The Saint on the Spanish Main (7 page)

“You pounded your brains during the
evening, and decided that the really smart move, if I was as close on
the trail
as that, was to keep me even closer. At least that
might make it easier
to keep track of me; and the more
you could make me think I was fooling
you, the better
you might be able to fool me. Besides, you still had the
selfish
personal angle that if I didn’t know too much
already, you might go
on selling the idea that you
weren’t really connected with Uckrose except
in the
most innocent and professional way, which is how the
operation
is set up anyhow. So if it came to a blow-up,
you might yet save your own skin.”

He leaned against the galley bulkhead and
flipped ashes fastidiously into the sink.

“Of course you didn’t give yourself
away by inviting
me to come over with you. I didn’t begin to smell the
rat
until you started on the tirade against Uckrose. You had
a good
idea there, but you overdid it. It just didn’t ring quite true that you should
be so bitter about a rich slob
who only gave you a nice bit of business every
year, even
if he
was a bum sportsman. It started me wondering
what
else there could be behind your attitude. And then, when we got here, you were
alone with him just long
enough to have tipped him off to the build-up
you’d
given me, and he had to carry on with
the gag. Only he overdid it too. I just couldn’t see a successful retired
business man being quite such an uninhibited boor… .
I didn’t see all this in a flash, but it filtered
through grad
ually. And I even began
to see what was developing
ahead
when you started the special advance work for
Gloria—almost pimping for her, if I may be so rude.”

O’Kevin glared up at him with his head
twisted side
ways, mutely, having little choice about doing it in any
other
way; but the Saint was quite content to conduct a
monologue.

“Now the only question is, what is the racket?” he
said. “Of course I could probably get you to
tell me by
sticking toothpicks under
your toenails, or something oldfashioned like that, but it’s more fun to make
it an
intellectual exercise. So I
shall try first to do it in my
head.
Listen carefully, Patsy, because you may have to
explain to the others how I did it without any help from
you.”

He paused a moment for a final review of his
thoughts,
because he would always be proud of this feat
of virtuosity if he brought it off.

“It has to involve some form of
merchandise, because
nothing else could pay off through Bimini. It
must be very valuable to account for the guard and for all the
concern
about it. It should be something that a man
could bring here from
Europe, which he could land with
in Nassau without any trouble, because the Customs
there never bother with the baggage of American
tour
ists. And then it only has to
be put on board a charter
boat
working out of Miami, which would only get a per
functory going-over by the Customs there if it was just coming back
from Bimini. The two most compact and likely possibilities are narcotics and
jewelry. Unless
Uckrose has invented
himself a completely phony back
ground,
which is less probable, the odds point to
jewels.”

He took a last drag at his cigarette and
flicked it
through
the porthole.

“Then where are these jewels? Not at
the hotel, because Clinton and Gloria and Vincent all went out with
you this morning, and they’d
never have risked me
burgling their rooms or
even the hotel safe while they
were
away if there’d been anything there to find. But all kinds of work has been
done to take suspicion off the
Colleen
—and you. Des is so obviously innocent that he’s
an extra asset to the camouflage. So this boat
should be the safest place in sight. And exactly where on the boat,
if I’m to find them without taking her apart?”

O’Kevin seemed to lie even more motionless
than his
bonds required, as if frozen by an almost superstitious
fascination.
And the Saint smiled at him like a
benevolent swami.

“Well, I remember something you
mentioned more
than once when you were knocking Uckrose, about how
you’d
have to take his fish back with you—any kind of fish. It seems like too
fanciful a touch for you to have
invented. Therefore you knew it was really
going to hap
pen, and you were trying to prepare me for it so that I
wouldn’t
be too struck by it when it did. So I am now
going to bet my roll on
that very fishy story.”

He went back out to the cockpit and opened
the fish
box. The dolphin that O’Kevin had shown him earlier
still lay
there on the ice. Simon squeezed its belly hard
with one hand, and
knew in a moment of exquisite and unforgettable elation that he had been right,
all the way to this climax. It was like having forecast a chess game
up to the checkmate after the
first half-dozen moves.

Straight ahead of him over the transom the
sun was
setting, and the silhouette of a seaplane coming head-on
was
etched against a crimson-tinted cloud. Already he
could hear the faint
hum of its engine like a distant
bumblebee.

With the bait-knife, Simon Templar performed
a deft
Caesarean
section that delivered the fish of a trans
parent
plastic bag in which many hard angular objects thinly wrapped in tissue paper
could be easily felt. He
returned to
the saloon and showed it to O’Kevin.

“I must check on Clinton’s ex-partner in
New York in
a couple of years,” he remarked. “I assume
he’s the re
ceiving end of the line, and by that time they may have
organized
some other channel that I can hijack. But I’m afraid you’ll have to go back to
legitimate fishing, Patsy
me b’y.”

He rinsed the plastic bag under the pump and
dried it on a dishtowel before he put it away in his pocket. The examination of
its contents could afford to wait, but his
plane was already
coming down for its landing on the
lagoon with a roar and a rush of wind
overhead.

“I wish you’d give Gloria a
message,” said the Saint.
“Tell her she didn’t really leave me
cold, but I couldn’t
take everything else she offered and these
jewels too. On
the other hand, I mightn’t have been doing this at all if
she hadn’t tried to take me like a yokel and stand me up.
There has
to be some self-respect among thieves.”

He went out and jumped up on to the dock and
walked
briskly away, wondering what he was going to
write to Don Mucklow.

NASSAU:

The Arrow of God

42

One of Simon Templar’s stock criticisms of
the classic
type of detective story is that the victim of the murder,
the reluctant spark-plug of all the entertaining mystery and strife, is usually
a mere nonentity who wanders
vaguely through the first few pages with the
sole purpose
of becoming a convenient body in the library by the end
of Chapter
One. But what his own feelings and problems
may have been, the
personality which has to provide so many people with adequate motives for
desiring him to drop dead, is largely a matter of hearsay, retrospectively
brought
out in the conventional process of drawing at
tention to one suspect after another.

“You could almost,” Simon has said,
“Call him a
cor
pus derelicti… .
Actually
the physical murder should
only be the mid-point of the story: the
things that led up .to it are at least as interesting as the mechanical
solution of who done it.
…
Personally, I’ve killed very few peo
ple that I
didn’t know plenty about first.”

Coming from a man who is generally regarded
as
almost a detective-story character himself, this comment
is at
least worth recording for reference; but it certainly
did not apply to the
shuffling off of Mr. Floyd Vosper,
which caused a brief commotion on the
island of New
Providence
in the early spring of that year.

2

Why Simon Templar should have been in Nassau
(which,
for the benefit of the untraveled, is the city of
New Providence,
which is an island in the Bahamas) at
the time is one of those questions
which always arise in stories about him, and which can only be answered by
repeating
that he liked to travel and was just as likely to
show up there as in
Nova Zembla or Namaqualand. As
for why he should have been invited to the
house of Mrs.
Herbert H. Wexall, that is another irrelevancy which is
hardly
covered by the fact that he could just as well have
shown up at the
house of Joe Wallenski (of the arsonist
Wallenskis) or the
White House—he had friends in
many places, legitimate and otherwise. But
Mrs. Wexall
had some international renown as a lion hunter, even if
her
stalking had been confined to the variety which
roars loudest in
plush drawing rooms; and it was not to be expected that the advent of such a
creature as Simon Templar would have escaped the attention of her salon
safari.

Thus one noontime Simon found himself
strolling up
the driveway and into what little was left of the life
of
Floyd Vosper. Naturally he did not know this at the
time; nor
did he know Floyd Vosper, except by name. In
this he was no
different from at least fifty million other
people in that
hemisphere; for Floyd Vosper was not
only one of the most widely syndicated
pundits of the
day, but his books
(Feet of Clay; As I Saw Them;
and
The Twenty Worst Men in the World)
had all been the
selections
of one book club or another and still sold by
the million in
reprints. For Mr. Vosper specialized in the
ever-popular sport of
shattering reputations. In his
journalistic years he had met, and apparently
had
unique opportunities to study, practically every great
name in
the national and international scene, and could
unerringly remember everything in their
biographies
that they would prefer
forgotten, and could impale and
epitomize
all their weaknesses with devastatingly pin
point precision, leaving them naked and squirming on the operating table
of his vocabulary. But what this
merciless
professional iconoclast was like as a person,
Simon had never heard or bothered much to wonder
about.

So the first impression that Vosper made on
him was a voice, a still unidentified voice, a dry and deliberate
and
peculiarly needling voice, which came from behind
a bank of riotous hibiscus and oleander.

“My dear Janet,” it said, “you
must not let your inno
cent admiration for Reggie’s bulging biceps
color your
estimate of his perspicacity in world affairs. The title
of All-American, I hate to disillusion you, has no reference
to
statesmanship.”

There was a rather strained laugh that must
have
come from Reggie, and a girl’s clear young voice said:
“That
isn’t fair, Mr. Vosper. Reggie doesn’t pretend to
be a genius but he’s
bright enough to have a wonderful
job waiting for him on Wall
Street.”

“I don’t doubt that he will make an
excellent contact
man for the more stupid clients,” conceded the
voice
with the measured nasal gripe. “And I’m sure that his
education
can cope with the simple arithmetic of the
Stock Exchange, just
as I’m sure it can grasp the basic figures of your father’s Dun and Bradstreet.
This should
not dazzle you with his brilliance, any more than it
should
make you believe that you have some spiritual
fascination that
lured him to your feet.”