The second time, the night before, at the Tropicana.
The Tropicana claims to be the biggest and the most beautiful night club in the world. It is indeed enormously big, and its fine-weather auditorium, roofed only by the sky and colonnaded with glamorously lighted palm trees, is certainly quite a sight. But in spite of the spectacular advantage of a backdrop of living trees interlaced with spidery stairways and catwalks over which the chorus was able to make endless dramatic entrances, counter-marches, and exits, the floor show was tremendous without much leavening of inspiration, and Simon was finally glad to vacate his seat at the bar and edge his way laboriously through the crowd to the Casino. And there she sat at the roulette table, with the same man standing behind her chair.
The Saint’s analytical eyes observed that she played without strain, moderately disappointed when she lost, reasonably elated when she won, but always relaxed enough to exchange a smiling word now and then with her companion. Therefore her luck was not financially important to her. But he also noted that her stakes were quite modest, and that, combined with the knowledge he already had that her car was not the most expensive make on the market, suggested that she was no more than comfortably well off, without the astronomical kind of bank balance that one automatically associates with such extravagances as gigolos. Could it then be a more genuine romance? There were well-heeled men in Cuba, too, and she was undeniably an attractive woman. But he saw her pick up a small stack of chips and offer them to the man, clearly urging him to play with them; the man shook his head in firm but amiable refusal. Then they both seemed to feel the Saint watching them, and looked at him, and he moved away. It could never be any great concern of his, anyhow — he thought.
Until now.
The croupier had nodded to him as he passed, he remembered, saying helpfully, “Not going to Puerto Rico this winter, sir?” — and the Saint had shrugged with affable vagueness and moved on before he placed the man, but realized that they must have seen each other across a table somewhere in San Juan. So it was probably true that that was how Beryl Carrington had learned his name.
But now she introduced herself as Mrs Carrington, and it was at least certain, for the record, that a man with the looks of her steady companion could not possibly be Mr Carrington.
It could well have seemed like a stretch of coincidence when the Saint strolled in to the Bambú that night and found himself seated two tables away from them. Yet the Bambú, billed as a typically Cuban night spot, was just as ineluctably as the Tropicana on the itinerary of any tourist who was stubbornly determined (as the Saint had been) to find out, regardless of the trauma to his pocketbook and eardrums, exactly what was the legendary fascination of Havana. But this time they had seen him at once, and turned to each other as unanimously as if their heads had been geared together, very evidently to talk about it.
Simon had tried his best this time to suggest innocence of any intention. Perhaps almost too studiously, he had kept his gaze from returning even approximately in their direction. And so now she was sitting beside him, asking for some nebulous kind of help.
It could do no more damage to look towards her table now, so he did, and saw that her boyfriend was no longer sitting there.
“He went to the men’s room,” she said. “I can’t say much now, because I don’t want him to catch me. I’m not sure he’d like it.”
“Shouldn’t you have found that out before you risked getting a knife stuck in me?” Simon murmured.
“I’m staying at the Comodoro. Mrs Carrington. Will you call me tomorrow? Any time. Please.” Again her eyes took a furtive glance around, and then they came back to him with an entreaty as urgent as the breathlessness of her voice: “Please, please do. I must go now.”
And before he could make any answer she was back at her own table, completely absorbed in the manipulation of mirror and lipstick. Her entire absence had been so brief that anyone who had not been watching her like a hawk might never have noticed that she had moved at all.
Simon Templar managed to look equally nonchalant as he took a long pull at his drink.
The orchestra, which had been mercifully silent during the bare minute that Beryl Carrington’s visit had taken, splintered the ephemeral lull with a blast of saxophones hurled full blast at the microphones which Cuban musical taste requires to be placed only inches away from the loudest sections of any orchestra; and in another instant a typically tuneless bedlam of brass was in full frenzied swing, amplified to bone-bruising intensity through the battery of souped-up loud speakers which Cuban custom demands for disseminating music through even the smallest room, and pounded remorselessly home with an assortment of drums, cymbals, rattles, gourds full of dried seeds, and just plain pieces of wood beaten together. Under the impact of that jungle cacophony magnified to the maximum intensity attainable through the abuse of modern electronics, the Saint found it relatively easy to keep his face a blank. In fact, about all he had to do was to let it mirror the numbness which the blare and concussion was threatening to induce in his brain. But out of the corner of his eye he saw Mrs Carrington’s playmate return to their table, and speak to her without sitting down; and she stood up, and they moved on to the dance floor and wedged themselves in among the dedicated crowd who were wriggling and jostling through the motions of a rumba or samba or mambo or whatever the current terpsichorean aphrodisiac was being called that season with every appearance of enjoyment.
About that time Simon Templar decided that he never was likely to experience for himself the mystic rapture which is evoked in some persons by Afro-Hispanic minstrelsy. Something in his cosmogony had undoubtedly been lacking from birth, and he decided to get out while he still had a few other faculties left, before the stupefying din left permanent scar tissue among his brain cells. He had to escape from that paralysing pandemonium to be able to make up his mind about Mrs Carrington’s peculiar invitation anyhow, and there could be no more inconspicuous time to do it than while she and her dancing partner were submerged in the gyrating mob in front of the bandstand. He succeeded in catching a waiter’s eye, and made the pantomime of scribbling on the palm of one raised flat hand which is understood to request a bill anywhere in the world.
As he emerged into the relative quiet outside, the doorman and three loitering drivers vocally offered taxi service, but they were physically cut out by a broad butterball of a man who half encircled the Saint’s back with a brotherly arm and grinned: “I got the best car for you, sir, and the best price.”
For just long enough to let himself be steered diagonally across the driveway into the parking lot, Simon submitted tolerantly to what seemed to be merely the effective technique of the most determined salesman on the beat. Then as he realized that they had gone just a little too far from the entrance, and a corner had shut them off from the sight of anyone there, the man stopped and turned him quite violently, and Simon looked down at the gleam of a knife-blade in the gloom.
“How long do you stay in Cuba, señor?” asked the man.
“Only as long as I can stand the noise,” snapped the Saint.
The fat man’s teeth flashed in the same dim light that glinted on the steel in his hand. Even at that distance the music was so loud that it must certainly prevent anyone around the entrance of the club from hearing almost anything that might happen in the parking lot, short of an atomic explosion.
“I think you will go home tomorrow,” the man said, “if you don’t want to get hurt. People don’t like you to spy on them. You are just a nuisance.”