The Saint on the Spanish Main

1

The Virgin Islands are named together as one geographical group, but some of them belong to Great Britain and some to the United States. And thereby hangs this tale.

“You see, the treasure is right in the middle,” April Mallory told the Saint.

“How awkward of it,” murmured Simon Templar.

Christopher Columbus discovered the islands east of Puerto Rico on his second voyage, in 1493, but Spain did nothing about them. The British occupied Tortola in 1666, and enlarged their claim to the islands east of there. The islands of St. Thomas, St. Croix, and St. John changed hands several times, but were held longest by the Danes, until Denmark sold them to the United States in 1917.

Now between the island of St. John and the island of Tortola to the northeast of it runs a strip of water once called, rather pompously, Sir Francis Drake Channel, known to the buccaneers more picturesquely as the Virgin’s Gangway, and shown on modern charts, in a dull modern way, as The Narrows. But today’s comparatively dull name, like many prosaic modern things, is unarguably efficient, at least as a description, for the channel is most certainly very narrow, as such straits go, being in places less than two miles across.

“So what you might call the frontier runs somewhere through there,” April Mallory explained. “But even the maps only show a dotted line which they call ‘approximate.’ Apparently England and America never had a full-dress meeting to decide exactly where to draw it. They got along fine anyway, the English on one island and the Americans on the other, with nothing to squabble about in between. Until now, when it’s a question of whose sea bottom the treasure is on.”

The Saint sipped his Dry Sack.

“That isn’t in the script,” he objected.

“What script?”

“The one Jack Donohue lent me.”

“And who’s he?”

The Saint sighed.

“Someone has to be kidding somebody,” he said. “But I’ll play it straight, if you like.”

“I wish you would.”

“From the very beginning?”

“Please.”

“All right. Columbus named them the Virgin Islands because there seemed to be an awful lot of them.”

“That was in 1493.”

“Christopher was thinking specifically of the legend of St. Ursula and her eleven thousand virgins from Britain,” said the Saint reprovingly. “Who were massacred by the Huns somewhere around Cologne in stalwart defense of their virtue.”

“What were they doing there?”

“I believe they’d been on a trip to Rome, among other things. A sort of medieval Girl Scouts’ junket.”

“When was this?”

“Oh, more than a thousand years before Christopher.”

“I don’t suppose England will ever replace them now,” April said. “But you don’t need to go back quite that far. Let’s get more contemporary.”

“Meaning around the time we picked each other up?”

“If you can’t make it sound any more romantic.” It was true, however. An hour ago they had set eyes on each other for the first time, seated on adjacent stools at the bar of the Golden Galleon, a newly opened place of refreshment in the town of Charlotte Amalie, which is the town of the island of St. Thomas, and it can be stipulated that all eyes were taken with what they saw. She had clear blue eyes and light red-gold hair and a face and figure that any pirate who ever trod those islands would have rather captured than any galleon, and with the same clear blue eyes and bronze swashbuckler’s face the Saint looked every inch as much a pirate as any man ever could have, even in such an imitation galleon as that. So that it had been very easy to strike up the conversation which just lately seemed to have gotten slightly out of hand.

“Okay,” he said. “I know there’s an outfit from Hollywood on location here, shooting footage for an epic entitled Perilous Treasure, in gorgeous Technicolor and colossal Cinemascope.”

“I’ve heard of it.”

“Jack Donohue is the director. He happens to be an old pal of mine. As a matter of fact, he wants me to double for the star in some skin-diving shots, on account of the hired hero is worried about sharks or something. That’s why he let me read the script.”

“How interesting.”

“So if you’re trying to hook me for some gag, darling, for publicity or anything else, I’m the wrong fish.”

“I’m not talking about any movie script, and it’s no gag,” she said. “This is a real treasure.”

Simon blinked. He could see now that she was completely serious.

“From pirates, yes?”

“In a way. It was a Spanish ship, the Santa Cecilia, loaded with gold from Mexico. Blackbeard the pirate got wind of her somehow, and he was waiting for her when she left Puerto Rico. He chased her around these islands and overtook her in the Narrows. Either his gunners hit her in the powder magazine with an unlucky shot, or the Spanish captain decided to sink her rather than be captured. Anyway, she blew up and sank before the pirates could get their hands on any of the loot.”

“You look very young to remember all this so clearly.”

“One of my great-great-etcetera-grandfathers sailed with Blackbeard for a while. He kept a diary, and he drew a chart in it that shows exactly where the Santa Cecilia went down.”

“Didn’t Blackbeard or anyone else try to fish up her cargo before it got barnacles on it?”

“She sank in about eighty feet of water, and they couldn’t swim down that far. They didn’t have any diving apparatus in those days.”

“But since then.”

“The diary was handed down from father to son, and someone was always going to do something about it, but I suppose they got a little more skeptical with each generation, and somehow nobody ever quite got around to it. Until me.”

“And you spill the whole thing to the first stranger you meet in a bar,” Simon remarked pensively.

She shook her head.

“I’m not quite that dumb. I heard you give your name in that last shop you were in, and I followed you.”

“I didn’t see you.”

“I hope not. I was trying on a bathing suit in the back room. But they told me which way you’d gone. The pick-up was entirely mutual. I thought a damsel in distress could trust the Saint.”

Simon nodded, and lighted a cigarette. His astonishment was already little more than a memory. An ordinary man would probably have still been gasping and goggle-eyed, if he were able to believe the girl at all, but to Simon Templar there was nothing too fantastic about a tale of sunken pirate treasure, or that it should be told to him. In fact, the really extraordinary thing was that in all the time he had spent among those islands of the Caribbean which history and fiction had adorned with all the trappings of the Spanish Main, he had waited so long for his first direct contact with such an obvious story.

“What’s your trouble?” he asked.

2

The other ingredients were almost standard for that kind of situation.

April was the last direct descendant of the Mallory who had sailed with Blackbeard. Her father had been shot down in Libya. April grew up and went to business school, after various experiments had risen to be an editorial assistant in a publishing house, where for forty hours a week in the office and uncounted hours at home she wrestled with strictly literary if not always literate adventure. When her mother had died not long ago, and April had found herself not only relieved of the responsibility of a partial dependent but the heiress to a nest egg of almost eight thousand dollars, she had realized that such an opportunity was never likely to knock again, and had decided to take one reckless fling at real adventure before resigning herself to the relatively humdrum alternatives of marriage or career or their combination.

“So here I am,” she said, “with a couple of aqualungs, and a boat that I chartered here, and that old chart. And it’s true, Saint. The wreck’s exactly where it’s supposed to be. I saw it!”

“What did it look like?” Simon asked casually.

“Not a bit like they’d do it in the movies. But I was ready for that. You know, there’d be nothing left of a wooden hull that was sunk in these waters as long ago as that. The marine worms would have eaten it all up. And the iron rusts and gets covered with coral. I’d read all about that in books.”

She could have done that, but at least she wasn’t trying to sell him the description of a picturesque movie-studio wreck, as one sizable category of inventors would have done. He could still swallow the story.

“But you were able to recognize something.”

“The shapes of some guns, and cannon balls, things like that — even with coral growing on them. When you see it yourself, you’ll know.”

“But now,” said the Saint, “there has to be a villain.”

“There is.”

“Name?”

“You may know it. Duncan Rawl.”

Simon did know it. Duncan Rawl was a professional world traveler and self-styled adventurer who had made a very comfortable living out of his own tall tales. He had been almost everywhere and done almost everything, at least according to himself, and although there were certain spoilsports who claimed to know that his familiarity with the far places and his role in the stirring incidents which he recounted had been a lot less rich and glorious than the way he told it, their voices were practically drowned in the acclaim of the largely feminine audience which bought his books and subscribed to his profitable lecture tours.

Simon also recalled other anecdotes about Mr Rawl’s inclination to believe in and enlarge upon his own publicity, which had brought him into several news stories of unquestionable authenticity and somewhat less glamorous implication, which had prompted one sharp-tongued columnist to suggest revising his name to Drunken Brawl... Yes, Mr Rawl had the makings of a most acceptable heavy.

“You’d met him through your job with the publisher,” he said. “So when you decided to shoot your roll on this treasure hunt, you thought he was just the guy to go to for some expert advice.”

“Only I didn’t realize he’d be in quite such a hurry to cut himself in. I suppose I was a bit presumptuous to think I could call on him just because I’d helped to promote a couple of his books in the line of duty. I guess I’d have seen his point if he’d asked for a cash fee, or even a percentage. But I’m sort of stuffy about being told I have to do business in bed.”

“Makes it too hard to concentrate, doesn’t it?” said the Saint sympathetically. “And so you parted.”

“But unfortunately I’d already shown him the chart.”

“And let him make a copy?”

“He didn’t need to. It’s not that complicated. Look.”

She took a folded paper from her purse and spread it out on the bar. It was a piece of thoroughly modern tracing paper, but the outlines on it were quite clear and easy to remember, even to the location of the X that marked the most important spot.

“This is my copy,” she said. “I took it from the original, and left that in a safe deposit in New York. But Great-great-etcetera-grandfather was a good sailor, or he had a very good eye. If you put this next to a modern chart, you’d almost think that’s what it was made from. The only difference is that the modern chart has a dotted line through the Narrows, here, for the ‘approximate’ boundary between British and American territory, and that line just about goes through the middle of the X. The little island up there, off the tip of Tortola, is called Great Thatch, and it’s British. And the treasure seems to be just halfway between there and St. John, which is ours.”

Simon signed to the bartender to refill their glasses, and glanced once more at the drawing. After that he could have reproduced it himself from memory, as accurately as from a photographic plate. It would not have been an altogether amazing accomplishment, and Duncan Rawl would not have needed to be a genius to duplicate it.

“So you located the wreck,” said the Saint “And then what?”

“I’d been down with a mask and the aqualung for nearly an hour — I’d probably have been down all day if my air hadn’t started to run low. When I came up, there was another launch beside my boat, and it was flying the British flag. Duncan Rawl was running it, and besides his crew he had three native police from Road Town, on Tortola. They claimed we were in British waters and we had no right to be trying to salvage anything there.”

“But it was all right for Rawl to try?”

“He’d set up a British company with a couple of native stooges, and he had a license and everything.”

“So?”

“All I could do was argue that we were on the American side of the line, and try to talk everything to a standstill. I waved the Stars and Stripes and talked fast about Washington and ambassadors and the President. Those British cops are honest fanatics about legality and protocol, even way out here, and I got them worried enough to make them decide that the only safe thing for them was to halt everything until somebody higher up settled the problem. Even Rawl couldn’t persuade them to let him go ahead and dive. I figured the treasure would at least be safe for a while, and I came back here and hired a lawyer.”

“When was that?”

“Just over a week ago.” The Saint relaxed.

“Oh, for a moment I thought it was urgent. Now I see your problem. A decision will be handed down in about forty years, and you’re wondering how your grandchildren will make out.”

“No. It might have been that way, but the American Governor and the British Governor are good friends. The British Governor comes over here to play golf, and the American Governor goes over there to fish. So they got everybody together and decided they ought to be able to settle it without any international complications. The first thing they said was, why didn’t we join forces and split fifty-fifty.”

“Duncan would have liked that, I suppose.”

“But I wouldn’t. Maybe he’s got just as much legal right to anything he can find as I have, but I’m prejudiced.”

“I don’t blame you.”

“So then they said, all right, suppose we agreed to dive on alternate days, and each kept what we brought up.”

“Subject to taxes and other lawful tribute, no doubt.”

“Of course. And if I hadn’t agreed to that, you’d have been right, everything probably would have been tied up for forty years.”

“When does this deal go into effect?”

“On Monday. And Duncan Rawl gets first crack!”

Simon raised his eyebrows.

“How come?”

“Those two Solomons decided that the only impartial way to settle that was to flip a coin for it. And I lost.”

The blue eyes had clouded at last, and there was a gleam of raindrops in them.

“That isn’t necessarily fatal,” he said.

“In clear water, as shallow as that, when we know exactly where the wreck is? In one full day, they could locate and haul up everything that didn’t have to be turned up with dynamite. No, they could take out everything easy in the morning, and dynamite for the hard stuff in the afternoon. What’ll be left on the second day won’t even pay my expenses!”

Simon scowled through a meditative smoke-ring. Her estimate was probably close to the truth. Assuming that there was any such treasure to be salvaged as she had described it, the first party with a free hand for a day should be able to skim all the cream off it.

“Sounds as if we’ll either have to whistle up a gale for Monday,” he said, “or—”

“Or you can still settle for half, April,” Duncan Rawl said.

He loomed up on the other side of the girl, leaning one elbow on the bar. Neither of them had seen him come in. But the Saint knew at once who it was, even before Rawl turned to the bartender and said, “The usual,” and the bartender identified him with an impersonal, “Yes, Mr Rawl.”

There had been unkind critics who said that few Hollywood actors worked as hard at looking romantic as Duncan Rawl. He had the natural advantages of a broad-shouldered six-foot-four-inch frame, and a flashing smile that could light up a handsome willful face, even if there was a certain telltale slackening of the important lines of waist and jaw. But the carefully disordered blond curls with a battered yachting cap perched on the back of them were perhaps a little too consciously photogenic, as was a shirt of sufficiently unusual cut to suggest a theatrical costume rather than a piece of haberdashery, worn unbuttoned almost to the waist as if intentionally to display an antique gold locket hung on a gold necklace chain thick enough to anchor a small boat. At any rate, it could never have been said that he tried self-effacingly to look like any ordinary Joe.

“I’m not greedy,” Rawl said insolently. “I’ll still be satisfied with an equal partnership.”

“Thank you,” said the girl icily. “I don’t want any charity from a crook. And I’m busy, if you hadn’t noticed.”

“Grow up, April. There aren’t any proprietary rights to a treasure. It’s finders keepers. The only reason you heard about this one first, if you’ll stop and think about it, is because one of your ancestors was a criminal. So what have you got to be so righteous about?”

“So long as you’re happy, why don’t you just go away?”

Rawl lounged more solidly against the bar, and picked up the double shot of straight whisky which the bartender had poured. He didn’t look a bit like moving.

Simon slid off his stool and came around on the other side of him.

“You heard what she said,” he remarked pleasantly. “Why don’t you drink that somewhere else?”

Rawl straightened up and measured him with a deliberate eye. Tall and sinewy as the Saint was, Rawl was two inches taller and forty pounds heavier. It was one of those rare occasions when the Saint looked as if he should have had more discretion. Rawl grinned confidently.

“How would you like to get it right in the kisser?”

“I’d love you to try,” said the Saint mildly.

Rawl raised his glass, drank it down to the last few drops, lowered it, and then jolted the dregs straight at the Saint’s face.

Incredibly, the Saint’s face was not there to receive them. It moved aside in an almost instantaneous blur, and the flung liquor only sprinkled a couple of drops on his shoulder as it passed through vacant space.

As another integrated process of the same general movement, Simon’s left fist sank like a depth charge into Rawl’s stomach just at the bottom of his dashing décolletage. Rawl grunted and leaned forward from the middle, but he was still able to launch one vicious swing at the Saint’s head. Only again the head was elusive. The swing connected with nothing but air, and Rawl’s own forward momentum only added a little extra verve to the encounter between his chin and the Saint’s right cross. Duncan Rawl hit the bar jarringly with his back and slid against it for a couple of yards on his way down, taking a few stools with him. His eyes were glazed before he reached the floor, and he lay there very solidly, as if he liked it there and had decided to stay.

3

“Please, sir,” said the bartender courteously, “would you mind leaving now? I’m sure you could handle him again, but it’s bad for business. And usually he breaks bottles.”

“Please,” April Mallory added for herself. “I was just going to ask if you’d take me to dinner.”

“I just like to oblige everyone,” said the Saint.

It hadn’t exactly been a brawl to rank with the most Homeric barroom brannigans in which Simon had ever participated, but it had clinched his acceptance of April’s story, and assured him that he would have no sentiment to waste on Duncan Rawl. Therefore he had no regrets about it. Besides, a flurry of that kind was practically an obligatory incident at a certain stage of any good pirate-treasure story, and the Saint was rather a traditionalist about his stories. He liked to feel that all the time-honored trimmings were in their proper place. It encouraged a kind of light-hearted certainty that virtue, which of course he represented, would be triumphant in the end.

In this case, however, the odds against the conventionally satisfying outcome looked more forbidding as he learned more about them.

He took April to dinner at Bluebeard’s Castle, where he was staying, because he had decided the first time he saw it that the view from the hillside terrace of the hotel over the landlocked harbor and the town of Charlotte Amalie could only be enjoyed to the full in the right kind of company, and the Saint also liked a seasoning of romance with his stories, which was another ancient and delightful tradition that he had no desire to violate. But almost two hours later, while they were enjoying the view to the full over coffee and cigarettes and Benedictine, he had to admit that the rest of what he had learned seemed to have closed up possible loopholes rather than opened any.

“My captain’s been ordered not to take me anywhere near the Narrows before Monday, and he’s too scared of losing his license to play games. Rawl’s crew is under the same orders from the Governor of the British islands,” she told him. “But I can’t even take you over for a look.”

“You wouldn’t have to go along,” he said. “Since you showed me the chart, I could go straight to the spot from memory. Why couldn’t I hire another boat and go there tomorrow? By the same token, what’s to stop Rawl doing the same — or anyone else, for that matter?”

“Because the place has been guarded ever since this hassle started. My lawyer got the American Governor to send a Coast Guard cutter to anchor over there to protect my interests, and as soon as it got there a boatload of police from Tortola came out and tied up alongside to watch out for the British claim. The treasure couldn’t be safer until the official hunting season opens at dawn on Monday.”

It was then Saturday night.

“At least we’ve still got about thirty hours to develop an inspiration,” he said finally. “Suppose we adjourn to your hotel now, where I hear they have dancing under the stars, and see if we dream up something there.”

But when he finally left her that night, considerably later, they had still not dreamed up anything that was strictly related to the problem that had brought them together. Not that either of them felt that the time had been altogether wasted...

“Call me when you wake up in the morning,” he said, “and we’ll start again.”

“I can’t,” she said. “I’ve promised to go to Caneel Bay for the day with my attorney and his wife, and they’ve been so sweet to me that I’ve got to do it. Besides, he’s trying to come up with a last-minute inspiration too. But I’ll call you as soon as I get back.”

And that was another conventional obstruction, which at the moment he could have done without.

He was picking up his key at the desk of Bluebeard’s Castle when a large man heaved himself out of an armchair in the lounge with a prodigious yawn.

“What sort of an hour is this to come home?” boomed Jack Donohue. “If I’d had to wait for you much longer they were going to start charging me rent.”

“You’re lucky I got back at all,” said the Saint. “I might have been in hospital, or in jail. Weren’t you worried?”

“I could have been. They told me you’d had a gorgeous red-head to dinner, and then you’d gone off with her somewhere. But I knew she’d get wise to you fairly soon, and throw you out.”

They walked across to Simon’s room with a pitcher of ice, and he produced a bottle of Peter Dawson to go with it.

“Well, Jackson,” he said. “Besides bumming a free nightcap and insulting me, what’s on your mind?”

“Are you going to do that swimming and diving for me on Monday, or not?”

“Can’t you do it yourself?”

“Yes, I could do it, but it would look like hell in the picture. You’ve read the script. It calls for someone who looks svelte, meaning skinny and underfed, like you. And I’ve got to know whether I can count on you, tonight. If not, I’ve got to phone New York and have someone flown down tomorrow.”

Simon moved his head reluctantly, left to right.

“I’m sorry, chum. I’m sort of engaged for Monday.”

“Give the girl such a time tomorrow that she won’t miss you till Tuesday.”

“She’s tied up tomorrow.”

“Then to hell with her. Make her wait for you till Tuesday.”

“We have a shooting schedule for Monday, too, and it’s something I can’t change.”

“What a louse you turned out to be,” Donohue said morosely. “I should have made an actor of you when I met you in Hollywood. Then you’d have been pleading with me for a chance to work, instead of spurning me for some ginger dye job. Aren’t you getting a bit old to be chasing these dizzy dolls?”

The Saint grinned.

“Didn’t you know, Junior? When you get to be my age, you’ll really appreciate them. And they will appreciate you for your sophistication and all the money you’ll have. It’s a grand old formula. And talking of formulas—”

He broke off suddenly, his face transfigured in mid-speech by a beatific thought that had illuminated his brain like a revelation from heaven. For several seconds he rolled it rapturously around in his mind, assaying all its possibilities of perfection.

“Well?” Donohue said coldly.

“I’m thinking of your corny script. And I will double in those underwater shots for you.”

“Thank you.”

“On Tuesday.”

“Monday.”

“No, I’m booked even more solid on Monday now. Just switch your schedules for the two days. I’m sure you can do it.”

“All right, damn you,” Donohue said resignedly. “I expect you’ll sink like a stone on Tuesday, but all right. If that’s all it’s costing me, I’ll switch the schedule for you.”

“It isn’t quite all...”

The director groaned aloud.

“What else? You want real mermaids to fan you between takes?”

“I don’t want to strain your budget. But since you don’t have to worry about getting a professional swimmer tomorrow, and you’ll have nothing but time on your hands, you’re going to have to do something for me.”

4

The Narrows on Monday morning had the air of a maritime picnic ground rather than the site of a salvage operation. The US Coast Guard cutter would have been dwarfed by a destroyer, but she looked big enough to be the mother of the brood of other craft gathered around her. The police boat from Road Town and the pinnace that had brought the Governor of the British islands were tied up to one side of her, and April Mallory’s chartered cabin cruiser was tied up to the other side. Duncan Rawl’s launch was hove to only a few yards away.

It was a perfect day for a picnic or for salvage. The water was oily calm, silver blue and turquoise, as the sun took its first step up into a cloudless sky, and the variety of flags called for by the nations and services and personages represented gave the little group of boats a festive and holiday appearance.

“I’m only surprised that everything else in the Caribbean that’ll float isn’t here,” said the Saint.

“All of us tried our best to keep it quiet,” April said. “That was about the only thing everyone was agreed on, including the authorities. If it had got into the papers, it’d ’ve taken the American and British navies combined to keep the channel clear.”

The American Governor was on board the cutter, where he was playing host to the British Governor, and he had courteously invited April and the Saint aboard as soon as they came within hailing distance.

It had been nine o’clock the previous night before Simon had talked to her on the phone.

“I had to have dinner with them,” she said, “and now I’m full of sun and sleepy, and we’ve got to leave tomorrow before daylight. Don’t let’s try to meet tonight.”

“Did your legal beagle produce his brainstorm?” he asked.

“No. Did you?”

“Yes.”

She was silent for a moment.

“I’m too tired to be teased, darling.”

“And I don’t want to give you any false hopes, baby. It might work, but it’s only a wild gamble. So I won’t say anything now. Get some sleep, and I’ll see you on the dock.”

But when they had met, before dawn, and the cabin cruiser droned out through Pillsbury Sound under the paling stars, he still refused to tell her any more.

“Let’s face it,” he said. “You’re prettier than most actresses, but you may not be one. And if you just act naturally, it’ll be better than any performance.”

“I think I’d rather not know, anyway,” she said listlessly. “I’ve been trying to get used to the idea that I’m licked, and it wouldn’t be much fun to start hoping and be let down all over again.”

Now, as they stood on the cutter’s deck watching Duncan Rawl preparing for his first dive, Simon could feel that she was somewhat less stoical than she might have wished to be, and he was scarcely surprised. He was aware of more than a mild tingle of anticipation himself, although it was necessarily in a different key from hers. Stripped down to his swimming trunks, Duncan Rawl looked like a heroic if slightly debauched and hung-over Norse god. He had declined to board the cutter or to tie up to her, cutting his engine a few lengths away and letting the launch drift by to the separate focal spot befitting the star of the show. He had ignored April and the Saint in his greetings as he passed as if he had not even seen them. He sat with his feet dangling over the side, scowling down at the water, while his helpers hung the air tanks on his shoulders and put a weighted belt around his middle.

The sun was barely high enough to send light under the water when he pulled down his mask, put on the breathing mouthpiece, and let himself down till he sank out of sight.

“I suppose it’d be wicked to hope that a shark bites him,” April said.

“Could be,” said the Saint. “But let’s hope it anyway.”

He lighted a cigarette and forced himself to smoke it unhurriedly. In that way, disciplining himself against the temptation to look at his watch every few seconds, he could estimate fairly accurately that it was less than ten minutes before Rawl surfaced again, and his spirits leapt as he saw it.

Rawl’s men helped him aboard and lifted off his air tank. There was a brief excited colloquy, and then one of the men took the wheel and the engine coughed and started. Rawl sprang up on to the foredeck as the launch eased over to the cutter, and as it drew alongside he was tall enough to grasp a stanchion on the cutter and hold on, mooring the launch with his own arm.

“Ahoy there, Captain, or whoever’s in charge!”

The Coast Guard skipper came to the rail, but the two Governors were at his elbow, and April and the Saint were close beside them.

“What is it, Mr Rawl?”

“You’d better get these boats moved away. I’m going to dynamite.”

“Already?” April gasped.

Simon cleared his throat, and moved in still closer.

“Pardon me, Your Excellencies,” he said to the two Governors, “but Miss Mallory asked me to come as her adviser because her attorney had to be in court this morning. And I think she has a right to protest against what Mr Rawl proposes to do.”

“On what grounds?” asked the British Governor.

“To use dynamite now, before the bottom has been thoroughly examined as it is, could obliterate a lot of treasure that otherwise might be quite easy to locate and bring up — for someone who really knows what he’s doing, I mean. Of course nobody would mind Mr Rawl making a mess down there if he were the only person concerned. But he should be obliged to leave Miss Mallory a fair chance to find something when her turn comes tomorrow.”

“What would you suggest?” asked the American Governor.

“I think it would only be fair to let each party make a thorough search of the bottom, without any blasting, before letting one party change the situation so drastically.”

“I’m not dynamiting to see what it uncovers, sir,” Rawl said. “I’ve got to do it to kill something that wouldn’t let anyone do any searching.”

Simon stared down at him clinically.

“You look rather pale, Duncan, old grampus,” he observed. “What was it frightened you down there?”

“Only the biggest damned octopus that anyone here will ever see,” snarled Rawl. “It’s thirty feet across if it’s an inch — and it’s sitting right where the treasure is supposed to be!”

The Saint’s expression was a masterpiece of derisive disbelief.

“Was it a pint one,” he inquired, “wearing a green top-hat and tartan pants, and playing a duet with itself on two piccolos?”

Rawl’s face turned dusky under his tan, and his muscles tensed as if to haul himself aboard the cutter by the stanchion he held.

And then a light of hellish inspiration overspread the darkness of rage, and his snarl modulated into a sneer.

“Maybe you’d like to go down and see for yourself,” he said.

“I’d love to,” Simon said calmly. “Can we take that as an official offer — that since you’re scared to go on without blowing that poor little squid to bits, you’ll step aside while I try it for April?”

“You’re goddam right you can,” Rawl said triumphantly. “And I’m going to laugh myself sick watching the great Saint run away from that poor little squid.”

April was clinging to the Saint’s arm.

“I won’t let you,” she said.

“You will, honey,” he said out of the side of his mouth. “You’ve got to. It’s your only chance.”

“Just one more thing, though,” Rawl said. “If I let you in ahead of your turn, time’s being wasted, and after the Saint comes back with his tail between his legs we’ll have to dynamite anyway, and then it’ll be hours before the water settles down again so anyone can see anything, so I should have tomorrow to myself as well.”

“We’ll accept that,” Simon said grimly.

The two Governors stepped aside and conferred together, but not for long. The American announced their decision:

“Since our main object is to eliminate or avoid a dispute, any compromise that Miss Mallory and Mr Rawl agree upon must have our approval.”

5

The Saint sank gently into the cool peacock depths, twisting and turning like a fancy high diver in slow motion to extract the utmost sensual delight from the feeling of three-dimensional freedom which only aqualung swimmers can experience, the nearest thing to the sensation of true flying that man has yet been able to achieve. The twin cylinders of compressed air on his back, so heavy and cumbersome on a deck, were such a negative burden under water that a belt of small lead weights was necessary to help him sink. Thus counterbalanced, his body felt almost weightless, so that he could turn in any direction or rest relaxed in any position without effort, or if he wished to move anywhere he only had to make lazy movements with his legs, and the rubber flippers on his feet would propel him as smoothly as the fins of a fish. Breath came to him through the mouthpiece gripped in his teeth, as much and as often as he wanted, so that there was none of the strain and struggle inseparable from ordinary swimming, no irksome reminder that he was in a foreign element. It was a strange rapture which he would discover anew every time he did it: to feel literally almost as much at home in the water as a fish, yet with a buoyant exultation more like the ecstasy of flight that a poet would attribute to a bird.

And like a bird he soared and glided through water almost as crystal clear as air, but more clinging and resistant so that all movements were more languorous, over the hills and valleys, the fantastic groves and gardens, of a strange silent world. Coveys of striped and tinted small fry scattered and circled as he planed through them, and among the submarine trees larger fish moved more sluggishly, and down in the bluer deeps, sprawling torpid and obscene, was the ultimate monster — the finest plastic octopus, Jack Donohue had assured him, that any Hollywood prop department had yet constructed.

The indispensable traditional octopus that had a part in every self-respecting story of sunken treasure since fiction discovered diving.

It was the first time Simon had seen it properly, even though he had helped to place it in its present location. He and Donohue and the prop man had been out there the day before on the tugboat which Donohue was using for his water work, ostensibly to scout scenery and make preparations for the following week’s shooting: the tugboat and Donohue were already known to the Coast Guard crew, and were allowed to approach without being warned off as brusquely as any other boat would have been. Simon and the prop man had dumped the deflated monster over the far side of the tug two hundred yards away and dragged it into position under water, while Donohue took the tug alongside the cutter and engaged the crew in conversation, and the keels of the two boats, which they could look up and see, provided a perfect marker for the position that Simon had to find. But then Simon had had trouble with his air regulator valve, and had had to jettison his weights and swim upwards hastily, leaving the prop man to complete the installation and inflation alone. He had steered his rise to the side of the tug away from the Coast Guard cutter, and climbed aboard where the tug’s deckhouse hid him, and soon afterwards the prop man had done the same, and then Donohue had promptly headed the tug away down the channel before they would seem to be dawdling too long in the forbidden area.

It had all worked out as slickly as a drill, and even the prop man had only been told that Donohue was determined to shoot some underwater scenes in that particular spot in spite of the prohibition.

Now that Simon saw the monster (which in their irreverent way the movie unit had christened Marilyn) in its full glory, he was ready to agree that it was a real work of art. Some of its tentacles which were not anchored to the rock, stirred no doubt by unseen tidal currents, moved sinuously like huge slothful snakes, and their undulating motion transmitted an effect of ponderously pulsing life to the bloated purple body and the malignant liquid eyes. He couldn’t despise Rawl for being scared. If he hadn’t known what it was, he wouldn’t have gone anywhere near it himself.

But it had worked, psychologically and with shrewd needling, exactly as the Saint had banked on it.

Now all he had to do was pick up the gold and load it into the cradle which had been lowered from April’s cruiser.

It seemed almost absurdly anticlimactic, but that was about all there was to it.

It was the kind of sunken treasure that salvage men dream about. The Santa Cecilia had gone down in a rocky basin which kept her remains together as if in a bowl. There were no shifting sands, the bane of most treasure hunts, to scatter and swallow them. Everything that had not perished was within a small radius, and he had located the area without too much trouble, as April had said he would, by the suggested shapes of such recognizables as cannons and cannon balls. It was only a matter of chipping the crusts of coral at every likely-looking spot, working with hammer and crowbar whenever he was rewarded with a yellow gleam, breaking the gold bars loose and dragging them to the cradle and putting them in...

In only half an hour he had collected as big a load as he figured the light tackle on the cruiser could comfortably handle.

He signaled on the rope for it to be hauled up, and paddled off to investigate another promising coral formation still closer to the shelf on which Marilyn sat eyeing him balefully. Under the concealing growth of living stone, he found another mound of ingots.

He wished he could have been on the cruiser’s deck, as well as down there, to share April’s excitement when she saw the first load.

He started to smile, almost getting himself a mouthful of water. The excitement on the surface would not be confined to April’s cruiser. It would spread in a flash to every other boat in the group — including Rawl’s. Somewhat belatedly, he wondered what would happen after that.

He had told April the truth about Marilyn, of course, before he started down, in a brief moment when he had her alone. But he hadn’t had time to emphasize that the secret must always be kept between them. He hoped that in her intoxication with the last-minute victory she wouldn’t let something out that would reach the ears of Rawl. It would be ironic to have victory snatched from them again on a technicality. But if Rawl cried foul, the Governors might have to sustain him. Or would Rawl prefer to accept defeat rather than ridicule?

Simon had a partial answer about April in a few minutes. She came down in the empty cradle, wearing her own aqualung, like a modern mermaid in a hammock. She could not smile, with the rubber mouthpiece deforming her lips, but as he touched her and they shook hands he saw her eyes shining and dancing behind the glass of her face mask.

Then she saw the octopus, and her eyes grew still bigger. Simon got her attention back by shaking her shoulder; then as she looked at him he pointed at the octopus, then up towards the surface, then put an upraised forefinger in front of his mouthpiece. She nodded vigorously, and repeated the forefinger gesture, and he figured that everything was still all right.

But he looked up again, and saw Duncan Rawl coming down.

There was no mistaking the glint of sunlight on his yellow curls. Or the glint of metal from the powerful spear gun couched under his arm like a lance.

The Saint’s thoughts raced in a vertiginous cascade. Had Rawl gone completely crazy with disappointment, berserk, decided to murder one or both of them regardless of the almost inevitable consequences? It seemed incredible to the Saint even as he instinctively thrust April behind him and poised himself for the flimsy chance of parrying the spear with his crowbar. Rawl was swimming down at a steep angle towards them, but on a course which began to look as if it would take him down on to Marilyn unless he pulled out of the dive at the last moment. Then was he playing for some kind of compensating glory? Since the Saint had made him look foolish by ignoring the octopus and having no trouble, was Rawl thinking of vindicating himself by killing it and then claiming to have saved the Saint’s life? That was plausible, yet it seemed hardly enough. A boast like that hardly seemed enough to salve a hypertrophied ego that had taken such punctures as he had administered to Rawl’s.

And then the answer dawned on him, with the clarity of a blueprint, as Rawl slowed his glide directly over the giant cephalopod. It was written like a book in the way Rawl glanced towards him for an instant, running his eye like a tape measure over the distance between Simon and the octopus.

Rawl only expected his shaft, when he fired it, to infuriate the creature. Then it would grab Simon and April, who were well within its reach. And Duncan Rawl would take credit for having valiantly tried to save them...

The Saint’s ribs ached from the impossibility of laughing.

Duncan Rawl fired his spear.

It twinkled like a silver arrow, straight down at Marilyn’s great amorphous body. And then the thing happened that curdled and froze the laughter in Simon’s chest.

As if the monster had watched everything with its basilisk eye, and hadn’t been fooled for a second, knowing exactly where the thing that stung it had come from — but how preposterous and fantastic could anything be? — it released the rock it sprawled on and shot straight upwards like an outlandish rocket. Its tentacles lashed around Rawl like enormous whips, and where they touched they clung. He looked like a pygmy in its stupendous eight-armed grip. One of the arms coiled around his head, then writhed away again, taking with it his mask and breathing hose. The Saint and April had one last dreadful glimpse of his face, before the final horror was blotted out in a tremendous cloud of ink.

6

“It’s a good thing I only want you to do some swimming, and not as a technical expert,” Jack Donohue said caustically, “if you can’t tell a real octopus from a prop.”

“I thought it looked extraordinarily lifelike,” said the Saint. “But I’ve heard they can do anything in Hollywood. I should be more careful what publicity I read.”

They sat out on the terrace of Bluebeard’s Castle again, watching the lights kindle below them as the brief twilight deepened over the town. April was with them, but she was not talking much.

“You’re lucky I don’t have to send you a bill that’d keep you broke for three years,” Donohue said. “Some fishermen found Marilyn drifting around Cruz Bay. She wasn’t damaged much. But I’m going to be more careful the next time anyone comes to me to borrow an artificial octopus.”

“The only way I can figure it, the real one must have had an unsatisfactory tussle with her,” Simon said, “whether he saw her as an unwilling sweetheart or a rival male. Anyway, before he found out she was only a prop, he’d torn her loose from her moorings, and she floated away. The real octopus liked the look of the spot and decided to settle down there himself.”

“And why he didn’t grab you for breakfast as soon as you came within reach, I’ll never know.”

“Maybe he’d just had a good breakfast and wasn’t hungry. Didn’t you ever go fishing and wonder why sometimes they’ll bite anything and other times they seem to be on a hunger strike? Of course when Rawl shot a spear into it, that was different. Even an octopus must have its pride.”

“And it was a break for you that it was smart enough to know who shot at it.”

“It’s too bad your camera crew wasn’t there. It was a better scene than you’ll ever direct.”

April shuddered.

“Please don’t,” she said. “I know he meant it to kill us, but I’ll have nightmares every time I remember that thing wooshing up at him. I never knew they could move so fast, and his face...”

“Don’t let that Saint name fool you,” Donohue said. “He’s a ghoul. No, I take that back. He’s a thing ghouls won’t speak to.”

“He is not!” she said indignantly. “As soon as he’d got me up to the boat, he went back to see if he couldn’t do anything, even though all he had was a knife. But he couldn’t see anything.”

“All right,” Donohue said. “He’s a hero. But don’t forget to count those gold bars every time he goes near them.”

“He can have anything he wants,” April said.

Jack Donohue finished his Peter Dawson and stood up.

“I’m expecting a call from the studio, and I’ve got to work on the script tonight,” he said. “But before I ruin your evening by leaving you, would someone tell me why the Saint always ends up with a billion dollars and the most beautiful girl in sight?”

“Doesn’t that go with every old treasure story?” said the Saint.