Mrs Carrington was almost shaken out of her wavering, and even the Saint’s eyes blinked with reluctant admiration. But he shook his head slowly.
“It’s a nice try, Ramon,” he conceded. “But it won’t score. Can you think back coldly and impartially just for a few seconds, Beryl — even though it’ll hurt? Do you really believe that any Underground movement that had any hope of getting as far out of the ground as its own tombstone would have a list of members that was as easy as that for anyone to get hold of? Or that anyone who was bright enough to live long enough to become a top man in that sort of conspiracy would tell you all about it after a few rumbas, and place the life of every last member in your hands because of the sympathy he saw in your pretty eyes? I knew he was taking you for a ride the minute you told it to me that way. But I didn’t appreciate quite what a ride it was until I checked on this business about the Dictatorship. And that really knocks the underpinnings from under the whole gehoozis. Because there just ain’t no such animal.”
“He is not a fool, querida,” Venino hissed. “He is insane.”
“Oh, I suppose it isn’t altogether our kind of democracy, Beryl,” Simon said imperturbably. “But there aren’t any downtrodden masses aching to shake off their chains. There may be a revolution some day, but it’ll just be one political faction against another, not an uprising of the people. If Ramón hadn’t scared the wits out of you, you could have asked some of ’em for yourself. You still can.”
“Are you trying to destroy us all?” Venino asked passionately.
Simon glanced over his shoulder. As he had rather anticipated, the two men in dark suits had withdrawn, but not completely out of the picture. They had retreated to a polite distance out of earshot, but not out of sight.
“We still have a couple of cops handy, Beryl,” he said. “Would you like me to walk over to them and say ‘Nuts to the President!’ so you can see if they shoot me?”
“I’m trying,” Mrs Carrington said, “not to have hysterics.”
“I’m sorry,” said the Saint contritely. “I’d better leave, before you get mad and call off our deal on the car.”
Mrs Carrington’s mouth opened, but no sound came from it. Sound came, however, from Ramón Venino.
“What deal on the car?” he demanded in a cracked voice.
“I made Mrs Carrington an offer to buy it,” Simon said calmly. “She wants to get something more sporty, like a convertible, and I’m paying a much better price than she could get on a trade-in. I’m taking this one over from her in Miami. I guess she hadn’t had time to tell you.”
“But we are taking this car to Europe,” Venino said shakily.
“That’s silly,” the Saint scoffed. “If she wants a flashy sports job, Europe’s the place to get one.”
“I will not allow it,” Venino said.
Mrs Carrington looked at him wonderingly.
“Why not?” she asked, and never quite knew why she said it like that.
“It would break my heart. Yes, I am sentimental. Because of this car, we met. In this car, I showed you my home town. In this car, my heart found a new life. Call me a temperamental Latin if you like, but I do not want to see Europe with you in any other car!”
Simon lighted a cigarette, and an immeasurable artistic contentment was ripening within him.
“What he means,” he said, “is that any other car would not be worth anything like as much to him. Which isn’t surprising, because this would probably be the most valuable car in Europe, if not in the whole world. As I have it figured, it should sell for around three hundred thousand dollars any place where there’s a fairly open market for gold, which of course rules out the United States. A really fabulous build-up has gone into jockeying you into making that trip with a date to meet Ramón on the other side.”
They were both listening to him now, without interruption and in a weird kind of stillness. And the Saint put one foot up on the rear bumper and leaned a forearm lazily on his knee.
“Big-time thieves aren’t an exclusively yanqui product. They crop up all over. Down here, I guess Ramón will rank numero uno. Anyway, he and his mob knocked off an armoured carload of three hundred grand’s worth of gold bars a few weeks before we got here. But they couldn’t sell it here, and the problem was to get a heavy load like that out of the country with the cops looking everywhere for it. Ramon’s brilliant idea was to watch for a likely female tourist, alone, bringing her own car over. With a simple little accident and a lot of charm, he was able to get away with the car for long enough for his mob to take impressions of suitable parts of it. They cast the gold in the moulds and plated it while he was keeping you on the hook with his personality and his fairy tales, and last night when he had the car again they put on the new gold trimmings.” The knife that had been Pancho’s flashed suddenly as Simon thumbed the catch that released the blade. “For instance, I’ll bet that if we carved a notch in this bumper—”
Ramón Venino moved then, his hand going to his hip pocket and coming out with something that he kept mostly hidden under the drape of his coat.
“That is enough,” he said. “You will both come with me, now, in this car.”
Mrs Carrington gasped as she saw the gun, but the Saint only glanced at it and then over Venino’s shoulder.
“You made one mistake when you had your fat friend try to warn me off at the Bambú,” he said. “You made another when you sent him back with a pal this afternoon to defenestrate me — meaning heave me out of a window. Because I clobbered both of them and sent for the police, but I left before the police got there. So now the police have followed me here, and teamed up with the two that we had already. You’d be making the classic mistake of all time if you shot me now, while they’re all standing behind you.”
“You must think me a fool if I would believe that,” Venino sneered.
“I assure you, compadre, he tells the truth,” one of the policemen said.
5
“Why did he have to pick on me?” Beryl Carrington said.
“You mean, why couldn’t he have put gold bumpers on his own car, and shipped it to Europe?” said the Saint. “We don’t know yet, but I’ll bet anything you like on a guilty conscience. Ramón and his mob could never be sure when they might be suspected, so they wanted to plant the loot on someone who would never be suspected.”
“But why me?” she said.
“I guess they just watched the boats from Key West, and you were the first good prospect they saw.”
“It didn’t have to be me,” she said in a queer stony voice.
“Did you hear what the gendarmes said about that twenty thousand dollars reward? I think we should split it down the middle.”
“I couldn’t care less.”
“You can do a lot of good things with ten thousand bucks.”
“Don’t you see?” she said. “I wish it had never happened. Or if it had to happen, I wish I’d never seen you. I wish I’d never known.”
Simon Templar looked at her shrewdly and with unwonted compassion for a while, and then he stood up.
“This isn’t the end of romance,” he said. “But if you’d gone on with Venino, one day you’d have had to find out, and that might have been the end. Now you think the most wonderful toy you ever had has been broken, and it was all you had. But it isn’t all you’ll ever have. Don’t start to believe that.”
“Please go now,” she said. But as he opened the door she raised her eyes and said, “But call me tomorrow.”
Simon went out and let the doorman earn a quarter for lifting one finger at a taxi.