"A lot of people like it here," he said. "Personally, when I come to Nassau, I'm not looking for a sterling-area Miami Beach."
"Yes, it is a different atmosphere. But if one could choose whom to be near—"
"One might ask for trouble. Would you be really happy if the Quillens were here too?"
"They are at the Country Club."
"Are they? So am I. Now when I see you there, I'll have to wonder what brought you."
She looked up, through the car window on her side, at the four tiers of deep Colonial verandahs overlooking the driveway where he had stopped.
"My room is that corner one, on the second balcony."
"I'll wave to you, Juliet."
She turned closer to him, one arm partly on the back of the seat and partly on his shoulder, her eyes big and darkly luminous in the distant light from the entrance.
"Could you not be even a little interested in getting rid of Cynthia for me?" she asked. "You must be so clever at such things, you would not make the mistakes I might make."
"Such as talking so much about it," he said amusedly.
"You think I am drunk? A little, perhaps. But sober enough to know I can deny anything you say I said. But you too can deny anything you like. So, why not be honest?"
Simon reminded himself to remember next time that in alcoholic reaction some steady starters could ride a wild finish. But for that moment he could only fall back on the faintly flippant equanimity developed from some past experience of such challenges.
"All right, darling, what's in it for me? After I've freed Godfrey from his encumbrance, but he's inherited her money, and you've married him—"
"We could console ourselves," she said, "until he had an accident."
There must be extravagances for which plain silence is ineffectual and a guffaw is inadequate. Simon decided that they were close enough to that pinnacle. He said lightly: "This, I must think over."
"Come upstairs and think."
"The management wouldn't like that. And in the morning, you might be sorry too."
She leaned on him even more overwhelmingly, bringing her full relaxed lips within an inch of his mouth. He waited, well aware of the softness that pressed against him. Then she drew back sharply, and slapped his face.
"Thank you, dear," said the Saint, reaching across her to open the other door. "And happy dreams."
She got out of the car. And as she did so, there was one inevitably perfect moment in which she offered a transient target that the most careful posing could never have improved. With the palm of his hand, he gave it an accolade that added an unpremeditated zip to her disembarcation and left her in stinging stupefaction for long enough for him to shut the car door again and get it moving out of range of retribution.
Almost as soon as he turned the next corner he had cooled off. He had a violent aversion to being slapped, and the smack with which he had reciprocated had been uninhibitedly meant to hurt, but he realized that she had some material for self-justification. Any woman who candidly offers all her physical potential to a man, and has as much to offer as Teresa Montesino, and is rejected with even goodnatured urbanity, can be expected to respond rather primitively.
Simon Templar had no virtuous feelings about the rejection. He was quite animal enough to be keenly aware of what she had in stock for the male animal, and he no longer had any lowercase saintly scruples about taking advantage of a grown woman whose natural impulses came more readily to the surface in the glow of certain liquid refreshments. He hadn't for one moment seriously contemplated making love to Teresa for any reward that Cynthia Quillen might have offered, but neither did that mean that he was resolved to fight to the death against letting her drag him into bed. He hadn't expected her to make any such effort, but when it happened he had found himself chilled by an unprecedented caution.
Recalling every one of the pertinent exchanges of their brief acquaintance, the slant of every second word that had been spoken, the Saint admitted to himself that he had been just plain scared. Discretion he could admire, and go along with; but a partnership in deception is another basis. He knew better than most people how many graveyards contain the headstones of men who listened too accommodatingly to the siren song which begins "If only something would happen to. " And Teresa had revealed herself much too acutely conscious of the rules of evidence for a free-wheeling freebooter's peace of mind. Getting into her bedroom might have been delightfully easy; but getting out again, unhooked by any whimsical barbs of her alcoholically precarious mood, might have been another deal altogether, and much more complicated than anything he had envisaged for that excursion.
"I must be getting old," he told himself wryly. And then he wondered how old you had to get before two totally differently attractive women each asked your advice about murdering the other, during the same evening. He thought that life might get really dull when there was no proposition you could afford to turn down and be satisfied with your own estimate of what you had passed up. He could see Teresa's last stunned expression as starkly frozen as a flash photo in his mind's eye, and was still laughing when he fell asleep.
He did not see the Quillens at breakfast in the dining room the next morning, or while he swam and sunned himself on the beach. But they could as well have breakfasted in their room, and immediately afterwards have had mechanical details to concern themselves with at the track before the general public came to watch the vehicles vehicling. Simon did not concern himself unduly with the thought that there might be a fairly fresh cadaver on the premises somewhere, and he was right. Charlie and Brenda Bethell, who had offered him a seat in their box for that afternoon, lunched with him at the Club and drove him out to the track, and among the first people he saw as they came down off the bridge at the end of the grandstand were Cynthia and Godfrey Quillen, both very much alive, even to a degree of visible vigor.
In fact, from their gestures and attitudes, one might have thought at a distance that they were having a heated argument; and as Simon excused himself and strolled along the front of the pits towards them, they greeted him with a simultaneous cordiality which suggested that he might have been a welcome interruption.
"I suppose this is a tactical conference," said the Saint, with smiling tactlessness. "I'm sure that racing pilots don't commit back-seat driving, even by remote control."
"Hah!" Cynthia said tersely. "I was just asking the wizard, here, to stop nagging our boss mechanic about something that went wrong yesterday, as long as he's got to service the car I'm driving today."
"That's why I want to keep him up to the mark, sweetheart," Quillen said. "If he's going to take thirty-two seconds over a routine wheel change—"
"Besides fixing something in the ignition that might have left you waiting to be towed home from the next lap."
"So he says. I don't know. I'm a driver, not an engineer. Anyhow, that was when Moss passed me, and I never had a hope of catching him again."
"That wasn't Enrico's fault. You were the driver, my dear. But now he's sulking again, and he might easily feel mean enough to do something to the Bristol that'd make it crack up this afternoon, with me in it. Everybody knows about these Italian vendettas and the stiletto in your back."
Godfrey Quillen appealed to Simon with a deprecating grin that was a model of husbandly tolerance, effortless savoir faire, and older-boyish charm.
"Please tell her that all Italians aren't members of the Mafia or Sicilian bandits and all that nonsense."