“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 certainl
y 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 g
o 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—”
The Saint to the Rescue (The Saint Series) Page 6
