The Saint Bids Diamonds (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “This gentleman is sailing on the Alicante Star tonight. You will take him down to the boat.”

  “Pero, señor,” protested the boy, “I cannot leave the hotel—”

  Simon made another contribution to the banana fund.

  “You will take him down and see him into his cabin,” he said. “He is not very well, and you must be careful with him. If he gives any trouble, remind him that he is going to see the Señorita Cristina. Here are the tickets. You will start as soon as I have left the hotel.”

  “Bueno,” said the boy obediently, and the Saint turned to Vanlinden.

  “He’s going to take you to the boat,” he said. “You stay with him and do just what he tells you. Then you wait for Christine on board—she won’t be long now.”

  The old man smiled at him again with the same tranquil faith, and Simon turned quickly away before his own face betrayed him. If he failed that childish trust, Vanlinden’s mind might never be restored. He would go on sinking deeper and deeper into that protective oblivion, while his vital forces gradually ebbed like a falling tide until one day he made the easy crossing from dusk to eternal darkness. No medical skill could do anything for him. Only one thing could bring him back to the light, and only the Saint knew what a fantastic task he had undertaken to conclude in the time he had set for himself.

  He looked at his watch as he went down the steps, and saw that he had just about three and a half hours left.

  For a few moments he stood on the pavement outside the hotel, leisurely lighting a cigarette. Then he set off diagonally upwards across the square. If anyone was watching the hotel now, they could take a walk with him while Joris was getting clear.

  He sauntered round the Casino block, stopped to inspect the photographs of homely and buxom artistes displayed outside the Café Zanzibar, stopped again to examine every article in the window of a tobacconist’s on the next corner, and only turned into the German Bar when he estimated that Joris and the wavy-haired boy had had time to get out of sight.

  The first thing he noticed was that Hoppy Uniatz was not there.

  Simon frowned as he sat down. He had given Hoppy directions which should have been explicit enough, although it was difficult to set limits to Mr Uniatz’s capacity for getting his orders mixed up. Unless a slight discrepancy between their watches had sent Hoppy back to the hotel while he had been walking round the block, or unless Hoppy had consumed all the whiskey on the premises and gone elsewhere to look for more, or unless even more natural causes had dictated a temporary absence from which Hoppy might return at any moment.

  The Saint ordered a drink and decided to wait for a few minutes. He had several things to think about for which he could use a little solitude.

  The rising temperature of police excitement of which he had been reminded at Camacho’s not long ago had taken another upward lift. Simon wondered whether the girl Maria had been prompted to bring in the police by anyone at Graner’s, and finally rejected the idea. It would have been too obviously wiser for the Graner syndicate to remove the body without any publicity. A simpler explanation was that Maria had returned later to find out what had happened and had seen the same thing that the Saint had seen. Even so, it didn’t make the outlook any brighter. She could give them the Saint’s description, and probably that would be the first thing she would do; the newspapers would have to think up a whole lot of new words to express their horror; the civil governor would issue some more inspiring proclamations, and the police would dash hither and thither in a perfect frenzy of zeal which would probably last for quite two days.

  Meanwhile the situation at Graner’s was probably altering every minute. Whether Lauber had suggested a partnership to the chauffeur and had been refused, or whether he hadn’t even troubled to do that, Simon had no doubt that he had shot the man to keep his mouth shut. Just as certainly, he had no doubt that Lauber had gone back to Graner with quite a different story, and it was not much harder to guess whom Lauber would have accused of the shooting…

  “Muy buenas!”

  Simon looked up with a start. A bootblack who leaned on a crutch on the side where his trouser was cut off at the knee was standing over the table, grinning with incredulous delight, and the Saint’s face broke into an answering smile in spite of his preoccupations.

  “Hola, Julian!” He held out his hand. “Que tal?”

  “Muy bien. Y usted?”

  “Como siempre.” The lad went on grinning at him inarticulately.

  “And the boy?” Simon asked.

  “Estupendo! Every day he is bigger and stronger…”

  Simon Templar’s queer friends had always been legion: there was hardly a corner of the world where they could not be found in the most unexpected places, telling stories of the Saint which Scotland Yard would have been surprised to hear. On the first day of a more peaceful visit to Tenerife, the Saint’s attention had been drawn to a ragged and crippled youth who shined his shoes and gave him one of the frankest and happiest smiles he had ever seen. He had learnt that Julian was married, that his wife was expecting a baby; one day he had gone to their home, a single room with hardly space to turn round, and had seen a poverty that made him feel small. Simon had never spoken about what he had done for them, but there were at least two people in Santa Cruz who thought of him as something like God, and one lusty infant who had been baptised Simon to bear witness to the miracle.

  The Saint was forced to forget other things while he talked—even with all that he was facing, he couldn’t have snubbed that welcome. He had to ask a dozen trivial questions and listen to a dozen answers, conscious all the while that the time was passing.

  “You are staying longer this time?” Julian asked presently.

  Simon shrugged.

  “I don’t know. It depends on a lot of things.”

  “You will come up and see Simonito?” said the lad eagerly. “I will tell my wife you are coming. She will not believe me, she will be so glad.”

  “Yes, I will come very soon—”

  The sentence died on the Saint’s lips and the friendly warmth faded out of his eyes for Reuben Graner had entered the bar and was walking towards his table.

  CHAPTER NINE:

  HOW SIMON TEMPLAR ENJOYED A JOKE AND MR LAUBER WAS NOT AMUSED

  1

  In moments of crisis the human brain flies off on curious tangents. There was one freezing moment in which Simon wondered whether Graner could have heard him talking Spanish, while the last words he had spoken re-echoed in his own ears like thunderclaps, and then he realised that the other patrons of the bar were making more than enough noise to drown what he was saying. They were only discussing the prospects for the next banana crop, but their heredity and upbringing made it impossible to lower their voices below a shout, and since they all knew that nobody else had anything to say worth listening to, they were all shouting at once. A split second later, another of those wildly disjointed flights of thought reminded Simon of something he had forgotten all day—the messages he had written and folded up in twenty-five-peseta notes in Graner’s attic that morning.

  Without any visible interruption, the Saint put his hand in his pocket and took out one of the notes. He could hardly have said why he did it, but it never occurred to him to hesitate. It was the only thing to do. Graner’s thin-drawn yellowish face showed no warning expression that could have been read at the distance, his dandified strut was exactly the same, his eyes were the same unwinking beads behind his glasses, like the eyes of a lizard, and yet the Saint knew. He knew, by the reflex bristle of his nerves, more surely than logic could have told him, that the gong was sounding for the final round. Whatever Graner’s manner might be, whatever was said between them, the curtains were going up for the last time, and at a moment like that, knowing all the odds against him, the Saint left nothing more to chance than he had to leave.

  He held out the note to Julian. The lad tried to wave it away.

  “Toma!” said the Saint imperativ
ely. It was the last word he could say before Graner was within earshot. He added in English, “Get me some change.”

  “El señor quiere cambio,” Graner interpreted, with sneering distinctness, as the bootblack stood smiling sheepishly.

  The lad nodded and grinned again, and hobbled nimbly off on his one leg and his crutch, and the Saint waved his hand hospitably towards a chair.

  “Sit down, Reuben,” he murmured. “What are you drinking?”

  “A sherry.” Graner gave the order to the waiter, and fitted a cigar into his amber holder. “It was lucky I saw you as I was driving by. Where have you been?”

  Simon lighted the cigar for him, and the action gave him a spare moment to consider his reply. There were half-a-dozen different approaches that he might have subconsciously expected Graner to make, but this was not one of them. It gave him an odd, ridiculous impression that Graner was feeling his ground as cautiously as he wanted to himself, and he wondered if his instincts were starting to play tricks with him.

  “I hung around the Calle San Francisco for a bit,” he said vaguely. “Then our friend came out, and I followed him. He’s a great walker—led me a chase all over the town. He went into three or four shops and bought things. Then he went into the Casino. I stayed outside for some time, until I got scared there might be a back way out. I went in and made enquiries, and there was. I toured all over the place, but he’d gone.”

  “Did you go back to Lauber after that?”

  “Yes.”

  “What happened there?”

  The Saint gave himself another breather while he lighted a cigarette. He was beginning to feel as if all his co-ordinates of reality were giving way, as if he were wading in grotesque slow motion through a sea of thick and glutinous soup, like a man on a marijuana jag. But he had made up his mind that the safest thing was to let Graner give him the lead, and meanwhile he didn’t see why he shouldn’t play the same game as he assumed Lauber had been playing.

  He said, with deliberately measured bluntness, “It might have been the last job I could have done for you for a long time. If I hadn’t been lucky you’d have been looking for a new diamond cutter.”

  “Why?”

  “Because in any case you’re going to have to look for a new chauffeur. He was the only guy I found when I got there, and he was dead.”

  “Manoel?”

  The Saint nodded.

  “Shot. Right between the eyes. He was still warm when I found him. The apartment was quite dark. I searched through it, but there wasn’t anyone there. I couldn’t do any more, because just then the police rolled up. I heard them coming and looked out of the window. Palermo’s girl was with them, so I suppose she found Manoel and turned in the alarm. I climbed out of a back window as they came in the door, and beat it over the roofs.”

  Graner’s face registered no emotion. He gripped the amber holder between his teeth and drew the end of his cigar to an even red. His sharp snaky eyes watched Simon intently through the smoke.

  “Would you be surprised to hear that Lauber said you had shot him?” he said.

  “Su cambio, señor.”

  The bootblack had returned. He laid five duros on the marble table in front of the Saint. Simon handed him a peseta and looked at him as he did so. Julian’s smile was uncertain, and his eyes were troubled: it was enough to tell the Saint that the lad had found his message and read it. He was still afraid that Julian might try to say something to him about it, and turned his shoulder on him quickly before that disaster could happen.

  “No,” he answered Graner blandly. “It wouldn’t surprise me very much. But it would make me a little more sure that Lauber had done it himself.”

  “You don’t like Lauber?”

  The Saint shrugged.

  “I expect you’ve already made up your own mind who did it. I’m just telling you what I think. What was Lauber’s story?”

  “He told me that when Manoel arrived with the message you were so insistent on going to the Calle San Francisco yourself that he became suspicious. When he tried to prevent you going, you hit him and knocked him out, and then he thinks you shot Manoel when he tried to stop you.”

  “It’s a good story,” said the Saint unconcernedly, “even if it is a god-damn lie. Lauber was the bloke who insisted that he wanted to wait there for Aliston. But if you believe him, why don’t you call the police?”

  “I’ll talk about that in a minute,” said Graner. He inspected his cigar for a few seconds, then looked up from it to add, “I have already seen Aliston.”

  A ball of lead formed in the Saint’s stomach and made his diaphragm feel as if it was being dragged down out of its rightful place. He had to check himself for a moment before he spoke, to make sure that his voice was under control.

  “That’s something, anyway,” he conceded coolly. “Was he looking pretty fit?”

  “He had Christine with him.”

  Simon knew how Lauber must have felt when he received that shattering jolt in the solar plexus, having seen it coming and yet only having had time to realise that he couldn’t possibly move fast enough to ward it off. He had had fair warning, but the shock was none the less deadly for that. He knew that he was hearing the truth—a fabrication that would have fitted so neatly into his own deductions would have been too wild a coincidence. The shock numbed every physical sense he commanded, but somehow it left his brain aloof and unshaken by the chaos of his nerves.

  “Better and better,” he said, and was amazed at the naturalness of his own voice. “Where was this?”

  “At the house.”

  The third shock was wasted—it had no reactions left to work on.

  “When?”

  “Aliston was there when I got back with Palermo.”

  “And who did he say I’d killed?”

  “I will tell you exactly what he told me. He told me that he traced your taxi back to the Calle San Francisco. He found Christine there—at the address where Joris’s friend went to after you let him go.”

  “That’s impossible,” said the Saint, with unruffled assurance. “Unless she got out of the place where I left her. Besides, this was before Joris’s pal went there, wasn’t it? Well, if he’d gone there expecting to find Christine, and she’d disappeared, would he have calmly gone off on a shopping tour like the one I followed him on?”

  “That is what he did according to your story,” Graner reminded him.

  “And according to Aliston’s story I’m a liar again. You know, I’m taking quite a shine to this outfit of yours, Reuben. It’s such a relief to know you’re among friends.”

  Graner nodded.

  “I said I would tell you exactly what Aliston told me.”

  “And I suppose he’d got another bright theory that I snatched Joris and his pal and parked them with Palermo’s slut.”

  “Oh no. Aliston did not deny that he and Palermo had taken them. He was very perturbed when he heard that they had been permitted to escape.”

  “I’ll bet he was,” said the Saint grimly. “And how did he make that sound all right—about double-crossing the rest of us?” Graner paused to trim the ash on his cigar, and again his hard, pebbly gaze rested on the Saint with the same unaccountable calculativeness that had been puzzling Simon ever since he sat down.

  “I will go on telling you what he told me. He said that it was because he and Palermo were suspicious of you. They were afraid to argue with me because they were too familiar with my objection to having my orders questioned, but they were convinced that for once I was making a mistake. They did not like the way I had accepted you and accepted your terms this morning. They were certain that it would be dangerous to take Joris and the other man back to the house while you were there. They decided to make sure of their ground before they tried to dispute the wisdom of my instructions; meanwhile they felt that Joris and the other man would be quite safe where they had taken them. Then they captured you to see if they could force you to give them any more information. Aliston poi
nted out that it was absurd to think that they were trying to double-cross me, when he had brought Christine straight to the house as soon as he found her. He said that once he had her in his hands, believing that Joris and the other man and yourself were safely held at the same time, he saw no further need for secrecy, and went to the house at once to tell me the whole story, bringing Christine as evidence of his good faith.”

  “What about Palermo?”

  “He more or less corroborated the story—as much of it as he knew.”

  “And why didn’t he tell it you in the first place?”

  “He said that he lost his nerve, that he was dazed by the beating you had given him and did not quite know what he was doing.”

  The Saint blew a smoke ring and annihilated it with his next gesture.

  “I won’t bother to point out that that’s the story anybody else would probably have told if they were in the same spot,” he said. “So it wouldn’t be such a fluke if Palermo hit on it as well. I expect you’ve thought all that out for yourself, and you know what you’re going to believe.”

  “Nevertheless, I should like your opinion.”

  Simon had to restrain the impulse to stare at him. What the devil could Graner be driving at? Simon had been watching him every instant for the first sign of hostility, racking his brain to try and predict what form it would take so that he could be prepared to forestall it, and he had been baffled from beginning to end. The feeling of unreality came back to him so strongly that the whole interview seemed like a nightmare. Any of the things he had been expecting would have been less disturbing than that precarious fencing in the dark. But he had to make the best of the situation as it stood.

  “If you’re really asking me,” he said slowly, “I should say that Lauber was the first double-crosser. The others seemed to think he had the ticket last night, didn’t they? Well, he might have had it. My first guess would be that for some reason or other he was trying to strike some bargain with Manoel to get him in with him, and Manoel turned him down and threatened to tell you, so Lauber shot him to keep his mouth shut.”