“I dunno, boss,” he said, striving conscientiously to keep up with the rapid march of events. “Which taxi was dat?”
“The taxi I brought her here in, you mutt!”
“You mean you brought her here, boss?”
“Yes.”
“Christine?”
“Yes.”
“In a taxi?” ventured Mr Uniatz, who had made up his mind to get to the bottom of the matter.
Simon gathered all his reserves of self-control.
“Yes, Hoppy,” he said. “I brought Christine here in a taxi, myself, before Palermo and Aliston picked me up—before I went to the house where I found you. I left her here and told her she wasn’t to go out. She ought to have been waiting for you when you got here.”
“Maybe dis guy takes her out,” suggested Mr Uniatz helpfully, hooking his thumb in the direction of the body on the couch. “Is his name Paloimo or Aliston?”
“It’s neither,” said the Saint. “His name’s Keena. This is his apartment.”
“Den how—”
“I borrowed it to give Christine a hide-out. He’s a friend of mine. He turned out of the place so that Christine could stay here. And you have to bop him on the dome!”
Mr Uniatz gaped dumbly at his victim. Life, he seemed to feel, was not giving him an even break. With things like that going on, how was a guy to know who to bop on the dome and who not to bop? It filled the most ordinary incidents of everyday life with unnatural complications.
“Chees, boss,” said Mr Uniatz pathetically, “you know I wouldn’t bop any guy on de dome if ya tole me he was on de rise. But how was I to know? De last time, ya tell me I should of bopped de guy I didn’t bop. Dis time—”
“I know,” said the Saint. “It isn’t your fault.”
He turned back to the couch as David Keena began to make sounds indicative of returning consciousness. With the help of the Saint’s treatment, he was soon sitting up and rubbing his head tenderly, while his eyes blearily endeavoured to take in his surroundings. Then he recognised Hoppy, and the whole story came back to him. He tried to get up, but the Saint held him down.
“Listen, David—it was all a mistake. Hoppy’s a friend of mine. He didn’t want to hurt you.”
“Well, what did he have to hit me for?”
“I sent him to look after Christine. He didn’t know who you were. You tried to get in, and he naturally thought you were one of the ungodly. I told you to keep away from here, didn’t I?”
“Dat’s right, boss,” said Mr Uniatz anxiously. “I didn’t know ya was a pal of de Saint. Why’ncha tell me?”
“Get him a drink,” ordered the Saint.
Mr Uniatz looked guilty.
“Dey was a bottle I found here—”
“Go and find it again,” said the Saint sternly. “And if you don’t find it I’ll pick you up and wring it out of you.”
Hoppy shuffled away and returned with a bottle. There was about an inch left in it. The Saint continued to regard him coldly, and Hoppy beetled off again and brought a glass. He was always forgetting the curious habit to which some people were addicted of pouring whiskey into a glass before transferring it to the mouth—a superfluous expenditure of time and energy which Mr Uniatz had never been able to understand.
But he was eager to make amends, and even took the unprecedented step of pouring out the remains of the whiskey himself.
While David was drinking it, Simon tried to readjust himself to what had happened. Aliston must have been lucky enough to find the taxi back on its rank almost as soon as he started his search. Simon still had to wonder how he had succeeded in getting Christine away, but it had been done. She had been gone when Hoppy arrived. Therefore Aliston had had her for some time. But what could he have done with her? The Saint would have expected him to take her straight back to the house where he himself had been taken, and Aliston had a car to do it with. And yet up to the time when the Saint had left there, a long while after, Aliston still hadn’t shown up. The explanation came to Simon in a flash: for three quarters of an hour or more, Graner’s Buick had been standing outside the house to which Aliston would have been going. Aliston must have seen it, suspected a hitch and driven by without stopping.
Either that, or he had already decided to double-cross Palermo…
But in any case, where else could he have gone?
Simon realised at once that that was a question to which theories were unlikely to provide an answer. He had got to go out and do something to solve it, although the Lord alone knew how. At least it meant that Aliston would be unlikely to be going back and falling into Lauber’s hands—if Lauber’s hands were in working order again. Somewhere on the island of Tenerife he was at large, and he had got to be tracked down and rounded up.
“Are you feeling any better?” he asked David.
“If I had some more of that I might live,” answered Keena doubtfully, putting down his glass.
Simon gave him a cigarette.
“We’ll send you out for some more in a minute,” he said. “But there are just a couple of things you might tell me first. What were you doing here when Hoppy bopped you?”
“I just came back to see how Christine was getting on.”
“You remember what I told you?”
“Yes, but I didn’t take that seriously. I didn’t know you were going to fill the place with boppers.”
“You’re lucky it was only kind-hearted Hoppy,” said the Saint callously. “If it had been one of the ungodly we’d probably be wondering what to do with your body by now. This isn’t a Children’s Hour, and anyone who butts into this picnic is liable to come out feet first. I warned you.”
David had been scanning the room in vague perplexity.
“Where’s Christine?”
“They’ve got her—or one of them has,” said the Saint flatly. “She was gone when Hoppy got here.”
“But how could they have done that?”
“If I knew the answer I’d tell you. There isn’t a trace that I’ve been able to see.”
Simon roamed rapidly round the apartment, and it took him only two or three minutes to verify his assumption. Everything looked untouched, exactly as he had left it—only Christine had gone.
“Was it like this when you arrived, Hoppy?”
“Yes, boss.”
“The door wasn’t locked?”
“No, boss. I toin de handle and I walk right in.”
“It didn’t look as if there had been a fight?”
“No, boss.” Mr Uniatz scratched his ear. “Maybe dey wasn’t no fight, at dat,” he suggested brilliantly.
“Maybe there wasn’t,” admitted the Saint.
He went back and examined the door, but it showed none of the signs of violence or skilful wangling which would have stood out a mile to his professional eye.
He turned to David again.
“You didn’t see anything when you got here?”
“I didn’t have a chance to see anything—except him.”
“But you didn’t see anything outside, anything the least bit out of the ordinary? A crowd, or people staring—or anything?”
“Not a thing that I noticed.”
Simon smoked silently for a little while and made up his mind.
“We can’t do any good by staying here,” he said. “Apart from which, it isn’t too healthy. At least one other member of the major ungodly and a nasty specimen of the minor know this address. I just hit both of them very hard, but I don’t know what they’ll do when they recover. We’d better be on our way.”
“That’s an idea,” Keena assented. “I don’t like your friends. Besides, we could get some more medicine.”
“You’ll have to get that by yourself, old lad. I’ll pay for it, but Hoppy and me are going to be busy. Besides, I’d rather not get you any more mixed up in this party than you are already.”
Keena nodded.
“I don’t want to be mixed up in it anymore,” he remarked with profound sincer
ity. “But when can I use my apartment again?”
“When I’ve cleaned up the opposition. I’ll let you know. Till then, if you see us anywhere, you’d better pretend you don’t know us. I’ll send you enough of the boodle one day to make you think it was all worthwhile…Conque andando. You toddle along, and we’ll give you five minutes start.”
David turned at the door and pointed at Hoppy.
“I only hope he gets bopped next,” he said.
Mr Uniatz watched the door close with a pained expression on his homely face. Himself a frank and openhearted soul, anxious to be friends with all the human race, it grieved him to find himself rebuffed.
“Boss,” said Mr Uniatz plaintively, “dat guy don’t seem to like me.”
“Did you expect him to love you after you’d bopped him on the dome?” said the Saint.
Mr Uniatz relapsed into injured silence. It was all quite incomprehensible to him. A guy had to take the breaks. Suppose a guy did get shot or bopped on the dome? If it was all done in the friendliest spirit, what had he got to bear a grudge about? He took a crumpled cigar from his pocket and chewed it ruminatively over the problem.
The Saint left him to it. He himself was fully occupied with the problem of Lauber’s and the chauffeur’s reactions to a similar incident, although he was unable to view them in the same naïve light which would presumably have illuminated them to Hoppy Uniatz’s complete satisfaction. By this time, presumably, those two would be on their feet again and restored to comparatively normal functioning, and Simon did not expect them to be forgiving.
What form their vindictiveness might take was something else again. So far as whining to Graner was concerned, Lauber had no authority to give the Saint orders, and the Saint had no particular obligation not to hit him in the stomach, although an imaginative man might invent a story to justify the former and misinterpret the latter. But that still left out the chauffeur, who could relate certain inexplicable happenings which had preceded the aforesaid massage of the stomach. Lauber would have to deal with him in some way first. But if Manoel had made the quicker recovery he might have decided to do some dealing on his own—and there would be nothing to prevent him telling Graner the whole truth as he knew it. It just introduced a few more incalculable factors into the jumble—and all of them had to be straightened out before the equation could be solved.
The Saint looked at his watch.
“Let’s waft,” he said.
He closed the door of the apartment and went down the stairs, with Hoppy at his heels.
The street below was still undisturbed. It had stopped raining at last, and the wet cobbles glistened in the grey light of the late afternoon. A few ragged and dirty children splashed in the rivers that still coursed through the gutters and lapped the top of the pavement. Two or three sloppy-looking young men stood in a near-by doorway and laboured energetically at the traditional local occupation of doing nothing. A toothless and wrinkled hag in a black shawl leaned against a wall and scratched herself philosophically. The sordid, ineffectual and time-ignoring life of Santa Cruz pursued the unimportant tenor of its way, as it had done for the last four hundred years and would probably continue to do for the next four hundred.
They got into the Saint’s taxi. As it started off, Simon looked back at the street scene. Nothing changed in it. He was certain they were not being watched or followed.
“Hotel Orotava,” he said.
He had nothing to say during the journey, and Mr Uniatz, who was still brooding over the mysteries of human psychology, made no efforts to draw him into conversation. Mr Uniatz knew by experience that conversation with the Saint usually involved intense mental concentration, an affliction which he never went out to seek. He had enough troubles already, what with one thing and another…
As they reached their destination, Simon scanned the square with the same alert and penetrating survey as he had given the Calle San Francisco (which is officially designated the Calle Doctor Comenge, although nobody in Tenerife except the map makers knows it). But that also was unchanged. The usual group of loafers propped up the statue of the Virgin of Candelaria, the usual buses were picking up their usual unsavoury passengers, the usual urchins were bawling the evening newspaper, the usual taxis were unnecessarily tooting their unusually offensive horns; the only unusual circumstance—if the divine inspiration of the guide books was to be accepted—was the river of muddy yellow water which poured down the street like a miniature Yangtze Kiang from the upper reaches of the town. But there was nobody in sight whom the Saint could recognise.
Nevertheless, his heart was in his mouth as the antique elevator bore him uncertainly upwards to the top floor of the hotel. When he went through the communicating door and found Joris Vanlinden lying peacefully asleep on the bed, he felt that that at least was almost too good to be true.
Simon studied him for a few moments, and one part of his threadbare plan crystallised in his mind. He tiptoed back to his own room and unhooked the telephone.
2
Presently Graner’s voice answered him—there was no mistaking the delicately poisonous accents which survived even the tinny reverberations of the Spanish instrument.
“This is Tombs,” said the Saint.
“Yes?” Graner’s answer came back without hesitation.
“Your chauffeur came round with the message. I went to the address. It seems to be a house with a couple of apartments, but I haven’t seen my man or anybody else. Of course, he may have gone again by now—I can’t find out without knocking on the doors. I’d rather not make a fuss if I can avoid it, for fear of scaring him off.”
“Had you heard anything of Aliston when you left Lauber?”
“Not a word. Have you?”
“He has not been in touch with the house.”
“Well, what do we do?” asked the Saint. “Why did you want someone to chase this other guy, anyway?”
“I thought it would be safer to watch him. Where are you telephoning from?”
“I’m in a shop nearby.”
“What is the number?”
“Three nine eight six,” said the Saint, hoping that Graner didn’t know anyone with that number.
“You had better wait for a while—say half an hour. If he comes out, follow him. If he has not come out in that time, try to enter the apartments and see what you can find out. If there is no trace of him, go back to Lauber. If I have any other instructions I will call you. You will tell the shop that you are expecting a call.”
“Okay.”
Simon replaced the telephone with a slight shrug.
He was not much further on than he had been before. If Graner’s share in the dialogue could be taken on trust, neither Lauber nor the chauffeur had yet been in touch with him. If any reliance could be placed on his tone of voice, Graner’s suspicions were still at rest. It was flimsy enough material on which to build vital decisions, but it was all there was. And even if it was tentatively accepted as sound, it still left Lauber’s next move to be prophesied.
Mechanically the Saint took out his cigarette case for the indispensable auxiliary to thought. The case was empty.
“Damn,” he said, and got up off the bed. “Have you got a cigarette, Hoppy?”
“I got a zepp,” said Mr Uniatz generously.
Simon looked at the cigar and shook his head tactfully.
“I’ll go out and buy some,” he said, and remembered something else he could do at the same time.
“Maybe we could get a drink de same place,” assented Mr Uniatz, brightening.
A firm veto to that sociable idea was on the tip of the Saint’s tongue when another angle on it crossed his mind. He peeped through the communicating door again. Joris was still sleeping the relaxed and utterly forgetful sleep of a child.
Simon closed the door silently.
“You can get a drink,” he said. “But we can’t be seen drinking together. Give me a couple of minutes, and go out on your own. You’d better go to the Ge
rman Bar—it’s just over the other side of the square, where you see the awning. I’ll come in there myself in—let’s see—in an hour and a half at the very outside. If I don’t pay any attention to you, don’t come and talk with me. And if I haven’t shown up by half past six, come back here and hold the fort. Have you got that, or shall I say it again?”
“I got it, boss,” said Mr Uniatz intelligently. “But do I bop de nex’ guy who comes in or don’t I?”
“I suppose you bop him,” said the Saint fatalistically.
On his way down the stairs he became more convinced of the soundness of his plan. Soon enough, whatever else developed out of the situation, someone or other would be investigating the report that Joris was back at the hotel, and anything that would confuse them and add to their difficulties would be an advantage on the side of righteousness and Saintly living. It was rather like using Hoppy for live bait, but at the same time it probably made very little actual addition to the danger he was already in.
The wavy-haired boy looked up with a pleased and optimistic smile as Simon approached the desk. He was beginning to regard those approaches as a continually recurring miracle.
Simon glanced around him before he spoke, but there was nobody in the lounge.
“You remember the old man who came in with my friend a little while ago?”
“Sí, señor.”
“Has anyone been enquiring for him?”
“No, señor. Nadie me ha preguntado.”
“Good. Now listen. In a few minutes my friend will go out again—alone. But if anyone inquires for the old man, you will say that he went out with him. If they want to know what room he was in, you will give them the number of one of your empty rooms on the second floor. But you will be quite definite that he has left the hotel. You will also say that I have not been back here. Is that understood?”
“Sí, señor,” said the boy expectantly.
He was not disappointed. Another hundred-peseta note unfurled itself under his eyes. If this went on for a few more days, he thought, he would be able to give up his job as conserje and purchase the banana plantation which is every good Canary Islander’s dream of independence and prosperity.
The Saint Bids Diamonds (The Saint Series) Page 18
