“You deserve all the things I’ve heard about you,” he said. “But why didn’t you say any of this yesterday?”
“I was interested to see how the scenario would work out. If you won’t think I’m being patronizing, I’d call it a kind of nostalgia. I admired a lot of touches in your technique. You handled the financial angles brilliantly — just the right pressure where it would do the most good. And I know you’ll do well with those traveler’s checks you were talking about — you can cash them abroad in so many places where they don’t ask questions.”
Doc Nemford made a deprecating gesture.
“I’m trying to make a living, like the rest of us, Saint.”
“And I’m not greedy. I told Jobyn I thought you had a good deal, because I figured that would bring Hamzah back with a higher bid, and so I’d be keeping Jobyn out of trouble. But at the same time it was a help to you, and my dear old grandmother taught me never to take part in a swindle unless I made something out of it for myself.”
Doc Nemford nodded philosophically.
“How much do you want?”
“I’ll settle for fifty thousand dollars, which I earned for you anyhow, so you shouldn’t begrudge it. And you can write Jobyn a letter and tell him you’re sorry to renege on the deal but you couldn’t resist that extra dough — and see that you’ve left town before he receives it.”
Nemford took from his wallet a small sheaf of cashier’s checks, selected one, and indorsed it on the back to the order of Simon Templar.
“You’re a lot fairer than I thought you’d be,” he said. “In fact, I didn’t think you’d let me get away with anything if you were wise to me.”
“Frankly, if the victim had been almost anyone else, I wouldn’t, Doc. But now for the rest of my life I can dream of the expression on Nasser’s face, when Hamzah arrives with his trophies and they find out what they’ve bought. I shall feel that I’ve personally done something about Foreign Aid,” said the Saint.
The gentle ladies
“All I can say,” Kathleen Holland said inadequately, “is that he’s a creep.”
“The world is crawling with them,” smiled the Saint sympathetically. “But unfortunately it isn’t a statutory offense yet. And if I tried to exterminate them all myself, just on general principles, I wouldn’t have any time left to steal a living. There has to be something specific about his creepiness.”
“But I thought that’s what you’d be able to find out!”
Simon Templar looked at her again. She had a face with bone in it: definite cheekbones and a strong jaw, a nose short but sculptured. She wore her thick chestnut hair almost without a wave, in a kind of abbreviated pageboy bob — obviously not because it was fashionable at the time, which it wasn’t, but because it suited her. Her hazel eyes were very lively and her chiseled lips framed a wide and potentially careless mouth.
“You’d have to tell me a lot more about him,” he said. “Perhaps if you weren’t so tied up with this charitable den of iniquity—”
“I can soon fix that,” she said. “There are more gals trying to help around here than you could shake a swizzle stick at. I’ll just tell the Mother Superior that I’m taking time out, and I’ll be all yours.”
She left him in the crepe-paper arbor where he had had her alone for a few minutes, and headed quickly and decisively for the gingham-clothed central table where a bevy of other eager maidens were cajoling the wandering citizenry to buy dollops of what the hand-lettered signs proclaimed to be champagne punch, ladled from a cut-glass bowl the size of a bathtub in which had been stirred together with several gallons of miscellaneous sodas and fruit juices (the Saint’s sensitive palate assured him) at least a magnum of genuine Bollinger.
Of all the unlikely surroundings in which the Saint might be discovered, a church bazaar, despite his canonical nickname, is certainly as implausible as any, but by this time he was getting so used to finding himself in improbable places that he had developed a form of philosophical passivity which might as well be emulated, if only in self-defense, by anyone who intends to follow him through many of these episodes.
The town of Santa Barbara, little more than two hours of freeway driving up the coast from Los Angeles, is California’s most jealous curator of its Spanish heritage. While the great sprawling monster that was once leisurely known as El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de los Angeles has lopped off all but the last two words of its historic name and surrendered itself to modern industry and smog, Santa Barbara seems to have decided that the twentieth century is the transient guest, and to be trying like a good housekeeper to keep things as much as possible the way the Conquistadors would like to find it when they come back. In the whole city not a tenth of the streets have North American names, the most conspicuous of them being State Street, which appropriately enough is the main stem of shops and offices and suchlike parvenu incursions. But flanking it are Chapala and Anacapa, and the streets crossing it ring with such names as Cabrillo, Figueroa, Ortega, and Gutierrez. And yet with all the Hispanic tradition there is also a social cult which leans towards institutions more commonly associated with the squirearchy of Old England, such as horse shows, flower shows, garden parties, fund-raising teas, and parochial fêtes like the one which had ensnared such an unprecedented patron as Simon Templar.
The better-looking half of the couple of old friends he was visiting had said firmly, “I’ve been roped into running the popgun shooting gallery all day long at this brawl, and the least you can do is drop by and relieve me for half an hour.” But when he dutifully showed up, she had inspected him again and said, “There’s a wicked gleam in your eye that makes me suspect that you’d be telling the kids to turn the popguns on the behinds of some of the passing dowagers. I’ll let you buy me a champagne punch instead, and introduce you to a pretty girl who’ll keep your mind on more grown-up ways of getting into trouble.”
Thus he had met Kathleen Holland, and, after his hostess had excused herself to hurry back to her stall, what might have been a more idly flirtatious encounter had become a half-serious discussion of the creepiness of Mr Alton Powls.
The Saint was almost automatically prejudiced against Mr Powls, but he could be impersonal enough to realize that Mr Powls might never even have squeezed his name into the conversation but for the reaction that the Saint’s own name evoked from most people who heard it. Kathleen Holland was a real estate agent and by all ordinary criteria a down-to-earth young business woman, but she was no less ordinary in assuming that the Saint was ready to take off like a bloodhound on any scent that was offered him. However, in her case the presumption was not so hard to take.
“You see,” she said, when she returned without the apron that was her badge of office, and was thereby transformed into another customer like himself, and they were strolling anonymously through the crowd in search of a more secluded place to continue the session, “I feel I’m partly responsible. I should have known there was something wrong when he asked so many questions about Aunt Flo.”
“The world seems to be infested with Aunts, too,” Simon observed philosophically. “But it isn’t necessarily a felony to ask questions about them. What has this one done?”
“Nothing, of course. I know you don’t live here, but when you meet her you’ll know how ridiculous that sounds. But you can say anything you think, because she isn’t really my aunt.”
Miss Florence Warshed, it appeared, was known to everyone within her social stratum in Santa Barbara as “Aunt Flo,” because that was the way she was known to the two nieces who lived with her, and that was the way she liked it, and whatever Aunt Flo liked had a way of becoming the way things were done, at least in her nearest vicinity.