The Saint to the Rescue

The fruitful land

Even a champion leads with his chin sometimes, and this was one time when the Saint did it with a flourish and fanfares. He hadn’t even been feinted out of position.

“Is there anything I can do for you down in the playgrounds of the Gilded Schmoe?” he asked.

Coming from anyone else, it would have been only a conventional and harmless way of saying thanks for the long weekend of bass fishing that he had enjoyed on the St Johns River between Welaka and Lake George, on his way South to the more sophisticated and in many ways less charming resorts of Florida’s Gold Coast. And Jim Harris, the lean and leathery owner of the lodge where Simon Templar always stopped, would have taken it the same way.

“Just don’t try to send us everyone you meet,” he said good-humouredly. “We’ve had some good sportsmen and fishermen from down there, but there’s some kind that expect more than we’re set up to give ’em.”

“I know what you mean,” Simon said. “A strike on every cast, air-conditioned skiffs, and a gaudy night club to come home to.”

They were sitting out on the high bluff overlooking the river, under the magnificent oaks that shaded it in the daytime, after the last dinner of that visit, watching the lights of a tug with a train of barges plodding up the channel and swapping the lazy post-mortems and promises that friends and fishermen swap at such times. At that latitude and inland, the first cold front of fall had spoiled the appetites of the mosquitoes, although it was still only a temporary dispensation that made it enjoyable to stay out after dark.

“On a night like this,” Simon murmured idly, “here and now, it’s hard to remember what it must have been like for the pioneers who hacked their way through the swamps and jungles of this entomologist’s paradise, and made it fit for the non-insect pests to move in.”

“I don’t think the Spaniards made much out of it,” Harris said. “But some of the later carpetbaggers did all right.”

“You can say that again,” put in his wife, with sudden unwonted vehemence. She turned to the Saint. “Yes, there is something you can do — for me, anyway. When you get down around Palm Beach, look up a fellow called Ed Diehl.”

“Now, Ernestine—”

“Well, why shouldn’t he? The Saint likes a good crook to go after, doesn’t he? And he might just happen to run short of crooks some wet weekend. And this Diehl is certainly a prize one.”

“Now, Ernestine, we can’t expect the Saint to take off after any little chiseler who took advantage of—”

“Little chiseler? He’s a big chiseler. ‘Square’ Diehl, he calls himself, Simon. Hah!”

One of the Saint’s redeeming graces was that he knew when he had hooked himself and could accept the consequences gracefully.

“All right,” he said placatingly. “I asked for it. What was the deal this merchant got you into?”

“Well, it wasn’t long after we started building this place,” Jim Harris said. “An aunt of mine back in Texas died and left me four lots she owned somewhere around Lake Worth. We were much too busy getting this place in shape to go down and look at ’em, though I know we could’ve done it all in a day. We kept telling ourselves we’d have to do it, but somehow we never could find that whole day to spare. A lot of people think that running a camp like this is all play and no work, but you’d be surprised how it ties you down.”

“So one day we get a letter from this Diehl,” Ernestine said. “He says he’s had an inquiry about these lots, and would we be interested in selling. If so, call him collect. He’s a regular real-estate broker with a fancy letterhead, so we didn’t think there’d be any harm in talking to him.”

“He’s a real smooth operator,” her husband resumed reminiscently. “He soon found out that we’d never been down that way and didn’t know much about conditions there, and while he was doing that he’d made himself sound so honest and helpful, I just didn’t even doubt him when I asked him what sort of property it was and he said it was in a poor section of town that never had done much good and lots were only fetching about a thousand dollars. I didn’t see what he was doing at the time, but I’ve thought about it since. Right then, when he said he had a customer offering five thousand for the four lots just because they were all together and he was a cranky old guy who didn’t want any near neighbors, he made it sound like the last chance we’d ever have to get that kind of price.”

“And I can’t even say ‘I told you so,’ ” lamented the distaff side of the record. “It sounded just as convincing to me, as you told it, and we thought we were lucky to get a windfall like that just when we could use it.”

Simon lighted a cigarette.

“And then you finally made the safari south and saw what you’d sold—”

“No, we still haven’t been able to take that day off,” Jim said. “But one day we had a couple staying here from Lake Worth, and we got to talking, and right off they said they hoped we hadn’t been given a fast shuffle like it seems this Ed Diehl is known for. So I got out the papers, and they knew exactly where these lots were, on a main-road corner right in the middle of a lot of new building developments, and there was a big new supermarket going up now on those very same lots we sold.”

“And the old codger who just wanted his privacy?”

“They recognized his name, too. Seems he’s a pretty active attorney, not very old, and also a cousin of Mrs Diehl’s.”

The Saint nodded sympathetically.

“Yes, of course. If a supermarket had appeared as the buyer, you couldn’t have helped knowing your property was worth more. They probably sold it to the market out of the same escrow, at a fat profit, without even putting up a dime of their own. And after that first vague letter, I bet you never had anything else from Diehl in writing except the formal ‘I enclose herewith’ kind of stuff.”

“That’s right. I realized that when I got mad and started wondering how much I could sue him for. Of all the lies he’d told me, he’d told everyone on the telephone. I couldn’t prove one thing in a courtroom, except with my word against his.”

“He’s a sharp operator, all right,” Ernestine said. “This couple told us a lot more stories about him. He learned his tricks from his father, who started the business, selling swampland by mail to suckers who never saw it, during the first Florida boom. They had a few square miles that they bought for a dollar an acre, all laid out on paper with streets and business and residential districts and even a city hall, yet, which hasn’t been lived in by anything but alligators to this day, but they called it Heavenleigh Hills” — she spelled it out — “and I believe Diehl is still advertising ‘retirement farms’ there in newspapers far enough away to reach the sort of buyers who’d make a down payment and not come looking for a long while. Anyway, that’s the reputation he has locally. But we were the hicks who hadn’t heard about it.”

“Sure taught me a lesson I won’t forget,” Jim said ruefully.

“I wish I could be as philosophical as that,” said his wife. “I’d just like to see him get his comeuppance, the way the Saint would give it to him.”

“I’m the victim of publicity agents I never hired,” sighed the Saint. “But for two swell people like you — and the memory of a couple of bankers that did not get away — I’ll keep an eye peeled for this square, Diehl.”

It was an easy promise to make, of a kind that he had learned to make rather easily in those days when so many people recognized his name or his face and expected miracles of freebooting to be performed instantly. It gave him a respectful inkling of what God must have to cope with if He heard all the prayers. But being only human, in spite of his sobriquet, it must be admitted here and now that Simon sometimes forgot such promises after they had served their first soothing purpose.

The case of Mr Edmund S Diehl happened not to be one of those examples of Saintly fallibility, and that was entirely the fault of Mr Diehl himself. That is, if Mr Diehl had decided at some earlier date to retire with his ill-gotten inheritance added to his own ill-gotten gains and live out his remaining years in luxury in some remote refuge from the tax collectors, the Saint might never have been reminded of him again. Possibly. But Mr Diehl was not a retiring type, and he was entrenched in one of the privileged fields in which tax-heavy Income can be almost effortlessly transmuted into tax-light Capital Gains.

Also, and even more to this point, Mr Diehl had not been raised on poetry. Any landscape, to him, was simply an area of real estate which could be subdivided into smaller areas, with an automatic profit on each reduction, and eventually peddled in convenient building lots at about the same price per foot as it had once brought by the acre. If only God could make a tree, as Mr Diehl had heard it said, Mr Diehl had plenty of bulldozers to knock them down, in his own territory, a lot faster than God could make them. Mr Diehl had effectively demonstrated this over great swaths of fertile soil which his machinery had scraped bare of its natural growth to make room for stark forests of power poles and television antennae brooding over regimented rows of standardized, bleakly functional, and uniformly faceless living-boxes available on a nominal down payment and easy terms. Like almost every other fast-buck Florida developer, Mr Diehl knew exactly what percentage could be saved by scarifying a tract from end to end in steam-roller sweeps instead of wasting time for the blades to maneuver in and out among the trees and skin out only the ugly undergrowth. “Landscape,” in the only sense he understood it, then became simply a dignified verb for the operation of selling the incoming settlers nursery shrubs, and saplings to restock the scorched earth, which he had created — a sideline which was not to be sneezed at.

Simon Templar had friends of his own to visit in Delray on his way down, and thus it was that his route took him past a pine wood off the main highway which was in course of being swiftly and efficiently razed in the interest of such an improvement as has just been described. He slackened his foot on the speed pedal as he saw the tallest tree in the grove, already canted at a crazy angle, rocking under the ruthless onslaughts of the gas-powered monster butting at its base.

The Florida native pine is a commercially useless tree, disdained as timber, pulpwood, and even fireplace logs. But it will grow, slowly, to a fifty-foot height of massive broad-branched thick-leaved evergreen that is one of the few arboreal majesties in a land of shallow contours and generally shallow vegetation. It may take twenty years to do this, so that it is not exactly expendable, except in the most coldly materialistic philosophy.

The Saint, thought of himself poetically quite as seldom as Edmund Diehl, but the creaks and groans of the tree and the roars and growls of the steel behemoth worrying it pierced his ears like the sounds of an animate conflict, as his car drifted slowly by, and as the struggle reached its foregone conclusion and the tree toppled and gave up the ghost in a great rending shuddering crash like a stentorian death-rattle, an actual physical hurt seemed to strike deep through his own body. He even trod the car to an abrupt full stop, with a savage insensate impulse to get out and go over and drag the driver out of the bulldozer and smash him down with a fist in the face and drive the bulldozer slowly over him. But he knew just as quickly as he controlled the reflex how stupid and unjust that would have been: the driver was only an innocent and earnest Negro, capably and methodically doing the job that he was paid to do. The man who Simon realized he really wanted was the one who hired the driver and gave him his instructions.

And at that susceptible moment, the Saint looked farther down the road and saw the enormous billboard which proclaimed that this was to be the site of “BLISS HAVEN VILLAGE — Another Contribution to Florida’s Future by ED (Square) DIEHL.”

Even if Mr Diehl had been psychically aware of the extra special attention which he had attracted, it is doubtful if it would have perturbed him. Although he had never outgrown an unquestioning loyalty to his father’s corny touch in the naming of projects, he had come a long way since the precarious days of the Heavenleigh Hills promotion. In fact, he had often thought of taking that skeleton out of his closet and burying it, but a certain stubborn cupidity could never quite let him renounce the small but steady revenue that still flaked off its bones. Aside from that, the new boom in Florida land values which began in mid-century had made fabulous profits possible even by legitimate methods, so that Mr Diehl was even accepted as an upstanding member of the community by many citizens with short memories. His dishonesties were mostly neater and mellower than they had formerly been, and always cautiously covered by shrewd legal advice, and such a brazen piece of chicanery as he had perpetrated on Jim Harris was due more than anything to an incurable attitude of mind that would always get the same kind of egotistical lift out of horn-swoggling an unsuspecting victim that a Don Juan type derives from a callous seduction.

Mr Diehl had little else in common with the picture of a Don Juan, being a large gross man with a beefy red face and small piggy eyes as bright as marbles. He wore a very large diamond ring with apparent disregard for the fact that its flashing drew particular attention to his hands, which nearly always featured a set of grimy fingernails, and he had other unpleasant personal habits which would hardly have made him welcome in the best boudoirs. But Mr Diehl, who preferred to base his self-satisfaction on his reception at the bank, was contemplating nothing but rosy futures on a certain morning when one of his underlings idled into his private office and told him that there was a potential client outside whom he might want to see.

“The Count of Cristamonte, yet. And he’s looking for a big deal.”

Mr Diehl had a plentiful staff of salesmen and secretaries to handle routine and minor transactions, but he had it understood that the most important properties were handled by himself personally. In this way he could entitle himself to pocket more of the commission, and also give himself more to brag about at the Golf Club bar.

“Then send him in, boy, send him in.”

The client had about him a quiet aroma of potential moola that Mr Diehl recognized at once. He carried himself with the graceful and unhurried confidence of one who is accustomed to deference, and his blue eyes had the easy nonchalance that nothing buttresses quite so solidly as the spare figures in a bank account, and if the trim pointed beard that outlined his lean jaw gave him a somewhat rakish and piratical appearance, that impression was softened by the mild and engaging way he spoke. It was a characterization to which the Saint had lately become quite attached, and it had yet to have its first failure.

“What kind of price range were you thinking in?” Mr Diehl asked bluntly, as soon as he could bluntly ask it.

“I don’t think there are any ordinary limits,” Simon said calmly. “I represent a syndicate of European investors who happen to have very large dollar credits to dispose of and would like to keep their capital working in this prosperous country.”

“What type of property are they interested in? Income, or development?”

“For a start, we were thinking of a country club that might be the most exclusive in America — strictly for what I think you call ‘rich millionaires.’ It would have to be on the Ocean, for the beach, and also on the waterway, for a private yacht harbor, and besides the usual bungalows and restaurant it would naturally need room for its own tennis courts, golf course, polo field, bridle trails, private airport, and so on. We could easily use two or three thousand acres. And if the property was right, we should not haggle over a million dollars one way or the other.”

Mr Diehl cleared his throat and aimed a sloppy shot at the brass cuspidor beside his desk, to prove that it was not just an antique ornament and that making light of a million dollars did not necessarily awe him.

“A hunk of property like that is going to take a bit of finding, these days, with all the subdividing that’s been, going on—”

“I’m well aware of that,” said the Saint. “And so I shall naturally be asking all the important brokers what they have to offer. You just happen to be the first one on my list. Eventually I shall have to deal with the one who has the most suitable parcel to show me. I hope there’s no misunderstanding about that.”

“Now let’s think that through, Count,” said Mr Diehl, scratching himself vigorously, which he was given to doing when he was excited. “I don’t want to talk out of turn, but you probably haven’t any idea how many highbinders here are in this business. You’re lucky you came to me first. Everyone knows what they call me around here: ‘Square’ Diehl — it’s right out there on the front of the building. But what they call some of the others I wouldn’t want to quote to you.”

“Indeed?”

“Yes, sir. And if there’s any kind of buyer they’ll gang up on worse than a Yankee, it’s a foreigner, if you’ll excuse the word. Maybe you were thinking that if you shop around, you’d have ’em all competing to offer you the best property at the best price. Well, you’d be wrong. They’ve worked out a better system than cutting each other’s throats. They’ve got an unofficial combine, and what they’d do is pass the word along, and every one would jack up the price of everything to you, and whoever you bought through they’d split the difference. In that way, everybody gets a commission — and you’d be paying all ten or fifteen of ’em instead of one.”

“But that’s almost crooked!” exclaimed the Saint, in shocked accents.

“You can say that again. But we can beat ’em — if you’d let me have this exclusive for a while.”

“How?”

Mr Diehl spat again, almost missing the brass bowl in his haste.

“Like this. Besides checking everything on our books that looks promising, I’ll have my salesmen contact all the other real estate offices, but very casually, without mentioning any names, see? That way, we’ll get an honest price on everything that might suit you that anyone has got listed. And then when it comes to making an offer, I’ll get a friend of mine who lives here to put in the bid, and they’ll know they can’t fool him with any fancy prices, but of course he’ll make an agreement in advance to sell the property to your syndicate at just a reasonable mark-up for his trouble.”

“That sounds like an interesting idea. But what have I done to deserve so much help from you?”

“Just blame it on the way I was brought up, Count. My father, who founded this business, used to tell me, God rest him, ‘I never want anyone who walks in these doors to walk out saying he didn’t get a square deal.’ If I find what you want and make the sale, I’ll be perfectly satisfied.”

The Saint had no doubts whatsoever on that score, but did not judge the moment opportune to press Mr Diehl for details as to how this satisfaction would be achieved. He simply allowed himself to look deeply impressed by a revelation of corrupt practices which might well have made the collective hair of the Florida Real Estate Board stand on end if its members had heard it. Mr Diehl did not even give that a thought, since there were no witnesses, and in any case there were a score of ways to explain how an ignorant foreigner might have misunderstood him.

“I’m very glad to have met you, Mr Diehl,” Simon said with unaffected sincerity. “And I think I shall give your suggestion a try. Instead to contact other agents this weekend, as I had planned, I shall let you do the work — while I go fishing, which to be truthful I much prefer.”

“You won’t regret it, I promise you. I’ll put my whole staff to work on it. While you go fishing. Have you arranged for a boat? I can get you the very best sailfish captain in these waters—”

“Pardon, but I was not thinking of the ocean fishing, though I know how wonderful it is here. But I have done so much of it — from Panama to Peru to New Zealand, you understand. Here in the southeast United States I like to fish one thing only, for which even in your country this is the headquarters, and which the rest of the world does not even know — the big-mouth bass.”

“The greatest fishing in the world,” Mr Diehl concurred automatically.

“I have studied it very closely, and I think on this visit I must catch a record. At any rate I shall enjoy proving my theory. Perhaps you yourself are a bass fisherman, Mr Diehl?”

“There’s nothing in the world I like better, except you-know-what.”

Ed (‘Square’) Diehl would have given the same answer, with the same leer and wink, to any customer with the same profit potential, on any subject from baseball to Balinese dancing in which the customer expressed an interest.

“I’ve had a theory for a long time,” Simon pursued, with a somewhat Countly portentousness, “that the reason why it begins to be said that your Florida waters are fished out — is that they are. The new roads that go everywhere, the new cars that everyone has, the new boats and outboards that everyone can afford on instalments — all this has placed an unbelievable pressure on the fish, who do not have similar devices on their side. Therefore there are no important bass left to catch where anyone can go. But for some privileged sportsmen there will always be some wilderness that is still fruitful in the old way, which modern science can make accessible. Here in Florida, in spite of your fantastic coastal developments, you are still only on the perimeter of a sportsman’s paradise to which the new key is — the helicopter!”

“You got something there, Count.”

“I am betting I have, Mr Square. You take off even today, in your helicopter, in spite of all the highways and turnpikes, and in less than half an hour you can be fishing where the fish have never seen anyone but a Seminole. I would like to show you this. I happen to have a small private helicopter which I bought to inspect properties, and if you like, this weekend, since I shall not be consulting other sharkers — beg your pardon, brokers — you should come with me as a good fisherman and let me prove this.”

Mr Diehl thought quickly, which he could always do when the chips were down, and did not have to be any unusual genius to realize that a Count of Cristamonte anywhere in the wilds with him would certainly be worth more than the same perambulating exchequer exposed to the sales pitch of the next grifter who might glom on to him.

“That’s a great idea,” Mr Diehl said, wriggling inside his sodden shirt. “My staff will spend the weekend getting a line on every big tract in this and the next two counties, while you and me get a line on them bass.”

It was not to be expected that Mr Diehl would fail to let it leak out as widely as possible that he was going fishing in the private plane of no less an international personage than the Count of Cristamonte, and as a matter of fact the Saint was counting on it as a minor but useful contribution to his plan. Nor was he disappointed or disconcerted when Mr Diehl’s belated qualms at the imminence of entrusting his life to the skill of an unknown pilot, and a foreigner at that, caused the relator to make himself unusually conspicuous at the County airfield by the noisy irreverence and raucous humor with which he tried to cover up his misgivings and convince the mechanics who were servicing the whirlybird that such expeditions were as commonplace to him as a trip to the bathroom. Simon Templar never omitted such factors from his calculations, and Mr Diehl lived up to everything that he expected.

After a vertical take-off they first headed roughly south, and then swung west somewhere over the outskirts of Delray. In only a few minutes the dense development of the coastal strip had faded into a hazy horizon and they were over a weird, incredibly flat-looking wilderness of scrubby green, dappled with myriad patches of water and sometimes scored with the thin straight slash of a drainage canal. This was the perspective that is always a little startling, when the blank spaces that take up most of the map of the lower Florida peninsula become a visible wilderness, and it can actually be seen how comparatively insignificant a rim of civilization has even yet been established on the raw land that is still straining to hold itself a few precarious feet out of the sea.

Ed Diehl had seen this vista before, or other areas indistinguishable from it, from the windows of large commercial airliners approaching the ports of West Palm Beach or Miami, without thinking even that much about it, for he was not an imaginative man except when describing some property or proposition that he was trying to sell, but before long he began to feel something radically unfamiliar about the view he was getting of it today, and in another little while it dawned on him that the important difference was one of altitude. The big passenger planes roared over at speeds that dwarfed the empty distances, and came slanting down into the serried suburbs from heights that hardly let one landmark out of sight before another could be identified. Whereas the helicopter, after crossing the split ribbon of the new turnpike at no more than three hundred feet, had gradually let down until it was cruising at what might have been little more than treetop height, if there had been, any trees important enough to judge by. Mr Diehl was aware that they made a number of changes of direction, as the copter obeyed the impulses of its pilot with some of the irresponsibility of a mechanical hummingbird, but the noise of the rotors made conversation difficult, and Mr Diehl did not want to seem fussy or uneasy, so he confined himself to grinning occasionally and trying to look as if he were enjoying every minute.

When, the engine note finally changed a little, and the helicopter tilted to a standstill and settled slowly to the ground like a rather unsteady elevator, Mr Diehl would not even have bet on which county he was in. His last orientation point had been some distant watery horizon that could equally well have been the Atlantic Ocean or the forty-mile diameter of Lake Okeechobee: he had not been watching the compass, and in any case he was vague about the turns they had made since then. But the Count seemed to know what he was doing, and when the overhead blades had shuddered to silence Mr Diehl turned to him in a passable impersonation of a man who had gone along on a dozen or two similar expeditions.

“You sure know how to drive this egg-beater, Count,” he said.

“Luckily for us,” said the Saint, unbuckling his safety belt and climbing out. “If anything happened to me, it wouldn’t be any more use to you than a kid’s tricycle for getting out of here, would it?”

“You can say that again,” grinned Mr Diehl.

“And what chance do you think you’d have of making it on foot?”

Mr Diehl gazed around. They were near the edge of one of the small lakes or large ponds that were visible everywhere from the air. The ground where they had landed and immediately around where they stood felt firm underfoot, but not far away water glistened between blades of sedge that would have looked like dry land from above. And everywhere else was nothing but the endless rippling expanse of wild grass varied sometimes by a fringe of reeds or a clump of palmettos, and broken only by an occasional scrawny tree or tuft of cabbage palm or the bare ghostly trunk of a dead cypress. Mr Diehl tried not to let it impress him.

“Then,” said the Saint calmly, “I guess you won’t care how much I charge for flying you out.”

Mr Diehl laughed heartily — not because he saw the joke, but because he thought he was supposed to.

“I should say not. What’s your price?”

“At this moment, only forty thousand dollars.”

Mr Diehl laughed again, a little more vaguely.

“That’s mighty generous of you.”

“I’m glad you think so,” said the Saint, and thereupon took his spinning rod out of the cabin and cautiously explored a route to the edge of the open water and began to fish.

Mr Diehl watched him somewhat puzzledly for a few minutes, and then decided that such incomprehensible foreign pleasantries were hardly worth racking his brain over. He fetched his own rod and tackle box and found a place a little farther along to try some casting himself.

It is possible that the bass in that remote slough were every whit as innocent and unspoiled as the Count of Cristamonte had theorized, but after a time it began to seem that even if they had never learned to suspect a hook they had grown up with much the same dumb instincts and habits as other bass, a species which does most of its feeding at dusk and dawn and is inclined to spend the heat of the day digesting or snoozing or holed up in finny meditation. At any rate, a wide variety of lures and retrieves failed to get either of them a strike, and Mr Diehl himself could recognize that the only signs of activity that broke the glassy water were made by gar. But as the sun rose higher and hotter and the bass presumably sank deeper into their cool weedy retreats, Mr Diehl grew thirstier, and began to think longingly of the supply of beer which he had seen loaded onto the helicopter in a portable icebox.

As if in telepathic unanimity, he saw the Count heading back at last to the ship, and hastened to join him.

“That,” he said, smacking his lips as he watched the puncturing of a can dripping with, cool moisture, “is going to taste awful good.”

“It certainly is,” Simon agreed, and proceeded to prove it to himself.

Mr Diehl was very faintly aware of something less than the elaborate olde-worlde courtesy he had read about somewhere, but he cheerfully reached in to grab and open his own can, and was dully startled to find his movement barred by a steel-cored arm.

“Just a minute, chum,” said the Saint. “Beer is selling here for a thousand dollars a shot.”

Mr Diehl’s grin this time was a trifle labored.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll owe it to you.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t give credit. After all, my price is strictly based on how much the customer might be willing to pay at the moment.”

“You should of told me before we left, and I’d of brought some cash with me.”

“Oh, I’m not as difficult as that. Your check is good enough.”

“Too bad I didn’t bring my check-book either.”

“I was afraid you mightn’t, so I brought one for you. This is one of your banks, isn’t it?”

Mr Diehl stared stupidly at the printed pad that was conjured almost from nowhere to be flourished under his nose. In the circumstances, he was prepared to extend himself almost infinitely to be a good Joe and go along with a gag, but this was rapidly getting beyond him.

“Yes, it is.” he said strenuously. “But frankly, Count, I must apologize if I missed the joke somewhere—”

“Suppose you start getting back on the beam by dropping that ‘Count’ business, Ed.” Simon suggested kindly, and it was only then that he shed the last vestiges of an accent which had been getting progressively thinner with every sentence. “I’m going to give you a big moment for your memoirs, I am the Saint, and I’m giving you the priceless favor of my personal attention in this project of collecting a small assessment which. I’ve decided that you should pay on your ill-gotten gains.”

“You sound crazier every minute,” Mr Diehl mumbled, though in a still crazier way this was beginning to sound like the most real nightmare he had ever experienced. “So you’re the Saint. Some kind of fancy crook. All right, you kidnaped me—”

“I don’t remember it that way,” Simon corrected him genially. “There was no violence or intimidation. In fact, you told everyone who’d listen to you at the airport how much you were going to enjoy this trip with me.”

“But if you keep me here—”

“I never said I wanted to keep you here. I merely told you how much I’d charge to fly you out. That’s my privilege, as a free agent in a free country.”

Mr Diehl glared at him through a kind of fog. There was a purely mental haze as well as the emotional murk in it, steaming off a much larger mass of incredibilia than his limited mentality could assimilate at one gulp: a) The Saint was only a mythological character anyhow, and b) even if he wasn’t, this couldn’t be happening to him, Ed Diehl, and c) even if it was happening, there must be some flaw in the structure of such an outrageous swindle. But for the moment the lean corsair’s face and figure that confronted him were fantastically convincing.

“You won’t get a nickel out of me,” he said, and tried to overcome an infuriating feeling of futility. “You and your Count of Cristamonte story—”

“I didn’t try to get a nickel out of you with that story,” said the Saint virtuously, “because that would have been fraudulent. But there’s nothing illegal about using a phony name just for fun.” He drank again from the can, deeply and with relish, and then made another raid on the ice-chest for a square plastic box, from which he extracted a thick and nourishing sandwich. “Pardon me if I have lunch,” he said. “There are plenty more of these, by the way, and to you they are only two thousand dollars each.”

Mr Diehl could not have explained why this was the precise twitch that snapped the rein of his congenially crude and choleric temper, but it was probably far more a general sense of frustration than any specific affront that made him crowd forward again with his fists bunched and his face purpling.

“I’m not taking any of this crap,” he growled. “You give me a sandwich and a can of beer, or I’ll help myself!”

“You’re standing in the shade of my helicopter,” Simon pointed out forbearingly. “For using this very expensive piece of equipment as a parasol I shall have to make a charge of one hundred dollars a minute. If you think that’s too high and you want to get out of the sun, go and sit under a tree.”

“What tree?” roared Mr Diehl.

“Oh, there don’t seem to be any right around here, now that you mention it. But you don’t care much about trees anyway, do you? At least, when they’re in the way of a fast cheap cleanup job on a subdivision, you’re the type of clot-headed dollar-clutching slob who—”

That was the exact moment when Mr Diehl threw his Sunday punch, and perhaps it was just his bad luck that this was only Saturday.

The Saint did not let go either the can of beer which he held in one hand or the sandwich in the other, but he leaned a little to one side and brought up an elbow with the power and accuracy of a short uppercut, and Mr Diehl suddenly found himself lying on his back with a numb sensation in his jowls, a taste of blood in his mouth, and an astronomically unrecorded nova erupting in the red haze that had temporarily clouded his vision.

With even more care not to spill a drop or lose a crumb. Simon used one foot to roll the realtor out into a rather muddy expanse of sunlight.

“Just for that gratuitous display of bad temper,” he said, “the fee for flying you out has now gone up to fifty grand.”

Mr Diehl sat on a damp log in the sun, making it damper with his own sweat, after the Saint had finished eating and drinking and had stretched himself out for a siesta under the shadow of the helicopter. Glowering at him from a safe distance, Mr Diehl had inevitably toyed with the idea of a murderous sneak attack, but when he was recovered enough to make the first tentative move in that direction, he was instantly greeted by the opening of a cool catlike eye which without any other explanation at all convinced him that such a maneuver would not have the automatic success that it might have conveniently enjoyed in a story.

In any case, even if he could have overpowered the Saint, he didn’t know how he could have forced him to fly the helicopter. A man might be beaten or even tortured into promising to fly, but once in the air, the passenger was at the mercy of the pilot. And if the preliminary struggle actually incapacitated or even killed the Saint, Mr Diehl would still be stuck there until a rescue party found him, and it would be a long time before any such search was organized. He recalled now, with awful clarity, how the Saint had told the airport crew that they expected to spend at least three days in the Everglades and might even go on to explore some of the inaccessible islands of the Bay of Florida before turning back — to all of which misdirection Mr Diehl had contributed his loud support.

Far out beyond the last stems of maiden cane, something dark and gnarled came slowly awash in the glazed surface of the water. Mr Diehl identified it after a while as the front end of an alligator, which stared at him with inscrutable agate eyes. Mr Diehl stared back, somewhat less enigmatically, and remembered to wish that he had brought a gun.

There had to be some weak point in the set-up, if he could only find it.

The Saint came languidly back to life, yawned and stretched, smoked a cigarette, bathed his face with a cloth ostentatiously dipped in ice-water from the cooler, hauled out a sheaf of magazines, and sat down again in the shade to read.

“You’re crazy,” Mr Diehl shouted.

“It just isn’t the time of day to catch bass,” argued the Saint reasonably. “As a native of these parts, you ought to know that. So I’m improving my mind instead of tiring out my arm. Would you care to join me? I’m renting magazines at only a hundred dollars a minute for the reading kind, or two hundred for the ones with girlie photos.”

Mr Diehl clenched his teeth to the point of almost cracking some expensive bridgework, but managed to suppress an answer that would have been impractical and unprofitable.

He was sharply susceptible to hunger, like any man accustomed to self-indulgence and a high-calorie diet, but he also had a cushion of accumulated blubber that could absorb temporary deprivations without acute distress. Mr Diehl felt miserably empty in the stomach, but in no danger of fainting from it. The thirst was much harder to bear. His propensity for profuse sweating was always a strain on his fluid resources, and the thought of cold cans of beer nestling in arctic beds of ice cubes or dripping clean refreshing wetness as they were lifted out was a refined anguish that became more acute with the passing of each unslaked minute. It got so bad that even while his pores were acting like faucets he could hardly find enough internal moisture for a good spit.

When the sun began to cooperate by dousing itself prematurely behind a high bank of clouds in the west, the Saint finished another can of beer and began fishing again. After a while he tied on to a fish that erupted from the water like a stung dervish as it felt the hook, and fought through several more minutes of explosive leaps and straining runs before the light tackle could subdue it. Mr Diehl watched morosely while the Saint beached it and unhooked it and held it up with a skillful thumb under its jaw.

“Would you like it for supper, Ed? Only two thousand dollars!”

“You go to hell,” Mr Diehl said hoarsely.

“Just as you like, Ed,” said the Saint agreeably.

He put the bass gently back in the water and released it. Then he slapped at himself a couple of times, and picked his way back to the shallow mound where the helicopter stood.

The word “picked” is not just an idle choice. At one point he froze abruptly on one foot, and remained thus grotesquely poised for several seconds, while a water moccasin slowly unwound its thick black coils from around the tuft of grass that he had been about to step on and slithered off into the muck. Mr Diehl saw it, and wondered if the Saint was also equipped with antivenin, and how much a shot would cost anyone else.

“The mosquitoes are starting to get hungry,” Simon observed imperturbably, slapping himself again.

Mr Diehl had already noticed that. He squirmed and fanned himself savagely while the Saint leaned into the cabin and brought out a bottle of insect repellent.

“I don’t want to rush you, Ed,” Simon remarked, rubbing himself liberally with the lotion, “but we don’t seem to be getting anywhere, and pretty soon I’m going to weaken for the idea of a nice cold shower, some clean clothes, a tall tinkling Pimm’s Cup in an air-conditioned bar, a prime steak dinner, and a comfortable bed. If you haven’t given in before I do, I guess I’ll just have to leave you here and hope I can find you tomorrow.” He replaced the cap on the bottle. “Would you like some of this gunk? You can have it for only five grand, and before morning you’ll think it was cheap at the price.”

Mr Diehl’s small eyes grew bigger with horror. The last straw that breaks the camel’s back is a time-worn cliché, but something like it happened to whatever stubbornness he had left. The unappetizing brown swamp water was certainly drinkable if a man got thirsty enough, and nobody died of simple starvation in a few days. But the prospect of a night of utter loneliness in the teeming dark, surrounded by snakes and alligators, with myriads of small swift invisible stinging and biting things to add real torment to imagination, was already a living nightmare before which the edges of his pampered brain curled in clammy panic.

“You wouldn’t do that,” he croaked. “A man could be killed or go nuts in one night, left here like that.”

“A Seminole wouldn’t mind it a bit,” contradicted the Saint. “But if it doesn’t appeal to you, you don’t have to stay.”

Mr Diehl knew it. And in that moment of truth, he also saw the elementary answer that had eluded him for so many wretched hours, and could scarcely believe that he had been so stupid as to miss it in the first five minutes.

“You’re right, I don’t,” he said. “Give me that repellent. And the check-book. And while I’m writing the check, get me a can of beer.”

“You could probably use a sandwich, too, to hold you till you get home,” said the Saint. “Let’s call it fifty-five thousand for the whole works, since you’re paying it all at once.”

Mr Diehl scribbled the check, and would not have cared much what the exact figures were. But the Saint examined it carefully before he folded it and put it away in his wallet.

“You may wonder why I should take all this trouble, when it might have been easier just to forge your signature,” he said. “But for some years now I’ve been trying to go straight, as the phrase has it, and I don’t want to be accused of doing anything criminal to get your money.”

Mr Diehl drained the can of beer in three long gulps, and scratched himself almost joyously. He was beginning to think that this highly publicized Saint character might literally have a weak place in his head, which it had taken a smart and nerveless man like Ed Diehl to discover.

“I just hope you get a sympathetic jury when you have to justify your prices,” he felt bold enough to say.

“Everyone is entitled to his day in court,” said the Saint equably. “And to save a lot of time-wasting argument there, I think we ought to mark this historic spot.”

He turned the check-book over and wrote quickly on the back of the last check: “This is the place that I paid $55,000 to be flown out of.”

“Sign it,” he said, “and I’ll witness it.”

This was done, and the note was sealed inside the plastic sandwich box, which was buried under the cypress log on which Mr Diehl had spent a good part of his unhappiest day. But he was far from unhappy as the whirling blades overhead brought the reassuring geometric patterns of highway and building in sight again, and in an absurdly few minutes the runways of the Lantana airfield were rising towards them out of the dusk.

He opened the door on his side and jumped out the moment the helicopter touched down, and was slightly ecstatically amazed that the Saint made no attempt to grab him. He did not fall on his knees and kiss the firm concrete under him, not being that kind of emotional jerk, but nothing could have stopped him taking a stand directly he had backed off beyond probable recapture or reprisal, and shouting his ultimate triumph and defiance.

“You sonofabitch!” he bawled. “Don’t waste time trying to cash that check after the cops get through working you over, because I’ll be at the bank when it opens on Monday to stop payment!”

Simon cut the engine and leaned out so as not to have to compete in vulgar volume.

“Okay, Ed,” he said gently. “You play it the way you see it. But long before that, I’ll have flown in a load of witnesses to pick up our X-marks-the-spot, and they’ll all be qualified surveyors who can testify that we buried it right where your plan calls for the City Hall of a dream town called Heavenleigh Hills. It should make fabulous publicity for everything else you’re contributing to the Future of Florida. Anyhow, you’ve got all tomorrow to think it over.”

Mr Diehl’s petulant baby face, grubby and scorched and sweat-streaked, puckered slowly but exactly like the face of a spoiled child about to burst into tears. It was an expression that the Saint had seen before. He hoped he would see it many times again.