The Saint on the Spanish Main (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “Life and death are not in my hands,” Astron said, in a calm and confident voice. “Death can only come from the hands of the Giver of all Life. In His own good time He will strike you down, and the arrow of God will silence your mockeries. This I have seen in the stars.”

  “Quaint, isn’t he?” Vosper said, and opened the gate between the wall and the beach.

  Beyond the wall a few steps led down to a kind of Grecian courtyard open on the seaward side, where the paving merged directly into the white sand of the beach. The courtyard was furnished with gaily colored lounging chairs and a well-stocked pushcart bar, to which Vosper immediately directed himself.

  “You have visitors, Lucy,” he said, without letting it interfere with the important work of reviving his highball.

  Out on the sand, on a towel spread under an enormous beach umbrella, Mrs Herbert Wexall rolled over and said, “Oh, Mr Templar.”

  Simon went over and shook hands with her as she stood up. It was hard to think of her as Janet Blaise’s sister, for there were at least twenty years between them and hardly any physical resemblances. She was a big woman with an open homely face and patchily sun-bleached hair and a sloppy figure, but she made a virtue of those disadvantages by the cheerfulness with which she ignored them. She was what is rather inadequately known as “a person,” which means that she had the personality to dispense with appearances and the money to back it up.

  “Good to see you,” she said, and turned to the man who had been sitting beside her, as he struggled to his feet. “Do you know Arthur Gresson?”

  Mr Gresson was a full head shorter than the Saint’s six foot two, but he weighed a good deal more. Unlike anyone else that Simon had encountered on the premises so far, his skin looked as if it was unaccustomed to exposure. His round body and his round balding brow, under a liberal sheen of oil, had the hot rosy blush which the kiss of the sun evokes in virgin epidermis.

  “Glad to meet you, Mr Templar.” His hand was soft and earnestly adhesive.

  “I expect you’d like a drink,” Lucy Wexall said. “Let’s keep Floyd working.”

  They joined Vosper at the bar wagon, and after he had started to work on the orders she turned back to the Saint and said, “After this formal service, just make yourself at home. I’m so glad you could come.”

  “I’m sure Mr Templar will be happy,” Vosper said. “He’s a man of the world like I am. We enjoy Lucy’s food and liquor, and in return we give her the pleasure of hitting the society columns with our names. A perfectly businesslike exchange.”

  “That’s progress for you,” Lucy Wexall said breezily. “In the old days I’d have had a court jester. Now all I get is a professional stinker.”

  “That’s no way to refer to Arthur,” Vosper said, handing Simon a long cold glass, “For your information, Templar, Mr Gresson—Mr Arthur Granville Gresson—is a promoter. He has a long history of selling phony oil stock behind him. He is just about to take Herb Wexall for another sucker, but since Herb married Lucy he can afford it. Unless you’re sure you can take Janet away from Reggie, I advise you not to listen to him.”

  Arthur Gresson’s elbow nudged Simon’s ribs.

  “What a character!” he said, almost proudly.

  “I only give out with facts,” Vosper said. “My advice to you, Templar, is never be an elephant. Resist all inducements. Because when you reach back into that memory, you will only be laughed at, and the people who should thank you will call you a stinker.”

  Gresson giggled, deep from his round pink stomach.

  “Would you like to get in a swim before lunch?” Lucy Wexall said. “Floyd, show him where he can change.”

  “A pleasure,” Vosper said. “And probably a legitimate part of the bargain.”

  He thoughtfully refilled his glass before he steered Simon by way of the verandah into the beachward side of the house, and into a bedroom. He sat on the bed and watched unblinkingly while Simon stripped down and pulled on the trunks he had brought with him.

  “It must be nice to have the Body Beautiful,” he observed. “Of course, in your business it almost ranks with plant and machinery, doesn’t it?”

  The Saint’s blue eyes twinkled.

  “The main difference,” he agreed good-humouredly, “is that if I get a screw loose it may not be so noticeable.”

  As they were starting back through the living room, a small bird-like man in a dark and (for the setting outside the broad picture window) incongruous business suit bustled in by another door. He had the bright baggy eyes behind rimless glasses, the slack but fleshless jowls, and the wide tight mouth which may not be common to all lawyers, bankers, and business executives, but which is certainly found in very few other vocations, and he was followed by a statuesque brunette whose severe tailoring failed to disguise an outstanding combination of curves, who carried a notebook and a sheaf of papers.

  “Herb!” Vosper said. “I want you to meet Lucy’s latest addition to the menagerie which already contains Astron and me—Mr Simon Templar, known as the Saint. Templar—your host, Mr Wexall.”

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Herbert Wexall, shaking hands briskly.

  “And this is Pauline Stone,” Vosper went on, indicating the nubile brunette. “The tired business man’s consolation. Whatever Lucy can’t supply, she can.”

  “How do you do,” said the girl stoically.

  Her dark eyes lingered momentarily on the Saint’s torso, and he noticed that her mouth was very full and soft.

  “Going for a swim?” Wexall said, as if he had heard nothing. “Good. Then I’ll see you at lunch, in a few minutes.”

  He trotted busily on his way, and Vosper ushered the Saint to the beach by another flight of steps that led directly down from the verandah. The house commanded a small half-moon bay, and both ends of the crescent of sand were naturally guarded by abrupt rises of jagged coral rock.

  “Herbert is the living example of how really stupid a successful business man can be,” Vosper said tirelessly. “He was just an office-boy of some kind in the Blaise outfit when he got smart enough to woo and win the boss’s daughter. And from that flying start, he was clever enough to really pay his way by making Blaise Industries twice as big as even the old man himself had been able to do. And yet he’s dumb enough to think that Lucy won’t catch on to the extracurricular functions of that busty secretary sooner or later—or that when she does he won’t be out on a cold doorstep in the rain…No, I’m not going in. I’ll hold your drink for you.”

  Simon ran down into the surf and churned seawards for a couple of hundred yards, then turned over and paddled lazily back, coordinating his impressions with idle amusement. The balmy water was still refreshing after the heat of the morning, and when he came out the breeze had become brisk enough to give him the luxury of a fleeting shiver as the wetness started to evaporate from his tanned skin.

  He crossed the sand to the Greek patio, where Floyd Vosper was on duty again at the bar in a strategic position to keep his own needs supplied with a minimum of effort. Discreet servants were setting up a buffet table. Janet Blaise and Reg Herrick had transferred their gin rummy game and were playing at a table right under the column where Astron had resumed his seat and his cataleptic meditations—a weird juxtaposition of which the three members all seemed equally unconscious.

  Simon took Lucy Wexall a Martini and said with another glance at the tableau, “Where did you find him?”

  “The people who brought him to California sent him to me when he had to leave the States. They gave me such a good time when I was out there, I couldn’t refuse to do something for them. He’s writing a book, you know, and of course he can’t go back to that dreadful place he came from, wherever it is, before he has a chance to finish it in reasonable comfort.”

  Simon avoided discussing this assumption, but he said, “What’s it like, having a resident prophet in the house?”

  “He’s very interesting. And quite as drastic as Floyd, in his own way, in summin
g up people. You ought to talk to him.”

  Arthur Gresson came over with an hors d’oeuvre plate of smoked salmon and stuffed eggs from the buffet. He said, “Anyone you meet at Lucy’s is interesting, Mr Templar. But if you don’t mind my saying so, you have it all over the rest of ’em. Who’d ever think we’d find the Saint looking for crime in the Bahamas?”

  “I hope no one will think I’m looking for crime,” Simon said deprecatingly, “any more than I take it for granted that you’re looking for oil.”

  “That’s where you’d be wrong,” Gresson said. “As a matter of fact, I am.”

  The Saint raised an eyebrow.

  “Well, I can always learn something. I’d never heard of oil in the Bahamas.”

  “I’m not a bit surprised. But you will, Mr Templar, you will.” Gresson sat down, pillowing his round stomach on his thighs. “Just think for a moment about some of the places you have heard of, where there is certainly oil. Let me mention them in a certain order. Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and the recent strike in the Florida Everglades. We might even include Venezuela in the south. Does that suggest anything to you?”

  “Hm-mm,” said the Saint thoughtfully.

  “A pattern,” Gresson said. “A vast central pool of oil somewhere under the Gulf of Mexico, with oil wells dipping into it from the edges of the bowl, where the geological strata have also been forced up. Now think of the islands of the Caribbean as the eastern edge of the same bowl. Why not?”

  “It’s a hell of an interesting theory,” said the Saint.

  “Mr Wexall thinks so too, and I hope he’s going into partnership with me.”

  “Herbert can afford it,” intruded the metallic sneering voice of Floyd Vosper. “But before you decide to buy in, Templar, you’d better check with New York about the time when Mr Gresson thought he could dig gold in the Catskills.”

  “Shut up, Floyd,” said Mrs Wexall, “and get me another Martini.”

  Arthur Granville Gresson chuckled in his paunch like a happy Buddha.

  “What a guy!” he said. “What a ribber. And he gets everyone mad. He kills me!”

  Herbert Wexall came down from the verandah and beamed around. As a sort of tacit announcement that he had put aside his work for the day, he had changed into a sport shirt on which various exotic animals were depicted wandering through an idealized jungle, but he retained his business trousers and business shoes and business face.

  “Well,” he said, inspecting the buffet and addressing the world at large, “Let’s come and get it whenever we’re hungry.”

  As if a spell had been snapped, Astron removed himself from the contemplation of the infinite, descended from his pillar, and began to help himself to cottage cheese and caviar on a foundation of lettuce leaves.

  Simon drifted in the same direction, and found Pauline Stone beside him, saying , “What do you feel like, Mr Templar?”

  Her indication of having come off duty was a good deal more radical than her employer’s. In fact, the bathing suit which she had changed into seemed to be based more on the French minimums of the period than on any British tradition. There was no doubt that she filled it opulently, and her question amplified its suggestiveness with undertones which the Saint felt it wiser not to challenge at that moment.

  “There’s so much to drool over,” he said, referring studiously to the buffet table. “But that green turtle aspic looks pretty good to me.”

  She stayed with him when he carried his plate to a table as thoughtfully diametric as possible from the berth chosen by Floyd Vosper, even though Astron had already settled there in temporary solitude. They were promptly joined by Reg Herrick and Janet Blaise, and slipped at once into an easy exchange of banalities.

  But even then it was impossible to escape Vosper’s tongue. It was not many minutes before his saw-edged voice whined across the patio above the general level of harmless chatter:

  “When are you going to tell the Saint’s fortune, Astron? That ought to be worth hearing.”

  There was a slightly embarrassed lull, and then everyone went on talking again, but Astron looked at the Saint with a gentle smile and said quietly, “You are a seeker after truth, Mr Templar, as I am. But when instead of truth you find falsehood, you will destroy it with a sword. I only say ‘This is falsehood, and God will destroy it. Do not come too close, lest you be destroyed with it.’ ”

  “Okay,” Herrick growled, just as quietly. “But if you’re talking about Vosper, it’s about time someone destroyed it.”

  “Sometimes,” Astron said, “God places His arrow in the hand of a man.”

  For a few moments that seemed unconscionably long nobody said anything, and then before the silence spread beyond their small group the Saint said casually, “Talking of arrows—I hear that the sport this season is to go hunting sharks with a bow and arrow.”

  Herrick nodded with a healthy grin.

  “It’s a lot of fun. Would you like to try it?”

  “Reggie’s terrific,” Janet Blaise said. “He shoots like a regular Howard Hill, but of course he uses a bow that nobody else can pull.”

  “I’d like to try,” said the Saint, and the conversation slid harmlessly along the tangent he had provided.

  After lunch everyone went back to the beach, with the exception of Astron, who retired to put his morning’s meditations on paper. Chatter surrendered to an afternoon torpor which even subdued Vosper.

  An indefinite while later, Herrick aroused with a yell and plunged roaring into the sea, followed by Janet Blaise. They were followed by others, including the Saint. An interlude of aquatic brawling developed somehow into a pick-up game of touch football on the beach, which was delightfully confused by recurrent arguments about who was supposed to be on which of the unequal sides. This boisterous nonsense churned up so much sand for the still freshening breeze to spray over Floyd Vosper, who by that time had drunk enough to be trying to sleep under the big beach umbrella, that the misanthropic oracle finally got back on his feet.

  “Perhaps,” he said witheringly, “I had better get out of the way of you perennial juveniles before you convert me into a dune.”

  He stalked off along the beach and lay down again about a hundred yards away. Simon noticed him still there, flat on his face and presumably unconscious, when the game eventually broke up through a confused water-polo phase to leave everyone gasping and laughing and dripping on the patio with no immediate resurge of inspiration. It was the last time he saw the unpopular Mr Vosper alive.

  “Well,” Arthur Gresson observed, mopping his short round body with a towel, “at least one of us seems to have enough sense to know when to lie down.”

  “And to choose the only partner who’d do it with him,” Pauline added vaguely.

  Herbert Wexall glanced along the beach in the direction that they both referred to, then glanced for further inspiration at the water-proof watch he was still wearing.

  “It’s almost cocktail time,” he said. “How about it, anyone?”

  His wife shivered, and said, “I’m starting to freeze my tail off. It’s going to blow like a son-of-a-gun any minute. Let’s all go in and get some clothes on first—then we’ll be set for the evening. You’ll stay for supper of course, Mr Templar?”

  “I hadn’t planned to make a day of it,” Simon protested diffidently, and was promptly overwhelmed from all quarters.

  He found his way back to the room where he had left his clothes without the benefit of Floyd Vosper’s chatty courier service, and made leisured and satisfactory use of the fresh-water shower and monogrammed towels. Even so, when he sauntered back into the living room, he almost had the feeling of being lost in a strange and empty house, for all the varied individuals who had peopled the stage so vividly and vigorously a short time before had vanished into other and unknown seclusions and had not yet returned.

  He lighted a cigarette and strolled idly towards the picture window that overlooked the verandah and the sea. Everything around his solitude was
so still, excepting the subsonic suggestion of distant movements within the house, that he was tempted to walk on tiptoe, and yet outside the broad pane of plate glass the fronds of coconut palms were fluttering in a thin febrile frenzy, and there were lacings of white cream on the incredible jade of the short waves simmering on the beach.

  He noticed, first, in what should have been a lazily sensual survey of the panorama, that the big beach umbrella was no longer where he had first seen it, down to his right outside the pseudo-Grecian patio. He saw, as his eye wandered on, that it had been moved a hundred yards or so to his left—in fact, to the very place where Floyd Vosper was still lying. It occurred to him first that Vosper must have moved it himself, except that no shade was needed in the brief and darkening twilight. After that he noticed that Vosper seemed to have turned over on his back, and then at last as the Saint focused his eyes he saw with a weird thrill that the shaft of the umbrella stood straight up out of the left side of Vosper’s scrawny brown chest, not in the sand beside him at all, but like a gigantic pin that had impaled a strange and inelegant insect—or, in a fantastic phrase that was not Simon’s at all, like the arrow of God.

  3

  Major Rupert Fanshire, the senior Superintendent of Police, which made him third in the local hierarchy after the Commissioner and Deputy Commissioner, paid tribute to the importance of the case by taking personal charge of it. He was a slight pinkish blond man with rather large and very bright blue eyes and such a discreetly modulated voice that it commanded rapt attention through the basic effort of trying to hear what it was saying. He sat at an ordinary writing desk in the living room, with a Bahamian sergeant standing stiffly beside him, and contrived to turn the whole room into an office in which seven previously happy-go-lucky adults wriggled like guilty schoolchildren whose teacher has been found libellously caricatured on their blackboard.

  He said, with wholly impersonal conciseness, “Of course, you all know by now that Mr Vosper was found on the beach with the steel spike of an umbrella through his chest. My job is to find out how it happened. So to start with, if anyone did it to him, the topography suggests that that person came from, or through, this house. I’ve heard all your statements, and all they seem to amount to is that each of you was going about his own business at the time when this might have happened.”