The Saint on the Spanish Main (12 page)

Major Fanshire fingered his upper lip.

“I don’t know,” he began; and then,
as Arthur Gran
ville Gresson began to rise like a floating balloon from
his chair, and the ebony-faced sergeant moved to in
tercept
him like a well-disciplined automaton, he knew.

JAMAICA:

The Black Commissar

72

The white crescent of Montego Bay was under
their wings, and most of the passengers on the Pan-American
clipper
who were disembarking at Kingston could be
identified by a
certain purposeful stirring as they
straightened and reassembled
themselves and their impedimenta in preparation for the landing a few minutes
ahead.
Simon Templar, who saw no reason for not trav
eling from one
vacation spot to another in vacation
clothes, was ready for Jamaica
without further prepara
tion, wearing nothing more troublesome than
sandals,
slacks, and a sport shirt tastefully decorated with a
pattern of rainbow-hued tropical fish circulating through a
forest of
graceful corals and vivid submarine flora; but he calculated that he had time
for one more cigarette
before the “no smoking” sign went
on, and lighted it
without haste.

The woman who had been sitting next to him, a
cold-
eyed and stoutly corseted dowager of the type which
travel
agencies so skillfully keep out of the pictures in
their romantically
illustrated brochures, had temporari
ly left her seat, presumably for basic
adjustments in the
privacy
of the ladies’ room, and Simon thought it was
only
she returning when he felt someone loom over him
and settle in the adjoining chair. He continued to gaze
idly at the scenery below his window until a voice
brought his head around—rather
abruptly, because not
only had that
forbidding female maintained a majestic
silence throughout the trip, but
the voice was much
deeper then even she
could plausibly have possessed,
and moreover it addressed him by name.

“Excuse me, Mr. Saint, sah.”

Simon looked into a grinning ebony face that
was
puzzlingly familiar, but which he somehow couldn’t as
sociate
at all with the spotless white shirt, port-wine
shantung jacket,
hand-painted tie, and smartly creased
dove-gray trousers which the young
negro wore.

“Bet you don’t recognize me, sah.”

Simon felt a little embarrassed, more so than
if a
white man had posed him the same challenge, but he smiled amiably.

“Yes, I know I’ve seen you before. But where?”

“Johnny, sah. I was a sparrin’ partner
with Steve
Nelson, up in New York, the time you and he had that
go with
the Masked Angel. Remember now, Mr. Saint?”

“Of course.” Now it all came back.
“But go easy with
that name, will you? I’m trying to live a
quiet and peace
ful
life for a while.”

“I’m sorry, sah.”

“I don’t think anyone else is.
…
Well,
I’ve certainly
got
an excuse for not recognizing you. I don’t think I
ever saw you before with anything but trunks on. What
are you
doing now, and where are you going?”

“Home, sah.”

The Saint raised his eyebrows with pleasant
interest,
but he could not escape a faint flicker of guilt that
touched
him at a deeper level. Of course he remembered
Johnny; a nice,
well-mannered, good-natured, hardworking colored boy around the gym, a willing
but not
gifted fighter … and that was all. As a being of a different race
and color, his background, his past, his per
sonal private present
and his unpredictable future, had
seemed as remote and insignificant,
except as they might affect any immediate contact with him, as the private life
of a mounted policeman’s horse. It was strange how in
curious
one could be about any fellow human, especially
one whose complexion
made him an everlasting
stranger.

“Home?” said the Saint.
“Where’s that?”

“Jamaica, sah. I was born here.” The
man added,
with an odd touch of pride: “I’m a Maroon.”

Perhaps hardly one listener in ten thousand would
have had any answer but the equivalent of
“What?” or
“So
what?” to such a statement, but Simon Templar was
that one. It was
one of those coincidences that were
almost
commonplace in his life that he not only knew
what a Maroon was, but even had some elements of an immediate interest
in that little-known political survival
of the old wild history of the
West Indies.

Johnny, however, had already interpreted the
Saint’s
minuscule stiffening of surprise as a normal reaction of perplexity,
and was hastening to explain: “The original
Maroons were slaves
who ran away, back at the beginnin
‘ of the eighteenth century, an’ took
to the hills.
When there was enough of ‘em, they kept fightin’ the
British troops who tried to round ‘em up, till it was just
like a
war. They done so well that finally the British
Empire had to give up
an’ make a peace treaty with ‘em.”

“I’ve heard about them,” said the Saint. “They got
their freedom, and a piece of the island set aside
for
them and their descendants for
ever, sort of like an Indi
an reservation
in the States. Only I was told that they
make their own laws and appoint their own rulers and
nobody can interfere with them in any way, just as
if
they were an independent little
country of their own.”

“That’s right,” Johnny said.
“And that’s our country,
right underneath you now.”

Simon looked down through the window. Below
them
was a welter of steeply rounded hills, reminiscent in
shape of
a mass of oldfashioned beehives jampacked together. Over almost every foot of
surface the jungle grew
like a coat of curly green wool above which
only the tops
of the tallest trees raised little knots like the mounds
in
a pebble-weave fabric. Only here and there was the
denseness
broken by a smoother slope that seemed to be
open grass, a tiny
brown patch of cultivation, the shiny
specks of a banana patch, or the
silver thread of a
stream exposed on an outcropping of bare boulders; but
most of it
looked as wild and impenetrable as any ter
rain that the Saint had ever seen.

“They call it the Cockpit,” Johnny
said. “I dunno
why,
‘cept that it’s sure seen a lot of fightin’. Doesn’t
look like it’s changed much, though I was only twelve
when my dad took me away to the States.”

“What makes you want to go back?” Simon asked.

“Well, sah, he died soon after that, so
I didn’t get to
go to school much more. I was too busy hustlin’ for a
livin’.
Bein’ a sparrin’ partner was just another job.
When I found I didn’t have what it takes
to be a top
fighter, I gave that up. I done
all kinds of things, from shoeshine boy to cook an’ butler. But by the time I
met you, I’d decided I wanted to be something better, an’ I started savin’ my
money an’ goin’ to night school. Presently I learned enough an’ saved up
enough to pass the
entrance exam to
Tuskegee an’ afford to go there. Got
me a degree a year ago. I know I’ll
never talk like a
college man, that’s a bad
habit I’ve had too long, but I
sure
learned all I could.”

“You’ve got enough to be proud of,”
said the Saint.
“But that still doesn’t tell me why you aren’t going
on
from there to
something better in the States.”

“Well, sah, you know as well as I do how
it is up
there. There’s a limit to what a colored man can
do.”
Johnny
spoke with devastating candor, without in
feriority
or rancor. “Some of the fellows at college
always think they’re goin’ to change the world. I never felt big enough
for that; but I done plenty of thinkin’.
After I got out an’ tried it, I knew I was always goin’ to
have to just be the best I could among colored
people. So then I began thinkin’, well, if that’s how it is, why
don’t I go back an’ do that with my own colored
people,
the Maroons, where I came
from? Maybe I’m needed
more down
here, where some negroes go to English uni
versities, but others are more illiterate even than the poorest
share-cropper in Mississippi.
…
I dunno, I
thought, maybe I can help more of ‘em to be ready when
that
change in the world comes.”

The sincerity in his brown eyes was so
cloudless and complete that Simon found himself hopelessly assaying
a medley
of assorted answers, afraid to utter any of them
spontaneously lest
he sound smug and patronizing.

In that paralysis of fumbling sensitivity,
the Deadly Dowager herself came to his rescue. Both Simon and
Johnny
simultaneously became aware of her, freshly
girdled and painted,
lowering over her usurped seat
and transfixing them alternately with the
daggers of her arctic eyes.

Even before the Saint himself could adjust to
that un
expected
additional problem, Johnny was scrambling
out
of the chair with the ingrained quick defensive hu
mility that not even a degree from Tuskegee had
eradicated, that was somehow a subtle humiliation
to both races.

“Excuse me, ma’am. And thank you for
listenin’,
sah.”

There was little that the Saint could do,
the world not
yet having changed. The illuminated sign on the forward
bulkhead
was on, and the stewardess was already intoning: “Will you fasten your
seat belts, please. And no
smoking, please.” But little as it was, Simon did it.

He put out his hand, directly across the
entering
matriarch’s midsection.

“It was nice seeing you again, Johnny.
Maybe I’ll run
into
you again—in the Cockpit.”

Then the dame surged like a tidal wave into
her seat.

“Well!”
she said,
condensing innumerable volumes
into a single syllable.

The Saint’s only consolation was that for
the remain
ing few minutes of the flight she stayed as far away
from
him as if he had been labeled the carrier of a contagious
disease, which gave him a
comfortable excess over the
normally limited
amount of elbow room.

2

David Farnham was at the airport, a sturdy
and un
mistakably British figure in open-necked shirt and khaki walking
shorts, pipe in mouth, bright eyes and bald head
shining. Under his
benevolent aegis the formalities of
immigration and customs passed Simon
through as if on
a fast-rolling conveyor belt, and in a matter of mere
minutes
they were in Farnham’s little English car, cir
cling around the harbor
and edging into the crowded
clattering streets of the town.

“I hope my wire wasn’t too much of a
shock to you,”
said the Saint. “When you talked to me at that
cocktail
party in
Nassau, you probably never thought I’d take
you
up on your invitation.”

“On the contrary, I’m delighted that you finally did. I
always believed you would, and it’s nice of you to
prove I was right.”

“I didn’t expect you to meet me, though.
Won’t the
Government
mind you taking this time off?”

“Government has nothing to say about
it,” Farnham
told him sedately. “I’ve managed to retire at last.
They
wanted me to carry on, but having reached the age of
sixty they
couldn’t prevent me getting out. I’ve been
looking forward to
this for a long time.”

Simon regarded him speculatively. He knew,
although
David by no means told everyone, that his host had been
a
schoolteacher before he had been practically drafted
into the service of
the Colonial Secretariat, on an in
definite leave of absence from his
blackboard which had
been extended for so long that his original
calling was
often forgotten. Placed in charge of almost every
activity
which could be classified under the broad heading of
General
Progress, he had brought so much honest en
thusiasm and kindly wisdom
to his job that the temporary appointment had drifted into a
de facto
per
manency.