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.