The Saint and the People Importers

1

The identity of the passenger who left his evening paper behind in a certain London taxi one dull September afternoon will probably never be discovered: he passed through this world but once, and may have nothing else in the course of his transit that will ever concern posterity. But the newspaper was still lying there on the seat when Simon Templar hailed the cab on Jermyn Street behind Fortnum & Mason’s, within which epicurean supermarket he had just concluded a transaction involving several thousand sturgeon eggs, and thus has a fair claim to have been the starting point of this adventure.

Simon Templar had long ago given up trying to predict where Adventure would come from: his only certainty was that he could never escape it. He would stumble upon it, or it would trip over him; but one way or another they were fated to come together, by the same kind of destiny that had ordained perhaps as a symbol for that afternoon, that Mr. Fortnum should be forever linked with Mr. Mason.

There had been an era long ago, admittedly, when Simon Templar had gone more than halfway to meet this agreeable doom. With an imagination as unlimited as possibility itself he had set out on his hunt; his territory was the world and his prey the two-legged predators who fattened on other men’s toil and hopes and sufferings: extortioners, swindlers, racketeers — every manner of human parasite that crept on the scalp of the earth, and especially those who had burdened themselves with a weighty enough load of ill-gotten gold to warrant the attention of a man of Simon’s expensive tastes.

But while a fair share of the wealth he rescued from the coffers of the Ungodly found its way into his own bank accounts, a large proportion of it ended up back in the hands of its original rightful owners. This fact, combined with Simon’s penchant for extralegal action and his contempt for the creaky wheels of due process, had caused some historically attuned pen-pusher to dub him the Robin Hood of Modern Crime. The comparison was apt, but another shorter and more mysteriously ambivalent sobriquet had attached itself to him very early in his career and had soon all but replaced his real name in the public mind.

It was a nom de guerre heard by detective officers and bandit chieftains with equal unease: The Saint.

More recently, he claimed that he positively leaned sideways in a noble effort to avoid trouble, but with no more success than an unskilful matador attempting to evade an educated bull. Their mutual karma was bigger than both of them. And that afternoon where we came in was a fair sample of its working.

Having directed the driver to take him to the Hilton Hotel, where he had no more nefarious objective in mind than the inhibition of a cool quenching rum punch in Trader Vic’s air-conditioned basement, the Saint pushed the abandoned newspaper out of his way, and settled back to relax while he was ferried through dense shoals of rush-hour traffic. The newspaper lay ignored beside him as he crossed his legs, folded his arms, and watched the crowds rushing along the sidewalks in a last-minute push to spend as much of their money as possible before the last shops closed, or to catch a homeward bus or train before everyone else with the same idea got ahead of them.

Even among those elegantly draped though unseemly hurrying West End throngs, Simon Templar had stood out as an extraordinarily well-tailored, handsome, and striking man. His six feet two inches, honed to balanced perfection through hard and steady use, set him above most of his fellow-creatures in stature as well as in fitness, and his blue eyes blazed in his tanned face with a magically startling translucency. Even the way he carried himself was unusual, somehow combining the urbane poise of an idle aristocrat with the quiet watchful readiness of a jungle-fighter.

Nature’s lavish kindness to the Saint, included the visual acuity of a jet pilot, and also burdened him with a ceaseless curiosity about everything that it took in. Long before his taxi turned from Piccadilly into Clarges Street, his eye had been caught during the cab’s frequent pauses in the inevitable jams by those hand-lettered, forcefully worded broadsheets which London’s newspaper vendors hang on their small red or yellow stands. There was such a journalistic entrepreneur on almost every corner — an invariably afflicted-looking man in stained cap and shapeless shoes — and ordinarily the Saint would not have found his imagination stirred by even their most lurid promises.

He could pass by CIGARETTE TAX SHOCK without a glance. DOCK STRIKE CHAOS was such a commonplace that it would have blended indiscernibly with the pavement and the shopfronts. Even AU PAIR GIRL MURDER! PICTURES! which could be counted on to galvanise weary commuters into a veritable stampede towards the news-hawkers with coins thrust forward in impatient hands, and to hold them spellbound on an underground ride from Piccadilly Circus to Maida Vale, would not have produced even a responsive tremor in the Saint’s vital organs.

But PAKISTANI CRUCIFIED IN SOHO rang with such a brazen barbaric resonance that even the Saint’s well-tempered nervous system could not entirely resist its call.

PAKISTANI CRUCIFIED IN SOHO!

The message was echoed and repeated as Simon’s taxi made its way in halts and spurts of sudden speed towards the hazy green of Hyde Park and the sunset-reddened glassy tower of the Hilton Hotel. In his imagination he saw the Pakistani’s exotic fate proclaimed before the department stores of Oxford Street, made loudly known along the Strand, and writ large on every corner of Trafalgar Square. The whole of the West End was aquiver with the ghastly tidings, and vast ant-streams of rail-borne commuters were even now pouring out into the countryside to spread the word to Croydon, Tunbridge Wells, and Beaconsfield.

The Saint’s immunity was not total. While he was not curious enough to have stopped his driver so that he could buy a newspaper, he was too intrigued to resist the impulse to pick up the secondhand tabloid that happened to be lying beside him. But before unfurling it he paused to wonder cynically if he might after all be cheated. Perhaps the editor of this particular journal had suffered a lapse in his sense of values or a misjudgment of public taste and had left the unfortunate Pakistani out of his columns altogether, assuming that the devaluation of some Latin American currency or the murder of a refugee by Russian border guards were matters more worthy of public knowledge?

Simon unfolded the discarded paper and was not disappointed. The Pakistani’s lot was emblazoned across the top of the front page in a barrage of letters two inches high. Below, in small but still bold type, were details calculated to funnel the reader’s eye down into the morass of finer print that made up the body of the sheet.

Simon’s eye scanned the column from “Grim sight greeted bobbies” through “Shopkeeper heard groans” to “Did he threaten to talk?”

The unpleasant details of the Pakistani’s demise and the subsequent discovery of his spreadeagled body in a temporarily vacant garage held less interest for the Saint than another fact which made him stop and look again when he was about two thirds of the way down the page: “The murdered man was a waiter at the Golden Crescent Restaurant in Soho, where his Pakistani colleagues claimed to know little about him or his origins.”

Simon lowered his foundling journal and leaned forward. The narrow centre panel in the glass partition that separated driver from passenger was already partially lowered. The Saint spoke through the opening.

“I don’t think I’ll stop at the Hilton after all,” he said. “I’ve developed a sudden craving for curry. Do you think we can get to the Golden Crescent Restaurant before midnight even in this traffic? It’s on Newlin street, near Leicester Square.”

The driver was a small ageing ugly man with a pocked nose and a surprisingly cheerful disposition.

“We can try,” he said over his shoulder. “If you’re in a hurry, there’s a hundred other curry houses, and with all respect I don’t see how anybody can tell ’em apart unless it’s by the different kinds of indigestion you pick up from the...”

Simon was spared any more of his chauffeur’s culinary comments when the current log-jam of cars broke into motion again.

“I think I’ll make it the Golden Crescent just the same,” he said. “I’ve been there before. De gustibus, et cetera...”

“Righto,” the driver answered tolerantly. “Leicester Square it is.”

“And no hurry,” said the Saint.

“Don’t worry.”

The driver shifted very audibly into second gear. Simon let himself be jolted back into his seat again and got on with his study of the evening’s news. The front page treatment of the Pakistani’s death was more visceral than analytical, but at the bottom of the column, in bold print, was a promising announcement: EXCLUSIVE! HOW ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS FALL PREY TO EXTORTION GANG. THE INSIDE STORY, BY TAM ROWAN. SEE PAGE 3.

The Saint saw page three. His driver, in the meantime, was beginning a series of torturous manoeuvres through clogged streets that would eventually enable him to get to Simon’s new destination. The tide of the evening rush was in full flood now. Pedestrians pressed toe to heel on the sidewalks, and the earth trembled to the surge of trains through the subterranean labyrinths.

It was understandable, Simon thought, that men of the Asian lands who wanted to avail themselves in person of Britain’s advantages ran into British objections and were forced to take unofficial routes into the country, thereby putting themselves in the category of “illegal immigrants.” It would seem to anybody observing mid-London late on a weekday afternoon that the island of which it was the capital not only had no room for new inhabitants, but in fact was about to founder under the weight of the ones who were already there.

Simon shut his eyes and ears to the throngs outside his taxi and concentrated on Tam Rowan’s exclusive inside story, which got off the mark with a verbal ring: “I was threatened with death for writing this article.”

Mr. Rowan, it seemed, had taken a professional interest in illegal immigration for some time past, and now had finally managed to introduce his proboscis into circles so touchy about their privacy that they had anonymously offered to detach not only his inquisitive sniffer but also his whole head if he did not lay off immediately.

Rowan revealed these facts in dramatic, rather breathless terms not wholly unflattering to himself, and then got down to a disappointingly vague account of what he had found out in the course of his snooping. The Saint’s impression was that Tam Rowan was not quite as heroically indifferent to the well-being of his highly active nose as he made himself out to be, and that he knew a lot more than he was willing to spill in the Evening Record. Much of what he said was common knowledge: Large numbers of people, especially from Pakistan and India, wanted to come to Britain. Britain, for obvious reasons, could not accommodate and offer jobs to any but a small proportion of those non-Britons who wanted to immigrate. The British government had been forced to restrict the human influx by means of annual quota systems, and to further refine the screening process by giving priority to new arrivals who practised some profession or had some skill that would make them an asset instead of an unemployable liability to the society they wanted to enter. A Pakistani doctor could get in with no trouble. A Pakistani labourer or clerk, to whom the wages of a London Transport ticket collector would have seemed comparable to the wealth of Midas, had almost no chance at all of entering.

It was those with no special qualifications for entry, and who were refused the vital employment permit, who sometimes decided to have a try at getting in anyway. Transportation, by plane to France or Benelux and thence by boat to a deserted stretch of English coast, was the usual method. Fraudulent documents of every necessary kind could be obtained in advance for stunning prices, and once ashore the smuggled man could lose himself so completely that the government authorities admitted that they had almost no chance of locating such an offender after he was inside the country’s borders.

The illegal immigrant, however, did not feel as secure as the government’s pessimistic attitude might seem to have warranted. And that was the crux of the racket the Saint was reading about. A gang of blackmailers was raking in a rich profit from fearful, uninformed, often ignorant Pakistanis and Indians who had sneaked into the country and were vulnerable to threats of exposure. Among the blackmailers were some of the Asians’ own countrymen — and to increase the unsavoury irony, the extortion syndicate got rich both coming and going, since they ran a two-sided business and many of the people they blackmailed were men they had helped slip into England in the first place, thus ingeniously providing themselves with a prelocated flock of sheep for shearing.

Simon did not at all admire illegal immigration nor the people who indulged in it, but he admired blackmailers even less. He was not a sentimental man, and he could appreciate an audacious bit of thievery with the taste of a connoisseur. He could enjoy the pricking of the pompous rich — though it was the pompous part and not the rich part that he disliked — and he could relish a duel between equals. But blackmail, by its very nature, had always struck him as especially rotten, and a blackmailer who sucked the blood of poor and defenceless people seemed to him to exist on a level approximately equivalent to the underside of a cockroach.

Simon folded the newspaper and tucked it into the pocket of his raincoat with the pleasant feeling of being no longer at loose ends but instead of having set a clear course in a promising direction. His driver was not so fortunate. In trying to take a shortcut through Soho he finally got himself bogged down near Wardour Street off Brewer Street. Here, in a notorious backwater bottleneck behind the theatre and restaurant district, the traffic jam seemed to be nearing the oft-predicted urban millennium when the only solution will be to cover the whole mess with concrete and start all over again on top of it.

“I’ll walk from here,” Simon said through the opening in The glass partition.

He got out and paid the driver.

“There’s plenty of curry restaurants around here,” the cabman said. “Must be at least one in every block.”

“I think I’ll go to the Golden Crescent anyway,” Simon told him. “They may all use the same brand of chutney, but where I’m going there’s something special about the atmosphere.”

2

To the uninitiated foreigner, London is Big Ben, double-decker buses, dazzling uniforms, and Buckingham Palace. The contrivers of English tourist brochures tend to give the central section of the city called Soho the same treatment that a respectable family gives to a fallen female relative: they get a kick out of knowing about her but they don’t go out of their way to advertise her existence very exuberantly to outsiders. Appropriately heralded by the statue of Eros in the middle of Piccadilly Circus on its southwest corner, Soho is a roughly rectangular area of about ninety acres bounded on the north by Oxford Street and on the east by Charing Cross Road; but its distinction is much more a matter of atmosphere than of physical boundaries.

Soho is, in the most far-reaching sense of the word, an entertainment district. It contains Carnaby Street, the birthplace of a contemporary form of sartorial extravagance, which for some tastes would be entertainment enough; but that is only one facet of its resources. Along its many-angled, space-starved streets and alleys the stalwart sensation-seeker can visit a pub, a penny arcade, a bookmaker’s shop, or a strip-tease show. He can buy a red hot magazine or a blue hot reel of movie film. He can eat at an Indian, Chinese, French, German, Italian, Balkan, American, Jewish, or even an English restaurant. He can get himself an expensive companion in an expensive bar, or a cheap dancing partner, or a souvenir lump on the back of his skull if he should be foolhardy enough to follow the wrong helpful little chap into the wrong obscure doorway.

Soho, regarded (for literary effect) as a painted woman, is considerably cleaner, better dressed, and brighter than what might loosely be called her counterparts in other great cities. When the Saint got out of his taxi he was standing in front of a pub as staid and wholesome as any in Oxford or Windsor. Many of the passers by would have looked at home on the most pristine boulevard in Belgravia.

But Soho, being the sort of place it is, attracts in large numbers that curious variety of human being who combines an enterprising spirit with inordinate laziness and a total lack of moral-principle. If prevented by circumstances from becoming a politician or a fiction-writer, such an individual will tend to gravitate to the kind of subsurface sources of income with which Soho abounds. The Saint saw a female of the species almost as soon as he left the kerb and set off down a short, constricted side street. She was fat and young and had curly black hair, and she was sitting in a ground floor window of a building across the road. When she saw Simon her expression of disconsolate boredom did not change, but remarkably like a clockwork toy she raised one plumpish hand and mechanically beckoned to him three times with a pudgy forefinger.

The Saint cheerfully tipped an imaginary hat and strode on. Turning into the next, more populous street, he ran a gauntlet of second rate strip-show establishments whose wares were vividly publicised by a fusillade of glossy photographs on either side of their doors — photographs whose charming bare subjects had no connection whatever with the dancing girls presumably on non-stop view inside. He edged around a ragged stoop-shouldered vendor of hot chestnuts, passed a hamburger house, a magazine shop, and an Italian delicatessen, and turned down to Shaftesbury Avenue, which was roaring with traffic and jammed with sightseers. He had to wait at a corner until he could get across the avenue to its southern side. The glow of the setting sun stained the façades of all the buildings a livid red. The day had seemed perfectly clear, but now that the sun had sunk below the roof-tops an autumn haze was filtering and deepening the tone of the light. As Simon continued on towards the Golden Crescent, he almost suddenly became aware of a wintry chill in the air, as if the sinking of the sun had revealed an underlying coldness that had been there all the time.

Or was the chill inside him — an omen of events that every deliberate step was bringing nearer?

He was approaching the Indian restaurant from its rear, and he could smell the exotic pungency of its kitchen exhaust while he was still yards away. The restaurant was on a corner, and behind it and its neighbouring shops ran a narrow alley serving their back doors. Simon would not have paid any particular attention to a medium-sized van which had backed into the alley if he had not happened to notice the two men who apparently were in charge of it. Their appearance was so startling that he paused and glanced at the side-panels of the blue van expecting to see the advertisement for a circus.

Instead he saw the words: SUPREME IMPORTS LTD., PURVEYORS OF FINEST INDIAN FOODSTUFFS.

All in a matter of seconds, he was able to take another look at the men who had attracted his attention as they lifted a crate and cartons from inside the van and carried them into the back door of the Golden Crescent. Both of them wore dirty blue workmen’s clothes, but that was where any resemblance ended.

By far the more striking of the two was a giant Indian or Pakistani, at least six and a half feet tall, with muscles and girth to match his amazing stature. The huge dome of his skull was bald, like a great gleaming egg resting in the bristling black nest of muttonchop whiskers and jutting moustaches which smothered the lower regions of his head. The bridge of his nose receded abnormally as it approached his massive brow, and his little oily eyes gave the impression of having rolled down close together in the depression like a pair of black ball-bearings.

The small cramped jet eyes fastened on Simon’s face for an instant and then flicked away to concentrate on the business of moving the wooden crate into the restaurant’s storeroom.

The other member of the blue-clad team was a European, and in no way as remarkable as his mate. It was just that his unusual smallness — jockey-like, the Saint thought — was so emphasised by the monstrous Indian’s Brobdingnagian bulk that he looked like a pigmy in comparison. He was not only rather short, but also thin, with an anxious deathshead face surmounted by a closely cut crop of coarse hair that stood rigidly up on end. He blinked rapidly as he worked, and did not notice Simon as the Saint went on past the entrance of the alley.

The Saint had no reason to think any more — for the time being — about the two oddly assorted purveyors of finest Indian foodstuffs. He was much more interested in knowing what the owner and staff of the Golden Crescent could tell him about their compatriots’ problems — if not their own — of involvement with extortioners of the kind whose bloody deed had just made the headlines.

Simon knew the Golden Crescent through half a dozen visits he had made during the past year. The only thing which differentiated it from scores of other Indian restaurants in London (distinction between Indian and Pakistani cuisine being virtually nonexistent in the British public mind) was the intensely calorific excellence of its curried lamb and the benevolent hospitality of its proprietor, Abdul Haroon. There were more lavish, and possibly better, Indian restaurants, but there was none with a more sociable and talkative owner — and talkativeness was a quality for which the Saint felt a keen desire on this particular evening.

He rounded the corner and approached the restaurant’s modest front entrance, an ordinary glass door flanked on either side by plate-glass windows, each bearing in appropriately gilt lettering the words golden cresent restaurant. Above the door, so that it could be seen by prospective customers approaching from east or west, hung another gilded announcement of the restaurant’s identity. It seemed unlikely that even the most unobservant pedestrian could feel any doubt that he was, indeed, at the portals of the Golden Crescent, but in case there should be any last-minute doubts among the exceptionally dull-witted the fact was confirmed once more by neat gold lettering on the glass of the entrance door itself.

Mr. Abdul Haroon was loquacious even in his advertising.

Before going inside, the Saint glanced through one of the windows, over a row of sickly ferns which had somehow survived the sunless and spice-laden atmosphere of the interior. It was barely six o’clock, and he was glad to see that he would be the first customer to arrive that evening.

He opened the door and stepped in. There was no entrance alcove, and he was immediately in the midst of white-covered tables packed as close together as sheep in an overcrowded fold. Along the walls were red-yellowish lamps and hand-painted murals of imaginative Eastern landscapes in which all the trees were palms and all the buildings were variations on the Taj Mahal. To the right in the rear was a small but well-stocked bar. A passageway led past the bar to the kitchen and cloakrooms.

The first thing the Saint’s senses registered as he entered was the wonderful smell of the place, dominated at the moment by cloves and saffron. The second fact that struck him was that there was not a single waiter in sight.

He tried to close the air-cushioned door as noisily as possible behind him, and picked out a table where he would be able to sit with his back to the wall and see the entrance, the bar, and the passage that gave access to the back rooms. Before he could take a seat a waiter, already known to him from previous visits as Mahmud, came rushing out around the bar from the inner sanctuary, jerking the hem of his white jacket into place over his baggy Eastern trousers.

“I am so sorry, sir!” he was exclaiming. “We have just opened our door this minute.”

“Not to worry,” Simon said. “I’d like this table, if it’s not reserved.”

“Mr. Templar!” the waiter said with sudden recognition.

He hurried to help Simon slip off his raincoat. “So long since you were here and no one to greet you!”

Mahmud, a Pakistani like Abdul Haroon, as his Muslim name indicated, was of moderate height, light-skinned, black-haired, and quick. He was in his early twenties and despite a professionally subservient manner gave the impression that he was destined for higher things than dishing up rice and poppadums and knew it.

“You have a good memory,” said the Saint. “It’s been some time since I was here — and it was usually Ali who waited on me.”

The Golden Crescent employed only three waiters and the evening paper had not made it clear which of them had been murdered. If it had been the one called Ali, a middle-aged quiet man, Mahmud gave no indication of it.

“It helps to cultivate the memory in my profession,” he said with smiling complacency.

He had pulled the table away from the wall so that Simon could sit down on the banquette. Now he pushed the table back and flicked an imaginary crumb off the clean white cloth. Like most tablecloths at restaurants of the Golden Crescent’s class, this one had a small but very neatly mended torn spot. It amused Simon to see the little white scar as soon as he looked to confirm his guess that it would be there — almost as much as it amused him that waiter Mahmud insisted on being completely unaware that one of his colleagues was even at this moment making grisly news posters all over London.

“Thank you,” Simon said coolly. “Would you please hand me that paper from the pocket of my coat before you hang it up?”

“Of course, sir.”

As the Saint took the paper he unfolded it on the table in front of him. Mahmud studiously avoided noticing the headline; but Simon refused to let him escape. When the waiter came back from hanging up the coat the Saint tapped the fat black letters.

“With your memory,” he said, “you can’t have forgotten Ali.”

Mahmud stiffened into a rigidly formal posture.

“No, sir.”

“It was the Ali who worked here then?”

“Yes, sir. Would you like a drink, sir?”

Mahmud staunchly met the Saint’s eyes through an invisible barrier as thick as the armour plating of a battleship.

“I’ll have a Peter Dawson with ice.”

“Yes, sir,” said Mahmud. “With plain water?”

The Saint nodded and smiled.

“You do have a very fine memory,” he said pleasantly. “I hope as the evening goes on you’ll find that it covers things other than customers’ names and drinking habits.”

Mahmud’s face was still expressionless but he permitted his dark eyes to glance again at the newspaper.

“You are interested in this matter?”

“Yes,” Simon said.

“For reasons of your own profession?”

For an instant Mahmud did not sound like a waiter.

“Possibly,” said the Saint.

“Thank you, sir,” Mahmud replied, sounding like a waiter again. “I will get your drink and the menu.”

3

Simon realised as Mahmud walked quickly away that the waiter’s sudden departure coincided with the advent of another more exalted personage in the dining room. It was Abdul Haroon himself, the proprietor and maître d’hotel of the Golden Crescent. He billowed in past the bar, resplendent in a red silk tunic which may or may not have resembled some mode of Pakistani national dress, and sailed towards the Saint’s table like a runaway balloon on a weakening wind.

He was, as if to advertise the bountiful nourishment he could offer, fat. His face was as nearly a perfect circle as a human countenance can be, and within it were the two nearly perfect circles of the lenses of his steel-rimmed spectacles. The roundness of his face was emphasised by the fact that before the onslaughts of time his hair had withdrawn from the area of his brow to form a secondary line of defence farther back on his scalp. His hair itself was as black as tar and glistened as if it had been copiously anointed with the same ghee in which its owner’s cook fried the chopped lamb.

There was a babyish look built into Abdul Haroon’s pliant features, and his voice had what promised to be a permanently youthful tone and lilt.

“Greetings, Mr. Simon Templar, greetings!” he declaimed, parting the air between him and his customer with a pair of beringed hands. “You do me honour. I am so sorry we have not seen you in such a long time.”

The Saint’s reputation had reached a point where he no longer stood much chance of remaining incognito anywhere in London, and he had to comfort himself over that loss of the advantages of anonymity with the knowledge that restaurant service was often considerably better when the Saint was on the receiving end than it might have been for some less distinguished, or less notorious patron. Abdul Haroon, as soon as he had found out who Simon was during one of his first visits, had asked him for a large signed portrait-photograph which would be hung in a prominent spot on the dining-room wall, but Simon had gently declined the invitation.

“And I’m sorry I haven’t been here,” he told Abdul. “I’d be happy to run through the whole menu twice a month if I could find the time.”

Abdul rotated with pleasure and glanced around hopefully to see if there were any other patrons within earshot. Unhappily, there were still no other patrons at all, but he failed to let that dampen his good spirits — good spirits which the Saint found remarkable considering the unwholesome circumstances in which Abdul had just lost one of his employees.

Mahmud brought Simon’s Peter Dawson and retreated quickly.

“You are too kind, too kind!” the rotund restaurateur declaimed. “If all customers were as appreciative as yourself it would be enough to inspire even the wretched charlatans who wheedle their way into my employment pretending to be cooks.”

It was one of Abdul’s customs to imply that all the creatures of the earth were allied in the common cause of bringing about bis financial, physical, and mental ruin. His employees, finding him otherwise kind, considerate, and even relatively generous, learned to tolerate his lamentations with resigned good humour, knowing that the more pleased he was the more likely he was to implore the heavens to witness the imminence of his downfall.

Simon tried to catch Abdul’s eyes behind the glint of his round-lensed spectacles.

“You have staff problems?” he asked pointedly.

“Always, always,” Abdul mourned. Now he was like a balloon going through a minor deflation. “They come and they go. I teach them to prepare and serve foods worthy of paradise and they take jobs as auto mechanics — or run away to trade the secrets they have learned from me for a job in some giant overdecorated mess-hall for American tourists where the tips are bigger and the management is not on the verge of bankruptcy...”

Abdul, being a balloon, seemed never to run short on his air supply, but the Saint interrupted him.

“According to this newspaper, all your ex-staff aren’t so lucky.”

For a moment Abdul looked as if he were going to ignore the Saint’s allusion altogether and go right on babbling about his own endless tribulations. But unlike his waiter, Mahmud, Abdul had not been endowed by nature with the makings of a poker face. His features were too soft. They melted and welled into an expression of still more intense distress. His ring-laden hands clung to one another for support.

“Horrible, horrible!” he whispered.

“It is,” Simon responded. “I had the impression for a minute that you hadn’t heard about it yet.”

“Oh, yes,” Abdul moaned. He shifted his eyes first to one side and then the other, this time to make sure there were no other customers in the room. “It is a tragedy. It is in all the ruddy papers. It will ruin me!”

“It certainly ruined Ali,” Simon said. “Have you seen this article?”

He opened the paper to the Tam Rowan story on page three; but in the meantime Abdul’s original distress had burgeoned into full-blown fear.

“I have not,” he answered hoarsely. “I don’t want to. If a man who works for me gets himself involved with criminals it is none of my affair! Now... I’m sorry, but you must excuse me. I... I’m needed in the kitchen.”

Abdul all but ran for cover and was replaced by Mahmud with a menu. Mahmud was no more communicative than before.

“Thank you,” he intoned professionally, and turned to leave; but the Saint called him back.

“Mahmud,” he asked with soft insistence, “who is it you’re afraid of — me, the police, or the inventive chaps who killed your friend?”

Mahmud’s eyes were now as evasive as Abdul’s had been.

“He was not my friend,” he announced curtly. “He was not a man to make friends. He never talked about himself, and I never saw him except here.”

“An unsociable type,” Simon mused, “but was that enough reason to kill him?”

Mahmud lost his aplomb for the first time.

“Kill him?” he exclaimed in a shocked whisper. “You cannot be suggesting that I or anyone here killed him!”

“I didn’t intend to suggest anything,” Simon answered. “I could hardly know, could I? You and your associates don’t seem to talk any more about yourselves than you say Ali did.”

Mahmud completed a carefully controlled deep breath.

“We are here to serve the customers,” he said stiffly.

The Saint took a deep breath of his own. He realised that he had been overoptimistic to imagine that Abdul Haroon or one of his employees would take the first opportunity to blurt out their secret troubles to his sympathetic ear, the way bullied townspeople do in Western movies as soon as the hero lopes into town. Apparently the fear of these Pakistanis was so overpowering that they were afraid even to admit that they had anything to fear. With Ali’s grisly example fresh in their minds, their attitude was not really surprising. It at least confirmed that Ali’s fate was not the handiwork of a couple of madmen who had chosen their victim more or less at random. The force that had twisted out Ali’s life had also threatened his co-workers.

“Mahmud,” the Saint said earnestly, “I am not here just to eat, and I’m certainly not here out of idle curiosity.” He leaned forward and rested his elbows on the newspaper and looked at Mahmud with disconcerting blue eyes. A little bluff seemed necessary to lubricate the wheels of confession. “I happen to know that Ali was not eliminated by a jealous husband or somebody who didn’t like the way he served the sambuls. He was killed because he got in the way of the racketeers who’re picking the bones of illegal immigrants from Pakistan and India after they get into this country. He was killed in the picturesque way he was so that other rebellious souls would feel a little less enthusiastic about shouting their complaints from the rooftops — or even whispering them to nosy characters like me. I don’t think I can put it any more clearly than that, and I don’t think I need to. My almost infallible intuition tells me that you’re already several chapters ahead of me.”

Mahmud was as unmoved as the Taj Mahal would have been by a light breeze.

“I am sorry, sir,” he said.

“So am I, but I suggest you talk this over with your boss in the back room and see if you can’t come up with something a little more helpful than cold sweat.” He handed back the menu unopened. “And while you’re back there, please order me some samosas, lamb curry, pilau rice, dhal, and all the sambuls you can crowd on the table.”

“Thank you, sir.” Simon had to admire the inappropriately arctic tones in which Mahmud uttered his next words. “And how would you like the curry, sir? Mild, medium or hot?”

“Very hot.”

“Thank you, sir.”

The Saint was left alone with his drink and his newspaper for just a few seconds. At the end of that brief interval, the street door opened and the Golden Crescent’s second customer of the early evening walked in, looked around, noted the Saint and the absence of waiters, and stood for a minute near the doorway as if wanting stubbornly to be greeted by people who were not there. He was a medium-weight tweedy man with sandy hair and moustache and ruddy cheeks. His face and the backward flow of his hair looked as if they had been sculpted to their present form by a strong headwind.

Simon would probably not have paid so much attention to the grey-suited man’s appearance if he had not already decided that his newspaper contained no other fascinating journalistic revelations, and settled back against the comfortably padded backrest to sip his iced whisky while he waited for a chance to continue his own probing. If the new customer had not come in he would have had nothing to watch but the change of light on the walls and the passage of cars in the street outside. Now he could observe Civilized Man of the insecurely pretentious sort attempting to assert his authority in a near vacuum.

“Wonderful service around here,” the newcomer remarked loudly.

“I understand they’ve had staff problems,” Simon said.

The man had moved over near him, looking down the passageway which led to the kitchen.

“Staff shortage?” he said. “I can’t understand why, with these Indian chaps pouring into the country like water into a torpedoed ship.” He stationed himself by a table nearby, refusing to sit down until he was properly greeted. “Mind,” he added with a guilty glance over his shoulder as if for the Thought Police of the Egalitarian State, “I’ve nothing against them as such, but we hardly need more people, do we?”

“We need less of some and more of others,” the Saint responded. He motioned indicatively with his glass. “If you want to stake a claim on that table I’ll be your witness.”

The other man lost some of his stiffness, gave a single-shot snorting laugh, and sat down.

“I mean, dammit, I can’t believe they’ve got a personnel problem. I should think there’d be eight men for every job. That’s what it’s coming to anyway, isn’t it? People breeding like rabbits everywhere. Be living ten to a room and eating nothing but seaweed in fifty years, won’t we?”

“I won’t,” said Simon, “but you have a point.”

“Well, I won’t either. I had my day, back when we still ruled the waves, or a good many of them. It’s the next generation that’s going to choke on these policies. I’ve spent some time out in India, and it’s damned obvious why those chaps want to get out and come here, especially since we turned tail and ran. It’s not so damned obvious why the Government welcomes ’em here with open arms. But then it’s not obvious why the Government does anything, unless it’s to appease all the loud mouths and empty pockets in the United Nations.”

“That’s as good a guess as I’ve heard,” Simon agreed. “But you sound even more bitter than most of us.”

“I’ve got reason to be. I was professional Navy; did what I could around Malta and Cyprus and a few other holiday spots during the war. And now...”

He shrugged.

“Caught in the cutbacks?” Simon asked.

“Cutbacks isn’t the word for it,” the red-faced man said. “Massacre, I’d call it. If you want to drive a ship and you’re good at it, you’ve still got just a one in four chance of moving up, and after that it’s four-to-one against you again.” He sat back and expelled air through puffed cheeks. “So, I’m a pensioner. Fifteen quid a week for the rest of my life.” He said it like a prisoner sharing the details of his sentence. “Nothing much to look forward to but sitting out my old age in Hove with a lot of other cast-offs while the country sinks under sheer weight of foreigners and the Government distributes largesse to everybody who can work up enough steam to reproduce.” He suddenly looked at Simon. “Have you been to India?”

“Yes, but only as a private citizen.”

“Like it?”

“I like the food,” Simon said temperately. “And it seems as if you do, too.”

“Right. Burns the soot out of the system. I’ve seen men half dead of dysentery cured with a good hot curry.” He peered around the unstafied room with renewed irritation. “Looks as if we’ll be half dead with starvation before we get any.” He looked back at Simon. “What do you think of this immigration business?”

The Saint pondered the question for a few seconds, but it was a question destined to fade unanswered into nothingness along with the last dying luminescence of the evening on the walls of the buildings opposite.

In the back room of the restaurant, a man screamed.

4

The Saint came to his feet, while his neighbour sat frozen bolt upright in his chair, staring towards the passageway that led past the bar. His once garrulous lips were petrified and pale, and he did not even break his sphynx-like pose when Simon strode away towards the rear of the dining room. Just after he reached the narrow hall beside the bar his way was blocked by Abdul Haroon, who came tottering in from the kitchen area with a handkerchief pressed to the side of his face.

“No reason for alarm or upset, ladies and gentlemen!” he burbled hysterically towards a mythical audience in the dining room. “A small accident in the kitchen. Everything will be immediately all right!”

The long agonised shriek that had reached the Saint’s ears had been no result of a finger sliced along with the onions or a cheek spattered with hot fat.

“I’ll have a look,” he told Abdul. “I’ve got a Boy Scout badge in domestic first aid.”

Abdul continued to interpose his bulk between Simon and the mysteries of the scullery, where a hurried scuffling of feet implied that the fun and games were not completely over yet.

“Sorry, Mr. Haroon, but I’m afraid I’ll have to violate the regulations. You’re not hurt, are you?”

“No,” Abdul said dazedly.

“Then I’d better go and see who is hurt. Pardon me.”

Simon grasped Abdul’s round shoulders firmly and simply moved him aside. As he hurried down the short passage he heard the proprietor lumbering ponderously to catch up with him.

The kitchen of the Golden Crescent was amazingly small and cramped, reminiscent of the interior of an early-model U-boat. There was no sign of a boiler explosion or the collapse of a stove. One panic-stricken cook had propped himself cataleptically against the greasy refrigerator and was staring at the open door of the storage pantry. The other cook and a waiter whose name Simon did not know were in that doorway ineffectually moving forward and backwards like two particles trapped in a fluctuating magnetic field.

Beyond their legs the Saint could see someone writhing on the floor of the storage pantry. Reaching the two frightened and hesitant men who were blocking the way, Simon saw over their shoulders that the party on the floor was Mahmud, who had waited on him. Mahmud lay moaning, his eyes squeezed shut, his knees drawn up, his left hand clutching his right arm. As he twisted in pain his white jacket was blotched and smeared with grime from the wooden floor. There was no sign of blood.

The Saint took in the details of the scene in one second, scarcely pausing behind the men who were already there.

As he shoved his way past them they gibbered at one another and at him in an incomprehensible amalgam of English and their native dialects.

“What happened and who did it?” Simon snapped.

All he could make out from the ensuing linguistic detonation were the words, “Arm broken!”

He did not stop beside Mahmud any longer than he had stopped behind the other two men.

“Call a doctor!” he threw over his shoulder.

If he had waited to inspect Mahmud or question the incoherent witnesses, anybody who had made the assault and fled could be putting half the West End between himself and the scene of his crime. There were only two doors to the Golden Crescent, the front and the back, and nobody had left through the front. Simon hurried on through the narrow room, rich with the smells of the condiments on its shelves, and out of the back door into the alley where he had seen the van parked not long before. There was no van and nobody in the semi-darkness of the alley now, no Indian Gulliver with Lilliputian helper.

The Saint paused for an instant, looking both ways to be doubly sure the alley was free of any possible danger, and then he ran to the corner and the sidewalk where he had passed on his way to the restaurant. He was sure that he saw the van which conveyed the purveyors of Indian foodstuffs losing itself in the traffic almost a block away. A recollection of the giant delivery man glowed to brief vividness in his mind; but knowing that he had no chance of identifying the mayhem merchant, whoever he was and whether he was in the van or not, Simon retraced his steps to the back door of the restaurant.

In the small storeroom Mahmud still lay on the floor, but Abdul Haroon and the uninjured waiter were kneeling beside him. Mahmud’s eyes were open now, and though his face was tense with pain he was completely conscious.

He turned his head fearfully to see who had come in the door, but tended to relax again when he saw that it was the Saint. Abdul looked more confused than his prostrate employee.

“Where did you go?” he asked Simon.

“To see if I could catch whoever did whatever’s been done,” said the Saint matter-of-factly. “I didn’t.”

He was standing beside Abdul now.

“His arm is broken,” the owner of the Golden Crescent told him.

Mahmud looked up at the Saint almost pleadingly.

“It was an accident,” he said.

Simon narrowed his eyes with disbelief.

“An accident?” he asked. “I’m sorry to have to take an ironic attitude in a time of personal tragedy for you, my friend, but what did you do — catch your arm in an egg-beater?”

“He slipped,” the other waiter said vaguely.

“A box fell,” added one of the cooks from the doorway for good measure.

The Saint knelt next to Abdul and Mahmud.

“I’d have been more likely to conclude that one of your competitors was trying to do you out of your waiters the hard way,” he averred.

He reached to touch Mahmud’s limp arm, but the injured man winced in agony as Simon put pressure on it, and tried to shrink away.

Haroon told one of the cooks to call for a taxi to pull into the alley, and the man scuttled out.

“We will take him to a doctor,” Haroon explained to Simon. “We know one near here.”

“At the rate you’re going, you might as well hire one to stay in residence,” the Saint said. He stood up suddenly, stepped back, and faced the whole group. “Now let’s try to bring a little realism to this Never-Never Land. As far as I can tell through all the polite fog, you’ve got every intention of sitting tight while the bad guys walk all over you with king-sized boots. There’s not much point in being discreet if you end up like Mahmud here.”

There was an embarrassed and very deep silence. Abdul finally spoke.

“It would be worse to end up like Ali,” he said in a voice that was almost a whisper.

The mere fact that he had found the courage to refer to Ali gave Simon hope.

“I don’t expect anybody to sign a complaint,” he said, “but I’m not the police so there’s no need to sign anything. I think Mr. Haroon at least has an idea of how I work. Just give me a hint — or get in touch with me later if you won’t talk in front of other people.”

He stopped and waited, feeling slightly ridiculous as another long silence followed. Abdul got to his feet next to Simon and avoided looking at him.

“But it was only an accident,” he muttered.

Simon looked around at his otherwise mute audience in exasperation. Before he could think of anything appropriately galvanising to say, the cook who had taken off came running back in.

“Taxi here!” he announced.

Behind him, through the open door, Simon could see the lights of the black taxi in the alley.

“Help me,” Mahmud groaned.

They lifted him carefully to his feet, and he was able to walk very slowly out to the car, supported by Abdul and one of the cooks. Abdul told his last operational waiter and his second cook to get back on the job before his reputation was so besmirched that he would be reduced in this, his intolerable old age, to hawking chestnuts in Piccadilly Circus.

Simon saw Mahmud safely into the taxi. The cook looked questioningly at Abdul.

“Yes, go with him, go with him!” the restaurant-owner cried in despair, flapping the cook into the automobile with the backs of both hands. “I am already destroyed. What does it matter — one cook, two cooks, no cook? I am utterly and completely undone!”

His whole body sagged as the cook scrambled into the taxi with the injured man and the cab pulled away. With a Lear-like expression of total despair he faced the Saint for an instant and then walked slowly towards the open door of the Golden Crescent. Simon reached out and closed it before Abdul could step inside. The sky was almost completely dark now, and there were no artificial lights in the alley itself. Abdul’s eyes, as they met the Saint’s at close range, were large with fear, reflecting the moving illuminations of the street at the comer.

“I must... see to my customers,” he said desperately.

As he pushed towards the door Simon barred his way with an outstretched arm so efficiently strong that it would have taken ten Abduls to move it.

“I’m one of your customers,” the Saint said, “and I’m always right.” He relaxed a little as Abdul stopped trying to push past him. “Besides, I have priority. I was the first one here tonight and I still haven’t been waited on, and I’m getting a little tired of waiting in general.”

Abdul made a futile effort to misinterpret.

“I am sorry, Mr. Templar, but you understand... As soon as possible you will have your dinner.”

Simon leaned back against the closed door and folded his arms, regarding Abdul in the darkness as a circus trainer might regard a recalcitrant seal.

“Let’s stop playing patty cake, shall we? I’m embarrassed enough for myself without having to be embarrassed for you.”

“Embarrassed?” Abdul asked.

“Yes, embarrassed. I’m a natural-born anarchist, and if there’s one thing I’d just as soon step on as look at it’s a do-gooder who tries to help people who don’t want his help. But that’s what you’re making me feel like.”

Abdul shifted his feet miserably.

“I’m sorry.”

Simon hesitated thoughtfully.

“I’m beginning to think you people enjoy being bashed.”

Abdul did not say anything.

“We’re obviously alone out here,” the Saint argued, “Nobody can hear us. I feel like dropping the whole subject and sticking to Italian restaurants from now on, but I hate to let something go once I’ve got a hold on it. So why don’t you at least give me a lead?”

Abdul still did not say anything.

“What about King Kong and his pint-sized playmate who were toting groceries through this very door at about the time Mahmud had his accident? They must have seen it... or done it.”

He could sense the electric tension that suddenly stiffened Abdul’s body, and he could see the confused surprise on the fat man’s face.

“How did you know they were here?” Abdul croaked.

“I was admiring them on my way in.”

“They...” Abdul stopped and shrugged. “They had left, of course, or they would have stayed... to help after the accident.”

Simon took in a deep breath and blew it tiredly out again.

“Oh, Mr. Haroon, you are very good at running a restaurant but very bad at lying. I’ll try once more: Would you just give me the name of the driver of that van and the address of Supreme Imports?”

Abdul, sensing reprieve in the wind, spoke more vehemently.

“I don’t know the driver’s name. There is no need to. And Supreme Imports...” He shrugged. “I do not happen to know their address since their salesman called on me here originally and all our business has been done here since then.”

Simon saw no reason to continue wasting his time. He stepped away from the door and opened it.

“After you, then. I’ve enjoyed our talk. It’s nice to meet a man without a care in the world.”

Abdul smiled wanly and dabbed his handkerchief against his perspiring fat cheeks.

“After you, Mr. Templar,” he said in a loud voice. “It is very good of you to be so concerned about poor Mahmud.”

Simon went disgustedly back through the kitchen, where his very existence was conscientiously ignored and down the hallway to his table. His red-cheeked acquaintance who had once ruled the waves had disappeared, perhaps understandably, but several more innocent diners had taken other places in the room. The other waiter, soon reinforced by Abdul’s frenetic help, was running from errand to errand in a valiant effort to please them. Almost as soon as the Saint sat down his food was served, but he had scarcely any real appetite left. Like a mathematician with a teasing problem in his head, he found it hard to think of anything but the challenge towards which he had set his course when he had entered the Golden Crescent in the first place. Briefly, out of disgust with the terror-stricken reticence of Abdul and his staff, he had felt like dropping the whole tentative project and leaving them to sweat out their own problems; but on reflection the silence of the Pakistanis seemed more a challenge than their co-operation would have been. And then there was that muttonchop-whiskered Goliath and his pipsqueak partner... and that daring reporter, Mr. Tam Rowan... all in all, ingredients which properly blended might provide as much excitement as the Saint had enjoyed in a long long while.

By the time he had finished his dinner Simon had no more thoughts of quitting left in his head. His mind was simmering with plans and possibilities, and he was as eager as a hound for the chase.

As if in reward for his determination, there was a little surprise waiting for him when he opened the folded bill which Abdul himself left on his table. A hasty hand had pencilled five words in the margin which had nothing to do with the menu.

“Don’t! They would kill anybody.”