“Well,” he said, “it was one way of giving those pearls back to the Indians. One day you’ll learn to stop being so smart, Jeannine. Can I offer you a ride out of town?”
“Whichever way you’re going,” she said with incandescent fascination, “I hope I’ll always be heading the other way.”
It was too bad, Simon Templar reflected. Too bad that she had to be so beautiful and so treacherous. And too bad, among other things, that his crusade for the cultivation of more general knowledge seemed to make so few converts. If only there were not so much ignorance and superstition in the world, both Wendel and Jeannine Roger would have known, as he did, that the story of pearls being dissolved in wine was strictly a fable, without a grain of scientific truth…Nevertheless, the pearls in his pocket were very pleasant to caress as he nursed his car over the Huey Long Bridge and turned west, towards Houston.
LUCIA
Simon Templar might easily have passed the “hotel.” For reasons known only to itself, it stood outside the town, perched aloofly on a stony slope that rose above the rudimentary road. But as he went by he saw the girl on the veranda, and admitted to himself that he was thirsty. He climbed the rough path and unslung his pack in the shade.
“If I were a millionaire,” he said, smiling at her, “I might offer you half my fortune for a drink.”
She had a rather pale, thoughtful face, delicately featured, almost too classically oval to have a character of its own, like one of those conventionalized portraits of the Italian seventeenth-century school. The sunlight struck blue-black glints from her hair as she wiped the table.
“What would you like?” she asked.
“What would you recommend?”
“We have some beer.”
“It was revealed to me in a vision,” said the Saint.
He leaned back and lighted a cigarette while he waited for her to bring it, gazing out across the sun-baked vista of granite and sandstone, ramshackle houses slumbering in the midday heat with their boards cracked and scarred and the tinted plaster peeling from their walls like the skin of a Florida sun-worshiper; sage, mesquite, violet-shadowed mesas, sparse trees powdered with dust, and the blue hint of mountains in the far distance. The same dust was thick on his bare brown arms, and the narrowing of his gaze against the glare creased dry wrinkles into the corners of his eyes. His clothes made no attempt to hide the fact that they had seen many weeks of vagabondage, and yet in some indefinable way they still rode his lean, wide-shouldered frame with a swashbuckling elegance that matched the gay lines of his face, for Simon made an adventure of all journeys.
“There you are.” The girl set a beaker of liquid gold before him, and watched while he drank. “Where are you from?” she asked.
Simon gestured toward the south.
“Cuautia,” he said. “Before that, Panama. A long time before that, Paris. And once upon a time I was in a place called Pfaffenhausen.”
“Looking for work?”
He shook his head.
“I’m an outlaw,” he said, with that smiling veracity which sometimes was so immeasurably more deceptive than any untruth. “I steal from the rich and wicked, and give to the poor and virtuous. I’m quite poor and virtuous myself,” he remarked parenthetically. “There has been some talk of making me a Saint.”
She laughed quietly, and left him as a man’s voice called her testily from indoors. Simon took another draught of the cool beer and stretched out his long legs contentedly.
He was in the state of happy vagueness in which an artist may find himself when confronted with a virgin canvas: for a modern privateer who modestly rated himself a supreme technician in the art of living, the situation was almost identical. Anything might take shape—dragons, murder, green hippopotami, bank robbers, damsels in distress, blue moons, or an absconding company promoter. Straight ahead of him as he sat there, if he cared to take that direction, he might come at last to Denver. He could turn east and follow the coast round to New Orleans and Miami. Or, in the fullness of time, he could wake up to the excitements of Chicago, New York, or San Francisco. Or he could stay right where he was with his beer in this forgotten border town of Saddlebag, and as a matter of fact, he was just preparing to discard the last alternative when he was privileged to witness the arrival of Mr Amadeo Urselli.
Urselli came on the bus, which went rattling past in a cloud of dust while Simon sat on over his refreshment. The same cloud of dust, halting to poise itself aridly over the roofs of the houses below, indicated that the bus had stopped somewhere in the village, and a few minutes later Mr Urselli himself came into view, toiling up the road toward the hotel with three or four inquisitive urchins following in his wake and apparently offering comment and counsel. Simon immediately admitted that there was some excuse for them—in his own early youth he would probably have been their ringleader. For Mr Urselli—whose name the Saint had yet to learn—was indeed a remarkable and resplendent sight in that setting.
His gray check suit fitted him so tightly, particularly around the waist, that he would probably have found it necessary to take his coat off in order to tie his shoelaces. His pearly hued felt hat looked as if it had come straight from a shop window; his tie had the gorgeous flamboyance of a tropical sunset; the pigskin suitcase which he carried in his right hand shone with a costly luster. The gesticulations which he made with his left hand in the attempt to rid himself of his juvenile escort flashed iridescent gleams of jewelry on his fingers.
He crested the slope leading up to the veranda and dumped his bag with a sigh. The escort gathered round him in an admiring circle while he mopped his brow with a large silk handkerchief.
“Say, will you sons of bandmasters scram?” he rasped—not, Simon gathered, for anything like the first time.
“Give them their fun, brother,” murmured the Saint. “They don’t get many chances to see the world.”
The newcomer turned toward him, and his sallow face slowly lightened to the gregarious gleam with which the exile in foreign climes recognizes another who speaks the same language.
“This is a helluva place,” he said emotionally.
It may be acknowledged at once that Simon Templar did not like the face, which was thin and pointed like a weasel’s, with flat brown eyes that shifted restlessly in their orbits, but Simon nodded amiably, and the traveler sank into a chair beside him.
“My name’s Urselli,” he volunteered. “I came out here to look at the neck of the woods where I was born. Ain’t there anyone around in this jernt?”
Simon glanced casually round, and was answered by the reappearance of the girl in the doorway. Mr Urselli stood up.
“Where’s Mr Intuccio?”
The girl turned and called, “Papa!” into the dark room behind her, and presently the innkeeper clumped out—a big black-bearded man in grimy shirt sleeves. Urselli held out a white manicured hand.
“You may not remember me, Salvatore,” he said in halting Italian. “I am Amadeo.”
The innkeeper’s sunken eyes surveyed him impassively, and held the hand with a callused paw.
“I remember. You will drink something?”
“Thank you,” said Mr Urselli.
He flopped back in his chair as the other left them after dispersing the enraptured audience with a hoarse “Git outside!” and a menacing lift of his arm which sent the urchins scampering. The girl followed the old man in.
“What I call a royal welcome,” observed Mr Urselli, when they were alone. He winked, craning his neck, “But the girl ain’t so bad, at that. It mightn’t be so dull here. If she calls him Papa she must be some kinda cousin of mine—Intuccio is. Since I’m here I guess I better like it.”
“Are you on a pleasure trip?” asked the Saint, turning his glass reflectively.
“You might call it that. Yes, I thought I might come back and take a rest in the old home town. I haven’t seen it for twenty years, and I guess it ain’t changed at all.” Urselli studied his expensive-looking hands
. “I’m in the joolry trade. Look at that piece of ice.”
He slipped a ring from one of his fingers and passed it over. “Very nice,” Simon remarked casually, examining it.
“I’ll say it’s nice,” affirmed Mr Urselli. “There ain’t a flaw in it, and it was a cheap buy at five grand. You gotta know your business with diamonds.”
Simon handed the ring back, and Mr Urselli replaced it on his finger. There was a tinge of mockery in the depths of the Saint’s sea-blue eyes, unperceived by Mr Urselli. It seemed a fantastic place for any practitioner of that ancient spiel to come with his diamonds, and Simon Templar’s curiosity never slept. He debated within himself, lazily interested, whether he should offer some ingenuous lead which would help the sales talk into its next phase, or whether he should leave the whole onus of its development on Mr Urselli’s doubtless capable shoulders, but at that moment the black-bearded innkeeper returned with a bottle and two glasses.
He poured out two drinks in silence, and sat down. Every movement he made was heavy and stolid, as his greeting had been. He raised his glass with a perfunctory mutter, and drank. His daughter came and leaned in the frame of the door. “What brings you home, Amadeo?”
The voice was dull and apathetic, and Urselli seemed to make an effort to retain his full expansiveness of geniality.
“I felt I needed a holiday. After all, there’s no place like home. And what’s home without a woman?” Urselli jerked his thumb slyly towards the girl. “I didn’t know you had a family.”
“There is only Lucia. Her mother died when she was born.”
“Pretty girl,” said Urselli approvingly.
Intuccio drank again, moving only his arm. “This is a long way from Chicago,” he said. “Where do you go now?”
“I thought I’d stay here for a while,” said Urselli comfortably. “It looks restful. Can you find room for me?” He looked at the girl as he spoke.
“There is always room,” she said.
Intuccio raised his deep-set eyes to her face, and lowered them again.
“What we have is yours,” he said formally.
“Then that’s settled,” said Urselli jovially. “It’ll be great to sit around and do nothing, and talk over old times.” He unbuttoned his coat and fanned himself energetically. “Jeez, is it always as hot as this? I’ll have to copy your costume if I’m making myself at home.”
Intuccio shrugged, watching him dispassionately, and Urselli took off his tight-waisted coat and hung it over the back of his chair. Something clunked solidly against the wood as he did so, and the Saint’s eyes turned absently towards the sound. One pocket was gaping under an unusual weight, and Simon looked into it and saw the gleaming metal of a gun butt.
Mr Urselli remembered him as his glass was refilled.
“Are you stayin’ here too?” he asked.
“I think I will,” said the Saint.
There was something bizarre about the home-coming of Amadeo Urselli. During the afternoon, with no more effort than was called for by attentive listening, Simon learned that both men were the scions of local families, immigrants to the United States at the beginning of the century. Not long afterwards their paths had separated. The Ursellis had taken to the big cities, merging themselves flexibly into the pace and turmoil of a rising civilization; the Intuccios, unyielding peasants for as many generations as the oldest of them could remember, had naturally sent down their roots into the soil, preferring to find their livelihood in the surroundings to which they had been born. The divergence was summed up almost grotesquely in the two men; if the Saint’s hypersensitive intuition had not been startled into alertness by the other oddities that had struck him about Urselli, he might have found himself staying on for nothing but the amusement of the human comedy which they were acting.
It was not until dinner was half finished that Intuccio’s rock-like taciturnity unbent at all. They ate in the smoky oil-lighted kitchen, the four of them together round a stained pine table, in the incense of garlic and charring wood.
Urselli prattled on in a kind of strained desperation, as if the mighty silence that welled in on them whenever he stopped was more than his nerves could stand. The older man answered only with grunts and monosyllables; the girl Lucia spoke very little, whether from shyness or habit Simon could not decide, and the Saint himself felt that he was a spectator rather than a player—at least for those early scenes. It was as a spectator that Simon watched Intuccio wind the last reel of spaghetti dexterously round his fork, and heard him interrupt Urselli’s recital of the delights of Broadway to ask, “You have done well in your business, Amadeo?”
They were speaking in Italian, the language on which Intuccio stubbornly insisted, and which Simon spoke as easily as he.
“Well enough,” Urselli answered. “It was easy for me. I must have been born for it. Buy and sell, the same as any other business—there is only the one secret—and know what you can sell before you buy.” He slapped his waist. “Here in my belt I have twenty thousand good American dollars. And you, Salvatore?”
The other drank from his wineglass and wiped his matted black beard.
“I also have no complaints. Five years ago I have much land and everyone is paying the highest prices, but I have the intelligence to see that it will not always be like that. Ebbene, I sell the farm, and presently when the prices have gone down I buy this place. It is something for me to do, and I like to stay here. I have perhaps thirty thousand dollars, perhaps a little more. We are thrifty people, and we do not have to spend money on fine clothes.”
The meal was completed with some grudging attempts at graciousness on the part of Intuccio at which Urselli gave Simon a covert grimace of relief and turned his attentions more openly to Lucia. When it was over the girl picked up a pail and went out to draw water from the well to wash the dishes, and Urselli followed her out with an offer of help. The old man’s shadowed eyes gazed after them fixedly.
“You have an attractive daughter,” Simon observed, with a touch of humorous significance.
Intuccio’s face turned slowly back to him, and the Saint was surprised by its darkness. There was a hunted flicker of fear and suspicion at the back of the innkeeper’s eyes, the same look that Simon might have expected if he had burst into the solitude of a hermit.
“Perhaps I should not have told that Amadeo that I had so much money,” he said, with an equal significance in the harshness of his reply.
“Why worry,” asked the Saint gently, “when it was not true?”
For the first time the semblance of a smile touched the innkeeper’s grim mouth.
“Amadeo does not know that. But I had to say it. I have not three hundred dollars, signor, but I have pride. Why should I let Amadeo boast against me?”
He raised himself from the table and stumped out of the kitchen. Simon went out and smoked a cigarette in the fresh air on the veranda. Later he found the old man serving the scanty orders of his evening customers in the big gloomy outer room, moving about his work in the same heavy unsmiling manner.
Simon drifted into a place at the long communal table which occupied the center of the room. The four customers were at the other end of it, grouped over a game of poker. Simon ordered himself a drink and listened abstractedly to the scuff of cards and the expressionless voices of the players. Intuccio called for the girl to come out and take over the serving; she came, composed and silent, and the old man joined Simon at the table. He sat there with his brawny arms spread forward and his glass held clumsily between his huge hands, without speaking, and the Saint wondered what thoughts were passing through the dark caverns of that heavy impenetrable mind. There was a sense of menace about that somber immobility, a dreadful inhumanity of aloofness, that sent an eerie ripple of half-understanding up Simon Templar’s spine. Suddenly he knew why so few men came to the inn.
Amadeo Urselli entered jauntily, and pulled out a chair beside them.
“This is a dandy spot,” he said fluently. “You know, wh
en I first dropped in here I nearly got straight back on the bus and went out again. Seemed like a guy would go nuts sittin’ around here with nothing to look at but a lot of mesquite. Well, now I guess movies and cabarets don’t mean so much compared with real home life. I could settle down in a town like this. Say, Salvatore, what’s the hunting around here?”
Intuccio lifted his eyes under their dense black brows. “Hunting?”
“Yeah. You got a swell rifle hangin’ on the wall outside. I took it down to have a look at it, and it was all cleaned and erled. Or is it in case the bandits come this way?”
The innkeeper sat motionless, as if he had not heard, staring at the glass cupped between his hands. The voices of the poker players muttered a pizzicato background to his stillness: “Two to come in.”
“And four.”
“Make it four more.”
“I’ll raise that ten.” The chips slithered and spilled across the board and hands were turned face downwards and sent spinning over the table to join the discard.
Intuccio, detached as a statue, turned his head as the game fell into the lull of a fresh deal.
“Mr Jupp, have you seen any bandits here?”
One of the players looked up.
“Since Roosevelt became President there have been no more bad men,” he said solemnly.
Another of the men leaned round in his chair.
“Yo’re new to these parts, I guess,” he drawled. “You oughta know that them stories belong back in the days of your grandfather. This is a peaceful country now.”
“By hookey,” erupted the third man, who wore a sheriff’s badge, “it had better be! You won’t see any bad men here while I’m responsible.”
Intuccio nodded. He turned to Urselli again, his eyes dispassionately intent, gleaming motionlessly in their hollow sockets like deep pools of stagnant water in a cave.
“You see, Amadeo?” he said. “At one time there were bad men and bandits here. Even now, sometimes, little things have happened. There are some who believe that the bad men are not altogether stamped out. But the times have changed.” The craglike head, inscrutable as a mask of rugged wax, held itself squarely in the field of Urselli’s shifting eyes. “Today you will find more robbers in the big cities of America than you will find here.”
Saint Errant (The Saint Series) Page 10
