Señor Saint Read Online Free PDF Page A

Ned.”
    “Please, you must both forgive me,” Consuelo said in a low voice. “Let us have some tequila.”
    Simon looked down at the little heap of beads in his hand.
    “What do you want me to do with the pearls?” he asked.
    The blind man’s dark glasses held his gaze like hypnotic hungry eyes.
    “Are they really valuable?”
    “I’d say they were, but I’m not an expert,” Simon replied, improvising with infinite care. “They’d have to be sold in the right place, of course. As you may know, individual pearls don’t mean so much, unless they’re really gigantic. Most pearls are made into necklaces and things like that, which means that they have to be matched, and they gain in value by being put together. And then it’s a funny market these days, on account of all the cultured pearls that only an expert can tell from real ones. There are still people who’ll spend a fortune on the genuine article, but you don’t find them waiting on every jeweler’s doorstep. It takes work, and preparation, and patience-and time.”
    “But-eventually-they should be worth a lot?”
    “Eventually,” said the Saint soberly, “they may mean more to you than you’d believe right now.”
    Ned Yarn’s breath came and went in a long sigh.
    “That’s all I wanted to know,” he said. “I can wait some more. I guess I’m used to waiting.”
    “Do you want me to take the pearls back to the States and see what I can do with them?”
    “Yes. And Consuelo and I will go on fishing for more. At least we’ll know we aren’t wasting our time. Where’s that drink you were talking about, Consuelo?” She put the glass in his hand, and he raised it. “Here’s luck to all of us.”
    “Especially to you two.” Simon looked at the woman over his glass and said: “Salud!”
    He wrapped the beads carefully in a scrap of newspaper and tucked it into his pocket.
    “Do you mind if Consuelo guides me back from here?” he asked. “I don’t want to get lost.”
    “Of course, we don’t want that. And thank you for coming.”
    The night was the same, perhaps a little cooler, perhaps a little more muted in its secret sounds. The woman’s heels tapped the same monotonous rhythm, perhaps a little slower. They walked quite a long way without speaking, as they had before; but now they kept silence as if to make sure that they were beyond the most fantastic range of a blind man’s hearing before they spoke.
    Simon Templar was glad that the silence lasted as long as it did. He had a lot to think about, to weigh and balance and to look ahead from.
    Finally she said, almost timidly: “I think you understand, seńor.”
    “I think so,” he said; but he waited to hear more from her.
    “When he began to be discontented, we went out in the boat and began looking for pearls. For a long time that made him happy. But presently, when we found nothing he was unhappy again. At last we found some oysters. Then again he had hope. But there were no pearls. So presently, after some more time, he was sad again. It hurt too much to see him despair. So at last I let him find some pearls. At first they were real, I think. I took them from some earrings that my mother gave me. And after that, they were beads.”
    “And when you said you sold them-“
    “I did sell the real ones, for a few pesos. The rest was money I had saved for him, like the five hundred dollars.”
    “Did you mean what I heard you say-that if you could save enough, you meant to take him to a specialist somewhere who might be able to bring back his sight?”
    There was a long pause before she answered.
    “I would have done it when I had the courage,” she said. “I will do it one day, when I am strong enough. But it will not be easy. Because I know that when he sees me with his eyes, he will not love me any more.”
    He felt it all the way through him down to his toes, like the subsonic tremor of an earthquake, the tingling realization of what those few simple words