The Saint and the People Importers Read Free Page B

owner-and talkativeness was a quality for which the Saint felt a keen desire on this particular evening.
    He rounded the corner and approached the restaurant’s modest front entrance, an ordinary glass door flanked on either side by plate-glass windows, each bearing in appropriately gilt lettering the words golden cresent restaurant. Above the door, so that it could be seen by prospective customers approaching from east or west, hung another gilded announcement of the restaurant’s identity. It seemed unlikely that even the most unobservant pedestrian could feel any doubt that he was, indeed, at the portals of the Golden Crescent, but in case there should be any last-minute doubts among the exceptionally dull-witted the fact was confirmed once more by neat gold lettering on the glass of the entrance door itself.
    Mr. Abdul Haroon was loquacious even in his advertising.
    Before going inside, the Saint glanced through one of the windows, over a row of sickly ferns which had somehow survived the sunless and spice-laden atmosphere of the interior. It was barely six o’clock, and he was glad to see that he would be the first customer to arrive that evening.
    He opened the door and stepped in. There was no entrance alcove, and he was immediately in the midst of white-covered tables packed as close together as sheep in an overcrowded fold. Along the walls were red-yellowish lamps and hand-painted murals of imaginative Eastern landscapes in which all the trees were palms and all the buildings were variations on the Taj Mahal. To the right in the rear was a small but well-stocked bar. A passageway led past the bar to the kitchen and cloakrooms.
    The first thing the Saint’s senses registered as he entered was the wonderful smell of the place, dominated at the moment by cloves and saffron. The second fact that struck him was that there was not a single waiter in sight.
    He tried to close the air-cushioned door as noisily as possible behind him, and picked out a table where he would be able to sit with his back to the wall and see the entrance, the bar, and the passage that gave access to the back rooms. Before he could take a seat a waiter, already known to him from previous visits as Mahmud, came rushing out around the bar from the inner sanctuary, jerking the hem of his white jacket into place over his baggy Eastern trousers.
    “I am so sorry, sir!” he was exclaiming. “We have just opened our door this minute.”
    “Not to worry,” Simon said. “I’d like this table, if it’s not reserved.”
    “Mr. Templar!” the waiter said with sudden recognition.
    He hurried to help Simon slip off his raincoat. “So long since you were here and no one to greet you!”
    Mahmud, a Pakistani like Abdul Haroon, as his Muslim name indicated, was of moderate height, light-skinned, black-haired, and quick. He was in his early twenties and despite a professionally subservient manner gave the impression that he was destined for higher things than dishing up rice and poppadums and knew it.
    “You have a good memory,” said the Saint. “It’s been some time since I was here-and it was usually Ali who waited on me.”
    The Golden Crescent employed only three waiters and the evening paper had not made it clear which of them had been murdered. If it had been the one called Ali, a middle-aged quiet man, Mahmud gave no indication of it.
    “It helps to cultivate the memory in my profession,” he said with smiling complacency.
    He had pulled the table away from the wall so that Simon could sit down on the banquette. Now he pushed the table back and flicked an imaginary crumb off the clean white cloth. Like most tablecloths at restaurants of the Golden Crescent’s class, this one had a small but very neatly mended torn spot. It amused Simon to see the little white scar as soon as he looked to confirm his guess that it would be there-almost as much as it amused him that waiter Mahmud insisted on being completely unaware that one of his