“You have plans for tonight, sir?” said the driver, as the cab got under way. “You should meet a nice Cuban girl. It happens I have a niece, very young, very beautiful...”
The Golden Frog
Introduction
For the benefit of readers who may not be familiar with the names of too many scientists, I should like to mention that the Dr Zetek who is mentioned in this story is not a fictitious character, and the yarn should really be dedicated to him. For, while I was in Panama, it was he who arranged for me the rare experience of a visit to Barro Colorado, the island in Gatun Lake which the Smithsonian Institute with the cooperation of the Panamanian Government has been able to preserve as virgo intacta for the study of tropical ecology, and where in the mess hall maintained for visiting naturalists I saw a brilliant color photo and learned description of his equally non-fictitious discovery, Atelopus zeteki, the golden frog (the real jumping one, that is) which started the Saint on the following adventure.
— Leslie Charteris
1
Professor Humphrey Nestor, it must be revealed ab initio, had never actually been a member of the faculty of any of the illustrious colleges whose names he liked to drop casually into his conversation, nor, to be utterly candid, did he possess any of the academic qualifications which could have made it even remotely possible that he might some day be offered such an appointment. In fact, some prejudiced persons had been heard to asseverate, perhaps wishfully, that the only chair of importance that Mr Nestor was ever likely to occupy would be wired for high-voltage electricity, but this was an exaggeration. Mr Nestor was not by nature addicted to violence.
At this time he was only fifty-five, and still spry and lean of frame, but his hair had already attained the snowy whiteness which, in the minds of the gullible, is simultaneously suggestive of both wisdom and benignity, and he had parlayed that fortunate colouration into a trim moustache and goatee which, combined with the bifocals that had been thrust upon him willy-nilly by the normal incipience of presbyopia, gave him an air of erudite distinction that only the most adamantine sceptic could resist. And though he had no right whatsoever to the title which he had adopted as a vocational convenience, he was by no means illiterate. He owned, among a unique collection of forgeries, an absolutely authentic degree from a minor university whose track team had been well repaid by his youthful gift of running very fast for short distances, and he had a predilection for magazines of the popular science and science-fiction type which gave him not only a useful repertoire of abstrusities but also invaluable models of what the public expected a Professor to be like. As a result, Professor Nestor was a much more convincing Professor than almost any ivied turret could produce — as a great many suckers had expensively learned.
Yet such are the vicissitudes to which a great talent may be subjected that on the day we are talking about Professor Humphrey Nestor was scraping the bottom of the barrel as literally as he was trying to suck the last drops of ice-diluted fluid through the straws that protruded from what had once been an ambrosial beaker of Panamanian rum punch.
“I can’t think what we’ve done to deserve such miserable luck,” he lamented.
“One thing is, you’re getting old,” said the shapely blonde who passed as his daughter Alice.
Their real relationship was of course much less conventional, but since she was almost exactly half his age, the father-daughter was far more disarming than if he had introduced her as his wife, and indeed was likely to arouse positive sympathy instead of a raised eyebrow. And there was the added advantage that this arrangement imposed no tiresome restrictions on the exploitation of her sex appeal, which was not negligible.
There were times, however, when he wished she would maintain a semblance of filial respect when they were alone, and this was one of them.
“You’re in a rut,” she said, with unsympathetic candour. “Sure, we had a good line once, but nobody’s been buying it lately. Instead of moaning about your bad luck, why don’t you start figuring out something new?”
“Because it’s still a good line,” said the Professor stubbornly. “The very best. I spent a lot of time dreaming it up. It’s worked fine for us down here — and we’re lucky to be here.”
There was much truth in that.
Some five years earlier, a purely technical error in the use of the mails had occasioned this rather abrupt deflection in a career which had long been devoted (with remarkably few interludes in jail, all things considered) to the cause of parting fools from their money with a promptness that would have gladdened the proverb-coiner’s heart. One day Professor Nestor woke up to realize that instead of a civil suit which he could have out-ranged by simply stepping over the nearest state line, he had laid himself open to federal retribution that would not be halted by any parochial boundaries within the United States. But he was a provident and foresighted man in other respects, and was never without an alternative identity sufficiently well documented to satisfy the liberal requirements of most Latin American countries, which are not inclined to make excessive difficulties for apparently solvent tourists; a banana boat happened to be sailing from New Orleans at a moment which it would be almost an understatement to call opportune, and in due course the Professor and Alice found themselves in Panama with an indefinite period of exile ahead of them.
Humphrey Nestor surveyed the situation and was not displeased. Such a precipitate departure as they had been forced to make might easily have landed them in any of the forsaken backwaters of the hemisphere, instead of which, they had been neatly unloaded on one of the world’s busiest bottlenecks. Through the Canal passed endless fleets of passenger-bearing vessels of all sizes and qualities, not to mention the coastwise trade and cruise boats of the Pacific and the Caribbean which touched the ports on either side of the isthmus, providing one of the basic essentials for the exercise of Mr Nestor’s peculiar talent: a bountiful supply of transients with time on their hands, money in the bank, a minimum of factual information about the locale, and a romantic predisposition to believe strange and wonderful tales appropriate to an exotic setting. He was reasonably sure that he had left no trail behind him, and he was not much worried about the police of the American zone, who were more concerned with the security of the Canal than with operations of his type. And there was the unique advantage of a completely invisible and unguarded frontier with the Republic of Panama, so that merely by crossing a street one could pass back and forth between jurisdictions — a convenience which he found extraordinarily comforting.
All that remained was to adapt one of their tried and proved routines to get the utmost value out of the scenery and atmosphere at their disposal, and this he had accomplished with such virtuosity that there were now twenty-three thousand dollars in a pension fund which they had accumulated by ruthlessly setting aside fifty per cent of all their killings.
Alice was the sole custodian of this fund, which she had insisted on as her price for continuing the partnership.
“We’re not going to live this way for ever,” she said. “We’re going to save up, and one day we’re going to retire and live like any other retired people, without ever having to worry again.”
There were times when the Professor wondered whether he was really included in those plans for her future. But he was forced to accept her terms, for very few bunco compositions can be played effectively as solos, and she was an invaluable confederate. This arrangement, however, explains the apparent paradox in the statement made earlier that at this moment the Professor was suffering an acute financial squeeze.