He himself made no sound. He came up until his hand could stretch out and grip the man’s shoulder, and he spoke in a sudden gentle whisper of Italian.
“One moment, Salvatore. You know as well as I do that there is no hurry to reach Skeleton Hill.”
The man halted with a jerk, and turned. His black-bearded face bent forward till he could recognize the Saint in the vague starlight. Then the shaggy black head bowed.
“Lai fatto molto bene,” said the old man gruffly. “I thought we should meet here.”
For a moment even Simon was startled. “You guessed, did you?”
“I knew that Amadeo could never have been so stupid as to try anything like that immediately after you had shown him up. And the hunting trip that left him alone for nearly four hours was your idea. Also you knew that I had no money, so I knew that I had nothing to fear from you. Where is Lucia?”
“She went and hid in the woodshed as I told her to,” answered the Saint shamelessly. “I told her to slip out as soon as it was dark and come along here. You’ll probably find her a little way along the road. But if you knew, why did you help me?”
“I did not see why that Amadeo should have so much money,” said Intuccio calmly. “You will be content with half?”
Simon laughed softly.
“From the very beginning,” he said, “I always meant you to have three quarters.”
Intuccio took out the money and divided it.
“Do we go back?” he asked.
“I think we shall have to make some ingenious explanations,” said the Saint. “If Lucia says it was Amadeo, he will probably be lynched. As far as I’m concerned, the probability leaves me unmoved, but since he’s still your cousin you may feel differently. If she says it was me, I’m not likely to have such a good time either. Perhaps she had better invent somebody.”
“Let us decide about that on the way,” agreed Salvatore Intuccio, and they walked on, arm in arm.
Teresa
One more story that stems from long ago. From 1931, to be quite exact — although I didn’t write it for a longish while afterwards.
This is another story in which the locale, and only that, was changed for contemporary geopolitical reasons, between the time it was first written and published in a magazine and the time when it ended up in a book collection.
I can make no more apologies for the liberties I have taken with times and places in the reprinting of stories such as this.
The way I see it, nothing is so dated as last year — at least in fiction. Put your setting back a century, and anything goes: any apparent anachronism, any unfamiliarity, is acceptable because it is said to have occurred in an era about which the reader happily admits his ignorance. Things were different in those days — that’s all. But let the period fall within the theoretical scope of his faulty memory, and the reader is at once a dissecting critic: anything that seems as if it could have happened yesterday must be submitted to the awareness of today. If a story uses a telephone, this kind of telescoping consciousness requires that it should also take cognizance of television.
This story was first written around a Corsican bandit whom I had the pleasure of meeting on his home ground in very similar circumstances to those I have used in this narrative. But they caught him eventually, although it took several regiments of the French Army to do it, and today Corsican bandits are just an old wives’ tale. Mexican bandits, however, for some reason, are still exotic currency. So let the story go there. If it is considered legitimate to disguise names, why not places?
— Leslie Charteris
“Bandits?” said Señor Copas. He shrugged. “Sí, hay siempre bandidos. The Government will never catch them all. Here in Mexico they are a tradition of the country.”
He looked again at the girl in the dark hat, appreciatively, because she was worth looking at, and he was a true Latin, and there was still romance in the heart that beat above his rounded abdomen.
He chuckled uncertainly, ignoring the other customers who were sitting in various degrees of patience behind their empty plates, and said, “But the señorita has nothing to fear. She is not going into the wilds.”
“But I want to go into the wilds,” she said.
Her voice was low and soft and musical, matching the quiet symmetry of her face and the repose of her hands. She was smart without exaggeration. She was Fifth Avenue with none of its brittle hardness, incongruously transported to that standstill Mexican village, and yet contriving not to seem out of place. To Señor Copas she was a miracle.
To Simon Templar she was a quickening of interest and a hint of adventure that might lead anywhere or nowhere. His eye for charm was no slower than that of Señor Copas, but there was more in it than that.
To Simon Templar, who had been called the most audacious bandit of the twentieth century, the subject was always new and fascinating. And he had an impish sense of humor which couldn’t resist the thought of what the other members of the audience would have said and done if they had known that the man who was listening to their conversation about bandits was the notorious Saint himself.
“Are you more interested in the wilds or the bandits?” he asked, in Spanish as native as her own.
She turned to him with friendly brown eyes in which there was a trace of subtle mockery.
“I’m not particular.”
“No es posible,” said Señor Copas firmly, as he dragged himself away to his kitchen.
“He doesn’t seem to like the idea,” said the Saint.
He was sitting beside her, at the communal table which half filled the dining room of the hotel. She broke a roll with her graceful, leisurely moving hands. He saw that her fingers were slender and tapering, delicately manicured, and one of them wore a wedding ring.
Fifth Avenue in the Fonda de la Quinta, in the shadow of the Sierra Madre, in the state of Durango in Old Mexico, which was a very different place.
“You know a lot about this country?” she asked.
“I’ve been here before.”
“Do you know the mountains?”
“Fairly well.”
“Do you know the bandits too?”
The Saint gazed at her with precarious gravity. He looked like a man who would obviously be on visiting terms with bandits. He looked rather like a bandit himself, in a debonair and reckless sort of way, with his alert tanned face and clean-cut fighting mouth and the unscrupulous gay twinkle in his blue eyes.
“Listen,” he said. “Once upon a time I was walking between San Miguel and Gajo, two villages not far from here. I saw from my map that the road led around in a great horseshoe, but they told me at an inn that there was a short cut, straight across, down into the canyon and up the other side. I climbed down something like the side of a precipice for hours — the path was all great loose stones, and presently one of them turned under my foot and I took a spill and sprained my ankle. When I got to the bottom I was done in. I couldn’t move another step, particularly climbing. I hadn’t any food, but there was a stream running through the bottom of the canyon, so I had water. I could only hope that someone else would try that short cut and find me... At the end of the third day a man did find me, and he looked like one of your bandits if anyone ever did. He did what he could for me, gave me food from his pack — bread and sausage and cheese — and then he said he would go on to San Miguel and send help for me. He could have taken everything I had, but he didn’t. He was insulted when I offered to pay him. ‘I am not a beggar,’ he said, and I’ve never seen anything so haughty in my life — ‘I am El Rojo.’ ”