The Saint and the People Importers

LESLIE CHARTERIS
THE SAINT AND
THE PEOPLE
IMPORTERS
FOREWORD

This is another of those joint efforts which I initiated with The Saint on TV, and which were accepted well enough to be followed by three other titles of similarly mixed parentage.

In this case, however, there are a few small differences. I first suggested the basic theme to Fleming Lee, who wanted to try his hand at a TV script. He worked out a synopsis, in which I made some suggestions, and which I passed on to the TV producers with my approval. Typically, this was not good enough for them: they bought his synopsis, but would not let him work on the script, and turned it over to another writer, eventually ending up with a script in which our original elements were barely recognisable.

Later, I suggested to Fleming that he should draft this book version, but revert to our original outline, ignoring the television “improvements.” Which he did, at the same time incorporating some slight changes of my own. Finally, as with all the preceding experiments of this kind, I personally revised the whole manuscript, doing my best to see that the style conformed as closely as possible to my own.

Once again, then, this should not be classed as a “ghosted” job, since I give full credit to my assistant. But since I have also had my own hand in it from start to finish, I don’t think it is being offered to Saint fans under false pretences.

L.C.

THE SAINT AND THE PEOPLE IMPORTERS

1
HOW SIMON TEMPLAR READ
ABOUT ALI, AND HIS CURRY
WAS DELAYED

The identity of the passenger who left his evening paper behind in a certain London taxi one dull September afternoon will probably never be discovered: he passed through this world but once, and may have nothing else in the course of his transit that will ever concern posterity. But the newspaper was still lying there on the seat when Simon Templar hailed the cab on Jermyn Street behind Fortnum & Mason’s, within which epicurean supermarket he had just concluded a transaction involving several thousand sturgeon eggs, and thus has a fair claim to have been the starting point of this adventure.

Simon Templar had long ago given up trying to predict where Adventure would come from: his only certainty was that he could never escape it. He would stumble upon it, or it would trip over him; but one way or another they were fated to come together, by the same kind of destiny that had ordained perhaps as a symbol for that afternoon, that Mr. Fortnum should be forever linked with Mr. Mason.

There had been an era long ago, admittedly, when Simon Templar had gone more than halfway to meet this agreeable doom. With an imagination as unlimited as possibility itself he had set out on his hunt; his territory was the world and his prey the two-legged predators who fattened on other men’s toil and hopes and sufferings: extortioners, swindlers, racketeers-every manner of human parasite that crept on the scalp of the earth, and especially those who had burdened themselves with a weighty enough load of ill-gotten gold to warrant the attention of a man of Simon’s expensive tastes.

But while a fair share of the wealth he rescued from the coffers of the Ungodly found its way into his own bank accounts, a large proportion of it ended up back in the hands of its original rightful owners. This fact, combined with Simon’s penchant for extralegal action and his contempt for the creaky wheels of due process, had caused some historically attuned pen-pusher to dub him the Robin Hood of Modern Crime. The comparison was apt, but another shorter and more mysteriously ambivalent sobriquet had attached itself to him very early in his career and had soon all but replaced his real name in the public mind.

It was a nom de guerre heard by detective officers and bandit chieftains with equal unease: The Saint.

More recently, he claimed that he positively leaned sideways in a noble effort to avoid trouble, but with no more success than an unskilful matador attempting to evade an educated bull. Their mutual karma was bigger than both of them. And that afternoon where we came in was a fair sample of its working.

Having directed the driver to take him to the Hilton Hotel, where he had no more nefarious objective in mind than the inhibition of a cool quenching rum punch in Trader Vic’s air-conditioned basement, the Saint pushed the abandoned newspaper out of his way, and settled back to relax while he was ferried through dense shoals of rush-hour traffic. The newspaper lay ignored beside him as he crossed his legs, folded his arms, and watched the crowds rushing along the sidewalks in a last-minute push to spend as much of their money as possible before the last shops closed, or to catch a homeward bus or train before everyone else with the same idea got ahead of them.

Even among those elegantly draped though unseemly hurrying West End throngs, Simon Templar had stood out as an extraordinarily well-tailored, handsome, and striking man. His six feet two inches, honed to balanced perfection through hard and steady use, set him above most of his fellow-creatures in stature as well as in fitness, and his blue eyes blazed in his tanned face with a magically startling translucency. Even the way he carried himself was unusual, somehow combining the urbane poise of an idle aristocrat with the quiet watchful readiness of a jungle-fighter.

Nature’s lavish kindness to the Saint, included the visual acuity of a jet pilot, and also burdened him with a ceaseless curiosity about everything that it took in. Long before his taxi turned from Piccadilly into Clarges Street, his eye had been caught during the cab’s frequent pauses in the inevitable jams by those hand-lettered, forcefully worded broadsheets which London’s newspaper vendors hang on their small red or yellow stands. There was such a journalistic entrepreneur on almost every corner-an invariably afflicted-looking man in stained cap and shapeless shoes- and ordinarily the Saint would not have found his imagination stirred by even their most lurid promises.

He could pass by CIGARETTE TAX SHOCK without a glance. DOCK STRIKE CHAOS was such a commonplace that it would have blended indiscernibly with the pavement and the shopfronts. Even AU PAIR GIRL MURDER! PICTURES!, which could be counted on to galvanise weary commuters into a veritable stampede towards the news-hawkers with coins thrust forward in impatient hands, and to hold them spellbound on an underground ride from Piccadilly Circus to Maida Vale, would not have produced even a responsive tremor in the Saint’s vital organs.

But PAKISTANI CRUCIFIED IN SOHO rang with such a brazen barbaric resonance that even the Saint’s well-tempered nervous system could not entirely resist its call.

PAKISTANI CRUCIFIED IN SOHO!

The message was echoed and repeated as Simon’s taxi made its way in halts and spurts of sudden speed towards the hazy green of Hyde Park and the sunset-reddened glassy tower of the Hilton Hotel. In his imagination he saw the Pakistani’s exotic fate proclaimed before the department stores of Oxford Street, made loudly known along the Strand, and writ large on every corner of Trafalgar Square. The whole of the West End was aquiver with the ghastly tidings, and vast ant-streams of rail-borne commuters were even now pouring out into the countryside to spread the word to Croydon, Tunbridge Wells, and Beaconsfield.

The Saint’s immunity was not total. While he was not curious enough to have stopped his driver so that he could buy a newspaper, he was too intrigued to resist the impulse to pick up the secondhand tabloid that happened to be lying beside him. But before unfurling it he paused to wonder cynically if he might after all be cheated. Perhaps the editor of this particular journal had suffered a lapse in his sense of values or a misjudgment of public taste and had left the unfortunate Pakistani out of his columns altogether, assuming that the devaluation of some Latin American currency or the murder of a refugee by Russian border guards were matters more worthy of public knowledge?

Simon unfolded the discarded paper and was not disappointed. The Pakistani’s lot was emblazoned across the top of the front page in a barrage of letters two inches high. Below, in small but still bold type, were details calculated to funnel the reader’s eye down into the morass of finer print that made up the body of the sheet.

“Waiter in Soho restaurant nailed to garage wall … dead when discovered this morning … believed to be victim of immigrant smuggling gang …”

Simon’s eye scanned the column from “Grim sight greeted bobbies” through “Shopkeeper heard groans” to “Did he threaten to talk?”

The unpleasant details of the Pakistani’s demise and the subsequent discovery of his spreadeagled body in a temporarily vacant garage held less interest for the Saint than another fact which made him stop and look again when he was about two thirds of the way down the page: “The murdered man was a waiter at the Golden Crescent Restaurant in Soho, where his Pakistani colleagues claimed to know little about him or his origins.”

Simon lowered his foundling journal and leaned forward. The narrow centre panel in the glass partition that separated driver from passenger was already partially lowered. The Saint spoke through the opening.

“I don’t think I’ll stop at the Hilton after all,” he said. “I’ve developed a sudden craving for curry. Do you think we can get to the Golden Crescent Restaurant before midnight even in this traffic? It’s on Newlin street, near Leicester Square.”

The driver was a small ageing ugly man with a pocked nose and a surprisingly cheerful disposition.

“We can try,” he said over his shoulder. “If you’re in a hurry, there’s a hundred other curry houses, and with all respect I don’t see how anybody can tell ‘em apart unless it’s by the different kinds of indigestion you pick up from the …”

Simon was spared any more of his chauffeur’s culinary comments when the current log-jam of cars broke into motion again.

“I think I’ll make it the Golden Crescent just the same,” he said. “I’ve been there before. De gustibus, et cetera …”

“Righto,” the driver answered tolerantly. “Leicester Square it is.”

“And no hurry,” said the Saint.

“Don’t worry.”

The driver shifted very audibly into second gear. Simon let himself be jolted back into his seat again and got on with his study of the evening’s news. The front page treatment of the Pakistani’s death was more visceral than analytical, but at the bottom of the column, in bold print, was a promising announcement: EXCLUSIVE! HOW ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS FALL PREY TO EXTORTION GANG. THE INSIDE STORY, BY TAM ROWAN. SEE PAGE 3.

The Saint saw page three. His driver, in the meantime, was beginning a series of torturous manoeuvres through clogged streets that would eventually enable him to get to Simon’s new destination. The tide of the evening rush was in full flood now. Pedestrians pressed toe to heel on the sidewalks, and the earth trembled to the surge of trains through the subterranean labyrinths.

It was understandable, Simon thought, that men of the Asian lands who wanted to avail themselves in person of Britain’s advantages ran into British objections and were forced to take unofficial routes into the country, thereby putting themselves in the category of “illegal immigrants.” It would seem to anybody observing mid-London late on a weekday afternoon that the island of which it was the capital not only had no room for new inhabitants, but in fact was about to founder under the weight of the ones who were already there.

Simon shut his eyes and ears to the throngs outside his taxi and concentrated on Tam Rowan’s exclusive inside story, which got off the mark with a verbal ring: “I was threatened with death for writing this article.”

Mr. Rowan, it seemed, had taken a professional interest in illegal immigration for some time past, and now had finally managed to introduce his proboscis into circles so touchy about their privacy that they had anonymously offered to detach not only his inquisitive sniffer but also his whole head if he did not lay off immediately.

Rowan revealed these facts in dramatic, rather breathless terms not wholly unflattering to himself, and then got down to a disappointingly vague account of what he had found out in the course of his snooping. The Saint’s impression was that Tam Rowan was not quite as heroically indifferent to the well-being of his highly active nose as he made himself out to be, and that he knew a lot more than he was willing to spill in the Evening Record. Much of what he said was common knowledge: Large numbers of people, especially from Pakistan and India, wanted to come to Britain. Britain, for obvious reasons, could not accommodate and offer jobs to any but a small proportion of those non-Britons who wanted to immigrate. The British government had been forced to restrict the human influx by means of annual quota systems, and to further refine the screening process by giving priority to new arrivals who practised some profession or had some skill that would make them an asset instead of an unemployable liability to the society they wanted to enter. A Pakistani doctor could get in with no trouble. A Pakistani labourer or clerk, to whom the wages of a London Transport ticket collector would have seemed comparable to the wealth of Midas, had almost no chance at all of entering.

It was those with no special qualifications for entry, and who were refused the vital employment permit, who sometimes decided to have a try at getting in anyway. Transportation, by plane to France or Benelux and thence by boat to a deserted stretch of English coast, was the usual method. Fraudulent documents of every necessary kind could be obtained in advance for stunning prices, and once ashore the smuggled man could lose himself so completely that the government authorities admitted that they had almost no chance of locating such an offender after he was inside the country’s borders.

The illegal immigrant, however, did not feel as secure as the government’s pessimistic attitude might seem to have warranted. And that was the crux of the racket the Saint was reading about. A gang of blackmailers was raking in a rich profit from fearful, uninformed, often ignorant Pakistanis and Indians who had sneaked into the country and were vulnerable to threats of exposure. Among the blackmailers were some of the Asians’ own countrymen- and to increase the unsavoury irony, the extortion syndicate got rich both coming and going, since they ran a two-sided business and many of the people they blackmailed were men they had helped slip into England in the first place, thus ingeniously providing themselves with a prelocated flock of sheep for shearing.