Señor Saint Read Online Free PDF Page B

dear man, you don’t know the half of it. Here I come dragging myself down to this ghastly dump, just in case Yarn has really got on to something I couldn’t afford to miss; and all he’s got is a mulatto concubine and a few beads. And all the time, right here in my jewel case, I’ve got a string of pearls that were good enough for Catherine of Russia!”
    Simon stood very still.
    “You have?” he said.
    “Just one of those baubles that Ormond used to pass out when he was indulging his sultan complex. Like I told you. I think he only paid about fifteen grand for them at an auction. And me wasting all this time and effort, not to mention yours, on Ned Yarn’s imaginary oyster bed!”
    At last the Saint began to laugh too, very quietly.
    “It is rather delirious,” he said. “Let me fix you another drink, and let’s go on with some unfinished business.”
    BOOK TWO
The Revolution Racket
1.
    “In my time, I’ve had all kinds of receptions from the police,” Simon Templar remarked. “Sometimes they want to give me a personal escort out of town. Sometimes they see me as a Heaven-sent fall guy for the latest big crime that they haven’t been able to pin on anybody else. Sometimes they just rumble hideous warnings of what they’ll do to me if I get out of line while I’m in their bailiwick. But your approach is certainly out of the ordinary.”
    “I try not to be an ordinary policeman,” said Captain Carlos Xavier.
    They sat in the Restaurant Larue, which has become almost as hardworked and undefinitive a name as Ritz among ambitious food purveyors: this one was in Mexico City, but it made a courageous attempt to live up to the glamorous cosmopolitan connotations of its patronymic. There was nothing traditionally Mexican about its decor, which was rather shinily international, and the menu strove to achieve the same expensive neutrality. However, at Xavier’s suggestion, they were eating pescados blancos, the delicate little fish of Lake Pátzcuaro which are not quite like anything else in the world, washed down with a bottle of Chilean Riesling; and this, it had already been established, was at the sole invitation and expense of Captain Carlos Xavier.
    “Sometimes,” Simon suggested cautiously, “I’ve actually been asked to help the police with a problem. But the buildup has never been as lavish as this.”
    “I have nothing to ask, except the pleasure of your company,” said Captain Xavier.
    He was a large fleshy man with a balding head and a compensatingly luxuriant mustache. He ate with gusto and talked with gestures. His small black eyes were humorous and very bright, but even to Simon’s critical scrutiny they seemed to beam honestly.
    “All my life I must have been reading about you,” Xavier said. “Or perhaps I should say, about a person called the Saint. But your identity is no secret now, is it?”
    “Hardly.”
    “And for almost as long, I have hoped that one day I might have the chance to meet you. I am what I suppose you would call a fan.”
    “Coming from a policeman,” said the Saint, “I guess that tops everything.”
    Xavier shook his head vigorously.
    “In most countries, perhaps. But not in Mexico.”
    “Why?”
    “This country was created by revolutions. Many of the men who founded it, our heroes, began as little more than bandits. To this very day, the party in power officially calls itself the Revolutionary Party. So, I think, we Mexicans will always have a not-so-secret sympathy in our hearts for the outlaw-what you call the Robin Hood. For although they say you have broken many laws, you have always been the righter of wrongs-is that not true?”
    “More or less, I suppose.”
    “And now that I see you,” Xavier went on enthusiastically, and with a total lack of self-consciousness, “I am even happier. I know that what a man looks like often tells nothing of what he really is. But you are exactly as I had pictured you- tall and strong and handsome, and with the air