The Saint Around the World

1

Cowichan Lake was a sheet of silver under a cloudless sky that was slowly warming into blue after the recent pallor of dawn, but rising trout were still dimpling the glassy sheen of the water. Simon Templar had already caught three of them, and four of that size were as many as he wanted for his lunch; he didn’t want to kill one more fish than he could use at that moment, and so he was in no hurry to end his sport by taking the last one. He was really working on the perfection of his cast now rather than trying to take a fish, waiting for a rise no less than twenty yards away from his boat and then trying to place his fly in the exact center of the spreading concentric ripples on the surface, as if in the bull’s-eye of a target.

Somewhere in the distance, so faint at first that it seemed to come from no actual direction, he heard the hum of an airplane engine.

There was nothing intrinsically noteworthy about the sound. Simon permitted himself a moment of detached philosophical astonishment at the random reflection that there could be hardly a corner of the globe left by that time where the sound of an airplane overhead would attract any general attention; in such a few years had man’s domain extended to the stratosphere, and so easily had the miracle been taken for granted. Up there in the heart of Vancouver Island beyond the end of the last trail that could be called a road, a plane was merely commonplace, the most simple and obvious vehicle to convey prospectors, timber surveyors, hunters, and fishermen to the remote destinations of their choice. The fantastic contraption of the Wright Brothers had become the horse and buggy of their grandchildren.

A nice sixty feet away, a young uncomplicated rainbow rose lazily to ingurgitate some insect that had fallen on the surface. Simon picked the tiny vortex of its inhalation as his next mark, and his rod rose and flipped forward again in a flowing rhythm. The line curled and snaked out like a graceful gossamer whip, and at the end of it the artificial fly settled on the water as airily as a tuft of thistledown.

The young trout, perhaps pardonably thinking it had left something unfinished, must have turned in its own length to rectify the omission. The fly went under in another little swirl, and instantly Simon set the hook. He felt his line become taut and alive, and the fish somersaulted into the air, the blade of its body shimmering in the clear morning light.

The drone of the plane had grown rapidly louder, and it seemed to the Saint’s sensitive ear that there was a kind of syncopated unevenness in its pulse. Almost as soon as he had localized it somewhere behind him and to his left it was bearing down lower, but he was too busy for the moment to turn and look at it. For a few minutes he was entirely absorbed in balancing the vigor of the fish against the strength of a filament that one sharp tug would have snapped. The struggle of the fish came through the fragile line and limber rod all the way into his hand, as if he were linked to it by an extended nerve. And the airplane engine roared in an approaching crescendo and then suddenly stopped, but the rush of its wings through the air went on, coming closer still, blending with the whine of a dead propeller and punctuated by an occasional spastic hiccup of erratic combustion. It wooshed over his head suddenly like a gigantic bird, seeming to swoop so low over him that involuntarily he ducked and crouched lower in the boat.

That momentary distraction and the slack that it put into his line were all that the spunky young trout needed. It was gone, with a last flashing leap, to await some other rendezvous with destiny, and Simon ruefully reeled in an unresisting hook as the cause of the trouble touched down a little further on, striking two plumes of spray from the water with its skimming pontoons.

He laid his rod down and lighted a cigarette, looking the seaplane over in more detail as it coasted towards the nearby shore. It was painted a dark gray that was almost black, its lines were not those of any make that he could identify, and it seemed to carry no identification numbers or insignia of any kind — he made those basic observations in approximately that sequence, although in less sharply punctuated compartments than the summary suggests.

Also it had definite engine trouble, as had been hinted by the irregular thrumming sound of its approach and the bronchitic coughs it had emitted as it glided down. Now the propeller was turning again, making strained uneven revolutions with recoils and pauses in between: the pilot was forcing it with the starter, but the motor refused to fire. Already the seaplane had lost the momentum of its landing speed; it needed power to steer and taxi even on the water, but it was not producing any, and a breeze that had barely started to ripple the smoothness of the lake was beginning to waft it sideways in undignified but inexorable impotence.

The Plexiglas canopy opened, and the pilot squirmed out and wriggled down onto one of the pontoons. He reached under into a trapdoor in the plane’s sternum and hauled out a light anchor with a line already attached and let it drop with a splash, and presently the plane stopped drifting and slewed around at the end of the line with its nose pointed aloofly at the playful zephyr.

The pilot stood on the pontoon and looked around with a kind of studied nonchalance, almost pointedly refraining from more than a glance in the direction of Simon Templar in his skiff. It was as if he intended to disclaim in advance even the suggestion of an appeal for help — as if, in fact, he would have denied that anything was wrong.

If that was the way he wanted it, Simon was in no hurry either. He snipped off the fly which the escaped trout had mauled severely in the tussle, and concentrated profoundly over the selection of another from the assortment in his pocket case. Finally he settled on one with gray hackles, a red body, and a yellow-brown wisp of tail, and began to tie it on to his leader with leisured care.

There was no outward change in his demeanor, any more than there is any visible change in the exterior of a radio when it is switched on. But already the mysterious circuits which had made the Saint what he was had awakened to silently busy life, telling him with dispassionate certainty that even in those last few moments, with no more overt symptoms than the facts which have just been narrated, the delicate tendrils of adventure had made contact with him again, even in that placid Shangri-La of the Northwest.

From the city of Vancouver on the west coast of Canada it was two hours and a quarter by ferry to Nanaimo on the east coast of Vancouver Island, from Nanaimo it was a roundabout sixty miles to where the Cowichan Lake road ended at the Youbou lumber settlement; beyond that, it was almost ten more miles by boat to the cove near the northwest tip of the lake where Simon Templar had been fly-casting when the gray-black seaplane swooped down to shatter the peace of the spring morning with its spluttering engine and drag him rudely back out of his own brief moment of tranquillity. Even there at the very edge of outright wilderness, it seemed, the Saint’s destiny could not spare him for long. Adventure was still as near as it had ever been. It was only up to him whether he should answer or ignore its beckoning finger.

But of course it was no accident that the invitation met with him there. The first pass had been made weeks ago, on the other side of the Pacific.

2

At the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, Major Vernon Ascony, the Assistant Commissioner of Police, said, “It isn’t coming through here, old boy. If it were, I couldn’t help getting a whiff of it. I personally don’t believe it’s even coming from India. From what I hear, the new governments of India and Pakistan have pretty well snuffed it out. And I don’t think it’s coming down from Indo-China either. We’d have been bound to find a link somewhere along the route. I just don’t think it’s our pidgin at all. But you can’t tell that to the international bigwigs. They’re still stuck with the ideas they got from Fu Manchu. Drugs are peddled by sinister Orientals, Singapore is one of the Orient’s gateways, therefore this must be one of the ports it clears from. So when an unusual amount of the stuff turns up in Los Angeles or Toronto, this here is one of the most likely places it came from. Then everyone wants to know why I don’t bloody well personally put a stop to it.”

The Saint smiled.

“A policeman’s lot is not a happy one,” he murmured. “Could that be set to music, or has someone already done it?”

“Don’t be too disappointed if someone got ahead of you, old chap. At least you’ve done more than almost anyone else to make it true.”

“Have I given you any trouble?”

“No. But I’m jolly well keeping my fingers crossed till your plane takes off… Seriously, old man,” Ascony said, “why don’t you do something about it? I don’t mind telling you, when I was a bit younger you were quite a hero of mine. You know, the Robin Hood of modern crime, the knight in shining armor — all that sort of rot. A lot of us in England used to think of you like that, when we read about you in the papers. But lately, you seem to have become rather different.”

“The world has become a little different too,” said the Saint.

“I know. And I’m sure that everything you’ve been doing has been important enough, in its own way. But I can’t help wishing that once in a while you’d take on something more like the old times, I mean some simple racket that we all understand and agree about, and do it up good and proper without making a dollar out of it for yourself, just because it ought to be done. Like this dope racket, for instance.”

“You’re not a boy now,” said the Saint, almost harshly. “You’re a policeman. You know how big and complicated the dope racket is. You know how many man-hours and dollars, how many elaborate organizations in how many countries, are trying to fight it. But you just want me to fix it all by myself, by tracking down one dastardly master-mind and punching him in the nose.”

“Yes, of course I know it isn’t so simple. But there actually is a flood of dope reaching North America on a bigger scale than it ever did before. Anyhow, that’s what I gather from the memoranda that end up on my desk. Well, a thing like that could have one simple source, which a fellow like yourself might be able to dig out, if he was lucky. You get around a lot. I suppose I’m talking out of turn. But I wish you’d try.”

Simon Templar frowned at the beading of dew on his stengah glass. It was a long time since he had been reminded of certain truths as bluntly as Major Ascony’s incongruously genuine eagerness had stated them.

“Maybe I’ll have to do that,” he said darkly.

And by the next morning he might have preferred to forget the easy boast, only some of the backwash of memories that had stung it out of him would not be so easily dismissed.

But in Hong Kong, Inspector Stephen Hao said, “If it’s coming from Red China, it isn’t shipped from here. Would you like to see how we search everybody who comes in from the mainland these days? After we get through frisking ’em, five thousand of ’em couldn’t be carrying enough dope to give an addict one good fix. Why don’t you look around in Japan?”

But in Tokyo, at his favorite tempura restaurant on Yodobashi Avenue, Master Sergeant Ben Johnson, of the Office of Special Investigations, said, “Sure, the Secret Service and the FBI have been riding our tails about it for months. They know that most of the supply these days is moving from west to east, from the Pacific Coast. But I’ll swear it isn’t coming from Nippon. Hell, we’ve got it licked here to the point where the domestic traffic is about ready to die from starvation, and the prices are out of sight. So where would anyone find that sort of quantity to export? What do you say, Nikki?”

Inspector Geichi Nikkiyama, of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, nodded owlishly over a fried shrimp breaded with golden batter.

“Ah, so. More likely criminal technician in United States having discovered how to make synthetic dope in bathtub, like so profitable Prohibition gin.”

But in San Francisco, in Johnny Kan’s restaurant on Grant Avenue, as the Saint dipped his chopsticks into a dish of tung gee bok opp, a succulent squab marinated in exotic spices and rose liqueur and dressed with a quite improbable sauce, Johnny told him: “If I were you, I’d go on up to Vancouver. From what I hear, that’s the easiest place to get it in all North America. If my name was Charlie Chan, I’d deduce that where it’s most plentiful would be the place nearest the source. I’d like to see you do something about it, Saint.”

“So would I,” said the Saint. “And it can’t be much harder than catching hold of a rainbow.”

“You might look into that too, while you’re up there,” Johnny Kan said confusingly.

Simon figured that some minor idiomatic cog had slipped somewhere between them, but wrote it off as not worth a laborious exploration. Yet for the first time he felt that he might be getting warm, and in Vancouver he made no more direct inquiries.

Most of what he did there would make rather tedious storytelling, except for certain individuals who might have nefarious motives for a too detailed curiosity about the Saint’s methods. It was quite a few years since the Saint had last slipped into the underworld and disappeared without a ripple, like an otter into a dark pool; but he did it as easily as if the last of the old days had been yesterday, and none of the persons he moved among during that time ever dreamed who it was that had passed through their stealthy lives more stealthily than their utmost caution could conceive.

He forgot all about Johnny Kan’s bland non sequitur until one day in the devious labyrinths he followed there was the echo of a name, Julius Pavan, and with it a reference to what seemed to be a stock joke about Mr Pavan’s passion for fishing. And at long last a bell had rung as Simon remembered that among truly dedicated fishermen the word “rainbow” primarily suggests a species of fish, the rainbow trout, after which the lighting phenomenon in the sky may possibly have been named.

And so a hint and a hunch had eventually led him to where he had just seen a seaplane of unfamiliar design and with no identification markings landing on the waters where Mr Pavan fished, and now it all seemed as clear and sure as Fate.

3

At the edge of the pines on the north shore of the cove there was a log cabin no bigger than a double garage. It was the only sign of human habitation within sight of that remote corner of the lake. It was crudely but solidly built of hand-hewn timber, and mellowed into the landscape with the weathering of many seasons. Perhaps some trapper of a generation ago had built it for his headquarters, before the swaths cut by commercial logging had driven the game even further back into the dwindling wilderness. But now it was the fishing camp of Julius Pavan, who lived alone in a big house in the heights of West Vancouver, and drove a big car and invested in buildings and real estate.

A man in a red plaid shirt and drab trousers came out of it and hurried down to a rough floating dock where a small motor-boat was tied up. He cast off and cranked it up and chugged across to the seaplane at an unspectacular but useful speed.

He stopped the boat beside the pontoon where the pilot stood, and the pilot got in. There was some discussion or explanation or argument, in which the pilot took the more gesticulatory part. Presently the pilot climbed up on the short fore-deck, and from that elevation managed to open a cowling over the plane’s single engine, while the man in the plaid shirt steadied the motor-boat by holding on to the plane’s propeller. The pilot peered and probed lengthily into the engine’s innards, and finally closed the cowling again and lowered himself back down into the boat with another outburst of gestures.

The man in the plaid shirt shrugged, and cranked his motor again, and the boat swung around and headed back towards the dock below the lonely cabin.

Their course took them within fifty yards of the Saint, and both men looked at him as they went by. But neither of them waved a casual greeting as is the friendly custom of the backwoods, and the Saint, having left it to them to make the advance, did not belatedly take the initiative. When they had finished looking at him, they returned to their private discussion, and with reciprocal indifference to their existence and their problems, Simon Templar plucked his fly from the water where it had been resting and freshened it a little with a couple of false casts and sent it floating downwind towards another imaginary target.

Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the motor-boat tie up at the dock, and the two men get out and walk up to the cabin and go in.

Simon decided to allow himself just three more casts, each to be made and properly fished without unseemly haste. Through one circumstance and another, several summers had gone by since he last practised that pin-point accuracy with a trout rod, and he was ingenuously delighted to discover that his wrist had lost little of its cunning. But on another level of his mind those three casts were only a convenient way of estimating a period of time he felt he should let go by, and simultaneously a way of occupying the time which might lull any suspicions of the two men who were now in the cabin, if perchance they were still keeping him under observation.

His third cast happened to be the first to fall several inches wide of its mark, but he disciplined himself sternly against the temptation to try just one more. He picked the line up on the reel, secured the fly, and put the rod down with the resigned air of a man who has decided to concede a temporary triumph to the caprices of the finny tribe. He even moulded exactly the right expression on his face, just in case he might be playing to an audience equipped with powerful binoculars.

As a matter of fact the sun had risen high enough by that time to send the fish down to cooler and shadier depths, and the rises had stopped almost as if some piscine curfew had sounded. It was a perfectly normal and convincing time for any angler to pack up until the evening.

Simon hauled up his anchor, moved back to the stern seat, and pulled the starter of his outboard.

It was one of the new silent models which were just then beginning to reduce the traditional machine-gun racket of outboard motors to little more than a horrible memory. It came to life with no more obtrusive a purr than an expensive automobile, but the skiff shot away as if springs had uncoiled behind it. And because of this epoch-making mechanical improvement, which made it impossible for anyone to trace his course and progress by ear, he was able to turn the skiff in towards the shore and cut the engine the moment he had passed the first promontory that shut off the cabin from his view, with complete assurance that the men in the cabin would hear nothing to suggest what he had done.

He let the skiff glide the last few yards under a steeply sloping bank, and moored it to a tree on which he also swung himself ashore. He climbed the slope at an easy slant and came to the top of a low ridge. From there he could look down to the waters of the cove which he had just left, and the seaplane riding at anchor further out on the lake. The roof of the log cabin was below him, almost hidden among the trees.

The same trees and bushes provided a perfect screen for his approach, and he moved between them as silently and invisibly as any Indian ever crept upon a pioneer’s homestead. He only had to expose himself in the very last eight feet, and those he covered in a low crouching leap that brought him up against the widest span of blank wall on that side and still kept him well under window level. The maneuver seemed even excessively cautious, for he felt quite sure that anyone in the cabin who was keeping a lookout at all would be watching the approach from the lake and not the back of the building.

Rising flat against the wall, he slid along it to the nearest window and with infinite care raised one eye just above the sill in one bottom corner of the opening.

The inside of the cabin was one big room for sleeping, living, and cooking, with the black iron wood-burning range which is standard equipment in the Northwest placed squarely and starkly in one corner. Other amenities, however, had been introduced to alleviate the Spartan simplicity in which the original builder had probably lived. There was a good carpet on the floor, a modern radio-phonograph in another corner, chrome-tube chairs with plastic-covered rubber cushions at the big all-purpose table, and a couple of big luxurious-looking armchairs with gay chintz slip covers. The pilot of the seaplane sat in one of them, gazing out at the lake through the opposite window.

The sleeping accommodation consisted of double-decker bunks built against the wall at one end of the room. Peering around at an acute angle, Simon could see about half the structure. But what he saw was the half where the girl sat.

She would have been no more than twenty-five, he judged, if you discounted the tired pallor that had sabotaged the young contours of her face. She wore blue jeans and a form-fitting cardigan that plainly sculptured youthful curves of hip and waist and breast. Her short hair was midnight black but her eyes were clear blue like mountain lakes. She sat on the lower bunk and leaned against one of the smooth posts that supported the upper berth, with her cheek resting against it and one arm wrapped around it. As she wore it the attitude had an unconsciously pathetic grace, but she could not have changed it much if she had wanted to, for her two wrists were handcuffed together where they met in her lap.

He did not see Julius Pavan.

But he heard Pavan say, behind him: “Put your hands up. Don’t make any other move, or I’ll blow you in half.”

4

“Well, well, well,” said the Saint. “Now I know what they mean by overpowering hospitality. Did I really look so lonesome, or were you just desperate for someone to make a fourth at bridge?”

He glanced mildly around the cabin with his hands still in the air, and Pavan kicked the door shut behind him without taking his repeating shotgun out of the Saint’s spine.

“Just as I figured,” Pavan said. “He ran his boat around the point and got out and came sneaking over the hill. All I had to do was stand still in the bushes and get the drop on him when he was jammed up against the house, peeking in.”

“What did you do that for?” the pilot asked Simon with curious gentleness.

He was under six feet tall, but immensely broad, with the neck and shoulders of a wrestler. His bullet head was covered with blond hair cropped so close that at first sight it looked shaved. He wore blue trousers and a gray turtle-neck sweater that somehow combined to give him a faintly nautical appearance. His age might have been anywhere in the thirties, the hardness of his features made it difficult to guess more accurately. His eyes were yellowish and very pale.

“I thought it would give an opening to anyone who wanted to ask silly questions,” said the Saint.

“Search him, Igor,” Pavan said impatiently. “I don’t want to have to hold this gun on him all day.”

The pilot ambled closer and passed his big hands competently over the Saint’s body. He showed no surprise at the automatic which he felt under the Saint’s armpit and pulled out from the shoulder holster under Simon’s shirt. He checked the action matter-of-factly and stuck the gun in his own hip pocket.

Beyond that, the Saint’s pockets yielded only a small amount of money and some cigarettes and matches, which the pilot put on the table, and a wallet, which the pilot opened and began to browse through.

Pavan’s shotgun muzzle prodded the Saint viciously in the kidneys.

“Get over to the bed. Hook your arm around the post, like the girl’s is, and put your wrists together.”

Simon obeyed. To get his arm around the post he had to put it around the girl’s arm as well, and he had to sit on the end of the bunk with his body half turned away from her.

Pavan produced another pair of handcuffs and snapped them deftly on the Saint’s wrists. Simon looked down at them with reluctant approval.

“So much faster and safer than tying people up,” he murmured. “I’ve often wondered why you crooks didn’t make more use of them.”

Pavan stared at him broodingly. Pavan was middle-aged and a little paunchy where the plaid shirt was tucked into his pants. He had lank black hair thinning back from his forehead, a long swarthy clean-shaven face, and thin lips clamped around an unlighted cigar. His black eyes measured the Saint for a retort, but debated at unhurried length whether it should be verbal or physical.

“His name is Simon Templar,” the pilot announced from his study of the identification cards in the Saint’s wallet.

The name did not seem to mean anything to him; but Simon felt the girl recognize it, without looking at her, in the involuntary tensing of her shoulder where it rested against his, and he saw the reaction that first widened Pavan’s eyes for a moment and then started something smoldering in them like hot slag.

Pavan uttered it.

“The Saint!”

“What is that?” asked the pilot.

“He’s no cop,” Pavan said. His eyes were fastened on the Saint with the unblinking malevolence of a snake’s. “He’s worse. He’s a guy who set out to be the cop and the judge too. He gives out that he hates crime — so that gives him an excuse to commit crimes himself against anyone with a racket. According to some people, this makes him a Robin Hood. According to me, he’s just a robber and a hood.”

“So now that I’ve been so elegantly introduced,” Simon said to the pilot, “what’s the rest of your name, Igor?”

“Igor Netchideff,” said the pilot amiably.

Simon nodded, and turned his head to the girl.

“Since we’re all getting so chummy,” he said, “won’t you tell me who you are?”

“Marian Kent,” she said.

Her voice was low but steady, and he liked the candid appraisal of her gaze.

“Are you trying to pretend you don’t know each other?” Pavan snarled.

Simon looked at him and then down to the shotgun, and drawled, “Pappy, I’d be proud to marry her, but I am not the father of her child.”

Pavan moved the gun abruptly and hit Simon across the ear with the barrel. Pain and shock stabbed a kaleidoscope of fire through the Saint’s brain and for an instant almost dissolved into blackness. As he fought to clear his vision, he heard Netchideff laughing.

“You are upset, Julius,” the pilot said. “Two of such people on your trail, so close together — it is upsetting. But if what you say about Templar is right, obviously they would not be friends. Now go and bring back Templar’s boat, before it may be noticed by some other fisherman.”

Pavan put the shotgun down in a corner by the door and went out.

Slowly the sharp agony in the Saint’s ear died down to a dull throbbing, and the sequins stopped dancing in front of his eyes.

Netchideff stood at the window gazing out, rubbing his square jaw on his clenched fist, apparently deep in thought.

“How did you get into this?” Simon asked the girl quietly. “Don’t answer if it’s any help to the enemy.”

“They know,” she said. “I’m in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”

“What — with no horse? No red coat?”

His flippancy was as cool as if they had been making conversation at a cocktail party. Tired and desperate as she must have been, it still managed to bring the wraith of a smile to her lips.

“These days, we’re also a Canadian FBI,” she said. “And they haven’t advertised it, but they’ve let a few women in. There are cases sometimes when they can do more than men.”

“And they tried you on Julius.”

“I got a job as his secretary.”

“So he’d already been tabbed as the main dope source that everyone’s been looking for?”

“Oh, no. It was much more like a wild suspicion. Until I had a couple of lucky breaks, that is. But I guess this unlucky one wipes them out.”

“I followed you up from Nanaimo last night,” Simon said. “I’d been watching you and wondering about the set-up before that, of course. I saw the two of you pile into his motor-boat and push off from the dock where he keeps it, and somehow I felt that something was wrong and that you were scared deep inside. But it was only a feeling, and there were too many facts against trying to get a boat and follow you in the dark. I stopped at a motel and figured I wouldn’t have too much trouble locating you after daybreak, but I’ll admit I didn’t sleep too well.”

“Were you after the same thing that I was?”

He nodded.

“Ever since a bloke in Singapore reminded me how long it was since I last did anything really valuable and altruistic for the human race.”

“I was damned scared,” she said. There seemed to be so much that they had to tell each other, even though a strange understanding had grown from nowhere between them that made the most skeletal explanation full and sufficient. “I had a sixth sense telling me that something had gone wrong and Pavan was on to me, but I tried to tell myself it was only nerves. This was my first important assignment, and I wanted to be a hero. I figured that if I wasn’t being brought here to be murdered, this might be the big break. I just had to take the gamble.”

“What was the reason he gave for bringing you up here?”

“To work on the prospectus of a housing development he’s interested in.”

“You couldn’t possibly have believed that that was all he meant to work on, at least.”

“I wasn’t afraid of what you’re thinking,” she said. “This was one of those jobs I mentioned where it was an advantage to be a woman. I have news for you. He’s queer.”

“That’s a switch,” said the Saint. “Now you may have to protect me.”

They had been ignoring the pilot unconsciously — it didn’t seem that anything he heard now could do any more harm, and indeed he had appeared to be completely immersed in his own cogitations. But now they saw him looking at them again with sphinx-like intensity, and became aware that he had never stopped listening.

Suddenly he thumped his chest.

“I am not queer,” he proclaimed proudly.

“Well, congratulations,” said the Saint.

‘Netchideff stalked closer, with an almost feral compactness of movement for a few steps.

His course tended towards the girl. He stood looking down at her, studying separate details with his pale eyes. Then, as if to confirm his observation, he cupped a hand over one of her breasts.

Marian Kent kicked at him savagely, but he turned skilfully and her foot only struck him in the thigh.

Netchideff slapped her face hard, but by no means with his full strength. Then he put his hands on his hips and roared with laughter.

“You son of a bitch,” said the Saint.

He couldn’t kick Netchideff effectively himself because of his position around the corner of the bunk, but hoped that the pilot might be tempted into a move that would remedy that.

Netchideff regarded him thoughtfully, but then the door opened again and Pavan returned.

Pavan carried the Saint’s fly rod and tackle box. He put the tackle box down by the wall and waved the end of the rod up and down, feeling the action of it, before he stood it up in the corner.

“Nice rod,” he said. “That’s all he had in the boat. He must have rented it from a camp down the lake.” His dark eyes shifted from one direction to another, and made certain deductions. “Were they giving you trouble?”

“No.” Netchideff laughed again. He moved back to the table, took a cigarette from the Saint’s package and lighted it, then looked a second time at the match booklet he had used. “Lake Cowichan Auto Court,” he read from it. “That is where he stayed last night.”

“Very likely. It looks like one of their boats.”

“When will they wonder why he does not come back?”

“Not before dark — and probably not even then.”

“Good. Then we do not have to worry all day. I will look after them while you take your boat down the lake and buy the part that will mend the engine of my plane.”

Pavan’s heavy brows drew together.

“Why me? I don’t know anything about engines.”

“It is a very simple part. I will write it down for you. It was invented by Russian engineers, but the spies of Henry Ford stole the design from our trucks which they saw in Europe and they now use it in all their cars. That is what it says in my emergency instructions.”

Simon exchanged fascinated glances with Marian.

“I’d probably still have to drive to Duncan for it,” Pavan said. “And that’s another twenty miles.”

“But you know the way, and you will know where to go, and no one will wonder about your accent,” Netchideff insisted jovially. “You need not be afraid for me. I have been listening to them talk, and I am quite sure they are alone and do not expect any friends to come to rescue them very soon. You should be back in three hours, and I shall not be bored. But that is no reason to waste time, Julius. You will start at once, please.”

5

The pilot came back from seeing Pavan off with Simon’s three rainbows dangling on a string. He held them up and admired them.

“This is very nice of you,” he said. “I shall enjoy them for lunch.”

“I hope you choke on a bone,” said the Saint pleasantly.

Netchideff chuckled with great good humor. He could not have made it plainer that he knew that he could afford a robust invulnerability to mere verbiage.

He took the fish to the sink and began to clean them, humming to himself in a rich voice that swallowed up the last receding mutter of the departing motor-boat. He seemed to have forgotten about sex as capriciously as a child might have been distracted from a toy.

Simon tried tentatively to keep it that way.

“I guess it’s a lot better than the lunch you’d get on your submarine,” he remarked.

The pilot stopped humming.

After a moment he said, “The Russian Navy is the best fed in the world. But did you know I came from a submarine, or did you guess?”

“It was a fairly simple deduction,” said the Saint. “Your clothes have a sea-going look. Your seaplane is painted a naval color. But all the insignia and identification marks have been painted out. Therefore you’re on a secret mission. Your seaplane is a type that could be launched from a large submarine. The safest craft to come sneaking close enough to this coast to launch it would be a submarine. So I bet on the submarine.”

“You are most intelligent.”

“The secret mission, of course, isn’t so glorious. The great well-fed Russian Navy is bringing supplies to a common dope peddler. But it isn’t so easy to deduce why.”

“I was told that he had a good organization, and he pays well.”

“Does he pay you?”

“Of course not. I do not know how that is done, but I suppose he pays one of our agents here. Then I am told when to make delivery.”

“And that doesn’t bother you a bit.”

“I am a good officer. I do what I am told.”

“I forgot. I’m sorry. Where you come from, you’re not encouraged to think.”

Netchideff had finished cleaning the fish. He washed his hands under the faucet and came towards the Saint, drying them on a dish towel.

“I think,” he stated complacently, “it is not my business, but I think I know why we supply Pavan. This dope is a popular vice in the bourgeois democracies. It is one of the vices that weakens them. So it is good for us to encourage. Anything that helps to keep you weak is good, because it will be harder for you to make the attack on us that your Wall Street leaders are planning. And the money we get helps to pay our friends and agents who keep us informed of your imperialist plans. So in all ways this is very good for us.”

“I begin to see the advantages,” Simon admitted. “Only you can’t help getting the aggressive and defensive angles reversed.”

Netchideff frowned.

“I do not quite understand that, but what you say is not important anyhow. Because of your bourgeois education, you cannot think clearly and correctly like a Russian.”

“But you just said I was most intelligent.”

“When you make a correct deduction, you are intelligent. When you repeat capitalist lies, you show that you are too stupid for anything except fishing.”

The pilot’s eyes drifted towards Marian again.

“Now you’re really talking as if you’d been hit on the head with a hammer and sickle,” Simon said desperately. “Maybe you invented everything from Ford cars to fleas, but I’ll bet there isn’t one good fisherman in the whole Soviet Union.”

Netchideff turned back to him with a sort of irritated incredulity.

“Now you are merely ridiculous. How do you think we make the caviar that even your Wall Street bankers will pay any price for?”

“By catching a poor pregnant sturgeon in a net,” Simon scoffed. “That isn’t what we call fishing. I mean with a rod and line.”

“We have people who catch fish with a rod and a hook too. I have done it myself, often.”

“And what did you use for bait?”

“A piece of bread, or meat, or a worm.”

“That’s what I thought. You wouldn’t even know what to do with a rig like mine.”

Netchideff glared at him in an uncertain way. Then he stomped over and snatched the Saint’s rod out of the corner where Pavan had stood it. He shook it as if it were an inadequate club, then pored over it from end to end like an inquisitive ape.

He unfastened the fly from where it was hooked into a little keeper ring near the butt, and held it up in his huge paw to squint at it.

“This is what you catch fish with?” he demanded.

“That’s right,” said the Saint. “It’s an artificial fly.”

“It is only some little feathers on a hook.”

“That’s all. But you see, the kind of fisherman I’m talking about would be ashamed to catch a fish with anything that a fish could actually eat. You don’t have to be very clever to make a fish take a bite at a good meal. The only time you prove that you’re really smarter than a fish is when you can fool it into taking a bite at a piece of tin, a few feathers, or an old shoelace — anything that no fish would dream of eating if it wasn’t for the way you offered it.”

Netchideff shook his head puzzledly.

“But why do you want to do that when it is much easier with a worm?”

“A Communist couldn’t begin to understand,” answered the Saint. “But the idea is to give even a poor fish a sporting chance.”

The pilot’s glower darkened.

“I do not believe you. It is some kind of bourgeois propaganda.”

“Comrade, you’ve just cleaned three fish that swallowed it.”

“How do you make fish eat these feathers?”

“You cast the fly out on the water, and if you do it right a fish comes and takes it. But as I said, no Russian could ever do it.”

“A Russian can do anything that you can,” Netchideff said violently.

“One ruble will get you fifty dollars that you can’t.”

Netchideff hefted the rod, as if he had a mind to hit Simon across the face with it. Then he looked at it again, and at the little red-bodied fly dancing at the end of the leader. A confused sort of anger twisted his face in a way that was incongruously suggestive of a baby preparing to cry.

“I will show you,” he said. “I will catch more fish than you with this thing. If I do not, it will prove you are lying!”

He flung open the door and went out.

Marian Kent and the Saint looked at each other without daring to speak.

The door opened again and Netchideff stood there.

“I do not want you to think that you have changed anything for yourselves,” he said. “I have to pass the time, that is all. It does not suit me to kill you, Templar, until Julius returns and I am ready to leave. So it is good that you have time to think of your mistakes. As for this pretty and foolish girl” — his yellowish cat’s eyes shifted to her with the naked directness of an animal — “I am not in a hurry for her because I do not need to be. I am going to take her back to my submarine where I can enjoy her better, and when I have enough my comrades will be glad to have their turn, until we get home and give her to other comrades who will ask her questions about the Canadian Police.”

6

“If I live to be a hundred,” Marian said at last, and giggled a little hysterically, “I don’t suppose I’ll ever listen to a more fantastic argument.”

“It worked, though, didn’t it?” Simon grinned tightly.

“I still can’t believe it. I can’t think why.”

“I gambled on a psychological gimmick. Haven’t you noticed the formula in all the Communist purges, how they can’t be satisfied with just erasing the opposition, as every other dictatorship has been? Their heretics have got to confess, and acknowledge how wrong they’ve been and how richly they deserve their punishment. I don’t know how a psychiatrist would explain it, I just know how it works. So I figured Igor mightn’t be able to resist the chance to make me eat crow before he kills me.”

“How long will he try?”

“An hour — maybe more if he’s stubborn.”

“But as he kindly told us, it won’t make any difference to what we’ve got coming,” she said. “When Pavan gets back with that part, the liquidation will proceed as scheduled.”

“We’re still ahead. Any time we can keep him arguing, fishing, or playing charades, is time where he won’t be developing his nastier ideas. And time for the cavalry to come galloping over the hill.”

“We didn’t kid him when he was listening,” she said quietly. “Why kid ourselves? There ain’t goin’ to be no cavalry.”

He met her eyes steadily.

“Are you sure of that?”

“Have you arranged for them?”

“No,” he said. “I’m on my own. But I hoped you might have.”

“Pavan didn’t spring this invitation on me till the last moment, and from then on he didn’t let me any farther away from him than a rest room — where there was no phone. I was afraid to try too hard to get word out, because part of the time I was wondering if the invitation itself was a trap, to see if I’d try to communicate with anyone and how I did it. And at the same time, if I was really getting a break, I didn’t want to risk fumbling it.”

“You must have some regular schedule of contacts. When will the other Mounties miss you?”

“Not before Monday. I only work for Pavan Monday through Friday, and I’d already reported everything okay yesterday afternoon just before Pavan asked me to come up here. My boss will think I’m just spending a nice restful weekend — which I should have been.”

Simon smiled fractionally.

“This could be quite a problem for us, if we can’t find a way to get loose.”

“Doesn’t the Saint always have something up his sleeve?”

“Sometimes I have had a knife. But not today. In any case, it wouldn’t have done any good. That’s one of the various advantages of handcuffs. You can’t cut them off without special tools.” He stared at his wrists. “Of course, you could cut your hands off. They say some animals caught in a trap will do that.”

She shuddered almost imperceptibly.

“I don’t know whether I could do it.”

“Frankly, neither do I. But fortunately we don’t have the gruesome decision to make. No knife.”

“How did Houdini do it?”

“If the handcuffs weren’t fixed in advance, he had a key stashed away somewhere. But I wasn’t told there were going to be handcuffs. No key.”

“And you can’t take them, apart, can you? No screwdriver. No hacksaw. No file.”

“I’ll never be able to look a boy scout in the eye again,” he said, “but I’m not wearing one of those things.”

“Could you pick the lock?”

“Maybe, if you were wearing a bobby pin, or even a hairpin.” He glanced over her short-cut dark hair. “But you aren’t, of course.”

“I haven’t even a safety pin — or any kind of pin.”

He looked down at his waist.

“And out of all the ordinary belts I’ve got,” he said, “I had to pick one with a new-fangled plastic catch instead of a buckle. If I ever get out of here, it goes straight in the ash-can.”

“A bedspring!” she gasped.

It was a forlorn idea, but they went through some strained contortions to explore its far-fetched possibility. This did not take long.

“The hell with Progress,” said the Saint. “And especially foam rubber.”

They sat on their shared corner of the bunk again, linked together around the corner post.

“There’s nothing we could reach, is there?” she said. “I mean with our feet, as far as they could stretch.”

“No,” he said briefly. “If I could get at my tackle box, it might be a different story. But Julius and Igor aren’t dopes, and they knew I couldn’t make my legs twelve feet long.”

He studied the post that their arms were linked around. It was a smooth pole fully five inches in diameter, with the bunk frames fastened solidly to it at their outside corner. Two other corners of the frames were fastened to the log walls, and their fourth corners were in the corner of the cabin itself. The pole went down to some attachment through a snug-fitting hole in the floor planking, and its upper end was notched into a tie beam overhead. It looked and felt as solid as a growing tree, but it was the only possible weak point left to try.

“Let’s see if we can shake this loose,” Simon said grimly.

For several minutes he heaved, pulled, jolted, pushed, and twisted against the pole from a number of carefully selected angles. Because of the way their arms were intertwined, he knew that some of his savage onslaughts must have hurt her cruelly, but she never uttered a sound of protest and added all that she could of her strength to his efforts.

Presently they were both bruised and spent, and the pole had not budged or given any sign of budging.

“We could start a fire and hope the pole would burn faster than it burned us,” Simon said between deep breaths. “But he took my matches and left them over there on the table, and even a boy scout would need another stick to rub against this one.”

“We could start gnawing it like beavers,” she said, “but I think it would last longer than our teeth.”

Then she suddenly sobbed once, and hid her face in his shoulder.

Simon cursed at not having even a cigarette to bolster an illusion of nonchalance.

So this was what it was like, he thought, when your luck finally ran out. He had been within a hair’s breadth of this identical situation a dozen times before, but always there had been some forgotten trump in his hand, some unappreciated weapon up his sleeve, some ultimate implausible contingency that might yet bring rescuing cavalry over the hill. Now every scant possibility had been checked off in remorseless rotation, every prospective mirage had been methodically eliminated.

As a matter of concrete and incontrovertible fact, unless some fairytale trout popped his head out of the water and with a few exceptionally well-chosen words converted Igor Netchideff to Buddhism, they had — as the cliché succinctly says — had it.

It was a curiously hollow and undramatic realization, in the same way that the somber machinery of an execution is an anticlimax to the pageantry and excitement of a murder trial.

“I guess it had to come to this some time,” said the Saint. “But I never really believed it.”

Presently Marian said, “I wonder why women always have to get raped. And why it seems to matter so much.”

“They should especially avoid tangling with Russians,” he said.

“Do you think you could manage to strangle me?” she asked in a small expressionless voice.

He looked at her, and her eyes were unforgettably serious.

“Shut up,” he said roughly. “Igor may still drop dead first.”

There was a crunch of heavy feet outside, and Igor Netchideff stomped back in, very much alive.

He flung the Saint’s rod down with a resounding crash.

“You try to make me a fool,” he thundered. “First, that absurd fly cannot be cast. It is too light, it has no weight, you cannot throw it anywhere. But second, even when I put it out a little way with the rod in the water, no fish, came for it. No fish would be so stupid, even the fish of a capitalist country. Therefore you only pretend you can do things which you cannot, to deceive and frighten other people with nothing, as your leaders would try to do to the Soviets.”

“You’re too easily discouraged.” said the Saint. “I probably wouldn’t do any better the first time I tried fishing in the Volga, until I learned how to handle a Party line.”

7

The pilot’s face was congested with the frustration of a man who senses that he is being mocked and yet cannot confidently isolate and specify the taunt. After a long moment during which it seemed to be a toss-up whether he would try to rip the Saint to pieces or settle for rupturing one of his own blood-vessels, he turned abruptly and marched himself heavily to the stove.

He chunked fat from a can into the skillet and began to fry the trout which he had cleaned earlier.

The simple activity of watching and turning them, perhaps combined with the savory aromas that began to permeate the air, seemed to alleviate his temper. After a while he began crooning musically to himself as he had done when he was cleaning the fish. But for the baritone register of his voice, it would have been exactly reminiscent of an easily distracted infant burbling obliviously over a newly invented pastime.

Simon and Marian began to experience a sharpening ache of hunger added to their weariness and cramping limbs and other discomforts. But not for anything would they have spoken of it — or, for that matter, said anything at all that might have regained Netchideff’s attention. Any intriguing new line of conversation or argument that might have occurred to them was to be treasured for the moment when Netchideff might need another distraction; for the present he was completely occupied, and that was all that mattered. It was like keeping motionless in the same room with an escaped tiger, hoping in that immobility not to be noticed. But as Simon had said, every minute of precarious survival was still a minute stolen from eternity.

But Netchideff hadn’t forgotten them. He was only letting them wait while he attended to something else. When the trout were done to his satisfaction, he brought the pan to the table and sat down and started to eat the fish from it, holding the head in one hand and the tail in the other and taking bites from the fish until it broke apart and he had one piece in each hand to finish in alternate mouthfuls. But in between bites he looked at Simon and Marian with the thoughtfulness of a tiger that is content to deal with one bone at a time.

When he had finished, he licked his fingers, belched resonantly, and continued to sit there looking at them inscrutably, like a conquering Mongol khan considering what to do with his captives. And as he sat, the lids drooped over his eyes, his head nodded, and his breathing became more audible. He fell asleep.

Simon and Marian sat in still more incredulous stillness as the sound of breathing thickened into an unmistakable snore. They let it go on for several minutes before they ventured even to whisper.

“We’re still getting reprieves,” Simon said.

“Yes, but for what?”

“Time to think of something, maybe.”

“We’re not outsmarting him. He’s just playing cat and mouse. I know it now. This is his way of trying to break us down.”

“So long as we don’t break down, we can use the time.”

“I know. I’ll be quiet. I know you’re trying to think.” But for the first time he heard weariness in her voice, the kind of weariness which is the foreshadow of despair.

And he was trying to think, too. He had never stopped. But no thought led to a way out. And only instinctive obstinacy refused to admit that that might very simply be because there was none. But he went on trying.

They talked very little more. It was easier not to. But whenever one of them moved to revive a numbed muscle, the other could feel it, and it was like an intimate reassurance in the strange closeness which had been forced on them.

Time, which seemed so precious for the miracles it might have to find room for, nevertheless seemed to crawl in slow motion through the revelation of the miracles it was not going to produce…

Until, creeping imperceptibly into dominance against the reverberating counterpoint of the pilot’s snores, the puttering approach of an identifiable motor-boat forced itself into the Saint’s ears, and he looked down at his wrist watch and was stunned to discover how treacherously three hours had melted away.

A moment later the rhythm of Netchideff’s snoring ended in a single grunt. His eyes opened, without any other movement of his body, and he also listened.

He looked out of the window, for a minute or two, while the chugging drew closer. Then he stood up without haste, yawned and stretched mightily, and went to the door. With a brief glance at his prisoners to satisfy himself that they were still helpless, he went out, and they heard his footsteps clumping down towards the lake.

“Well,” she said. “Have you thought of anything?”

He shook his head.

“No.” It was too late for any more pretending. “I’m sorry, Marian.”

“I’m sorry too,” she said with a little sigh. “I always knew I’d meet you some day, but I imagined it very differently from this.”

“You did?” Any conversation would have seemed trivial now, but any triviality was good if it kept worse things out of her mind for a few moments longer. “How?”

“Didn’t my name mean anything to you?”

“I’m afraid not. Should it?”

“Do you remember anyone else named Kent?”

“Oh. Yes.” Two little lines notched in between his brows. “One of my very best friends, a long time ago, was named Kent.”

“Norman Kent.”

His eyes were frozen on her face.

“How did you know?”

“He was an uncle of mine. I hardly remembered him at all as a person, of course — I was still in kindergarten when he died. But I heard about it later, what little anybody ever knew. He was killed doing something with you, wasn’t he?”

“He gave his life,” said the Saint. “For me, and a few others — or perhaps millions. He did one of the bravest things a man ever did for his friends, and maybe for the world too. But I never knew—”

“Why should you? He wouldn’t be likely to talk about a brat like me.”

He was still staring at her half unbelievingly. And through his memory flooded the faces and the voices and the movements of the band of reckless young men that he had led back in those crusading days that were sometimes almost forgotten, the days that Major Vernon Ascony had uncomfortably reminded him of in Singapore to spark the train that had led halfway around the world to this moment. And most vividly of all he recalled a cottage in England, by the Thames, with the shadows of a peaceful summer evening lengthening over the garden, and the dark serious face of Norman Kent as he signed his own death-warrant and managed to hide from all of them what he had done.[1]

“Why didn’t you tell me before?” he asked.

“Would it have made any difference? There were other things that seemed a bit more urgent. Anyway, I was hoping for a better occasion, when I could ask you to tell me the whole story.”

“And now there’s no time,” he said bitterly. “But I will tell you. You should be prouder than a princess to have Norman Kent for an uncle.”

“If I were the least bit superstitious,” she said, “I’d have to believe there was some thread of Fate binding the Kent wagon to your star.”

His face had hardened into planes and grooves of bronze.

“It’s a coincidence,” he said flatly. “But I wish to hell you’d kept it to yourself.”

Hurt flicked her face like an invisible whip.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean to make it worse.”

“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “But in any good corny story, this would be where I repaid a debt and gave you the life that Norman gave me. But I don’t even see a chance of that. I think that’s what’s hardest to take.”

Her arm moved and pressed against his.

“If either of us gets the chance to do the ungodly any damage, right up to the last moment, we’ll do it,” she said. “And, please, I’d like to be kissed just once more by a man who wouldn’t have to force me.”

He turned to her and their lips met, firmly and tenderly, yet without passion, in a kiss such as few men can have known.

But not for an instant had Netchideff slipped out of his awareness altogether.

Almost unconsciously, between their speeches and their silences, he had heard the motor-boat throttle down as it reached the dock. Then, after a short pause, he had heard it start up again, and recede again for a certain distance, and stop again. He realized quickly that Netchideff must have jumped in and told Pavan to take him out at once to the seaplane, to make the repair with the part that Pavan had brought. Then for a long time there had been silence, which was broken at last by the sudden shocking roar of the seaplane’s engine. The seaplane’s engine boomed up in a smooth vibrant prolonged crescendo of power, and died no less smoothly down until a switch cut it off. Then, after a much shorter interval, the stutter of the motor-boat replaced it, plodding stolidly back towards the dock.

The repair had been made and tested: it worked, and the pilot was ready to go.

Pavan entered the cabin first, with Netchideff close behind him. Pavan looked sullen, but the pilot seemed to radiate elemental good spirits. He took the Saint’s automatic from his hip pocket and released the safety.

“Go on, Julius,” he said. “Separate the girl, and handcuff her again.”

“Damn it, you’re a stubborn bastard, Igor,” grumbled Pavan. “Why can’t I make you see how much more complicated this is? You could have given me the stuff you brought while we were out at the plane. Instead of which, I’ll have to go back again with you and—”

“Please,” Netchideff said, grinning — and perhaps only a nervous man would have thought that the gun he held was not too careful about where it pointed. “Do what I ask.”

Pavan took a small key from his pocket and approached the bunk warily. He held one of Marian’s wrists firmly in one hand, staying on the opposite side of her from the Saint, while he unlocked her handcuffs with the other. The instant the hand he was not holding was free, she jerked it around the corner pole and clawed at him like a wildcat, but he was ready for her with strength and leverage. He was extremely skilful, and in only a moment she was handcuffed again, this time behind her back. To escape the still undaunted menace of her wildly kicking feet he flung her bodily at Netchideff. The pilot caught her arm near the shoulder with his left hand alone, holding her at arm’s length and chuckling as she sobbed impotently in his gorilla grasp.

“Now, please, the same for Templar,” Netchideff said.

“What’s the matter with you?” Pavan argued. “Why—”

“Please,” Netchideff said.

Pavan approached Simon even more warily, although with the same technique. But instead of pulling away the instant it was released, as Pavan was reasonably anticipating, the Saint’s free hand shot forward. It grasped Pavan by the slack front of his plaid shirt and then recoiled again with incredible violence, jerking Pavan forward to hit the pole crunchingly with his face.

In another blurring whirlwind of movement it was Pavan whose arms were pinioned behind him, and Simon was holding him up like a shield.

“How about it, Igor?” Simon asked grittily. “Shall we talk a trade?”

“I will show you,” Netchideff said genially.

The gun barked in his hand, and Pavan screamed once and then was only a dead weight in more than a mere figure of speech.

Simon let him fall, and waited for the next shot.

“You only shortened his life by a few seconds,” Netchideff said. “I had decided to kill him in any case. Since he had already been noticed by the Canadian police, and was stupid enough to let both of you find this place, he could be no more use to us.”

“A nice way to reward an old comrade,” Simon remarked.

“He was not a comrade. It was only a business arrangement.”

Without a change of expression or any other warning Netchideff jerked the girl towards him and hit her on the head with the butt of the gun in his clubbed fist. As her knees buckled, he kept his hold of her and hoisted her over his left shoulder with a twist of his powerful left arm, exactly as he might have slung a heavy sack. And through all those movements the automatic made adaptations so that it did not lose its aim on the Saint for more than a decimal part of a second.

It was all done in a fragment of the time it takes to recite, and Simon still looked down the barrel of the gun and wondered what blind hope would keep him obedient until the irrevocable bullet crashed into his brain.

“Pick up your rod,” Netchideff ordered. “Before I kill you, you will prove that you have lied.”

8

The Saint stood on the floating dock in the bright afternoon sun, the fly rod in his hand. Netchideff had dropped the girl from his shoulder into the bottom of the motor-boat, where she lay still mercifully unconscious, and had cast off the mooring lines. He had not started the motor, but the breeze was carrying the boat steadily away over a widening slick of water. The pilot stood up squarely in the boat with his legs spread like a foreshortened Colossus, the gun which he never forgot to control no matter what else he had to do still leveled at the Saint from his lumpy fist.

“Now, show me if you can cast that thing,” Netchideff said.

“Why should I?” Simon snarled.

Yet in a sort of nightmare automatism he was making the motions of stripping line from the reel, gathering it in loose even coils in his left hand.

“Are you afraid to look foolish?” Netchideff jeered. “Or are you afraid I shall steal your secret?”

“You’re damn right you can’t make me this foolish,” said the Saint. “You can go right ahead and shoot me, but you can’t make me give you a lesson in fly casting.”

“It is, perhaps, an American secret weapon?”

“Yes,” Simon said, and the truth awakened in him like a light. “It is. In a way you’ll never understand.”

“Pah!” Netchideff spat. “You are too stupid to know how stupid you are, like any democratic bourgeois. We are symbols, you and I. I with the gun which I have taken from you, which will kill you — you with nothing but your stupid toy, and your talk of what you call sport.”

The boat was drifting away with surprising speed. The Saint had to raise his voice to be sure that he would be heard.

“And we’ll still lick you,” he said, “because you don’t know what that means.”

“You think I do not understand a sporting chance?”

How symptomatic, Simon thought, of the psychosis that is Communism to insist on pounding ideological dialectic even at that impossible moment. And yet his own compulsion forced him to fling defiance back. You went down with your colors flying, or some such traditional gesture.

“Who could interpret it for you?” he retorted. “Karl Marx, or Groucho?”

“I will give you a sporting chance,” Netchideff shouted. “Cast your feathers, catch a fish — at once — and I will not shoot you!”

The boat by then was about fifty-five feet away — little more than the minimum range for any class of pistol marksman. But the fly on the Saint’s line traveled half that distance as he raised and lowered his rod and set the fly floating lazily back and forth.

“And your Uncle Joe Stalin’s mustache,” said the Saint, with the most passionate sincerity he could put into it.

And his rod swept forward once more like a long graceful extension of his arm, and as the line reached forward ahead of it he released the reserve coils in his left hand and let them shoot out through the guides in pursuit of the sailing leader, and the whole line stretched out and straightened like a long living tongue until at the exact extremity of the cast the fly flicked Netchideff’s face.

It did not hit the pilot squarely in the left eye, the improbably miniscule target that Simon Templar had extravagantly chosen to aim for. But less than an inch below it, in the soft skin under the lower lid, the little hook stuck and pricked and then as Netchideff involuntarily flinched dug its barb deep and firm into the tender flesh.

Exquisite agony needled the pilot’s face as the hook set, and lanced blindingly through his vision as the Saint put pressure on the rod. A reflex spasm contracted Netchideff’s forefinger on the trigger of the automatic, but he had already lost sight of its mark in the sharp bright flash of pain, and even as the shot exploded another reflex was jerking both his hands up to clutch at the focal center of his anguish.

There was a remorseless pulling in the pain, a thin pitiless traction that redoubled his torture at the least resistance and offered surcease only from yielding to the pull and leaning in its direction so as to reduce the agonizing tension. He leaned into the pull until his feet had to follow his tottering balance and he stumbled against something with his shins and the boat rocked and he was suddenly weightless and then the water struck him and closed over him. Somewhere in that flurry he let go the gun.

But even when he came up again, choking and spluttering, the pain was still under his eye, drawing him steadily towards itself. His clawing hands touched a thread too frail to grasp, yet their own pressure on it only increased the agonizing drag on the embedded hook. But the line would not break: the limberness of the rod was a spring that refused to allow a solid resistance against which the line could have been snapped. There was still no relief except in following that fragile but inexorable pull, half swimming and half floundering in the direction it dictated.

With a heart-stopping delicacy that no angler has probably been called upon to match before or since, the Saint played him like a fish, until he was close enough to the dock to be knocked cold with an oar.

9

In Johnny Kan’s restaurant in San Francisco, Simon Templar said, “You’ll meet her. She should be here in a few minutes. But the Mounties still wanted her for a lot of dull routine work, digging out the roots of Pavan’s distributing organization as far as possible, and that kind of mopping-up bores me. Is everything ready? The gai yung yee chee—”

“Yes, we have your shark’s fin soup. And gum buoy ngun jon, and the chicken with wing nien sauce. What about the Russian pilot?”

“I think they’re still trying to decide what sort of protocol to apply to him. When the politicians and diplomats get into the act, I’d rather be included out. So we made a date to celebrate here as soon as she could get away.”

“That was nice of you.”

“Besides, I had to find out how much you really knew when you let out a hint about fishing that was what finally put me on the track — when I got the point.”

“You can hear a lot of things through the Chinese grapevine,” Johnny Kan said. “For God’s sake don’t tell anyone, or I’ll never be left alone. It was just a rumor that I hoped might do you some good. When I was a kid there were so many lousy stories written about opium dens run by sinister Orientals that it gives me a special kick to think I did something personally to help smash a dope racket.”

“Well, we dented it anyhow,” Simon said. “Although I don’t suppose it’ll be long before the ungodly are trying again.”

“If they ever gave up, what would you do for excitement? Go fishing?”

The Saint grinned, and lighted a cigarette.

“I’ve been wondering if I could claim some sort of record. He must have been damn nearly the biggest thing ever landed with a fly rod. He was about seventy inches long and would have weighed easily two hundred and twenty pounds. I was using HCH line with a four-pound-test leader, and by the happiest coincidence I hooked him with a fly called a Red Ant.”