Which was perhaps why he had had to learn to draw a mask over the glints of purely juvenile devilment that always tended to creep into his eyes at such inspiriting prospects.
“What’s the matter?” he inquired patiently. “Did you lose your husband, or are you trying to?”
“Please be serious. I’ve only got a moment.”
He had all the time in the world, but he had been toying with the preposterous whimsy that he might be able to spend some of it in Havana without any of the things happening to him that seemed to happen everywhere else.
He flicked over in his mind the other times he had seen her. Because of course he had noticed her, as she had noticed him.
The first time, two days ago, in the Capitolio Nacional.
Simon Templar would not ordinarily have been a customer for a piece of conducted sightseeing, especially of a government building, and least of all one which from the outside promised to be just another version of the central-domed design which has become the architectural cliché of the Capitols of the New World. But a taxi driver had mentioned that set in the floor under the dome there was a diamond worth fifty thousand dollars, and this he was curious to see. After all, although the days were somewhat precariously past when he would have been thinking seriously of stealing it, he did not have to forgo the intellectual exercise of casing the job and figuring out how it might be done.
That was the only reason why he happened to be one of a small group of tourists shuffling through the Salon de los Pasos Perdidos, listening with half an ear to the recitation of the guide (“The Hall of Lost Footsteps…largest in the world…four hundred feet…Florentine Renaissance style. Please notice how the pattern of the ceiling is exactly reproduced in the tile on the floor…”) and then gawking up at the immense symbolic gilt figure of The Republic (“The biggest indoor statue in the world…the spear alone weighs a ton…”) and finally clustered with them around the small roped-off square in the centre of which was the diamond (“Bought with the contributions of everyone who worked on this building…it marks the exact spot from which all distances in Cuba are measured. When they say it is a hundred miles to Havana, and you wonder what part of Havana they mean, this is the place…it has thirty-two facets, the same as the number of points of the compass.…”). But you had to take the guide’s word for it, for all you could see was a small circular brass grating set in the floor with a pane of glass under it, through which you could only imagine that you saw a diamond.
So the Saint let his gaze shift idly over the faces of his fellow tourists, and the one that arrested it was Mrs Carrington’s. Hers first because it was notably easy to look at on its own merits, and then in conjunction with and emphasized by the face of the man with her, who kept a possessive hand under her arm. For just as she was unmistakably a visitor, with her Nordic features and colouring, the man with his well-oiled black hair and olive skin and rather long-nosed good looks was no less obviously a Cuban. The oddity, of course, being that you would never normally expect to find a native of Havana among such a typical clutch of rubbernecks. He didn’t look a day older than the woman, which left just enough room for cynical speculation to impress them both on the Saint’s memory. Simon found himself dawdling towards the rear of the sightseeing party as it was ushered out of the building, being vaguely inquisitive about what the couple might reveal in the manner of their departure, and saw them get into a new Mercury that was parked outside. It had Indiana licence plates, but the man drove it.
And shortly after that Simon would probably have let them disappear into the limbo of all fruitless surmises. But before he could forget them, he saw them again.
The second time, the night before, at the Tropicana.
The Tropicana claims to be the biggest and the most beautiful night club in the world. It is indeed enormously big, and its fine-weather auditorium, roofed only by the sky and colonnaded with glamorously lighted palm trees, is certainly quite a sight. But in spite of the spectacular advantage of a backdrop of living trees interlaced with spidery stairways and catwalks over which the chorus was able to make endless dramatic entrances, counter-marches, and exits, the floor show was tremendous without much leavening of inspiration, and Simon was finally glad to vacate his seat at the bar and edge his way laboriously through the crowd to the Casino. And there she sat at the roulette table, with the same man standing behind her chair.
The Saint’s analytical eyes observed that she played without strain, moderately disappointed when she lost, reasonably elated when she won, but always relaxed enough to exchange a smiling word now and then with her companion. Therefore her luck was not financially important to her. But he also noted that her stakes were quite modest, and that, combined with the knowledge he already had that her car was not the most expensive make on the market, suggested that she was no more than comfortably well off, without the astronomical kind of bank balance that one automatically associates with such extravagances as gigolos. Could it then be a more genuine romance? There were well-heeled men in Cuba, too, and she was undeniably an attractive woman. But he saw her pick up a small stack of chips and offer them to the man, clearly urging him to play with them; the man shook his head in firm but amiable refusal. Then they both seemed to feel the Saint watching them, and looked at him, and he moved away. It could never be any great concern of his, anyhow—he thought.
Until now.
The croupier had nodded to him as he passed, he remembered, saying helpfully, “Not going to Puerto Rico this winter, sir?”—and the Saint had shrugged with affable vagueness and moved on before he placed the man, but realized that they must have seen each other across a table somewhere in San Juan. So it was probably true that that was how Beryl Carrington had learned his name.
But now she introduced herself as Mrs Carrington, and it was at least certain, for the record, that a man with the looks of her steady companion could not possibly be Mr Carrington.
It could well have seemed like a stretch of coincidence when the Saint strolled in to the Bambú that night and found himself seated two tables away from them. Yet the Bambú, billed as a typically Cuban night spot, was just as ineluctably as the Tropicana on the itinerary of any tourist who was stubbornly determined (as the Saint had been) to find out, regardless of the trauma to his pocketbook and eardrums, exactly what was the legendary fascination of Havana. But this time they had seen him at once, and turned to each other as unanimously as if their heads had been geared together, very evidently to talk about it.
Simon had tried his best this time to suggest innocence of any intention. Perhaps almost too studiously, he had kept his gaze from returning even approximately in their direction. And so now she was sitting beside him, asking for some nebulous kind of help.
It could do no more damage to look towards her table now, so he did, and saw that her boyfriend was no longer sitting there.
“He went to the men’s room,” she said. “I can’t say much now, because I don’t want him to catch me. I’m not sure he’d like it.”
“Shouldn’t you have found that out before you risked getting a knife stuck in me?” Simon murmured.
“I’m staying at the Comodoro. Mrs Carrington. Will you call me tomorrow? Any time. Please.” Again her eyes took a furtive glance around, and then they came back to him with an entreaty as urgent as the breathlessness of her voice: “Please, please do. I must go now.”
And before he could make any answer she was back at her own table, completely absorbed in the manipulation of mirror and lipstick. Her entire absence had been so brief that anyone who had not been watching her like a hawk might never have noticed that she had moved at all.
Simon Templar managed to look equally nonchalant as he took a long pull at his drink.
The orchestra, which had been mercifully silent during the bare minute that Beryl Carrington’s visit had taken, splintered the ephemeral lull with a blast of saxophones hurled full blast at the microphones which Cuban musical taste requires to be placed only inches aw
ay from the loudest sections of any orchestra; and in another instant a typically tuneless bedlam of brass was in full frenzied swing, amplified to bone-bruising intensity through the battery of souped-up loud speakers which Cuban custom demands for disseminating music through even the smallest room, and pounded remorselessly home with an assortment of drums, cymbals, rattles, gourds full of dried seeds, and just plain pieces of wood beaten together. Under the impact of that jungle cacophony magnified to the maximum intensity attainable through the abuse of modern electronics, the Saint found it relatively easy to keep his face a blank. In fact, about all he had to do was to let it mirror the numbness which the blare and concussion was threatening to induce in his brain. But out of the corner of his eye he saw Mrs Carrington’s playmate return to their table, and speak to her without sitting down; and she stood up, and they moved on to the dance floor and wedged themselves in among the dedicated crowd who were wriggling and jostling through the motions of a rumba or samba or mambo or whatever the current terpsichorean aphrodisiac was being called that season with every appearance of enjoyment.
About that time Simon Templar decided that he never was likely to experience for himself the mystic rapture which is evoked in some persons by Afro-Hispanic minstrelsy. Something in his cosmogony had undoubtedly been lacking from birth, and he decided to get out while he still had a few other faculties left, before the stupefying din left permanent scar tissue among his brain cells. He had to escape from that paralysing pandemonium to be able to make up his mind about Mrs Carrington’s peculiar invitation anyhow, and there could be no more inconspicuous time to do it than while she and her dancing partner were submerged in the gyrating mob in front of the bandstand. He succeeded in catching a waiter’s eye, and made the pantomime of scribbling on the palm of one raised flat hand which is understood to request a bill anywhere in the world.
As he emerged into the relative quiet outside, the doorman and three loitering drivers vocally offered taxi service, but they were physically cut out by a broad butterball of a man who half encircled the Saint’s back with a brotherly arm and grinned: “I got the best car for you, sir, and the best price.”
For just long enough to let himself be steered diagonally across the driveway into the parking lot, Simon submitted tolerantly to what seemed to be merely the effective technique of the most determined salesman on the beat. Then as he realized that they had gone just a little too far from the entrance, and a corner had shut them off from the sight of anyone there, the man stopped and turned him quite violently, and Simon looked down at the gleam of a knife-blade in the gloom.
“How long do you stay in Cuba, señor?” asked the man.
“Only as long as I can stand the noise,” snapped the Saint.
The fat man’s teeth flashed in the same dim light that glinted on the steel in his hand. Even at that distance the music was so loud that it must certainly prevent anyone around the entrance of the club from hearing almost anything that might happen in the parking lot, short of an atomic explosion.
“I think you will go home tomorrow,” the man said, “if you don’t want to get hurt. People don’t like you to spy on them. You are just a nuisance.”
“Well, Pancho,” said the Saint judicially, “speaking purely on the spur of the moment, I should say you were just a horse’s ass.”
And then, as the fat man’s patronizing grin vanished, Simon moved with a speed that the other, for all his apparent professionalism, could never have allowed for. That fat man himself could never reconstruct exactly what happened; he only knew that a blow out of nowhere sapped all the strength from his fingers, and that the knife he dropped was caught in mid-air almost as he released it and presented point first at the tip of his own nose.
“Go back to the goat who sent you,” said the Saint, in fluent Spanish, “and tell him that it annoys me to be rushed. And when I am annoyed, I do things like this.”
The stout man flinched from the flash of metal across his eyes as the knife spun away into the night. And then a fist that felt no less metallic, although blunter, impinged crisply on his nose and sat him down suddenly in his tracks with a new constellation of lights zipping across his vision. Before he could clear his involuntarily streaming eyes, the Saint was no longer in sight.
In a taxi heading back towards town along the Rancho Boyeros highway, the driver said helpfully, “You no have a girl tonight, sir?”
“Not tonight,” said the Saint.
“You are smart guy, I think. Some women you find make much trouble…But if you like, if you are lonely, I have young cousin, very honest and beautiful girl—”
“Thank you,” Simon said. “But I think someone just got an option on me.”
2
“You see,” Beryl Carrington told him, “Ramón is one of the top men in the Underground.”
“Oh,” said the Saint, and now for the first time he did begin to see a little.
She jumped up restlessly, with a swirl of the clinging négligé that she had put on when he knocked.
“It’s exciting, and rather frightening—isn’t it?—to think that things like that still have to go on, and so close to the United States.”
“Sure,” he said. “But how does it happen to concern you?”
She stared at him, puzzled and almost hurt.
“If I hadn’t heard it, I wouldn’t have believed that the Saint asked that question. Isn’t the fight for freedom, anywhere, something that concerns all of us these days?”
“I know the oratory,” Simon said mildly. “I meant—why you, personally?”
“I got into it when I met Ramón.”
“Where did you meet him? Here?”
“Yes.”
“What part of Indiana are you from?”
“Why, is the accent so obvious?”
“No, but your car plates are. Excuse me if I sound like a district attorney, but I like to know just a few things about the people I’m supposed to help.”
“I understand.” She sat down, facing him. “Lewisburg, Indiana, is the place. Probably you’ve never heard of it, it’s a very small town. I was born and raised there, and I lived there all my life. This is the farthest away I’ve ever been. I married my high school sweetheart, who was also the heir to the biggest industry in town—an umbrella factory. You don’t look like a man who ever owned an umbrella, but if you had one it could easily be a Carrington. They’re very good umbrellas. My husband was a very good guy and a good husband—and just as dull as an umbrella. We had a good, comfortable, normal, and very dull life. Until he died of a good dull case of lobar pneumonia a couple of years ago. It wasn’t until I got over that that I realized how very ordinary and how very dull my entire life had been. I wasn’t left filthy rich—that wouldn’t have been ordinary, would it?—but I could afford to go anywhere within reason. So I decided to see a few places while I was still young enough to have fun. Does that tell you enough?”
Simon nodded, and poured himself another cup of coffee—she had been having breakfast in her room when he arrived, and had ordered a fresh pot of coffee for him.
“And here you just happened to meet Ramón.”
“It wasn’t exactly that kind of pick-up,” she said.
Beryl Carrington had been told by a travel agent that if she wanted to see more of Cuba than the city of Havana where all the tourists go, it would be cheaper to have her own car ferried over from Key West. She had faced the prospect of trying to find her way around in a foreign country with some trepidation, but had finally decided to let it be an adventure. By the time she reached her hotel after getting lost five times on her way from the dock she was wondering whether that kind of adventure could possibly be worth any economy it effected, and a call on the house phone that came to her room while she was still unpacking convinced her that she could only have fallen for the idea during a spell of mental incompetence.
“I am very sorry,” the caller said, “but I have had a little accident to your car.”
Ram
ón Venino, as he introduced himself with a card in the lobby, was very apologetic and very embarrassed. She was too upset at first to notice how very personable he also was.
“My hand slipped on the wheel—but that is no excuse. I was careless. I wish to take all responsibility.”
They went out together to the parking area to inspect the damage, which consisted of one moderately crumpled fender.
“It is only a little less bad because it is easy to fix,” Venino said. “Give me the key, and I will take it to a garage, and tonight I will bring it back like new.”
Very quickly and sharply she visualized herself waiting from then until doomsday to see either him or her car again. She was distinctly pleased with her own poise and perspicacity.
“Thanks,” she said. “I’d rather take it to a garage myself.”
He inclined his head.
“As you wish. The hotel manager will recommend a place. I only insist that I pay the bill.”
After she had been directed to a garage, and was faced only with the navigational problem of actually finding it, she found Venino waiting beside her car with a taxi.
“Tell the driver where you are going,” he said, “and he will lead the way. He speaks good English, and he will help you at the garage. Then he will drive you where you want to go for the rest of the day. Don’t pay him anything—it is all taken care of.”
He bowed, and left her before she could think of anything to say.
The next morning, however, she recognized his voice when it spoke on the house telephone again.
“Please don’t be annoyed that I have brought your car back myself,” he said. “I only wish to be sure that you are completely satisfied with the repair before I pay the garage.”
The fender had been so well smoothed out and repainted that it would have taken a magnifying glass to find fault with it. And the fact remained that Venino had apparently had little difficulty in persuading the garage to turn the car over to him. If he had been a car thief with a new angle, as her hypertrophied caution had at first suspected him, he could already have got away with his objective.
Señor Saint (The Saint Series) Page 8
