The Saint’s very clear blue eyes searched her face with disconcerting penetration.
“You think a lot of this guy, don’t you?”
“Only because of what he’s doing, and what he stands for,” she insisted. “I’m not a middle-aged sugar-mammy who came here to look for a Latin thrill. You mustn’t believe that.”
“I don’t,” he said soberly. “And most especially the ‘middle-aged’ part.”
He stubbed out his cigarette and turned towards the door.
“Thanks to the discretion ingrained in me by a misspent youth,” he said, “I got out of my taxi two blocks away, walked over to the beach, wandered into the back of this posada by way of the swimming pool, and ambled up a service stairway. If any Gestapo gunsels do happen to be watching you, I don’t think they saw me coming and I don’t think they’ll see me leave.”
“But where’ll I see you again?” she gasped, in a sudden panic.
“If you don’t know, nobody can make you tell. But I’ll find you. Don’t worry.” He grinned, and tapped the briefcase under his arm. “Whatever happens, I shall be holding the bag.”
He had already started down the service stairs when he heard other footsteps coming up. It was too late to turn back, for whoever was coming up would have turned the corner of the half-landing and seen him before he could have retreated out of sight, and his abrupt reversal of direction would have looked guilty even to someone who was quite unsuspicious. And there was no reason why the feet could not belong to innocent guests of the hotel or its equally inoffensive employees. Simon kept on going, with his reflexes triggered on invisible needle points.
They were two men in dark suits, with a certain air about them which to the Saint was as informative as a label. They looked at him with mechanical curiosity, but he held his course without faltering, and they fell into single file to let him go by. He passed them with the smile and carefree nod of a tourist who had never consciously noticed a policeman in plain clothes in his life.
As he reached the foot of the stairs, the voice of one of them came down to him from the floor above, speaking low and tersely in Spanish.
“Hide yourself here, and take note of anyone who comes to visit her.”
3
Out there in the Miramar district where the Comodoro Hotel is located, Havana’s Fifth Avenue (which, like Manhattan’s Sixth, has been officially re-christened ‘Avenue of the Americas,’ and is just as stubbornly known only by its old name to every native) is far from being the city’s busiest thoroughfare, and as he reached it Simon was wondering if he would have trouble finding a taxi. He did not want to be wandering around the streets of that neighbourhood for long, where not only might the plain-clothes men he had already encountered decide belatedly to investigate him, but Ramón Venino might come driving by from any direction en route to his rendezvous with Beryl Carrington.
He need have had no anxiety. He had barely taken one glance up and down the street when a taxi, drawn by the uncanny instinct for prey that achieves its supreme development in the vulture and the Havana taxi driver, made a screaming U turn and swooped in to the curb beside him.
“Where to?” asked the driver cheerily, starting off without waiting to find out. “Are you hoping to meet a girl, or is your wife here with you? I have a young sister, a lovely girl, but very naughty, who is crazy for Americanos.”
“I have a weak heart,” said the Saint, “and the doctor has ordered me to leave naughty girls alone.”
“Some sightseeing then? I can take you to the Botanical Gardens, then to the Cathedral—”
Simon frowned at the briefcase on the seat beside him. Wherever he went, its pristine newness would be conspicuous, and to walk into his hotel with it in full view, where either policemen or friends of the man he had called Pancho might be watching for him, would be too naïve to even consider.
“How about one of the rum distilleries?” he suggested.
“Yes, sir. I will take you to Trocadero.”
Presently they drew up beside a large low building, at an entrance with sliding doors designed for trucks to drive through. The driver waved aside the Saint’s proffered payment.
“I will be here when you come out.”
Simon stepped into the odorous interior, and was adopted at once by the nearest of a number of men who stood waiting by the entrance.
“Good morning, sir. This is where we make that famous Cuban rum. Step this way, please.” They entered one corner of a vast barn-like factory. “The sugar cane is pulped in that machine there, and then the juice is fermented in those tanks over there. Then it passes through those stills which you see there, and the rum goes into those barrels to be aged. Now this way, please.” They passed through another door into a large room conveniently at hand, where there were several tables already well populated by other visitors concluding their research into the manufacture of rum. “Here we invite you to sample our products. Sit down and be comfortable — there is no hurry.”
Each table was provided with stools on three sides and a long row of bottles on the fourth. Simon’s guide went behind the bottles and at once became a bartender rapidly pouring samples into an inexhaustible supply of glasses, as other guides all over the room were already doing for their personal protégés.
“This is our light rum, this is our dark rum, this is our very best rum. Don’t be bashful, it’s all on the house. These are our liqueurs — apricot brandy, blackberry brandy, crème de cacao. Have whatever you want, there is no limit. And you should try our special exotic drinks — banana cordial, pineapple cordial, mango cordial. You are allowed to take back five bottles with you free of duty. Would you like some of our Tropical Punch, or some Elixir, or a frozen Daiquiri?”
“I’ll take five bottles of plain drinking rum,” said the Saint, sipping very judiciously. “But I want ’em in one of those fancy baskets that you give away.”
“Of course.” The man whipped out a pad and wrote the order. “I’ll get them for you right away. Help yourself to anything you want while you’re waiting.”
Simon moistened his tongue experimentally, out of academic interest, with some of the more unfamiliar flavours, but he was in no mood, as most of the students of distillation around him seemed to be, to take memorable advantage of the phenomenon of unlimited free drinks. He was not even interested in the rum he was buying, except as much of it as would be suitable ballast for the container it would come in.
The guide-salesman returned promptly, bearing a sturdy straw bag of the kind in which every island in the Caribbean makes a trademark of packaging the homing tourist’s duty-free quota of the local brew. Simon paid him, picked up the bag along with the briefcase which he had brought in with him, and went out to look for his driver, who had expected to rack up a nice hunk of waiting time and was disappointed to see him so soon.
“Take me to the Sevilla-Biltmore,” said the Saint.
He quietly removed the paper-wrapped bottles from the straw bag, and put the new alligator briefcase in.
“Do you drink rum, amigo?” Simon inquired.
“Sometimes,” said the driver indifferently.
Simon handed a bottle over the back of the front seat.
“Put this away for when you feel thirsty,” he said.
“Thank you, señor,” said the driver, much more brightly. “Did you enjoy the distillery?”
“It was most educational,” said the Saint. He passed over another bottle. “Take this one home to your sister, the lovely and naughty one, with my compliments and regrets.”