The Saint Bids Diamonds (24 page)

A couple of seconds crawled into infinity while he looked at her and she looked at him.

She nodded pleasantly.

“Buenas noches,” she said politely.

“Buenas noches,” responded the Saint, with the same old-world courtesy, and groped his way out into the street as she went on up the stairs.

After a few minutes’ walking he found himself in familiar surroundings and realised that he was in the street which contained the back entrance of the Hotel Orotava. He let himself in and threaded the labyrinth of passages through to the front of the hotel, running the gauntlet of the inquisitive eyes of a chef, a waiter and a pantry boy, with the impermeable aplomb of a man for whom Fate would have to work pretty hard to devise any new ordeals.

Joris Vanlinden opened his eyes as the Saint entered the room, but he did not stir. Simon went up to the bed, and the old man watched him without any expression.

“How are you feeling?” Simon asked quietly.

Vanlinden’s lips moved fractionally, so that without uttering a word his face answered that he was quite contented, that he was grateful that someone was being kind to him, that he had nothing on his mind.

“You’re going to see Christine,” said the Saint.

A slow smile came to the old man’s lips, and a little life came back into his gaze.

“When?” he whispered.

“Very soon.” Simon saw the intelligence beginning to fade again, and went on quickly: “You’re going away from here. On a ship. With Christine. Tonight. You and Christine are going away together.”

“Now?”

“Yes.”

Vanlinden nodded and tried to rise. The Saint helped him and kept an arm round him all the way down the stairs. It was like leading a man in a trance: Vanlinden would go where he was taken, once the stimulus of Christine’s name had started him moving, but if Simon stopped the other stopped also, waiting for him with the patience of a man for whom time and initiative have lost all meaning.

In the hall, Simon called the conserje from behind his desk.

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

“Pero seńor,” 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 Seńorita 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 Cafe 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’ 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… .

“ĄMuy 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.

“ĄHolá, Julian!” He held out his hand. “żQue tal?”

“Muy bien. żY usted?”

“Como siempre.”

The lad went on grinning at him inarticulately.

“And the boy?” Simon asked.

“ĄEstupendo! 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.

IX
How Simon Templar Enjoyed a Joke,
and How Mr Lauber Was Not Amused
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.

“ĄToma!” said the Saint imperatively. It was the last word he could say before Graner was within earshot. He added in English: “Get me some change.”

“El seńor 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 sometime, 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, senior.”

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.”