“Staff shortage?” he said. “I can’t understand why, with these Indian chaps pouring into the country like water into a torpedoed ship.” He stationed himself by a table nearby, refusing to sit down until he was properly greeted. “Mind,” he added with a guilty glance over his shoulder as if for the Thought Police of the Egalitarian State, “I’ve nothing against them as such, but we hardly need more people, do we?”
“We need less of some and more of others,” the Saint responded. He motioned indicatively with his glass. “If you want to stake a claim on that table I’ll be your witness.”
The other man lost some of his stiffness, gave a single-shot snorting laugh, and sat down.
“I mean, dammit, I can’t believe they’ve got a personnel problem. I should think there’d be eight men for every job. That’s what it’s coming to anyway, isn’t it? People breeding like rabbits everywhere. Be living ten to a room and eating nothing but seaweed in fifty years, won’t we?”
“I won’t,” said Simon, “but you have a point.”
“Well, I won’t either. I had my day, back when we still ruled the waves, or a good many of them. It’s the next generation that’s going to choke on these policies. I’ve spent some time out in India, and it’s damned obvious why those chaps want to get out and come here, especially since we turned tail and ran. It’s not so damned obvious why the Government welcomes ’em here with open arms. But then it’s not obvious why the Government does anything, unless it’s to appease all the loud mouths and empty pockets in the United Nations.”
“That’s as good a guess as I’ve heard,” Simon agreed. “But you sound even more bitter than most of us.”
“I’ve got reason to be. I was professional Navy; did what I could around Malta and Cyprus and a few other holiday spots during the war. And now...”
He shrugged.
“Caught in the cutbacks?” Simon asked.
“Cutbacks isn’t the word for it,” the red-faced man said. “Massacre, I’d call it. If you want to drive a ship and you’re good at it, you’ve still got just a one in four chance of moving up, and after that it’s four-to-one against you again.” He sat back and expelled air through puffed cheeks. “So, I’m a pensioner. Fifteen quid a week for the rest of my life.” He said it like a prisoner sharing the details of his sentence. “Nothing much to look forward to but sitting out my old age in Hove with a lot of other cast-offs while the country sinks under sheer weight of foreigners and the Government distributes largesse to everybody who can work up enough steam to reproduce.” He suddenly looked at Simon. “Have you been to India?”
“Yes, but only as a private citizen.”
“Like it?”
“I like the food,” Simon said temperately. “And it seems as if you do, too.”
“Right. Burns the soot out of the system. I’ve seen men half dead of dysentery cured with a good hot curry.” He peered around the unstafied room with renewed irritation. “Looks as if we’ll be half dead with starvation before we get any.” He looked back at Simon. “What do you think of this immigration business?”
The Saint pondered the question for a few seconds, but it was a question destined to fade unanswered into nothingness along with the last dying luminescence of the evening on the walls of the buildings opposite.
In the back room of the restaurant, a man screamed.
4
The Saint came to his feet, while his neighbour sat frozen bolt upright in his chair, staring towards the passageway that led past the bar. His once garrulous lips were petrified and pale, and he did not even break his sphynx-like pose when Simon strode away towards the rear of the dining room. Just after he reached the narrow hall beside the bar his way was blocked by Abdul Haroon, who came tottering in from the kitchen area with a handkerchief pressed to the side of his face.
“No reason for alarm or upset, ladies and gentlemen!” he burbled hysterically towards a mythical audience in the dining room. “A small accident in the kitchen. Everything will be immediately all right!”
The long agonised shriek that had reached the Saint’s ears had been no result of a finger sliced along with the onions or a cheek spattered with hot fat.
“I’ll have a look,” he told Abdul. “I’ve got a Boy Scout badge in domestic first aid.”
Abdul continued to interpose his bulk between Simon and the mysteries of the scullery, where a hurried scuffling of feet implied that the fun and games were not completely over yet.
“Sorry, Mr. Haroon, but I’m afraid I’ll have to violate the regulations. You’re not hurt, are you?”
“No,” Abdul said dazedly.
“Then I’d better go and see who is hurt. Pardon me.”
Simon grasped Abdul’s round shoulders firmly and simply moved him aside. As he hurried down the short passage he heard the proprietor lumbering ponderously to catch up with him.
The kitchen of the Golden Crescent was amazingly small and cramped, reminiscent of the interior of an early-model U-boat. There was no sign of a boiler explosion or the collapse of a stove. One panic-stricken cook had propped himself cataleptically against the greasy refrigerator and was staring at the open door of the storage pantry. The other cook and a waiter whose name Simon did not know were in that doorway ineffectually moving forward and backwards like two particles trapped in a fluctuating magnetic field.
Beyond their legs the Saint could see someone writhing on the floor of the storage pantry. Reaching the two frightened and hesitant men who were blocking the way, Simon saw over their shoulders that the party on the floor was Mahmud, who had waited on him. Mahmud lay moaning, his eyes squeezed shut, his knees drawn up, his left hand clutching his right arm. As he twisted in pain his white jacket was blotched and smeared with grime from the wooden floor. There was no sign of blood.
The Saint took in the details of the scene in one second, scarcely pausing behind the men who were already there.
As he shoved his way past them they gibbered at one another and at him in an incomprehensible amalgam of English and their native dialects.
“What happened and who did it?” Simon snapped.
All he could make out from the ensuing linguistic detonation were the words, “Arm broken!”
He did not stop beside Mahmud any longer than he had stopped behind the other two men.
“Call a doctor!” he threw over his shoulder.
If he had waited to inspect Mahmud or question the incoherent witnesses, anybody who had made the assault and fled could be putting half the West End between himself and the scene of his crime. There were only two doors to the Golden Crescent, the front and the back, and nobody had left through the front. Simon hurried on through the narrow room, rich with the smells of the condiments on its shelves, and out of the back door into the alley where he had seen the van parked not long before. There was no van and nobody in the semi-darkness of the alley now, no Indian Gulliver with Lilliputian helper.
The Saint paused for an instant, looking both ways to be doubly sure the alley was free of any possible danger, and then he ran to the corner and the sidewalk where he had passed on his way to the restaurant. He was sure that he saw the van which conveyed the purveyors of Indian foodstuffs losing itself in the traffic almost a block away. A recollection of the giant delivery man glowed to brief vividness in his mind; but knowing that he had no chance of identifying the mayhem merchant, whoever he was and whether he was in the van or not, Simon retraced his steps to the back door of the restaurant.
In the small storeroom Mahmud still lay on the floor, but Abdul Haroon and the uninjured waiter were kneeling beside him. Mahmud’s eyes were open now, and though his face was tense with pain he was completely conscious.