The Saint Around the World (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  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 imaginar
y 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 anyth
ing 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.”