“If I were a millionaire,” he said, smiling at her, “I might offer you half my fortune for a drink.”
She had a rather pale, thoughtful face, delicately featured, almost too classically oval to have a character of its own, like one of those conventionalized portraits of the Italian seventeenth-century school. The sunlight struck blue-black glints from her hair as she wiped the table.
“What would you like?” she asked.
“What would you recommend?”
“We have some beer.”
“It was revealed to me in a vision,” said the Saint.
He leaned back and lighted a cigarette while he waited for her to bring it, gazing out across the sun-baked vista of granite and sandstone, ramshackle houses slumbering in the midday heat with their boards cracked and scarred and the tinted plaster peeling from their walls like the skin of a Florida sun-worshiper; sage, mesquite, violet-shadowed mesas, sparse trees powdered with dust, and the blue hint of mountains in the far distance. The same dust was thick on his bare brown arms, and the narrowing of his gaze against the glare creased dry wrinkles into the corners of his eyes. His clothes made no attempt to hide the fact that they had seen many weeks of vagabondage, and yet in some indefinable way they still rode his lean, wide-shouldered frame with a swashbuckling elegance that matched the gay lines of his face, for Simon made an adventure of all journeys.
“There you are.” The girl set a beaker of liquid gold before him, and watched while he drank. “Where are you from?” she asked.
Simon gestured toward the south.
“Cuautia,” he said. “Before that, Panama. A long time before that, Paris. And once upon a time I was in a place called Pfaffenhausen.”