“Just finish your transaction as fast as you can and get rid of him,” Simon told them.
Annabella was groping at the dashboard of the car.
“Where is the key?” she asked. “In case—”
“In case you decide to leave me standing here holding an empty bag?” Simon drawled. “The ethical side of your nature needs a little encouragement, too.”
He tossed the key in his hand, grinned, put it back into his pocket and strolled across the street to the dark schoolyard. There was a row of large chestnut trees along the sidewalk giving perfect concealment from the eyes of anyone on the lighted street. The Saint leaned against one of the tree trunks, folded his arms comfortably, and waited.
He did not have long to wait. Apparently Mathieu’s financial resources were not only adequate but very handy. Perhaps the money had even been in his car — it was possible that Mathieu or his employers had anticipated paying for the paintings as a last resort all along. In any case, it was less than fifteen minutes until a pair of headlights flared around the corner and Mathieu’s car pulled up and stopped on Simon’s side of the street facing in the opposite direction to the car that was already there. Mathieu got out, leaving Bernard at the wheel. The engine remained running.
Simon watched from his hiding place, not ten paces away, as the pseudo-Inspector crossed the street. Annabella got out of the Saint’s car to meet him. Mathieu opened the rear door of Simon’s car and looked over the paintings. Seeming satisfied, he turned and motioned to Bernard. Bernard got out of the car with an attaché case in one hand. While he was still hidden by the car door from the view of the people across the street, he extracted a pistol from his pocket, clicked off the safety catch, and held it close to his body.
The Saint, like a fleeting shadow, was suddenly behind Bernard as he crossed the road and Mathieu’s assistant felt the hard cold nose of an automatic pressed very hard against his spine.
“What a naughty boy you are, Bernard,” Simon said so that all could hear. “Now show the nice people what you’ve got in your hand, and then drop it on the street with the safety on.”
Bernard dropped his pistol on to the pavement, and the Saint picked it up. Mathieu ground his teeth and rolled his eyes in an expression which would have fitted quite well into one of Michelangelo’s more dramatic renditions of the Last Judgement.
“Well,” Simon said to Annabella. “What shall we do with them now?”
“I did not tell him to do that!” Mathieu protested, waving both hands at the abashed Bernard. “I swear I did not. Show them the money, you fool!”
Bernard sheepishly opened the attaché case, revealing stacks of banknotes.
“To pay you with,” Mathieu said anxiously. “It is there. You can count it.”
“Stand over there, Bernard, and give me the money,” Simon said.
The currency was genuine. Annabella looked at it and then enquiringly at the Saint.
“What should I do?” she asked anxiously.
“I suggest you take it before it’s devalued,” Simon said. “And that you give the paintings to these two boobs so they’ll stay off your neck once and for all.”
There was a general sigh of relief, particularly on the Italian side of the parlay, and Mathieu anxiously received the paintings from Hans.
“You are going to let us go?” Mathieu asked, with an apprehensive look at Simon’s gun.
“No fear, Garibaldi,” Simon said. “Run along and don’t come back.”
“And good riddance!” Hans grunted after them in German.
The two Italians hurried into their car, slammed the doors with feverish haste, and roared away.
When they were gone Annabella sagged happily against the side of Simon’s car.
“I am rich!” she exulted. “I’m at least a little rich!”
“We are a little rich,” Simon corrected her.
He took a pile of lire from the glove compartment and put them into his coat pocket. Annabella’s initial look of horror faded and relaxed into a smile as she took a deep breath.
“Fair enough. You’ve earned it.” She took Hans’s hand in one of hers and Simon’s in the other and squeezed them both. “We’ve all earned it. Let’s form a team. Is Reubens bringing good prices?”
“Quite,” said Simon. “Why?”
“Well, darling, these Leonardos and things were just the beginning! There’s lots more where they came from!”
Simon looked slack-jawed at Hans, who ducked his head in affirmation and smiled modestly through the pale lamplight.
The Persistent Patriots[2]
1
The tropical African coastal territory of Nagawiland had, for most of its humid eons of existence, been of little interest to anyone except monkeys, insects, snakes, crocodiles, wart hogs, and an occasional party of black hunters passing through its inhospitable coastal marshes toward the high country farther inland. The few humans who settled permanently in the small area seem to have been the remnants of a tribe of headhunters who were defeated and eaten by a more powerful neighboring tribe.
Having settled a sufficiently safe distance from the scene of their forefathers’ Armageddon, the Nagawi, as they called themselves (a word translated roughly as “the only real people”) showed no enthusiasm for headhunting or anything else. They lived on what they could get without much effort — their treats consisting of an occasional lame wild pig or senile baboon — and carved crude obscene figures out of tree roots. Their religious exercises consisted of flagellating one another with thorn bushes and cutting off the ear lobes of all boys who managed to survive for twelve years — which by Nagawi standards of life expectancy represented early middle age. Those who survived the religious exercises went on to reproduce languidly but steadily, until by 1870, when Livingstone discovered it, the tribe had grown from its original handful to a thousand or more.
Their first mild notoriety was passed on to the outer world by European missionaries who had come there to see what could be done about the Nagawi’s souls and the fact that the women wore no blouses. The missionaries reported that the Nagawi chieftains pre-chewed all food before it was passed around to honored guests. Perhaps for that reason the Christian sects never showed quite the same zeal for converting the Nagawi as they did for converting tribes with different sorts of table etiquette.
The Nagawi’s second wave of fame came during the 1920s when their obscene root carvings were declared by a group of Paris-centered artists (known as “Les Sept Emmerdants”) to be superior to anything produced in stone by Michelangelo or in wood by Riemenschneider. The Nagawi were delighted to find they could receive valuable salt and fine cloth in exchange for trinkets that anybody with ten fingers and a sharp knife could knock out in half an hour.
But the peak of Nagawiland’s popularity with the rest of the world came when the foothills of its western borders were found to be bursting with ores of minerals precious to industrialized societies. Englishmen, whose nation had controlled the area since the 1914 World War, poured into the territory. They cut a harbor into the coastline and built a city there. Other towns sprang up and grew into cities. Electrical power plants burgeoned along the Bawu River. The Nagawi tribesmen could grow relatively rich if they chose to abandon their former way of life. Other native Africans trooped across the borders seeking the wages paid by the British. Nagawiland flourished.
But things changed in Britain and elsewhere. Highly educated men declared that the British had stolen Nagawiland from the Nagawi and ought to give it back, not only with its cities and power plants, but with additional reparations to make up in some small way for the damage they had done to human rights. Politicians of a number of states claimed that what the English had done amounted not only to theft, but to exploitation of Nagawi labor. Missionaries had once praised the strides the Nagawi had made since the coming of European civilization. Now the European papers printed comparisons of the wages of Nagawi laborers with the wages of workers in Birmingham, Lille, and Milan. Pictures compared Nagawi shacks with residential areas of London and Stockholm. A Nagawi man who had been sent to Oxford to school went over to Hyde Park every Sunday morning and publicly cursed the English for sadistic brutes. The English audience applauded politely and took guilty note of the speaker’s scarred neck and missing ear lobes.