The Saint on the Spanish Main by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online Page A

apart?”
    O’Kevin seemed to lie even more motionless
than his bonds required, as if frozen by an almost superstitious fascination.
And the Saint smiled at him like a benevolent swami.
    “Well, I remember something you
mentioned more than once when you were knocking Uckrose, about how you’d
have to take his fish back with you—any kind of fish. It seems like too
fanciful a touch for you to have invented. Therefore you knew it was really
going to hap pen, and you were trying to prepare me for it so that I wouldn’t
be too struck by it when it did. So I am now going to bet my roll on
that very fishy story.”
    He went back out to the cockpit and opened
the fish box. The dolphin that O’Kevin had shown him earlier still lay
there on the ice. Simon squeezed its belly hard with one hand, and
knew in a moment of exquisite and unforgettable elation that he had been right,
all the way to this climax. It was like having forecast a chess game up to the checkmate after the
first half-dozen moves.
    Straight ahead of him over the transom the
sun was setting, and the silhouette of a seaplane coming head-on was
etched against a crimson-tinted cloud. Already he could hear the faint
hum of its engine like a distant bumblebee.
    With the bait-knife, Simon Templar performed
a deft Caesarean
section that delivered the fish of a trans parent
plastic bag in which many hard angular objects thinly wrapped in tissue paper
could be easily felt. He returned to
the saloon and showed it to O’Kevin.
    “I must check on Clinton’s ex-partner in
New York in a couple of years,” he remarked. “I assume
he’s the re ceiving end of the line, and by that time they may have organized
some other channel that I can hijack. But I’m afraid you’ll have to go back to
legitimate fishing, Patsy me b’y.”
    He rinsed the plastic bag under the pump and
dried it on a dishtowel before he put it away in his pocket. The examination of
its contents could afford to wait, but his plane was already
coming down for its landing on the lagoon with a roar and a rush of wind
overhead.
    “I wish you’d give Gloria a
message,” said the Saint. “Tell her she didn’t really leave me
cold, but I couldn’t take everything else she offered and these
jewels too. On the other hand, I mightn’t have been doing this at all if she hadn’t tried to take me like a yokel and stand me up. There has
to be some self-respect among thieves.”
    He went out and jumped up on to the dock and walked
briskly away, wondering what he was going to write to Don Mucklow.
     
     
     
    NASSAU:
    The Arrow of God
    42
    One of Simon Templar’s stock criticisms of
the classic type of detective story is that the victim of the murder,
the reluctant spark-plug of all the entertaining mystery and strife, is usually
a mere nonentity who wanders vaguely through the first few pages with the
sole purpose of becoming a convenient body in the library by the end of Chapter
One. But what his own feelings and problems may have been, the
personality which has to provide so many people with adequate motives for
desiring him to drop dead, is largely a matter of hearsay, retrospectively brought
out in the conventional process of drawing at tention to one suspect after another.
    “You could almost,” Simon has said,
“Call him a cor pus derelicti… . Actually
the physical murder should only be the mid-point of the story: the
things that led up .to it are at least as interesting as the mechanical
solution of who done it. … Personally, I’ve killed very few peo ple that I
didn’t know plenty about first.”
    Coming from a man who is generally regarded
as almost a detective-story character himself, this comment is at
least worth recording for reference; but it certainly did not apply to the
shuffling off of Mr. Floyd Vosper, which caused a brief commotion on the
island of New Providence
in the early spring of that year.
     
    2
    Why Simon Templar should have been in Nassau (which,
for the benefit of the