He set a tall tinkling glass in front of her, and raised its duplicate to the level of his own lips.
“Here’s to Loro,” he said, and drank.
He went on measuring her with a steady gaze, while he put his glass down and placed a cigarette in his mouth.
“Forgive me if I’m off the beam,” he said, “but a moment ago it sounded just as if you were assuming that we were partners in a newly discovered gold mine.”
“Aren’t we?”
“I don’t think it’s exactly up to you to say that, darling. The only partnership deal we made was that I agreed to finance a highly speculative expedition to try and recover some golden frog idols, with the understanding that if we succeeded I could keep, say, half of them.”
“But if I hadn’t brought you here, you’d never have discovered this gold mine,” she was hot-headed enough to argue.
“That’s true,” he said coolly. “And if I hadn’t been in the bar at El Panamá I might never have met you — but does that mean the bartender is entitled to cut himself in? I’m a gambler, but I play percentages. I told you this afternoon, even before we found any gold, that it wasn’t your frogs I was betting on, but the other angle, the possible gold mine, which I had figured out all by myself. Maybe you could make me feel generous about that, but I’d be uncomfortable if I felt you were grabbing.”
She looked at him speechlessly, and only the most Spartan self-discipline inhibited her from throwing her glass in his face.
He did not appear to notice the gelid malevolence in her eyes, for through her self-inflicted silence his ear was caught and held by a new sound that had been trying to creep in through the thin bulkheads and open screens. He raised a hand, his face suddenly tense and withdrawn.
“Do you hear that?” he asked, and a well-worn behaviour pattern dragged her back rather like an automaton into the script that had been so catastrophically interrupted but which was supposed to be still unreeling itself with her help.
“The drums!” she breathed.
He thrust open the screen door and stepped out on to the scanty triangle of foredeck, and in a moment she followed him. The scrawny captain was already out there, standing rigidly in the bow, with a naked machete gleaming in his hand. Dusk had been falling when Simon and Alice reached the boat, and the brief twilight had long since passed, but now a full moon had risen above the trees and flooded the boat with a cold silver-green brilliance. The river flowed past and under it like a torpidly undulant sheet of liquid lead, but the walls of jungle on each side were by contrast impenetrably black and solid except for the luminous dappling of their topmost foliage. And out of that huge formless obscurity came the monotonous menacing thump and titter of the drums, swelling and fading, shifting and drifting, muttering endless spells and abominations out of the unspeakable night. The tympani virtuosi of the nearby village, inspired by copious libations of Loro’s rum, were truly floating it out.
“Sounds like a big fiesta for Loro,” Simon said.
She clutched his arm, to make sure he would feel her shiver.
“No, it’s bad,” she said shakily. “They never play those drums for fun. Only for a blood ritual, a head chopping. I’ve heard them before — I can never forget...”
“Bad,” said the taciturn captain, in corroboration. “Muy malo!”
A single ear-splitting shriek pealed out of the blackness, hung quavering on a climax of agony, and was abruptly cut off.
“Oh, no,” Alice sobbed.
At the Saint’s first movement, she clung to him tighter.
“No, I won’t let you. There’s nothing you could do!”
Like a giant firefly, a torch blinked alight in the forest, flaring and eclipsing as it wandered among the trees. It was joined by another, and another, until there were six or seven of them shimmering and weaving towards the river, throwing weirdly moving silhouettes of deformed tree trunks and twisted jungle growth. The drums came nearer, picked up a more feverish tempo.
As the torches bobbed closer to the bank, they revealed not only the shapes of the brown men who carried them, but the gleaming leaping forms of a horde of other naked creatures that writhed and capered around them. The male population of the village where Loro sojourned didn’t do things by halves. He had explained to them that this was what the incomprehensible white tourists expected, and in return for the rum which he dispensed they were always ready to oblige. It was more fun for them than a square dance, anyway.
Then, as if at a signal, the torches drew together and became almost still. And in the midst of them, on the point of a spear, to an accompaniment of shrill yips and yells, was raised a bleeding human head.
This was Professor Humphrey Nestor’s crowning inspiration, the climactic triumph of his dramatic genius. The head, moulded in papier-mâché from a plaster matrix which the Professor had made himself, was a recognizable facsimile of Loro’s to pass at that distance and in the flickering torchlight, and the long black hair affixed to its scalp and the gold ring in one ear were clinchers of identification. The ketchup which dripped from its neck was a gruesome touch of realism which had become even more horrifyingly effective when some of the performers had discovered how good it tasted and had taken to dipping their fingers in the drips and licking them with ghoulish glee. Thus the subsidizer of the whole elaborate fraud was to be fully and incontrovertibly convinced that Loro was dead, the guns were lost, the expedition had failed, and there was nothing left but to kiss his investment goodbye and be thankful his own head was still on his shoulders. At that, he would go home with an anecdote to embroider for the rest of his life which in itself was almost worth the capital outlay, which he could take as a tax deduction, if he could get anyone to believe him.
Alice screamed.
All the torches went out as if a switch had been pulled. It had been found too dangerous to leave them alight any longer than it took to fulfil their purpose. One earlier victim had been so emotionally affected that he had fetched a gun and started blazing away, and might easily have hurt someone.
Out of the darkness that seemed to swallow the land again came a rustle like unseen wings, and a shower of arrows plonked into the bulkheads and the deck. They were shot by the best archers in the village, who could be relied on not to hit anyone accidentally.
The captain let out a yell of fear, and his machete flashed, cutting the bow rope by which they were moored with a single stroke. Instantly the boat started to move with the strong deep current. The captain scuttled into the wheelhouse, and as Simon instinctively dragged Alice down to the deck they heard the laboured grinding of the electric starter. The air quivered with bloodcurdling ululations from the Stygian shoreline. After four excruciating attempts the engine finally caught and the boat came under control, turning with increasing sureness out towards the centre of the river. Another shower of arrows fell mostly in the water behind them, and the hysterical war-whoops faded rapidly as the boat gathered speed with the stream.
Simon rose and helped Alice up, and sympathetically let her continue to hold on to him, since that was what she seemed to want.
“It’s all my fault,” she moaned. “I got Loro killed, and lost you all that money—”
“Loro got himself killed,” said the Saint sternly. “It was his own idea, and he was sure he could get away with it. Nobody was twisting his arm. As for the money, I don’t know what you think I’ve got to complain about.”
She had to force herself to recall how radically inappropriate half of her carefully rehearsed speech had become in the light of the veritable catastrophe which had intervened.
The boat, driving at full throttle down the stream which the climbing moon had turned into a floodlit highway, must already have been somewhere near the place which they had reached so laboriously that afternoon on foot. Simon pointed towards the now silent blackness of the land.