Señor Saint by Leslie Charteris Page A

miserable than they are. I wouldn’t like that.”
    “Not even if it dropped a very nice piece of change into your own lap?”
    His mouth hardened.
    “Not even if it dropped me the keys to Fort Knox,” he said coldly. “I can always steal a few million without killing anyone, or making nearly so many people unhappy.”
    She flicked her cigarette jerkily. The ash made a gray splash on the carpet.
    “So if you could, you’d try to stop Sherman from making a deal.”
    “I’ll go further. I intend to do my God-damnedest to louse it up.”
    “I had an idea that was what you’d say.”
    “If you’d read anything about me worth reading, you wouldn’t even have had to ask.”
    She took a slow deep breath. It stirred fascinating contours under the soft silk of her dress.
    “That’s good,” she said. “I just had to be sure. Now I know you’ll be with us. We don’t have any cargo of guns to sell. We’re just trying to clean up in the bunko racket, with a bit of that Robin Hood touch you used to specialize in. The whole pitch was just a build-up to take the Enriquez brothers.”
    4.
    Simon Templar stood up, unfolding his length inch by inch. He felt for the pack of cigarettes in his shirt pocket. He drew out a cigarette and placed it between his lips. He stroked his lighter and put it to the cigarette. He exhaled a thin jet of smoke and put the lighter back in his pocket. All his movements were extremely slow and careful, as if he had been balancing on a tightrope over a whirling void. They had to be, while he waited for his fragmented coordinates to settle down, like a spun kaleidoscope, into a new pattern. But by this time his capacity for dizziness was fortunately a little numbed. The human system can only absorb so many jolts in one evening without losing some of its pristine vigor of response.
    “I see,” he said. “I suppose I should have guessed it when your husband came bouncing in and spilled all the beans so loudly and clearly at the very next table to Manuel and Pablo -after you’d kept them watching you long enough to be quite sure they’d be listening.”
    “He wasn’t meant to wait quite so long,” she said, “but he did get held up.”
    “So there is no ship. And no guns.”
    She shook her head.
    “There is a ship. It’s cruising in the Gulf of Mexico right now. It has a lot of crates on board-full of rocks. There are also two or three on top which do have rifles and machine-guns in them, which can be opened for inspection. We weren’t expecting the Enriquez brothers to put out a lot of cash without being pretty convinced about what they were buying.”
    “That sounds like quite an investment.”
    “It was. But we can afford it. If it works out, we’ll pick up at least half a million dollars.”
    The Saint rubbed his hands softly together, just once.
    “A truly noble swindle,” he murmured with restrained rapture. “Boldly conceived, ingeniously contrived, unstintingly financed, slickly dramatized, professionally played-and one of the classics of all time for size. I wish I’d thought of it myself.”
    For the first time in a long while, a trace of a smile touched her lips.
    “You approve?”
    “Especially in the choice of pigeons.”
    “I’m glad of that. I picked them myself, and planned it all for them. I thought it made quite a Saintly set-up. In fact, I should really give you most of the credit. I was thinking of things I’d read about you, and the way you used to do jobs like this, all the time I was figuring it out.”
    He studied her again, for the first time with purely intellectual appraisal.
    “It begins to sound as if you were the brains of the Inkler partnership.”
    “Sometimes I am. Of course, Sherm wasn’t doing so badly when I teamed up with him. But this one was my very own brain-child.”
    “And was it all your own idea, too, to come and talk to me just now?”
    “We agreed on it. I had a chance to get in a word with him alone, when they dropped me off.