Señor Saint

1

Before the idea becomes too firmly established that Simon Templar (or, as it usually seems easier to call him, the Saint), never bothered to steal anything of which the value could be expressed in less than six figures, I want to tell here the story of the most trivial robbery he ever committed.

The popular conception of the meanest theft that can be committed is epitomized in the cliché of “stealing pennies from a blind man.” Yet that, almost literally, is what the Saint once did. And he is perhaps prouder of it than of any other larceny in a list which long ago assumed the dimensions of an epic.

The Saint has been called by quite a thesaurus of romantic names, of which “The Robin Hood of Modern Crime” and “The Twentieth Century’s Brightest Buccaneer” are probably the hardest worked. By public officials obligated to restrain his self-appointed and self-administered kind of justice, and by malefactors upon whom it had been exercised, he was described by an even more definitive glossary of terms which cannot be quoted in a publication available to the general public. To himself he was only an adventurer born in the wrong age, a cavalier cheated out of his sword, a pirate robbed of his black flag, with a few inconvenient ideals which had changed over the years in detail but never in principle. But by whatever adjectives you choose to delineate him, and with whatever you care to make of his motives, the sober arithmetical record certainly makes him, statistically, one of the greatest robbers of all time. Estimates of the total loot which at one time or another passed through his hands, as made by mathematically-minded students of these stories, vary in their net amount: his expenses were always high, and his interpretation of a tithe to charity invariably generous. But by any system of calculation, they run comfortably into the millions.

Such a result should surprise nobody. Simon Templar liked big adventures, and in big affairs there is usually big money involved, this being the sordid state of incentives in our day and age.

But the Saint’s greatness was that he could be just as interested in small matters when they seemed big enough to him. And that is what the incident I am referring to was about.

This happened around the town of La Paz, which in Spanish means only “Peace.”

2

La Paz lies near the southern tip of the peninsula of Baja California, “Lower California” in English — a long narrow leg of land which stretches down from the southern border of California and the United States. On account of the peculiarly ineradicable obsession of American statesmen with abstract lines of latitude and longitude as boundaries, instead of more intelligible geographic or ideographic frontiers, which accepted the ridiculous 38th-parallel partition of Korea as naturally as the quaint geometrical shape of most American state lines, this protuberance was blandly excluded from the deal which brought California into the Union, although topographically it is as obviously a proper part of California as its name implies. There is in technical fact a link of dry land south of the border connecting Baja California with the mainland of Mexico, but there is no practical transportation across it, no civilized way from one to the other without passing through the United States: for all the rest of its length, the Gulf of Lower California, or the Sea of Cortez, as the Mexicans know it, thrusts a hundred miles and more of deep water between the two.

Thus like an almost amputated limb, Baja California hangs in the edge of the Pacific, bound to Mexico by nationality, to California by what terrestrial ligaments it has, nourished by neither and an anomaly to both. The highway artery leaps boldly across to Tijuana and contrives to keep going south to Ensenada, bearing a fair flow of tourist blood; but then almost at once it is a mere dusty trickle of an almost impassable road, navigable only to rugged venturers in jeeps, which meanders through scorched and barren waste lands for hundreds of empty miles to La Paz, which is the end of the line.

La Paz is a port of long defunct importance, seeming to survive mainly because its inhabitants have nowhere else to go. But that was not always true. Here in the fine natural harbour, once, top-lofty Spanish galleons came to anchor, and bearded soldier-monks peered hungrily at the rocky shore, eager to convert the heathen with pax vobiscums or bonfires, but with some leaning towards the latter, and always with an eye to the mundane treasures that could be heisted from the pagans in exchange for a sizzling dose of salvation. But the gold of that region, though it was there and is still there, was too hard to extract for their voracious appetite, and they sailed on towards the richer promise of the north. Others, however, who came later and stayed, discovered treasure of another kind under the pellucid warm blue waters near by: once upon a time, the pearl fisheries of La Paz were world famous, far surpassing the product of the South Pacific oyster beds which most people think of in that connection today.

And that is what this story began to be about.

“It was the Japs,” Jocelyn Ormond said. “They put something in the water that killed off all the oysters. They were all up and down this coast just before the war, pretending to be fishermen, but really they were taking soundings and mapping our fortifications and getting ready for all kinds of sabotage. Like that.”

“I know,” said the Saint lazily. “And every one of them had a Leica in his pocket and an admiral’s uniform in his duffel bag. Some of it’s probably true. But can you tell me how destroying the Mexican pearl industry would help their war plans against the United States? Or do you think it was some weird Oriental way of putting a spell on everything connected with pearls, like for instance Pearl Harbor?”

“You’re kidding,” she said sulkily. “The oysters did die. You can’t get away from that.”

When they were introduced by a joint acquaintance he had a puzzling feeling that they had met somewhere before. After a while he realized that they had — but it had never been in the flesh. She was a type. She was the half-disrobed siren on the jacket of a certain type of paper-bound fiction. She was the girl in the phony-tough school of detective stories, the girl that the grotesque private eye with the unpaid rent and the bottle of cheap whisky in his desk drawer is always running into, who throws her thighs and breasts at him and responds like hot jelly to his simian virility. She had all the standard equipment — the auburn hair, the bedroom eyes, the fabulous mammary glands, the clothes that clung suggestively to her figure, the husky voice, the full moist lips that looked as if they would respond lecherously enough to satisfy any addict of that style of writing — although the Saint hadn’t yet sampled them. He couldn’t somehow make himself feel like the type of cut-rate Casanova who should have been cast opposite her. He couldn’t shake off a sense of unreality about her perfect embodiment of the legendary super-floozy. But there was no doubt that she was sensational, and in a cautious way he was fascinated.

He knew that other men had been less backward. She was Mrs Ormond now, but she had discarded Ormond some time ago in Reno. Before Ormond, there had been another, a man with the earthy name of Ned Yarn. It was Ned Yarn whose resuscitated ghost was with them now, intangibly.

“I mean,” she said, “they were all supposed to have died — until I got that letter from Ned.”

Simon went to the rail of the balcony which indiscreetly connected their rooms, and gazed out over the harbour and the ugly outlines of La Paz, softened now by the glamour of night lights. They were sitting outside to escape from the sweltering stuffiness of their rooms, the soiled shabbiness of the furniture and decoration, and the sight of the giant cockroaches which shared their tenancy. For such reasons as that, and because your chronicler does not want to be sued for libel, the hotel they were staying at must be nameless.

“Let me see it again,” he said.

She took the worn sheet of paper from her purse and gave it to him, and he held it up to read it by the light from inside the room.

The writing was awkward and straggly, up hill and down dale, the long letters overlapping between lines.

“Is this his writing?” Simon asked.

“It wasn’t always that bad. Maybe he was drunk when he wrote it. Now that we’re here, I wonder why I came on this wild-goose chase.” She stared at the anæmic residue in her glass. “Fix me another slug, Saint.”

He went back into the room, fished melting ice cubes from the warming water in the pitcher, and poured Peter Dawson over them. That was how she took it, and it never seemed to affect her much. Another characteristic that was strictly from literature.

“That letter dated over five months ago,” he said. “Did it take all that time to reach you, or did you only just decide to do something about it?”

“Both,” she said. “I didn’t get it for a long time — I was moving around, and it was just lucky that people kept forwarding it. And when I got it, I didn’t know whether to believe it, or what to do. If I hadn’t met you, I mightn’t ever have done anything about it. But you know about jewels.”

“And I’m notorious for taking chances.”

“And I like you.”

He smiled into her slumbrous eyes, handing her the re-filled glass, and sat down again in the other chair stretching his long legs.

“You liked Ormond when you married him, I suppose,” he said. “What was the mistake in that?”

“He was a rich old man, but I thought he needed me. I found out that all he wanted was my body.”

“It sounds like a reasonable ambition.”

“But he wanted a bird in a gilded cage. To keep me in purdah, like a sultan. He didn’t want to go places and do things. He’d give me presents, but he wouldn’t let me have a penny of my own to spend.”

“An obvious square,” said the Saint. “But you fixed him. What about Ned?”

“I was very young then, just a small-town girl trying to crash Hollywood and making doughnut money as an extra. And it was during the war, and he was young too, and strong and healthy, and that Navy uniform did something for him. It happened to a lot of girls... And then the war was over, and I woke up, and he was just a working diver, a sort of submerged mechanic, earning a mechanic’s wages and going nowhere except under docks and bridges.”

Simon nodded, leaning back with his freebooter’s profile turned up impersonally to the stars. He had heard all this before, of course, but he wanted to hear it once again, to be sure he had heard it all.

“That’s all this Tiltman wanted,” she said. “A good working diver. Percival Tiltman — what a name! I should have known he was a phony, with that name, and his old-school-tie British accent. But he knew where the richest oyster bed of all was, and it was one that the Japs had missed somehow, and he had some real pearls to prove it... Of course, he needed money too — for equipment, and a boat, and bribes. Mostly for bribes. That should have been the tip-off, all by itself.”

“I don’t know,” said the Saint. “I can believe that the Mexican Government might take a dim view of foreigners coming down and walking off with their pearls.”

“Well, anyway, he got it.”

“It was about ten thousand dollars, wasn’t it?”

“Exactly eleven thousand. Most of it was from my friends — people I’d known in the studios. Ned’s best friend put some in. And twenty-five hundred was my own savings, from what Ned had sent me while he was overseas.”

“And Ned and Brother Tiltman took off with it all in cash?”

“All of it. And that’s the last anyone heard of them — until I got that letter.”

“How hard did you try to find him?”

“What could I do? I didn’t have an address. Ned was going to write to me when he got down here. He never did.”

“There’s an American vice-consul.”

“We tried that, after a while. He never heard of them.”

“How about the police?”

“I wrote to them. They took three weeks to answer, and then they just said they had no information. Perhaps some of the money was used for bribes, at that.”

“I mean the American police. Didn’t anyone make a complaint?”

“How could I? And make myself the wife of a runaway crook? Our friends were very nice about it. They were sorry for me. I’ve never felt so humiliated. But it was all too obvious. Ned and Tiltman had just taken our money and run off with it. It wasn’t even worth anybody’s while to come down here and try to trace them. They’d had too long a start. By the time we realized what they’d done, they could have been anywhere in South America — or anywhere in the world, for that matter. I just waited till Ned had been gone a year, and divorced him as quietly as I could, for desertion.”

“But,” said the Saint, “it looks now as if he’d been here all the time, after all.”

Mrs Ormond swished the Scotch around over the ice in her glass with a practised rotary motion, brooding over it sullenly.

“Perhaps he came back. Perhaps he spent all his share of the money, and now he thinks he can promote some more with the same gag. Who knows?”

“It was nearly ten years ago when he disappeared, wasn’t it?” said the Saint. “If he got half the loot, he’s lived on less than six hundred a year. That’s really making it last. If he was going to try for more, why would he leave it so long? And why did he disappear when he did, without any kind of word?”

“Don’t ask me,” she said. “You’re the detective. All I know is, there’s something fishy about it. That’s why I wouldn’t have come here alone. You’d better be careful. I hope you’re smarter than he is.”

Simon raised an eyebrow.

“When this started, you gave the impression that he was almost boringly simple.”

“That’s what everyone thought. But look what he did. He must have had us all fooled. You can’t believe anything he says.”

“I’m not exactly notorious for buying wooden nickels — or plasticine pearls. I’ll keep my guard up.”

“Do that in more ways than one. I told you, he was a very husky guy. And he could be plenty tough.”

“I can be tough too, sometimes.”

She eyed him long and appraisingly.

“Come here,” she said, in her throatiest voice.

He unfolded himself languidly and stood beside her.

“No, don’t tower over me. Come down to my level.”

He squatted good humouredly on his heels, close to her chair.

“You look strong,” she murmured, “in a lean leathery way. But I never found out how far it went. That’s why I like you. You’re different. Most men are in such a hurry to show me.”

Her hand felt his arm, sliding up under his short sleeve. Her eyes widened a little, and became soft and dreamy. The hand slid up to his shoulder, and the tip of her tongue touched her parted lips.

Simon Templar grinned, and stood up.

“I’m strong enough,” he said. “And I’ll be very careful.”

3

He had already located the Cantina de las Flores — had, in fact, been inside it earlier in the evening. It was a small and dingy bistro in a back street of unromantic odours, and the only flowers in its vicinity were those which were painted in garish colours on the sign over the door. An unshaven bartender in a dirty shirt had informed him that Consuelo would not be there until ten. It was only a few minutes after that hour when the Saint strolled towards it again.

He would probably have been less than human if he had not thought more about Jocelyn Ormond than about Consuelo on the way over. Consuelo was only a name, but Mrs Ormond was not easy to forget.

He tried to rationalize his reaction to her, and couldn’t do it. According to all tradition, there should have been no problem. She not only had all the physical attributes, in extravagant abundance, but she knew every line in the script, in all its cereal ripeness. The dumbest private eye on the news-stands could have taken his cue and helped himself to the offering. Yet the Saint found a perverse pleasure in pretending to be blandly unconscious of the routine, in acting as if her incredible voluptuousness left him only amused. Which was an outright glandular lie.

He shook his head. Maybe he was just getting too old inside...

The bar, which had been drably deserted when he was there before, was now starting to jump. There were a dozen and a half cash customers, a few obviously local citizens but a majority with the heterogeneous look of seamen from visiting freighters — a sterling and salty clientele, no doubt, but somewhat less than elegant. There were also half a dozen girls, who seemed to function occasionally as waitresses, but who also obviously offered more general hospitality and comradeship. Instead of the atmospheric obbligato of guitars with which no Hollywood producer could have resisted backgrounding such a set, an enormous juke box blared deafening orchestrations out of its rococo edifice of plastic panels behind which coloured lights flowed and blended like delirious rainbows, a dazzling and stentorian witness to the irresistible march of North American culture.

Simon went to the counter and ordered a beer. The bartender, only a few hours more unshaven and a few hours dirtier than at their first meeting, looked at him curiously as he poured it.

“You are the señor who was looking for Consuelo.”

“Is she here now?”

“I will tell her,” the man said.

Simon took his glass over to the juke box and stood reading the list of its musical offerings, toying with the faint hope that he might find a title which suggested that in exchange for a coin some slightly less ear-splitting melody might be evoked.

“You were asking for me?” a voice said at his shoulder.

The Saint turned.

He turned slowly, because the quality of the voice had jolted him momentarily off balance. It was an amazing thing for a mere voice to do at any time and, against the strident din through which he had to hear it, it was almost incredible. Yet that was what it achieved without effort. It was the loveliest speaking voice he had ever heard. It had the pure tones of cellos and crystal bells in it, and yet it held a true warmth and a caress and a passion that made the untrammelled sexiness of Jocelyn Ormond’s voice sound like a crude rasp. Just those few words of it stippled goose-pimples up his spine. He wanted the space of a breath to re-establish his equanimity before he saw the owner.

Then he saw her; and the goose-pimples tightened and chilled as if at a touch of icy air, and the jolt he had felt turned to a leaden numbness.

She could have been under thirty, but she was aged in the cruel way that women of her racial mixture, in that climate, will age. You could see Spanish blood in her, and Indian, and undoubtedly some African. Her figure might once have been enticingly ripe, but now it was overblown and mushy. Her black hair was lank and greasy, her nose broad and flat, her painted mouth coarse and thick. Even under a heavy layer of powder that was several shades too light, her complexion showed dark and horribly ravaged with pock-marks. She smiled, showing several gold teeth.

“I am Consuelo,” she said in that magical voice.

Somehow the Saint managed to keep all reaction out of his face, or hoped he did.

“I am looking for an American, a Señor Yarn,” he said. “He wrote a letter saying that one should come here and ask for you.”

Her eyes flickered over him oddly.

“Sí,” she said. “I remember. I will take you to him. Un momentito.”

She went to the bar and spoke briefly to the bartender, who scowled and shrugged. She came back.

“Come.”

Simon put down his glass and went out with her.

The sidewalk was so narrow that there was barely room for them both, and when they met any other walkers there was a subtle contest of bluff to decide which party should give way.

“It was a long time ago that he told me to expect someone,” she said. “Why did you take so long?”

“His letter took a long time. And there were other delays.”

“You have the letter with you?”

“It was not written to me. I was sent by the person to whom he wrote.”

Some instinct of delicacy compelled him to evade a more exact naming of the person. He said, cautiously, “You know what it was about?”

“I know nothing.”

Her high heels clicked a tattoo of fast short steps, hobbled by a skirt that was too tight from hip to knee.

“I have never met Señor Yarn,” he said. “What kind of a man is he?”

She stopped, looking up to search his face with a kind of vehement suddenness.

“He is a good man. The best I have ever known. I hope you are good for him!”

“I hope so too,” said the Saint gently.

They walked on, zigzagging through alleys that grew steadily narrower and darker and more noisome, but the Saint, whose sense of direction could be switched on like a recording machine, never lost track of a turn. The people who shared the streets with them became fewer and vaguer shadows. Life went indoors, and barricaded itself against the night behind shutters through which only an occasional streak of yellow light leaked out. It revealed itself only as a muffled grumbling voice, a sharp ripple of shrill laughter, the wail of a baby, the faint tinny sound of a cheap radio or gramophone; and against that dim sound-track the clatter of Consuelo’s heels seemed to ring out like blows on an anvil. If the Saint had not stepped silently from incurable habit, he would have found himself doing it with a self-conscious impulse to minimize his intrusion. If he could conceivably have picked up Consuelo, or any of the other girls, in the Cantina de las Flores, without an introduction, and had found himself being led where he was for any other reason, he would have been tense with suspicion and wishing for the weight of a gun in his pocket. But he did not think he had anything to fear.

When she stopped, a faint tang of sea smells penetrating the hodge-podge of less natural aromas told his nostrils that they were near another part of the waterfront. The shack that loomed beside them was different only in details of outline from the others around it — a shanty of crumbling plaster and decaying timbers, with a rambling roof line which could consist of nothing but an accumulation of innumerable inadequate repairs.

“Here,” she said.

She opened the cracked plank door, and Simon followed her in.

The whole house was only one little room. There was a brass bedstead against one wall, with a faded chintz curtain across the corner beside it which might have concealed some sort of sanitary facilities. In another corner, there was an ancient oil cooking stove, and a bare counter board with a chipped enamel basin. On shelves above the counter, there were cheap dishes and utensils, and a few canned foods. Clothing hung on hooks in the walls, between an assortment of innocuous lithographs pinned up according to some unguessable system of selection.

“Ned,” Consuelo said very clearly, “I have brought the Americano you sent for.”

The man sat in the one big chair in the room. It was an overstuffed chair of old-fashioned shape, with a heavily patched slip cover, but he looked comfortable in it, as if he had used it a lot. He had untidy blond hair and a powerful frame, but the flesh on his big bones was soft and shrunken and unhealthy, although his skin had a good tan, and his clean cotton shirt and trousers hung loosely on him. His face had the cragginess of a skull, an impression which was accentuated by the shadows of the dark glasses he wore even though the only light was an oil lamp turned down so low that it gave no more illumination than a candle. He turned only his head.

“I was afraid no one was ever coming,” he said.

“My name is Templar,” said the Saint. “I was sent by — the party you wrote to.”

“My wife,” the man said. “You don’t have to be tactful. Consuelo knows about her.”

“Your ex-wife,” said the Saint.

Ned Yarn sat still, and the dark lenses over his eyes were a mask.

“I guess I’d sort of expected that. How did she get it? Desertion, I suppose.”

“Yes.”

“Is she...”

“She was married again, to a man named Ormond.”

“I don’t know him.”

“They’re divorced now.”

“I see.” Yarn’s bony fingers moved nervously. “And you?”

“Just an acquaintance. Nothing more. What with changing her name, and changing her address several times, apparently your letter took a long time to find her. And then she didn’t want to come here alone, and couldn’t decide who else to trust. Now I seem to be it.”

“Sit down,” Ned Yarn said.

Simon sat on a plain wooden chair by the oilcloth-covered table. Yarn looked around and said, “Do we have anything to drink, Consuelo?”

“Some tequila.”

She brought a half-empty bottle and three small jelly glasses, and poured a little for each of them. She put one of the glasses on the edge of the table nearest to Yarn. Yarn stretched out his hand, touched the edge of the table, and slid his fingers along it until they closed on the glass.

“You must excuse me seeming so helpless,” he said harshly. “But you see, I’m blind.”

4

The Saint lighted a cigarette, and put his lighter away very quietly. He glanced at Consuelo for a moment as she sat down slowly on the other wooden chair at the table, and then he looked at Ned Yarn again.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “How long ago did that happen?”

“Almost as soon as I got here.” The other gave a kind of short two-toned grunt that might have been meant for a laugh. “How much did she tell you about all this?”

“As much as she knows, I think.”

“I can figure what else she thinks. And what everybody else thinks. But you know as much now as I knew when I came down here with Tiltman. That’s the truth, so help me.”

“I hope you’ll tell me the rest.”

Yarn sipped his drink, and put it down without a grimace, as if he was completely inured to the vile taste.

“We flew down here from Tijuana, and I thought it was all on the level. A chance to make some big money legitimately — that is, if we weren’t bothered about bribing a few Mexicans not to watch us too closely. I’m just a sucker, I guess, but I fell for it like all the others. I was even carrying the money myself. We checked in at a hotel, the Perla.”

“And yet the American vice-consul and the police couldn’t find any trace of you. That seems like an obvious place for them to have started asking.”

“Tiltman registered for us both — only he didn’t use our names. If you want to check up on me, ask if they’ve got a record of Thompson and Young. He told me that later.”

“How long did he play it straight?”

“We had dinner. Tiltman was supposed to have arranged for a boat before we left Los Angeles. I was all excited and raring to go, of course. I didn’t even want to wait till morning to look it over. I wanted to see it that night. He tried to stall me a bit, and then he gave in. We set out walking from the hotel. He led me through all kinds of back streets — I haven’t the faintest idea where. Presently, in one of the darkest of them, we came to a bar, and he said, ‘Let’s stop in for a drink.’ ”

“The Cantina de las Flores?”

“No. I didn’t even know the name of it. But, anyway, we went in. We had a drink. And then, as calmly as anything, he said, ‘Look, Ned, I’m going to stop beating about the bush. There isn’t any boat. There isn’t any diving equipment — all that stuff we ordered sent down here from Los Angeles, I cancelled the order and got your money back.’ ”

“And the great lost bed of pearl oysters?”

“He said, ‘That’s just a rumour I heard when I was down here, sort of a local legend. But I don’t know where it is, and nobody else does. It just gave me the idea for a good story to pick up a nice lot of money with. All that money you’ve got in your pocket,’ he said.”

“That must have called for another drink,” murmured the Saint.

“At first I thought he was kidding. But I soon knew he wasn’t. He said, ‘I could’ve taken it from you tonight and left you holding the bag. But I like you, Ned, and I could use a partner. I’ve got tickets for both of us on a plane to Mazatlán. Let’s split the money and go on and make a lot more like it.’ ”

Simon barely touched his glass to his lips.

“And you said no?”

“I swear it. I told him he’d never get his hands on any of the money I had. I was taking it right back to Los Angeles, and I’d see what the police here could do about getting back the refund he’d gotten on the diving equipment. And I walked out.” Ned Yarn twisted his knuckles tensely together. “I didn’t get very far. He must have followed me and crept up behind me. Something hit me on the head, and I was out like a light. It’s been lights out for me ever since.”

“The money was gone, of course.”

Yarn nodded. He said, “You tell him, Consuelo.”

She said, “I found him. It was just outside here. I was going to work. I thought he was drunk. Then I saw the blood. I could not leave him to die. I took him in my house. Then, when he did not get well quickly, I was afraid. I thought, if I call the police, they will say I did it to rob him. I sent for a doctor I know. Together we took care of him. He was sick for a long time. And then I could not turn him out, because he was blind.”

“And you’ve looked after him ever since,” said the Saint, and deliberately averted his eyes.

“I was glad to.” He heard only her voice. “Because then I had fallen in love.”

And now the Saint understood at least a part of that strange story, with a fullness that left him for a little while without speech.

Ned Yarn had never seen Consuelo. He had met her only as a voice, a voice of indescribable sweetness, just as the Saint had first met her; but Ned Yarn had never been able to turn his eyes and have the mental vision that the voice created shattered by the sight of her coarse raddled face. And the woman who spoke with the voice had been kind to him in a way that fulfilled all the promise of its rich tenderness. Her figure would have been better then, and perhaps even her face less marred. And his fingers, when they clumsily explored her features, would that have been sensitive enough to trace them as they really were? They could easily have confirmed to him a picture that his imagination had already formed and was determined to believe. And in his perpetual darkness there could be no disillusion...

“Maybe you think I’m a bum,” Ned Yarn said. “Maybe I am. But what could I do? I didn’t have a penny, and I couldn’t go more than a few steps by myself. Tiltman probably thought he’d killed me with that crack on the head. He might almost as well have. It was months before I really knew what was going on. And even then I still couldn’t think straight, I guess.”

“You figured by that time everyone would have decided you’d run off with Tiltman and the money,” said the Saint.

“Even Joss. I couldn’t blame her. I was just too ashamed to try to write and explain. I didn’t think anyone would believe me. I guess I was wrong, but by the time I started to think it out properly, it was later still — that much more too late. And by then...”

The premature lines in his face softened amazingly. “By then I was in love too. I didn’t really want to go back.”

Ash tumbled from the Saint’s long-neglected cigarette as he put it to his mouth again.

“But you finally wrote to Jocelyn,” he said.

“I’m coming to that. After a while, I realized I couldn’t go on for ever doing nothing but being sorry for myself, letting Consuelo keep me on the money she made as a waitress.”

From the matter-of-fact way Yarn said it, Simon knew that the man could never have had any idea of the kind of place she worked in. He was aware of the woman’s eyes on him, but he gave no sign of it.

“Her doctor thought there might be a chance of getting my sight back if I could go to a first-class specialist,” Ned Yarn said. “But that would cost plenty of money. And I couldn’t go back to the States for treatment when it’d probably mean being put in jail. I needed even more money, to pay everybody back what I’d helped them to lose through Tiltman. I wanted to do that anyway. When I finally got my guts back, I knew that was what I had to do somehow — pay everyone off, and get my eyes fixed, and make a fresh start.”

“You still believed in that overlooked oyster bed?”

“It was the only chance I could think of. Eventually I talked Consuelo into helping me. She has a friend who’s a fisherman, and he’d let us borrow his boat sometimes. We went out as often as we could. We searched all over, everywhere.”

“You went diving, when you were blind?”

“No, Consuelo did that. With a face mask. She can swim like a fish, she tells me, I just sat in the boat. And then, when at last she found oysters, I’d haul up the baskets she filled, and help her to open them. And as I wrote to Joss, we finally did it. We found those pearls!”

“The jackpot?” Simon asked.

Ned Yarn shook his head.

“I don’t know. Quite a few, so far. Consuelo sold a few small ones, to get money to make us just a little more comfortable. And six months ago we bought a boat of our own, so we could go out more often. Of course she got practically nothing for them, because of the way she had to sell them. And she couldn’t show any of the big ones without attracting too much attention. That’s why I had to get in touch with someone who’d know their real value, and perhaps be able to sell them properly up north.”

At Simon’s side, the woman turned abruptly, her over-plucked eyebrows drawn together.

“Is he a buyer of pearls?” she asked. “Is that why he is here? You did not tell me, Ned.”

“I know.” The man smiled awkwardly. “I told you I was sending for someone who would help us to buy some real diving equipment, so we could really bring up those oysters after I taught you to use it. I was afraid of getting your hopes too high. But actually, that’s just what he might do.”

“If the pearls are not worth so much, you will use the money to buy diving equipment to look for more?”

“That’s right.”

“But if they’re worth enough,” said the Saint, “you want to pay back eleven thousand dollars to various people, and see if something can be done about your eyes?”

“Yes.”

“And then come back to Consuelo,” said the Saint softly.

“Oh, no,” Ned Yarn said. “I wouldn’t leave here unless she came with me.”

Consuelo stood up with a sudden rough movement that shook the table. She stood beside Yarn with a hand on his shoulder, and his hand went up at once to cover hers.

“I do not like it,” she said. “How do you know you can trust him?”

“I’ll have to risk it,” Yarn said grimly. “Show him the pearls, Consuelo.”

She stared at the Saint defensively, her eyes hot and hostile and shifting like the eyes of a cornered animal.

“I will not.”

“Consuelo!”

“I cannot,” she said. “I have already sold them.”

“What?”

“Sí, sí,” she said quickly. “I sold them. To a dealer I met at the Cantina. I was going to surprise you. He gave me five hundred dollars—”

“Five hundred dollars!”

“For a start. He will bring me the rest soon. I have it here.” She twisted away towards the bed and rummaged under the mattress. In a moment she was back, thrusting crumpled bills into his hands, “There! Count them. It is all there. And there will be more!”

Ned Yarn did not count the bills. He did not even hold them. They spilled over his lap and fluttered down to the floor. He had caught one of Consuelo’s wrists, and clung to it with both hands, and his blind face turned up towards her strickenly.

“What is this?” he said in a terrible hoarse voice. “I never thought you lied to me. But you’re lying now. Your voice tells me.”

“I do not lie!”

“Templar,” said Yarn, with a straining throat, “please help me. There’s a pottery jar on the top shelf, in the corner over the stove. Look in it and tell me what you find.”

Simon got to his feet, a little uncertainly. Then he crossed to the corner in three quick strides. There was only one jar that fitted the description. With his height, he could just reach it.

Consuelo writhed and twisted in Yarn’s grip like a lassoed wildcat, so that the chair he sat in rocked, and pounded on his head and shoulders with her free fist.

“No, no!” she screamed.

But the blind man’s grip held her like an anchor, and she fell still at last as the Saint tilted the jar over one cupped hand, so that the ripple of things rolling from it could be heard over the heavy breathing which was the only other thing that broke the silence.

Simon Templar looked at the dozen or so cheap beads of various sizes brought together in the hollow of his palm, and looked up from them to the defiant streaming eyes of Ned Yarn’s woman.

“I think these are the most beautiful pearls I ever saw,” he said.

5

The woman slid down to the floor beside Yarn and sat there with her face pressed against his thigh.

“Why did you lie, Consuelo?” Yarn asked puzzledly. “What on earth upset you like that?”

“I think I can guess,” said the Saint. “She was just trying to protect you. After all, neither of you knows me from Adam, and you are taking rather a lot on trust. Probably she wanted time to talk it over with you first.”

The woman sobbed.

Ned Yarn caressed her stringy hair, murmuring little soothing sounds as she clung to his legs.

“It’s all right, querida.” His face was still troubled. “But the money — the five hundred dollars. Where did that come from?”

“I bet I can answer that too,” said the Saint. “She’d held out two or three more small pearls and sold them, and she was saving the money for a surprise present of some kind. Is that right, Consuelo?”

She lifted her head and looked at the Saint.

“No,” she said. “It is my own money. I earned it and saved it myself. I kept it from you, Ned. I did not want to spend quite all our money on the search for pearls. I thought, perhaps we will never find any pearls, but I would keep saving, and one day perhaps I could take you myself to see if you could be cured. That is the truth.”

Yarn lifted her up and kissed her.

“How blind can a man be?” he said huskily.

“Some people would give their eyes for what you’ve got,” Simon said.

“And I wish I had mine most so that I could see it. I know how beautiful she must be, but I would like to see her. She is beautiful, isn’t she?”

“She is beautiful, Ned.”

“Please, you must both forgive me,” Consuelo said in a low voice. “Let us have some tequila.”

Simon looked down at the little heap of beads in his hand.

“What do you want me to do with the pearls?” he asked.

The blind man’s dark glasses held his gaze like hypnotic hungry eyes.

“Are they really valuable?”

“I’d say they were, but I’m not an expert,” Simon replied, improvising with infinite care. “They’d have to be sold in the right place, of course. As you may know, individual pearls don’t mean so much, unless they’re really gigantic. Most pearls are made into necklaces and things like that, which means that they have to be matched, and they gain in value by being put together. And then it’s a funny market these days, on account of all the cultured pearls that only an expert can tell from real ones. There are still people who’ll spend a fortune on the genuine article, but you don’t find them waiting on every jeweller’s doorstep. It takes work, and preparation, and patience — and time.”

“But — eventually — they should be worth a lot?”

“Eventually,” said the Saint soberly, “they may mean more to you than you’d believe right now.”

Ned Yarn’s breath came and went in a long sigh.

“That’s all I wanted to know,” he said. “I can wait some more. I guess I’m used to waiting.”

“Do you want me to take the pearls back to the States and see what I can do with them?”

“Yes. And Consuelo and I will go on fishing for more. At least we’ll know we aren’t wasting our time. Where’s that drink you were talking about, Consuelo?” She put the glass in his hand, and he raised it. “Here’s luck to all of us.”

“Especially to you two.” Simon looked at the woman over his glass and said, “Salud!”

He wrapped the beads carefully in a scrap of newspaper and tucked it into his pocket.

“Do you mind if Consuelo guides me back from here?” he asked. “I don’t want to get lost.”

“Of course, we don’t want that. And thank you for coming.”

The night was the same, perhaps a little cooler, perhaps a little more muted in its secret sounds. The woman’s heels tapped the same monotonous rhythm, perhaps a little slower. They walked quite a long way without speaking, as they had before, but now they kept silent as if to make sure that they were beyond the most fantastic range of a blind man’s hearing before they spoke.

Simon Templar was glad that the silence lasted as long as it did. He had a lot to think about, to weigh and balance and to look ahead from.

Finally she said, almost timidly, “I think you understand, señor.”

“I think so,” he said, but he waited to hear more from her.

“When he began to be discontented, we went out in the boat and began looking for pearls. For a long time that made him happy. But presently, when we found nothing, he was unhappy again. At last we found some oysters. Then again he had hope. But there were no pearls. So presently, after some more time, he was sad again. It hurt too much to see him despair. So at last I let him find some pearls. At first they were real, I think. I took them from some earrings that my mother gave me. And after that, they were beads.”

“And when you said you sold them—”

“I did sell the real ones, for a few pesos. The rest was money I had saved for him, like the five hundred dollars.”

“Did you mean what I heard you say — that if you could save enough, you meant to take him to a specialist somewhere who might be able to bring back his sight?”

There was a long pause before she answered.

“I would have done it when I had the courage,” she said. “I will do it one day, when I am strong enough. But it will not be easy. Because I know that when he sees me with his eyes, he will not love me any more.”

He felt it all the way through him down to his toes, like the subsonic tremor of an earthquake, the tingling realization of what those few simple words meant.

She was not blind, and she used mirrors. If she had ever deluded herself, it had not been for long. She knew very well what they told her. Homely and aged and scarred as she was, no man such as she had dreamed of as a young girl would ever love her as a young girl dreams of love. Unless he was blind. Even before the ageing had taken hold she had discovered that, and seen the infinite emptiness ahead. But one night, some miracle had brought her a blind man...

She had taken him in and cared for him in his sickness, finding him clean and grateful, and lavished on him all the frustrated richness of her heart. And out of his helplessness, and for her kindness and the tender beauty of her voice, he had loved her in return. She had used what money she could earn in any way to humour his obsession, to bring him back from despair, to encourage hope and keep alive his dream. And one day she believed she might be able to make at least part of the hope come true, and have him made whole — and let him go.

Simon walked slowly through a night that no longer seemed dark and sordid.

“When he knows what you have done,” he said, “he should think you the most beautiful woman in the world.”

“He will not love me,” she said without bitterness. “I know men.”

“Now I can tell you something. He has been blind for nearly ten years. There will have been too many degenerative changes in his eyes by this time. There is hardly any chance at all that an operation could cure him now. And I never thought I could say any man was lucky to be blind, but I think Ned Yarn is that man.”

“Nevertheless, I shall have to try one day.”

“It will be a long time still before you have enough money.”

She looked up at him.

“But the beads you took away. You told him they were worth much. What shall I tell him now?”

It was all clear to Simon now, the strangest crime that he had to put on his bizarre record.

“He will never hear another word from me. I shall just disappear. And presently it will be clear to him that I was a crook after all, as he believes you suspected from the start, and I stole them.”

“But the shock — what will it do to him?”

“He will get over it. He cannot blame you. He will think that your instinct was right all along, and he should have listened to you. You can help him to see that, without nagging him.”

“Then he will want to start looking for pearls again.”

“And you will find them. From time to time I will send you a few for you to put in the oysters. Real ones. You can make them last. You need not find them too often, to keep him hoping. And when you sell them, which you can do as a Mexican without getting in any trouble, you must do what your heart tells you with the money. I think you will be happy,” said the Saint.

6

Mrs Ormond, formerly Mrs Yarn, lay back in her chair and laughed, deeply and vibrantly in her exquisitely rounded throat, so that the ice cubes clinked in the tall glass she held.

“So the dope finally found his level,” she gurgled. “Living in some smelly slum hovel with a frowzy native slut. While she’s whoring in a crummy saloon and dredging up pearl beads to kid him he’s something better than a pimp. I might have known it!”

She looked more unreally beautiful than ever in the dim light of the balcony, a sort of cross between a calendar picture and a lecherous trash-writer’s imagining, in the diaphanous négligé that she had inevitably put on to await the Saint’s return in. Her provocative breasts quivered visibly under the filmy nylon and crowded into its deep-slashed neckline as she laughed and some of the beads rolled out of the unfolded paper in her lap and pattered on the bare floor.

Simon had told her only the skeletal facts, omitting the amplifications and additions which were his own, and waited for her reaction, and this was it.

“I hadn’t realized it was quite so funny,” he said stonily.

“You couldn’t,” she choked. “My dear man, you don’t know the half of it. Here I come dragging myself down to this ghastly dump, just in case Yarn has really got on to something I couldn’t afford to miss, and all he’s got is a mulatto concubine and a few beads. And all the time, right here in my jewel case, I’ve got a string of pearls that were good enough for Catherine of Russia!”

Simon stood very still.

“You have?” he said.

“Just one of those baubles that Ormond used to pass out when he was indulging his sultan complex. Like I told you. I think he only paid about fifteen grand for them at an auction. And me wasting all this time and effort, not to mention yours, on Ned Yarn’s imaginary oyster bed!”

At last the Saint began to laugh too, very quietly.

“It is rather delirious,” he said. “Let me fix you another drink, and let’s go on with some unfinished business.”