The Saint on the Spanish Main (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “My God, what a wonderful name,” said the Saint, with the pure delight of a poet. Then his hand lay on Johnny’s shoulder, and he said, “But now it’s your job to make it the District of Look Ahead.”

  Then they both looked back at the house, and listened.

  PUERTO RICO: THE UNKIND PHILANTHROPIST

  1

  “One of these days,” said Simon Templar lazily, “when I decide to become Dictator of the Universe, I shall issue a law for the protection of men’s names. This modern fad of giving them to girls has got to be stopped somewhere. It was bad enough when women broke out in a rash of semi-masculine diminutives, occasionally with and just as often without some connection with the monickers they got baptized with, of which I have known for instance Bobbie, Billie, Jo, Charlie, Marty, Jackie, Jerry, Freddie, Tommy, Dickie, Stevie, Teddy, Tony—”

  “Braggart,” said Tristan Brown.

  “After which,” Simon continued inexorably, “I have seen the movie marquees blossom with actresses calling themselves, with or without baptismal authority, by such traditionally male labels as Toby, Dale, Gene, Jeff, Robin, Gregg, Terry, Alexis, and heaven knows what next. In my own limited acquaintance of females, I can vouch for dolls who were actually christened Franklin, Craig, Cameron, Christopher, and even George.”

  “How about the men I’ve known,” Tristan inquired, “who were called Jess, Evelyn, and Shirley?”

  “I think a little research would show that they had the prior claim. Only they lost it sooner. Like that guy who keeps on writing about me. He’s always getting circulars from mail-order lingerie merchants addressed to Miss Leslie Charteris. It’s getting so that about the only name you could give your son today, with reasonable certainty that no woman would be wearing it tomorrow, would be something like Gladys.”

  “I think Tristan is a nice name,” she said tartly. “So did my father. Brown is dull enough for a surname, so he tried to Liven it up. I like it.”

  Simon squeezed the car past a crawling truck top-heavy with sugar cane.

  “I’m the old-fashioned type,” he said gloomily. “I think girls should have girls’ names. If you ever suffered through the opera, you’d remember that Tristan was a man.”

  “What does the name of Morgan make you think of?” she asked.

  “J. P. Morgan. A big business man. Or before him, Sir Henry Morgan—another very male go-getter, in his way.”

  “But in the same legend that Tristan came from, wasn’t Morgan le Fay a woman?”

  Just for a moment Simon was stopped.

  “Well, as I recall it, she was the queen of the fairies,” he said, and the girl had to laugh.

  It was merely an idle conversation to lighten the drive from San Juan up into the mountains of Puerto Rico, and the Saint had no idea at the time of the significance that the thought behind it would have in his always unpredictable odyssey.

  Tristan Brown had entered his life during his first morning on the island, on a tour of the historic fortress of El Morro, which dominates the narrow entrance of the spacious harbor which Christopher Columbus discovered, and whence later Ponce de León, then Governor of the colony, sailed on his famous quest for the Fountain of Youth which took him only to Florida and his death. And because she was very noticeably feminine, in spite of the name which he had yet to find out, with urchin-cut mahogany hair and eager brown eyes and a figure that moulded exactly the right curves into a thin cotton dress, and in fact would have been an exciting person to see even in a much less nondescript crowd, Simon automatically manoeuvred himself next to her as the party moved along and thoughtfully contrived to stay there.

  The guide was explaining with the aid of a map how Puerto Rico’s strategic position had once made it the natural rendezvous for the Spanish treasure convoys that fanned out on their golden quests all up and down the coasts of Central and South America, and how for the same reason it was coveted by the privateers who cruised the Caribbean to loot the looters on their homeward voyage, and she saw the Saint and could not help thinking how much like the idealized conception of a pirate he looked, with the trade wind ruffling his dark hair and the sun on his keen tanned face and a half-smile on his strong reckless mouth. Against those battlements the tall swordsman’s grace of his body and the merry insolence of his blue eyes seemed to span the centuries as easily as the weathered stone, so that with the slightest imagined change of costume she could see him as the living prototype of what the heroes of innumerable technicolor movies tried ineffectually to re-create, but with him she had a strange disturbing feeling that the resemblance was real…And she awoke to the awareness that she was still staring at him, and that he knew it.

  Farther along, someone asked, “Was this fort ever captured?”

  “Not until the Spanish-American War,” said the conductor, with some pride. “And then it was mostly by invitation. The English and the Dutch tried to take it for a couple of hundred years, but they weren’t good enough. In 1595, it even gave the great Sir Francis Drake a licking.”

  “And I bet you won’t find that in an English history book,” Simon murmured to the girl.

  By that time she had recovered from her confusion.

  “Who was it said that histories are always written by the winning side?” she responded easily.

  “I don’t know, but it’s probably true. Drake must have been pretty young then, and he did get his own back on the Armada. But he’d be a still bigger man if they didn’t try to make him look like a winner all the time.”

  After that, when the tour was over and she asked directions back from the castle, it was easy to offer his personal guiding service, and he walked her by way of the Fortaleza up into the narrow streets of the old town. Then it was time for lunch, and the restaurant El Meson was conveniently nearby.

  Over glasses of Dry Sack they exchanged names, and she recognized his at once.

  “I just knew it would have to be something like that when I first saw you,” she said, but she declined to explain what she meant.

  “To answer the routine question you’re dying to ask,” he said, “I’m not in the midst of any felonious business. I’m just island-hopping and amusing myself.”

  “Spending your ill-gotten gains?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And I’m spending somebody else’s,” she said brightly.

  “Does he know about it?”

  “Oh, no. He’s dead.” She laughed at the restrained lift of his brows, and said, “Have you heard of the Ogden H. Kiel Foundation?”

  “Of course.”

  For the benefit of any unlikely person who may not have heard of him, it may be recalled that Mr Ogden H. Kiel was a shining example of free enterprise who, starting away back with a bottle of snake oil and a medicine show, parlayed himself into a patent medicine empire that loaded the drugstore shelves of the nation with an assortment of salves, lotions, potions, physics, and vitamin compounds which, if all their various claims could be believed, should have banished every human ailment from the face of this planet. The fact that this millennium did not supervene must have spurred him to continually more frenzied efforts of distribution, through the media of printed advertising, radio, and television, so that the sale of his nostrums brought him a flood of wealth which not even modern taxes could reduce to a stream of a size that even a lavish liver could spend. Wherefore he had created the Ogden H. Kiel Foundation, dedicated (to do him justice) to giving suffering humanity more substantial forms of relief than gaily colored pills—an institution which, upon probate of his will, found itself with more than eighty million dollars in the kitty and at least another million in royalties accruing every year.

  “I work for it,” Tristan Brown said. “For a mere hundred dollars a week, plus my expenses, I help to give away millions.”

  “How does one get a job like that?” Simon inquired with interest.

  “I happen to be a lawyer. Don’t look indignant—it’s quite legal! The firm of which I’m a very junior member
happens to be the trustees of the fund. It takes six of us all our time to get around and find places to leave checks. It isn’t half the life you’d think it would be, but I’m seeing a lot of the world.”

  “And you’re here to hand out some of this dough in Puerto Rico?”

  “It’s the kind of territory that the Foundation is set up to help, and I’m supposed to find the best channel for one of our grants.”

  “How about me? A million dollars would rehabilitate me right out of sight.”

  “That’s what I’d be afraid of,” she said dryly.

  He sighed.

  “It’s prejudices like that,” he said, “that have forced me into my life of crime.”

  He introduced her to ompanadas, succulent pasties filled with a mixture of ground meat, almonds, raisins, olives, and capers, and mofongo, a fried mash of green plantains mixed with cracklings, garlic, coriander, and cayenne, and she made him talk more about himself. She made it easy for him to do, revealing a most unlawyerlike delight in the motives and methods which had made the Saint almost as mythological a figure as the Robin Hood with whom he was always inevitably compared. And since there was nothing mythical at all about his reaction to any beautiful girl, it must be admitted that he thoroughly enjoyed the realization that her response to him as a person was much warmer than the basic requirements of intellectual research.

  But the Saint was also an extraordinarily careful man in some ways, and a pretty girl who claimed to be a qualified attorney and moreover to be entrusted with such a fantastic responsibility as Tristan Brown was a sufficiently unusual phenomenon to draw a delicate screen of caution between his intelligence and his impulses.

  Everything she said might be perfectly true. But just as possibly, everything she said might be only the groundwork for some bunko routine that would presently begin to take a familiar shape.

  The Saint was no stranger to the technique of the Colossal Lie. He had used it himself, on occasion. If you say you are the sheriff of some unheard-of county in Texas, almost any reasonably suspicious citizen will check up on you. But if you say you are a Governor of the Bank of England, and pick up a telephone and invite anyone to call London and verify it, the average sucker will figure that nobody would dare to tell such a preposterous tale if his bluff could be called so easily, and will not even bother to put it to the test.

  Simon permitted himself to keep a pleasantly open mind about Tristan Brown. But he also permitted himself to lead her into telling him that she had graduated from Columbia Law School, and as soon as he was back at his hotel he looked up the address of the Ogden H. Kiel Foundation in a New York directory, and that same afternoon he sent off two telegrams.

  While he waited for the replies, however, there was nothing to stop him getting the maximum pleasure out of their acquaintance. He took her to dinner at the Casino, danced and played harmless roulette with her at Jack’s, and was making more plans for the next day as he strolled back with her to their hotel.

  “I have to work tomorrow,” she said firmly. “I’m visiting the Guavate prison camp. They’re sending a car for me.”

  “Tell ’em you’ll get there on your own,” he said. “Let me rent a car and drive you up. I’ll wait for you, and we can come back by way of El Yunque, which you ought to see.”

  That was how he came to be driving her up the narrow winding road out of Caguas, making trivial banter about male and female names.

  They turned into the Guavate National Forest and went on twisting upwards, glimpsing simple vacation cabins and rocky streams tumbling between the trees, and then out of the deepest shade and still winding upwards along steep slopes green with banana trees and opening on to vast blue-veiled panoramas of the lower hills, and so at last to a wide open gateway across the road where a guard was negligently taking a light for his cigarette from one of a group of convicts. Beyond, there were plain clean-looking buildings without bars or wire, and many more brown-skinned men in prison denims who worked or loafed and turned to stare at them with uninhibited and amiable curiosity.

  “Don’t apologize for not asking me in,” said the Saint. “Something about me is allergic to prisons, even when they have a lovely setting like this. I’ll have lunch in Caguas and come back for you about three.”

  And that was how he happened to meet Mr Elmer Quire.

  2

  Mr Quire was a stout man with a ruddy face and a shock of white hair, a thin beak of a nose, and bright eyes that twinkled behind heavy black spectacle frames, so that he looked rather like an elderly and benevolent owl. He had a slight tic which kept his head nodding almost imperceptibly, a movement which in combination with his bluff paternal manner made him seem ingratiatingly sympathetic and cooperative to anyone who was talking to him. It was an affliction that had proved to be anything but a disadvantage to him in his operations.

  He was ready to tell anyone who asked him that he was a retired building contractor from New England, which for all it matters to this chronicle he may quite well have been. He had come to Puerto Rico ten years before, in search of a pleasant climate in which to take his well-earned ease, and had stayed ever since, which made him a relative old-timer in the current new era of the island’s development. He had taken steps to make himself widely acquainted, had taken active part in many charitable enterprises, and was generally reputed to be a pillar of the community, a natural choice for civic committees, and a philanthropist of stature. Exactly how much wealth he had retired with was a matter of conjecture, but it was even less common knowledge that he had been able to increase his assets considerably while he appeared to be devoting all his time to good works.

  It could only have been the fine hand of Fate that caused the Saint to be privileged to learn how this could be done on his very first encounter with Mr Elmer Quire.

  Mr Quire never dreamed that Fate was stalking him when he saw Simon Templar saunter through the Mallorquina in Caguas, where he was having lunch, and sit down at the next table. He gave the Saint a little more than a casual glance, as people usually did, dismissed him for the moment as an obvious tourist, and returned his attention to the man who sat nervously stirring a cup of coffee beside him.

  “That’s the trouble with you people,” Mr Quire said severely. “One tries to help you, to bring you along and teach you to grow up. Everyone knows how hard I’ve worked for all of you. But you’re like so many of the others, Gamma. I gave you a great opportunity, and you messed it up.”

  “I did my best, señor,” said the man called Gamma.

  He was obviously a native borinqueño of the country, a thin middle-aged man with a lined face and anxious black eyes, and his dark clothes were neat but old and threadbare.

  “Of course you say that,” Mr Quire lectured him reproachfully. “A failure always says he did his best. Therefore the failure is not his fault. He won’t admit that he failed because his best wasn’t good enough, which would force him to try harder. That is why he never becomes a success.”

  “Is it my fault, señor, if my tomato seeds shoot up only a little bit and then die?”

  “Certainly it is. They died because you didn’t put chemicals in the water, as I’ve been trying to explain.”

  “When you tell me about this wonderful new way to grow tomatoes in water, without earth, you do not tell me I must put anything in the water.”

  Mr Quire became aware intuitively that he had an additional audience in the person of the bronzed tourist with the buccaneer’s face who sat almost at his elbow, but the knowledge made him if possible only more righteous and long-suffering.

  “If I told you once, I must have told you twenty times. How would you expect any plant to grow on nothing but water? You’re enough of a farmer to know better than that. It has to have something to feed on. Like the fertilizer you put on the ground. The whole principle of growing vegetables hydroponically is that you put the fertilizer directly into the tanks of water that your plants grow in.”

  “You did not tell me, seño
r,” Gamma said doggedly.

  “I told you, but you must have forgotten. Or you just weren’t paying attention. That’s what I mean about how hard it is to do anything for you people. You don’t concentrate. You half learn some-thing, and go off half cocked, and then wonder why it doesn’t work.”

  The man sipped his coffee and stirred it again glumly. Mr Quire continued to eat. There was a long silence which Mr Quire quite imperturbably allowed to run its natural course.

  “If I put in chemicals now, and new seed,” Gamma said at last, “will the tomatoes grow?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Then I must do that.”

  “Exactly.”

  “But,” Gamma said, “I have no money to do it.”

  Mr Quire seemed surprised.

  “None at all?”

  “Señor, you know that the little I had, and all that you lent me, was spent to build the tanks in which the tomatoes would grow. And from my friends I already borrow all that I can to eat.”

  “Then how will you go about it?” asked Mr Quire, with fatherly interest.

  The man licked his lips.

  “I thought, señor, perhaps, if you would lend me a little more…”

  Mr Quire’s frown was almost a benediction.

  “My dear man, that’s quite impossible! I lent you everything I could spare to help you start this hydroponic business.”

  “But I will pay you as soon as the tomatoes grow—”

  “But it’ll be weeks, even months, before they’re ready for market. Think of all the time you’ve wasted on that first crop that died. You should have been getting money from them already to meet your first payment to me, which is overdue right now. I’m not a rich man, Gamma. I need that money back. In fact, I must have it at once.”

  “I cannot pay you now, señor.”

  Mr Quire pursed his lips worriedly.

  “That’s really too bad,” he said. “It means I shall have to take your land.”