Señor Saint by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online Page A

myself? I am Manuel Enriquez. That is my brother Pablo.”
    “Sherman Inkler,” said the husband, whipping out a wallet and a card from the wallet. “And of course this is Mrs. Inkler.”
    “Oh, Sherm!” Doris Inkier gasped. “This could be the break you’ve been waiting for!”
    “We can soon find out,” Manuel said. “But this is not a good place to discuss business. You have not yet ordered your dinner. May I invite you to another place where we can talk more privately? My car is outside, and you shall be my guests.”
    As the Inklers and Pablo stood up simultaneously, he waved imperiously to the head waiter and shepherded them towards the stairs, pausing only to take both checks and sign them on the way out. It was during that brief stoppage that the blonde turned and looked at the Saint again, so intently that he knew, with utter certainty, that something had clicked in her memory, and that she knew who he was.
    3.
    The implications of that long deliberate look would have sprinkled goose-pimples up his spine-if there had been room for any more. But he had just so much capacity for horripilation, and all of it had already been pre-empted by the scene he had witnessed just previously. The Saint had long ago conditioned himself to accept coincidences unblinkingly that would have staggered anyone who was less accustomed to them: it was much the same as a prizefighter becoming inured to punishment, except that it was more pleasant. He had come to regard them as no more than the recurrent evidence of his unique and blessed destiny, which had ordained that wherever he turned, whether he sought it or not, he must always collide with adventure. But the supernatural precision and consecutiveness with which everything had unfolded that evening would have been enough to send spooky tingles up a totem pole.
    And yet the immediate result was to leave him sitting as impotently apart as the spectator of a play when the first-act curtain comes down. With the departure of the Enriquez brothers and the Inklers, he was as effectively cut off from the action as if it were unrolling in another world. The instinctive impulse, of course, was to follow; but cold reason instantaneously knocked that on the head. Manuel Enriquez had said they would go to a place where they could talk privately, and the Saint felt sure it would be just that. If any of them saw him again in their vicinity, it was a ten-to-one bet that they would have remembered him from the restaurant anyway, and drawn the obvious conclusion. But that last long look from the blonde had taken it out of the realm of risk into the confines of stark certainty.
    He tried to analyze that look again in retrospect, to determine what else might have been in it beyond simple recognition, while another department of his mind reached for philosophical consolation for the quirk of circumstance that kept him pinned to his chair.
    Why did he have to follow, anyhow? He could predict exactly what would happen next. The Enriquez brothers would offer to buy the shipload of guns. And Sherman Inkler, of course, would have his price… .
    The full significance of the blonde’s look eluded him. Each time he tried to reconstruct and re-assess it, he was halted before an intangible wall of inscrutability.
    He finished his cognac and coffee and stood up at last, and went down the stairs and through the bar out to the Paseo de la Reforma. It was raining, as it can do in Mexico City even in late spring, and the moist air had an exotic aroma of overloaded drains. One day, they say, the whole city will sink back and disappear into the swampy depths of the crater from which it arose. On such nights, as in any other city, there is always a dearth of taxis, but the Saint was fortunate enough to meet one unloading customers for the movie theater next door.
    He had had plans to go prowling in search of distraction later that evening, whenever he got rid of Xavier; but now the drive had evaporated.