“But that’s almost crooked!” exclaimed the Saint, in shocked accents.
“You can say that again. But we can beat ’em — if you’d let me have this exclusive for a while.”
“How?”
Mr Diehl spat again, almost missing the brass bowl in his haste.
“Like this. Besides checking everything on our books that looks promising, I’ll have my salesmen contact all the other real estate offices, but very casually, without mentioning any names, see? That way, we’ll get an honest price on everything that might suit you that anyone has got listed. And then when it comes to making an offer, I’ll get a friend of mine who lives here to put in the bid, and they’ll know they can’t fool him with any fancy prices, but of course he’ll make an agreement in advance to sell the property to your syndicate at just a reasonable mark-up for his trouble.”
“That sounds like an interesting idea. But what have I done to deserve so much help from you?”
“Just blame it on the way I was brought up, Count. My father, who founded this business, used to tell me, God rest him, ‘I never want anyone who walks in these doors to walk out saying he didn’t get a square deal.’ If I find what you want and make the sale, I’ll be perfectly satisfied.”
The Saint had no doubts whatsoever on that score, but did not judge the moment opportune to press Mr Diehl for details as to how this satisfaction would be achieved. He simply allowed himself to look deeply impressed by a revelation of corrupt practices which might well have made the collective hair of the Florida Real Estate Board stand on end if its members had heard it. Mr Diehl did not even give that a thought, since there were no witnesses, and in any case there were a score of ways to explain how an ignorant foreigner might have misunderstood him.
“I’m very glad to have met you, Mr Diehl,” Simon said with unaffected sincerity. “And I think I shall give your suggestion a try. Instead to contact other agents this weekend, as I had planned, I shall let you do the work — while I go fishing, which to be truthful I much prefer.”
“You won’t regret it, I promise you. I’ll put my whole staff to work on it. While you go fishing. Have you arranged for a boat? I can get you the very best sailfish captain in these waters—”
“Pardon, but I was not thinking of the ocean fishing, though I know how wonderful it is here. But I have done so much of it — from Panama to Peru to New Zealand, you understand. Here in the southeast United States I like to fish one thing only, for which even in your country this is the headquarters, and which the rest of the world does not even know — the big-mouth bass.”
“The greatest fishing in the world,” Mr Diehl concurred automatically.
“I have studied it very closely, and I think on this visit I must catch a record. At any rate I shall enjoy proving my theory. Perhaps you yourself are a bass fisherman, Mr Diehl?”
“There’s nothing in the world I like better, except you-know-what.”
Ed (‘Square’) Diehl would have given the same answer, with the same leer and wink, to any customer with the same profit potential, on any subject from baseball to Balinese dancing in which the customer expressed an interest.
“I’ve had a theory for a long time,” Simon pursued, with a somewhat Countly portentousness, “that the reason why it begins to be said that your Florida waters are fished out — is that they are. The new roads that go everywhere, the new cars that everyone has, the new boats and outboards that everyone can afford on instalments — all this has placed an unbelievable pressure on the fish, who do not have similar devices on their side. Therefore there are no important bass left to catch where anyone can go. But for some privileged sportsmen there will always be some wilderness that is still fruitful in the old way, which modern science can make accessible. Here in Florida, in spite of your fantastic coastal developments, you are still only on the perimeter of a sportsman’s paradise to which the new key is — the helicopter!”
“You got something there, Count.”
“I am betting I have, Mr Square. You take off even today, in your helicopter, in spite of all the highways and turnpikes, and in less than half an hour you can be fishing where the fish have never seen anyone but a Seminole. I would like to show you this. I happen to have a small private helicopter which I bought to inspect properties, and if you like, this weekend, since I shall not be consulting other sharkers — beg your pardon, brokers — you should come with me as a good fisherman and let me prove this.”
Mr Diehl thought quickly, which he could always do when the chips were down, and did not have to be any unusual genius to realize that a Count of Cristamonte anywhere in the wilds with him would certainly be worth more than the same perambulating exchequer exposed to the sales pitch of the next grifter who might glom on to him.
“That’s a great idea,” Mr Diehl said, wriggling inside his sodden shirt. “My staff will spend the weekend getting a line on every big tract in this and the next two counties, while you and me get a line on them bass.”
It was not to be expected that Mr Diehl would fail to let it leak out as widely as possible that he was going fishing in the private plane of no less an international personage than the Count of Cristamonte, and as a matter of fact the Saint was counting on it as a minor but useful contribution to his plan. Nor was he disappointed or disconcerted when Mr Diehl’s belated qualms at the imminence of entrusting his life to the skill of an unknown pilot, and a foreigner at that, caused the relator to make himself unusually conspicuous at the County airfield by the noisy irreverence and raucous humor with which he tried to cover up his misgivings and convince the mechanics who were servicing the whirlybird that such expeditions were as commonplace to him as a trip to the bathroom. Simon Templar never omitted such factors from his calculations, and Mr Diehl lived up to everything that he expected.
After a vertical take-off they first headed roughly south, and then swung west somewhere over the outskirts of Delray. In only a few minutes the dense development of the coastal strip had faded into a hazy horizon and they were over a weird, incredibly flat-looking wilderness of scrubby green, dappled with myriad patches of water and sometimes scored with the thin straight slash of a drainage canal. This was the perspective that is always a little startling, when the blank spaces that take up most of the map of the lower Florida peninsula become a visible wilderness, and it can actually be seen how comparatively insignificant a rim of civilization has even yet been established on the raw land that is still straining to hold itself a few precarious feet out of the sea.
Ed Diehl had seen this vista before, or other areas indistinguishable from it, from the windows of large commercial airliners approaching the ports of West Palm Beach or Miami, without thinking even that much about it, for he was not an imaginative man except when describing some property or proposition that he was trying to sell, but before long he began to feel something radically unfamiliar about the view he was getting of it today, and in another little while it dawned on him that the important difference was one of altitude. The big passenger planes roared over at speeds that dwarfed the empty distances, and came slanting down into the serried suburbs from heights that hardly let one landmark out of sight before another could be identified. Whereas the helicopter, after crossing the split ribbon of the new turnpike at no more than three hundred feet, had gradually let down until it was cruising at what might have been little more than treetop height, if there had been, any trees important enough to judge by. Mr Diehl was aware that they made a number of changes of direction, as the copter obeyed the impulses of its pilot with some of the irresponsibility of a mechanical hummingbird, but the noise of the rotors made conversation difficult, and Mr Diehl did not want to seem fussy or uneasy, so he confined himself to grinning occasionally and trying to look as if he were enjoying every minute.