The Saint to the Rescue (10 page)

“That’s a great idea,” Mr. Diehl
said, wriggling inside his
sodden shirt. “My staff will spend the
weekend getting a
line on every big tract in this and the next two
counties,
while you and me get a line on them bass.”

It was not to be expected that Mr. Diehl would
fail to
let it leak out as widely as possible that he was going fishing
in the
private plane of no less an international personage
than the Count of
Cristamonte, and as a matter of fact the Saint was counting on it as a minor
but useful contribution
to his plan. Nor was he disappointed or
disconcerted when
Mr. Diehl’s belated qualms at the imminence of entrusting
his life
to the skill of an unknown pilot, and a foreigner at
that, caused the
realtor to make himself unusually conspic
uous at the County
airfield by the noisy irreverence and
raucous humor with which he tried to
cover up his misgivings
and convince the mechanics who were servicing
the whirly-
bird that such expeditions were as commonplace to him as
a trip to
the bathroom. Simon Templar never omitted such
factors from his
calculations, and Mr. Diehl lived up to
everything that he
expected.

After a vertical take-off they first headed
roughly south,
and then swung west somewhere over the outskirts of
Delray.
In only a few minutes the dense development of the coastal
strip had
faded into a hazy horizon and they were over a
weird incredibly
flat-looking wilderness of scrubby green
dappled with myriad
patches of water and sometimes scored
with the thin straight slash of a
drainage canal. This was the
perspective that is always a little startling,
when the blank spaces that take up most of the map of the lower Florida
peninsula
become a visible wilderness, and it can actually
be seen how
comparatively insignificant a rim of civilization
has even yet been
established on the raw land that is still
Straining to hold
itself a few precarious feet out of the sea.

Ed Diehl had seen this vista before, or other
areas indistinguishable from it, from the windows of large commercial
airliners
approaching the ports of West Palm Beach or
Miami, without
thinking even that much about it, for he was
not an imaginative man
except when describing some property or proposition that he was trying to
sell; but before long
he began to feel something radically
unfamiliar about the
view he was getting of it today, and in
another little while
it dawned on him that the important difference was one of
altitude. The big passenger planes roared over at
speeds
that dwarfed the empty
distances, and came slanting down into the serried suburbs from heights that
hardly let one
landmark out of sight
before another could be identified.
Whereas the helicopter, after
crossing the split ribbon of the
new
turnpike at no more than three hundred feet, had grad
ually let down until it was cruising at what might
have
been little more than treetop
height, if there had been any
trees
important enough to judge by. Mr. Diehl was aware
that they made a number of changes of direction, as
the
copter obeyed the impulses of
its pilot with some of the
irresponsibility
of a mechanical hummingbird; but the noise of the rotors made conversation
difficult, and Mr. Diehl did
not
want to seem fussy or uneasy, so he confined himself
to grinning occasionally and trying to look as if
he were
enjoying every minute.

When the engine note finally changed a little, and the heli
copter tilted to a standstill and settled slowly
to the ground
like a rather unsteady
elevator, Mr. Diehl would not even
have
bet on which county he was in. His last orientation point
had been some distant watery horizon that could
equally
well have been the Atlantic
Ocean or the forty-mile diameter
of
Lake Okeechobee: he had not been watching the com
pass, and in any case he was vague about the turns
they
had made since then. But the
Count seemed to know what
he was
doing, and when the overhead blades had shuddered
to silence Mr. Diehl turned to him in a passable
impersona
tion of a man who had gone
along on a dozen or two similar
expeditions.

“You sure know how to drive this
egg-beater, Count,” he
said.

“Luckily for us,” said the Saint, unbuckling his safety
belt
and climbing out. “If anything happened
to me, it wouldn’t be any more use to you than a kid’s tricycle for getting out
of here, would it?”

“You can say that again,” grinned
Mr. Diehl.

“And what chance do you think you’d have
of making it
on foot?”

Mr. Diehl gazed around. They were near the
edge of one
of the small lakes or large ponds that were visible
everywhere
from the air. The ground where they had landed and imme
diately
around where they stood felt firm underfoot, but not
far away water
glistened between blades of sedge that would
have looked like dry
land from above. And everywhere else was nothing but the endless rippling
expanse of wild grass
varied sometimes by a fringe of reeds or a
clump of palmettos, and broken only by an occasional scrawny tree or tuft of
cabbage palm or the bare ghostly trunk of a dead
cypress. Mr. Diehl
tried not to let it impress him.

“I’m glad I won’t have to try.”

“Then,” said the Saint calmly,
“I guess you won’t care how
much I charge for flying you out.”

Mr. Diehl laughed heartily—not because he saw
the joke,
but because he thought he was supposed to.

“I should say not. What’s your
price?”

“At this moment, only forty thousand
dollars.”

Mr. Diehl laughed again, a little more
vaguely.

“That’s mighty generous of you.”

“I’m glad you think so,” said the
Saint, and thereupon
took his spinning rod out of the cabin and
cautiously ex
plored a route to the edge of the open water and began to
fish.

Mr. Diehl watched him somewhat puzzledly for
a few min
utes, and then decided that such incomprehensible foreign
pleasantries were hardly worth racking his brain over. He
fetched his
own rod and tackle box and found a place a
little farther along
to try some casting himself.

It is possible that the bass in that remote
slough were
every whit as innocent and unspoiled as the Count of
Cristamonte
had theorized, but after a time it began to
seem that even if
they had never learned to suspect a hook
they had grown up with
much the same dumb instincts and
habits as other bass, a species which does
most of its feed
ing at dusk and dawn and is inclined to spend the heat of
the day
digesting or snoozing or holed up in finny medita
tion. At any rate, a
wide variety of lures and retrieves failed
to get either of
them a strike, and Mr. Diehl himself could recognize that the only signs of
activity that broke the glassy
water were made by gar. But as the sun rose
higher and
hotter and the bass presumably sank deeper into their
cool
weedy
retreats, Mr. Diehl grew thirstier, and began to think
longingly of the supply of beer which he had seen loaded onto the
helicopter in a portable icebox.

As if in telepathic unanimity, he saw the
Count heading
back at last to the ship, and hastened to join him.

“That,” he said, smacking his lips as he watched the
punc
turing of a can dripping with cool
moisture, “is going to taste awful good.”

“It certainly is,” Simon agreed, and
proceeded to prove
it to himself.

Mr. Diehl was very faintly aware of something
less than
the elaborate olde-worlde courtesy he had read about,
some
where, but he cheerfully reached in to grab and open his
own can,
and was dully startled to find his movement barred
by a steel-cored arm.

“Just a minute, chum,” said the Saint. “Beer is
selling here
for a thousand dollars a
shot.”

Mr. Diehl’s grin this time was a trifle
labored.

“Okay,” he said. “I’ll owe it
to you.”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t give credit.
After all, my price is
strictly based on how much the customer might
be willing
to pay at the moment.”

“You should of told me before we left, and I’d of brought
some cash with me.”

“Oh, I’m not as difficult as that. Your
check is good
enough.”

“Too bad I didn’t bring my check-book
either.”

“I was afraid you mightn’t, so I brought
one for you. This
is one of your banks, isn’t it?”

Mr. Diehl stared stupidly at the printed pad
that was con
jured almost from nowhere to be flourished under his
nose.
In the circumstances, he was prepared to extend himself
almost
infinitely to be a good joe and go along with a gag,
but this was rapidly
getting beyond him.

“Yes, it is,” he said strenuously.
“But frankly, Count, I
must apologize if I missed the joke
somewhere—”

“Suppose you start getting back on the
beam by dropping
that ‘Count’ business, Ed,” Simon suggested kindly,
and it
was only then that he shed the last vestiges of an accent
which had
been getting progressively thinner with every
sentence. “I’m
going to give you a big moment for your memoirs. I am the Saint, and I’m giving
you the priceless
favor of my personal attention in this project of
collecting
a small assessment which I’ve decided that you should pay
on your
ill-gotten gains.”

“You sound crazier every minute,”
Mr. Diehl mumbled,
though in a still crazier way this was beginning to sound
like the
most real nightmare he had ever experienced. “So
you’re the Saint. Some
kind of fancy crook. All right, you
kidnaped me—”

“I don’t remember it that way
,”
Simon
corrected him
genially. “There was no violence or intimidation. In
fact, you
told everyone who’d listen to you at the airport how much
you were
going to enjoy this trip with me.”

“But if you keep me here—”

“I never said I wanted to keep you here.
I merely told you
how much I’d charge to fly you out. That’s my privilege,
as
a free agent in a free country.”

Mr. Diehl glared at him through a kind of
fog. There was
a purely mental haze as well as the emotional murk in it,
steaming
off a much larger mass of incredibilia than his
limited mentality
could assimilate at one gulp,
a)
The Saint
was only a
mythological character anyhow; and
b)
even if
he wasn’t, this
couldn’t be happening to him, Ed Diehl;
and
c)
even if
it was happening, there must be some flaw
in the structure of
such an outrageous swindle. But for the
moment the lean
corsair’s face and figure that confronted
him were fantastically
convincing.

“You won’t get a nickel out of me,”
he said, and tried to
overcome an infuriating feeling of futility.
“You and your
Count of Cristamonte story—”

“I didn’t try to get a nickel out of you
with that story,”
said the Saint virtuously, “because that
would have been
fraudulent. But there’s nothing illegal about using a
phony
name just for fun.” He drank again from the can, deeply
and with
relish, and then made another raid on the icechest
for a square plastic
box, from which he extracted a thick
and nourishing sandwich. “Pardon
me if I have lunch,” he
said. “There are plenty more of these, by
the way, and to
you they are only two thousand dollars each.”

Mr. Diehl could not have explained why this
was the
precise
twitch that snapped the rein of his congenitally crude
and choleric temper, but it was probably far more a general
sense
of frustration than any specific affront that made him
crowd forward again with his fists bunched and his face
purpling.