The Revolution Racket
The Saint modestly averted his eyes.
This was especially easy to do because the shift permitted him to gaze again at a woman who sat alone at a table across the room. He had noticed her as soon as she entered, and had been glancing at her as often as he could without seeming too inattentive to his host.
With her fair colouring and the unobtrusive elegance of her clothes, she was obviously an American. She was still stretching out her first cocktail, and referring occasionally to the plain gold watch on her wrist: she was, of course, waiting for somebody. The wedding ring on he left hand suggested that it was probably a husband - no love worthy of her time would be likely to keep such a delectable dish waiting. But, there was no harm in considering, married women did travel alone, and sometimes wait for female friends; they also came to Mexico to divorce husbands; and, as a matter of final realism, an attractive woman wearing a wedding ring abroad was not necessarily even married at all, but might wear it just as a kind of flimsy chastity belt, i the hope of discouraging a certain percentage of unwanted Casanovas. The chances were tenuous enough, but an incorrigible optimist like the Saint could always dream.
...
"The Enriquez brothers," said Xavier, "They are sitting opposite you now, at the table next to the young woman you have been staring at for the last hour."
Simon winced very slightly, and looked very carefully past the blonde.
...
"I've got fifty thousand late-model rifles and five thousand machine-guns cruising around the Caribbean, with five million rounds of ammunition - and nobody seems to want 'em!"
It should be recorded as a major testimonial to Simon Templar's phenomenal self-control that for an appreciable time he did not move a muscle. But he felt as unreal as if he had been sitting still in the midst of an earthquake. It required a conscious adjustment for him to realize that the seismic shock he experienced was purely subjective, that the mutter of other voices around had not changed key or missed a beat, that the ceiling had not fallen in and all the glassware shattered in one cataclysmic crash.
But nothing of the sort had happened. Nothing at all. Of course not.
...
It was in that brief stoppage that the blonde turned and looked at the Saint again, so intently that he knew, with utter certainly, that something had clicked in her memory, and that she knew who he was.
The implications of the 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.
...
Dorise Inkler stood outside (his room)
"You don't have to try any longer, unless you particularly want to," she said. "May I come in?"
The Saint was not given to exaggerated reactions. He did not fall over backwards in an explosion of sparks and stars like a character in the funny papers, with his eyebrows shooting up through his hair. He may have felt rather like it, but he was able to resist the inclination. In his memoirs, he would probably list it among the finest jobs of resisting he ever did.
"But of course," he said cordially. "This proves that telepathy is still better than telephones."
...
He wondered why he had ever allowed himself to get in a stew about the apparent dead end he had run into. He should have known that such a fantastically pat and promising beginning could not possibly peter out, so long as there was an obviously plot-conscious genius at work. Inevitably the thread would have been brought back to him even if he had done nothing but sit and wait for it.
But underneath his coolly interested repose he was as wary as if he had been closeted with a coy young tigress. Perhaps everything would remain cosy and kitteny; but he had no illusions about the basic hazards of the situation.
She took a slow deep breath. It stirred fascinating contours under the soft silk of her dress.
Simon Templar stood up.
All his movements were extremely slow and careful, as if he had been balancing on a tightrope over a whirling void. They had to be, while he waited for his fragmented co-ordinates to settle down, like a spun kaleidoscope, into a new pattern. But by this time his capacity for dizziness was fortunately a little numbed. The human system can only absorb so many jolts in one evening without losing some of its pristine vigour of response.
"A truly noble swindle," he murmured with restraining rapture. "Boldly conceived, ingeniously contrived, unstintingly financed, slickly dramatized, professionally played - and one of the classics of all time for size. I wish I'd thought of it myself."
...
She stood up from the chair and moved towards him. She kept on coming towards him, slowly, until the tips of her breasts touched his chest.
"If that isn't enough", she said, "there might be a personal bonus . . . Sherman won't be back for a long while yet. You've got time to think it over."
________________
She had all the standard equipment - the auburn hair, the bedroom eyes, the fabulous mammary glands, the clothes that clung suggestively to her figure, the husky voice, the full moist lips that looked as if they would respond lecherously enough to satisfy any addict of that style of writing - although the Saint hadn't yet sampled them. He couldn't somehow make himself feel like the type of cut-rate Casanova who should have been cast opposite her. He couldn't shake off a sense of unreality about her perfect embodiment of the legendary super-floozy. But there was no dout that she was sensational, and in a curious way he was fascinated.
...
It was all clear to Simon now, the strangest crime that he had to put on his bizarre record.
"He will never hear another word from me. I shall just disappear. And presently it will be clear to him that I was a crook after all, as he believes you suspected from the start; and I stole them (pearls)."
"Then he will want to start looking for pearls again."
"And you will find them. From time to time I will send you a few for you to put in the oysters. Real ones."
...
"You have?" (a string of real pearls)
"Just one of those baubles that Ormond used to pass out when he was indulging his sultan complex. Like I told you. I think he only paid about fifteen grand for them at an auction. And me wasting all this time and effort, not to mention yours, on Ned Yarn's imaginary oyster bed!"
At last the Saint began to laugh too, very quietly.
"It is rather delirious," he said.
"Let me fix you another drink, and let's go on with some unfinished business.
