They began almost conventionally at a white table under an artistically lighted tree in the patio of Cumberland House, over the ritual turtle pie which is the best-known gastronomic specialty of the islands, and with the equally predictable conversational probings that have to be undergone at such first encounters. He learned that aside from any personal interest in a racing driver, she was one herself.
“But not a very good one yet,” she said. “I need a lot more experience, and that is hard for a woman to get. It is a stupid prejudice. You don’t need to be a gorilla with great muscles to drive a modern car. All it takes is strong nerves, and a skilful touch, and good judgment. It is one of the few non-intellectual contests where a woman can start equal with a man. Perhaps that is why they make it so hard for us to prove ourselves. My own father discourages me.”
“I thought the name sounded familiar.” Simon was frowning. “But I couldn’t place—”
“A woman. No, you were thinking of him. Enrico Montesino. He could have been one of the greatest. But he rolled over a mountain corner in the Mexico City race, trying to pass someone he thought had sneered at him. And he says I am too reckless and too emotional!”
“Is he here now?”
“Oh, yes. But not for me. Because he is a great mechanic, too, Ferrari still gave him a job when he could not drive again. And from that job, Godfrey hired him away to be his personal chief mechanic. For this his wife insults me, and perhaps I shall kill her.”
Simon only blinked once, for by now the line had begun to sound faintly like a refrain.
“All by yourself?” he inquired hopefully.
“Who else would do it for me?”
He studiously evaded a direct entanglement with her witch’s eyes, but after a moment she went on as she had done before, as if she would scarcely have heard anything he said anyway, “Besides, it would be most easy for me to do, in the Ladies’ Trophy race. If there is an accident, you will be quite right to suspect me—but that is the most you will be able to do.”
The Saint devoted himself to maintaining a sangfroid which would have been rated commendable by the sternest British standards.
“I didn’t know she was a driver too,” he said.
“She isn’t. At least, not for any kind of professional racing. But she wants to prove something, and she has learned enough to get through a few qualifying laps. Godfrey is letting her drive his Ace Bristol. He can hardly refuse, since she bought it. She would drive his Ferrari if she could, but it is too big for the class. Another discrimination against women—we can only be trusted with smaller cars. But in my Maserati I shall show her some tricks. Do you know what a real driver can do to an amateur?”
Simon raptly allowed her to embroider some examples, while he made the most of his dinner. He was wise enough at that age not to take the initiative in convulsing his digestion.
Thus the rest of the meal meandered through pleasant trivialities, until over coffee and Benedictine and some background music at the Drake there came the inevitable lull in which he said, “Why do you care enough about Cynthia Quillen to want to knock her off? I gather from some things that have been said that you’ve got the inside track—if such a horsy metaphor isn’t indecent in strictly horse-power circles—”
“To use your language, that is a position I would have to keep jockeying for, which is not dignified. I would rather have him all to myself. So I am only thinking of the kindest way to take him from her.”
“Of course, how stupid of me. Not many girls I know would be so sensitive.”
“If I merely steal him because I am more attractive,” she went on calmly, without any hint of whether she was unconscious of his irony or ignoring it, “Cynthia would never get over the injury to her pride. She would rather die. So, it would be generous of me to let her.”
Simon was glad now that he had waited for this until he had nothing in his mouth to choke on.
“And what does Godfrey think about this?”
“I have not asked. As you have seen, he is the charming type who likes a woman to tell him. The right woman, naturally.”
“Yes, little mother.”
“You should dance with me to this music,” she said.
So for a while he danced with her, as casually as it could be done with anyone of her build and cooperative zeal. Another unfriendly woman might have commented that she was not very subtle about the way she made it difficult for her partner to be unaware for a moment of her architectural assets, but to a victim with hormones it was not a completely unendurable ordeal.
And then there was some other music at the Prince George, not for dancing, where he persuaded her to moderate the Benedictine to B-and-B and tapered himself into Old Curio on the rocks. She seemed to hold her fuel much more phlegmatically than Cynthia, but he wanted to be able to cope with any extra acceleration she might develop.
Thus, after many other bandyings of “relevancies which this chronicler has no space to quote,” Simon only found himself verging back on the fatal subject when he said, “You must get tired of answering this, but why didn’t those Roman talent scouts think they could get more dividends from you in a movie than a motor-car?”
“I have had those offers. And perhaps I would be as good as some others who have taken them.” She was just brash enough to pull back her shoulders a trifle and take a slightly deeper breath, which on her was a seismic combination. Yet the Saint was far more devastated by the absolute certainty that he detected a downright twinkle in her gaze. “But the competition is much tougher, and I am very lazy. There are a thousand pretty girls who want to be movie stars, but so few who want to drive the Mille Miglia. So, while they scramble for the photographers’ attention, the photographers scramble for mine. And while they must submit to many horrible people with influence, I can choose my important people.”
“Thank you,” said the Saint gravely. “But if Godfrey heard all that I have this evening, do you think his respiration would be running at the same r-p-m?”
“It might be accelerated a lot. But being a gentleman, you will not tell him. And if you did, being the kind of man he is, he would not believe you, and only punch your nose.”
“Now I’m feeling miserable too. Where would you like to go next?”
She was in the mood then for some of the more boisterous native entertainment, so he walked her a couple of blocks up Bay Street to the Junkanoo, where it was noisy enough to make any but the most succinct and rudimentary forms of conversation impossible. It was a respite of sorts, if not exactly a soporific, and when she suggested another move after the deafening climax on the floor show that they had walked in on, he would have hated to be called for an appraisal of just how grateful he was.
“This is all wonderful for me,” he said, with ingenious congeniality. “But I don’t have to be needle-eyed and full of reflexes tomorrow.”
“I know, you think I should go home. Very well, take me.”
It would have been only another fairly short walk, and pleasant in the mild freshness of the night, but the little car he had rented was even closer, and he put her in and drove her up to the Royal Victoria, where she was quartered. “I think that is the word,” she said. “The invited drivers are all guests of the meeting, and they deal us to the hotels like a pack of cards.”
“A lot of people like it here,” he said. “Personally, when I come to Nassau, I’m not looking for a sterling-area Miami Beach.”
“Yes, it is a different atmosphere. But if one could choose whom to be near—”
“One might ask for trouble. Would you be really happy if the Quillens were here too?”
“They are at the Country Club.”
“Are they? So am I. Now when I see you there, I’ll have to wonder what brought you.”
She looked up, through the car window on her side, at the four tiers of deep Colonial verandahs overlooking the driveway where he had stopped.
“My room is that corner one, on the second balcony.”
“
I’ll wave to you, Juliet.”
She turned closer to him, one arm partly on the back of the seat and partly on his shoulder, her eyes big and darkly luminous in the distant light from the entrance.
“Could you not be even a little interested in getting rid of Cynthia for me?” she asked. “You must be so clever at such things, you would not make the mistakes I might make.”
“Such as talking so much about it,” he said amusedly.
“You think I am drunk? A little, perhaps. But sober enough to know I can deny anything you say I said. But you too can deny anything you like. So, why not be honest?”
Simon reminded himself to remember next time that in alcoholic reaction some steady starters could ride a wild finish. But for that moment he could only fall back on the faintly flippant equanimity developed from some past experience of such challenges.
“All right, darling, what’s in it for me? After I’ve freed Godfrey from his encumbrance, but he’s inherited her money, and you’ve married him—”
“We could console ourselves,” she said, “until he had an accident.”
There must be extravagances for which plain silence is ineffectual and a guffaw is inadequate. Simon decided that they were close enough to that pinnacle. He said lightly: “This, I must think over.”
“Come upstairs and think.”
“The management wouldn’t like that. And in the morning, you might be sorry too.”
She leaned on him even more overwhelmingly, bringing her full relaxed lips within an inch of his mouth. He waited, well aware of the softness that pressed against him. Then she drew back sharply, and slapped his face.
“Thank you, dear,” said the Saint, reaching across her to open the other door. “And happy dreams.”
She got out of the car. And as she did so, there was one inevitably perfect moment in which she offered a transient target that the most careful posing could never have improved. With the palm of his hand, he gave it an accolade that added an unpremeditated zip to her disembarcation and left her in stinging stupefaction for long enough for him to shut the car door again and get it moving out of range of retribution.
Almost as soon as he turned the next corner he had cooled off. He had a violent aversion to being slapped, and the smack with which he had reciprocated had been uninhibitedly meant to hurt, but he realized that she had some material for self-justification. Any woman who candidly offers all her physical potential to a man, and has as much to offer as Teresa Montesino, and is rejected with even good-natured urbanity, can be expected to respond rather primitively.
Simon Templar had no virtuous feelings about the rejection. He was quite animal enough to be keenly aware of what she had in stock for the male animal, and he no longer had any lower-case saintly scruples about taking advantage of a grown woman whose natural impulses came more readily to the surface in the glow of certain liquid refreshments. He hadn’t for one moment seriously contemplated making love to Teresa for any reward that Cynthia Quillen might have offered, but neither did that mean that he was resolved to fight to the death against letting her drag him into bed. He hadn’t expected her to make any such effort, but when it happened he had found himself chilled by an unprecedented caution.
Recalling every one of the pertinent exchanges of their brief acquaintance, the slant of every second word that had been spoken, the Saint admitted to himself that he had been just plain scared. Discretion he could admire, and go along with; but a partnership in deception is another basis. He knew better than most people how many graveyards contain the headstones of men who listened too accommodatingly to the siren song which begins “If only something would happen to…” And Teresa had revealed herself much too acutely conscious of the rules of evidence for a free-wheeling freebooter’s peace of mind. Getting into her bedroom might have been delightfully easy, but getting out again, unhooked by any whimsical barbs of her alcoholically precarious mood, might have been another deal altogether, and much more complicated than anything he had envisaged for that excursion.
“I must be getting old,” he told himself wryly. And then he wondered how old you had to get before two totally differently attractive women each asked your advice about murdering the other, during the same evening. He thought that life might get really dull when there was no proposition you could afford to turn down and be satisfied with your own estimate of what you had passed up. He could see Teresa’s last stunned expression as starkly frozen as a flash photo in his mind’s eye, and was still laughing when he fell asleep. He did not see the Quillens at breakfast in the dining room the next morning, or while he swam and sunned himself on the beach. But they could as well have breakfasted in their room, and immediately afterwards have had mechanical details to concern themselves with at the track before the general public came to watch the vehicles vehicling. Simon did not concern himself unduly with the thought that there might be a fairly fresh cadaver on the premises somewhere, and he was right. Charlie and Brenda Bethell, who had offered him a seat in their box for that afternoon, lunched with him at the Club and drove him out to the track, and among the first people he saw as they came down off the bridge. At the end of the grandstand were Cynthia and Godfrey Quillen, both very much alive, even to a degree of visible vigor. In fact, from their gestures and attitudes, one might have thought at a distance that they were having a heated argument, and as Simon excused himself and strolled along the front of the pits towards them, they greeted him with a simultaneous cordiality which suggested that he might have been a welcome interruption.
“I suppose this is a tactical conference,” said the Saint, with smiling tactlessness. “I’m sure that racing pilots don’t commit back-seat driving, even by remote control.”
“Hah!” Cynthia said tersely. “I was just asking the wizard, here, to stop nagging our boss mechanic about something that went wrong yesterday, as long as he’s got to service the car I’m driving today.”
“That’s why I want to keep him up to the mark, sweetheart,” Quillen said. “If he’s going to take thirty-two seconds over a routine wheel change—”
“Besides fixing something in the ignition that might have left you waiting to be towed home from the next lap.”
“So he says. I don’t know. I’m a driver, not an engineer. Anyhow, that was when Moss passed me, and I never had a hope of catching him again.”
“That wasn’t Enrico’s fault. You were the driver, my dear. But now he’s sulking again, and he might easily feel mean enough to do something to the Bristol that’d make it crack up this afternoon, with me in it. Everybody knows about these Italian vendettas and the stiletto in your back.”
Godfrey Quillen appealed to Simon with a deprecating grin that was a model of husbandly tolerance, effortless savoir faire, and older-boyish charm.
“Please tell her that all Italians aren’t members of the Mafia or Sicilian bandits and all that nonsense.”
“I’ve personally known at least five who weren’t,” Simon said solemnly. “And even if Enrico is a bad one, I’m sure his native chivalry wouldn’t let him work off a grudge on you. When Godfrey loses a wheel in the chicane, you might start worrying.”
Quillen clapped him heartily and happily on the back.
“Keep it up, pal,” he said enthusiastically. “I’m late now for an interview I promised some dame who hooked me the last time I tried to sneak past the press box, but I’ll look for you at the bar shortly.”
He gave his wife’s brow a quick brush of a kiss which she had no chance to freeze off or respond to, and was in full but delightfully definitive retreat before he could be caught in any more dispute.
Cynthia looked at the Saint defensively.
“I said a lot of silly things last night,” she stated. “I wish you’d forget them.”
“Consider them forgotten.”
“Did you have fun?”
“I don’t remember,” he said, with his blandest smile.
Her eyes flashed with the involuntary exasperation of any woman
caught in a trap of logic, but she was game enough to bite off any bid to wriggle out of it.
“All right,” she said. “But at least you know what I mean when I tell you I really am scared of Enrico but I can’t admit the true reason to Godfrey. You’ve got to admit it’s an impossible situation, with him being the father of—you know who. Suppose they were ganging up to get rid of me?”
“It might be rather uncomfortable,” Simon conceded soothingly. “Especially if you were bothered by wondering who thought of it first. Let’s see what they’re doing to your car now.”
The “pits,” which in petroleum-racing parlance are the stables in which mechanical steeds are groomed and babied for their decisive appearance on the track, were literally a figure of speech at this convocation, being completely unexcavated to any unprofessional eye. In effect, they were merely a long row of spaces divided by the pillars that supported the upper level of the “grandstand” where the reserved boxes flanked the press box and control tower and bar; the competitors who wanted and could afford more amenities than could be stacked on rough shelves between the pillars had station wagons and trucks and trailers of all sizes parked behind their berths. The start-and-finish straight was directly in front, where a procession of small noisy bugs was even then buzzing and blattering past in the last laps of an opening amateur event. She led him just a little way along the line, to a smoothly squat white car that looked momentarily like some sort of carnivorous robot preparing to swallow a human tidbit, which it had already engulfed except for the helplessly dangling legs.
“This is Enrico,” Cynthia said.
After a second or two the snack squirmed back out of the gaping jaws of the monster, revealing itself to be a very short slight man with thinning hair and extraordinarily bright black eyes that were a perfect complement to his small bird-like beak of a nose.
“She is all-a ready, signora,” he said, with a completely factual detachment. “All-a you got to do is-a drive her.”
The Saint in the Sun (The Saint Series) Page 10