“If we don’t find a mark very soon indeed,” he said, “I’m going to have to borrow something from our retirement fund.”
“Then you’d better find a mark very soon, Pappy,” she said promptly. “Because our retirement fund is not lending.”
“But this would be an emergency,” he argued. “After all, we’ve both lived off the half share that doesn’t go into your fund, and all the other expenses came out of it too. You can’t do any good in this racket without capital.”
“Then I hope you connect while you’ve still got some,” she said. “But if I let you get your fingers into that fund on one excuse, pretty soon you’d have another, and before long there’d be no more fund, and we’d be on our way to the poorhouse in a Cadillac just like when I met you.”
“You haven’t done badly since we teamed up,” he reminded her tartly. “For a B-girl who never did anything bigger on her own than roll a drunk—”
“That’s why I went for you, Pappy,” she said sweetly. “I knew you had what it takes. Only I don’t know how I’d feel if I thought you’d lost it.”
“I could do fine if only we got a break,” he said. “I had that rich Australian solidly hooked last week, didn’t I? And then his daughter has to get polio and he turns around and flies home and that’s probably the last we’ll hear of him.”
“Anyhow, he got away,” she said. “And we didn’t get a cent out of him.”
The Professor sighed over the remorseless inflexibility of feminine logic, and looked glumly around in search of some happier conversational diversion.
They were sitting in the bar of what unschooled tourists will always call, redundantly, “The El Panamá” — at that time the newest and most luxurious (and most expensive) hotel in the Republic. Built and operated by Americans for Americans, it was the counterpart of fifty kindred air-conditioned caravanserais which had raised their uniformly modernistic façades of glass and concrete and aluminium during that generation amid every conceivable skyline from mud huts to minarets and Spanish tile to Norman towers, all dedicated to the proposition that since air travel had brought the farthest corners of the globe into everybody’s back yard, no traveller should be allowed to feel that he had ever left home. Sooner or later an inevitable nine-tenths of the best-heeled travellers were bound to stroll at least once through its patios and lobbies, and Professor Humphrey Nestor was a regular customer for reasons which happily combined business with pleasure.
“As the great Barnum said, there’ll be another along in a minute,” he remarked bravely. “Now suppose we had one more drink—”
“We’ll have six more, if you can pay for them,” said Alice accommodatingly. “Only don’t try to stick me with the tab, because you’d look awful undignified trying to race me to the door.”
They might have continued indefinitely with another bout of these genial exchanges, but at that very moment a new patron strolled into the bar whose aspect called a truce to recriminations as abruptly as a soundless bomb.
His supremely comfortable costume of featherweight slacks, sandals, and a shirt that appeared to have been designed with the help of a kaleidoscope, plus the inevitable camera slung over one shoulder, branded him frankly and cheerfully as a tourist. But not just any tourist. There were graduations in these markings for which the Professor and Alice had eyes that would have sent a vulture looking for an oculist. The slacks were tailored of the lightest Italian shantung, the shirt was a still finer silk, even the sandals were of beautiful leather and finished like expensive shoes. The camera was the newest and most costly model Leica. And his face and arms had the bone-deep kind of tan, subtly different from the superficial browning of a brief vacation, which marks a man who habitually spends most of his time out of doors. True, there are humble labourers who share that privilege with the leisured wealthy, but although this man was slim-waisted and wide-shouldered he moved with a casual grace and assurance that left no possible doubt which category he belonged in. And although an indefinable keenness of eye and rakishness of feature suggested that he might at some time have known a ruggeder form of outdoor life than a golf course or a fashionable beach, a certain spirit of adventure in the victim was a contribution rather than an obstacle to the ideal dénouement of the plot in which the Professor and Alice had so often played their profitable roles. In fact, if they had been given some kind of supernatural carte blanche to design the type of character that they would have most liked to see walk into the bar at that moment, it might well have turned out to be a recognizable facsimile of the newcomer whom we have just described.
For almost half a minute they were too distrustful of this apparently divine dispensation to be able to speak.
It was Mr Nestor who recovered his voice first. The new arrival, he finally convinced himself, was no mirage of the kind which is reported to torment the thirst-crazed wanderer in the Sahara. Mr Nestor could see him quite normally and three-dimensionally through the upper part of his bifocals. And Alice had seen the same thing at the same moment. He could tell by the pure spirituality that had descended on her rather childish face, and by the fact that she had not taken advantage of his own silence to get in any more shrewd licks.
“Well,” he said heavily, at last, “will you trust me to start this one in my old-fashioned way, or would you rather take over?”
“Go ahead, Pappy,” she said, and added almost affectionately, “Just don’t ham it up too much like you do sometimes.”
He waited with agonizing patience until his quarry’s drink was almost finished, and then he picked up his modest box camera and ambled over to the bar.
“Pardon me, sir,” he said bashfully, “but I see that you’re a photographer, and I wondered if I could impose on you — if you’d be so kind as to snap a picture of my daughter and myself with our camera?”
“Why, of course,” Simon Templar said amiably.
“There’s no hurry. Whenever you can spare a moment.”
“I’ve nothing but moments to spare right now.”
Simon laid a dollar bill on the bar and slid off his stool. The Professor turned back towards the table where he had been sitting.
“Alice, dear,” he said, “the gentleman very kindly says he’ll oblige us right away.”
As she came to join them, he said shyly, “My name is Professor Humphrey Nestor, and this is my daughter, Alice. Might I know whom we are indebted to?”
Simon had a preposterous alias which in some circumstances came almost instinctively to his lips.
“Sebastian Tombs,” said the Saint, without hesitation.
2
“It’s terribly sweet of you,” Alice said, looking up at him with big blue eyes as if he had volunteered to bring her the moon in a platinum casket. “You know how it is — usually Pappy takes a picture of me, and then I take a picture of him, but we never have one of the two of us together.”
“I know how it is,” said the Saint sympathetically.
“Really, I should get one of those timer gadgets that let you get into your own pictures,” the Professor reproached himself.
They went out into the glaring shade under the umbrella trees, and the two Nestors stood rather stiffly and naively side by side, smiling at the camera, while Simon clicked the shutter.
“We ought to have one with the Frog,” Alice said.
“Yes, yes,” agreed the Professor, frowning. “If we aren’t taking up too much of Mr Tombs’s time...”