"But I may be hours," Hall protested.
Delgado called upon the Saints in a series of genially blasphemous exhortations. "Mother of God," he said, "it is bad luck not to make a round trip with the first American of the season. I'll wait and not charge you more than two pesos for the whole trip."
"I do not wish to rob you," Hall said. "Wait, and we shall make a fair price later."
He entered the Comercio building, but as the doors of the elevator closed and he started on his way up to the seventh floor Hall knew that Delgado was only playing the fool and was in fact no man's fool at all, and it bothered him. The right side of his face twitched slightly as he left the car and walked down to the bend in the hall leading to Room 719.
Chapter three
The frosted glass door of Room 719 bore the words, "Roger Fielding Y Cia." The anteroom was dark, but Hall could see the dim form of a man sitting in a lighted inner room. He knocked on the glass without trying the knob. In a moment, the light snapped on in the anteroom, and the man from the inner office opened the hall door.
"Mr. Hall?" he asked. "I'm Roger Fielding. Welcome to San Hermano. And please come inside."
Fielding fitted to the last detail the mental image Hall had conjured of the man on the phone. Genial, peppery, he not only talked like a Hollywood Englishman, he was a casting director's dream. Let the call go out for a man to play a retired India colonel, a British Ambassador, the Duke of Gretna Green, the popular professor of Chaldean Culture at Oxford, the Dean of Canterbury or the Chief of Scotland Yard, and Fielding was the man who could slip into the role without even changing from street clothes to costume. Fielding was the man, complete to the faintly grizzled face with the gaunt features, the dazzling plaid jacket, the thick-walled Dunhill pipe with the well-caked bowl.
He ushered Hall into the inner office, whose shades were all drawn to the sills. There was a large mahogany desk at the window; against the wall stood a long table bearing a row of glass coffee makers, a tray of demi-tasse cups, and a series of earthen canisters. On the wall above this table hung a large sepia-tinted photograph of London, taken about 1920. It faced a large print of a cottage and a brook in the Shakespeare country. This engraving hung over a row of four filing cabinets with steel locks. The walls were further decorated with framed certificates of Fielding's membership in coffee associations of San Hermano, Rio and New Orleans.