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

office. Although there were sourpouts who sneered that she acted better in bedrooms than before cameras, except for certain films which her first husband had spent a small fortune buying up, anything that she did was news and she had worked hard at making it newsworthy. Her assiduously advertised weakness was for men who lived with death at their elbow—racing drivers, lion tamers, deep-sea divers, test pilots, soldiers of fortune, young men on a flying trapeze, anyone whose luck had more chances to run out than that of most people. Her wild romances with these statistical bad bets had filled more columns of print than her thespian achievements ever earned, culminating with her marriage to Usebio, the torero who until he cut his pigtail had been generally rated most likely to become an obituary.
    “You were sensational then, Elias,” she said almost wistfully. “Nobody who hasn’t seen you in a corrida can imagine how wonderful you were. Every time you stepped out into the ring, I died. But you always lived, and that was more wonderful still.”
    “And now I expect to go on living,” Usebio said indulgently, “until I am knocked down on the sidewalk by a runaway bus.”
    “Does that mean that you lost your nerve?” asked the other man who was with them.
    He was much taller and bigger, with the fine mahogany tan which develops on a certain type of Englishman, but as a rule only when he has been exiled for a long time to colonies where the sun shines more consistently than it normally does at home. He had large white teeth to contrast with his complexion, and an outdoor man’s interesting crowfoot wrinkles to point up his light gray eyes, and the ideal dusting of gray in his hair to give it all distinction without making him seem old.
    He too was recognizable—in a lesser degree, but Simon happened to have read an article about him not long before, in the kind of magazine one thumbs through in waiting-rooms. His name was Russell Vail, and he was what is rather oddly called a white hunter: that is, he guided package-priced adventurers to the haunts of wild animals, told them when to shoot, and finished off the specimens that they wounded or missed, never forgetting that a satisfied client must go home not only with a soporific supply of anecdotes but also with the hides, heads, and horns to prove them. He had chaperoned a number of Hollywood safaris into Darkish Africa and had written a book about it, which made him a personality too.
    “I only decided not to be stupid,” Usebio said quietly. “It is a matter of arithmetic. Even if you are very good, every afternoon there is a chance for the bull to get you. Each time you go out, he has more chances. If you shoot at a target often enough, no matter how difficult it is, one day you must hit it. Too many bullfighters have forgotten that. They say, ‘In one year, three years, when I am forty, I will retire.’ But before that, they meet a bull who does not know the date. There is only one time when you can say you retire and be sure of it. That is when you are alive to say you will not fight again, not even once more.”
    “Quit while you’re ahead, eh?” Russell Vail said heartily. “Well, that’s how the sharpies play cards.”
    “Elias was always very brave,” Iantha Lamb said. “All the critics always said that.”
    “So, I had been lucky, and I was well paid, and I had not lived foolishly, as many bullfighters do. I was a rich man. I did not have to go on fighting, except for a thrill. And then I discovered a much greater thrill—to go on living, and be the husband of Iantha. That was the surprise present I gave her on our honeymoon.”
    “And what a surprise,” she said pensively. “The last thing I ever expected. But don’t blame it on me. I never asked for it.”
    Usebio looked up almost in pain, and said: “Who spoke of blame? I wanted to give you my life, and how could I give it if I did not have it?”
    There was a slightly awkward silence,