Chapter 2
1
THE WONDERFUL WAR The Republic of Pasala lies near the northward base of the Yucatan peninsula in Central America. It has an area of about 10,000 square miles, or roughly the size of England from the Tweed to a line drawn from Liverpool to Hull. Population, about 18,000. Imports, erratic. Exports, equally erratic, and consisting (when the population can be stirred to the necessary labour) of maize, rice, sugar-cane, mahogany, and-oil.
'You can hurry up and warble all you know about this oil, Archie,' said Simon Templar briskly, half an hour after he landed at Santa Miranda. 'And you can leave out your adventures among the senoritas. I want to get this settled-I've got a date back in England for the end of May, and that doesn't give me a lot of time here.'
Mr. Archibald Sheridan stirred slothfully in his long chair and took a pull at a whisky-and-soda in which ice clinked seductively.
'You've had it all in my letters and cables,' he said. 'But I'll just run through it again to connect it up. It goes like this. Three years ago almost to the day, a Scots mining engineer named McAndrew went prospecting round the hills about fifty miles inland. Everyone said he was crazy-till he came back six months later with samples from his feeler borings. He said he'd struck one of the richest deposits that ever gushed- and it was only a hundred feet below the surface. He got a concession-chiefly because the authorities still couldn't believe his story-staked his claim, cabled for his daughter to come over and join him, and settled down to feel rich and wait for the plant he'd ordered to be shipped over from New Orleans.'
'Did the girl come?' asked Templar.
'She's right here,' answered Sheridan. 'But you told me to leave the women out of it. She doesn't really come into the story anyway. The man who does come in is a half-caste bum from God knows where, name of Shannet. Apparently Shannet had been sponging and beachcombing here for months before McAndrew arrived. Everyone was down on him, and so McAndrew, being one of these quixotic idiots, joined up with him. He even took him into partnership, just to defy public opinion; and, anyhow, he was wanting help, and Shannet had some sort of qualifications. The two of them went up into the interior to take a look at the claim. Shannet came back, but McAndrew didn't. Shannet said a snake got him.'
Simon Templar reached for another cigarette.
'Personally, I say that snake's name was Shannet,' remarked Archie Sheridan quietly. 'Lilla-McAndrew's daughter-said the same thing. Particularly when Shannet produced a written agreement signed by McAndrew and him self, in which it was arranged that if either partner should die, all rights in the claim should pass to the other partner. Lilla swore that McAndrew, who'd always thought first of her, would never have signed such a document, and she got a look at it and said the signature was forged. Shannet replied that McAndrew was getting over a bout of malaria when he signed it, and his hand was rather shaky. The girl carried it right to the court of what passes for justice here, fighting like a hero, but Shannet had too big a pull with the judge, and she lost her case. I arrived just after her appeal was turned down.'
'What about McAndrew's body?'
'Shannet said he buried it by the trail; but the jungle trails here are worse than any maze that was ever invented, and you can almost see the stuff grow. The grave could quite reasonably be lost in a week. Shannet said he couldn't find it again. I took a trip that way myself, but it wasn't any use. All I got out of it was a bullet through a perfectly good hat from some sniper in the background-Shannet for a fiver.'
'After which,' suggested Simon Templar thoughtfully, 'Shannet found he couldn't run the show alone, and sold out to our dear friend in London, Master Hugo Campard, shark, swindler, general blackguard, and promoter of unlimited dud companies--'
'Who perpetrated the first sound company of his career, Pasala Oil Products, on the strength of it,' Sheridan completed. 'Shares not for public issue, and sixty percent of them held by himself.'
Simon Templar took his cigarette from his mouth and blew a long, thin streamer of smoke into the sunlight.
'So that's what I've come over to deal with, Archibald?' he murmured. 'Well, well, well! . . . Taken by and large, it looks like a diverting holiday. Carol a brief psalm about things political, son.'
'Just about twice as crooked as anything else south of the United States border,' said Sheridan. 'The man who matters isn't the President. He's under the thumb of what they call the Minister of the Interior, who finds it much more convenient and much safer to stay in the background-they never assassinate Ministers of the Interior, apparently, but Presidents are fair game. And this man-Manuel Conception de Villega is his poetic label-is right under the wing of Shannet, and is likely to stay there as long as Shannet's money lasts.'
The Saint rose and lounged over to the veranda rail. At that hour (which was just after midday) the thermometer stood at a hundred and two in the shade, and the Saint had provided himself suitably with white ducks. The dazzling whiteness of them would have put snow to shame; and he wore them, as might have been expected of him, with the most cool and careless elegance in the world. He looked as if he would have found an inferno chilly. His dark hair was brushed smoothly back; his lean face was tanned to a healthy brown; altogether he must have been the most dashing and immaculate sight that Santa Miranda had set eyes on for many years.
Sheridan was in despair before that vision of unruffled perfection. His hair was tousled, his white ducks looked some what limp with the heat, and his pleasantly ugly face was moist.
'What about the rest of the white, or near-white, inhabitants?' inquired the Saint.
'A two-fisted, rip-roaring giant of a red-headed Irishman named Kelly,' was the reply. 'His wife-that's two. Lilla McAndrew, who's staying with them-I wouldn't let her put up at the filthy hotel in the town any longer-three. Four and five, a couple of traders, more or less permanently drunk and not worth considering. Six-Shannet. That's the lot.'
The Saint turned away and gazed down the hillside. From where he stood, on the veranda of Sheridan's bungalow, he could look down onto the roofs of Santa Miranda-the cluster of white buildings in the Moorish style which formed the centre, and the fringe of adobe huts on the outskirts. Left and right of him, on the hill above the town, were other bungalows. Beyond the town was the sea.
The Saint studied the view for a time in silence; then he turned round again.
'We seem to be onto the goods,' he remarked. 'Shannet, the small fish, but an undoubted murderer-and, through him, our real man, Campard. I had a hunch I shouldn't be wasting your time when I sent you out here as soon as I heard Campard was backing Pasala Oil Products. But I never guessed P.O.P. would be real till I got your first cable. Now we're on a truly classy piece of velvet. It all looks too easy.'
'Easy?' queried Sheridan skeptically. 'I'm glad you think it's easy. With Shannet's claim established, and the concession in writing at Campard's London office, and Lilla McAndrew's petition dismissed, and Shannet twiddling the government, the army, the police, and the rest of the bunch, down to the last office boy, round and round his little finger with the money he gets from Campard-and the man calls it easy. Oh, take him away!'
The Saint's hand drove even deeper into his pockets. Tall and trim and athletic, he stood with his feet astride, swaying gently from his toes, with the Saintly smile flickering faintly round his mouth and a little dancing devil of mischief rousing in his blue eyes.
'I said easy,' he drawled.
Sheridan buried his face in his hands.
'Go and put your head in the ice bucket,' he pleaded. 'Of course, it's the sun. You're not used to it-I forgot that.'
'How big is the army?'
'There's a standing army of about five hundred, commanded by seventeen generals, twenty-five colonels, and about fifty minor officers. And if your head hurts, just lie down, close the eyes, and relax. It'll be quite all right in an hour or two.'
