He leaned against the galley bulkhead and flipped ashes fastidiously into the sink.
“Of course you didn’t give yourself away by inviting me to come over with you. I didn’t begin to smell the rat until you started on the tirade against Uckrose. You had a good idea there, but you overdid it. It just didn’t ring quite true that you should be so bitter about a rich slob who only gave you a nice bit of business every year, even if he was a bum sportsman. It started me wondering what else there could be behind your attitude. And then, when we got here, you were alone with him just long enough to have tipped him off to the build-up you’d given me, and he had to carry on with the gag. Only he overdid it too. I just couldn’t see a successful retired business man being quite such an uninhibited boor…I didn’t see all this in a flash, but it filtered through gradually. And I even began to see what was developing ahead when you started the special advance work for Gloria—almost pimping for her, if I may be so rude.”
O’Kevin glared up at him with his head twisted sideways, mutely, having little choice about doing it in any other way, but the Saint was quite content to conduct a monologue.
“Now the only question is, what is the racket?” he said. “Of course I could probably get you to tell me by sticking toothpicks under your toenails, or something old-fashioned like that, but it’s more fun to make it an intellectual exercise. So I shall try first to do it in my head. Listen carefully, Patsy, because you may have to explain to the others how I did it without any help from you.”
He paused a moment for a final review of his thoughts, because he would always be proud of this feat of virtuosity if he brought it off.
“It has to involve some form of merchandise, because nothing else could pay off through Bimini. It must be very valuable to account for the guard and for all the concern about it. It should be something that a man could bring here from Europe, which he could land with in Nassau without any trouble, because the Customs there never bother with the baggage of American tourists. And then it only has to be put on board a charter boat working out of Miami, which would only get a perfunctory going-over by the Customs there if it was just coming back from Bimini. The two most compact and likely possibilities are narcotics and jewelry. Unless Uckrose has invented himself a completely phony background, which is less probable, the odds point to jewels.”
He took a last drag at his cigarette and flicked it through the porthole.
“Then where are these jewels? Not at the hotel, because Clinton and Gloria and Vincent all went out with you this morning, and they’d never have risked me burgling their rooms or even the hotel safe while they were away if there’d been anything there to find. But all kinds of work has been done to take suspicion off the Colleen—and you. Des is so obviously innocent that he’s an extra asset to the camouflage. So this boat should be the safest place in sight. And exactly where on the boat, if I’m to find them without taking her apart?”
O’Kevin seemed to lie even more motionless than his bonds required, as if frozen by an almost superstitious fascination. And the Saint smiled at him like a benevolent swami.
“Well, I remember something you mentioned more than once when you were knocking Uckrose, about how you’d have to take his fish back with you—any kind of fish. It seems like too fanciful a touch for you to have invented. Therefore you knew it was really going to happen, and you were trying to prepare me for it so that I wouldn’t be too struck by it when it did. So I am now going to bet my roll on that very fishy story.”
He went back out to the cockpit and opened the fish box. The dolphin that O’Kevin had shown him earlier still lay there on the ice. Simon squeezed its belly hard with one hand, and knew in a moment of exquisite and unforgettable elation that he had been right, all the way to this climax. It was like having forecast a chess game up to the checkmate after the first half-dozen moves.
Straight ahead of him over the transom the sun was setting, and the silhouette of a seaplane coming head-on was etched against a crimson-tinted cloud. Already he could hear the faint hum of its engine like a distant bumblebee.
With the bait-knife, Simon Templar performed a deft Caesarean section that delivered the fish of a transparent plastic bag in which many hard angular objects thinly wrapped in tissue paper could be easily felt. He returned to the saloon and showed it to O’Kevin.
“I must check on Clinton’s ex-partner in New York in a couple of years,” he remarked. “I assume he’s the receiving end of the line, and by that time they may have organized some other channel that I can hijack. But I’m afraid you’ll have to go back to legitimate fishing, Patsy me b’y.”
He rinsed the plastic bag under the pump and dried it on a dish-towel before he put it away in his pocket. The examination of its contents could afford to wait, but his plane was already coming down for its landing on the lagoon with a roar and a rush of wind overhead.
“I wish you’d give Gloria a message,” said the Saint. “Tell her she didn’t really leave me cold, but I couldn’t take everything else she offered and these jewels too. On the other hand, I mightn’t have been doing this at all if she hadn’t tried to take me like a yokel and stand me up. There has to be some self-respect among thieves.”
He went out and jumped up on to the dock and walked briskly away, wondering what he was going to write to Don Mucklow.
NASSAU: THE ARROW OF GOD
INTRODUCTION
It can hardly escape notice that I have a personal antipathy to the words “detective” and “mystery” as descriptives of a certain type of story. Aside from the pejorative implications which has been given them by literary snobs (and, admittedly, with the assistance of the worst and most venal writers) I find them both inadequate and unnecessarily restrictive. They relate to an old cut-and-dried formula: body is found—whodunit?—detective pins guilt on least likely suspect. Even the genius of John Dickson Carr, who added the superlative factor of what I have named the “howdiddee” (the murder was committed in a sealed and locked room, and would be theoretically impossible except that you can’t explain away the body, so some rational method of killing and leaving it there must be found) could not wipe out this limitation. Considered in three or even four dimensions, there are still many more aspects to a crime than that. At the moment, I tend to favor the description “crime story,” meaning that in its core there is essentially some factor of extra-legality, so that in addition to the ordinary problems of human friction and attraction between A and B there is a third impersonal force called The Law. It is along these excursion lines that I have tried to enlarge the range of The Saint Magazine.
But while being so guided in this anthology, I have become aware that I have given my benison to a preponderance of unorthodox selections—that is, stories which are basically neither “whodunits” or “howdiddees.” Having maintained for years that I don’t write “detective” or “mystery” stories, but adventures with a criminal angle, it is ironic that I feel obliged to redress the balance with one of my own few genuine exercises in the formula I disparage. But, in my own judgment, one of the best I have been able to do.
—Leslie Charteris
1
One of Simon Templar’s stock criticisms of the classic type of detective story is that the victim of the murder, the reluctant spark-plug of all the entertaining mystery and strife, is usually a mere nonentity who wanders vaguely through the first few pages with the sole purpose of becoming a convenient body in the library by the end of Chapter One. But what his own feelings and problems may have been, the personality which has to provide so many people with adequate motives for desiring him to drop dead, is largely a matter of hearsay, retrospectively brought out in the conventional process of drawing attention to one suspect after another. “You could almost,” Simon has said, “call him a corpus derelicti.
“…Actually, the physical murder should only be the mid-point of the story: the things that led up to it are at least as interesting as the mechanical solution of who don
e it…Personally, I’ve killed very few people that I didn’t know plenty about first.”
Coming from a man who is generally regarded as almost a detective-story character himself, this comment is at least worth recording for reference, but it certainly did not apply to the shuffling off of Mr Floyd Vosper, which caused a brief commotion on the island of New Providence in the early spring of that year.
2
Why Simon Templar should have been in Nassau (which, for the benefit of the untraveled, is the city of New Providence, which is an island in the Bahamas) at the time is one of those questions which always arise in stories about him, and which can only be answered by repeating that he liked to travel and was just as likely to show up there as in Nova Zembla or Namaqualand. As for why he should have been invited to the house of Mrs Herbert H. Wexall, that is another irrelevancy which is hardly covered by the fact that he could just as well have shown up at the house of Joe Wallenski (of the arsonist Wallenskis) or the White House—he had friends in many places, legitimate and otherwise. But Mrs Wexall had some international renown as a lion hunter, even if her stalking had been confined to the variety which roars loudest in plush drawing rooms, and it was not to be expected that the advent of such a creature as Simon Templar would have escaped the attention of her salon safari.
Thus one noontime Simon found himself strolling up the driveway and into what little was left of the life of Floyd Vosper. Naturally he did not know this at the time, nor did he know Floyd Vosper, except by name. In this he was no different from at least fifty million other people in that hemisphere, for Floyd Vosper was not only one of the most widely syndicated pundits of the day, but his books (Feet of Clay, As I Saw Them, and The Twenty Worst Men in the World) had all been the selections of one book club or another and still sold by the million in reprints. For Mr Vosper specialized in the ever-popular sport of shattering reputations. In his journalistic years he had met, and apparently had unique opportunities to study, practically every great name in the national and international scene, and could unerringly remember everything in their biographies that they would prefer forgotten, and could impale and epitomize all their weaknesses with devastatingly pinpoint precision, leaving them naked and squirming on the operating table of his vocabulary. But what this merciless professional iconoclast was like as a person, Simon had never heard or bothered much to wonder about.
So the first impression that Vosper made on him was a voice, a still unidentified voice, a dry and deliberate and peculiarly needling voice, which came from behind a bank of riotous hibiscus and oleander.
“My dear Janet,” it said, “you must not let your innocent admiration for Reggie’s bulging biceps color your estimate of his perspicacity in world affairs. The title of All-American, I hate to disillusion you, has no reference to statesmanship.”
There was a rather strained laugh that must have come from Reggie, and a girl’s clear young voice said, “That isn’t fair, Mr Vosper. Reggie doesn’t pretend to be a genius, but he’s bright enough to have a wonderful job waiting for him on Wall Street.”
“I don’t doubt that he will make an excellent contact man for the more stupid clients,” conceded the voice with the measured nasal gripe. “And I’m sure that his education can cope with the simple arithmetic of the Stock Exchange, just as I’m sure it can grasp the basic figures of your father’s Dun and Bradstreet. This should not dazzle you with his brilliance, any more than it should make you believe that you have some spiritual fascination that lured him to your feet.”
At this point Simon rounded a curve in the driveway and caught his first sight of the speakers, all of whom looked up at him with reserved curiosity and two-thirds of them with a certain hint of relief.
There was no difficulty in assigning them to their lines—the young red-headed giant with the pleasantly rugged face and the slim pretty blonde girl, who sat at a wrought-iron table on the terrace in front of the house with a broken deck of cards in front of them which established an interrupted game of gin rummy, and the thin stringy man reclining in a long cane chair with a cigarette-holder in one hand and a highball glass in the other.
Simon smiled and said, “Hello. This is Mrs Wexall’s house, is it?”
The girl said, “Yes,” and he said, “My name’s Templar, and I was invited here.”
The girl jumped up and said, “Oh, yes. Lucy told me. I’m her sister, Janet Blaise. This is my fiancé, Reg Herrick. And Mr Vosper.”
Simon shook hands with the two men, and Janet said, “I think Lucy’s on the beach. I’ll take you around.”
Vosper unwound his bony length from the long chair, looking like a slightly dissolute and acidulated mahatma in his white shorts and burnt chocolate tan.
“Let me do it,” he said. “I’m sure you two ingénues would rather be alone together. And I need another drink.”
He led the way, not into the house but around it, by a flagged path which struck off to the side and meandered through a bower of scarlet Poinciana. A breeze rustled in the leaves and mixed flower scents with the sweetness of the sea. Vosper smoothed down his sparse gray hair, and Simon was aware that the man’s beady eyes and sharp thin nose were cocked towards him with brash speculation, as if he were already measuring another target for his tongue.
“Templar,” he said. “Of course, you must be the Saint—the fellow they call the Robin Hood of modern crime.”
“I see you read the right papers,” said the Saint pleasantly.
“I read all the papers,” Vosper said, “in order to keep in touch with the vagaries of vulgar taste. I’ve often wondered why the Robin Hood legend should have so much romantic appeal. Robin Hood, as I understand it, was a bandit who indulged in some well-publicized charity—but not, as I recall, at the expense of his own stomach. A good many unscrupulous promoters have also become generous—and with as much shrewd publicity—when their ill-gotten gains exceeded their personal spending capacity, but I don’t remember that they succeeded in being glamorized for it.”
“There may be some difference,” Simon suggested, “in who was robbed to provide the surplus spoils.”
“Then,” Vosper said challengingly, “you consider yourself an infallible judge of who should be penalized and who should be rewarded.”
“Oh, no,” said the Saint modestly. “Not at all. No more, I’m sure, than you would call yourself the infallible judge of all the people that you dissect so definitively in print.”
He felt the other’s probing glance stab at him suspiciously and almost with puzzled incredulity, as if Vosper couldn’t quite accept the idea that anyone had actually dared to cross swords with him, and moreover might have scored at least even on the riposte—or if it had happened at all, that it had been anything but a semantic accident. But the Saint’s easily inscrutable poise gave no clue to the answer at all, and before anything further could develop there was a paragraphic distraction.
This took the form of a man seated on top of a truncated column which for reasons best known to the architect had been incorporated into the design of a wall which curved out from the house to encircle a portion of the shore like a possessive arm. The man had long curly hair that fell to his shoulders, which with his delicate ascetic features would have made him look more like a woman if it had not been complemented with an equally curly and silken beard. He sat cross-legged and upright, his hands folded symmetrically in his lap, staring straight out into the blue sky a little above the horizon, so motionless and almost rigid that he might easily have been taken for a tinted statue except for the fluttering of the long flowing white robe he wore.
After rolling with the first reasonable shock of the apparition, Simon would have passed on politely without comment, but the opportunity was irresistible for Vosper to display his virtuosity again, and perhaps also to recover from his momentary confusion.
“That fugitive from a Turkish bath,” Vosper said, in the manner of a tired guide to a geek show, “calls himself Astron. He’s a nature boy from the
Dardanelles who just concluded a very successful season in Hollywood. He wears a beard to cover a receding chin, and long hair to cover a hole in the head. He purifies his soul with a diet of boiled grass and prune juice. Whenever this diet lets him off the pot, he meditates. After he was brought to the attention of the Western world by some engineers of the Anglo-Mongolian Oil Company, whom he cures of stomach ulcers by persuading them not to spike their ration of sacramental wine with rubbing alcohol, he began to meditate about the evils of earthly riches.”
“Another member of our club?” Simon prompted innocuously.
“Astron maintains,” Vosper said, leaning against the pillar and giving out as oracularly as if the object of his dissertation were not sitting on it at all, “that the only way for the holders of worldly wealth to purify themselves is to get rid of as much of it as they can spare. Being himself so pure that it hurts, he is unselfishly ready to become the custodian of as much corrupting cabbage as they would like to get rid of. Of course, he would have no part of it himself, but he will take the responsibility of parking it in a shrine in the Sea of Marmora which he plans to build as soon as there is enough kraut in the kitty.”
The figure on the column finally moved. Without any waste motion, it simply expanded its crossed legs like a lazy tongs until it towered at its full height over them.
“You have heard the blasphemer,” it said. “But I say to you that his words are dust in the wind, as he himself is dust among the stars that I see.”
“I’m a blasphemer,” Vosper repeated to the Saint, with a sort of derisive pride combined with the ponderous bonhomie of a vaudeville old-timer in a routine with a talking dog. He looked back up at the figure of the white-robed mystic towering above him, and said, “So if you have this direct pipeline to the Almighty, why don’t you strike me dead?”
The Saint on the Spanish Main (The Saint Series) Page 5