Señor Saint

1

She had probably celebrated at least thirty-five birthdays, but most of them must have marked pleasant years. Now she was entering the period of life at which the sophisticated European, impervious to the adolescent fixations with which Hollywood has helped to pervert the American taste, finds a woman most attractive. She could approach it with the confidence of a figure that had ripened without ever being allowed to get out of hand, a face enhanced by the distinction of maturity, and the kind of clothes and grooming that it takes experience as well as money to acquire.

She said, in a quick breathless way, “You’re Simon Templar, aren’t you? The Saint. One of the croupiers at the Tropicana told me.”

“Did he warn you not to play cards with me?” Simon asked disinterestedly.

“Silly. I’m Mrs Carrington. Beryl, to be friendly. That’s all the introduction I can manage.”

“How do you do,” he said, with restrained courtesy.

She looked over her shoulder nervously, then back to him again.

“I’m not drunk,” she said. “Please believe that. We’ve got to have help and I thought you might be it.”

The Saint inhaled expressionlessly through his cigarette. It was getting to be a job for an electronic computer to count the number of times he had heard some similar opening to that. And “help” usually meant something basically unlawful, with a good chance of getting shot, or clapped in jail, or both, as the most obvious reward.

Which was perhaps why he had had to learn to draw a mask over the glints of purely juvenile devilment that always tended to creep into his eyes at such inspiriting prospects.

“What’s the matter?” he inquired patiently. “Did you lose your husband, or are you trying to?”

“Please be serious. I’ve only got a moment.”

He had all the time in the world, but he had been toying with the preposterous whimsy that he might be able to spend some of it in Havana without any of the things happening to him that seemed to happen everywhere else.

He flicked over in his mind the other times he had seen her. Because of course he had noticed her, as she had noticed him.

The first time, two days ago, in the Capitolio Nacional.

Simon Templar would not ordinarily have been a customer for a piece of conducted sightseeing, especially of a government building, and least of all one which from the outside promised to be just another version of the central-domed design which has become the architectural cliché of the Capitols of the New World. But a taxi driver had mentioned that set in the floor under the dome there was a diamond worth fifty thousand dollars, and this he was curious to see. After all, although the days were somewhat precariously past when he would have been thinking seriously of stealing it, he did not have to forgo the intellectual exercise of casing the job and figuring out how it might be done.

That was the only reason why he happened to be one of a small group of tourists shuffling through the Salon de los Pasos Perdidos, listening with half an ear to the recitation of the guide (“The Hall of Lost Footsteps... largest in the world... four hundred feet... Florentine Renaissance style. Please notice how the pattern of the ceiling is exactly reproduced in the tile on the floor...”) and then gawking up at the immense symbolic gilt figure of The Republic (“The biggest indoor statue in the world... the spear alone weighs a ton...”) and finally clustered with them around the small roped-off square in the centre of which was the diamond (“Bought with the contributions of everyone who worked on this building... it marks the exact spot from which all distances in Cuba are measured. When they say it is a hundred miles to Havana, and you wonder what part of Havana they mean, this is the place... it has thirty-two facets, the same as the number of points of the compass....”). But you had to take the guide’s word for it, for all you could see was a small circular brass grating set in the floor with a pane of glass under it, through which you could only imagine that you saw a diamond.

So the Saint let his gaze shift idly over the faces of his fellow tourists, and the one that arrested it was Mrs Carrington’s. Hers first because it was notably easy to look at on its own merits, and then in conjunction with and emphasized by the face of the man with her, who kept a possessive hand under her arm. For just as she was unmistakably a visitor, with her Nordic features and colouring, the man with his well-oiled black hair and olive skin and rather long-nosed good looks was no less obviously a Cuban. The oddity, of course, being that you would never normally expect to find a native of Havana among such a typical clutch of rubbernecks. He didn’t look a day older than the woman, which left just enough room for cynical speculation to impress them both on the Saint’s memory. Simon found himself dawdling towards the rear of the sightseeing party as it was ushered out of the building, being vaguely inquisitive about what the couple might reveal in the manner of their departure, and saw them get into a new Mercury that was parked outside. It had Indiana licence plates, but the man drove it.

And shortly after that Simon would probably have let them disappear into the limbo of all fruitless surmises. But before he could forget them, he saw them again.

The second time, the night before, at the Tropicana.

The Tropicana claims to be the biggest and the most beautiful night club in the world. It is indeed enormously big, and its fine-weather auditorium, roofed only by the sky and colonnaded with glamorously lighted palm trees, is certainly quite a sight. But in spite of the spectacular advantage of a backdrop of living trees interlaced with spidery stairways and catwalks over which the chorus was able to make endless dramatic entrances, counter-marches, and exits, the floor show was tremendous without much leavening of inspiration, and Simon was finally glad to vacate his seat at the bar and edge his way laboriously through the crowd to the Casino. And there she sat at the roulette table, with the same man standing behind her chair.

The Saint’s analytical eyes observed that she played without strain, moderately disappointed when she lost, reasonably elated when she won, but always relaxed enough to exchange a smiling word now and then with her companion. Therefore her luck was not financially important to her. But he also noted that her stakes were quite modest, and that, combined with the knowledge he already had that her car was not the most expensive make on the market, suggested that she was no more than comfortably well off, without the astronomical kind of bank balance that one automatically associates with such extravagances as gigolos. Could it then be a more genuine romance? There were well-heeled men in Cuba, too, and she was undeniably an attractive woman. But he saw her pick up a small stack of chips and offer them to the man, clearly urging him to play with them; the man shook his head in firm but amiable refusal. Then they both seemed to feel the Saint watching them, and looked at him, and he moved away. It could never be any great concern of his, anyhow — he thought.

Until now.

The croupier had nodded to him as he passed, he remembered, saying helpfully, “Not going to Puerto Rico this winter, sir?” — and the Saint had shrugged with affable vagueness and moved on before he placed the man, but realized that they must have seen each other across a table somewhere in San Juan. So it was probably true that that was how Beryl Carrington had learned his name.

But now she introduced herself as Mrs Carrington, and it was at least certain, for the record, that a man with the looks of her steady companion could not possibly be Mr Carrington.

It could well have seemed like a stretch of coincidence when the Saint strolled in to the Bambú that night and found himself seated two tables away from them. Yet the Bambú, billed as a typically Cuban night spot, was just as ineluctably as the Tropicana on the itinerary of any tourist who was stubbornly determined (as the Saint had been) to find out, regardless of the trauma to his pocketbook and eardrums, exactly what was the legendary fascination of Havana. But this time they had seen him at once, and turned to each other as unanimously as if their heads had been geared together, very evidently to talk about it.

Simon had tried his best this time to suggest innocence of any intention. Perhaps almost too studiously, he had kept his gaze from returning even approximately in their direction. And so now she was sitting beside him, asking for some nebulous kind of help.

It could do no more damage to look towards her table now, so he did, and saw that her boyfriend was no longer sitting there.

“He went to the men’s room,” she said. “I can’t say much now, because I don’t want him to catch me. I’m not sure he’d like it.”

“Shouldn’t you have found that out before you risked getting a knife stuck in me?” Simon murmured.

“I’m staying at the Comodoro. Mrs Carrington. Will you call me tomorrow? Any time. Please.” Again her eyes took a furtive glance around, and then they came back to him with an entreaty as urgent as the breathlessness of her voice: “Please, please do. I must go now.”

And before he could make any answer she was back at her own table, completely absorbed in the manipulation of mirror and lipstick. Her entire absence had been so brief that anyone who had not been watching her like a hawk might never have noticed that she had moved at all.

Simon Templar managed to look equally nonchalant as he took a long pull at his drink.

The orchestra, which had been mercifully silent during the bare minute that Beryl Carrington’s visit had taken, splintered the ephemeral lull with a blast of saxophones hurled full blast at the microphones which Cuban musical taste requires to be placed only inches away from the loudest sections of any orchestra; and in another instant a typically tuneless bedlam of brass was in full frenzied swing, amplified to bone-bruising intensity through the battery of souped-up loud speakers which Cuban custom demands for disseminating music through even the smallest room, and pounded remorselessly home with an assortment of drums, cymbals, rattles, gourds full of dried seeds, and just plain pieces of wood beaten together. Under the impact of that jungle cacophony magnified to the maximum intensity attainable through the abuse of modern electronics, the Saint found it relatively easy to keep his face a blank. In fact, about all he had to do was to let it mirror the numbness which the blare and concussion was threatening to induce in his brain. But out of the corner of his eye he saw Mrs Carrington’s playmate return to their table, and speak to her without sitting down; and she stood up, and they moved on to the dance floor and wedged themselves in among the dedicated crowd who were wriggling and jostling through the motions of a rumba or samba or mambo or whatever the current terpsichorean aphrodisiac was being called that season with every appearance of enjoyment.

About that time Simon Templar decided that he never was likely to experience for himself the mystic rapture which is evoked in some persons by Afro-Hispanic minstrelsy. Something in his cosmogony had undoubtedly been lacking from birth, and he decided to get out while he still had a few other faculties left, before the stupefying din left permanent scar tissue among his brain cells. He had to escape from that paralysing pandemonium to be able to make up his mind about Mrs Carrington’s peculiar invitation anyhow, and there could be no more inconspicuous time to do it than while she and her dancing partner were submerged in the gyrating mob in front of the bandstand. He succeeded in catching a waiter’s eye, and made the pantomime of scribbling on the palm of one raised flat hand which is understood to request a bill anywhere in the world.

As he emerged into the relative quiet outside, the doorman and three loitering drivers vocally offered taxi service, but they were physically cut out by a broad butterball of a man who half encircled the Saint’s back with a brotherly arm and grinned: “I got the best car for you, sir, and the best price.”

For just long enough to let himself be steered diagonally across the driveway into the parking lot, Simon submitted tolerantly to what seemed to be merely the effective technique of the most determined salesman on the beat. Then as he realized that they had gone just a little too far from the entrance, and a corner had shut them off from the sight of anyone there, the man stopped and turned him quite violently, and Simon looked down at the gleam of a knife-blade in the gloom.

“How long do you stay in Cuba, señor?” asked the man.

“Only as long as I can stand the noise,” snapped the Saint.

The fat man’s teeth flashed in the same dim light that glinted on the steel in his hand. Even at that distance the music was so loud that it must certainly prevent anyone around the entrance of the club from hearing almost anything that might happen in the parking lot, short of an atomic explosion.

“I think you will go home tomorrow,” the man said, “if you don’t want to get hurt. People don’t like you to spy on them. You are just a nuisance.”

“Well, Pancho,” said the Saint judicially, “speaking purely on the spur of the moment, I should say you were just a horse’s ass.”

And then, as the fat man’s patronizing grin vanished, Simon moved with a speed that the other, for all his apparent professionalism, could never have allowed for. That fat man himself could never reconstruct exactly what happened; he only knew that a blow out of nowhere sapped all the strength from his fingers, and that the knife he dropped was caught in mid-air almost as he released it and presented point first at the tip of his own nose.

“Go back to the goat who sent you,” said the Saint, in fluent Spanish, “and tell him that it annoys me to be rushed. And when I am annoyed, I do things like this.”

The stout man flinched from the flash of metal across his eyes as the knife spun away into the night. And then a fist that felt no less metallic, although blunter, impinged crisply on his nose and sat him down suddenly in his tracks with a new constellation of lights zipping across his vision. Before he could clear his involuntarily streaming eyes, the Saint was no longer in sight.

In a taxi heading back towards town along the Rancho Boyeros highway, the driver said helpfully, “You no have a girl tonight, sir?”

“Not tonight,” said the Saint.

“You are smart guy, I think. Some women you find make much trouble... But if you like, if you are lonely, I have young cousin, very honest and beautiful girl—”

“Thank you,” Simon said. “But I think someone just got an option on me.”

2

“You see,” Beryl Carrington told him, “Ramón is one of the top men in the Underground.”

“Oh,” said the Saint, and now for the first time he did begin to see a little.

She jumped up restlessly, with a swirl of the clinging négligé that she had put on when he knocked.

“It’s exciting, and rather frightening — isn’t it? — to think that things like that still have to go on, and so close to the United States.”

“Sure,” he said. “But how does it happen to concern you?”

She stared at him, puzzled and almost hurt.

“If I hadn’t heard it, I wouldn’t have believed that the Saint asked that question. Isn’t the fight for freedom, anywhere, something that concerns all of us these days?”

“I know the oratory,” Simon said mildly. “I meant — why you, personally?”

“I got into it when I met Ramón.”

“Where did you meet him? Here?”

“Yes.”

“What part of Indiana are you from?”

“Why, is the accent so obvious?”

“No, but your car plates are. Excuse me if I sound like a district attorney, but I like to know just a few things about the people I’m supposed to help.”

“I understand.” She sat down, facing him. “Lewisburg, Indiana, is the place. Probably you’ve never heard of it, it’s a very small town. I was born and raised there, and I lived there all my life. This is the farthest away I’ve ever been. I married my high school sweetheart, who was also the heir to the biggest industry in town — an umbrella factory. You don’t look like a man who ever owned an umbrella, but if you had one it could easily be a Carrington. They’re very good umbrellas. My husband was a very good guy and a good husband — and just as dull as an umbrella. We had a good, comfortable, normal, and very dull life. Until he died of a good dull case of lobar pneumonia a couple of years ago. It wasn’t until I got over that that I realized how very ordinary and how very dull my entire life had been. I wasn’t left filthy rich — that wouldn’t have been ordinary, would it? — but I could afford to go anywhere within reason. So I decided to see a few places while I was still young enough to have fun. Does that tell you enough?”

Simon nodded, and poured himself another cup of coffee — she had been having breakfast in her room when he arrived, and had ordered a fresh pot of coffee for him.

“And here you just happened to meet Ramón.”

“It wasn’t exactly that kind of pick-up,” she said.

Beryl Carrington had been told by a travel agent that if she wanted to see more of Cuba than the city of Havana where all the tourists go, it would be cheaper to have her own car ferried over from Key West. She had faced the prospect of trying to find her way around in a foreign country with some trepidation, but had finally decided to let it be an adventure. By the time she reached her hotel after getting lost five times on her way from the dock she was wondering whether that kind of adventure could possibly be worth any economy it effected, and a call on the house phone that came to her room while she was still unpacking convinced her that she could only have fallen for the idea during a spell of mental incompetence.

“I am very sorry,” the caller said, “but I have had a little accident to your car.”

Ramón Venino, as he introduced himself with a card in the lobby, was very apologetic and very embarrassed. She was too upset at first to notice how very personable he also was.

“My hand slipped on the wheel — but that is no excuse. I was careless. I wish to take all responsibility.”

They went out together to the parking area to inspect the damage, which consisted of one moderately crumpled fender.

“It is only a little less bad because it is easy to fix,” Venino said. “Give me the key, and I will take it to a garage, and tonight I will bring it back like new.”

Very quickly and sharply she visualized herself waiting from then until doomsday to see either him or her car again. She was distinctly pleased with her own poise and perspicacity.

“Thanks,” she said. “I’d rather take it to a garage myself.”

He inclined his head.

“As you wish. The hotel manager will recommend a place. I only insist that I pay the bill.”

After she had been directed to a garage, and was faced only with the navigational problem of actually finding it, she found Venino waiting beside her car with a taxi.

“Tell the driver where you are going,” he said, “and he will lead the way. He speaks good English, and he will help you at the garage. Then he will drive you where you want to go for the rest of the day. Don’t pay him anything — it is all taken care of.”

He bowed, and left her before she could think of anything to say.

The next morning, however, she recognized his voice when it spoke on the house telephone again.

“Please don’t be annoyed that I have brought your car back myself,” he said. “I only wish to be sure that you are completely satisfied with the repair before I pay the garage.”

The fender had been so well smoothed out and repainted that it would have taken a magnifying glass to find fault with it. And the fact remained that Venino had apparently had little difficulty in persuading the garage to turn the car over to him. If he had been a car thief with a new angle, as her hypertrophied caution had at first suspected him, he could already have got away with his objective.

“It looks fine,” she said.

“I can only apologize again for the inconvenience,” he said. “I am sorry we could not have met in any other way, so that I could have hoped to see you again without you thinking bad things of me.”

It was her turn to feel awkward and embarrassed.

“I think you’ve been very charming,” she said. “If everyone who had an accident was like you, the insurance companies would be out of business.”

“You are very kind. But still I have made it impossible for me ever to ask you to dinner.”

His manner was studiously correct but disarmingly wistful, and his good looks were finally able to make their impression on her.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “Why not ask me, and let me decide how I feel?”

He had given her the most enjoyable evening she had yet spent in Havana, and had distinguished himself further by not making a single premature pass. Therefore she had no excuse for refusing to let him drive her around sightseeing in her own car the next day — which prolonged itself painlessly into another dinner together, and thus into another project for the following morning. And so on.

Almost from the first evening she began to notice odd things about him — the way he would stop and look carefully up and down the street every time they came out of a building, a trick of glancing back over his shoulder at unexpected moments, his phobia about taking any table in a restaurant where he could not sit facing the entrance and with his back to a wall, the continual restless wandering of his eyes. By the third day she had no hesitation about asking him why.

“And so he told you,” said the Saint.

“I suppose it was easier for him, since I was a foreigner, so at least he could be pretty sure I wasn’t already on the other side. And we’d become very good friends very quickly. You know, that can happen.”

Simon nodded.

“What is he afraid of?”

“You forget, it’s really a dictatorship here. And Ramón is one of the people who are trying to get rid of the Strong Man and bring democracy back. You know what would happen to him if the Secret Police caught him.”

“I’m afraid I haven’t been following Cuban politics too closely,” Simon confessed. “However, what’s the programme for getting rid of the Strong Man? A fine rowdy revolution, or a nice neat assassination?”

“Neither,” she said with some spirit. “Ramón and his friends aren’t gangsters. You can’t build a lasting good government on any kind of violence. And it isn’t necessary, either. The majority wants freedom, as they do in any dictatorship. They’re just held down by one small group that’s well organized and has all the key positions. So the Underground is organizing too, and they’ll just arrest that group all at once, the same as a surgeon would remove a growth, without chopping the patient up with an axe.”

“It sounds frightfully humane and tidy,” Simon remarked. “South American revolutions were a lot more fun when I was a boy. So time marches on... Well, when is this change-over set for?”

“Very soon now. It might be almost any day.”

“If it’s all so efficiently organized and ready to roll so soon, I’m still wondering why you so desperately need me.”

She stood up again, as if the springs of repressed excitement would not let her relax.

“They’re afraid that there may be a traitor in the Underground.”

“Aha.”

“And if there is, he might know that Ramón is the only man who has a complete list of all the members. You see what that means? If Ramón was arrested by the Secret Police, everything would be lost. He’s sure that they’d never get a single name out of him under any torture” — she shuddered — “but if they got the list, all his courage wouldn’t make any difference.”

“I’m beginning to appreciate this lad Ramón,” said the Saint. “The list, I gather, isn’t in his head.”

“Of course not. It couldn’t possibly be. There are thousands of names and addresses on it. Naturally there has to be one key list like that, but can you imagine the responsibility of trying to keep it safe?”

Simon regarded her steadily.

“Looking at you,” he observed thoughtfully, “I gather that it makes you pretty jittery.”

She stared at him, her eyes widening and her mouth falling open.

“I didn’t say—”

“No, you didn’t say it, darling. But my brain is beginning to work. Obviously, Ramón has asked you to take care of this list.”

She brought her lips together again with a shrug of resolution.

“All right, that’s it. I’m leaving tonight, and I’m to take it back to the States with me. I can put it in a safe deposit box in Miami until Ramón needs it, and the Secret Police can’t do anything about that.”

“But you’re scared about getting it there — is that it? You’ve been seen around with Ramón too much. If he’s already being watched — which you don’t know — then you may be suspected yourself.”

“Ramon thinks the odds are on my side. As an American who’s never been here before, they ought to believe I’m... well, just a passing romance. But I can’t help thinking and thinking about the other possibility. Suppose they don’t?”

“You’ve got something to worry about.”

“So that’s why — when I saw you for the third time running last night — and by that time I knew who you were — it seemed like an omen. I had to ask you for help.” In her intensity she was completely sexless, either because she scorned such wiles or because nothing in her background was consonant with the use of them; yet for that very reason her appeal was stronger than any siren could have achieved. “Please, will you?”

“Yes,” said the Saint calmly.

She slumped against the wall, twisting her hands together.

“I feel so stupid and small,” she said. “And I was so excited at first. Coming here, and meeting a man who turned out to be a real hero like Ramón and winning his confidence. And then having the chance to do something really important for the first time in my life — something truly dangerous and romantic, like most people only read about. But when it came right to the point, I found I didn’t have what it takes. It wasn’t only being scared of how I’d react to being arrested, or — or the things they might do to me. It was thinking of the thousands of other people whose lives I’d be responsible for. And I found out I was in a blue frozen funk, all through my insides... You must despise me.”

“Anything but. I’m glad you had the sense to know when you were out of your depth, and the guts to admit it.” The Saint’s brows lowered over a passing thought. “Ramón spotted me last night, too — I saw you speak to each other about it. What did he say?”

“He didn’t like it. I told him it must be a coincidence, and you couldn’t possibly be against him, but he was worried. I tried to tell him what everyone knows about you, but I don’t know how much I convinced him. That’s why I still haven’t told him I spoke to you.”

Simon lighted a cigarette.

“All right. Where is this list now?”

“It’s in one of my suitcases. He left it with me last night.”

She hesitated a moment, and then went and opened a suitcase which stood on a trestle in a corner. She turned over a few folded pieces of clothing and brought out an alligator briefcase.

She came over to the Saint with it, and he took it.

“What’s the opposite of a nightmare?” she said. “It’s the word I need for the way it feels to know I don’t have to think twice about trusting you.”

“The words you’re thinking of may be ‘pipe-dream,’ ” he said sardonically.

The briefcase was brand new, so that the leather bulged stiffly over the bulk that it contained. It was equipped with a lock which Simon recognized as being much more resistant to amateur picking than the average run of such hardware, although of course it had no defence against a sharp knife in the hands of anyone who was not bothered about preserving its virginal appearance.

“I’d suggest you go on packing, and let Ramón think this is still in the bottom of that suitcase — then there won’t be any argument,” said the Saint, and got to his feet. “By the way, when are you seeing him again?”

“He’s coming here at one o’clock, for a farewell lunch — or I suppose you’d say, an hasta la vista. He has to bring my car back, anyhow — I let him take it home last night after he brought me back, because his own car is in the shop having an overhaul.”

The Saint’s very clear blue eyes searched her face with disconcerting penetration.

“You think a lot of this guy, don’t you?”

“Only because of what he’s doing, and what he stands for,” she insisted. “I’m not a middle-aged sugar-mammy who came here to look for a Latin thrill. You mustn’t believe that.”

“I don’t,” he said soberly. “And most especially the ‘middle-aged’ part.”

He stubbed out his cigarette and turned towards the door.

“Thanks to the discretion ingrained in me by a misspent youth,” he said, “I got out of my taxi two blocks away, walked over to the beach, wandered into the back of this posada by way of the swimming pool, and ambled up a service stairway. If any Gestapo gunsels do happen to be watching you, I don’t think they saw me coming and I don’t think they’ll see me leave.”

“But where’ll I see you again?” she gasped, in a sudden panic.

“If you don’t know, nobody can make you tell. But I’ll find you. Don’t worry.” He grinned, and tapped the briefcase under his arm. “Whatever happens, I shall be holding the bag.”

He had already started down the service stairs when he heard other footsteps coming up. It was too late to turn back, for whoever was coming up would have turned the corner of the half-landing and seen him before he could have retreated out of sight, and his abrupt reversal of direction would have looked guilty even to someone who was quite unsuspicious. And there was no reason why the feet could not belong to innocent guests of the hotel or its equally inoffensive employees. Simon kept on going, with his reflexes triggered on invisible needle points.

They were two men in dark suits, with a certain air about them which to the Saint was as informative as a label. They looked at him with mechanical curiosity, but he held his course without faltering, and they fell into single file to let him go by. He passed them with the smile and carefree nod of a tourist who had never consciously noticed a policeman in plain clothes in his life.

As he reached the foot of the stairs, the voice of one of them came down to him from the floor above, speaking low and tersely in Spanish.

“Hide yourself here, and take note of anyone who comes to visit her.”

3

Out there in the Miramar district where the Comodoro Hotel is located, Havana’s Fifth Avenue (which, like Manhattan’s Sixth, has been officially re-christened ‘Avenue of the Americas,’ and is just as stubbornly known only by its old name to every native) is far from being the city’s busiest thoroughfare, and as he reached it Simon was wondering if he would have trouble finding a taxi. He did not want to be wandering around the streets of that neighbourhood for long, where not only might the plain-clothes men he had already encountered decide belatedly to investigate him, but Ramón Venino might come driving by from any direction en route to his rendezvous with Beryl Carrington.

He need have had no anxiety. He had barely taken one glance up and down the street when a taxi, drawn by the uncanny instinct for prey that achieves its supreme development in the vulture and the Havana taxi driver, made a screaming U turn and swooped in to the curb beside him.

“Where to?” asked the driver cheerily, starting off without waiting to find out. “Are you hoping to meet a girl, or is your wife here with you? I have a young sister, a lovely girl, but very naughty, who is crazy for Americanos.”

“I have a weak heart,” said the Saint, “and the doctor has ordered me to leave naughty girls alone.”

“Some sightseeing then? I can take you to the Botanical Gardens, then to the Cathedral—”

Simon frowned at the briefcase on the seat beside him. Wherever he went, its pristine newness would be conspicuous, and to walk into his hotel with it in full view, where either policemen or friends of the man he had called Pancho might be watching for him, would be too naïve to even consider.

“How about one of the rum distilleries?” he suggested.

“Yes, sir. I will take you to Trocadero.”

Presently they drew up beside a large low building, at an entrance with sliding doors designed for trucks to drive through. The driver waved aside the Saint’s proffered payment.

“I will be here when you come out.”

Simon stepped into the odorous interior, and was adopted at once by the nearest of a number of men who stood waiting by the entrance.

“Good morning, sir. This is where we make that famous Cuban rum. Step this way, please.” They entered one corner of a vast barn-like factory. “The sugar cane is pulped in that machine there, and then the juice is fermented in those tanks over there. Then it passes through those stills which you see there, and the rum goes into those barrels to be aged. Now this way, please.” They passed through another door into a large room conveniently at hand, where there were several tables already well populated by other visitors concluding their research into the manufacture of rum. “Here we invite you to sample our products. Sit down and be comfortable — there is no hurry.”

Each table was provided with stools on three sides and a long row of bottles on the fourth. Simon’s guide went behind the bottles and at once became a bartender rapidly pouring samples into an inexhaustible supply of glasses, as other guides all over the room were already doing for their personal protégés.

“This is our light rum, this is our dark rum, this is our very best rum. Don’t be bashful, it’s all on the house. These are our liqueurs — apricot brandy, blackberry brandy, crème de cacao. Have whatever you want, there is no limit. And you should try our special exotic drinks — banana cordial, pineapple cordial, mango cordial. You are allowed to take back five bottles with you free of duty. Would you like some of our Tropical Punch, or some Elixir, or a frozen Daiquiri?”

“I’ll take five bottles of plain drinking rum,” said the Saint, sipping very judiciously. “But I want ’em in one of those fancy baskets that you give away.”

“Of course.” The man whipped out a pad and wrote the order. “I’ll get them for you right away. Help yourself to anything you want while you’re waiting.”

Simon moistened his tongue experimentally, out of academic interest, with some of the more unfamiliar flavours, but he was in no mood, as most of the students of distillation around him seemed to be, to take memorable advantage of the phenomenon of unlimited free drinks. He was not even interested in the rum he was buying, except as much of it as would be suitable ballast for the container it would come in.

The guide-salesman returned promptly, bearing a sturdy straw bag of the kind in which every island in the Caribbean makes a trademark of packaging the homing tourist’s duty-free quota of the local brew. Simon paid him, picked up the bag along with the briefcase which he had brought in with him, and went out to look for his driver, who had expected to rack up a nice hunk of waiting time and was disappointed to see him so soon.

“Take me to the Sevilla-Biltmore,” said the Saint.

He quietly removed the paper-wrapped bottles from the straw bag, and put the new alligator briefcase in.

“Do you drink rum, amigo?” Simon inquired.

“Sometimes,” said the driver indifferently.

Simon handed a bottle over the back of the front seat.

“Put this away for when you feel thirsty,” he said.

“Thank you, señor,” said the driver, much more brightly. “Did you enjoy the distillery?”

“It was most educational,” said the Saint. He passed over another bottle. “Take this one home to your sister, the lovely and naughty one, with my compliments and regrets.”

“I thank you for her,” said the driver earnestly. “She would certainly be crazy for an Americano like you. It is a great pity your heart is not just a little stronger. She can be most gentle, too.”

“It would be a privilege to die in her arms,” Simon said gravely, “but it might be embarrassing for you both.”

The three remaining bottles, replaced alongside and overlapping the briefcase, adequately concealed it and left the straw bag bulging just about the same as before.

“I will wait for you,” said the driver, as Simon got out in front of the hotel.

“Not this time,” Simon told him firmly. “I may not go out again today at all.”

He let the distillery basket be snatched by a determined bellhop, and followed it up the steps to the lobby after paying off the cab.

“What room, sir?”

“Can you keep it down here for me till I check out?” Simon asked, and added for the conclusive benefit of anyone who might be listening, “I don’t want to start drinking it up before I get home.”

The bellhop took the bag to the little store room behind the bell captain’s desk, and gave him the stub of a tag. Simon gave him a quarter in exchange and strolled casually away towards the elevators; but as he reached the elevator alcove he swung briskly to his left around a group of visiting firemen and turned off again down the little-used passage to the side entrance on the Prado. But it was not too little used for there to be a taxi waiting outside, and Simon was in it before the driver had time to deliver more than the first four words of his sales talk.

“The Toledo,” Simon said.

“If you want a real good restaurant,” said the driver, “let me take you to—”

“I have to meet someone at the Toledo — and,” Simon continued rapidly, to forestall any further suggestions, “she happens to be a young and beautiful girl.”

This was the purest fiction, but he had nevertheless picked the Toledo for a reason. He had eaten well enough there once before, and knew it to be a small quiet place that made relatively little effort to invite the tourist trade. He thought that he might have done a fair job of throwing any possible followers off his scent for a while, and he did not want to show himself in any of the places where the bloodhounds would most naturally go sniffing first if they were trying to get back on his trail. At least he would like a chance to enjoy his lunch, and a breathing spell in which to sit still and think.

He ordered a dish of Moro crab, that big-clawed delicacy who manages somehow to be just a little more succulent down there than his brother the stone crab of the Florida Keys, and a paella Valenciana, and said, “One other thing — do you think you can find a newspaper lying around anywhere?”

“I will see,” said the waiter.

Simon lighted a cigarette and sipped a glass of manzanilla, and began to take a few things apart in his mind.

Just as positively as the two men he had seen at the Comodoro were of the police, the man he had called Pancho was not. Simon had yet to meet any kind of police, even Secret Police, who threatened people with knives. And if the short man had had any kind of authority, the Saint would never have got away with punching him in the nose. Simon had made no effort to disappear that night, and it wouldn’t have taken a determined search very long to locate him among Havana’s relatively few hotels.

But by the same token it wouldn’t have taken Pancho’s mob much longer to do the same thing, if they had any sort of organization.

Simon had assumed that Pancho was under orders of Venino. Had Mrs Carrington’s argument, then, finally convinced Venino that the Saint meant no danger to him, and had Venino called Pancho off?

That was what Venino might well be hoping that the Saint would believe. But the Saint didn’t believe it for one moment. To believe it, he would have had to accept two or three much greater improbabilities that he simply could not buy.

There had to be some other explanation, that would tie everything together, and whatever it was, it could only be as illegitimate as a cardinal’s daughter.

The waiter brought the Moro crab claws, and with them a slightly rumpled copy of Informacion.

“Lo siento, it is all we have. But if you like I can send out for a Miami paper.”

“No, this is what I wanted.” Simon looked at him with a lift of the eyebrows that was as expressive as it was calculated. “But do you mean to say that you can get Miami papers here?”

The waiter’s surprise was manifestly unfeigned.

“Yes, why not?”

“Even if they say rude things about the President?”

The waiter shrugged.

“What President is not criticized somewhere, señor?”

“Do you ever criticize him?” Simon asked.

“I do not argue about politics,” said the other cheerfully. “It is like religion. It is easy to offend someone and very hard to convert anyone.”

“But you aren’t afraid that if you said what you thought you might land in the juzgado.”

The waiter looked honestly puzzled.

“What would the President care what a poor waiter said?”

“Then you aren’t looking forward to a revolution,” Simon said.

The waiter laughed.

“I hope not. Revolutions are bad for business.”

The Saint let him go to attend to another table, and proceeded to read the newspaper with unusual assiduousness while he ate.

For once he was uninterested in any international events, but he read every line that had any reference to local affairs. And although he did not skip any political items, he was most hopeful of finding the missing link that he needed under much more sensational headlines. A major jewel robbery would have suited him very well — or, as a supreme refinement of plot constructions it would have been almost deliriously intoxicating to read that some ingenious sportsman had actually contrived to steal from the Capitol the diamond across which he had first set eyes on Beryl Carrington and Ramón Venino. But nothing as poetic as that rewarded him — in fact, the only important larceny he found mentioned was an armoured carload of bullion which seemed to have recently vanished somehow between the Banco Insular and the Treasury, which the police were still looking for. And even if some Underground of self-convinced patriots had pulled that caper, it certainly was not hidden in an alligator briefcase.

Suddenly the Saint realized that it no longer made sense to be so coy about that briefcase.

He watched the waiter place beside his coffee cup the complimentary glass of coffee liqueur topped with cream which is the custom of the country, and said, “You have converted me, amigo. I have decided against the revolution. My bill, please.”

“Sí, señor.”

Fifteen minutes later he was at the Prado entrance of the Sevilla-Biltmore again, this time on his way in. He turned immediately towards the elevators, and caught one that was just about to start up. Out of an ingrained habit of preparedness he had his key in his pocket and had not needed to go to the desk for it, and there was nobody lurking around his landing that he could see as he let himself into his room. He went straight to the telephone and called the bell captain.

“Have the goodness to send up the bag of rum which I left down there,” he said, and gave the number of his claim check.

He hung up, and as he did so he heard the sound behind him, though it was no more than the faintest scuff of fabric or the catch of an over-restrained breath. But it made the difference that he was turning as the blanket fell over his head, and the man who threw it did not clamp him quite solidly in the bear-hug that was meant to pinion it over his arms. Another pair of arms clutched him around the knees in the next instant, and he was lifted off his feet and being carried swiftly across the room; he could feel the direction and an involuntary chill went through him, but he went on squirming and lifting his elbows outwards and freed his arms enough to drive one fist after another into something that sobbed and yielded. The grip around his shoulders weakened, and he brought his knees up towards his chest and kicked out again savagely and felt his heels crunch satisfyingly against flesh and bone, and then he was free and falling only a little way to the floor.

The blanket fell off him as he thrashed up, and he saw that he was right beside the open window and in another moment no doubt would have been falling out of it. A queasy horror in his stomach transformed him into a bolt of berserk lightning that completed the annulment of the two men who would have done it to him before they could comprehend the catastrophic extent of their failure. The big man who had thrown the blanket, who was still bent double over what the Saint’s punches had done to his mid-section, took a kick in the face that dropped him in an inert heap; and Pancho the fat boy, who was holding his ribs with one hand and bringing out his switch-knife with the other, only felt the first of the two teak-like fists that bounced his head off the wall until his folding knees took it down below easy reach...

Simon Templar stood breathing slowly and deeply, and gradually became aware of a prosaic but persistent knocking on the door.

He walked over to it, past the open closet where he realized Pancho and his taller pal must have been waiting for him, and flung the door open. A bellboy with the rum basket in one hand stared at him and then beyond him with bulging eyes.

Simon took the bag from him before he dropped it, and acknowledged the two facsimiles of corpses on the floor with a deprecatory gesture.

“They attacked me and tried to rob me,” he said casually. “Send for a policeman to take them away, por favor.”

The lad turned and scooted away like a startled rabbit.

Simon sat on the bed and picked up the telephone again. While he waited for the operator to answer, he extracted the briefcase from under the bottles in the bag.

“The Hotel Comodoro,” he requested.

Reaching out a long leg, he raked Pancho’s knife across the floor towards him, and picked it up. He held the telephone between his ear and his hunched shoulder while he turned the briefcase over and inserted the point of the knife delicately into a seam.

“Mrs Carrington, please,” he said to the Comodoro operator.

It was like a cue for background music when she answered almost at once.

“Beryl,” he said, “this is Simon Templar. Just answer yes or no. Is Ramón with you?”

“Yes,” she said. “I just finished packing.”

“Pretend I’m your travel agency checking with you. Does he still think you’ve got the briefcase?”

“Yes. I’ll be driving straight to New York, and then probably going to Europe.”

Simon gazed down at what the briefcase had spilled into his lap through the seam he had slit open. It was nothing but an old Havana telephone directory.

“Don’t move from there, and keep Ramón with you,” he said. “Tell him I have to verify your engine number before I can get you a boarding pass for the ferry. Don’t try to argue. The click you will hear will be me taking off.”

He put the phone down in its bracket and was on his way.

4

He went down a back stairway which he had taken note of the very first time he left his room — it was another habit he would probably never lose, that in any new surroundings he automatically and unconsciously observed the alternative and less obvious exits. The police would inevitably ride up in an elevator, and even though he might never have a better chance to play the outraged innocent victim, he would inevitably pay for it with an involvement in red tape that might keep him tied up for hours, and he figured that that could wait. The police would catch up with him soon enough now.

Pancho and his big brother had caught up with him, after all. In a hotel with the Grand Central atmosphere of the Sevilla-Biltmore no one would have noticed them going up to the Saint’s floor; the old-fashioned lock on his door would not have delayed them for more than ten seconds, and, but for their grievous miscalculation of his superlatively vigilant senses and tigerish fighting power, no one would have noticed them leaving after the Saint had become a splash on the pavement seventy feet down from his window.

So for a little while he could give a shocking surprise to anyone who was relying on the efficiency of Pancho and Pal.

He slipped through the service crypts of the hotel without encountering anybody but one belatedly perplexed camarero, and with no trouble found a door that let him out into an alley lined with garbage cans, and thus in a few more steps he was on a side street looking for a taxi, and as usual there was a taxi waiting for him.

In her room, Mrs Carrington put down the phone and said, “That was the travel agency. They have to send someone over to verify the engine number of my car so I can get a pass to go on the ferry.”

“Is that all?” Venino said. “You looked so troubled, I thought it was something serious.”

“It’s just a nuisance.”

“It will be all right.” He frowned. “But it seems so foolish. They could check your engine number at the dock.”

She shrugged.

“Anyway, the agency’s taking care of it. But when your people take over, you should make them fire all the bureaucrats who invent stupid regulations. Just think, you could go down in history as the man who created the first government in the world to abolish red tape.”

“What I am doing is nothing to joke about.”

He spoke so roughly that it was like being physically pushed aside.

“I’m sorry.”

“Forgive me,” he said quickly. “I am on edge. I am more afraid all the time that something is going wrong. Those men...”

When Ramón Venino had arrived and called up from the lobby to announce himself, and she had left her room to go down and meet him, she had quite accidentally looked directly at a face that was looking directly towards her through the two-inch opening of a door at the end of the corridor. It was more discomfiting because the man did not move or look away before she did, apparently believing himself invisible, and she could feel his eyes on her back all the way to the elevator.

Then, when they went to the bar for a cocktail, there was a man in a dark suit who followed them in, and when they moved to the terrace outside for lunch, he came out immediately after them and sat down a few tables away. There he was joined presently by another man in a similar dark suit, the two of them having none of the seaside vacationing air of the other guests, and the two put their heads together and kept looking at her and Ramón as they talked. And though the glimpse she had had upstairs had been far too narrow for positive recognition, she felt utterly certain that the second man was the one who had been watching when she left her room.

She had hesitantly asked Ramón what he thought of them.

“I’d already noticed them,” he said. “Did you ever see two more obvious detectives?”

She told him about what had happened upstairs.

“It looks very bad,” he said grimly. “He was not watching you, of course, but watching for me. I am still sure you have nothing to fear. Because you are leaving, they will not believe you are important. But I think you are going just in time.”

“But if they’re watching you, it means you’ve been betrayed.”

“Perhaps not so badly. We do not know who our traitor is — or we should have dealt with him. So we do not know how much he can betray. Perhaps very little. Then the Secret Police would not know enough yet to arrest me; they would only be watching.”

“But then it’s only a question of time—”

He nodded, tight-lipped.

“I begin to think that everything may have to be postponed. For a while only, but at least until they are off guard again. And I shall go abroad — then they will be certain that I am not in mischief. I could not be organizing a revolution on the Riviera. Would you like to go there?”

“If you’d promise to meet me there, I’d go.”

“I must think about it,” he had said.

Now, two hours later, he strode to her window and stood gazing out unseeingly, with his hands gripping nervously together behind his back. Finally he said, “Yes, querida, I have decided. When I heard you say on the phone just now that you might go to Europe, I knew it was right. Will you think me a coward if I go?”

“Oh, no, Ramón! I want you to be a hero, but you wouldn’t help anyone by throwing your life away.”

He turned to her and kissed her hands.

“Then it is settled. You will drive to New York, as you said, and book a passage on the first good boat. You will take your car for us to drive around, because it is much newer than mine, but of course I will pay the expenses. I shall book myself on a plane in about a week, so that I do not seem in too big a hurry, but I shall be there in France when you land.”

“You don’t know what a load you’ve taken off my mind,” she said, and yet as she said it she felt inexplicably as if something else had been taken from her also.

He glanced at his watch.

“We should have your bags taken to the car before they want to charge you another day for the room,” he said practically. “We can wait downstairs for your travel agent.”

They went downstairs together with her luggage and watched it stowed in the trunk of her sedan. Venino tipped the bellboys and dismissed them.

Beryl Carrington felt a strange vague uncomfortableness as they faced each other alone again, with nothing to do but to kill time and nothing special to talk about. Nothing, that is, except something most personal. Everything else had been wrapped up so quickly and finally. But right up until then, the kisses he had recently pressed on her hands were the nearest approach to emotion there had been between them. In the beginning she had been charmed and relieved by his correctness. But she had always been convinced that at the proper time, when it could be done without crudity and disrespect, his attentions would become warmer. It could not be any other way, with such a romantic enterprise binding their lives together. Yet now that he could scarcely avoid making some declaration about themselves, she found herself desperately unready to receive it.

He took her hand and drew her towards him.

“You must not worry about me,” he said, and a flutter of pure panic suddenly shook her.

“Why not?” asked the Saint’s coolest and most languid voice. “I’d say there was a whole lot to worry about.”

They turned like two marionettes jerked with the same string.

Beryl Carrington’s startlement was at first almost grateful — until her eyes fell on the briefcase that Simon carried, and grew round with blank dismay. But Ramón Venino’s face turned yellow with the sickly anaemia of a sceptic who for the first time believes that he is seeing an incontrovertible ghost; and then, as he too saw the briefcase, his eyes literally jolted in their sockets as if he had been hit behind the head. And the Saint strolled closer, around the side of the car which had concealed his silent approach.

“As a one-man revolution,” he remarked, “I’d say he was a lousy actuarial risk.”

Venino put forth a colossal effort that dragged his congealing stare from the briefcase to Mrs Carrington.

“What is this?” he demanded hoarsely. “I thought—”

“Yes, I gave it to him,” she said with sudden assurance. “I was afraid you were gambling too much on the police thinking I wasn’t important. And I’ve told you all about him. He promised he’d get it to Florida for me.”

“And if you insist,” Simon said earnestly, “I will. I’ll even get you a police escort for it.”

As though they had only been waiting to explode that boast, the two men in dark suits whom Mrs Carrington had temporarily lost sight of materialized from between other parked cars and hurled themselves at the Saint in a co-ordinated rush that had one of them clamped on to each of his arms before Mrs Carrington fully grasped what was happening. But the Saint seemed only inconsequentially put out.

“You’re grabbing the wrong guy,” he said, without struggling.

One of the dark-suited men turned to Mrs Carrington.

“This is the man who has been annoying you?” he said.

“Annoying me?” she repeated in complete bewilderment.

“We were called by someone who spoke for you,” explained one of the detectives. “About some lunatic who has been making telephone calls and trying to force himself into your room. We understood you did not want to complain personally, or to have a scandal, so we have only been watching to catch this man the next time he annoyed you.”

“But no one has been annoying me,” she said helplessly.

“You are Mrs Carrington?”

“Yes.”

“Mrs Beryl Carrington?”

“Yes.”

“Somebody must have been playing a joke on you,” said the Saint.

“This gentleman is a friend of mine,” she said shakily. “Please let him go.”

The two plain-clothes men looked at Venino with a sort of forlorn desperation, and one of them said, “Usted no sabe nada de esto, señor?”

With his eyes flickering back to the briefcase which Simon still held, Venino said brusquely, “Nada. As the señor says, it is either a mistake or a stupid trick.”

The two detectives looked at each other. In unison, they raised their eyebrows, they pursed their lips, they shrugged. Their vice-like grips unhooked themselves from the Saint’s arms. They stepped back, and bowed with a sort of defeated sarcasm.

“Pardon us, Mrs Carrington,” they said, and turned stiffly on their heels.

Beryl Carrington shook her head dazedly.

“I don’t understand — any of this—”

“It is a Secret Police trick, if nothing worse,” Venino snapped.

“I think it was your trick, Ramón,” Simon said pleasantly. “You called the cops in her name and told them that cock-and-bull story to get them to keep a watch on her. Then you pointed the sleuths out to prove that they were watching you. It’s just dawned on me that that may have been the clincher that sold her on going to Europe. Did you just decide that this afternoon, Beryl?”

“Yes,” she said with unnatural steadiness. “It was exactly like that.”

“And maybe that was the only proof you ever had that anyone was after him.”

“It was. But—”

“He is trying to confuse you,” Venino said harshly. “We must get back that briefcase.”

“This?” Simon held up the alligator bag by the handle, so that the telephone directory slid out into his other hand through the seam he had opened along its underside. “Or the priceless contents?”

He showed Mrs Carrington the book, making sure that she recognized what it was.

“This,” he said reverently, “is the God-damnedest Underground you ever saw the secret list of. Every single soul in Greater Havana who can afford a telephone is a member.”

Venino snatched the directory from him.

“You fool,” he snarled. “If anyone had discovered the marks in invisible ink against each name that is one of us—”

Mrs Carrington was almost shaken out of her wavering, and even the Saint’s eyes blinked with reluctant admiration. But he shook his head slowly.

“It’s a nice try, Ramon,” he conceded. “But it won’t score. Can you think back coldly and impartially just for a few seconds, Beryl — even though it’ll hurt? Do you really believe that any Underground movement that had any hope of getting as far out of the ground as its own tombstone would have a list of members that was as easy as that for anyone to get hold of? Or that anyone who was bright enough to live long enough to become a top man in that sort of conspiracy would tell you all about it after a few rumbas, and place the life of every last member in your hands because of the sympathy he saw in your pretty eyes? I knew he was taking you for a ride the minute you told it to me that way. But I didn’t appreciate quite what a ride it was until I checked on this business about the Dictatorship. And that really knocks the underpinnings from under the whole gehoozis. Because there just ain’t no such animal.”

“He is not a fool, querida,” Venino hissed. “He is insane.”

“Oh, I suppose it isn’t altogether our kind of democracy, Beryl,” Simon said imperturbably. “But there aren’t any downtrodden masses aching to shake off their chains. There may be a revolution some day, but it’ll just be one political faction against another, not an uprising of the people. If Ramón hadn’t scared the wits out of you, you could have asked some of ’em for yourself. You still can.”

“Are you trying to destroy us all?” Venino asked passionately.

Simon glanced over his shoulder. As he had rather anticipated, the two men in dark suits had withdrawn, but not completely out of the picture. They had retreated to a polite distance out of earshot, but not out of sight.

“We still have a couple of cops handy, Beryl,” he said. “Would you like me to walk over to them and say ‘Nuts to the President!’ so you can see if they shoot me?”

“I’m trying,” Mrs Carrington said, “not to have hysterics.”

“I’m sorry,” said the Saint contritely. “I’d better leave, before you get mad and call off our deal on the car.”

Mrs Carrington’s mouth opened, but no sound came from it. Sound came, however, from Ramón Venino.

“What deal on the car?” he demanded in a cracked voice.

“I made Mrs Carrington an offer to buy it,” Simon said calmly. “She wants to get something more sporty, like a convertible, and I’m paying a much better price than she could get on a trade-in. I’m taking this one over from her in Miami. I guess she hadn’t had time to tell you.”

“But we are taking this car to Europe,” Venino said shakily.

“That’s silly,” the Saint scoffed. “If she wants a flashy sports job, Europe’s the place to get one.”

“I will not allow it,” Venino said.

Mrs Carrington looked at him wonderingly.

“Why not?” she asked, and never quite knew why she said it like that.

“It would break my heart. Yes, I am sentimental. Because of this car, we met. In this car, I showed you my home town. In this car, my heart found a new life. Call me a temperamental Latin if you like, but I do not want to see Europe with you in any other car!”

Simon lighted a cigarette, and an immeasurable artistic contentment was ripening within him.

“What he means,” he said, “is that any other car would not be worth anything like as much to him. Which isn’t surprising, because this would probably be the most valuable car in Europe, if not in the whole world. As I have it figured, it should sell for around three hundred thousand dollars any place where there’s a fairly open market for gold, which of course rules out the United States. A really fabulous build-up has gone into jockeying you into making that trip with a date to meet Ramón on the other side.”

They were both listening to him now, without interruption and in a weird kind of stillness. And the Saint put one foot up on the rear bumper and leaned a forearm lazily on his knee.

“Big-time thieves aren’t an exclusively yanqui product. They crop up all over. Down here, I guess Ramón will rank numero uno. Anyway, he and his mob knocked off an armoured carload of three hundred grand’s worth of gold bars a few weeks before we got here. But they couldn’t sell it here, and the problem was to get a heavy load like that out of the country with the cops looking everywhere for it. Ramon’s brilliant idea was to watch for a likely female tourist, alone, bringing her own car over. With a simple little accident and a lot of charm, he was able to get away with the car for long enough for his mob to take impressions of suitable parts of it. They cast the gold in the moulds and plated it while he was keeping you on the hook with his personality and his fairy tales, and last night when he had the car again they put on the new gold trimmings.” The knife that had been Pancho’s flashed suddenly as Simon thumbed the catch that released the blade. “For instance, I’ll bet that if we carved a notch in this bumper—”

Ramón Venino moved then, his hand going to his hip pocket and coming out with something that he kept mostly hidden under the drape of his coat.

“That is enough,” he said. “You will both come with me, now, in this car.”

Mrs Carrington gasped as she saw the gun, but the Saint only glanced at it and then over Venino’s shoulder.

“You made one mistake when you had your fat friend try to warn me off at the Bambú,” he said. “You made another when you sent him back with a pal this afternoon to defenestrate me — meaning heave me out of a window. Because I clobbered both of them and sent for the police, but I left before the police got there. So now the police have followed me here, and teamed up with the two that we had already. You’d be making the classic mistake of all time if you shot me now, while they’re all standing behind you.”

“You must think me a fool if I would believe that,” Venino sneered.

“I assure you, compadre, he tells the truth,” one of the policemen said.

5

“Why did he have to pick on me?” Beryl Carrington said.

“You mean, why couldn’t he have put gold bumpers on his own car, and shipped it to Europe?” said the Saint. “We don’t know yet, but I’ll bet anything you like on a guilty conscience. Ramón and his mob could never be sure when they might be suspected, so they wanted to plant the loot on someone who would never be suspected.”

“But why me?” she said.

“I guess they just watched the boats from Key West, and you were the first good prospect they saw.”

“It didn’t have to be me,” she said in a queer stony voice.

“Did you hear what the gendarmes said about that twenty thousand dollars reward? I think we should split it down the middle.”

“I couldn’t care less.”

“You can do a lot of good things with ten thousand bucks.”

“Don’t you see?” she said. “I wish it had never happened. Or if it had to happen, I wish I’d never seen you. I wish I’d never known.”

Simon Templar looked at her shrewdly and with unwonted compassion for a while, and then he stood up.

“This isn’t the end of romance,” he said. “But if you’d gone on with Venino, one day you’d have had to find out, and that might have been the end. Now you think the most wonderful toy you ever had has been broken, and it was all you had. But it isn’t all you’ll ever have. Don’t start to believe that.”

“Please go now,” she said. But as he opened the door she raised her eyes and said, “But call me tomorrow.”

Simon went out and let the doorman earn a quarter for lifting one finger at a taxi.

“You have plans for tonight, sir?” said the driver, as the cab got under way. “You should meet a nice Cuban girl. It happens I have a niece, very young, very beautiful...”