Señor Saint Read Free

stood up.
    “I’m strong enough,” he said. “And I’ll be very careful.”
    3.
    He had already located the Cantina de las Flores-had, in fact, been inside it earlier in the evening. It was a small and dingy bistro in a back street of unromantic odors, and the only flowers in its vicinity were those which were painted in garish colors on the sign over the door. An unshaven bartender in a dirty shirt had informed him that Consuelo would not be there until ten. It was only a few minutes after that hour when the Saint strolled towards it again.
    He would probably have been less than human if he had not thought more about Jocelyn Ormond than about Consuelo on the way over. Consuelo was only a name; but Mrs. Ormond was not easy to forget.
    He tried to rationalize his reaction to her, and couldn’t do it. According to all tradition, there should have been no problem. She not only had all the physical attributes, in extravagant abundance, but she knew every line in the script, in all its cereal ripeness. The dumbest private eye on the newsstands could have taken his cue and helped himself to the offering. Yet the Saint found a perverse pleasure in pretending to be blandly unconscious of the routine, in acting as if her incredible voluptuousness left him only amused. Which was an outright glandular lie.
    He shook his head. Maybe he was just getting too old inside. …
    The bar, which had been drably deserted when he was there before, was now starting to jump. There were a dozen and a half cash customers, a few obviously local citizens but a majority with the heterogeneous look of seamen from visiting freighters-a sterling and salty clientele, no doubt, but somewhat less than elegant. There were also half a dozen girls, who seemed to function occasionally as waitresses, but who also obviously offered more general hospitality and comradeship. Instead of the atmospheric obbligato of guitars with which no Hollywood producer could have resisted backgrounding such a set, an enormous juke box blared deafening orchestrations out of its rococo edifice of plastic panels behind which colored lights flowed and blended like delirious rainbows, a dazzling and stentorian witness to the irresistible march of North American culture.
    Simon went to the counter and ordered a beer. The bartender, only a few hours more unshaven and a few hours dirtier than at their first meeting, looked at him curiously as he poured it.
    “You are the seńor who was looking for Consuelo.”
    “Is she here now?”
    “I will tell her,” the man said.
    Simon took his glass over to the juke box and stood reading the list of its musical offerings, toying with the faint hope that he might find a title which suggested that in exchange for a coin some slightly less earsplitting melody might be evoked.
    “You were asking for me?” a voice said at his shoulder.
    The Saint turned.
    He turned slowly, because the quality of the voice had jolted him momentarily off balance. It was an amazing thing for a mere voice to do at any time, and against the strident din through which he had to hear it it was almost incredible. Yet that was what it achieved, without effort. It was the loveliest speaking voice he had ever heard. It had the pure tones of cellos and crystal bells in it, and yet it held a true warmth and a caress and a passion that made the untrammeled sexiness of Jocelyn Ormond’s voice, sound like a crude rasp. Just those few words of it stippled goose-pimples up his spine. He wanted the space of a breath to re-establish his equanimity before he saw the owner.
    Then he saw her; and the goose-pimples tightened and chilled as if at a touch of icy air, and the jolt he had felt turned to a leaden numbness.
    She could have been under thirty, but she was aged in the cruel way that women of her racial mixture, in that climate, will age. You could see Spanish blood in her, and Indian, and undoubtedly some African. Her figure might once have been enticingly ripe, but now it