The Saint on the Spanish Main (21 page)

“I work for it,” Tristan Brown
said. “For a mere hun
dred dollars a week, plus my expenses, I
help to give
away millions.”

“How does one get a job like
that?” Simon inquired
with interest.

“I happen to be a lawyer. Don’t look
indignant—it’s
quite legal! The firm of which I’m a very junior member
happens
to be the trustees of the fund. It takes six of us
all our time to get
around and find places to leave
checks. It isn’t half the life you’d think
it would be, but
I’m seeing a lot of the world.”

“And you’re here to hand out some of
this dough in
Puerto
Rico?”

“It’s the kind of territory that the
Foundation is set
up to help, and I’m supposed to find the best channel for
one of our grants.”

“How about me? A million dollars would
rehabilitate
me right out of sight.”

“That’s what I’d be afraid of,” she
said dryly.

He sighed.

“It’s prejudices like that,” he
said, “that have forced
me into my life of crime.”

He introduced her to
empanadas,
succulent
pasties
filled with a mixture of ground meat, almonds, raisins,
olives,
and capers, and
mofongo,
a fried mash of green
plantains mixed with
cracklings, garlic, coriander, and
cayenne; and she made him talk more about himself.
She made it easy for him to do, revealing a most
unlawyerlike
delight in the motives
and methods which
had made the Saint
almost as mythological a figure as
the
Robin Hood with whom he was always inevitably
compared. And since there was nothing mythical at all about his
reaction to any beautiful girl, it must be ad
mitted that he thoroughly
enjoyed the realization that
her response to
him as a person was much warmer than
the
basic requirements of intellectual research.

But the Saint was also an extraordinarily
careful man
in some ways, and a pretty girl who claimed to be a
qualified
attorney and moreover to be entrusted with
such a fantastic
responsibility as Tristan Brown was a
sufficiently unusual phenomenon to draw a delicate
screen of caution between his intelligence and his
im
pulses.

Everything she said might be perfectly true.
But just
as possibly, everything she said might be only the
groundwork
for some bunko routine that would pres
ently begin to take a familiar shape.

The Saint was no stranger to the technique
of the Co
lossal
Lie. He had used it himself, on occasion. If you
say you are the sheriff of some unheard-of county in
Texas, almost any reasonably suspicious citizen
will
check up on you. But if you say
you are a Governor of
the Bank of
England, and pick up a telephone and invite
anyone to call London and verify it, the average sucker
will figure that nobody would dare to tell such a
pre
posterous tale if his bluff
could be called so easily, and
will
not even bother to put it to the test.

Simon permitted himself to keep a pleasantly
open
mind about Tristan Brown. But he also permitted himself to lead her
into telling him that she had graduated
from Columbia Law
School, and as soon as he was back
at his hotel he looked up the address
of the Ogden H.
Kiel Foundation in a New York directory; and that
same
afternoon he sent off two telegrams.

While he waited for the replies, however,
there was
nothing to stop him getting the maximum pleasure out
of their
acquaintance. He took her to dinner at the
Casino, danced and
played harmless roulette with her at
Jack’s, and was making more plans for
the next day as
he strolled back with her to their hotel.

“I have to work tomorrow,” she said
firmly. “I’m visiting the Guavate prison camp. They’re sending a car for
me.”

“Tell ‘em you’ll get there on your
own,” he said. “Let
me rent a car and drive you up. I’ll wait for
you, and we
can come back by way of El Yunque, which you ought
to
see.”

That was how he came to be driving her up
the nar
row winding road out of Caguas, making trivial banter
about male and female names.

They turned into the Guavate National Forest and
went on twisting upwards, glimpsing simple
vacation
cabins and rocky streams
tumbling between the trees,
and then
out of the deepest shade and still winding up
wards along steep slopes green with banana trees and
opening on
to vast blue-veiled panoramas of the lower
hills,
and so at last to a wide open gateway across the
road where a guard was negligently taking a light for his
cigarette from one of a group of convicts. Beyond
there
were plain clean-looking
buildings without bars or wire,
and
many more brown-skinned men in prison denims
who worked or loafed and turned to stare at them with
uninhibited and amiable curiosity.

“Don’t apologize for not asking me
in,” said the
Saint. “Something about me is allergic to prisons,
even when they have a lovely setting like this. I’ll have lunch
in Caguas
and come back for you about three.”

And that was how he happened to meet Mr. Elmer
Quire.

2

Mr. Quire was a stout man with a ruddy face
and a
shock of
white hair, a thin beak of a nose, and bright
eyes
that twinkled behind heavy black spectacle frames,
so that he looked rather like an elderly and
benevolent owl. He had a slight tic which kept his head nodding almost
imperceptibly, a movement which in combina
tion with his bluff paternal manner made him seem ingratiatingly
sympathetic and cooperative to anyone who
was talking to him. It was an affliction that had proved to be anything
but a disadvantage to him in his.operations
.

He was ready to tell anyone who asked him
that he
was a retired building contractor from New England,
which for
all it matters to this chronicle he may quite
well have been. He
had come to Puerto Rico ten years
before, in search of a pleasant
climate in which to take
his well-earned ease, and had stayed ever
since, which
made him a relative old-timer in the current new era of
the
island’s development. He had taken steps to make
himself widely
acquainted, had taken active part in
many charitable enterprises, and was
generally reputed
to be a pillar of the community, a natural choice for
civic
committees, and a philanthropist of stature. Exactly how much wealth he had
retired with was a matter of
conjecture, but it was even less common
knowledge that
he
had been able to increase his assets considerably
while he appeared to be devoting all his time to good
works.

It could only have been the fine hand of
Fate that
caused the Saint to be privileged to learn how this could
be done on his very first encounter with Mr. Elmer
Quire.

Mr. Quire never dreamed that Fate was
stalking him
when he saw Simon Templar saunter through the
Mallorquina
in Caguas, where he was having lunch, and sit down at the next table. He gave
the Saint a little more
than a casual glance, as people usually did,
dismissed him for the moment as an obvious tourist, and returned
his
attention to the man who sat nervously stirring a cup
of coffee beside
him.

“That’s the trouble with you
people,” Mr. Quire said
severely. “One tries to help you, to
bring you along and
teach you to grow up. Everyone knows how hard I’ve
worked for all of you. But you’re like so many of the
others, Gamma. I gave
you a great opportunity, and you
messed it up.”

“I did my best,
se
ñ
or,”
said the man called Gamma.

He was obviously a native
borinque
ñ
o
of the country,
a thin middle-aged
man with a lined face and anxious black eyes, and his dark clothes were neat
but old and
threadbare.

“Of course you say that,” Mr.
Quire lectured him reproachfully. “A failure always says he did his best.
Therefore the failure is not his fault. He won’t admit that he failed
because his best wasn’t good enough,
which would force him to try harder.
That is why he
never becomes a success.”

“Is it my fault,
se
ñ
or,
if my tomato seeds shoot up
only a little bit and then
die?”

“Certainly it is. They died because you
didn’t put
chemicals in the water, as I’ve been trying to
explain.”

“When you tell me about this wonderful
new way to
grow tomatoes in water, without earth, you do not tell
me I must
put anything in the water.”

Mr. Quire became aware intuitively that he
had an additional audience in the person of the bronzed tourist
with the
buccaneer’s face who sat almost at his elbow,
but the knowledge
made him if possible only more right
eous and longsuffering.

“If I told you once, I must have told
you twenty times.
How
would you expect any plant to grow on nothing
but
water? You’re enough of a farmer to know better
than that. It has to have something to feed on. Like the
fertilizer you put on the ground. The whole principle
of
growing vegetables hydroponically
is that you put the
fertilizer
directly into the tanks of water that your plants
grow in.”

“You did not tell me,
se
ñ
or,”
Gamma said doggedly.

“I told you, but you must have
forgotten. Or you just weren’t paying attention. That’s what I mean about how
hard it is to do anything for you people. You don’t con
centrate.
You half learn something, and go off half
cocked, and then wonder why it doesn’t work.”

The man sipped his coffee and stirred it
again glumly.
Mr. Quire continued to eat. There was a long silence
which Mr.
Quire quite imperturbably allowed to run its
natural course.

“If I put in chemicals now, and new
seed,” Gamma
said
at last, “will the tomatoes grow?”

“Certainly.”

“Then I must do that.”

“Exactly.”

“But,” Gamma said, “I have no
money to do it.”

Mr. Quire seemed surprised.

“None at all?”

“Se
ñ
or,
you know that the little I had, and all that you
lent me,
was spent to build the tanks in which the
tomatoes would grow.
And from my friends I already
borrow all that I can to eat.”

“Then how will you go about it?”
asked Mr. Quire, with fatherly interest.

The man licked his lips.

“I thought,
se
ñ
or,
perhaps, if you would lend me a
little more …”

Mr. Quire’s frown was almost a benediction.

“My dear man, that’s quite impossible! I
lent you
everything I could spare to help you start this
hydroponic
business.”

“But I will pay you as soon as the
tomatoes
grow——
”

“But it’ll be weeks, even months,
before they’re ready
for market. Think of all the time you’ve
wasted on that
first crop that died. You should have been getting mon
ey from
them already to meet your first payment to me,
which is overdue
right now. I’m not a rich man, Gamma. I need that money back. In fact, I must
have it at once.”

“I cannot pay you now,
se
ñ
or.”
Mr. Quire pursed his lips worriedjy.

“That’s really too bad,” he said.
“It means I shall
have to take your land.”

“You cannot do that!”

“Tut, tut, man. Of course I can. Or are
you forgetting again? When you borrowed that money, you signed a
paper
giving me the right to take your land in full settlement if you were ever
behind in your payments. You’re
behind now, and I have to get my money back
some
how.”