2
But the general aspect of the affair met with his complete approval. He had no fault to find with it—even if it had temporarily interrupted the urgent and fascinating business that brought him to the Canary Islands. Adventure was still adventure, and there was always room for more—that was the fundamental article of faith which had blazed the Saint’s trail of debonair outlawry through all the continents and half the countries of the world. Besides which, there were points about this adventure which were beginning to make it look more than ordinarily interesting…
He glanced at the girl again as they turned out into the wide, open space fronting the harbour.
“Where do you live?” he enquired, and his tone was as casual as if he had been driving her home from a dance.
“Nowhere!” she said quickly. And then, as if the word had come out before she realised what a ridiculous answer it was and how many more questions must inevitably follow it, she said, “I mean—I don’t want to give you any more trouble. You’ve been awfully kind…but you can drop us anywhere around here, and we’ll be quite all right.”
Simon turned the car slowly round into the Plaza de la República and tilted his head significantly towards the tonneau.
“I’m sure you will,” he agreed patiently. “But I have to keep on reminding you about uncle. Or will you carry him?”
“Is he all right?”
She turned round quickly, and the Saint also looked back as he brought the Hirondel to a stop outside the Hotel Orotava. The only person visible in the back seat was Hoppy Uniatz, who did not seem to have fully grasped his obligations as an administrator of first aid. Mr Uniatz was lighting a large cigar, and, for all the evidence to the contrary, he might have been sitting on his patient.
“Sure, de old buzzard is okay, miss,” said Mr Uniatz cheerfully. “He just took a bit of massage, but dat’s nut’n. You oughta seen what de cops done to me one time when dey had me in de kitchen.”
Simon saw the pain in her eyes.
“We must take him to a doctor,” she said.
“By all means,” he assented amiably. “Who is your doctor?”
She passed a hand shakily over her forehead.
“I’m afraid I don’t know one—”
“Nor do I. And from what I do know about Spanish doctors, if he’s not dead yet they’ll soon find a way to finish him off. I could look after him much better myself. Why not let’s take him in here and see about fixing him up?”
“I don’t want to go on bothering you.”
The Saint chuckled and reached back to open the rear door.
“Take him inside, Hoppy,” he ordered. “Pretend he’s passed out, and get him up to my room—you’d better act a bit squiffy yourself to complete the picture. We’ll follow in a few minutes so it won’t look too much like a party.”
Mr Uniatz nodded and hauled the patient out like a sack. As he started across the pavement, he lifted up his unmelodious voice in a song of which the distinguishable words made the Saint mildly thankful that no English-speaking residents were likely to be within.
Again the girl made an involuntary movement of protest, but Simon took her by the arm.
“What’s on your mind?” he asked quietly, and she shrugged helplessly.
He could feel the tenseness of her under his touch.
“Let me look at you,” she said.
He took off his hat and turned towards her. Her eyes searched his face. They were brown eyes, he noticed, and her hair shone copper-brown under the lamplight. He realised that if her mouth had been happy it would have been very happy, a soft, red, full-lipped mouth that would have tantalised the imagination of any man whose impulses were human.
She saw a face coloured with the warm tan of unwalled horizons and lighted with the clearest blue eyes that she had ever seen. It was a face that might have leapt to life from the portrait of some sixteenth-century buccaneer; a face that managed to harmonise a dozen strange contradictions between the firm chin and finely chiselled lips and the broad artist’s forehead, and yet altogether cast in such a gay and reckless mould that it took all contradictions in its stride and made them insignificant. It was the face of a poet with the dare-devil humour of a cavalier, the face of an unrepentant outlaw with the calm straightforwardness of an idealist. It was the sort of face that she thought Robin Hood might have had—and did not know then that a thousand newspapers had unanimously named its owner the Robin Hood of modern crime.
But Simon Templar opened his face for inspection in the main square of Santa Cruz without a twinge of anxiety even for the two guardias who were strolling by; though he knew that photographic reproductions of it were to be found in the police archives of almost every civilised country in the world. For at that particular time the Saint was not officially wanted by the police of any country—a fact which many citizens who had met him in the past had reason to regard with grave indignation.
“I’m just—rather upset,” she said, as if she was satisfied with the result of her scrutiny.
“That’s only natural,” said the Saint lightly. “Getting beaten up by a bunch of toughs isn’t what they usually recommend for soothing the nerves. Now let’s go and see what we can do for uncle.”
He got out and opened the door for her, and the music that was still lilting through the depths of his being opened itself up and sent its rapturous diapasons warbling towards the moon. He knew now that his inspiration must be right.
Somewhere in the vicinity of Santa Cruz there was the material for even more fun and games than he had optimistically expected—and he had come there in the definite expectation of a good deal. And he had tumbled straight into it within a few hours of getting off the boat. Which was only the normal course of events, for him. If there was trouble brewing anywhere, he tumbled into it: it was his destiny, the sublime compensation for all the other things that his outlawry might have denied him.
It never occurred to him to doubt that it had happened again. Otherwise, why had the three toughs been so very determined to beat up the old man whom he had rescued? And why, when he interfered, did they fight to the last man for the privilege of going on with the job? And why, when he had dealt with them once, had they brought their artillery into play to try and start the fight over again? And why was the girl still so afraid even of her rescuer, still suspicious of him even after he had indicated which side he was on in no uncertain manner? And why, most intriguing point of all, hadn’t she volunteered one single word of explanation about how the fight started, as anyone else would automatically have done? The whole episode fairly bristled with questions, and none of them could be satisfactorily answered by the circumstances of commonplace highway robbery.
“You know,” Simon burbled genially on, “these things always make me wonder for a bit whether it’s safe to look a policeman in the eye for the next few days. I remember the last time anything like this happened to me—it was in Innsbruck, but it was almost exactly the same sort of thing. A friend of mine and myself horned in on a scrap where one harmless-looking little bird was getting the hide pasted off him by three large, ferocious-looking thugs. We laid them out and heaved them into the river, and it started no end of trouble. You see, it turned out that the harmless-looking little bird was carrying a bag full of stolen jewels, and the three ferocious-looking thugs were perfectly respectable detectives trying to arrest him. It only shows you how careful you have to be with this knight-errant business—Is anything the matter?”
Her face had gone as white as milk, and she was leaning back against the side of the lift, staring at him.
“It’s nothing,” she said. “Just—all these other things.”
“I know.”
The lift stopped at his floor, and he opened the doors for her and followed her out.
“I’ve got a bottle of vintage lemonade that’ll have you turning cartwheels again in no time,” he remarked as they walked round the passage. “That is, if Hoppy hasn’t drunk it all to try and revive t
he invalid.”
“I hope you’ll turn him inside out if he has,” she answered, and he was amazed by the sudden change in her voice.
She was still pale, pale as death, but the terror had gone far from her eyes as if a mask had been drawn over them. She smiled up at him—it was the first time he had seen her smile, and he couldn’t help noticing that he had been right about her mouth. It was turned up to him in a way that at any other time would have put irresistible ideas into his head, and she slipped a hand through his arm as they came to the door of his room. Her small fingers moved over his biceps.
“You must be terrifically strong,” she said, and the Saint shrugged.
“I can usually manage to get a glass to my mouth.”
A queer ghostly tingle touched the base of his spine as he opened the door and let her into the room. It wasn’t anything she had said: coming from most women, her last remark would have made him wince, but she had a fresh young voice that made it seem perfectly natural. It wasn’t even the new personality which she had started to take on, for that fitted her so perfectly that it was hard to imagine her with any other. The feeling was almost subconscious, a stirring of uncompleted intuition that gave him an odd sensation of walking blindfold along the edge of a precipice, and again he knew, beyond all doubt, that he was nowhere near the end of the consequences of that night’s work.
The old man lay motionless on the bed, exactly as Mr Uniatz must have dumped him. Hoppy himself, as the Saint had feared, had started the work of resuscitation on himself, and half the contents had disappeared from a bottle of Haig that had been unopened when Simon left it on the table. He arrived just in time, for Mr Uniatz had the bottle in his hand when Simon opened the door and he was on the point of repeating his previous experiments. Simon took it away from him and replaced the cork.
“Thank God for non-refillable bottles,” he said fervently. “They pour so slowly. If this had been the ordinary kind there wouldn’t have been a drop left by now.”
He went to the bed and unbuttoned the old man’s coat and shirt. His pulse was all right, making due allowances for his age, and there were no bones broken, but his body was terribly bruised and his face scratched and swollen. Whether he had internal injuries, and what the effects of shock might be, would have to be decided when he recovered consciousness. He was breathing stertorously, with his mouth hanging open, and for the moment he seemed to be in no imminent danger of death.
Simon went to the bathroom and soaked a towel in cold water. He began to bathe the old man’s face and clean it up as well as he could, but the girl stopped him.
“Let me do it. Will he be all right?”
“I’ll lay you odds on it,” said the Saint convincingly.
He left her with the towel and went back to the table to pour out some of the whiskey which he had rescued. She held up the old man’s head while he forced some of it between the puffed and bleeding lips. The old man groaned and stirred weakly.
“That ought to help him,” murmured Simon. “You’d better have the rest yourself—it’ll do you good.”
She nodded, and he gave her the glass. There were tears in her eyes, and while he looked at her they welled over and ran down her cheeks. She drank quickly, without a grimace, and put the glass down before she turned back to the old man. She sat on the bed, holding him with his head pillowed on her breast and her arm round him, rocking a little as if she were cradling a child, wiping his grimed and battered face with the wet towel while the tears ran unheeded down her cheeks.
“Joris,” she whispered. “Joris darling. Wake up, darling. It’s all right now…You’re all right, aren’t you, Joris? Joris, my sweet…”
The Saint was on his way back to the table to pour a drink for himself, and he stopped so suddenly that if she had been looking at him she must have noticed it. For a second or two he stood utterly motionless, as if he had been turned to stone, and once again that weird uncanny tingle laid its clammy touch on the base of his spine. Only this time it didn’t pass away almost as quickly as it had begun. It crept right up his back until the chill of it crawled over his scalp, and then it dropped abruptly into his stomach and left his heart thumping to make up for the time it had stood still.
To the Saint it seemed as if a century went by while he stood there petrified, but actually it could have been hardly any time at all. And at last he moved again, stretching out his hand very slowly and deliberately for the bottle that he had been about to pick up. With infinite steadiness he measured a ration of whiskey into his glass, and unhurriedly splashed soda on top of it.
“Joris,” he repeated, in a voice that miraculously managed to be his own. “That’s rather an unusual name…Who is he?”
The fear that flashed through her eyes was suppressed so swiftly this time that if he had not been watching her closely he would probably have missed it altogether.
“He’s my father,” she said, almost defiantly. “But I’ve always called him Joris.”
“Dutch name, isn’t it?” said the Saint easily. “Hullo—he seems to be coming round.”
The old man was moving a little more, shaking his head mechanically from side to side and moaning like a man recovering from an anaesthetic. Simon returned to the bedside, but the girl waved him away.
“Please—leave him with me for a minute.”
The Saint nodded sympathetically and sauntered over to a chair. The first breath-taking shock was gone now, and once again his mind was running as cool and clear as an alpine stream. Only the high-strung tension of his awakened nerves, a pulse of vivid expectation too deeply pitched and infinitesimal in its vibration to be perceptible to any senses but his own, remained to testify to the thunderbolt of realisation that had flamed through his brain.
He slipped a cigarette from his case, tapped it, set it between his lips without a tremor in his hands, and lighted it without haste. Then he opened his wallet and took out a folded piece of blue paper.
It was a Spanish telegram form, and he read it through again for the twentieth time since it had come into his possession, though he already knew every word of it by heart. It had been sent from Santa Cruz on the twenty-second of December, and it was addressed to a certain Mr Rodney Felson at the Palace Hotel, Madrid. The message ran:
MUST REPLACE JORIS IMMEDIATELY CAN YOU SECURE SUBSTITUTE VERY URGENT
—GRANER
Simon folded the sheet and put it carefully away again, but the words still danced before his eyes. He drew the smoke of his cigarette deep into his lungs and let it trickle out towards the ceiling.
“What’s the rest of the name?” he enquired, as if he was merely making idle conversation.
A moment passed before she answered.
“Vanlinden,” she said, in the same half-defiant way, and then the Saint knew that he had been right in the wild hunch that had come to him five nights ago in Madrid and sent him driving recklessly through the night to Cadiz to catch the boat that left for Tenerife the next day.
3
Simon looked up and realised that the scarecrow physiognomy of Mr Uniatz was becoming convulsed with the same sort of expression that might have been found on the face of a volcano preparing to erupt—if a volcano had a face. His eyes were bulging out of his head like a crab’s, and his whole face was turning purple with such an awful congestion, that anyone who did not know him well might have thought that he was being strangled. The Saint, who was not in that innocent category, knew in a flash that these horrible symptoms were only the outward and visible signs of the dawning of a Thought somewhere in the dark unfathomed caves of Mr Uniatz’s mind. His eyes blazed a warning that would have paralysed a more sensitive man, but all the sensitiveness in Mr Uniatz would have made a rhinoceros look like a wilting gazelle. Besides, Hoppy’s cerebrations had gone too far to be suppressed: he had to get them out of his system or asphyxiate.
“Boss,” he exploded, “dijja hear dat? Joris Vanlinden! Ain’t dat de guy—”
“Yes, Hoppy, of cours
e that’s the guy,” said the Saint soothingly.
He went quickly over to the bed and sat down facing the girl. It was a moment when he had to act faster than he could think, before Hoppy’s blundering feet blotted out every trace of the fragile bridge that he had been trying to build. He held out his hand and smiled disarmingly into her eyes.
“Lady,” he said solemnly, “this is a great moment. Will you shake?”
Her fingers met his almost immediately.
“But why?” she said.
“Just to keep me going till I can shake hands with Joris himself. I’ve always wanted to meet one of the boys who pulled off that job at Troschman’s—it was one of the classics of the century.”
“I don’t think I know what you’re talking about.”
He was still smiling.
“I think you do. I said your father had an uncommon name, but I knew I’d heard it before. Now it’s all come back to me. I knew I should never forget it.”
And he was speaking nothing but the most candid truth, though she might not understand it.
When some persons unknown got into Troschman’s diamond fabriek down on Maiden Lane one rainy night in April, and cleaned out a safe that had held two hundred thousand dollars’ worth of cut and uncut stones, the police were particularly interested in the fact that the raid could hardly have been better timed had the raiders been partners in the business. This was impossible, for Troschman had no partners; Troschman’s was a small concern which employed only one permanent cutter, taking on other workers when they were needed. As a matter of fact, this cutter was the nearest approach to a partner that Troschman had, for he was acknowledged to be one of the finest craftsmen in the trade, and had been with Troschman ever since the business was started. So that it was natural for him to be given more confidence than an ordinary employee would have received, and when the stones were collected to fill the biggest order that Troschman had ever secured in his career, this cutter was the only other man who knew when the collection was complete. His name was Joris Vanlinden.
The Saint Bids Diamonds (The Saint Series) Page 2
