Trust the Saint by Leslie Charteris Read Free Book Online Page A

greatest moment in that line,” said the Saint equably, “you’d either splash it all over your paper, which would be a breach of confidence, or you wouldn’t believe me, which would hurt my pride. So let’s save us both embarrassment by trying some other subject. After all, burglars can make just as big headlines as bullfighters.”
    In simple fact, Simon had tried his cape-work against very young bulls at round-up time on the fincas of a couple of breeders whom he had known in Spain, and his natural grace and superb reflexes had caused some of the privileged observers to proclaim perhaps extravagantly that he was a born phenomenon whose refusal to make it a career would be a disaster through which tauromachy would continue irreparably impoverished. But he had never taken any but a spectator’s part in any formal corrida, and in spite of the acidulous journalist’s imputation he had never felt any ambition to.
    Nevertheless the Saint’s last answer, like many of his smoothest evasions, was only a bald truth which it privately amused him to veil and confuse.
    He did actually, once, make a quite such as no matador up to and including Belmonte ever dreamed of, or is likely to dream of since, except in nightmares.
    (I must intrude myself again here to mention that what I have just italicized has no connection with the English word “quite,” meaning “moderately,” as in a phrase like “quite nice,” often pronounced “quaite naice”: this one is pronounced in Spain something like key-tay, and in a formal bullfight refers to the work of luring the bull away from a fallen picador, the lancer on the horse which the bull has felled, despite the squeals of Anglo-Saxon tourists in the stands, who as charter members of some SPCA do not regard human beings as animals that should not be cruelly treated. Aficionados, who may be more sentimental, rate the quite as a rather valiant job, sometimes almost heroic.)
    Simon Templar really did think of the hunting of criminals sometimes as a sport, and infinitely more exciting than the pursuit of the much less cunning and dangerous quarry which satisfies other self-designated sportsmen. But just as devotees of the more generally accepted versions of the chase rate some forms as more challenging than others, to the Saint one of the supreme refinements was to spot the villain before he became the answer to a whodunit, or to anticipate the crime before the perpetrators had finally decided to commit it.
    Sometimes, Simon maintained, a man is ineluctably marked for murder. He may be the political candidate with the reform platform in a town that doesn’t want to be reformed, the crook who has decided to squeal on a powerful racket, the inconvenient husband who stands in the way of somebody’s hot ideas for a reshuffle—there are many obvious possibilities. But since murders, like marriages, require at least two participants, the consummation requires an inexorable aggressor as well as a predestined victim.
    There was an evening in London when the Saint felt sure he had met both together. This was at the bar of the White Elephant, which was a supper club where in those days you might run into anyone that you read about in the papers, and frequently did.
    The slight swarthy man with the burning black eyes and the ugly scar on one temple he recognized instantly as Elias Usebio, who had been called the greatest matador since Manolete: Simon had never seen him in the ring, but that scimitar profile had been widely caricatured, especially since his sensational wedding and equally publicized retirement a year ago.
    Iantha Lamb, whom he had married, or who had married him, would have been ecstatically recognized by many millions more to whom he was only a name which they were still very vague about, such being the more international scope of motion pictures and their attendant publicity. Iantha Lamb was a movie star, if not of the first magnitude, at least a luminary to gladden the box