Simon Templar grinned, and stood up.
“I’m strong enough,” he said. “And I’ll be very careful.”
3
He had already located the Cantina de las Flores — had, in fact, been inside it earlier in the evening. It was a small and dingy bistro in a back street of unromantic odours, and the only flowers in its vicinity were those which were painted in garish colours on the sign over the door. An unshaven bartender in a dirty shirt had informed him that Consuelo would not be there until ten. It was only a few minutes after that hour when the Saint strolled towards it again.
He would probably have been less than human if he had not thought more about Jocelyn Ormond than about Consuelo on the way over. Consuelo was only a name, but Mrs Ormond was not easy to forget.
He tried to rationalize his reaction to her, and couldn’t do it. According to all tradition, there should have been no problem. She not only had all the physical attributes, in extravagant abundance, but she knew every line in the script, in all its cereal ripeness. The dumbest private eye on the news-stands could have taken his cue and helped himself to the offering. Yet the Saint found a perverse pleasure in pretending to be blandly unconscious of the routine, in acting as if her incredible voluptuousness left him only amused. Which was an outright glandular lie.
He shook his head. Maybe he was just getting too old inside...
The bar, which had been drably deserted when he was there before, was now starting to jump. There were a dozen and a half cash customers, a few obviously local citizens but a majority with the heterogeneous look of seamen from visiting freighters — a sterling and salty clientele, no doubt, but somewhat less than elegant. There were also half a dozen girls, who seemed to function occasionally as waitresses, but who also obviously offered more general hospitality and comradeship. Instead of the atmospheric obbligato of guitars with which no Hollywood producer could have resisted backgrounding such a set, an enormous juke box blared deafening orchestrations out of its rococo edifice of plastic panels behind which coloured lights flowed and blended like delirious rainbows, a dazzling and stentorian witness to the irresistible march of North American culture.
Simon went to the counter and ordered a beer. The bartender, only a few hours more unshaven and a few hours dirtier than at their first meeting, looked at him curiously as he poured it.
“You are the señor who was looking for Consuelo.”
“Is she here now?”
“I will tell her,” the man said.
Simon took his glass over to the juke box and stood reading the list of its musical offerings, toying with the faint hope that he might find a title which suggested that in exchange for a coin some slightly less ear-splitting melody might be evoked.
“You were asking for me?” a voice said at his shoulder.
The Saint turned.
He turned slowly, because the quality of the voice had jolted him momentarily off balance. It was an amazing thing for a mere voice to do at any time and, against the strident din through which he had to hear it, it was almost incredible. Yet that was what it achieved without effort. It was the loveliest speaking voice he had ever heard. It had the pure tones of cellos and crystal bells in it, and yet it held a true warmth and a caress and a passion that made the untrammelled sexiness of Jocelyn Ormond’s voice sound like a crude rasp. Just those few words of it stippled goose-pimples up his spine. He wanted the space of a breath to re-establish his equanimity before he saw the owner.
Then he saw her; and the goose-pimples tightened and chilled as if at a touch of icy air, and the jolt he had felt turned to a leaden numbness.
She could have been under thirty, but she was aged in the cruel way that women of her racial mixture, in that climate, will age. You could see Spanish blood in her, and Indian, and undoubtedly some African. Her figure might once have been enticingly ripe, but now it was overblown and mushy. Her black hair was lank and greasy, her nose broad and flat, her painted mouth coarse and thick. Even under a heavy layer of powder that was several shades too light, her complexion showed dark and horribly ravaged with pock-marks. She smiled, showing several gold teeth.
“I am Consuelo,” she said in that magical voice.
Somehow the Saint managed to keep all reaction out of his face, or hoped he did.
“I am looking for an American, a Señor Yarn,” he said. “He wrote a letter saying that one should come here and ask for you.”
Her eyes flickered over him oddly.
“Sí,” she said. “I remember. I will take you to him. Un momentito.”
She went to the bar and spoke briefly to the bartender, who scowled and shrugged. She came back.
“Come.”
Simon put down his glass and went out with her.
The sidewalk was so narrow that there was barely room for them both, and when they met any other walkers there was a subtle contest of bluff to decide which party should give way.
“It was a long time ago that he told me to expect someone,” she said. “Why did you take so long?”
“His letter took a long time. And there were other delays.”
“You have the letter with you?”
“It was not written to me. I was sent by the person to whom he wrote.”
Some instinct of delicacy compelled him to evade a more exact naming of the person. He said, cautiously, “You know what it was about?”
“I know nothing.”
Her high heels clicked a tattoo of fast short steps, hobbled by a skirt that was too tight from hip to knee.
“I have never met Señor Yarn,” he said. “What kind of a man is he?”
She stopped, looking up to search his face with a kind of vehement suddenness.
“He is a good man. The best I have ever known. I hope you are good for him!”
“I hope so too,” said the Saint gently.
They walked on, zigzagging through alleys that grew steadily narrower and darker and more noisome, but the Saint, whose sense of direction could be switched on like a recording machine, never lost track of a turn. The people who shared the streets with them became fewer and vaguer shadows. Life went indoors, and barricaded itself against the night behind shutters through which only an occasional streak of yellow light leaked out. It revealed itself only as a muffled grumbling voice, a sharp ripple of shrill laughter, the wail of a baby, the faint tinny sound of a cheap radio or gramophone; and against that dim sound-track the clatter of Consuelo’s heels seemed to ring out like blows on an anvil. If the Saint had not stepped silently from incurable habit, he would have found himself doing it with a self-conscious impulse to minimize his intrusion. If he could conceivably have picked up Consuelo, or any of the other girls, in the Cantina de las Flores, without an introduction, and had found himself being led where he was for any other reason, he would have been tense with suspicion and wishing for the weight of a gun in his pocket. But he did not think he had anything to fear.
When she stopped, a faint tang of sea smells penetrating the hodge-podge of less natural aromas told his nostrils that they were near another part of the waterfront. The shack that loomed beside them was different only in details of outline from the others around it — a shanty of crumbling plaster and decaying timbers, with a rambling roof line which could consist of nothing but an accumulation of innumerable inadequate repairs.
“Here,” she said.
She opened the cracked plank door, and Simon followed her in.
The whole house was only one little room. There was a brass bedstead against one wall, with a faded chintz curtain across the corner beside it which might have concealed some sort of sanitary facilities. In another corner, there was an ancient oil cooking stove, and a bare counter board with a chipped enamel basin. On shelves above the counter, there were cheap dishes and utensils, and a few canned foods. Clothing hung on hooks in the walls, between an assortment of innocuous lithographs pinned up according to some unguessable system of selection.