“I haven’t told you that I met Arthur Rasnec tonight.”
Vi stopped.
“With Talon?”
“No.”
“I’ve never met him, myself. Where did this happen?” asked Vi.
“He was with Karl Krogstad, the director of The Pirate, at some silly double feature playing at the Harvard Exit. But there was a woman with him, a rather remarkable and attractive woman named Diamond, a woman who seemed to know more about what I was doing than she had any right to, including details of Alisdare’s bogus Costello Treasure story.”
Vi Berkman appeared momentarily surprised and unmistakably abashed. She averted her eyes, but Simon sensed it was not from guilt. He walked her to the driver’s side and held the door while she entered, then circled the back of the car. Vi released the door locks and Simon took the seat beside her. A few drops of light rain speckled the windshield; Vi adjusted the rear-view mirror; the Saint chuckled softly and shook his head.
“C’mon, Vi. What’s the story on Diamond? Your silence is deafening.”
She leaned her head back on the seat and sighed with a slight smile.
“Quite a looker isn’t she, Saint? Her name, so she says, is Diamond Tremayne. I honestly had no idea that your paths would cross, at least not tonight. All I know is that she has personal interests in getting to the bottom of this for reasons similar to mine, although I have the impression that her motivations may be more vengeance than justice. She told me that a cousin’s daughter got into some trouble a few years ago, ran away from home in Massachusetts, wound up in Seattle,” Vi sighed as if telling the story increased the burden of knowing the details, “and after her experiences here at the hands of a certain respected law enforcement official, she committed suicide. A scrawled note of drug-fuelled rumblings makes for poor evidence, especially out of town, but it was enough for Diamond. But not enough,” added Vi with a practiced air of professional detachment, “for the Federal authorities to whom she complained. They said they would look into it...”
Vi stared out the window for a moment, but she wasn’t looking at anything. Simon allowed her the silence. After a moment, Vi purposely decorated her face with an adult smile.
“I meet a lot of angry, confused and vindictive people in my line of work, Simon. Most of them make a lot of noise, and then go home. I’ve learned to take very few of them seriously. Anyway, when I shared my feelings about Rasnec and Talon’s connection to Uncle Elmo’s Good Time Arcade, Diamond seemed convinced that she could use her considerable feminine charms to successfully ingratiate herself with the primary suspects and, in her words, make them pay.”
Make them pay.
The Saint repeated the phrase almost inaudibly to himself, allowing the implications to percolate in his subconscious. The resultant realizations formed and extrapolated slowly at first, but Simon Templar soon felt a warm glow radiate from the center of his being, rising in increasing calorific intensity until it manifested itself in a grin of near luminescent magnitude.
His bright blue eyes widened as if attempting to absorb a panorama of possibilities. Perhaps, reasoned Vi, he was indulging in the predictable, masculine contemplation of Diamond’s ample, tempting lips, or the attractive packaging of her flawless features and statuesque physique.
“I think I’m in love,” declared the Saint. And Vi Berkman, to this day, affirms that she actually heard him giggle.
If the Rabbi’s wife believed the Saint had taken leave of his senses, she was not the first person to harbor such an erroneous impression. It may be noted, should one be taking notes, that Simon Templar had been considered irrevocably eccentric and decidedly absurd by numerous individuals throughout his distinctively dangerous career. For some, such an appraisal had proven fatal; for others, simply distracting. And were Viola to infer that the Twentieth Century’s Brightest Buccaneer had blown a bulb, such an hypothesis would only indicate a failed appreciation for an essential and endearing aspect of the Saint’s unique and wondrous personality. Simon Templar had always been his own greatest admirer, but such personal aggrandizement never obscured his appreciation for the accomplishments of others. Among the talents and abilities cultivated within himself was the glorious appreciation of the same light reflected in different mirrors. The dazzling illumination refracted by Diamond Tremayne was, by his appraisal, nothing short of breathtaking.
Although his initial intuitive deduction cleft the veils of conscious reasoning like a comet crashing resistless through the narrow mathematical orbits of logic, his brain had to catch up with it, plodding laboriously over the steps that inspiration had taken in its winged stride. For Simon Templar, such laborious plodding took mere moments, and he promptly offered an adequate, if truncated, explanation for his unexpected excursion into inappropriate jocularity.
“I’ve been bending my brain into a pretzel attempting to unravel this business with Talon, Alisdare, Buzzy, SeaQue Salvage, and the Costello Treasure,” admitted Simon, “and, up to a point, I accepted much of it as an improbable, yet intriguing, interlacing of coincidences. But Diamond crossed the line — her subtle references were lobbed over Rasnec’s head with clear intent. She wanted me to catch each and every allusion. Ever since I walked out of the Harvard Exit I’ve been asking myself what she was up to and how she knew so much. And then, when you said ‘make them pay’, I realized that she was doing exactly that — making them pay. I bet she’s responsible for Alisdare clipping Talon for twenty grand, responsible for Alisdare passing ten of it on to me. It is currently my conviction that the dynamic Ms Diamond is also the author of that outlandish Costello story. No wonder I thought it was a practical joke,” exclaimed Simon, remembering his initial impulse to credit Barney Malone, “I was never meant to fall for it in the first place. Alisdare was convinced that I would, but someone convinced him first. The con was a con from the moment of conception.”
Vi looked at the Saint with tight jawed intensity.
She had no interest in fabricated treasure stories nor intra-criminal deceptions.
“What Talon did to Buzzy is no practical joke,” she remarked ruefully, “We’re talking about predators, Simon. These men are life destroyers.”
The Saint turned towards her, taking her cool hands in his warm grip. Another bus passed by, but Vi didn’t notice the brief blue sparks reflected in her windshield. The blaze of solid determination flaming behind the Saint’s eyes transfixed her attention.
“I know what these men are, and they disgust me,” insisted Simon. “They don’t deserve to be called men at all, because they’re lower than animals. Trust me, Vi. I’ve vowed that Talon will not escape justice, and the same goes for Alisdare and the whole damn bunch. If Rasnec’s dirty, I guarantee you that he’s going down too.”
Vi’s own grip tightened as if drawing strength from a dynamic electric current.
“But we’re not alone in this,” continued the Saint seriously, “There is more going on with Diamond Tremayne than either of us fully understands. Each of us has met the woman only once, but from what she said tonight, I believe she’s working both sides of the game, raiding the hulls of two different ships, and is either smart enough or crazy enough to point it out to me. But that is a deadly and dangerous game to play.”
Vi loosed her hands and lowered her head.
“I don’t know, Saint. What kind of woman would ingratiate herself with the likes of those men?”
Condensation clouded the BMW’s windshield; smeared light seemed to run in rivulets across the tinted glass. Seattle, blurred and augmented by mid-town metropolitan drone, could have been any city of neon, nightlife, and too much traffic. The Saint thought of New York.