He signaled on the rope for it to be hauled up, and paddled off to investigate another promising coral formation still closer to the shelf on which Marilyn sat eyeing him balefully. Under the concealing growth of living stone, he found another mound of ingots.
He wished he could have been on the cruiser’s deck, as well as down there, to share April’s excitement when she saw the first load.
He started to smile, almost getting himself a mouthful of water. The excitement on the surface would not be confined to April’s cruiser. It would spread in a flash to every other boat in the group — including Rawl’s. Somewhat belatedly, he wondered what would happen after that.
He had told April the truth about Marilyn, of course, before he started down, in a brief moment when he had her alone. But he hadn’t had time to emphasize that the secret must always be kept between them. He hoped that in her intoxication with the last-minute victory she wouldn’t let something out that would reach the ears of Rawl. It would be ironic to have victory snatched from them again on a technicality. But if Rawl cried foul, the Governors might have to sustain him. Or would Rawl prefer to accept defeat rather than ridicule?
Simon had a partial answer about April in a few minutes. She came down in the empty cradle, wearing her own aqualung, like a modern mermaid in a hammock. She could not smile, with the rubber mouthpiece deforming her lips, but as he touched her and they shook hands he saw her eyes shining and dancing behind the glass of her face mask.
Then she saw the octopus, and her eyes grew still bigger. Simon got her attention back by shaking her shoulder; then as she looked at him he pointed at the octopus, then up towards the surface, then put an upraised forefinger in front of his mouthpiece. She nodded vigorously, and repeated the forefinger gesture, and he figured that everything was still all right.
But he looked up again, and saw Duncan Rawl coming down.
There was no mistaking the glint of sunlight on his yellow curls. Or the glint of metal from the powerful spear gun couched under his arm like a lance.
The Saint’s thoughts raced in a vertiginous cascade. Had Rawl gone completely crazy with disappointment, berserk, decided to murder one or both of them regardless of the almost inevitable consequences? It seemed incredible to the Saint even as he instinctively thrust April behind him and poised himself for the flimsy chance of parrying the spear with his crowbar. Rawl was swimming down at a steep angle towards them, but on a course which began to look as if it would take him down on to Marilyn unless he pulled out of the dive at the last moment. Then was he playing for some kind of compensating glory? Since the Saint had made him look foolish by ignoring the octopus and having no trouble, was Rawl thinking of vindicating himself by killing it and then claiming to have saved the Saint’s life? That was plausible, yet it seemed hardly enough. A boast like that hardly seemed enough to salve a hypertrophied ego that had taken such punctures as he had administered to Rawl’s.
And then the answer dawned on him, with the clarity of a blueprint, as Rawl slowed his glide directly over the giant cephalopod. It was written like a book in the way Rawl glanced towards him for an instant, running his eye like a tape measure over the distance between Simon and the octopus.
Rawl only expected his shaft, when he fired it, to infuriate the creature. Then it would grab Simon and April, who were well within its reach. And Duncan Rawl would take credit for having valiantly tried to save them...
The Saint’s ribs ached from the impossibility of laughing.
Duncan Rawl fired his spear.
It twinkled like a silver arrow, straight down at Marilyn’s great amorphous body. And then the thing happened that curdled and froze the laughter in Simon’s chest.
As if the monster had watched everything with its basilisk eye, and hadn’t been fooled for a second, knowing exactly where the thing that stung it had come from — but how preposterous and fantastic could anything be? — it released the rock it sprawled on and shot straight upwards like an outlandish rocket. Its tentacles lashed around Rawl like enormous whips, and where they touched they clung. He looked like a pygmy in its stupendous eight-armed grip. One of the arms coiled around his head, then writhed away again, taking with it his mask and breathing hose. The Saint and April had one last dreadful glimpse of his face, before the final horror was blotted out in a tremendous cloud of ink.
6
“It’s a good thing I only want you to do some swimming, and not as a technical expert,” Jack Donohue said caustically, “if you can’t tell a real octopus from a prop.”
“I thought it looked extraordinarily lifelike,” said the Saint. “But I’ve heard they can do anything in Hollywood. I should be more careful what publicity I read.”
They sat out on the terrace of Bluebeard’s Castle again, watching the lights kindle below them as the brief twilight deepened over the town. April was with them, but she was not talking much.
“You’re lucky I don’t have to send you a bill that’d keep you broke for three years,” Donohue said. “Some fishermen found Marilyn drifting around Cruz Bay. She wasn’t damaged much. But I’m going to be more careful the next time anyone comes to me to borrow an artificial octopus.”
“The only way I can figure it, the real one must have had an unsatisfactory tussle with her,” Simon said, “whether he saw her as an unwilling sweetheart or a rival male. Anyway, before he found out she was only a prop, he’d torn her loose from her moorings, and she floated away. The real octopus liked the look of the spot and decided to settle down there himself.”
“And why he didn’t grab you for breakfast as soon as you came within reach, I’ll never know.”
“Maybe he’d just had a good breakfast and wasn’t hungry. Didn’t you ever go fishing and wonder why sometimes they’ll bite anything and other times they seem to be on a hunger strike? Of course when Rawl shot a spear into it, that was different. Even an octopus must have its pride.”
“And it was a break for you that it was smart enough to know who shot at it.”
“It’s too bad your camera crew wasn’t there. It was a better scene than you’ll ever direct.”
April shuddered.
“Please don’t,” she said. “I know he meant it to kill us, but I’ll have nightmares every time I remember that thing wooshing up at him. I never knew they could move so fast, and his face...”
“Don’t let that Saint name fool you,” Donohue said. “He’s a ghoul. No, I take that back. He’s a thing ghouls won’t speak to.”
“He is not!” she said indignantly. “As soon as he’d got me up to the boat, he went back to see if he couldn’t do anything, even though all he had was a knife. But he couldn’t see anything.”
“All right,” Donohue said. “He’s a hero. But don’t forget to count those gold bars every time he goes near them.”
“He can have anything he wants,” April said.
Jack Donohue finished his Peter Dawson and stood up.
“I’m expecting a call from the studio, and I’ve got to work on the script tonight,” he said. “But before I ruin your evening by leaving you, would someone tell me why the Saint always ends up with a billion dollars and the most beautiful girl in sight?”
“Doesn’t that go with every old treasure story?” said the Saint.
Haiti: The questing tycoon
1
It was intolerably hot in Port-au-Prince, for the capital city of Haiti lies at the back of a bay, a gullet twenty miles deep beyond which the opening jaws of land extend a hundred and twenty miles still farther to the west and north-west, walled in by steep high hills, and thus perfectly sheltered from every normal shift of the trade winds which temper the climate of most parts of the Antilles. The geography which made it one of the finest natural harbors in the Caribbean had doubtless appealed strongly to the French buccaneers who founded the original settlement, but three centuries later, with the wings of Pan-American Airways to replace the sails of a frigate, a no less authentic pirate could be excused for being more interested in escaping from the sweltering heat pocket than in dallying to admire the anchorage.