He got up and pottered vaguely out into the lobby. He had practised that gait until it had become almost a part of him — it suggested a kind of ingenuous and earnest helplessness which was peculiarly convincing. Alice’s eyes followed him protectively.
“Poor darling,” she said. “It means so much to him.”
Simon offered her a cigarette.
“There’s no real chance that you won’t raise the money, is there? I should think he’d only have to wire his university—”
“It isn’t as easy as that. You see, no one even heard of the Frog cult before he deduced that it must have existed. And you’ve no idea how sceptical scientists can be, especially about someone else’s discovery. It’s not only scientists, either. There’s a man who has a desk out in the lobby who calls himself Jungle Jim: he organizes jungle trips for tourists. If you asked him, he’d tell you there aren’t any head-hunters in Panama. Of course he doesn’t take his parties anywhere near the head-hunter country, and he doesn’t want them scared off, but you can imagine what someone who was checking up on our story might think.”
Simon nodded.
“Have you tried already and been turned down?”
“No. As a matter of fact, we’ve hardly told anyone. We have to be awfully careful. If the Panamanian government heard about it and believed it, they’d claim it and send a company of soldiers to get it. That wouldn’t matter to Pappy, so long as he got the scientific credit, but you can guess how many of the frogs would mysteriously disappear on the way back. In fact, the expedition would be just as likely to come back and swear they hadn’t found anything at all — or maybe never even come back, if you see what I mean.”
The Saint decided that it was not up to him to dispute this libellous estimate of the Panamanian militia.
“How much would it cost to go in and get those frogs?” he asked.
She had the figure ready arrived at by an intuition that had seldom failed her: it had to be small enough, compared with her assessment of his means, for him to consider without undue anxiety, but it should also encompass every last dollar that the operation might be good for.
“About ten thousand dollars,” she said, and he didn’t blink.
“Someone might go for that as a straight business gamble, in return for a fair share of the loot.”
It was not so much a statement as the thinly veiled basis for an offer, but she shook her head.
“That’s the trouble. Pappy would never allow it to be treated as loot. All those frogs would have to go into museums. He’d rather they stayed lost for ever than see any of them melted down, or even put up for sale.”
“Then you certainly are looking for a philanthropist.”
“I know, it isn’t realistic. But who could mistake my Pappy for a realist? Now, I’m different. If I could get him just a few of those frogs — enough to make one museum exhibit and a lot of pictures, and prove his theory and make him famous — I wouldn’t care what happened to the rest.”
Simon regarded her contemplatively, and suddenly she leaned closer and impulsively put a hand on his arm.
“Tell me something,” she said. “I don’t know why I’m talking to you like this, except that I feel you’re a terribly wise person. But I’ve got to ask you. Suppose I managed to find some business man who was a bit of a gambler, and made a deal with him on my own.” It was consummate artlessness that continued to keep the discussion impersonal, so that she was absolved of any suspicion of propositioning him. “If I got just a few of those golden frogs for Pappy, he needn’t even know what happened to the rest, the head-hunters might have found the cave after we left and taken most of them away, but what he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him. He could write his articles and be famous and die happy. Would you think I’d done something very wrong or very good?”
Simon pondered for long enough to calculate what the approximate value of the golden frogs that Nestor had described would be.
“I’d think you should have a medal,” he said. “And if you decide to make anyone that sort of offer, I wish you’d give me the first chance.”
She looked at him in a dazed and startled way as if a halo had literally appeared over his head like a neon light, and her big eyes swam with soft half-unbelieving tears.
“I’m afraid I shall have to desert you tonight, dear,” said Professor Humphrey Nestor, noting the artistic symptoms with approval as he returned to the table. “Some former colleagues of mine from Colombia are passing through here — they happened to be calling on the curator when I telephoned, so I had to speak to them. They insisted on me joining them for dinner, but I shall not inflict that ordeal on you. I know our shop talk would bore you to death.”
“That’s all right,” Alice said, with her eyes still on the Saint and the most tentative conspiratorial smile touching her lips. “Mr Tombs just asked me if I could get away to have dinner with him.”
3
She suggested the Jardín El Rancho, and as soon as he saw it he had to approve of her selection. It was like the courtyard of a Spanish hacienda, tile-roofed around three sides but uncovered to the stars in the centre, and open everywhere to the perfect mildness of the night. The service was competently unobtrusive, and the lighting was artistic enough to encourage romance without causing eyestrain. But at first they were strictly practical.
“How would you work this scheme of yours?” he asked.
“Remember, I was at the cave too. I know where it is as well as Pappy.”
“You mean you’d go back there yourself — head-hunters and all?”
“I would if I had to,” she said bravely.
He shook his head.
“That doesn’t sound so good.”
“I can’t say I’m crazy about it,” she admitted. “So I don’t mind telling you I had another idea.”
“Give.”
“Loro — the native guide who took us into that district.”
“Don’t tell me he’d want to go back there.”
“He might. He just about adopted Pappy as his own father, but for some weird reason he practically worships me. Probably because I’m blonde and blue-eyed, and I treated him like a human being — oh, yes, and he got an infected foot once, and I fixed him up from the first-aid kit. It sounds ridiculous, but these natives are like children and he’s at least fifteen-sixteenths Indian. And after the head-hunters had chased us out, he told us we’d gone about it all wrong, and if he’d known what we were after he could have gone there alone and got it without any trouble.”
Simon tenderly impaled a pink shrimp on his fork, coated it lightly with sauce, and slid it between his teeth to confirm an earlier impression that the shrimps of Panama are for some unexplored reason the most crisply ambrosial representatives of their genus in all the legendary seven seas.
“Do you know where to find this reckless warrior?”
“Yes, he’s still around. As a matter of fact, he came to our hotel a little while before you picked me up — Pappy had already left to meet his friends. He wanted to know if there was any chance of our making another expedition. I was just going to tell him that it wouldn’t be for a long time, if ever, because we’d spent all our money, and then I had this idea. I asked him to stop by here at nine o’clock, so you could meet him anyway.”
They had sancocho, the rich chicken soup with vegetables that can easily become a meal in itself, but left themselves room for some excellent beef tenderloin sliced in mushroom sauce which was entirely European in conception and flavour. He asked many more details about the finding of the cave of golden frogs and the escape from the head-hunters which Professor Nestor had skipped over, but that also had been anticipated. The Professor had read many helpful books, and had schooled her so exhaustively that she was never at a loss. Simon’s admiration increased undisguisedly as the meal progressed.