“To be supplied by the Inklers?”
It was the Saint’s turn to stare.
“How did you know?”
“Why do you think I took you to Larue last night, where I knew the Enriquez brothers would be, and where I hoped the Inklers would try to contact them? If they had not done it that night, I would have taken you wherever they went the next night. Why do you think I arranged for Inkler to be delayed, until I had had time to tell you about Manuel and Pablo? Why do you think I arranged to be called away afterwards so that you would be free to observe what happened and to act as you chose? Why do you think I have never been far away from you since then, even to watching you at sea this afternoon from an aeroplane, until it got too dark? Meeting you here, of course, was easy: I knew about your reservations as soon as they were made. But you should be grateful to me, instead of wondering whether to use the gun you have under your arm.”
“Excuse me,” said the Saint, and leaned against the wall.
“I told you I was an unusual policeman,” Xavier said. “I received word from your FBI that the Inklers were here, and what to expect from them. They have been in other Central American countries, always working on the discontented element, and usually with the story that they could influence assistance from Washington. So I knew that the Enriquez brothers would be perfect for them. I had a problem. It was my duty not to let the Inklers swindle anyone; yet I did not have much desire to protect Manuel and Pablo. That is why I was most happy that you were here. I was sure I could rely on you for a solution.”
Simon’s eyes widened in a blinding smile.
“Is anything wrong with this one?”
“It is a lot of money.” Xavier pursed his lips over it judicially. “But I have no report of any such sum being stolen. And no one has made any accusations against you. I do not see how I can prevent you leaving with it. On the other hand, I am not very well paid, and I think you owe me something.” He took out six of the neat bundles of green paper and distributed them in different pockets of his clothing. “I should like to retire, and buy a small hotel in Fortín.”
Simon Templar drew a deep breath, and straightened up.
“One day I must visit you there,” he said.
Captain Xavier closed the suitcase, and Simon picked it up. Xavier opened another door, and the Saint found himself out on the landing field. In front of him, the first passengers were boarding the plane.
The Romantic Matron
1
She had probably celebrated at least thirty-five birthdays, but most of them must have marked pleasant years. Now she was entering the period of life at which the sophisticated European, impervious to the adolescent fixations with which Hollywood has helped to pervert the American taste, finds a woman most attractive. She could approach it with the confidence of a figure that had ripened without ever being allowed to get out of hand, a face enhanced by the distinction of maturity, and the kind of clothes and grooming that it takes experience as well as money to acquire.
She said, in a quick breathless way, “You’re Simon Templar, aren’t you? The Saint. One of the croupiers at the Tropicana told me.”
“Did he warn you not to play cards with me?” Simon asked disinterestedly.
“Silly. I’m Mrs Carrington. Beryl, to be friendly. That’s all the introduction I can manage.”
“How do you do,” he said, with restrained courtesy.
She looked over her shoulder nervously, then back to him again.
“I’m not drunk,” she said. “Please believe that. We’ve got to have help and I thought you might be it.”
The Saint inhaled expressionlessly through his cigarette. It was getting to be a job for an electronic computer to count the number of times he had heard some similar opening to that. And “help” usually meant something basically unlawful, with a good chance of getting shot, or clapped in jail, or both, as the most obvious reward.
Which was perhaps why he had had to learn to draw a mask over the glints of purely juvenile devilment that always tended to creep into his eyes at such inspiriting prospects.
“What’s the matter?” he inquired patiently. “Did you lose your husband, or are you trying to?”
“Please be serious. I’ve only got a moment.”
He had all the time in the world, but he had been toying with the preposterous whimsy that he might be able to spend some of it in Havana without any of the things happening to him that seemed to happen everywhere else.
He flicked over in his mind the other times he had seen her. Because of course he had noticed her, as she had noticed him.
The first time, two days ago, in the Capitolio Nacional.
Simon Templar would not ordinarily have been a customer for a piece of conducted sightseeing, especially of a government building, and least of all one which from the outside promised to be just another version of the central-domed design which has become the architectural cliché of the Capitols of the New World. But a taxi driver had mentioned that set in the floor under the dome there was a diamond worth fifty thousand dollars, and this he was curious to see. After all, although the days were somewhat precariously past when he would have been thinking seriously of stealing it, he did not have to forgo the intellectual exercise of casing the job and figuring out how it might be done.
That was the only reason why he happened to be one of a small group of tourists shuffling through the Salon de los Pasos Perdidos, listening with half an ear to the recitation of the guide (“The Hall of Lost Footsteps... largest in the world... four hundred feet... Florentine Renaissance style. Please notice how the pattern of the ceiling is exactly reproduced in the tile on the floor...”) and then gawking up at the immense symbolic gilt figure of The Republic (“The biggest indoor statue in the world... the spear alone weighs a ton...”) and finally clustered with them around the small roped-off square in the centre of which was the diamond (“Bought with the contributions of everyone who worked on this building... it marks the exact spot from which all distances in Cuba are measured. When they say it is a hundred miles to Havana, and you wonder what part of Havana they mean, this is the place... it has thirty-two facets, the same as the number of points of the compass....”). But you had to take the guide’s word for it, for all you could see was a small circular brass grating set in the floor with a pane of glass under it, through which you could only imagine that you saw a diamond.
So the Saint let his gaze shift idly over the faces of his fellow tourists, and the one that arrested it was Mrs Carrington’s. Hers first because it was notably easy to look at on its own merits, and then in conjunction with and emphasized by the face of the man with her, who kept a possessive hand under her arm. For just as she was unmistakably a visitor, with her Nordic features and colouring, the man with his well-oiled black hair and olive skin and rather long-nosed good looks was no less obviously a Cuban. The oddity, of course, being that you would never normally expect to find a native of Havana among such a typical clutch of rubbernecks. He didn’t look a day older than the woman, which left just enough room for cynical speculation to impress them both on the Saint’s memory. Simon found himself dawdling towards the rear of the sightseeing party as it was ushered out of the building, being vaguely inquisitive about what the couple might reveal in the manner of their departure, and saw them get into a new Mercury that was parked outside. It had Indiana licence plates, but the man drove it.
And shortly after that Simon would probably have let them disappear into the limbo of all fruitless surmises. But before he could forget them, he saw them again.