Saint Errant (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “Stop!”

  The sheriff’s command boomed like a gunshot through the din. He turned to Urselli grimly.

  “Reckon you better say something quick, friend,” he drawled.

  Urselli’s face twisted and twitched, his hunted eyes swiveling frantically over the bank of remorseless faces. He shrank away like a cornered animal.

  “It’s not true!” he blubbered. “I ain’t done nothing. Ya can’t frame this on me! This won’t help ya. That ransom’s gotta be paid by midnight—an’ if it ain’t there—”

  The clamor which had been hushed began again. Fingers plucked at him. Red eyes glowered into his whichever way he turned. And all the time the innkeeper’s inexorable hands held him as helpless as a struggling child. Urselli screamed.

  “Don’t touch me!” he gasped, writhing away from them. “You’re all wrong. You don’t know what you’re doing. Gimme a break. Don’t touch me! Salvatore—you wouldn’t let them do this to me? I’ll do anything—anything. Here, look. I told you I had twenty thousand bucks. You can have them. I’ll give them to you. Take them and pay the ransom!”

  “What do you think. Salvatore?” asked the sheriff steadily.

  Silence came down again, raw-edged and expectant. Intuccio turned. He shrugged, and the slobbering object in his grip rose and fell like a puppet with the heave of his shoulders.

  “It is easy enough to pay ransom to oneself,” he said skeptically. “But I can take his money. If they will give Lucia back to me—if she is safe—afterwards we shall see.”

  “We can all go with you,” spoke up one of the bystanders, and there was a chorus of assent. “If we can catch one o’ them thar coyotes—”

  Others chimed in.

  “Fools!” cried the old man bitterly. “If it were as easy as that, should I not have asked your company long ago? Lucia will not be there. They will keep her until the money is paid.” The fire smoldered again in his dark eyes. “But when I return, you, Amadeo, will still be here. And death pays for treachery. If Lucia does not come home, I will kill you myself.”

  He tore off Urselli’s belt and flung it to the sheriff. Pack after pack of new crisp bills came from it, and the sheriff counted the pile and stacked it together.

  “It is my duty to forbid this,” he said gravely. “But it’s—your daughter.”

  Intuccio nodded stonily.

  “Yes,” he said. “It is my daughter.”

  He scanned their faces once, his eyes resting last on the trembling figure of Urselli held by two pairs of strong hands, and then he passed through them to the door, with the circle opening to let him through. And again the stillness began to be broken, voice by voice.

  “I have an idea,” said the Saint.

  He stood by the wall, a little apart from them, cigarette poised between lean brown fingers. The very quiescence of his lounging suppleness had the electric quality of a smoothly humming dynamo, but the light was too dim for them to see the reckless blue twinkle of his eyes. Yet they all looked at him.

  “All of you couldn’t go,” he said quietly. “But one man might. I’ve done plenty of night hunting. I could follow—and see where the money was taken.”

  “Could you be sure no one would know?” asked the sheriff, and Simon smiled.

  “Anyone who heard me, or saw me, would be a living miracle.”

  He had a way about him.

  They listened to him.

  He went through the night toward Skeleton Hill with a blithe softness. The country before him and on either side was an earthly sleeping wilderness, ragged and obscure in the shrouded darkness of a night without a moon. The cry of a hunting coyote somewhere in the distance wailed faintly through the veiled space, and the Saint smiled again. Presently, ahead of him, he heard the monotonous scrunch of plodding boots going down the dirt road. He came up swiftly with the sound, till he could see the ghostly bulk of the walker blotting out the stars.

  He himself made no sound. He came up until his hand could stretch out and grip the man’s shoulder, and he spoke in a sudden gentle whisper of Italian.

  “One moment, Salvatore. You know as well as I do that there is no hurry to reach Skeleton Hill.”

  The man halted with a jerk, and turned. His black-bearded face bent forward till he could recognize the Saint in the vague starlight. Then the shaggy black head bowed.

  “Lai fatto molto bene,” said the old man gruffly. “I thought we should meet here.”

  For a moment even Simon was startled. “You guessed, did you?”

  “I knew that Amadeo could never have been so stupid as to try anything like that immediately after you had shown him up. And the hunting trip that left him alone for nearly four hours was your idea. Also you knew that I had no money, so I knew that I had nothing to fear from you. Where is Lucia?”

  “She went and hid in the woodshed as I told her to,” answered the Saint shamelessly. “I told her to slip out as soon as it was dark and come along here. You’ll probably find her a little way along the road. But if you knew, why did you help me?”

  “I did not see why that Amadeo should have so much money,” said Intuccio calmly. “You will be content with half?”

  Simon laughed softly.

  “From the very beginning,” he said, “I always meant you to have three quarters.”

  Intuccio took out the money and divided it.

  “Do we go back?” he asked.

  “I think we shall have to make some ingenious explanations,” said the Saint. “If Lucia says it was Amadeo, he will probably be lynched. As far as I’m concerned, the probability leaves me unmoved, but since he’s still your cousin you may feel differently. If she says it was me, I’m not likely to have such a good time either. Perhaps she had better invent somebody.”

  “Let us decide about that on the way,” agreed Salvatore Intuccio, and they walked on, arm in arm.

  TERESA

  INTRODUCTION

  One more story that stems from long ago. From 1931, to be quite exact—although I didn’t write it for a longish while afterwards.

  This is another story in which the locale, and only that, was changed for contemporary geopolitical reasons, between the time it was first written and published in a magazine and the time when it ended up in a book collection.

  I can make no more apologies for the liberties I have taken with times and places in the reprinting of stories such as this.

  The way I see it, nothing is so dated as last year—at least in fiction. Put your setting back a century, and anything goes: any apparent anachronism, any unfamiliarity, is acceptable because it is said to have occurred in an era about which the reader happily admits his ignorance. Things were different in those days—that’s all. But let the period fall within the theoretical scope of his faulty memory, and the reader is at once a dissecting critic: anything that seems as if it could have happened yesterday must be submitted to the awareness of today. If a story uses a telephone, this kind of telescoping consciousness requires that it should also take cognizance of television.

  This story was first written around a Corsican bandit whom I had the pleasure of meeting on his home ground in very similar circumstances to those I have used in this narrative. But they caught him eventually, although it took several regiments of the French Army to do it, and today Corsican bandits are just an old wives’ tale. Mexican bandits, however, for some reason, are still exotic currency. So let the story go there. If it is considered legitimate to disguise names, why not places?

  —Leslie Charteris

  “Bandits?” said Señor Copas. He shrugged. “Sí, hay siempre bandidos. The Government will never catch them all. Here in Mexico they are a tradition of the country.”

  He looked again at the girl in the dark hat, appreciatively, because she was worth looking at, and he was a true Latin, and there was still romance in the heart that beat above his rounded abdomen.

  He chuckled uncertainly, ignoring the other customers who were sitting in various degrees
of patience behind their empty plates, and said, “But the señorita has nothing to fear. She is not going into the wilds.”

  “But I want to go into the wilds,” she said.

  Her voice was low and soft and musical, matching the quiet symmetry of her face and the repose of her hands. She was smart without exaggeration. She was Fifth Avenue with none of its brittle hardness, incongruously transported to that standstill Mexican village, and yet contriving not to seem out of place. To Señor Copas she was a miracle.

  To Simon Templar she was a quickening of interest and a hint of adventure that might lead anywhere or nowhere. His eye for charm was no slower than that of Señor Copas, but there was more in it than that.

  To Simon Templar, who had been called the most audacious bandit of the twentieth century, the subject was always new and fascinating. And he had an impish sense of humor which couldn’t resist the thought of what the other members of the audience would have said and done if they had known that the man who was listening to their conversation about bandits was the notorious Saint himself.

  “Are you more interested in the wilds or the bandits?” he asked, in Spanish as native as her own.

  She turned to him with friendly brown eyes in which there was a trace of subtle mockery.

  “I’m not particular.”

  “No es posible,” said Señor Copas firmly, as he dragged himself away to his kitchen.

  “He doesn’t seem to like the idea,” said the Saint.

  He was sitting beside her, at the communal table which half filled the dining room of the hotel. She broke a roll with her graceful, leisurely moving hands. He saw that her fingers were slender and tapering, delicately manicured, and one of them wore a wedding ring.

  Fifth Avenue in the Fonda de la Quinta, in the shadow of the Sierra Madre, in the state of Durango in Old Mexico, which was a very different place.

  “You know a lot about this country?” she asked.

  “I’ve been here before.”

  “Do you know the mountains?”

  “Fairly well.”

  “Do you know the bandits too?”

  The Saint gazed at her with precarious gravity. He looked like a man who would obviously be on visiting terms with bandits. He looked rather like a bandit himself, in a debonair and reckless sort of way, with his alert tanned face and clean-cut fighting mouth and the unscrupulous gay twinkle in his blue eyes.

  “Listen,” he said. “Once upon a time I was walking between San Miguel and Gajo, two villages not far from here. I saw from my map that the road led around in a great horseshoe, but they told me at an inn that there was a short cut, straight across, down into the canyon and up the other side. I climbed down something like the side of a precipice for hours—the path was all great loose stones, and presently one of them turned under my foot and I took a spill and sprained my ankle. When I got to the bottom I was done in. I couldn’t move another step, particularly climbing. I hadn’t any food, but there was a stream running through the bottom of the canyon, so I had water. I could only hope that someone else would try that short cut and find me…At the end of the third day a man did find me, and he looked like one of your bandits if anyone ever did. He did what he could for me, gave me food from his pack—bread and sausage and cheese—and then he said he would go on to San Miguel and send help for me. He could have taken everything I had, but he didn’t. He was insulted when I offered to pay him. ‘I am not a beggar,’ he said, and I’ve never seen anything so haughty in my life—‘I am El Rojo.’ ”

  “Then why is Señor Copas so frightened?”

  “They’re all frightened of El Rojo.”

  Her finely penciled brows drew together.

  “El Rojo?” she said. “Who is El Rojo?”

  “ ‘The greatest bandit since Villa. They’re all scared because there’s a rumor that he’s in the district. You ought to be scared, too. They’re all offended if you aren’t scared of El Rojo…He really is a great character, though. I remember once the Government decided it was time that something drastic was done about him. They sent out half the Mexican army to round him up. It was the funniest thing I ever heard of, but you have to know the country to see the joke.”

  “They didn’t catch him?”

  The Saint chuckled.

  “One man who knew the country could laugh at three armies.”

  For a little while the girl was wrapped in an unapproachable solitude of thought. Then she turned to the Saint again.

  “Señor,” she said, “do you think you could help me find El Rojo?”

  Even south of the border, he was still a Saint errant, or perhaps a sucker for adventure. He said, “I could try.”

  They rode out on the dazzling stone track that winds beside the river—a track which was nothing more than the marks that centuries of solitary feet had left on the riot of tumbled boulders from which the hills rose up.

  The Saint lounged in the saddle, relaxed like a vaquero, letting his mount pick its own way over the broken rock. His mind went back to the café where they had sat together over coffee, after lunch, and he had said to her, “Either you must be a journalist looking for an unusual interview, or you want to be kidnapped by El Rojo for publicity, or you’ve been reading too many romantic stories and you think you could fall in love with him.”

  She had only smiled in her quiet way, inscrutable in spite of its friendliness, and said, “No, señor—you are wrong in all your guesses. I am looking for my husband.”

  The Saint’s brows slanted quizzically.

  “You mean you are Señora Rojo?”

  “Oh, no. I am Señora Alvarez de Quevedo. Teresa Alvarez.”

  Then she looked at him, quickly and clearly, as if she had made up her mind about something.

  “The last time I heard of my husband, he was at the Fonda de la Quinta,” she said. “That was two years ago. He wrote to me that he was going into the mountains. He liked to do things like that, to climb mountains and sleep under the stars and be a man alone, sometimes—it is curious, for he was very much a city man…I never heard of him again. He said he was going to climb the Gran Seño. I remembered, when I heard the name, that I had read of El Rojo in the newspapers about that time. And it seemed to me, when I heard you speak of El Rojo, that perhaps El Rojo was the answer.”

  “If it was El Rojo,” said the Saint quietly, “I don’t think it would help you to find him now.”

  Her eyes were still an enigma.

  “Even so,” she said, “it would be something to know.”

  “But you’ve waited two years—”

  “Yes,” she said softly. “I have waited two years.”

  She had told him no more than that, and he had known that she did not wish to say any more, but it had been enough to send him off on that quixotic wild-goose chase.

  He had been leading the way for two hours, but presently, where the trail broadened for a short distance, she brought her horse up beside his, and they rode knee to knee. “I wonder why you should do this for me,” she said.

  He shrugged.

  “Why did you ask me?”

  “It was an impulse.” She moved her hands puzzledly. “I don’t know. I suppose you have the air of a man who is used to being asked impossible things. You look as if you would do them.”

  “I do,” said the Saint modestly.

  It was his own answer, too. She was a damsel in distress—and no damsel in distress had ever called on the Saint in vain. And she was beautiful, also, which was a very desirable asset to damsels in distress. And about her there was a mystery, which to Simon Templar was the trumpet call of adventure.

  In the late afternoon, at one of the bends in the trail where it dipped to the level of the river, the Saint reined in his horse and dismounted at the water’s edge.

  “Are we there?” she said.

  “No. But we’re leaving the river.”

  He scooped water up in his hands and drank, and splashed it over his face. It was numbingly cold, but it steamed
off his arms in the hot dry air. She knelt down and drank beside him, and then sat back on her heels and looked up at the hills that hemmed them in.

  A kind of shy happiness lighted her eyes, almost uncertainly, as if it had not been there for a long time and felt itself a stranger.

  “I understand now,” she said. “I understand why Gaspar loved all this, in spite of what he was. If only he could have been content with it…”

  “You were not happy?” said the Saint gently.

  She looked at him.

  “No, señor. I have not been happy for so long that I am afraid.”

  She got up quickly and put her foot in the stirrup. He helped her to mount, and swung into his own saddle. They set off across the shallow stream; the horses picked their way delicately between the boulders.

  On the far side, they climbed, following a trail so faint that she could not see it all, but the Saint rarely hesitated. Presently the trees were thicker, and over the skyline loomed the real summit of the hill they were climbing. The valley was swallowed up in darkness, and up there where the Saint turned his horse across the slope the brief subtropical twilight was fading.

  Simon Templar lighted a cigarette as he rode, and he had barely taken the first puff of smoke into his lungs when a man stepped from behind a tree with a rifle leveled and broke the stillness of the evening with a curt, “Manos arriba!”

  The Saint turned his head with a smile.

  “You’ve got what you wanted,” he said to Teresa Alvarez. “May I present El Rojo?”

  The introduction was almost superfluous, for the red mask from which El Rojo took his name, which covered his face from the brim of his sombrero down to his stubble-bearded chin, was sufficient identification. Watching the girl, Simon saw no sign of fear as the bandit came forward. Her face was pale, but she sat straight-backed on her horse and gazed at him with an unexpected eagerness in her eyes. Simon turned back to El Rojo.