Señor Saint by Leslie Charteris Page B

I told him I’d recognized you, and who you were. We both knew we’d have to do some fresh figuring, fast. He left it to me. As a matter of fact, he didn’t have much choice. The Enriquez brothers were waiting. He said whatever I did was okay with him, but for Christ’s sake do something.”
    “Well,” said the Saint helpfully, “what are you going to do?”
    She raised her eyes to his face.
    “I’ve told you the whole story. And I’m hoping you’re not sore at me for trying to imitate your act.”
    “Of course not,” Simon assured her heartily. “If you mean, for baiting such a beautiful trap to skin a pair of sidewinders like Manuel and Pablo. I wish a lot more people would take up the sport. However …” His brows drew together and his gaze slanted at her shrewdly. “I had my eye on them too, even if you saw them first.”
    “And you should get a royalty for being my inspiration.” She put out her cigarette, escaping his steady scrutiny only for a moment, and looked at him again.
    “All right,” she said. “Would you be satisfied if we split three ways?”
    He didn’t move.
    “You, me, and Sherman?” he said.
    “Yes. After all, we’ve spent a lot of money, and done a lot of groundwork.”
    Simon walked over to the window and looked out. It seemed to have stopped raining, but the streets below were shiny with water. He gazed over the nearer rooftops and the scattered lights to the hazy glow of illumination that hung over the city’s center. He had seldom felt that life was so rich and bountiful.
    There may well be among the varied devotees of these chronicles some favored individual who has once experienced a certain feeling of elation upon learning that a hitherto undreamed-of uncle has gone to join the heavenly choir, leaving him a half-dozen assorted oil wells. Such a one might have a faint conception of the incandescent beatitude that was welling up in the Saint’s ecstatic soul. A very faint and protopathic conception. For the fundamentally dreary mechanics of inheriting a few mere fountains of liquid lucre cannot really be compared with the blissful largesse that the Saint saw Providence decanting on him from its upturned cornucopia. This had poetry; this fell into the kind of artistic pattern that made music in his heart.
    He turned at last.
    “Will you just mail me my share,” he asked, “or am I expected to help?”
    “Is the deal okay?”
    “You must remind me some day to warn you about being too generous, in this racket.”
    She let out breath in an almost inaudible sigh, sinking a little deeper in the chair. It was the first proof she had given that she had been under tension before.
    “You could help a lot.”
    “Tell me.”
    “Frankly,” she said, “the only thing I’ve been worried about is the payoff. First, they’ll want to be sure that we’ve really got the guns. That’s taken care of. They can take a motor-boat and go out a few miles from Vera Cruz or Tampico, and meet our boat. All right. Then we’ll come to the question of delivery. That cargo can’t be unloaded at a regular port. So I expect them to pick some quiet spot along the coast where it can be brought in at dead of night.”
    “How do you manage to be so beautiful and have this kind of brain?” he asked admiringly.
    “I’m only thinking it out the way you would.” There was nothing coy about her now: it was all business. “So we agree to do that. But we can’t count on them giving us the money and trusting that we’ll deliver. Most probably, they’ll want to payoff at the landing place, when the cargo starts coming ashore. We’d have to agree to that too. And then suppose they decided to double-cross us-to take the cargo and keep their money?”
    “They’d be afraid of you tipping off the cops… . But of course, if they were going that far, they could shut you up permanently.”
    “And Sherman isn’t the fighting type. Even if he had a gun, he wouldn’t know how to use it.”
    “How