“But then it’s only a question of time—”
He nodded, tight-lipped.
“I begin to think that everything may have to be postponed. For a while only, but at least until they are off guard again. And I shall go abroad — then they will be certain that I am not in mischief. I could not be organizing a revolution on the Riviera. Would you like to go there?”
“If you’d promise to meet me there, I’d go.”
“I must think about it,” he had said.
Now, two hours later, he strode to her window and stood gazing out unseeingly, with his hands gripping nervously together behind his back. Finally he said, “Yes, querida, I have decided. When I heard you say on the phone just now that you might go to Europe, I knew it was right. Will you think me a coward if I go?”
“Oh, no, Ramón! I want you to be a hero, but you wouldn’t help anyone by throwing your life away.”
He turned to her and kissed her hands.
“Then it is settled. You will drive to New York, as you said, and book a passage on the first good boat. You will take your car for us to drive around, because it is much newer than mine, but of course I will pay the expenses. I shall book myself on a plane in about a week, so that I do not seem in too big a hurry, but I shall be there in France when you land.”
“You don’t know what a load you’ve taken off my mind,” she said, and yet as she said it she felt inexplicably as if something else had been taken from her also.
He glanced at his watch.
“We should have your bags taken to the car before they want to charge you another day for the room,” he said practically. “We can wait downstairs for your travel agent.”
They went downstairs together with her luggage and watched it stowed in the trunk of her sedan. Venino tipped the bellboys and dismissed them.
Beryl Carrington felt a strange vague uncomfortableness as they faced each other alone again, with nothing to do but to kill time and nothing special to talk about. Nothing, that is, except something most personal. Everything else had been wrapped up so quickly and finally. But right up until then, the kisses he had recently pressed on her hands were the nearest approach to emotion there had been between them. In the beginning she had been charmed and relieved by his correctness. But she had always been convinced that at the proper time, when it could be done without crudity and disrespect, his attentions would become warmer. It could not be any other way, with such a romantic enterprise binding their lives together. Yet now that he could scarcely avoid making some declaration about themselves, she found herself desperately unready to receive it.
He took her hand and drew her towards him.
“You must not worry about me,” he said, and a flutter of pure panic suddenly shook her.
“Why not?” asked the Saint’s coolest and most languid voice. “I’d say there was a whole lot to worry about.”
They turned like two marionettes jerked with the same string.
Beryl Carrington’s startlement was at first almost grateful — until her eyes fell on the briefcase that Simon carried, and grew round with blank dismay. But Ramón Venino’s face turned yellow with the sickly anaemia of a sceptic who for the first time believes that he is seeing an incontrovertible ghost; and then, as he too saw the briefcase, his eyes literally jolted in their sockets as if he had been hit behind the head. And the Saint strolled closer, around the side of the car which had concealed his silent approach.
“As a one-man revolution,” he remarked, “I’d say he was a lousy actuarial risk.”
Venino put forth a colossal effort that dragged his congealing stare from the briefcase to Mrs Carrington.
“What is this?” he demanded hoarsely. “I thought—”
“Yes, I gave it to him,” she said with sudden assurance. “I was afraid you were gambling too much on the police thinking I wasn’t important. And I’ve told you all about him. He promised he’d get it to Florida for me.”
“And if you insist,” Simon said earnestly, “I will. I’ll even get you a police escort for it.”
As though they had only been waiting to explode that boast, the two men in dark suits whom Mrs Carrington had temporarily lost sight of materialized from between other parked cars and hurled themselves at the Saint in a co-ordinated rush that had one of them clamped on to each of his arms before Mrs Carrington fully grasped what was happening. But the Saint seemed only inconsequentially put out.
“You’re grabbing the wrong guy,” he said, without struggling.
One of the dark-suited men turned to Mrs Carrington.
“This is the man who has been annoying you?” he said.
“Annoying me?” she repeated in complete bewilderment.
“We were called by someone who spoke for you,” explained one of the detectives. “About some lunatic who has been making telephone calls and trying to force himself into your room. We understood you did not want to complain personally, or to have a scandal, so we have only been watching to catch this man the next time he annoyed you.”
“But no one has been annoying me,” she said helplessly.
“You are Mrs Carrington?”
“Yes.”
“Mrs Beryl Carrington?”
“Yes.”
“Somebody must have been playing a joke on you,” said the Saint.
“This gentleman is a friend of mine,” she said shakily. “Please let him go.”
The two plain-clothes men looked at Venino with a sort of forlorn desperation, and one of them said, “Usted no sabe nada de esto, señor?”
With his eyes flickering back to the briefcase which Simon still held, Venino said brusquely, “Nada. As the señor says, it is either a mistake or a stupid trick.”
The two detectives looked at each other. In unison, they raised their eyebrows, they pursed their lips, they shrugged. Their vice-like grips unhooked themselves from the Saint’s arms. They stepped back, and bowed with a sort of defeated sarcasm.
“Pardon us, Mrs Carrington,” they said, and turned stiffly on their heels.
Beryl Carrington shook her head dazedly.
“I don’t understand — any of this—”
“It is a Secret Police trick, if nothing worse,” Venino snapped.
“I think it was your trick, Ramón,” Simon said pleasantly. “You called the cops in her name and told them that cock-and-bull story to get them to keep a watch on her. Then you pointed the sleuths out to prove that they were watching you. It’s just dawned on me that that may have been the clincher that sold her on going to Europe. Did you just decide that this afternoon, Beryl?”
“Yes,” she said with unnatural steadiness. “It was exactly like that.”
“And maybe that was the only proof you ever had that anyone was after him.”
“It was. But—”
“He is trying to confuse you,” Venino said harshly. “We must get back that briefcase.”
“This?” Simon held up the alligator bag by the handle, so that the telephone directory slid out into his other hand through the seam he had opened along its underside. “Or the priceless contents?”
He showed Mrs Carrington the book, making sure that she recognized what it was.
“This,” he said reverently, “is the God-damnedest Underground you ever saw the secret list of. Every single soul in Greater Havana who can afford a telephone is a member.”
Venino snatched the directory from him.
“You fool,” he snarled. “If anyone had discovered the marks in invisible ink against each name that is one of us—”