIOTS

  Original Teleplay by Michael Pertwee

  Adapted by Fleming Lee

  1

  The tropical African coastal territory of Nagawiland had, for most of its humid eons of existence, been of little interest to anyone except monkeys, insects, snakes, crocodiles, wart hogs, and an occasional party of black hunters passing through its inhospitable coastal marshes toward the high country farther inland. The few humans who settled permanently in the small area seem to have been the remnants of a tribe of headhunters who were defeated and eaten by a more powerful neighboring tribe.

  Having settled a sufficiently safe distance from the scene of their forefathers’ Armageddon, the Nagawi, as they called themselves (a word translated roughly as “the only real people”) showed no enthusiasm for headhunting or anything else. They lived on what they could get without much effort—their treats consisting of an occasional lame wild pig or senile baboon—and carved crude obscene figures out of tree roots. Their religious exercises consisted of flagellating one another with thorn bushes and cutting off the ear lobes of all boys who managed to survive for twelve years—which by Nagawi standards of life expectancy represented early middle age. Those who survived the religious exercises went on to reproduce languidly but steadily, until by 1870, when Livingstone discovered it, the tribe had grown from its original handful to a thousand or more.

  Their first mild notoriety was passed on to the outer world by European missionaries who had come there to see what could be done about the Nagawi’s souls and the fact that the women wore no blouses. The missionaries reported that the Nagawi chieftains pre-chewed all food before it was passed around to honored guests. Perhaps for that reason the Christian sects never showed quite the same zeal for converting the Nagawi as they did for converting tribes with different sorts of table etiquette.

  The Nagawi’s second wave of fame came during the 1920s when their obscene root carvings were declared by a group of Paris-centered artists (known as “Les Sept Emmerdants”) to be superior to anything produced in stone by Michelangelo or in wood by Riemenschneider. The Nagawi were delighted to find they could receive valuable salt and fine cloth in exchange for trinkets that anybody with ten fingers and a sharp knife could knock out in half an hour.

  But the peak of Nagawiland’s popularity with the rest of the world came when the foothills of its western borders were found to be bursting with ores of minerals precious to industrialized so
cieties. Englishmen, whose nation had controlled the area since the 1914 World War, poured into the territory. They cut a harbor into the coastline and built a city there. Other towns sprang up and grew into cities. Electrical power plants burgeoned along the Bawu River. The Nagawi tribesmen could grow relatively rich if they chose to abandon their former way of life. Other native Africans trooped across the borders seeking the wages paid by the British. Nagawiland flourished.

  But things changed in Britain and elsewhere. Highly educated men declared that the British had stolen Nagawiland from the Nagawi and ought to give it back, not only with its cities and power plants, but with additional reparations to make up in some small way for the damage they had done to human rights. Politicians of a number of states claimed that what the English had done amounted not only to theft, but to exploitation of Nagawi labor. Missionaries had once praised the strides the Nagawi had made since the coming of European civilization. Now the European papers printed comparisons of the wages of Nagawi laborers with the wages of workers in Birmingham, Lille, and Milan. Pictures compared Nagawi shacks with residential areas of London and Stockholm. A Nagawi man who had been sent to Oxford to school went over to Hyde Park every Sunday morning and publicly cursed the English for sadistic brutes. The English audience applauded politely and took guilty note of the speaker’s scarred neck and missing ear lobes.

  The political earthquakes which followed in due course were met with determination on the part of the white population of Nagawiland to maintain their own human rights.

  In the move of the area from colonial status toward independence, only one man seemed able to keep the conflicting forces in fair balance and prevent his country’s becoming the slaughteryard into which so much of the rest of Africa had been turned. His name was Thomas Liskard, and he was the white Prime Minister of Nagawiland.

  On a certain morning in January, Prime Minister Liskard prepared to fly to London for crucial talks with Her Majesty’s government which, it was hoped, would lead to some settlement of Nagawiland’s immediate problems. Nagawiland, being a small country, did not furnish its government officials with private transport planes, so the Prime Minister and his party were driven to the airport of Nagawiland’s capital city to meet a commercial jetliner coming up on a Cape Town-to-London run.

  It happened that on the same January morning Simon Templar was driven by taxi to the same airport in order to catch the same plane for London. The unlikely presence of that adventurer—who under his nickname of the Saint was perhaps better known throughout the world than Thomas Liskard himself—in Nagawiland is easily explained. The Saint was there as a tourist. Nagawiland is of course far from ordinary tourist routes, but then Simon Templar was far from an ordinary tourist. He was a man who lived on excitement and constant change. It was his penchant for the former which, diligently indulged from his earliest years, had enabled him to afford the latter. His buccaneering expeditions into the Never-Never Land of lawless men had earned him the fear and hatred of criminals, the grudging respect of police officials, and enough money to travel in the most elegant style anywhere in the world anytime he felt like it.

  He had felt like going to Nagawiland for two primary reasons. In the first place, it was one of the few places left where one could see certain African animals in an almost completely natural state. Thanks to Liskard’s predecessors, a huge preserve had been cordoned off and kept free from poachers. Simon had stayed in the guest house of the game park and thoroughly enjoyed himself for several days, luxuriating in the total absence of pressure. It was fascinating to be able to watch the animals in the park, whose lives were as direct, as cleanly instinctive and sometimes as deadly, as his own had always been.

  The second reason for the Saint’s choice of Nagawiland as a place to spend those few days involved a more practical kind of interest. He wanted to see for himself one of those newly emergent countries whose teething troubles provided so much grist for the world’s press mills. Nagawiland had in recent months occupied considerably more space in newsprint than it did in geographical area, and much of the journalistic expanses dedicated to it were thronged with inky armies of reporters and editors marching forth in a sort of new Children’s Crusade against colonialism, restricted suffrage, and Thomas Liskard. Simon Templar, on the other hand, had developed a great admiration for Thomas Liskard, without of course having had any personal contact with him. It seemed to him that Liskard was one of the few politicians in the world who was more interested in the job he was doing for his country than in his own career. His whole life reflected his ability and integrity—and it was in fact his completely unblemished reputation among the British public as well as his own people which gave him his great personal power as a statesman, and which kept his land from catastrophe.

  So Simon Templar had a chance, in going to Liskard’s country, not only to relax in the tropics while the world to the north shivered in wintry slush, but also to verify his positive opinions about Nagawiland’s good government. It seemed to him more than ever obvious that—contrary to the strictly liberal, rigidly democratic doctrines expressed in most of the newspapers—it was slightly better that a country be governed well by a few people than that it be governed poorly by a great many.

  It was not one of the Saint’s intentions to take a look at Thomas Liskard himself, but the fact that he did see the Prime Minister was no great coincidence. There was only one direct flight to London each week from Nagawiland’s just created jet-sized airfield, so everybody going to London in any given seven-day period would naturally collect at the terminal on the same morning.

  The Saint, tall and lean and tanned, in a middleweight blue suit that tried to take into account the fact what while it was 98 degrees Fahrenheit here it would be 42 degrees in London when he got off the plane, gratefully left the sweltering glare of the asphalt drive where his taxi had dropped him, and entered the air-conditioned coolness of the terminal building. The place was not large by European standards, but it was white and clean and new, and it possessed a small restaurant which supplied him a late breakfast

  When he came out into the waiting room he immediately noticed an atmosphere of expectancy among the airport personnel and the two-dozen or so waiting passengers and their friends. Simon, having read in the papers that the Prime Minister would be traveling on the same flight that he was taking, realized what the anticipation was all about. He stationed himself in a comfortable chair alongside a row of tropical flowers in colorful ceramic pots. There he could have a farewell view of the Nagawiland countryside, get a look at the Prime Minister when he arrived, and read the morning paper in detail.

  The front page carried reports of threats against the Prime Minister’s life by “nationalist groups,” and the reassuring news that the jetliner and its passengers would be thoroughly searched for bombs and weapons before Liskard got aboard. The small but vociferous Popular Front party (which amounted to the disloyal opposition to Liskard’s United Reform party, and which took a much more “liberal” line) deplored such extremist excesses as assassination attempts, but sympathized with their motives and called for Liskard’s resignation and “return” of the government to the hands of “the people.”

  There are certain species of birds which are said to detect the approach of a hurricane several days before its arrival, and to abandon the threatened area while the air is still mild and sunny. Simon Templar had the same facility for sensing with great precision when some explosive event was about to take place in his presence. Without that sixth sense he would never have survived and prospered as long as he had. In this case he had a distinct feeling that an attempt to kill the Prime Minister would actually be made, and that if it were not made in the capital, or on the road the Prime Minister would be traveling, it would very possibly be here at Nagawiland’s National Airport.

  The Saint did not shrug such intuitions off lightly, but at the same time he did not regard himself as an infallible prophet. His premonition—which he was quite ready to laugh off w
hen it proved to be wrong—took a practical form only in that it made him more alert and gave his nerves and muscles a pleasant ready tension.

  “Here he comes,” one of the baggage clerks said.

  The people in the waiting room watched as several automobiles pulled up in the asphalt circular drive and discharged their passengers. Simon saw the tall Prime Minister’s shaggy thatch of brown hair above the other heads. Policemen entered the waiting room. Some obvious secret service types already there began to look even more obvious. Then came half a dozen photographers walking backwards, and walking toward them came Thomas Liskard, his blonde wife, and his associates and aides.

  A section of the waiting room had been roped off in advance, and now it was occupied by the government group. Simon, not standing and craning his neck as most of the others in the place had done, caught only glimpses of Liskard’s rather rumpled gray suit in the crowd. At the same time, he saw the jet which was to take them to London swooping smoothly down onto the runway.

  The photographers had just about exhausted the possibilities for pictures in the waiting room. They drifted away from the official party, most of them going out to the loading area. Some of the police went in the same direction. The pack around the Prime Minister began to break up and disperse. Liskard, his wife, and several of their group took seats in the roped-off section. The whining roar of the jetliner grew louder as the plane taxied toward the terminal building. Just before it stopped, its engines generated so much noise, even in the more or less soundproofed waiting room, that conversation came to a virtual halt.

  That was when Simon Templar suddenly seemed to go mad. One moment he was lounging peaceably in his chair. The next instant he sprang to his feet with a yell, snatched up a blue ceramic pot containing a crimson tropical blossom, and hurled it across the airport waiting room at the Prime Minister of Nagawiland.

  2

  Within two seconds, two more ceramic pots were flying through the air from Simon Templar’s side of the room toward the Prime Minister and his party. Liskard, his wife, and his associates were diving for cover, and the Saint was throwing himself down to avoid gunfire that might understandably be sent in his direction by the official party’s guards. But the only gunfire came from the ceiling, and it was directed at Thomas Liskard.