Simon Templar settled back a little more lazily into his chair, and a very Saintly meekness was spreading over his face.
“Name?” he inquired laconically.
“Shannet himself.”
The Saint’s eyes were half-closed.
“I will compose a little song about him immediately,” he said.
Then a shadow fell across the table, but the Saint did not move at once. He appeared to be lost in a day-dream.
“Buenos días, Shannet,” said Archie Sheridan. “Also, as soon as possible, adios. Hurry up and say what you’ve got to say before I kick you out.”
“I’ll do any kicking out that’s necessary, thanks,” said Shannet harshly. “Sheridan, I’ve come to warn you off for the last time. The Andalusia berthed this morning, and she sails again on the evening tide. You’ve been nosing around here too long as it is. Is that plain enough?”
“Plainer than your ugly face,” drawled Sheridan. “And by what right do you kick me out? Been elected President, have you?”
“You know me,” said Shannet. “You know that what I say here goes. You’ll sail on the Andalusia—either voluntary or because you’re put on board in irons. That’s all…What’s this?”
The Saint, perceiving himself to be the person thus referred to, awoke sufficiently to open his eyes and screw his head round so that he could view the visitor.
He saw a tall, broad-shouldered man of indeterminate age, clad in a soiled white suit of which the coat was unbuttoned to expose a grubby singlet. Shannet had certainly not shaved for two days, and he did not appear to have brushed his hair for a like period, for a damp, sandy lock drooped in a tangle over his right eye. In one corner of his mouth a limp and dilapidated cigarette dangled tiredly from his lower lip.
The Saint blinked.
“Gawd!” he said offensively. “Can it be human?”
Shannet’s fists swept back his coat and rested on his hips. “What’s your name, Cissy?” he demanded.
The Saint flicked some ash from his cigarette, and rose to his feet delicately.
“Benito Mussolini,” he answered mildly. “And you must be one of the corporation scavengers. How’s the trade in garbage?” His gentle eyes swept Shannet from crown to toe. “Archie, there must have been some mistake. The real scavenger has gone sick, and one of his riper pieces of refuse is deputising for him. I’m sorry.”
“If you…”
“I said I was sorry,” the Saint continued, in the same smooth voice, “because I’m usually very particular about the people I fight, and I hate soiling my hands on things like you.”
Shannet glowered.
“I don’t know who you are,” he said, “and I don’t care. But if you’re looking for a fight you can have it.”
“I am looking for a fight, dear one,” drawled the Saint. “In fact, I’m looking for a lot of fights, and you’re the first one that’s offered. ‘Cissy’ is a name I particularly object to being called, O misbegotten of a pig!”
The last words were spoken in colloquial Spanish, and the Saint made more of them than it is possible to report in printable English. Shannet went white, then red.
“You…”
His answering stream of profanity merged into a left swing to the Saint’s jaw, which, if it had landed, would have ended the fight there and then. But it did not land.
Simon Templar swayed back, and the swing missed by a couple of inches. As Shannet stumbled, momentarily off his balance, the Saint reached round and took the jug of ice water off the table behind him. Without any appearance of effort or haste, he side-stepped and poured most of the contents of the jug down the back of Shannet’s neck.
Shannet swung again. The Saint ducked, and sent the man flying with a smashing jab to the nose.
“Look out, Saint!” Sheridan warned suddenly.
“Naughty!” murmured the Saint, without heat.
Shannet was getting to his feet, and his right hand was drawing something from his hip pocket.
The Saint took two steps and a flying leap over Shannet’s head, turning in the air as he did so. Shannet had only got to his knees when the Saint landed behind him and caught his opponent’s throat and right wrist in hands that had the strength of steel cables in their fingers. Shannet’s wrist was twisted behind his back with an irresistible wrench…
The gun clattered to the floor simultaneously with Shannet’s yelp of agony, and the Saint picked up the gun and stepped away.
“A trophy! Archie!” he cried, and tossed the weapon over to Sheridan. “Guns I have not quite been shot with—there must be a drawer full of them at home…Let’s start, sweet Shannet!”
Shannet replied with a chair, but the Saint was ten feet away by the time it crashed into the opposite wall.
Then Shannet came in again with his fists. Any one of those whirling blows carried a kick that would have put a mule to sleep, but the Saint had forgotten more about ring-craft than many professionals ever learn. Shannet never came near touching him. Every rush Shannet made, somehow, expended itself on thin air, while he always seemed to be running his face slap into the Saint’s stabbing left.
And at last the Saint, scorning even counter-attack, dropped his hands into his pockets, and simply eluded Shannet’s homicidal onslaught by sheer brilliant footwork—ducking, swaying, swooping, as calm and unruffled as if he were merely demonstrating a few ballroom steps, and as light and graceful on his toes as a ballet dancer—until Shannet reeled limply back against the wall with the sweat streaming into his eyes, utterly done in.
The Saint’s mocking smile had never left his lips, and not one hair of his head had shifted.
“Want a rest?” he asked kindly.
“If you’d come in and fight like a man,” gasped Shannet, his tortured chest heaving, “I’d kill you!”
“Oh, don’t be silly!” said the Saint in a bored voice, as though he had no further interest in the affair. “Hurry up and get out—I’m going to be busy.”
He turned away, but Shannet lurched after him.
“Get out yourself!” snarled the man thickly. “D’you hear? I’m going right down to fetch the police…”
The Saint sat down.
“Listen to me, Shannet,” he said quietly. “The less you talk about police when I’m around, the better for you. I’m telling you now that I believe you murdered a man named McAndrew not so long ago, and jumped his claim on a forged partnership agreement. I’m only waiting till I’ve got the proof. And then—well, it’s too much to hope that the authorities of this benighted republic will execute the man who pays half their salaries, and so in the name of Justice I shall take you myself and hang you from a high tree.”
For a moment of silence the air seemed to tingle with the same electric tension as heralds the breaking of a thunderstorm, while the Saint’s ice-blue eyes quelled Shannet’s re-awakening fury; and then, with a short laugh, the Saint relaxed.
“You’re a pawn in the game,” he said, with a contrasting carelessness which only emphasised the bleak implacability of his last speech. “We won’t waste good melodrama on you. We reserve that for clients with really important discredit accounts. Instead, you shall hear the epitaph I’ve just composed for you. It commemorates a pestilent tumour named Shannet, who disfigured the face of this planet. He started some fun, but before it was done he was wishing he’d never began it. That otherwise immortal verse is greatly marred by a grammatical error, but I’m not expecting you to know any better…Archibald—the door!”
Archie Sheridan had no reason to love Shannet, and the kick with which he launched the man into the garden was not gentle, but he seemed to derive no pleasure from it.
He came back with a grave face, and resumed his chair facing the Saint.
“Well,” he said, “you’ve done what you wanted. Now shall we sit down and make our wills, or shall we spend our last hours of life in drinking and song?”
“Of course, we may be shot,” admitted the Saint calmly. “That’s up to us.
How soon can we expect the Army?”
“Not before five. They’ll all be asleep now, and an earthquake wouldn’t make the Pasala policeman break off his siesta. Much less the Army, who are inclined to give themselves airs. We might catch the Andalusia,” he added hopefully.
The Saint surveyed him seraphically.
“Sweetheart,” he said, “that joke may now be considered over. We’ve started, and we’ve got to keep moving. As I don’t see the fun of sitting here waiting for the other side to surround us, I guess we’ll bounce right along and interview Kelly. And when you two have coached me thoroughly in the habits and topography of Santa Miranda, we’ll just toddle along and capture the town.”
“Just toddle along and which?” repeated Sheridan dazedly.
The Saint spun a cigarette high into the air, and trapped it neatly between his lips as it fell.
“That is to say, I will capture the town,” he corrected himself, “while you and Kelly create a disturbance somewhere to distract their attention. Wake up, sonny! Get your hat, and let’s go!”
3
The Saint’s breezy way of saying that he would “just toddle along and capture the town” was a slight exaggeration. As a matter of fact, he spent nearly four days on the job.
There was some spade-work to be done, and certain preparations to be made, and the Saint devoted a considerable amount of care and sober thought to these details. Though his methods, to the uninformed observer, might always have seemed to savour of the reckless, tip-and-run, hit-first-a net-ask-questions-afterwards school, the truth was that he rarely stepped out of any frying-pan without first taking the temperature of the fire beyond.
Even in such a foolhardy adventure as that in which he was then engaged, he knew exactly what he was doing, and legislated against failure as well as he might; for, even in the most outlandish parts of the world, the penalty of unsuccessful revolution is death, and the Saint had no overwhelming desire to turn his interesting biography into an obituary notice.
He explained his plan to Kelly, and found the Irishman an immediate convert to the Cause.
“Shure, I’ve been thinkin’ for years that it was time somebody threw out their crooked Government,” said that worthy, ruffling a hand like a ham through his tousled mop of flaming hair. “I’m just wonderin’ now why I niver did ut meself.”
“It’s a desperate chance,” Simon Templar admitted. “But I don’t mind taking it if you’re game.”
“Six years I’ve been here,” mused Kelly ecstatically, screwing up a huge fist, “and I haven’t seen a real fight. Exceptin’ one or two disagreements with the natives, who run away afther the first round.”
The Saint smiled. He could not have hoped to find a more suitable ally.
“We might easily win out,” he said. “It wouldn’t work in England, but in a place like this…”
“The geography was made for us,” said Kelly.
On a scrap of paper he sketched a rough map to illustrate his point.
Pasala is more or less in the shape of a wedge, with the base facing north-east on the sea-coast. Near the centre of the base of the wedge is Santa Miranda. In the body of the wedge are the only other three towns worth mentioning—Las Flores, Rugio, and, near the apex, Esperanza. They are connected up by a cart-track of a road which includes them in a kind of circular route which starts and finishes at Santa Miranda, for the State of Pasala does not yet boast a railway. This is hardly necessary, for the distance between Santa Miranda and Esperanza, the two towns farthest apart, is only 140 miles.
It should also be mentioned that the wedge-shaped territory of Pasala cuts roughly into the Republic of Maduro, a much larger and more civilised country.
“Of course, we’re simply banking on the psychology of revolutions and the apathy of the natives,” said the Saint, when they had finished discussing their plan of campaign. “The population aren’t interested—if they’re shown a man in a nice new uniform, and told that he’s the man in power, they believe it, and go home and pray that they won’t be any worse off than they were before. If we take off a couple of taxes or something like that, as soon as we get in, the mob will be with us to a man. I’m sure the Exchequer can stand it—I don’t imagine Manuel Concepcion de Villega has been running this show without making a substantial profit on turnover.”
“That’ll fetch ‘em,” Kelly averred. “They’re bled dhry with taxes at present.”
“Secondly, there’s the Army. They’re like any other army. They obey their officers because it’s never occurred to them to do anything else. If they were faced with a revolution they’d fight it. So instead of that we’ll present the revolution as an accomplished fact. If they’re like any other South American army, they’ll simply carry on under the new Government—with a bonus of a few pesos per man to clinch the bargain.”
They talked for a while longer, and then they went out and joined Archie Sheridan, who had not been present at the council, being otherwise occupied with Lilla McAndrew on the verandah.
The Saint had a little leisure to admire the girl. She was rather tall, fair-haired and blue-eyed, superbly graceful. Her sojourn in that sunny climate had coloured her skin a pale golden-brown that was infinitely more becoming than mere pink-and-white, but the peach-like bloom of her complexion had not had time to suffer.
It was plain that Archie Sheridan was fatally smitten with the inevitable affliction, and the Saint was mischievously delighted.
“You want to be careful of him, Miss McAndrew,” he advised gravely. “I’ve known him since he was so high, and you wouldn’t believe what a past he’s collected in his brief career of sin. Let’s see…There was Gladys, the golden-haired beauty from the front row of the Gaiety chorus, Susan, Beryl—no, two Beryls—Ethel, the artist’s model, Angela, Sadie from California, Joan—two Joans—no, three Joans…”
“Don’t believe him, Lilla,” pleaded Archie. “He’s been raving all day. Why, just before lunch he said he was Benito Mussolini!”
The girl laughed.
“It’s all right,” she told Simon. “I don’t take him seriously.”
“There’s gratitude for you!” said Sheridan wildly. “After all I’ve done for her! I even taught her to speak English. When she arrived here she had a Scots accent that would have made a bawbee run for its life. She reeked of haggis…”
“Archie!”
“Haggis,” persisted Sheridan. “She carried one around in her pibroch till it starved to death.”
“What are pibroch?” asked the Saint curiously. “Are they something you wear under a kilt?”
When the girl had recovered her composure, “Is he really so impossible?” she exclaimed.
“I don’t know you well enough to tell you the whole truth,” said the Saint solemnly. “The only hope I can give you is that you’re the first Lilla in his life. Wait a minute—sorry—wasn’t Lilla the name of the barmaid…”
“Go away,” said Sheridan morosely. “With sudden death staring you in the face, you ought to be spending your time in prayer and repentance. You’ll be shot at dawn tomorrow, and I shall look over the prison walls and cheer on the firing squad.”
He watched Kelly and the Saint retire to the other end of the verandah, and then turned to the girl, with his pleasant face unusually serious.
“Lilla,” he said, “I don’t want to scare you, but it isn’t all quite as funny as we make out. The Saint would still be laughing in the face of the firing squad I mentioned, but that doesn’t make the possibility of the firing squad any less real.”
She looked at him with sober eyes.
“Then it’s easily settled,” she said. “I won’t let you do it.”
Sheridan laughed. “It isn’t me you’ve got to deal with,” he replied. “It’s the Saint. Nothing you could say would stop him. He’d simply tell me to beat it with you on the Andalusia this evening if I was scared. And I’d rather face the said firing squad than have the Saint say that to me.”
She
would have protested further, but something in the man’s tone silenced her. She knew that he was making no idle statement. She had no experience whatever of such things, and yet she realised intuitively what she was up against, recognised the heroic thing when she met it—the blind, unswerving loyalty of a man to his friend, the unshakable obedience of a man to a loved leader. And she knew that any attempt she made to seduce her man from that reality would only lower herself in his eyes.
Perhaps there are few women who could have shown such an understanding, but Lilla McAndrew was—Lilla McAndrew.
She smiled suddenly.
“I’ve always wanted to see a revolution,” she said simply.
Moments passed before Sheridan could grasp the full wonder of her sympathy and acquiescence. And then his arms went round her, and her hands tousled his hair.
“Dear Archie!” she said, and found herself unaccountably breathless.
“I admit every girl the Saint mentioned,” said Sheridan defiantly. “And a few more. But that doesn’t alter the fact that I love you, and as soon as this comic revolution’s over I’m going to marry you.”
“I’ll believe that when you do it,” she teased him, but her heart was on her lips when he kissed her…
Some almost offensively discreet coughing from the Saint interrupted them ten minutes later.
“I tried to save you,” said the Saint, declining to avert his shamelessly quizzical gaze from the girl’s efforts to straighten her hair inconspicuously. “And I’m sorry to have to butt in on your downfall, but your boyfriend and I have work to do. If you look down towards the town you’ll see a file of men advancing up the main street in our direction, led by two men on horseback in the uniform of commissionaires. The entire police force of Santa Miranda, as far as I can make out from this distance, is on its way up here to arrest me for assaulting and battering one of their most prominent citizens, and to arrest Archie as an accessory before, after, and during the fact. They have just woken up from their afternoon snooze, and have been put on the job by the aforesaid citizen with commendable rapidity. Will you excuse us if we escape?”
Featuring the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 9
