The Saint Around the World (33 page)

It was all done in a fragment of the time it takes to recite, and Simon still looked down the barrel of the gun and wondered what blind hope would keep him obedient until the irrevocable bullet crashed into his brain.

“Pick up your rod,” Netchideff ordered. “Before I kill you, you will prove that you have lied.”

viii

The Saint stood on the floating dock in the bright afternoon sun, the fly rod in his hand. Netchideff had dropped the girl from his shoulder into the bottom of the motor-boat, where she lay still mercifully unconscious, and had cast off the mooring lines. He had not started the motor, but the breeze was carrying the boat steadily away over a widening slick of water. The pilot stood up squarely in the boat with his legs spread like a foreshortened Colossus, the gun which he never forgot to control no matter what else he had to do still leveled at the Saint from his lumpy fist.

“Now, show me if you can cast that thing,” Netchideff said.

“Why should I?” Simon snarled.

Yet in a sort of nightmare automatism he was making the motions of stripping line from the reel, gathering it in loose even coils in his left hand.

“Are you afraid to look foolish?” Netchideff jeered. “Or are you afraid I shall steal your secret?”

“You’re damn right you can’t make me this foolish,” said the Saint. “You can go right ahead and shoot me, but you can’t make me give you a lesson in fly casting.”

“It is, perhaps, an American secret weapon?”

“Yes,” Simon said, and the truth awakened in him like a light. “It is. In a way you’ll never understand.”

“Pah!” Netchideff spat. “You are too stupid to know how stupid you are, like any democratic bourgeois. We are symbols, you and I. I with the gun which I have taken from you, which will kill you—you with nothing but your stupid toy, and your talk of what you call sport.”

The boat was drifting away with surprising speed. The Saint had to raise his voice to be sure that he would be heard.

“And we’ll still lick you,” he said, “because you don’t know what that means.”

“You think I do not understand a sporting chance?”

How symptomatic, Simon thought, of the psychosis that is Communism to insist on pounding ideological dialectic even at that impossible moment. And yet his own compulsion forced him to fling defiance back. You went down with your colors flying, or some such traditional gesture.

“Who could interpret it for you?” he retorted. “Karl Marx, or Groucho?”

“I will give you a sporting chance,” Netchideff shouted. “Cast your feathers, catch a fish—at once—and I will not shoot you!”

The boat by then was about fifty-five feet away—little more than the minimum range for any class of pistol marksman. But the fly on the Saint’s line traveled half that distance as he raised and lowered his rod and set the fly floating lazily back and forth.

“And your Uncle Joe Stalin’s mustache,” said the Saint, with the most passionate sincerity he could put into it.

And his rod swept forward once more like a long graceful extension of his arm, and as the line reached forward ahead of it he released the reserve coils in his left hand and let them shoot out through the guides in pursuit of the sailing leader, and the whole line stretched out and straightened like a long living tongue until at the exact extremity of the cast the fly flicked Netchideff’s face.

It did not hit the pilot squarely in the left eye, the improbably miniscule target that Simon Templar had extravagantly chosen to aim for. But less than an inch below it, in the soft skin under the lower lid, the little hook stuck and pricked and then as Netchideff involuntarily flinched dug its barb deep and firm into the tender flesh.

Exquisite agony needled the pilot’s face as the hook set, and lanced blindingly through his vision as the Saint put pressure on the rod. A reflex spasm contracted Netchideff’s forefinger on the trigger of the automatic, but he had already lost sight of its mark in the sharp bright flash of pain, and even as the shot exploded another reflex was jerking both his hands up to clutch at the focal center of his anguish.

There was a remorseless pulling in the pain, a thin pitiless traction that redoubled his torture at the least resistance and offered surcease only from yielding to the pull and leaning in its direction so as to reduce the agonizing tension. He leaned into the pull until his feet had to follow his tottering balance and he stumbled against something with his shins and the boat rocked and he was suddenly weightless and then the water struck him and closed over him. Somewhere in that flurry he let go the gun.

But even when he came up again, choking and spluttering, the pain was still under his eye, drawing him steadily towards itself. His clawing hands touched a thread too frail to grasp, yet their own pressure on it only increased the agonizing drag on the embedded hook. But the line would not break: the lim-berness of the rod was a spring that refused to allow a solid resistance against which the line could have been snapped. There was still no relief except in following that fragile but inexorable pull, half swimming and half floundering in the direction it dictated.

With a heart-stopping delicacy that no angler has probably been called upon to match before or since, the Saint played him like a fish, until he was close enough to the dock to be knocked cold with an oar.

ix

In Johnny Kan’s restaurant in San Francisco, Simon Templar said: “You’ll meet her. She should be here in a few minutes. But the Mounties still wanted her for a lot of dull routine work, digging out the roots of Pavan’s distributing organization as far as possible, and that kind of mopping-up bores me. Is everything ready? The gai yung yee chee–-“

“Yes, we have your shark’s fin soup. And gum buoy ngun jon, and the chicken with wing nien sauce. What about the Russian pilot?”

“I think they’re still trying to decide what sort of protocol to apply to him. When the politicians and diplomats get into the act, I’d rather be included out. So we made a date, to celebrate here as soon as she could get away.”

“That was nice of you.”

“Besides, I had to find out how much you really knew when you let out a hint about fishing that was what finally put me on the track—when I got the point.”

“You can hear a lot of things through the Chinese grapevine,” Johnny Kan said. “For God’s sake don’t tell anyone, or I’ll never be left alone. It was just a rumor that I hoped might do you some good. When I was a kid there were so many lousy stories written about opium dens run by sinister Orientals that it gives me a special kick to think I did something personally to help smash a dope racket.”

“Well, we dented it, anyhow,” Simon said. “Although I don’t suppose it’ll be long before the ungodly are trying again.”

“If they ever gave up, what would you do for excitement? Go fishing?”

The Saint grinned, and lighted a cigarette.

“I’ve been wondering if I could claim some sort of record. He must have been damn nearly the biggest thing ever landed with a fly rod. He was about seventy inches long and would have weighed easily two hundred and twenty pounds. I was using HCH line with a four-pound-test leader; and by the happiest coincidence I hooked him with a fly called a Red Ant.”

WATCH FOR THE SIGN OF THE SAINT!

HE WILL BE BACK!