The Saint on the Spanish Main (9 page)

“Herb!” Vosper said. “I want
you to meet Lucy’s
latest addition to the menagerie which already contains
Astron and me—Mr. Simon
Templar, known as the Saint. Templar—your host, Mr. Wexall.”

“Pleased to meet you,” said Herbert
Wexall, shaking
hands briskly.

“And this is Pauline Stone,”
Vosper went on, indicat
ing the nubile brunette. “The tired business man’s consolation.
Whatever Lucy can’t supply, she can.”

“How do you do,” said the girl
stoically.

Her dark eyes lingered momentarily on the
Saint’s
torso, and he noticed that her mouth was very full and
soft.

“Going for a swim?” Wexall said, as
if he had heard
nothing. “Good. Then I’ll see you at lunch, in a few
minutes.”

He trotted busily on his way, and Vosper
ushered the
Saint to the beach by another flight of steps that led
directly
down from the verandah. The house com
manded a small half-moon bay, and
both ends of the crescent of sand were naturally guarded by abrupt rises
of jagged
coral rock.

“Herbert is the living example of how
really stupid a
successful business man can be,” Vosper said
tirelessly.
“He was just an office-boy of some kind in the
Blaise
outfit when he got smart enough to woo and win the
boss’s
daughter. And from the flying start, he was clever
enough to really pay
his way by making Blaise In
dustries twice as big as even the old man himself
had
been able to do. And yet he’s dumb enough to think that
Lucy won’t
catch on to the extracurricular functions of that busty secretary sooner or
later—or that when she does he won’t be out on a cold doorstep in the rain…
.
No, I’m not going in. I’ll hold your drink for you.”

Simon ran down into the surf and churned
seawards
for a couple of hundred yards, then turned over and
paddled
lazily back, coordinating his impressions with
ideal amusement. The
balmy water was still refreshing
after the heat of the morning, and when he
came out the
breeze had become brisk enough to give him the luxury
of a
fleeting shiver as the wetness started to evaporate
from his tanned skin.

He crossed the sand to the Greek patio,
where Floyd Vosper was on duty again at the bar in a strategic posi
tion to
keep his own needs supplied with a minimum of
effort. Discreet
servants were setting up a buffet table. Janet Blaise and Reg Herrick had
transferred their gin
rummy game and were playing at a table right
under the
column where Astron had resumed his seat and his
cataleptic
meditations—a weird juxtaposition of which
the three members all
seemed equally unconscious.

Simon took Lucy Wexall a Martini and said
with another glance at the tableau: “Where did you find him?”

“The people who brought him to
California sent him
to me when he had to leave the States. They gave me
such a
good time when I was out there, I couldn’t refuse
to do something for
them. He’s writing a book, you
know, and of course he can’t go back to that
dreadful
place he
came from, wherever it is, before he has a chance to finish it in reasonable
comfort.”

Simon avoided discussing this assumption, but he
said: “What’s it like, having a resident
prophet in the
house?”

“He’s very interesting. And quite as
drastic as Floyd,
in his own way, in summing up people. You ought to
talk to
him.”

Arthur Gresson came over with an hors
d’oeuvre
plate of smoked salmon and stuffed eggs from the buffet.
He said: “Anyone you meet at Lucy’s is interesting,
Mr.
Templar. But if you don’t mind my saying so, you
have it all over the
rest of ‘em. Who’d ever think we’d
find the Saint looking for crime in the Bahamas?”

“I hope no one will think I’m looking
for crime,” Si
mon said deprecatingly, “any more than I take it for
granted that you’re looking for oil.”

“That’s where you’d be wrong,”
Gresson said. “As a
matter of fact, I am.”

The Saint raised an eyebrow.

“Well, I can always learn something. I’d
never heard
of oil in the Bahamas.”

“I’m not a bit surprised. But you will,
Mr. Templar,
you will.” Gresson sat down, pillowing his round
stom
ach on his thighs. “Just think for a moment about some
of the
places you have heard of, where there is certainly
oil. Let me mention
them in a certain order. Mexico, Texas, Louisiana, and the recent strike in the
Florida
Everglades. We might even include Venezuela in the
south. Does that suggest
anything to you?”

“Hm-mm,” said the Saint thoughtfully.

“A pattern,” Gresson said. “A
vast central pool of oil
somewhere under the Gulf of Mexico, with oil
wells dip
ping into it from the edges of the bowl, where the geo
logical
strata have also been forced up. Now think of the
islands of the
Caribbean as the eastern edge of the same
bowl. Why not?”

“It’s a hell of an interesting
theory,” said the Saint.

“Mr. Wexall thinks so too, and I hope
he’s going into
partnership with me.”

“Herbert can afford it,” intruded
the metallic sneering voice of Floyd Vosper. “But before you decide to
buy in, Templar, you’d better
check with New York
about the time when Mr.
Gresson thought he could dig
gold in
the Catskills.”

“Shut up, Floyd,” said Mrs. Wexall,
“and get me an
other Martini.”

Arthur Granville Gresson chuckled in his
paunch like
a
happy Buddha.

“What a guy!” he said. “What
a ribber. And he gets
everyone mad. He kills me!”

Herbert Wexall came down from the verandah
and beamed around. As a sort of tacit announcement that he
had put
aside his work for the day, he had changed into
a sport shirt on
which various exotic animals were de
picted wandering through an idealized
jungle, but he retained his business trousers and business shoes and busi
ness
face.

“Well,” he said, inspecting the
buffet and addressing
the world at large. “Let’s come and get
it whenever
we’re hungry.”

As if a spell had been snapped, Astron
removed him
self from the contemplation of the infinite, descended
from his
pillar, and began to help himself to cottage cheese and caviar on a foundation
of lettuce leaves.

Simon drifted in the same direction, and
found
Pauline Stone beside him, saying: “What do you feel like, Mr.
Templar?”

Her indication of having come off duty was a
good
deal more radical than her employer’s. In fact, the bath
ing suit
which she had changed into seemed to be based
more on the French
minimums of the period than on
any British tradition. There was no doubt
that she filled
it opulently; and her question amplified its suggestive
ness with
undertones which the Saint felt it wiser not to
challenge at that moment.

“There’s so much to drool over,”
he said, referring
studiously to the buffet table. “But that green
turtle
aspic looks
pretty good to me.”

She stayed with him when he carried his plate
to a table as thoughtfully diametric as possible from the
berth
chosen by Floyd Vosper, even though Astron had
already settled
there in temporary solitude. They were
promptly joined by
Reg Herrick and Janet Blaise, and
slipped at once into an easy exchange
of banalities.

But even then it was impossible to escape
Vosper’s tongue. It was not many minutes before his saw-edged voice whined
across the patio above the general level of
harmless chatter:

“When are you going to tell the Saint’s
fortune,
Astron? That ought to be worth hearing.”

There was a slightly embarrassed lull, and
then ev
eryone went on talking again; but Astron looked at the
Saint
with a gentle smile and said quietly: “You are a
seeker after truth,
Mr. Templar, as I am. But when in
stead of truth you find falsehood, you will destroy it
with a sword. I only say ‘This is falsehood, and
God
will destroy it. Do not come too
close, lest you be de
stroyed with
it.’ “

“Okay,” Herrick growled, just as
quietly. “But if
you’re talking about Vosper, it’s about time
someone
destroyed
it.”

“Sometimes,” Astron said,
“God places His arrow in
the hand of a man.”

For a few moments that seemed unconscionably
long
nobody said anything; and then before the silence
spread
beyond their small group the Saint said casually:
“Talking of
arrows—I hear that the sport this season is
to go hunting sharks
with a bow and arrow.”

Herrick nodded with a healthy grin.

“It’s a lot of fun. Would you like to try
it?”

“Reggie’s terrific,” Janet Blaise
said. “He shoots like
a regular Howard Hill, but of course he uses
a bow that
nobody
else can pull.”

“I’d like to try,” said the Saint,
and the conversation slid harmlessly along the tangent he had provided.

After lunch everyone went back to the beach,
with the
exception of Astron, who retired to put his morning’s
meditations
on paper. Chatter surrendered to an after
noon torpor which even subdued Vosper.

An indefinite while later, Herrick aroused
with a yell
and
plunged roaring into the sea, followed by Janet Blaise. They were followed by
others, including the
Saint. An interlude
of aquatic brawling developed some
how
into a pick-up game of touch football on the beach,
which was delightfully confused by recurrent
arguments
about who was supposed to
be on which of the unequal
sides. This boisterous nonsense churned up so
much
sand for the still freshening breeze
to spray over Floyd
Vosper, who by
that time had drunk enough to be trying
to sleep under the big beach umbrella, that the misan
thropic
oracle finally got back on his feet.

“Perhaps,” he said witheringly,
“I had better get out
of the way of you perennial juveniles before
you convert
me into a dune.”

He stalked off along the beach and lay down
again about a hundred yards away. Simon noticed him still
there, flat
on his face and presumably unconscious,
when the game eventually
broke up through a confused
water-polo phase to leave everyone gasping
and laugh
ing and dripping on the patio with no immediate resurge
of inspiration. It was the last time he saw the unpopular
Mr. Vosper
alive.

“Well,” Arthur Gresson observed,
mopping his short
round body with a towel, “at least one of us seems
to
have enough
sense to know when to lie down.”

“And to choose the only partner who’d do
it with
him,” Pauline added vaguely.

Herbert Wexall glanced along the beach in the
direc
tion that they both referred to, then glanced for further
inspiration
at the waterproof watch he was still wearing.

“It’s almost cocktail time,” he
said. “How about it,
anyone?”

His wife shivered, and said: “I’m
starting to freeze my
tail off. It’s going to blow like a
son-of-a-gun any
minute. Let’s all go in and get some clothes on first—
then we’ll be set for the evening. You’ll stay for supper
of course, Mr. Templar?”

“I hadn’t planned to make a day of
it,” Simon pro
tested diffidently, and was promptly overwhelmed from
all quarters.

He found his way back to the room where he
had left
his clothes without the benefit of Floyd Vosper’s chatty
courier service, and made leisured and satisfactory use
of the
freshwater shower and monogrammed towels.
Even so, when he
sauntered back into the living room, he almost had the feeling of being lost in
a strange and
empty house, for all the varied individuals who had peo
pled the
stage so vividly and vigorously a short time
before had vanished
into other and unknown seclusions
and had not yet returned.