Introduction
One more story that stems from long ago. From 1931, to be quite exact — although I didn’t write it for a longish while afterwards. This is another story in which the locale, and only that, was changed for contemporary geopolitical reasons, between the time it was first written and published in a magazine and the time when it ended up in a book collection. I can make no more apologies for the liberties I have taken with times and places in the reprinting of stories such as this. The way I see it, nothing is so dated as last year — at least in fiction. Put your setting back a century, and anything goes: any apparent anachronism, any unfamiliarity, is acceptable because it is said to have occurred in an era about which the reader happily admits his ignorance. Things were different in those days — that’s all. But let the period fall within the theoretical scope of his faulty memory, and the reader is at once a dissecting critic: anything that seems as if it could have happened yesterday must be submitted to the awareness of today. If a story uses a telephone, this kind of telescoping consciousness requires that it should also take cognizance of television. This story was first written around a Corsican bandit whom I had the pleasure of meeting on his home ground in very similar circumstances to those I have used in this narrative. But they caught him eventually, although it took several regiments of the French Army to do it, and today Corsican bandits are just an old wives’ tale. Mexican bandits, however, for some reason, are still exotic currency. So let the story go there. If it is considered legitimate to disguise names, why not places? — Leslie Charteris
“Bandits?” said Señor Copas. He shrugged. “ Sí, hay siempre bandidos. The Government will never catch them all. Here in Mexico they are a tradition of the country.”
He looked again at the girl in the dark hat, appreciatively, because she was worth looking at, and he was a true Latin, and there was still romance in the heart that beat above his rounded abdomen.
He chuckled uncertainly, ignoring the other customers who were sitting in various degrees of patience behind their empty plates, and said, “But the señorita has nothing to fear. She is not going into the wilds.”
“But I want to go into the wilds,” she said.
Her voice was low and soft and musical, matching the quiet symmetry of her face and the repose of her hands. She was smart without exaggeration. She was Fifth Avenue with none of its brittle hardness, incongruously transported to that standstill Mexican village, and yet contriving not to seem out of place. To Señor Copas she was a miracle.
To Simon Templar she was a quickening of interest and a hint of adventure that might lead anywhere or nowhere. His eye for charm was no slower than that of Señor Copas, but there was more in it than that.
To Simon Templar, who had been called the most audacious bandit of the twentieth century, the subject was always new and fascinating. And he had an impish sense of humor which couldn’t resist the thought of what the other members of the audience would have said and done if they had known that the man who was listening to their conversation about bandits was the notorious Saint himself.
“Are you more interested in the wilds or the bandits?” he asked, in Spanish as native as her own.
She turned to him with friendly brown eyes in which there was a trace of subtle mockery.
“I’m not particular.”
“ No es posible,” said Señor Copas firmly, as he dragged himself away to his kitchen.
“He doesn’t seem to like the idea,” said the Saint.
He was sitting beside her, at the communal table which half filled the dining room of the hotel. She broke a roll with her graceful, leisurely moving hands. He saw that her fingers were slender and tapering, delicately manicured, and one of them wore a wedding ring.
Fifth Avenue in the Fonda de la Quinta, in the shadow of the Sierra Madre, in the state of Durango in Old Mexico, which was a very different place.
“You know a lot about this country?” she asked.
“I’ve been here before.”
“Do you know the mountains?”
“Fairly well.”
“Do you know the bandits too?”
The Saint gazed at her with precarious gravity. He looked like a man who would obviously be on visiting terms with bandits. He looked rather like a bandit himself, in a debonair and reckless sort of way, with his alert tanned face and clean-cut fighting mouth and the unscrupulous gay twinkle in his blue eyes.
“Listen,” he said. “Once upon a time I was walking between San Miguel and Gajo, two villages not far from here. I saw from my map that the road led around in a great horseshoe, but they told me at an inn that there was a short cut, straight across, down into the canyon and up the other side. I climbed down something like the side of a precipice for hours — the path was all great loose stones, and presently one of them turned under my foot and I took a spill and sprained my ankle. When I got to the bottom I was done in. I couldn’t move another step, particularly climbing. I hadn’t any food, but there was a stream running through the bottom of the canyon, so I had water. I could only hope that someone else would try that short cut and find me... At the end of the third day a man did find me, and he looked like one of your bandits if anyone ever did. He did what he could for me, gave me food from his pack — bread and sausage and cheese — and then he said he would go on to San Miguel and send help for me. He could have taken everything I had, but he didn’t. He was insulted when I offered to pay him. ‘I am not a beggar,’ he said, and I’ve never seen anything so haughty in my life — ‘I am El Rojo.’ ”
“Then why is Señor Copas so frightened?”
“They’re all frightened of El Rojo.”
Her finely penciled brows drew together.
“El Rojo?” she said. “Who is El Rojo?”
“ ‘The greatest bandit since Villa. They’re all scared because there’s a rumor that he’s in the district. You ought to be scared, too. They’re all offended if you aren’t scared of El Rojo... He really is a great character, though. I remember once the Government decided it was time that something drastic was done about him. They sent out half the Mexican army to round him up. It was the funniest thing I ever heard of, but you have to know the country to see the joke.”
“They didn’t catch him?”
The Saint chuckled.
“One man who knew the country could laugh at three armies.”
For a little while the girl was wrapped in an unapproachable solitude of thought. Then she turned to the Saint again.
“Señor,” she said, “do you think you could help me find El Rojo?”
Even south of the border, he was still a Saint errant, or perhaps a sucker for adventure. He said, “I could try.”
They rode out on the dazzling stone track that winds beside the river — a track which was nothing more than the marks that centuries of solitary feet had left on the riot of tumbled boulders from which the hills rose up.
The Saint lounged in the saddle, relaxed like a vaquero, letting his mount pick its own way over the broken rock. His mind went back to the café where they had sat together over coffee, after lunch, and he had said to her, “Either you must be a journalist looking for an unusual interview, or you want to be kidnapped by El Rojo for publicity, or you’ve been reading too many romantic stories and you think you could fall in love with him.”
She had only smiled in her quiet way, inscrutable in spite of its friendliness, and said, “No, señor — you are wrong in all your guesses. I am looking for my husband.”
The Saint’s brows slanted quizzically.
“You mean you are Señora Rojo?”
“Oh, no. I am Señora Alvarez de Quevedo. Teresa Alvarez.”
Then she looked at him, quickly and clearly, as if she had made up her mind about something.
“The last time I heard of my husband, he was at the Fonda de la Quinta,” she said. “That was two years ago. He wrote to me that he was going into the mountains. He liked to do things like that, to climb mountains and sleep under the stars and be a man alone, sometimes — it is curious, for he was very much a city man... I never heard of him again. He said he was going to climb the Gran Seño. I remembered, when I heard the name, that I had read of El Rojo in the newspapers about that time. And it seemed to me, when I heard you speak of El Rojo, that perhaps El Rojo was the answer.”
“If it was El Rojo,” said the Saint quietly, “I don’t think it would help you to find him now.”
Her eyes were still an enigma.
“Even so,” she said, “it would be something to know.”
“But you’ve waited two years—”
“Yes,” she said softly. “I have waited two years.”
She had told him no more than that, and he had known that she did not wish to say any more, but it had been enough to send him off on that quixotic wild-goose chase.
He had been leading the way for two hours, but presently, where the trail broadened for a short distance, she brought her horse up beside his, and they rode knee to knee. “I wonder why you should do this for me,” she said.
He shrugged.
“Why did you ask me?”
“It was an impulse.” She moved her hands puzzledly. “I don’t know. I suppose you have the air of a man who is used to being asked impossible things. You look as if you would do them.”
“I do,” said the Saint modestly.
It was his own answer, too. She was a damsel in distress — and no damsel in distress had ever called on the Saint in vain. And she was beautiful, also, which was a very desirable asset to damsels in distress. And about her there was a mystery, which to Simon Templar was the trumpet call of adventure.
In the late afternoon, at one of the bends in the trail where it dipped to the level of the river, the Saint reined in his horse and dismounted at the water’s edge.
“Are we there?” she said.
“No. But we’re leaving the river.”
He scooped water up in his hands and drank, and splashed it over his face. It was numbingly cold, but it steamed off his arms in the hot dry air. She knelt down and drank beside him, and then sat back on her heels and looked up at the hills that hemmed them in.
A kind of shy happiness lighted her eyes, almost uncertainly, as if it had not been there for a long time and felt itself a stranger.
“I understand now,” she said. “I understand why Gaspar loved all this, in spite of what he was. If only he could have been content with it...”
“You were not happy?” said the Saint gently.
She looked at him.
“No, señor. I have not been happy for so long that I am afraid.”
She got up quickly and put her foot in the stirrup. He helped her to mount, and swung into his own saddle. They set off across the shallow stream; the horses picked their way delicately between the boulders.
On the far side, they climbed, following a trail so faint that she could not see it all, but the Saint rarely hesitated. Presently the trees were thicker, and over the skyline loomed the real summit of the hill they were climbing. The valley was swallowed up in darkness, and up there where the Saint turned his horse across the slope the brief subtropical twilight was fading.
Simon Templar lighted a cigarette as he rode, and he had barely taken the first puff of smoke into his lungs when a man stepped from behind a tree with a rifle leveled and broke the stillness of the evening with a curt, “ Manos arriba! ”
The Saint turned his head with a smile.
“You’ve got what you wanted,” he said to Teresa Alvarez. “May I present El Rojo?”
The introduction was almost superfluous, for the red mask from which El Rojo took his name, which covered his face from the brim of his sombrero down to his stubble-bearded chin, was sufficient identification. Watching the girl, Simon saw no sign of fear as the bandit came forward. Her face was pale, but she sat straight-backed on her horse and gazed at him with an unexpected eagerness in her eyes. Simon turned back to El Rojo.
“ Qué tál, amigo? ” he murmured genially.
The bandit stared at him unresponsively.
“ Baje usted ” he ordered gruffly. He glanced at the girl. “You too — get down.”
His eyes, after that glance, remained fixed on her, even after she was down from the saddle and standing by the horse’s head. The Saint wondered for the first time whether he might not have let his zest for adventure override his common sense when he deliberately led her into the stronghold of an outlawed and desperate man.
El Rojo turned back to him.
“The señorita,” he said, “will tie your hands behind you.”
He dragged a length of cord from his pocket and threw it across the space between them. The girl looked at it coldly.
“Go on,” said the Saint, “Do what the nice gentleman tells you. It’s part of the act.”
He could take care of such minor details when the time came, but for the present there was a mystery with which he was more preoccupied.
When the Saint’s hands had been tied, El Rojo pointed his rifle.
“The señorita will lead the way,” he said. “You will follow, and I shall direct you from behind. You would be wise not to try and run away.”
He watched them file past him, and from the sounds that followed, the Saint deduced that El Rojo had taken the horses by their bridles and was towing them after him as he brought up the rear.
As they moved roughly parallel with the valley, the slope on their right became steeper and steeper until it was simply a precipice, and the rocks on their left towered bleaker and higher, and they were walking along a narrow ledge with the shadow of one cliff over them and another cliff falling away from their feet into a void of darkness. The path wound snake-like around the fissures and buttresses into which the precipice was sculptured, and presently, rounding one of those natural breastworks, they found themselves at a place where the path widened suddenly to become a natural balcony about twenty feet long and twelve feet deep — and then stopped. A natural wall of rock screened it from sight of the valley or the hills on the other side.
El Rojo followed them into the niche, leading the two horses, which he tied up to an iron ring by the mouth of a cave that opened in the rock wall at the end.
There was a dull glow of embers close by the mouth of the cave. The bandit stirred them with his foot, and threw on a couple of mesquite logs.
“Perhaps you are hungry,” said El Rojo. “I have little to offer my guests, but you are welcome to what there is.”
“I should like a cigarette as much as anything,” said the Saint. “But I’m not a very good contortionist.” The bandit considered him.
“I could untie you, señor, if you gave me your word of honor not to attempt to escape. It is, I believe, usual in these circumstances.”
His speeches had an elaborate theatricalism which came oddly out of his rough and ragged clothing.
“I’ll give you my word for two hours,” said the Saint, after a moment’s thought. “It can be renewed if necessary.”
“Es bastante. Y usted, señorita?”
“Conforme.”
“Entonces, por dos horas.”
El Rojo laid down his rifle and untied the Saint’s hands, but Simon noticed that he picked up the gun again at once, and that he kept it always within easy reach. The Saint understood the symptom well enough not to be disturbed by it. He lighted a cigarette and stretched himself out comfortably beside the fire and beside Teresa Alvarez, while the night closed down like a purple blanket and El Rojo brought out the bread and cheese and sausage and coarse red wine which are the staple fare in the mountains.
He said presently, “I take it that you have ideas about ransom.”
The bandit shrugged.
“I regret the necessity. But I am a poor man, and you must be charitable. Let us say that it was unlucky that you chose to travel this way.”
“But we were looking for you,” said Teresa.
El Rojo stopped with a knife-load of cheese halfway to his mouth.
“For me?”
“Yes,” she said. “I wanted to see you, and this gentleman was good enough to help me. We were not unlucky. We came here on purpose.”
“You pay me an unusual compliment, señorita. Could one ask what I have done to deserve such a distinguished honor?”
“I am looking for my husband,” she said simply.
He sat watching her.
“ No comprendo. It is true that I often have the pleasure of entertaining travelers in the mountains. But, alas, they never stay with me for long. Either their friends are so desolate in their absence that they bribe me to ensure their safe and speedy return — or their friends are so unresponsive that I am forced to conclude that they cannot be very desirable guests. I am incapable of believing that a gentleman who had won the heart of the señora can have belonged to the latter category.”
“It is possible,” she said, without bitterness. “But I knew nothing of it.”
She was silent for a moment.
“It was two years ago,” she said. “He came here to Durango, to La Quinta. He was going into the mountains. No one ever heard of him again. I know that you were here then, and I wondered if you might have — entertained him. Perhaps I was foolish...”
El Rojo dug his knife in the cheese.
“ Por Dios! ” he said. “Is it like that that one lives in Mexico? You have lost your husband for two years, and it is not until today that you want to find him?”
“I don’t want to find him,” she said. “I want to know that he is dead.”
She said it quietly, without any force of feeling, as if it was a thought that she had lived with for so long that it had become a commonplace part of her life. But in the very passionlessness of that matter-of-fact statement there was something that sent an electric ripple up the Saint’s spine.
He had finished eating, and he was sitting smoking with his feet towards the warmth of the fire and his back leaning against the rock. On his left, Teresa Alvarez was looking straight ahead of her, as if she had been alone, and El Rojo’s eyes were riveted on her through the slits in his mask, so that the Saint almost felt as if he were an eavesdropper. But he was too absorbed in the play to care about that.
“I was very young,” said the girl, in that quiet and detached way that left so much emotion to be guessed at. “I was still in the convent school when I was engaged to him. I knew nothing, and I was not given any choice. I was married to him a few weeks later. Yes, these things happen. It is still the custom in the old-fashioned families. The parents choose a man they think will make their daughter a good husband, and she is expected to be guided by their wisdom.”
Her face was impassive in the firelight.
“I think he was unfaithful to me on our honeymoon,” she said. “I know he was unfaithful many times after that. He boasted of it. I might have forgiven that, but he boasted also that he had only married me for my dowry — and for what pleasure he could have out of me before he wanted a change. I found out that he was nothing but a shady adventurer, a gambler, a cheat, a petty swindler, a man without a shadow of honor or even common decency. But by that time I had no one to go to... My father and mother died suddenly six months after we were married, and I had never had any friends of my own. It will seem strange to you — it seems strange to me, now — but I never realized that I could leave him myself. I had never been brought up to know anything of the world. So I stayed with him. For four years... and then he came here, and I never saw him again.” The Saint could feel the suffering and humiliation and disillusionment of those four years as vividly as if she had told the story of them day by day, and his blue eyes rested on her with a new and oddly gentle understanding.
She went on after a while: “At first I was only glad that he had gone, and that I could have some peace until he returned. He had told me that he was going away for a holiday, but one day a man from the police came to see me, and I found out that he had gone away because for once he had not been so clever as he had been before, and there was a charge against him.
“Then I hoped that the police would catch him and he would go to prison, perhaps for many years, perhaps forever. But they never found him. And I hoped that he might have fallen over a precipice in the mountains, or that he had escaped to the other end of the world, or anything that would mean he would never come back to me. I didn’t mind very much what it was, so long as I never saw him again. But I was happy. And then, six months ago, I fell in love. And my happiness was finished again.”
“Because you were in love?” El Rojo asked, incredulously.
“Because I was not free. This man is everything that my husband never was, and he knows everything that I have told you. He wants to marry me. Before, I never cared where my husband was, or what had happened to him, but now, you see, I must know.”
El Rojo looked up toward the Saint.
“And the señor,” he said, “is he the fortunate man with whom you fell in love?”
“No. He is in Mexico City. He is in the government service, and he could not leave to come with me.”
“He is rich, this man?”
“Yes,” she said, and her voice was no longer cold.
There was silence for a long time — for so long that the dancing firelight died down to a steady red glow.
Teresa Alvarez gazed into the dull embers, with her arms clasped around her knees, absorbed in her own thoughts, and at last she said, “But I have only been dreaming. Even in such a small territory as this, why should anyone remember one man who was here two years ago?”
El Rojo stirred himself a little.
“Was your husband,” he said, “a man of middle height, with smooth black hair and greenish eyes and a thin black mustache?”
Suddenly she was still, with a stillness that seemed more violent than movement.
“Yes,” she said. “He was like that.”
“And his name was Alvarez?”
“Yes. Gaspar Alvarez de Quevedo.”
Her voice was no more than a whisper.
The bandit drew a gust of evil-smelling smoke from his cheap cigarette.
“Such a man was a guest of mine about two years ago,” he said slowly. “I remember him best because of the ring, which I gave to a girl in Matamoros, and because he was the only guest I have had here who left without my consent.”
“He escaped?”
The words came from the girl’s lips with a weariness that was too deep for feeling.
“He tried to,” said El Rojo. “But it was very dark, and these mountains are not friendly to those who do not know them well.”
He stretched out his arm, toward the black emptiness beyond the rock wall that guarded the niche where they sat.
“I buried him where he fell. It was difficult to reach him, but I could not risk his body being seen by any goatherds going up the valley. In the morning, if you like, I will point you out his grave. It is below the path we followed to come here — more than a hundred meters down... The señora may go on without fear to the happiness that life has kept waiting for her.”
It was very dark, but Simon could see the tears rise in the girl’s eyes before she hid her face in her hands.
The morning sun was cutting hot swaths through the fading mist when El Rojo followed the Saint and Teresa along the winding ledge between cliff and cliff that led out of his eyrie high above the river. Where the slope of the mountain opened clear before them he called to them to stop, and held the bridle of the horse which the girl was to ride while she climbed into the saddle.
“I give you — buen viaje,” he said. “You can make no mistake. Follow the side of the hill until you come to a belt of trees, and then go downwards. To find your way back here — that is another matter. But if you keep going downwards you must come to the river, and on the other side of the river is the road to La Quinta. I will meet you somewhere on that road in three days from now, at about four o’clock in the afternoon.”
“I can never thank you,” she said.
“You have no need to,” he answered roughly. “You are going to bring me — how much did we agree? — one hundred thousand pesos, and the señor remains as my guest as a surety for our meeting. I regret that I have to be commercial, but one must live, and if your lover is rich he will not mind.” She held out her hand to the Saint.
“I shall be there to meet him in three days,” she said. “And then I shall be able to thank you again.”
“This was nothing,” he answered with his lazy smile. “But if you ever meet any dragons I wish you’d send for me.”
He kissed her fingers, and watched her ride away until the curve of the hill hid her from sight. It was true that he had done very little, but he had seen the light in her eyes before she went, and to him that was reward enough for any adventure.
He was thoughtful as he walked back along the cliff edge track towards the bandit’s cave with El Rojo just behind his elbow, and when they were halfway along it he said casually, “By the way, I ought to warn you that the parole I renewed last night is just running out.”
The muzzle of the bandit’s rifle pressed into his chest as he turned.
“In that case señor, you will please put up your hands. Unless, of course, you prefer to renew your parole again.” Simon raised his hands to the level of his shoulders. “My friend,” he said, “have you forgotten the Arroyo Verde?”
“ Perdone? ”
“The Arroyo Verde,” said the Saint steadily. “Between San Miguel and Gajo. Where there was a man with a sprained ankle who had been there for three days without food, and who might have stayed there until he starved if a brigand with a price on his head had not stayed to help him.”
“I have not the least idea what you are talking about.”
“I thought not,” said the Saint softly. “Because you weren’t there.”
He saw the bandit’s hands go rigid around the gun, and the blue steel was as sharp as knife points in his eyes.
“I didn’t think this brigand would have forgotten me so completely that we could spend an evening together without him recognizing me. You see, we got quite friendly down in that forsaken canyon, and when my ankle was better I paid him a visit here. That’s why I was able to find my way so easily yesterday. I came to Durango because I hoped to meet him again. And yet this brigand’s name was El Rojo, too. How do you explain that — Señor Alvarez?”
For a moment the bandit was silent, standing tense and still, and Simon could feel the shattering chaos whirling through the man’s mind, the wild spin of instinctive stratagems and lies sinking down to the grim realization of their ultimate futility.
“And suppose I am Alvarez?” said the man at last, and his natural voice was quite different from the way he had been speaking before.
“Then you should tell me more about what you said last night — and about El Rojo. Where is he?”
“I found him here by accident, but he thought I was looking for him. We fought, and he fell over the precipice. He lies in the grave which I said was mine.”
“And because you wanted to disappear, and because you loved the mountains, you thought that the best way for you to hide would be to take his place. No one had ever seen the face of El Rojo, no one ever knew who he was. You took his mask and became El Rojo.”
“ Eso es.”
Alvarez had not moved. Simon could sense the taut nerves of a man who held death in his hands and was only waiting for one word to turn the scale of his decision.
Simon Templar was also waiting for the answer to one question. He said, “And last night?”
“ A usted que más le da? ”
“The answer is in your hands,” said the Saint.
His eyes were as clear and unclouded as the sky over their heads, and there was something as ageless and unchangeable as justice in the even tones of his voice.
“Perhaps in these two years you might have changed,” he said. “Perhaps you were glad that you could never go back to the old life. And perhaps you told that lie to cut the last link with it, and you were glad to set your wife free for the happiness which you never gave her. If that was so, your secret will always be safe with me. But I’ve never seen a man like you change very much, and I wondered why all you asked about your wife’s lover was whether he was rich. I wondered if it had occurred to you that if you let her believe you were dead, so that she would marry this man, you could go back to Mexico City and charge a price for your silence. And if that was so—”
“You will never tell her,” said Alvarez viciously, and the rifle jerked in his hand.
The crack of the shot rattled back and forth, growing fainter and fainter, between the hills, and something like fire struck the Saint’s chest. He smiled, as if something amused him.
“You’re wasting your time,” he said. “I took all the bullets out of the shells in your gun while you were asleep last night. But you’ve told me what I wanted to know. I said that the answer was in your own hands—”
Alvarez came out of the superstitious trance which had gripped him for a moment. He snatched the rifle back and then lunged with it savagely. Simon stepped to the right, and the thrust passed under his left arm. Then he swung his right fist to Alvarez’s jaw. Alvarez was on the very edge of the path, and the force of the blow lifted him backwards with his arms sprawling...
Simon Templar stood for some time gazing down into the abyss. His face was serene and untroubled, and he felt neither pity nor remorse. His mind went on working calmly and prosaically. There was no need for Teresa Alvarez to know. Nothing would disturb her conscience if she went on believing what she had been told the night before. And she would think well of El Rojo, who to her would always be the real El Rojo whom Simon had called his friend.
He would have to think up some story to account for El Rojo deciding to waive his claim to the hundred thousand pesos she had promised. He went thoughtfully back to collect his horse.