The Saint on the Spanish Main (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “Fooled you, didn’t I?” said the Saint croakily. “You must still need some coaching on your hex technique.”

  Netlord moved his hand a little, rather carefully, and his knuckle whitened on the trigger of the automatic. The range was point-blank.

  Simon’s eardrums rang with the shot, and something struck him a stunning blinding blow over the heart. He had an impression of being hurled backwards as if by the blow of a giant fist, and then with no recollection of falling he knew that he was lying on the floor, half under the table, and he had no strength to move any more.

  6

  Theron Netlord rose from his chair and looked down, shaken by the pounding of his own heart. He had done many brutal things in his life, but he had never killed anyone before. It had been surprisingly easy to do, and he had been quite deliberate about it. It was only afterwards that the shock shook him, with his first understanding of the new loneliness into which he had irrevocably stepped, the apartness from all other men that only murderers know.

  Then a whisper and a stir of movement caught his eye and ear together, and he turned his head and saw Sibao. She wore the white dress and the white handkerchief on her head, and the necklaces of threaded seeds and grain, that were prescribed for what was to be done that night.

  “What are you doing here?” he snarled in Creole. “I said I would meet you at the houmfort.”

  “I felt there was need for me.”

  She knelt by the Saint, touching him with her sensitive hands. Netlord put the gun in his pocket and turned to the sideboard. He uncorked a bottle of rum, poured some into a glass, and drank.

  Sibao stood before him again.

  “Why did you want to kill him?”

  “He was—he was a bad man. A thief.”

  “He was good.”

  “No, he was clever.” Netlord had had no time to prepare for questions. He was improvising wildly, aware of the hollowness of his invention and trying to bolster it with truculence. “He must have been waiting for a chance to meet you. If that had not happened, he would have found another way. He came to rob me.”

  “What could he steal?”

  Netlord pulled out his wallet, and took from it a thick pad of currency. He showed it to her.

  “He knew that I had this. He would have killed me for it.” There were twenty-five crisp hundred-dollar bills, an incredible fortune by the standards of a Haitian peasant, but only the amount of pocket money that Netlord normally carried and would have felt undressed without. The girl’s dark velvet eyes rested on it, and he was quick to see more possibilities. “It was a present I was going to give to you and your father tonight.” Money was the strongest argument he had ever known. He went on with new-found confidence, “Here, take it now.”

  She held the money submissively.

  “But what about—him?”

  “We must not risk trouble with the police. Later we will take care of him, in our own way…But we must go now, or we shall be late.”

  He took her compellingly by the arm, but for a moment she still held back.

  “You know that when you enter the sobagui to be cleansed, your loa, who sees all things, will know if there is any untruth in your heart.”

  “I have nothing to fear.” He was sure of it now. There was nothing in voodoo that scared him. It was simply a craft that he had set out to master, as he had mastered everything else that he made up his mind to. He would use it on others, but it could do nothing to him. “Come along, they are waiting for us.”

  Simon heard their voices before the last extinguishing wave of darkness rolled over him.

  7

  He woke up with a start, feeling cramped and bruised from lying on the floor. Memory came back to him in full flood as he sat up. He looked down at his shirt. There was a black-rimmed hole in it, and even a gray scorch of powder around that. But when he examined his chest, there was no hole and no blood, only a pronounced soreness over the ribs. From his breast pocket he drew out the metal plaque with the vêver of Erzulie. The bullet had scarred and bent it, but it had struck at an angle and glanced off without even scratching him, tearing another hole in the shirt under his arm.

  The Saint gazed at the twisted piece of tin with an uncanny tingle feathering his spine.

  Sibao must have known he was unhurt when she touched him. Yet she seemed to have kept the knowledge to herself. Why?

  He hoisted himself experimentally to his feet. He knew that he had first been drugged, then over that lowered resistance almost completely mesmerized; coming on top of that, the deadened impact of the bullet must have knocked him out, as a punch over the heart could knock out an already groggy boxer. But now all the effects seemed to have worn off together, leaving only a tender spot on his chest and an insignificant muzziness in his head. By his watch, he had been out for about two hours.

  The house was full of the silence of emptiness. He went through a door to the kitchen, ran some water, and bathed his face. The only other sound there was the ticking of a cheap clock.

  Netlord had said that only the two of them were in the house. And Netlord had gone—with Sibao.

  Gone to something that everything in the Saint’s philosophy must refuse to believe. But things had happened to himself already that night which he could only think of incredulously. And incredulity would not alter them, or make them less true.

  He went back through the living room and out on to the front verandah. Ridge beyond ridge, the mysterious hills fell away from before him under a full yellow moon that dimmed the stars, and there was no jeep in the driveway at his feet.

  The drums still pulsed through the night, but they were no longer scattered. They were gathered together, blending in unison and counterpoint, but the acoustical tricks of the mountains still masked their location. Their muttering swelled and receded with chance shifts of air, and the echoes of it came from all around the horizon, so that the whole world seemed to throb softly with it.

  There was plenty of light for him to walk down to the Châtelet des Fleurs.

  He found Atherton Lee and the waiter starting to put out the lights in the bar. The innkeeper looked at him in a rather startled way.

  “Why—what happened?” Lee asked.

  Simon sat up at the counter and lighted a cigarette.

  “Pour me a Barbancourt,” he said defensively, “and tell me why you think anything happened.”

  “Netlord brought the jeep back. He told me he’d taken you to the airport—you’d had some news which made you suddenly decide to catch the night plane to Miami, and you just had time to make it. He was coming back tomorrow to pick up your things and send them after you.”

  “Oh, that,” said the Saint blandly. “When the plane came through, it turned out to have filled up at Ciudad Trujillo. I couldn’t get on. So I changed my mind again. I ran into someone downtown who gave me a lift back.”

  He couldn’t say, “Netlord thought he’d just murdered me, and he was laying the foundation for me to disappear without being missed.” Somehow, it sounded so ridiculous, even with a bullet hole in his shirt. And if he were pressed for details, he would have to say, “He was trying to put some kind of hex on me, or make me a zombie.” That would be assured of a great reception. And then the police would have to be brought in. Perhaps Haiti was the only country on earth where a policeman might feel obliged to listen seriously to such a story, but the police were still the police. And just at those times when most people automatically turn to the police, Simon Templar’s instinct was to avoid them.

  What would have to be settled now between him and Theron Netlord, he would settle himself, in his own way.

  The waiter, closing windows and emptying ashtrays, was singing to himself under his breath:

  “Moin pralé nan Sibao,

  Chaché, chaché, lole-o—”

  “What’s that?” Simon asked sharply.

  “Just Haitian song, sir.”

  “What does it mean?”

  “It mean, I will
go to Sibao—that holy place in voodoo, sir. I take oil for lamp, it say. If you eat food of Legba you will have to die:

  “Si ou mangé mangé Legba,

  Ti ga çon onà mouri, oui.

  Moin pralé nan Sibao—”

  “After spending an evening with Netlord, you should know all about that,” Atherton Lee said.

  Simon downed his drink and stretched out a yawn.

  “You’re right. I’ve had enough of it for one night,” he said. “I’d better let you go on closing up—I’m ready to hit the sack myself.”

  But he lay awake for a long time, stretched out on his bed in the moonlight. Was Theron Netlord merely insane, or was there even the most fantastic possibility that he might be able to make use of things that modern materialistic science did not understand? Would it work on Americans, in America? Simon remembered that one of the books he had read referred to a certain American evangelist as un houngan insuffisamment instruit, and it was a known fact that that man controlled property worth millions, and that his followers turned over all their earnings to him, for which he gave them only food, shelter, and sermons. Such things had happened, and were as unsatisfactory to explain away as flying saucers…

  The ceaseless mutter of the distant drums mocked him till he fell asleep.

  “Si ou mangé mangé Legba,

  Ti ga çon onà mouri, oui!”

  He awoke and still heard the song. The moonlight had given way to the gray light of dawn, and the first thing he was conscious of was a fragile unfamiliar stillness left void because the drums were at last silent. But the voice went on—a flat, lifeless, distorted voice that was nevertheless recognizable in a way that sent icy filaments crawling over his scalp.

  “Moin pralé nan Sibao,

  Moin pralé nan Sibao,

  Moin pralé nan Sibao,

  Chaché, chaché, lole-o—”

  His window overlooked the road that curved up past the inn, and he was there while the song still drifted up to it. The two of them stood directly beneath him—Netlord, and the slender black girl dressed all in white. The girl looked up and saw Simon, as if she had expected to. She raised one hand and solemnly made a pattern in the air, a shape that somehow blended the outlines of a heart and an ornate letter M, quickly and intricately, and her lips moved with it: it was curiously like a benediction.

  Then she turned to the man beside her, as she might have turned to a child.

  “Venez,” she said.

  The tycoon also looked up, before he obediently followed her. But there was no recognition, no expression at all, in the gray face that had once been so ruthless and domineering, and all at once Simon knew why Theron Netlord would be no problem to him or to anyone, any more.

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  The stories in this book were largely written in the year or two following Leslie Charteris’s marriage to his fourth wife, the actress Audrey Long. The union reinvigorated him, and he and his new bride spent a lot of time traveling. Naturally, wherever they went, the Saint was likely to follow…

  Consequently, with one exception, these stories were written towards the end of 1953 and into 1954 and saw first publication in The Saint Detective Magazine, a monthly publication that combined a Saint adventure with stories by other writers. The magazine was launched in the spring of 1953, so it was still quite young and could reap the benefits of having new Saint adventures in every edition. The exception to this was “The Arrow of God,” which was first published in the September 1949 edition of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

  The book itself was first published in 1955 by Doubleday in the United States and Canada, and on 6 October 1955, in Great Britain. The advent of paperback books in Great Britain—particularly in the 1960s to tie in with the first television series—helped keep this title in print for many years, although the 1958 Avon edition (which subsequently got picked up by other publishers) opted to omit “The Arrow of God” and “The Unkind Philanthropist.” No, we don’t know why either.

  Some of the stories in this book were included in a Czech anthology of Saint adventures, Svatý opět přichází, which was published in 1982. A French edition, Le Saint aux Antilles, was published in 1957 whilst the Italians needed Roger Moore’s assistance before Il Santo nei Caraibi would appear in June 1968.

  “The Arrow of God” was adapted for the first season of The Saint with Roger Moore, directed by John Paddy Carstairs, the man indirectly responsible for getting the Saint on TV by introducing producer Robert S. Baker to Leslie Charteris. It was originally broadcast as part of the first season on Thursday, 15 November 1962. “The Effete Angler” followed two weeks later. “The Unkind Philanthropist” was adapted by scriptwriter and actor Marcus Demian, and first aired on Sunday, 20 December 1964; “The Questing Tycoon” followed a few weeks later, on 25 February 1965. “The Old Treasure Story” was the final black-and-white episode, which first aired on Sunday, 21 August 1965.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “I’m mad enough to believe in romance. And I’m sick and tired of this age—tired of the miserable little mildewed things that people racked their brains about, and wrote books about, and called life. I wanted something more elementary and honest—battle, murder, sudden death, with plenty of good beer and damsels in distress, and a complete callousness about blipping the ungodly over the beezer. It mayn’t be life as we know it, but it ought to be.”

  —Leslie Charteris in a 1935 BBC radio interview

  Leslie Charteris was born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin in Singapore on 12 May 1907.

  He was the son of a Chinese doctor and his English wife, who’d met in London a few years earlier. Young Leslie found friends hard to come by in colonial Singapore. The English children had been told not to play with Eurasians, and the Chinese children had been told not to play with Europeans. Leslie was caught in between and took refuge in reading.

  “I read a great many good books and enjoyed them because nobody had told me that they were classics. I also read a great many bad books which nobody told me not to read…I read a great many popular scientific articles and acquired from them an astonishing amount of general knowledge before I discovered that this acquisition was supposed to be a chore.”1

  One of his favourite things to read was a magazine called Chums. “The Best and Brightest Paper for Boys” (if you believe the adverts) was a monthly paper full of swashbuckling adventure stories aimed at boys, encouraging them to be honourable and moral and perhaps even “upright citizens with furled umbrellas.”2 Undoubtedly these types of stories would influence his later work.

  When his parents split up shortly after the end of World War I, Charteris accompanied his mother and brother back to England, where he was sent to Rossall School in Fleetwood, Lancashire. Rossall was then a very stereotypical English public school, and it struggled to cope with this multilingual mixed-race boy just into his teens who’d already seen more of the world than many of his peers would see in their lifetimes. He was an outsider.

  He left Rossall in 1924. Keen to pursue a creative career, he decided to study art in Paris—after all, that was where the great artists went—but soon found that the life of a literally starving artist didn’t appeal. He continued writing, firing off speculative stories to magazines, and it was the sale of a short story to Windsor Magazine that saved him from penury.

  He returned to London in 1925, as his parents—particularly his father—wanted him to become a lawyer, and he was sent to study law at Cambridge University. In the mid-1920s, Cambridge was full of Bright Young Things—aristocrats and bohemians somewhat typified in the Evelyn Waugh novel Vile Bodies—and again the mixed-race Bowyer-Yin found that he didn’t fit in. He was an outsider who preferred to make his own way in the world and wasn’t one of the privileged upper class. It didn’t help that he found his studies boring and decided it was more fun contemplating ways to circumvent the law. This inspired him to write a novel, and when publishers Ward Lock & Co. offered him a three-book deal on the st
rength of it, he abandoned his studies to pursue a writing career.

  When his father learnt of this, he was not impressed, as he considered writers to be “rogues and vagabonds.” Charteris would later recall that “I wanted to be a writer, he wanted me to become a lawyer. I was stubborn, he said I would end up in the gutter. So I left home. Later on, when I had a little success, we were reconciled by letter, but I never saw him again.”3

  X Esquire, his first novel, appeared in April 1927. The lead character, X Esquire, is a mysterious hero, hunting down and killing the businessmen trying to wipe out Britain by distributing quantities of free poisoned cigarettes. His second novel, The White Rider, was published the following spring, and in one memorable scene shows the hero chasing after his damsel in distress, only for him to overtake the villains, leap into their car…and promptly faint.

  These two plot highlights may go some way to explaining Charteris’s comment on Meet—the Tiger!, published in September 1928, that “it was only the third book I’d written, and the best, I would say, for it was that the first two were even worse.”4

  Twenty-one-year-old authors are naturally self-critical. Despite reasonably good reviews, the Saint didn’t set the world on fire, and Charteris moved on to a new hero for his next book. This was The Bandit, an adventure story featuring Ramon Francisco De Castilla y Espronceda Manrique, published in the summer of 1929 after its serialisation in the Empire News, a now long-forgotten Sunday newspaper. But sales of The Bandit were less than impressive, and Charteris began to question his choice of career. It was all very well writing—but if nobody wants to read what you write, what’s the point?

  “I had to succeed, because before me loomed the only alternative, the dreadful penalty of failure…the routine office hours, the five-day week…the lethal assimilation into the ranks of honest, hard-working, conformist, God-fearing pillars of the community.”5