Two days later he was relaxing his long lean body on the private beach of the Roney Plaza, revelling in the clean sharp bite of the sun on his brown skin and lazily debating the comparative attractions of iced beer or a tinkling highball as a noon refresher, when two voices reached him sufficiently clearly to force themselves into his drowsy consciousness. They belonged to a man and a girl, and it was obvious that they were quarrelling.
Simon wasn't interested. He was at peace with the world. He concentrated on digging up a small sand castle with his toes and tried to shut them out. And then he heard the girl say: "My God, are you so dumb that you can't see that they must be crooks?"
It was the word "crooks" that did it. When the Saint heard that word, he could no more have concentrated on sand castles than a rabid egyptologist could have remained aloof while gossip of scarabs and sarcophagi shuttled across his head. A private squabble was one thing, but this was something else that to the Saint made eavesdropping not only pardonable but almost a moral obligation.
He rolled over and looked at the girl. She was only a few feet from him and even at that range it was easier to go on looking than to look away. From her loose raven hair down to her daintily enamelled toenails there wasn't an inch of her that didn't make its own demoralizing demands on the eye, and the clinging silk swimsuit she wore left very few inches any secrets.
"Why must they be crooks?" asked the man stubbornly. He was young and tow-headed but the Saint's keen survey traced hard and haggard lines in his face. "Just because I've been out of luck—"
"Luck!" The girl's voice was scornful and impatient. "You were out of luck when you met them. Two men that you know nothing about, who pick you up in a bar and suddenly discover that you're the bosom pal they've been looking for all their lives — who want to take you out to dinner every night, and take you out fishing every day, and buy you drinks and show you the town — and you talk about luck! D'you think they'd do all that if they didn't know they could get you to play cards with them every night and make you lose enough to pay them back a hundred times over?"
"I won plenty from them to begin with."
"Of course you did! They let you win — just to encourage you to play higher. And now you've lost all that back and a lot more that you can't afford to lose. And you're still going on, making it worse and worse." She caught his arm impulsively and her voice softened. "Oh, Eddie, I hate fighting with you like this, but can't you see what a fool you're being?"
"Well, why don't you leave me alone if you hate fighting? Anyone might think I was a kid straight out of school."
He shrugged himself angrily away from her, and as he turned he looked straight into the Saint's eyes. Simon was so interested that the movement caught him unprepared, still watching them, as if he had been hiding behind a curtain and it had been abruptly torn down.