He stopped walking and looked at Vanlinden again. The old man, shivering with nervous reaction and clinging pathetically to his daughter’s hand, had sunk back exhausted onto the pillow. His weak, tired eyes stared mutely up at the Saint, but even he must have been convinced that Simon knew nothing, for the fire had died out of them and left only the anguish.
Simon turned to the girl.
“If Graner’s idea was what you say it was, why did he let you go at all?”
“He didn’t. He said he was going to, but I never believed him. Every day I was terrified that something—something would happen to Joris. When I knew that the official lists were supposed to arrive tonight, I was…I was sure they…they would see that something happened to Joris before he woke up tomorrow.”
“So you decided to make a dash for it.”
She nodded.
“We said we were going to bed early and we got out of a window. Graner hadn’t let the dogs out then…”
“There are dogs, are there?”
He heard her catch her breath.
“Yes. But they weren’t out…We got away, and we ran. But they must have missed us. They came after us and caught us on the road. That was when you arrived.”
The Saint blew two smoke rings, very carefully putting the second through the middle of the first.
“So they took the ticket,” he said. “But they didn’t have to kill Joris. Or did they?” His eyes pinned her again, very clear and level and bright like sapphires. “Does anything strike you about that?”
She pushed her fingers through her disordered hair.
“My God,” she said, “how can I think?”
“Well, doesn’t anything strike you? They may have wanted to put Joris away because he knew too much. But there may have been another reason. If he was running about loose after they’d pinched his ticket, he might make a fuss about it. It wouldn’t be easy, but I suppose he could make a fuss. People don’t buy a whole two-thousand-peseta Navidad ticket all to themselves so often, especially in a place like this, that the shop wouldn’t be likely to remember him. If he was dead, anybody could say they bought it off him, but if he was alive and raising hell—”
“How could he? He couldn’t go near the police—”
“That’s a matter of opinion. Admittedly he’d be getting himself into trouble at the same time, but anyone who turns state’s evidence can usually count on a good deal of leniency, and Joris has a lot less to lose than the others have. Just looking at it theoretically, when a bloke is in Joris’s position, and a miracle has tossed him up within a finger’s length of getting everything he wants most in the world, and then somebody snatches it away from him at the last moment and shoves him back again, it’s liable to make him crazy enough to do anything for revenge. I don’t know what sort of a psychologist Reuben Graner is, but I’d be inclined to look at it that way if I were in his place. What do you think, Hoppy?”
The unornamental features of Mr Uniatz marshalled themselves into an expression of reproachful anguish. Even in their moments of most undisturbed serenity, they tended to resemble something which an amateur sculptor had beaten out of a lump of clay with a large hammer, in the vain hope that his most polite friends would profess to recognise it as a human face, but when twisted out of repose they looked even more like an unfortunate essay in ultra-futuristic art, and could probably have commanded a high price from an advanced museum. Mr Uniatz, however, was not concerned about his beauty. A man of naïve and elemental tastes, there was something about the mere sound of the word “think” which made him wince.
“What—me?” he said painfully.
“Yes, you.”
Mr Uniatz bit another piece off the end of his cigar and swallowed it absent-mindedly.
“I dunno, boss,” he began weakly, and then, with the Saint’s clear and accusing blue eye fixed on him, he returned manfully to his torment. “Dis guy Graner,” he said. “Is he de guy wit’ de oughday?”
“We were hoping he had some.”
“De guy wit’ de ice?”
“That’s right.”
“De guy ya tell me about in Madrid?”
“Exactly.”
“De guy we come here to take?”
“The same.”
“De lottery guy?” said Hoppy, leaving no stone un-turned in his anxiety to make sure of his ground before committing himself.
Simon nodded approvingly.
“You seem to have grasped some of it, anyway,” he said. “I suppose you could call Graner the lottery guy for the present. Anyway, he’s got the ticket. So the question is—what happens next?”
“Dat looks like a cinch,” said Mr Uniatz airily, and the Saint subsided limply into a chair.
“One of two things has happened to you for the first time in your life,” he said sternly. “Either the whiskey has had some effect, or an idea has got into your head.”
Mr Uniatz blinked.
“Sure, it’s a cinch, boss. All we gotta do is, we go to dis guy an’ say ‘Lookit, mug, eider you split wit us on your racket, or we toin ya in to de cops.’ Sure, he comes t’ru. It’s a pipe,” said Mr Uniatz, driving home his point.
The Saint gazed at him pityingly.
“You poor fathead,” he said. “It isn’t a racket. This is the Spanish official lottery. It’s perfectly legal. Graner isn’t running it. He’s simply got the ticket that won it.”
Mr Uniatz looked unhappy. The Spanish government, he felt, had done him a personal injury. He brooded glumly.
“I dunno, boss,” he said at length, reverting to his original platform.
“It looks plain enough to me,” said the Saint.
He sprang up again. To Christine Vanlinden, watching him, fascinated, there was an atmosphere of buoyant and invincible power about him like nothing she had ever felt about a man before. Whether he could be trusted or not, whatever scruples he might or might not have, his personality filled the room and absorbed everyone in it. And yet he was smiling, and his gesture had the faint half-amused swagger which was inseparable from every movement he made.
“Graner has got the ticket,” he said. “But we’ve got Joris. So long as Joris is out of sight and an unknown quantity, I think Graner will be afraid to risk trying to cash the ticket. He’ll try to get hold of Joris again to find out exactly how he stands. He can afford to wait a few days, and meanwhile he’ll probably be trying to figure out some other way to get round the difficulty. But I don’t think he’ll be on the doorstep of the lottery agent first thing in the morning asking for the prize. So we hold exactly half the stakes each. And while Graner is trying to fill his hand, we can be trying to fill ours. Therefore, the next move from our side is to go and have a talk with Reuben.”
He saw the quick pressure of white teeth on her lip.
“Talk to Graner?” she gasped. “You can’t do that—”
“Can’t I?” said the Saint grimly. “He’s expecting me!”
2
Her eyes widened. “You?”
“Yours sincerely. We got off the boat late, and then they didn’t have any proper tackle to land the car. Every time they rigged up some gimcrack contraption, the ropes broke, and then they all stood around waving their arms about and telling each other why it didn’t work. When we did get off, I had to hang around for the other half of the day trying to get the carnet stamped. Tenerife again. After that was all over we came and fixed ourselves up here, and what with one thing and another we seemed to need a few drinks and a spot of food before we plunged into any more excitement. So we had them. Eventually we did make some enquiries about Graner, and after six people had given us sixteen different directions, we were on our way to try and find him when we met you.” The Saint smiled. “But Reuben is expecting me all right!”
“Why?”
Simon looked at his watch.
“Do you know that it’s just about midnight?” he said. “I think there are a few other things to be done before we talk any more. Joris needs some re
st, if nobody else does.” He took another quick turn up and down the room, and came back. “What’s more, I don’t think we’d better make any noise about having him here—the first thing Graner’s crowd will do is to beat around the hotels. Hoppy brought him in as a drunk, and the night man doesn’t know who’s staying here and who isn’t. So Hoppy had better keep him for tonight without any advertisement, and maybe tomorrow we’ll think of something else to do with him. Is that okay with you, Hoppy? You can sleep on the floor or put yourself in the bath or something.”
“Sure, boss,” said Mr Uniatz obligingly. “Anyt’ing is jake wit’ me.”
“Good.” Simon smiled at the girl again. “In that case, I’ll just toddle down and organise a room for you.”
He left the room and ran briskly downstairs. After making more noise than half-a-dozen inexperienced burglars trying to enter the hotel by knocking the front door down with a battering-ram, he finally succeeded in rousing the night porter from his slumbers and explained his requirement.
The man looked at him woodenly.
“Mañana,” he said, with native resourcefulness. “Tomorrow, when there is someone who knows about rooms, you will be able to arrange it.”
“Tomorrow,” said the Saint, “the Teide may start to erupt, and the inhabitants of this god-forsaken place may move quickly for the first time in their lives. I want a room tonight. What about going to the office and looking at the books?”
“’stá cerrao,” said the other pessimistically. “It is shut.”
The Saint sighed.
“It is for a lady,” he explained, attempting an appeal to the well-known Spanish spirit of romance.
The man continued to gape at him foggily. If it was a señorita, he appeared to be thinking, why should there be so much fuss about getting her a room?
“You have a room,” he pointed out.
“I know,” said the Saint patiently. “I’ve seen it. Now I want another. Haven’t you got a list of the rooms occupied, so that you know how many people you have to check in before you lock up?”
“There is the list,” admitted the porter cautiously.
“Well, where is it?”
The man rummaged behind his desk and finally produced a soiled sheet of paper. Simon looked at it.
“Now,” he said, “does it occur to you that the rooms which are not on this list will be empty?”
“No,” said the porter, “because they do not always put all the numbers on the list.”
Simon drew a deep breath.
“Are you waiting for anybody else to come in?”
“Only number fifty-one,” said the man, who apparently had his own clairvoyant method of checking the homing guests.
“Then the other keys in those boxes belong to empty rooms,” persisted the Saint, whose association with Hoppy Uniatz had made him more than ordinarily skilful at making his points with pellucid clarity.
The porter sullenly acknowledged that this was probably true.
“Then I’ll have one of them,” said the Saint.
He reached over and helped himself to the key which hung in the box numbered forty-nine, which was the next number to his own. Then he opened the doors of the automatic elevator and got in. He pressed the button for the top floor. Nothing happened.
“No funciona,” said the porter, with a certain morose satisfaction, and Simon heard him snoring again before he had climbed the first flight of stairs.
He recovered his good humour on the way back, partly because his mind was too taken up with other things to brood for long over the deficiencies of the Canary Island character. He had more things to think about than he really wanted, and already he began to feel the beginnings of a curious dread of the time which must come when certain questions could no longer be postponed…
“You ought to stay here and settle down, Hoppy,” he remarked, as he re-entered the bedroom. “Compared with the natives, you’d look such a genius that they’d probably make you mayor. All the same, I got a room.”
He went over to the bed and felt Vanlinden’s pulse again.
“Do you think you could walk a little way?” he said.
“I’ll try.”
Simon helped him up and kept an arm round him.
“Give me five minutes to get him undressed and into bed,” he said to Christine, “and then Hoppy can bring you along.”
Hoppy’s room was two doors along the passage, with the room Simon had taken for Christine in between. Nearly all Vanlinden’s emaciated weight hung on the Saint’s strong arm.
“Don’t you think I could look after myself?” he said when they got there, and the Saint dubiously let him go for a moment.
The old man started to take off his coat. He got one arm out of its sleeve, and then he stood still, and a queerly childish perplexity crinkled over his face.
“Perhaps I’m not very well,” he said huskily, and sat down suddenly on the bed.
Simon undressed him. Stripped naked, the old man was not much more than skin and bones. Where the skin was not raw or starting to turn black and blue, it was very white and almost transparent, with characteristic soft creases round the neck and shoulders that told their own story. Simon examined him again and treated his more obvious injuries with deft and amazingly gentle fingers. Then he wrapped him up in a suit of Mr Uniatz’s eye-paralysing silk pajamas, and had just tucked him up when Hoppy and Christine arrived. Simon went back to his own room then returned to the bedside with a couple of tiny white tablets and a glass of water.
“Will you take these?” he said. “They’ll help you to rest.”
He supported the old man’s head while he drank the water, and laid him gently back. Vanlinden looked up at him.
“You’ve been kind,” he said. “And I am tired.”
“Tomorrow you’ll be crowing like a fighting cock,” said the Saint.
He took Hoppy by the arm and drew him out of the room, but as soon as he turned away from the bed, the cheerfulness went out of his face. There was no doubt that Joris Vanlinden was an old man, old not only in body but also in mind, and Simon knew that, in that subtle process which is called growing old, the hopelessness of the last four years must have played more than their full part. What would be the effect of that night’s beating on the old man’s ebbing vitality? And how much more would the crowning blow of the stolen ticket drain from his failing strength?
Simon sat on the rail of the veranda and smoked down half an inch of his cigarette, quietly considering the questions. They were still unanswered when he forced his mind away from them. He pointed to the room.
“When you go back in there, Hoppy,” he said, “lock the door and put the key in your pocket and keep it there. Don’t let anybody in or out till I come round in the morning—not even yourself, unless you have to call me during the night.”
“Okay, boss.”
Mr Uniatz struck a match and relighted as much of his cigar as he had not yet eaten. He looked at the Saint with an expression which in anyone else might have been called reflective.
“Dis lottery ticket,” he said. “It must be woit plenty.”
“It is, Hoppy. It’s worth two million dollars.”
“Chees, boss—” Mr Uniatz counted on his fingers. “What I couldn’t do wit’ five hundred grand!”
Simon frowned at him.
“What do you mean—five hundred grand?”
“I t’ought ya might make dat my end, boss. De last time, ya cut me in two bits on de buck. Half a million for me an’ one an’ a half for you. Or is dat too much?” said Hoppy wistfully.
“Let’s work it out when we get it,” said the Saint shortly, and then the door opened and Christine came out.
She nodded in answer to his question.
“He’s asleep already,” she said. And then, “I don’t see why I should turn your friend out of his bed. I can sleep in a chair and keep an eye on Joris quite easily.”
“Good Lord, no,” said the Saint breezily. “Hoppy can sleep anywh
ere. He sleeps on his feet most of the day. You can’t even tell the difference until you get used to him. If Joris wants anything, Hoppy will fix it, and if Hoppy can’t fix it he’ll call me, and if it’s anything serious I’ll call you. But you need all the rest you can get, the same as Joris.”
He pushed Hoppy gently but firmly away towards his vigil and unlocked the other room with the key he had taken from downstairs. He switched on the lights and followed her in, locking the door after him and taking the key out to give to her.
“Keep it like that—just in case of accidents. It’s not so much for tonight as for tomorrow, in case Graner and company get up early. You can lock the communicating door on your side.”
He unlocked it and went through into his own room to rake a dressing gown out of his suitcase. When he turned round she had followed him. He hung the robe over her arm.
“It’s the best I can do,” he said. “I’m afraid my pajamas would be a bit loose on you, but you can have some if you like. Can you think of anything else?”
“Have you got a spare cigarette?”
He took a packet off the dressing table and gave it to her.
“So if that’s all we can do for you…”
She didn’t make a move to go. She stood there with her hands in the pockets of her light coat and the dressing gown looped over her arm, looking at him with dried eyes that he suddenly realised might be impish. The light picked the burnished copper out of the curls on her russet head. Her coat was belted at the waist, and thrown open under the belt; under it the thin dress she wore flowed over slender curves that would have been disturbing to watch too closely.
The Saint Bids Diamonds (The Saint Series) Page 4
