The Saint Abroad: The Art Collectors/ the Persistent Patriots (14 page)

“Good,” said Simon. “Hans and
I were discussing old
English sayings while you were gone, and
this situation brings
to mind another one … about not putting all one’s eggs in
the same automobile.”

“What do you mean?” Annabella
asked.

“I mean I think I’ll wait over there
across the road in the
shadows in case Mathieu decides that he’d
prefer spending a couple of cheap bullets rather than a lot of expensive
money.”

“You think he doesn’t intend to go
through with this even
now?” Annabella asked in dismay.

“I think he does,” the Saint replied, “if he has
to. But it
won’t hurt to give the ethical
side of his nature a little en
couragement.”

He opened the door and let her into the front
passenger
seat of the car. Hans, at his indication, took the
driver’s
seat.

“Just finish your transaction as fast as
you can and get
rid of him,” Simon told them.

Annabella was groping at the dashboard of the
car.

“Where is the key?” she asked.
“In case——”

“In case you decide to leave me standing here holding an
empty bag?” Simon drawled. “The ethical
side of your nature
needs a little
encouragement, too.”

He tossed the key in his hand, grinned, put
it back into
his pocket and strolled across the street to the dark
school
yard. There was a row of large chestnut trees along the sidewalk
giving perfect concealment from the eyes of anyone on
the lighted street.
The Saint leaned against one of the tree
trunks, folded his
arms comfortably, and waited.

He did not have long to wait. Apparently
Mathieu’s
financial resources were not only adequate but very
handy. Perhaps the money had even been in his car—it was possible
that
Mathieu or his employers had anticipated paying for
the paintings as a
last resort all along. In any case, it was less
than fifteen minutes
until a pair of headlights flared around
the corner and
Mathieu’s car pulled up and stopped on
Simon’s side of the street
facing in the opposite direction to
the car that was already there. Mathieu
got out, leaving
Bernard at the wheel. The engine remained running.

Simon watched from his hiding place, not ten
paces away, as the pseudo-Inspector crossed the street. Annabella got out
of the
Saint’s car to meet him. Mathieu opened the rear door
of Simon’s car and
looked over the paintings. Seeming satis
fied, he turned and
motioned to Bernard. Bernard got out of the car with an attache case in one
hand. While he was still
hidden by the car door from the view of the
people across the
street, he extracted a pistol from his pocket, clicked
off the
safety catch, and held it close to his body.

The Saint, like a fleeting shadow, was
suddenly behind
Bernard
as he crossed the road and Mathieu’s assistant felt
the hard cold nose of an automatic pressed very hard against his spine.

“What a naughty boy you are,
Bernard,” Simon said so
that all could hear. “Now show the nice
people what you’ve
got in your hand, and then drop it on the street with the
safety on.”

Bernard dropped his pistol on to the pavement, and the Saint
picked it up. Mathieu ground his teeth and rolled his
eyes in an expression which would have fitted quite well into one of Michelangelo’s
more dramatic renditions of the Last
Judgement.

“Well,” Simon said to Annabella.
“What shall we do with
them now?”

“I did not tell him to do that!”
Mathieu protested, waving
both hands at the abashed Bernard. “I
swear I did not. Show
them the money, you fool!”

Bernard sheepishly opened the attach
é
case, revealing stacks
of
banknotes.

“To pay you with,” Mathieu said anxiously. “It is
there.
You can count it.”

“Stand over there, Bernard, and give me
the money,”
Simon said.

The currency was genuine. Annabella looked at
it and then
enquiringly at the Saint.

“What should I do?” she asked
anxiously.

“I suggest you take it before it’s
devalued,” Simon said.
“And that you give the paintings to
these two boobs so they’ll
stay off your neck once and for all.”

There was a general sigh of relief,
particularly on the
Italian side of the parlay, and Mathieu anxiously
received the
paintings from Hans.

“You are going to let us go?”
Mathieu asked, with an
apprehensive look at Simon’s gun.

“No fear, Garibaldi,” Simon said. “Run along and
don’t
come back.”

“And good riddance!” Hans grunted
after them in German.

The two Italians hurried into their car,
slammed the doors
with feverish haste, and roared away.

When they were gone Annabella sagged happily
against the
side of Simon’s car.

“I
am
rich!” she exulted.
“I’m at least a
little
rich!”

“
We
are a little rich,”
Simon corrected her.

He took a pile of
lire
from the glove
compartment and
put them into his coat pocket. Annabella’s initial look
of horror faded and relaxed into a smile as she took a deep
breath.

“Fair enough. You’ve earned it.”
She took Hans’s hand in
one of hers and Simon’s in the other and
squeezed them both.
“We’ve all earned it. Let’s form a team. Is Reubens
bringing good prices?”

“Quite,” said Simon.
“Why?”

“Well, darling, these Leonardos and
things were just the
beginning!
There’s lots more
where they came from!”

Simon looked slack-jawed at Hans, who ducked
his head in
affirmation and smiled modestly through the pale
lamplight.

THE
 
PERSISTENT
 
PATRIOTS

ORIGINAL
 
TELEPLAY
 
BY
 
MICHAEL
 
PERTWEE

ADAPTED
 
BY
 
FLEMING
 
LEE

1

The tropical African coastal territory of
Nagawiland had, for most of its humid eons of existence, been of little
interest to
anyone except monkeys, insects, snakes, crocodiles, wart
hogs,
and an occasional party of black hunters passing through its
inhospitable
coastal marshes toward the high country farther
inland. The few
humans who settled permanently in the small
area seem to have been
the remnants of a tribe of head
hunters who were defeated and eaten by a more
powerful
neighboring tribe.

Having settled a sufficiently safe distance
from the scene of
their forefathers’ Armageddon, the Nagawi, as they
called
themselves (a word translated roughly as “the only real
people”)
showed no enthusiasm for headhunting or anything
else. They lived on
what they could get without much effort—
their treats
consisting of an occasional lame wild pig or senile
baboon—and carved
crude obscene figures out of tree roots. Their religious exercises consisted of
flagellating one another with thorn bushes and cutting off the ear lobes of all
boys who
managed to survive for twelve years—which by Nagawi
standards of life expectancy represented early middle age. Those who survived
the religious exercises went on to re
produce languidly but steadily, until
by 1870, when Living
stone
discovered it, the tribe had grown from its original
handful to a thousand or more.

Their first mild notoriety was passed on to
the outer world by European missionaries who had come there to see what could
be done about the Nagawi’s souls and the fact that the
women wore no
blouses. The missionaries reported that the Nagawi chieftains pre-chewed all
food before it was passed
around to honored guests. Perhaps for that
reason the Chris
tian sects never showed quite the same zeal for
converting the
Nagawi as they did for converting tribes with different
sorts of
table
etiquette.

The Nagawi’s second wave of fame came during
the 1920s when their obscene root carvings were declared by a group of
Paris-centered
artists (known as “Les Sept Emmerdants”) to
be superior to
anything produced in stone by Michelangelo or in wood by Riemenschneider. The
Nagawi were delighted to
find they could receive valuable salt and fine cloth in ex
change for trinkets that anybody with ten fingers
and a
sharp knife could knock out in
half an hour.

But the peak of Nagawiland’s popularity with the rest of
the world came when the foothills of its western
borders were
found to be bursting
with ores of minerals precious to in
dustrialized
societies. Englishmen, whose nation had con
trolled the area since the 1914 World War, poured into the territory.
They cut a harbor into the coastline and built a city
there. Other towns sprang up and grew into
cities. Electrical
power plants
burgeoned along the Bawu River. The Nagawi tribesmen could grow relatively rich
if they chose to abandon
their former
way of life. Other native Africans trooped across
the borders seeking the wages paid by the
British. Nagawiland
flourished.

But things changed in Britain and elsewhere.
Highly
educated men declared that the British had stolen Nagawi
land from
the Nagawi and ought to give it back, not only with
its cities and power
plants, but with additional reparations
to make up in some
small way for the damage they had done
to human rights.
Politicians of a number of states claimed that what the English had done
amounted not only to theft, but to exploitation of Nagawi labor. Missionaries
had once praised the strides the Nagawi had made since the coming of
European civilization. Now the
European papers printed com
parisons of the
wages of Nagawi laborers with the wages of
workers in Birmingham, Lille,
and Milan. Pictures compared
Nagawi shacks
with residential areas of London and Stockholm. A Nagawi man who had been sent
to Oxford to school
went over to Hyde
Park every Sunday morning and publicly
cursed
the English for sadistic brutes. The English audience
applauded politely and took guilty note of the
speaker’s
scarred neck and missing
ear lobes.

The political earthquakes which followed in
due course were
met with determination on the part of the white
population
of Nagawiland to maintain their own human rights.

In the move of the area from colonial status
toward in
dependence, only one man seemed able to keep the
conflicting
forces in fair balance and prevent his country’s becoming
the
slaughteryard into which so much of the rest of Africa had
been
turned. His name was Thomas Liskard, and he was the
white Prime Minister
of Nagawiland.

On a certain morning in January, Prime
Minister Liskard
prepared
to fly to London for crucial talks with Her Majesty’s
government which, it was hoped, would lead to some settle
ment of Nagawiland’s immediate problems.
Nagawiland, being a small country, did not furnish its government officials
with private transport planes, so the Prime
Minister and his
party were driven to the airport of Nagawiland’s
capital city to
meet a commercial jetliner
coming up on a Capetown to
London
run.

It happened that on the same January morning
Simon
Templar was driven by taxi to the same airport in order to catch the
same plane for London. The unlikely presence of
that adventurer—who under his nickname of
the Saint was
perhaps better known throughout
the world than Thomas
Liskard
himself—in Nagawiland is easily explained. The Saint
was there as a tourist. Nagawiland is of course
far from
ordinary tourist routes, but
then Simon Templar was far from
an
ordinary tourist. He was a man who lived on excitement
and constant change. It was his penchant for the
former
which, diligently indulged
from his earliest years, had enabled
him
to afford the latter. His buccaneering expeditions into
the Never-Never Land of lawless men had earned him
the fear
and hatred of criminals,
the grudging respect of police officials,
and enough money to travel in the most elegant style any
where in the world anytime he felt like it.