The Saint Around the World (29 page)

The drone of the plane had grown rapidly louder, and it seemed to the Saint’s sensitive ear that there was a kind of syncopated unevenness in its pulse. Almost as soon as he had localized it somewhere behind him and to his left it was bearing down lower, but he was too busy for the moment to turn and look at it. For a few minutes he was entirely absorbed in balancing the vigor of the fish against the strength of a filament that one sharp tug would have snapped. The struggle of the fish came through the fragile line and limber rod all the way into his hand, as if he were linked to it by an extended nerve. And the airplane engine roared in an approaching crescendo and then suddenly stopped, but the rush of its wings through the air went on, coming closer still, blending with the whine of a dead propeller and punctuated by an occasional spastic hiccup of erratic combustion. It wooshed over his head suddenly like a gigantic bird, seeming to swoop so low over him that involuntarily he ducked and crouched lower in the boat.

That momentary distraction and the slack that it put into his line were all that the spunky young trout needed. It was gone, with a last flashing leap, to await some other rendezvous with destiny; and Simon ruefully reeled in an unresisting hook as the cause of the trouble touched down a little further on, striking two plumes of spray from the water with its skimming pontoons.

He laid his rod down and lighted a cigarette, looking the seaplane over in more detail as it coasted towards the nearby shore. It was painted a dark gray that was almost black, its lines were not those of any make that he could identify, and it seemed to carry no identification numbers or insignia of any kind—he made those basic observations in approximately that sequence, although in less sharply punctuated compartments than the summary suggests.

Also it had definite engine trouble, as had been hinted by the irregular thrumming sound of its approach and the bron-chitic coughs it had emitted as it glided down. Now the propeller was turning again, making strained uneven revolutions with recoils and pauses in between: the pilot was forcing it with the starter, but the motor refused to fire. Already the seaplane had lost the momentum of its landing speed; it needed power to steer and taxi even on the water, but it was not producing any, and a breeze that had barely started to ripple the smoothness of the lake was beginning to waft it sideways in undignified but inexorable impotence.

The plexiglass canopy opened, and the pilot squirmed out and wriggled down on to one of the pontoons. He reached under into a trapdoor in the plane’s sternum and hauled out a light anchor with a line already attached and let it drop with a splash, and presently the plane stopped drifting and slewed around at the end of the line with its nose pointed aloofly at the playful zephyr.

The pilot stood on the pontoon and looked around with a kind of studied nonchalance, almost pointedly refraining from more than a glance in the direction of Simon Templar in his skiff. It was as if he intended to disclaim in advance even the suggestion of an appeal for help—as if, in fact, he would have denied that anything was wrong.

If that was the way he wanted it, Simon was in no hurry either. He snipped off the fly which the escaped trout had mauled severely in the tussle, and concentrated profoundly over the selection of another from the assortment in his pocket case. Finally he settled on one with gray hackles, a red body, and a yellow-brown wisp of tail, and began to tie it on to his leader with leisured care.

There was no outward change in his demeanor, any more than there is any visible change in the exterior of a radio when it is switched on. But already the mysterious circuits which had made the Saint what he was had awakened to si-lently busy life, telling him with dispassionate certainty that even in those last few moments, with no more overt symptoms than the facts which have just been narrated, the delicate tendrils of adventure had made contact with him again, even in that placid Shangri-La of the Northwest.

From the city of Vancouver on the west coast of Canada it was two hours and a quarter by ferry to Nanaimo on the east coast of Vancouver Island; from Nanaimo it was a roundabout sixty miles to where the Cowichan Lake road ended at the Youbou lumber settlement; beyond that, it was almost ten more miles by boat to the cove near the northwest tip of the lake where Simon Templar had been flycasting when the gray-black seaplane swooped down to shatter the peace of the spring morning with its spluttering engine and drag him rudely back out of his own brief moment of tranquillity. Even there at the very edge of outright wilderness, it seemed, the Saint’s destiny could not spare him for long. Adventure was still as near as it had ever been. It was only up to him whether he should answer or ignore its beckoning finger.

But of course it was no accident that the invitation met with him there. The first pass had been made weeks ago, on the other side of the Pacific.

ii

At the Raffles Hotel in Singapore, Major Vernon Ascony, the Assistant Commissioner of Police, said: “It isn’t coming through here, old boy. If it were, I couldn’t help getting a whiff of it. I personally don’t believe it’s even coming from India. From what I hear, the new governments of India and Pakistan have pretty well snuffed it out. And I don’t think it’s coming down from Indo-China either. We’d have been bound to find a link somewhere along the route. I just don’t think it’s our pidgin at all. But you can’t tell that to the international bigwigs. They’re still stuck with the ideas they got from Fu Manchu. Drugs are peddled by sinister Orientals; Singapore is one of the Orient’s gateways; therefore this must be one of the ports it clears from. So when an unusual amount of the stuff turns up in Los Angeles or Toronto, this here is one of the most likely places it came from. Then everyone wants to know why I don’t bloody well personally put a stop to it.”

The Saint smiled.

“A policeman’s lot is not a happy one,” he murmured. “Could that be set to music, or has someone already done it?”

“Don’t be too disappointed if someone got ahead of you, old chap. At least you’ve done more than almost anyone else to make it true.”

“Have I given you any trouble?”

“No. But I’m jolly well keeping my fingers crossed till your plane takes off … Seriously, old man,” Ascony said, “why don’t you do something about it? I don’t mind telling you, when I was a bit younger you were quite a hero of mine. You know, the Robin Hood of modern crime, the knight in shining armor—all that sort of rot. A lot of us in England used to think of you like that, when we read about you in the papers. But lately, you seem to have become rather different.”

“The world has become a little different too,” said the Saint.

“I know. And I’m sure that everything you’ve been doing has been important enough, in its own way. But I can’t help wishing that once in a while you’d take on something more like the old times, I mean some simple racket that we all understand and agree about, and do it up good and proper without making a dollar out of it for yourself, just because it ought to be done. Like this dope racket, for instance.”

“You’re not a boy now,” said the Saint, almost harshly. “You’re a policeman. You know how big and complicated the dope racket is. You know how many man-hours and dollars, how many elaborate organizations in how many countries, are trying to fight it. But you just want me to fix it all by myself, by tracking down one dastardly master-mind and punching him in the nose.”

“Yes, of course I know it isn’t so simple. But there actually is a flood of dope reaching North America on a bigger scale than it ever did before. Anyhow, that’s what I gather from the memoranda that end up on my desk. Well, a thing like that could have one simple source, which a fellow like yourself might be able to dig out, if he was lucky. You get around a lot. I suppose I’m talking out of turn. But I wish you’d try.”

Simon Templar frowned at the beading of dew on his stengah glass. It was a long time since he had been reminded of certain truths as bluntly as Major Ascony’s incongruously genuine eagerness had stated them.

“Maybe I’ll have to do that,” he said darkly.

And by the next morning he might have preferred to forget the easy boast: only some of the backwash of memories that had stung it out of him would not be so easily dismissed.

But in Hong Kong, Inspector Stephen Hao said: “If it’s coming from Red China, it isn’t shipped from here. Would you like to see how we search everybody who comes in from the mainland these days? After we get through frisking ‘em, five thousand of ‘em couldn’t be carrying enough dope to give an addict one good fix. Why don’t you look around in Japan?”

But in Tokyo, at his favorite tempura restaurant on Yodo-bashi Avenue, Master Sergeant Ben Johnson, of the Office of Special Investigations, said: “Sure, the Secret Service and the FBI have been riding our tails about it for months. They know that most of the supply these days is moving from west to east, from the Pacific Coast. But I’ll swear it isn’t coming from Nippon. Hell, we’ve got it licked here to the point where the domestic traffic is about ready to die from starvation, and the prices are out of sight. So where would anyone find that sort of quantity to export? What do you say, Nikki?”

Inspector Geichi Nikkiyama, of the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, nodded owlishly over a fried shrimp breaded with golden batter.

“Ah, so. More likely criminal technician in United States having discovered how to make synthetic dope in bathtub, like so profitable Prohibition gin.”

But in San Francisco, in Johnny Kan’s restaurant on Grant Avenue, as the Saint dipped his chopsticks into a dish of tung gee bok opp, a succulent squab marinated in exotic spices and rose liqueur and dressed with a quite improbable sauce, Johnny told him: “If I were you, I’d go on up to Vancouver. From what I hear, that’s the easiest place to get it in all North America. If my name was Charlie Chan, I’d deduce that where it’s most plentiful would be the place nearest the source. I’d like to see you do something about it, Saint.”

“So would I,” said the Saint. “And it can’t be much harder than catching hold of a rainbow.”

“You might look into that too, while you’re up there,” Johnny Kan said confusingly.

Simon figured that some minor idiomatic cog had slipped somewhere between them, but wrote it off as not worth a laborious exploration. Yet for the first time he felt that he might be getting warm, and in Vancouver he made no more direct inquiries.

Most of what he did there would make rather tedious storytelling, except for certain individuals who might have nefarious motives for a too detailed curiosity about the Saint’s methods. It was quite a few years since the Saint had last slipped into the underworld and disappeared without a ripple, like an otter into a dark pool; but he did it as easily as if the last of the old days had been yesterday, and none of the persons he moved among during that time ever dreamed who it was that had passed through their stealthy lives more stealthily than their utmost caution could conceive.

He forgot all about Johnny Kan’s bland non sequitur until one day in the devious labyrinths he followed there was the echo of a name, Julius Pavan, and with it a reference to what seemed to be a stock joke about Mr. Pavan’s passion for fishing. And at long last a bell had rung as Simon remembered that among truly dedicated fishermen the word “rainbow” primarily suggests a species of fish, the rainbow trout, after which the lighting phenomenon in the sky may possibly have been named.

And so a hint and a hunch had eventually led him to where he had just seen a seaplane of unfamiliar design and with no identification markings landing on the waters where Mr. Pavan fished; and now it all seemed as clear and sure as Fate.

iii

At the edge of the pines on the north shore of the cove there was a log cabin no bigger than a double garage. It was the only sign of human habitation within sight of that remote corner of the lake. It was crudely but solidly built of hand-hewn timber, and mellowed into the landscape with the weathering of many seasons. Perhaps some trapper of a generation ago had built it for his headquarters, before the swaths cut by commercial logging had driven the game even further back into the dwindling wilderness. But now it was the fishing camp of Julius Pavan, who lived alone in a big house in the heights of West Vancouver, and drove a big car and invested in buildings and real estate.

A man in a red plaid shirt and drab trousers came out-of it and hurried down to a rough floating dock where a small motor-boat was tied up. He cast off and cranked it up and chugged across to the seaplane at an unspectacular but useful speed.

He stopped the boat beside the pontoon where the pilot stood, and the pilot got in. There was some discussion or explanation or argument, in which the pilot took the more gestic-ulatory part. Presently the pilot climbed up on the short fore-deck, and from that elevation managed to open a cowling over the plane’s single engine, while the man in the plaid shirt steadied the motor-boat by holding on to the plane’s propeller. The pilot peered and probed lengthily into the engine’s innards, and finally closed the cowling again and lowered himself back down into the boat with another outburst of gestures.

The man in the plaid shirt shrugged, and cranked his motor again, and the boat swung around and headed back towards the dock below the lonely cabin.

Their course took them within fifty yards of the Saint, and both men looked at him as they went by. But neither of them waved a casual greeting as is the friendly custom of the backwoods; and the Saint, having left it to them to make the advance, did not belatedly take the initiative. When they had finished looking at him, they returned to their private discussion; and with reciprocal indifference to their existence and their problems, Simon Templar plucked his fly from the water where it had been resting and freshened it a little with a couple of false casts and sent it floating downwind towards another imaginary target.

Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the motor-boat tie up at the dock, and the two men get out and walk up to the cabin and go in.

Simon decided to allow himself just three more casts, each to be made and properly fished without unseemly haste. Through one circumstance and another, several summers had gone by since he last practised that pin-point accuracy with a trout rod, and he was ingenuously delighted to discover that his wrist had lost little of its cunning. But on another level of his mind those three casts were only a convenient way of estimating a period of time when he felt he should let go by, and simultaneously a way of occupying the time which might lull any suspicions of the two men who were now in the cabin, if perchance they were still keeping him under observation.