The Saint and the People Importers Read Free Page A

passed a hamburger house, a magazine shop, and an Italian delicatessen, and turned down to Shaftesbury Avenue, which was roaring with traffic and jammed with sightseers. He had to wait at a corner until he could get across the avenue to its southern side. The glow of the setting sun stained the façades of all the buildings a livid red. The day had seemed perfectly clear, but now that the sun had sunk below the roof-tops an autumn haze was filtering and deepening the tone of the light. As Simon continued on towards the Golden Crescent, he almost suddenly became aware of a wintry chill in the air, as if the sinking of the sun had revealed an underlying coldness that had been there all the time.
    Or was the chill inside him-an omen of events that every deliberate step was bringing nearer?
    He was approaching the Indian restaurant from its rear, and he could smell the exotic pungency of its kitchen exhaust while he was still yards away. The restaurant was on a corner, and behind it and its neighbouring shops ran a narrow alley serving their back doors. Simon would not have paid any particular attention to a medium-sized van which had backed into the alley if he had not happened to notice the two men who apparently were in charge of it. Their appearance was so startling that he paused and glanced at the side-panels of the blue van expecting to see the advertisement for a circus.
    Instead he saw the words: SUPREME IMPORTS LTD., PURVEYORS OF FINEST INDIAN FOODSTUFFS.
    All in a matter of seconds, he was able to take another look at the men who had attracted his attention as they lifted a crate and cartons from inside the van and carried them into the back door of the Golden Crescent. Both of them wore dirty blue workmen’s clothes, but that was where any resemblance ended.
    By far the more striking of the two was a giant Indian or Pakistani, at least six and a half feet tall, with muscles and girth to match his amazing stature. The huge dome of his skull was bald, like a great gleaming egg resting in the bristling black nest of muttonchop whiskers and jutting moustaches which smothered the lower regions of his head. The bridge of his nose receded abnormally as it approached his massive brow, and his little oily eyes gave the impression of having rolled down close together in the depression like a pair of black ball-bearings.
    The small cramped jet eyes fastened on Simon’s face for an instant and then flicked away to concentrate on the business of moving the wooden crate into the restaurant’s storeroom.
    The other member of the blue-clad team was a European, and in no way as remarkable as his mate. It was just that his unusual smallness-jockey-like, the Saint thought-was so emphasised by the monstrous Indian’s Brobdingnagian bulk that he looked like a pigmy in comparison. He was not only rather short, but also thin, with an anxious deathshead face surmounted by a closely cut crop of coarse hair that stood rigidly up on end. He blinked rapidly as he worked, and did not notice Simon as the Saint went on past the entrance of the alley.
    The Saint had no reason to think any more-for the time being-about the two oddly assorted purveyors of finest Indian foodstuffs. He was much more interested in knowing what the owner and staff of the Golden Crescent could tell him about their compatriots’ problems-if not their own-of involvement with extortioners of the kind whose bloody deed had just made the headlines.
    Simon knew the Golden Crescent through half a dozen visits he had made during the past year. The only thing which differentiated it from scores of other Indian restaurants in London (distinction between Indian and Pakistani cuisine being virtually nonexistent in the British public mind) was the intensely calorific excellence of its curried lamb and the benevolent hospitality of its proprietor, Abdul Haroon. There were more lavish, and possibly better, Indian restaurants, but there was none with a more sociable and talkative