The Saint on the Spanish Main (29 page)

Rawl only expected his shaft, when he fired it,
to in
furiate the creature. Then it would grab Simon and April, who were well
within its reach. And Duncan
Rawl would take credit for having valiantly
tried to save
them… .

The Saint’s ribs ached from the
impossibility of laugh
ing.

Duncan Rawl fired his spear.

It twinkled like a silver arrow, straight
down at
Marilyn’s great amorphous body. And then the thing
happened
that curdled and froze the laughter in Simon’s
chest.

As if the monster had watched everything with
its
basilisk eye, and hadn’t been fooled for a second, know
ing
exactly where the thing that stung it had come from
—
but how
preposterous and fantastic could anything be?
—it released the rock
it sprawled on and shot straight
upwards like an outlandish rocket. Its
tentacles lashed
around Rawl like enormous whips, and where they
touched
they clung. He looked like a pygmy in its stu
pendous eight-armed
grip. One of the arms coiled
around his head, then writhed away again,
taking with it
his mask and breathing hose. The Saint and April had
one last
dreadful glimpse of his face, before the final
horror was blotted
out in a tremendous cloud of ink.

6

“It’s a good thing I only want you to
do some swim
ming, and not as a technical expert,” Jack Donohue
said
caustically, “if you can’t tell a real octopus from a
prop.”

“I thought it looked extraordinarily
lifelike,” said the
Saint. “But I’ve heard they can do
anything in Holly
wood. I should be more careful what publicity I
read.”

They sat out on the terrace of Bluebeard’s
Castle
again, watching the lights kindle below them as the brief
twilight
deepened over the town. April was with them,
but she was not talking much.

“You’re lucky I don’t have to send you
a bill that’d
keep you broke for three years,” Donohue said.
“Some
fisherman found Marilyn drifting around Cruz Bay. She
wasn’t damaged much. But I’m going to be more careful
the next time anyone
comes to me to borrow an artificial
octopus.”

“The only way I can figure it, the real
one must have
had an unsatisfactory tussle with her,” Simon said,
“whether he saw her as an unwilling sweetheart or a ri
val male.
Anyway, before he found out she was only a
prop, he’d torn her
loose from her moorings, and she
floated away. The real octopus liked the look
of the spot
and decided to settle down there himself.”

“And why he didn’t grab you for
breakfast as soon as
you came within reach, I’ll never know.”

“Maybe he’d just had a good breakfast
and wasn’t
hungry. Didn’t you ever go fishing and wonder why
sometimes they’ll bite anything
and other times they
seem to be on a hunger
strike? Of course when Rawl
shot a
spear into it, that was different. Even an octopus
must have its
pride.”

“And it was a break for you that it was
smart enough
to know who shot at it.”

“It’s too bad your camera crew wasn’t
there. It was a
better
scene than you’ll ever direct.”

April shuddered.

“Please don’t,” she said. “I know he meant it to
kill
us, but I’ll have nightmares every
time I remember that
thing wooshing
up at him, I never knew they could move
so fast, and his face …”

“Don’t let that Saint name fool
you,” Donohue said.
“He’s a ghoul. No, I take that back.
He’s a thing ghouls
won’t speak to.”

“He is not!” she said indignantly. “As soon as he’d
got me up to the boat, he went back to see
if he couldn’t do anything, even though all he had was a knife. But he
couldn’t
see anything.”

“All right,” Donohue said. “He’s a hero. But don’t
forget to count those gold bars every time he
goes near
them.”

“He can have anything he wants,”
April said.

Jack Donohue finished his Peter Dawson and
stood
up.

“I’m expecting a call from the studio,
and I’ve got to
work on the script tonight,” he said. “But
before I ruin
your evening by leaving you, would someone tell me
why the
Saint always ends up with a billion dollars and
the most beautiful girl in sight?”

“Doesn’t that go with every old treasure
story?” said the Saint.

HAITI:

The Questing Tycoon

193

It was intolerably hot in Port-au-Prince; for
the capital
city of Haiti lies at the back of a bay, a gullet twenty
miles deep beyond which the opening jaws of land extend a hundred and
twenty miles still farther to the west and northwest, walled in by steep high
hills, and thus
perfectly sheltered from every normal shift of the trade
winds which temper the climate of most parts of the
Antilles. The
geography which made it one of the finest
natural harbors in the Caribbean had
doubtless ap
pealed strongly to the French
buccaneers who founded
the original
settlement; but three centuries later, with the
wings of Pan American Airways to replace the sails of a
frigate, a no less authentic pirate could be
excused for
being more interested in
escaping from the sweltering
heat pocket than in dallying to admire the
anchorage.

As soon as Simon Templar had completed his
errands
in the town, he climbed into the jeep he had borrowed
and headed
back up into the hills.

Knowing what to expect of Port-au-Prince at
that
time of year, he had passed up the ambitious new hotels
of the capital
in favor of the natural air-conditioning of
the Ch
â
telet des Fleurs, an unpretentious but com
fortable
inn operated by an American whom he had met
on a previous visit,
only about fifteen miles out of the
city but five thousand feet above the
sea-level heat. He
could feel it getting cooler as the road climbed, and in
a
surprisingly
short time it was like being in another
latitude.
But the scenery did not seem to become any milder to correspond with the relief
of temperature: the
same brazen sun
bathed rugged brownish slopes with
few
trees to soften their parched contours. Most of the
houses he passed, whether a peasant’s one-room
cottage
or an occasional expensive ch
â
teau, were built of ir
regular blocks of the same native stone, so that
they had
an air of being literally
carved out of the landscape; but sometimes in a sudden valley or clinging to a
distant hillside there would be a palm-thatched cabin of rough
raw timbers that looked as if it had been
transplanted
straight from Africa.
And indisputably transplanted
from
Africa were the straggling files of ebony people,
most of them women, a few plutocrats adding their
own
weight to the already fantastic
burdens of incredibly
powerful little
donkeys, but the majority laden fabulous
ly themselves with great baskets balanced on their
heads, who bustled cheerfully along the rough
shoulders
of the road.

He came into the little town of P
é
tionville, drove past
the pleasant
grass-lawned square dominated by the very French-looking white church, and
headed on up the
corkscrew highway towards Kenscoff. And six kilometers
further on he met Sibao.

As he rounded one of the innumerable curves
he saw a little crowd collected, much as some fascinating ob
struction
would create a knot in a busy string of ants.
Unlike other groups
that he had passed before where a
few individuals from one of the
ant-lines would fall out
by the wayside to rest and gossip, this
cluster had a focal
point
and an air of gravity and concern that made him
think first of an automobile accident, although there wa
s no car or truck in sight. He slowed up auto
matically, trying to see what it was all about as
he went
by, like almost any normal
traveler; but when he
glimpsed the
unmistakable bright color of fresh blood
he pulled over and stopped, which perhaps few drivers
on that road would have troubled to do.

The chocolate-skinned young woman whom the
oth
ers were gathered around had a six-inch gash in the calf
of one
leg. From the gestures and pantomime of her
companions rather
than the few basic French word-
sounds which his ear could pick out of their
excited jabber of Creole, he concluded that a loose stone had rolled
under her
foot as she walked, taking it from under her
and causing her to
slip sideways down off the shoulder,
where another sharp pointed stone
happened to stick
out at exactly the right place and angle to slash her
like
a crude dagger. The mechanics of the accident were not
really
important, but it was an ugly wound, and the
primitive first-aid
efforts of the spectators had not been
able to stanch the
bleeding.

Simon saw from the tint of the blood that no
artery
had been cut. He made a pressure bandage with his
handkerchief
and two strips ripped from the tail of his shirt; but it was obvious that a few
stitches would be necessary for a proper repair. He picked the girl up and
carried
her to the jeep.

“Nous allons chercher un m
é
decin,”
he said; and he
must have been understood, for
there was no protest
over the abduction as
he turned the jeep around and
headed
back towards P
é
tionville.

The doctor whom he located was learning
English and
was anxious to practice it. He contrived to keep Simon
around while he cleaned and sewed up and dressed the
cut, and then conveniently mentioned his
fee. Simon
paid it, although the young woman
tried to protest, and
helped her
back into the jeep.

His good-Samaritan gesture seemed to have
become
slightly harder to break off than it had been to get into;
but with
nothing but time on his hands he was cheerfully
resigned to letting
it work itself out.

“Where were you going?” he asked
in French, and she
pointed up the road.

“L
à
-haut.”

The reply was given with a curious dignity,
but with
out presumption. He was not sure at what point he had
begun to
feel that she was not quite an ordinary peasant girl. She wore the same faded
and formless kind of cot
ton dress, perhaps cleaner than some, but
not cleaner
than all the others, for it was not uncommon for them to
be
spotless. Her figure was slimmer and shapelier than
most, and her
features had a patrician mould that re
minded him of ancient
Egyptian carvings. They had re
mained masklike and detached throughout the
min
istrations of the doctor, although Simon knew that some
of it must have hurt like hell.

He drove up again to the place where he had
found
her. Two other older women were sitting there, and they
greeted her as the jeep
stopped. She smiled and an
swered, proudly
displaying the new white bandage on
her leg. She started to get out.

He saw that there were three baskets by the
roadside where the two women had waited. He stopped her, and
said:
“You should not walk far today, especially with a
load. I can take you
all the way.”

“Vous
ê
tes tr
è
s gentil.”

She spoke French very stiffly and shyly and
correctly,
like a child remembering lessons. Then she spoke
fluently
to the other women in Creole, and they hoisted the third
basket between them and put it in the back of the jeep.
Her shoes
were still on top of its miscellany of fruits and
vegetables, according
to the custom of the country,
which regards shoes as too valuable to be
worn out with
mere
trampling from place to place, especially over
rough rocky paths.