When, the engine note finally changed a little, and the helicopter tilted to a standstill and settled slowly to the ground like a rather unsteady elevator, Mr Diehl would not even have bet on which county he was in. His last orientation point had been some distant watery horizon that could equally well have been the Atlantic Ocean or the forty-mile diameter of Lake Okeechobee: he had not been watching the compass, and in any case he was vague about the turns they had made since then. But the Count seemed to know what he was doing, and when the overhead blades had shuddered to silence Mr Diehl turned to him in a passable impersonation of a man who had gone along on a dozen or two similar expeditions.
“You sure know how to drive this egg-beater, Count,” he said.
“Luckily for us,” said the Saint, unbuckling his safety belt and climbing out. “If anything happened to me, it wouldn’t be any more use to you than a kid’s tricycle for getting out of here, would it?”
“You can say that again,” grinned Mr Diehl.
“And what chance do you think you’d have of making it on foot?”
Mr Diehl gazed around. They were near the edge of one of the small lakes or large ponds that were visible everywhere from the air. The ground where they had landed and immediately around where they stood felt firm underfoot, but not far away water glistened between blades of sedge that would have looked like dry land from above. And everywhere else was nothing but the endless rippling expanse of wild grass varied sometimes by a fringe of reeds or a clump of palmettos, and broken only by an occasional scrawny tree or tuft of cabbage palm or the bare ghostly trunk of a dead cypress. Mr Diehl tried not to let it impress him.
“Then,” said the Saint calmly, “I guess you won’t care how much I charge for flying you out.”
Mr Diehl laughed heartily — not because he saw the joke, but because he thought he was supposed to.
“I should say not. What’s your price?”
“At this moment, only forty thousand dollars.”
Mr Diehl laughed again, a little more vaguely.
“That’s mighty generous of you.”
“I’m glad you think so,” said the Saint, and thereupon took his spinning rod out of the cabin and cautiously explored a route to the edge of the open water and began to fish.
Mr Diehl watched him somewhat puzzledly for a few minutes, and then decided that such incomprehensible foreign pleasantries were hardly worth racking his brain over. He fetched his own rod and tackle box and found a place a little farther along to try some casting himself.
It is possible that the bass in that remote slough were every whit as innocent and unspoiled as the Count of Cristamonte had theorized, but after a time it began to seem that even if they had never learned to suspect a hook they had grown up with much the same dumb instincts and habits as other bass, a species which does most of its feeding at dusk and dawn and is inclined to spend the heat of the day digesting or snoozing or holed up in finny meditation. At any rate, a wide variety of lures and retrieves failed to get either of them a strike, and Mr Diehl himself could recognize that the only signs of activity that broke the glassy water were made by gar. But as the sun rose higher and hotter and the bass presumably sank deeper into their cool weedy retreats, Mr Diehl grew thirstier, and began to think longingly of the supply of beer which he had seen loaded onto the helicopter in a portable icebox.
As if in telepathic unanimity, he saw the Count heading back at last to the ship, and hastened to join him.
“That,” he said, smacking his lips as he watched the puncturing of a can dripping with, cool moisture, “is going to taste awful good.”
“It certainly is,” Simon agreed, and proceeded to prove it to himself.
Mr Diehl was very faintly aware of something less than the elaborate olde-worlde courtesy he had read about somewhere, but he cheerfully reached in to grab and open his own can, and was dully startled to find his movement barred by a steel-cored arm.
“Just a minute, chum,” said the Saint. “Beer is selling here for a thousand dollars a shot.”
Mr Diehl’s grin this time was a trifle labored.
“Okay,” he said. “I’ll owe it to you.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t give credit. After all, my price is strictly based on how much the customer might be willing to pay at the moment.”
“You should of told me before we left, and I’d of brought some cash with me.”
“Oh, I’m not as difficult as that. Your check is good enough.”
“Too bad I didn’t bring my check-book either.”
“I was afraid you mightn’t, so I brought one for you. This is one of your banks, isn’t it?”
Mr Diehl stared stupidly at the printed pad that was conjured almost from nowhere to be flourished under his nose. In the circumstances, he was prepared to extend himself almost infinitely to be a good Joe and go along with a gag, but this was rapidly getting beyond him.
“Yes, it is.” he said strenuously. “But frankly, Count, I must apologize if I missed the joke somewhere—”
“Suppose you start getting back on the beam by dropping that ‘Count’ business, Ed.” Simon suggested kindly, and it was only then that he shed the last vestiges of an accent which had been getting progressively thinner with every sentence. “I’m going to give you a big moment for your memoirs, I am the Saint, and I’m giving you the priceless favor of my personal attention in this project of collecting a small assessment which. I’ve decided that you should pay on your ill-gotten gains.”
“You sound crazier every minute,” Mr Diehl mumbled, though in a still crazier way this was beginning to sound like the most real nightmare he had ever experienced. “So you’re the Saint. Some kind of fancy crook. All right, you kidnaped me—”
“I don’t remember it that way,” Simon corrected him genially. “There was no violence or intimidation. In fact, you told everyone who’d listen to you at the airport how much you were going to enjoy this trip with me.”
“But if you keep me here—”
“I never said I wanted to keep you here. I merely told you how much I’d charge to fly you out. That’s my privilege, as a free agent in a free country.”
Mr Diehl glared at him through a kind of fog. There was a purely mental haze as well as the emotional murk in it, steaming off a much larger mass of incredibilia than his limited mentality could assimilate at one gulp: a) The Saint was only a mythological character anyhow, and b) even if he wasn’t, this couldn’t be happening to him, Ed Diehl, and c) even if it was happening, there must be some flaw in the structure of such an outrageous swindle. But for the moment the lean corsair’s face and figure that confronted him were fantastically convincing.
“You won’t get a nickel out of me,” he said, and tried to overcome an infuriating feeling of futility. “You and your Count of Cristamonte story—”
“I didn’t try to get a nickel out of you with that story,” said the Saint virtuously, “because that would have been fraudulent. But there’s nothing illegal about using a phony name just for fun.” He drank again from the can, deeply and with relish, and then made another raid on the ice-chest for a square plastic box, from which he extracted a thick and nourishing sandwich. “Pardon me if I have lunch,” he said. “There are plenty more of these, by the way, and to you they are only two thousand dollars each.”