The Saint on the Spanish Main (23 page)

But as they drove down again into the soft
warmth of
Santurce, and she was a little sleepy, and they did not
have to
talk so much, he was thinking again about
Elmer Quire, and she
knew it telepathically.

She said: “Are you going to do something
about that
man?”

“I might, one of these days,” he
said. “When I can’t
have this much fun with you.”

“Then opportunity is just around the
corner,” she
said. “I’m starting off early tomorrow, to go around
the
island, to Mayag
ü
ez and Ponce. I’m
still a working girl.
I’ll be gone for a couple of days.”

“What’s wrong with this car?”

“A local judge and his wife are taking
me. And I can’t get out of that, because he’s a former classmate of one of
my
bosses. Besides, I have to maintain some reputa
tion.”

“The first reason was good enough. You
didn’t have
to add such a dull one.”

She snuggled a little closer.

“In case you think I’m a prude,” she said, “I was
planning to invite you to my room for a nightcap
any
way.”

When he came down to breakfast the next morning
she had already left; but there were two cablegrams in his box.

The first one he opened verified that Tristan
Brown was indeed a graduate of Columbia Law School. The
second
said:

GLAD
CONFIRM TRISTAN BROWN OUR FULL AC
CREDITED REPRESENTATIVE WILL APPRECIATE YOUR
COOPERATION

JAMES
TANTRUM

OGDEN
H. KIEL FOUNDATION

So the improbable story was true, after all,
as im
probable stories occasionally could be. It made him feel
even
better.

But it still left him with time on his hands
and nothing but the matter of Mr. Elmer Quire on his mind—which,
for the Saint, was a highly
unstable state to be in.

Mr..Quire was in the small office he maintained in
San Juan, in conference with a vice-president of
an Ala
bama textile mill, when the
phone call came.

“I couldn’t think of a better location
for your fac
tory,” he was saying. “It’s right outside
Caguas, on the
new four-lane highway to Ponce. Electricity, water, fine
transportation, and plenty of labor to draw on. Used to
be a
hydroponic tomato farm, but it’s nice level ground
and naturally worth
a lot more as an industrial site.
They’re good hardworking people around
there,
educated enough to learn fast, and yet they still aren’t
demanding
the kind of wages you’re used to paying.
With the tax
exemption you’ll get
…
Excuse me.”

He picked up the phone.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes… .
The Mallorquina at
Caguas? Yes, of course. I do remember… .
Certainly.
… Delighted… . Well, I’m going to be busy
this afternoon. How
about a small libation later? …
Fine. Suppose you meet me at the Club
Nautico at six
o’clock… .
Not at all, it’ll be a pleasure!”

4

To Mr. Quire, the word “pleasure” began to seem a
wholly inadequate description of their meeting.
After he had listened attentively for some time, he felt like a man
who
had been personally introduced to Santa Claus.

“Do you mean,” he said, “that
the Ogden H. Kiel
Foundation would consider handing me, say, a million
dollars to
disburse here as I saw fit?”

“That would be the idea,” said the
Saint. “You see,”
he went on, glibly appropriating the speech
which
Tristan Brown had generously provided for him, “we
don’t just
write checks to organized charities, and yet we
obviously can’t deal
with thousands of individual cases.
So in each area we go into, we try to
find a good local administrator, give him an allocation, and leave the han
dling of
it to his judgment.”

“There is certainly a lot of good to be
done here,” said Mr. Quire, nodding even more rapidly. “When the
sugar
market collapsed, the Puerto Ricans didn’t stop breed
ing. We’ve
got the densest population on any American
soil, more than six
hundred to the square mile, and still
growing. Even all the new industry
that’s been coming in
can’t absorb them. I’m afraid there will
always be hard
ship here. But may I ask, why did you happen to think
of
me?”

“As soon as I started to make inquiries, I kept hearing
your name mentioned as a real local philanthropist.”

“I have tried to do my small best for
the island since
I
settled here,” Mr. Quire said modestly. “Being retired
from business, it keeps me occupied and helps me
to feel
I’m not altogether
useless.” His bright eyes blinked
keenly
through his glasses. “Now we come to that, by
the way, I don’t think I even know your name—or
didn’t I hear it?”

The Saint did not hesitate for an instant.

“Brown,” he said. “Tristan
Brown.” With un
surpassable confidence he added: “1 know
this must
seem a rather fantastic situation, but it’s easy for you
to
check up on. Just send a wire to the Ogden H. Kiel
Foundation
in New York and ask them about me.”

Mr. Quire continued to gaze at him shrewdly.

“Then our meeting the other day wasn’t
entirely an
accident?”

“No, it was purely coincidence. But when
your name came up, I remembered having seen you in action, so to
speak.”
The Saint frowned. “To be perfectly frank, I’ve
been just a little
worried about that.”

“In what way, sir?”

“About the last things you said to that
man.”

“Gamma?” Mr. Quire smiled. The
smile ripened
gradually into a resonant jolly chuckle, deep in his
chest,
the chortle of a good guy enjoying a good joke. “My
dear
fellow! How you must have misunderstood me. But
of course you’re new
to these parts. Puerto Ricans are
Latins, and they’re used to violent
expressions. In fact
they don’t understand any other kind. And now
and
again you have to scold them, just like you would a
child, and
let them know you mean business. Certainly,
I was putting the
fear of God into Pedro, because that’s
what he needed. But
by this time he’s thought it over,
and we’ll be able to work something
out. Before we’re
finished he’ll be telling everyone I’m his best
friend.”

“I’m glad to hear that.” Simon
looked relieved. “Be
cause our investigation has to be very
thorough. As a
matter of fact, one of our requirements is to have the
person we
are considering submit a list of everyone he
has done any kind of business with for the
past five
years. Then we interview all
those people; and naturally,
if any
one of them gives the impression that he’s had a
raw deal, or been taken advantage of in any way, the
application is probably dropped right there.
Would you
be prepared to go along
with that?”

Mr. Quire rubbed his chin.

“A list like that would take me a
little time,” he said.
“But, yes, I could let you have
one.”

“There’s just one other thing,”
said the Saint.

Since he had already stolen so much of
Tristan
Brown’s material, he saw no reason to waste the rest of
the act
which he had projected for her in his own skeptical
mind and unjustly suspected her of
leading up to.

“The late Mr. Kiel,” he said,
“started off keeping his
money in an old sock, and never really got
used to the
idea of banks. And financial statements, to him, were
just a way for clever
accountants to make a bankrupt
look
prosperous. His will expressly forbids us to accept references of that kind.
But obviously we have to have
some
guarantee that the person we’re considering is sufficiently well off not to be
tempted by the opportunities
we’d be
giving him. So we ask him to show us a substan
tial amount of cash.”

“What sort of amount, Mr. Brown?”

“At least twenty thousand dollars. We
have to see it in
actual currency. Then it’s deposited somewhere—in the
applicant’s
own name, of course—and has to stay there
until our
investigation is completed. The object is just to
establish that he has
that kind of money that he can get
along without.”

Mr. Quire put his fingertips together. Simon
had the
impression
that if he had been a cat he would have
purred.

“Of course I can meet that condition
too. But you’re
giving me quite a lot to do. When would you want to go
into all this?”

“The sooner the better.”

Mr. Quire made a rapid calculation. The
Saint could
visualize every step of it as if he looked into Mr.
Quire’s
mind through a window. So long to set things right with
certain
people like Pedro Gamma, who might expose
embarrassing angles
of his philanthropy. So long to get
a cable reply from New York—for
although Mr. Quire’s
cupidity might rise to the right bait as
quickly as
anyone’s, he was not the volatile type that gulps down
the
Colossal Lie without a test. But with the wire he had
himself received from
New York warm in his pocket,
and the exact wording of it clear in his
memory, Simon
could envisage that prospect with complete equanimity.

“How about the day after tomorrow?”

“That suits me,” said the Saint.
“Why not meet me
for lunch at my hotel?”

The hotel he named was not the one where he
and
Tristan were staying, but the one where he intended to
register
forthwith under this borrowed name.

“I’ll be there at one,” said Mr.
Quire. “And I’ll try to
bring my deposit.”

“And I hope,” said the Saint cordially,
as they shook
hands, “that we’ll soon be entrusting you with a lot
more than that.”

He took one of his suitcases to the other
hotel and
checked in, and decided to have dinner and sleep there.
The rest
of the evening seemed flat and unpromising. He
missed Tristan Brown,
and wished she had been avail
able for some sort of celebration that would
have sup
plied an outlet for his suppressed exhilaration—even
though he
knew that her providential absence was as valuable to this stage of the story
as his fortunate meet
ing with her had been to its early
development.

He was up very early the next morning, for
he had
certain errands to do which included another drive to Caguas and, later,
the making of airplane reservations.
But those things only occupied him until
lunch. He
drove out for a swim at Luquillo Beach and lay on the
smooth
sand until sundown, and went back to his original hotel hoping that Tristan
would have returned. She still hadn’t come in by eight o’clock, and he went out
to
dinner and then to the Club 88 where he tried to divert
himself with some of the
amenable ladies who fre
quented the bar.
But he couldn’t develop even a super
ficial interest, and gave it up
early and went home.
Tristan was still away.

The next morning was better. The impatient
excite
ment that the Saint always felt at the approaching
climax of
a beautifully dovetailed plot, as a mechanical craftsman might be enraptured by
the working of an ex
quisitely contrived machine, was
subordinated to the solid purpose of wrapping it up and handing it over to
history.
He slept late and luxuriously, breakfasted,
sunned, swam, shaved,
showered, and dressed himself with
detailed care and enjoyment, as if to
make himself feel
that everything behind him was perfect and ready for the
crowning touch of perfection to come.