Brighter Buccaneer (2 page)

Mr. Wilmer-Steck blinked.

“Why, certainly, if the matter is urgent, Captain-er —”

“Tombs. Help yourself to anything you want. Thanks so much. Pleased to see you. Bye-bye,” said the Saint.

Mr. Wilmer-Steck felt himself wrung warmly by the hand, heard the sitting-room door bang, heard the front door bang, and saw the figure of his host striding past the open windows; and he was left pardonably breathless.

After a time, however, he recovered sufficiently to help himself to a whisky-and-soda, and a cigarette, and he was sipping and puffing appreciatively when the telephone began to ring.

He frowned at it vaguely for a few seconds; and then he realized that he must be alone in the house, for no one came to take the call. After some further hesitation, he picked up the receiver.

“Hullo,” he said.

“Listen, Simon-I’ve got great news for you,” said the wire. “Remember those shares of yours you were asking me to make inquiries about? Well, it’s quite true they were worth nothing yesterday, but they’ll be worth anything you like to ask for them tomorrow. Strictly confidential till they release the news, of course, but there isn’t a doubt it’s true. Your company has struck one of the biggest gushers on earth-it’s spraying the landscape for miles around. The papers’ll be full of it in twenty-four hours. You’re going to pick up a fortune!”

“Oh!” said Mr. Wilmer-Steck.”

“Sorry I can’t stop to tell you more now, laddie,” said the man on the wire. “I’ve got a couple of important clients waiting, and I must see them. Suppose we meet for a drink later. Berkeley at six, what?”

“Ah,” said Mr. Wilmer-Steck.

“Right-ho, then, you lucky old devil. So-long!”

“So-long,” said Mr. Wilmer-Steck.

He replaced the receiver carefully on its bracket, and it was not until several minutes afterwards that he noticed that his cigarette had gone out.

Then, depositing it fastidiously in the fireplace and helping himself to a fresh one, he turned to the telephone again and dialled a number.

He had scarcely finished his conversation when the Saint erupted volcanically back into the house; and Mr. Wilmer-Steck was suffering from such profound emotion that he plunged into the subject of his visit without preamble.

“Our directors have gone carefully into the matter of those shares you mentioned, Captain Tombs, and I am happy to be able to tell you that we are prepared to buy them immediately, if we can come to an agreement. By the way, will you tell me again the exact extent of your holding?”

“A nominal value of two thousand pounds,” said the Saint. “But as for their present value —”

“Two thousand pounds!” Mr. Wilmer-Steck rolled the words almost gluttonously round his tongue. “And I don’t think you even told us the name of the company.”

“The British Honduras Mineral Development Trust.”

“Ah, yes! The British Honduras Mineral Development Trust! … Naturally our position must seem somewhat eccentric to you, Captain Tombs,” said Mr. Wilmer-Steck, who appeared to have only just become conscious of the fact, “but I can assure you —”

“Don’t bother,” said the Saint briefly.

He went to his desk and flicked open a drawer, from which he extracted the bundle of shares.

“I know your position as well as you know it yourself. It’s one of the nuisances of running a bucket-shop that you have to have shares to work on. You couldn’t have anything more worthless than this bunch, so I’m sure everyone will be perfectly happy. Except, perhaps, your clients-but we don’t have to worry about them, do we?”

Mr. Wilmer-Steck endeavoured to look pained, but his heart was not in the job.

“Now, if you sold those shares for, let’s say, three hundred pounds —”

“Or supposing I got five hundred for them—
“If you were offered four hundred pounds, for instance —”

“And finally accepted five hundred —”

“If, as we were saying, you accepted five hundred pounds,” agreed Mr. Wilmer-Steck, conceding the point reluctantly, “I’m sure you would not feel you had been unfairly treated.”

“I should try to conceal my grief,” said the Saint.

He thought that his visitor appeared somewhat agitated, but he never considered the symptom seriously. There was a little further argument before Mr. Wilmer-Steck was persuaded to pay over the amount in cash. Simon counted out the fifty crisp new ten-pound notes which came to him across the table, and passed the share certificates over in exchange. Mr. Wilmer-Steck counted and examined them in the same way.

“I suppose you’re quite satisfied?” said the Saint. “I’ve warned you that to the best of my knowledge and belief those shares aren’t worth a fraction of the price you’ve paid for them —”

“I am perfectly satisfied,” said Mr. Wilmer-Steck. He pulled out his large gold chronometer and glanced at the dial. “And now, if you will excuse me, my dear Captain Tombs, I find I am already late for an important engagement.”

He made his exit with almost indecent haste.

In an office overlooking the Haymarket he found two men impatiently awaiting his return. He took off his hat, mopped his forehead, ran a hand over his waistcoat, and gasped.

“I’ve lost my watch,” he said.

“Damn your watch,” said Mr. Julian Lamantia callously. “Have you got those shares?”

“My pocket must have been picked,” said the bereaved man plaintively. “Yes, I got the shares. Here they are. It was a wonderful watch, too. And don’t you forget I’m on to half of everything we make.”

Mr. Lamantia spread out the certificates in front of him, and the man in the brown bowler who was perched on a corner of the desk leaned over to look.

It was the latter who spoke first.

“Are these the shares you bought, Meyer?” he asked in a hushed whisper.

Wilmer-Steck nodded vigorously.

“They’re going to make a fortune for us. Gushers blowing oil two hundred yards in the air-that’s the news you’ll see in the papers tomorrow. I’ve never worked so hard and fast in my life, getting Tombs to —”

“Who?” asked the brown bowler huskily.

“Captain Tombs-the mug I was working. But it’s brain that does it, as I’m always saying … What’s the matter with you, Fred-are you feeling ill?”

Mr. Julian Lamantia swivelled round in his chair.

“Do you know anything about these shares, Jorman?” he demanded.

The brown bowler swallowed.

“I ought to,” he said. “I was doing a big trade in them three or four years ago. And that damned fool has paid five hundred pounds of our money for ‘em-to the same man that swindled me of thirty pounds only last week! There never was a British Honduras Mineral Development Trust till I invented it and printed the shares myself. And that-that —”

Meyer leaned feebly on the desk.

“But listen, Fred,” he pleaded. “Isn’t there some mistake? You can’t mean-After all the imagination and brain work I put into getting those shares —”

“Brain work!” snarled Happy Fred.

1. The Export Trade
   

IT is a notable fact, which might be made the subject of a profound philosophical discourse by anyone with time to spare for these recreations, that the characteristics which go to make a successful buccaneer are almost the same as those required by the detective whose job it is to catch him.

That he must be a man of infinite wit and resource goes without saying; but there are other and more uncommon essentials. He must have an unlimited memory not only for faces and names, but also for every odd and out-of-the-way fact that comes to his knowledge. Out of a molehill of coincidence he must be able to build up a mountain of inductive speculation that would make Sherlock Holmes feel dizzy. He must be a man of infinite human sympathy, with an unstinted gift for forming weird and wonderful friendships. He must, in fact, be equally like the talented historian whose job it is to chronicle his exploits-with the outstanding difference that instead of being free to ponder the problems which arise in the course of his vocation for sixty hours, his decisions will probably have to be formed in sixty seconds.

Simon Templar fulfilled at least one of these qualifications to the nth degree. He had queer friends dotted about in every outlandish corner of the globe, and if many of them lived in unromantic-sounding parts of London, it was not his fault. Strangely enough, there were not many of them who knew that the debonair young man with the lean tanned face and gay blue eyes who drifted in and out of their lives at irregular intervals was the notorious law-breaker known to everyone as the Saint. Certainly old Charlie Milton did not know.

The Saint, being in the region of the Tottenham Court Road one afternoon with half an hour to dispose of, dropped into Charlie’s attic work-room and listened to a new angle in the changing times.

“There’s not much doing in my line these days,” said Charlie, wiping his steel-rimmed spectacles. “When nobody’s going in for real expensive jewellery, because the costume stuff is so good, it stands to reason they don’t need any dummies. Look at this thing-the first big bit of work I’ve had for weeks.”

He produced a glittering rope of diamonds, set in a cunning chain of antique silver and ending in a wonderfully elaborate heart-shaped pendant. The sight of it should have made any honest buccaneer’s mouth water, but it so happened that Simon Templar knew better. For that was the secret of Charlie Milton’s employment.

Up there, in his dingy little shop, he laboured with marvelously delicate craftsmanship over the imitations, which had made his name known to every jeweller in London. Sometimes there were a hundred thousand pounds’ worth of precious stones littered over his bench, and he worked under the watchful eye of a detective detailed to guard them. Whenever a piece of jewellery was considered too valuable to be displayed by its owner on ordinary occasions, it was sent to Charlie Milton for him to make one of his amazingly exact facsimiles; and there was many a wealthy dowager who brazenly paraded Charlie’s handiwork at minor social functions, while the priceless originals were safely stored in a safe deposit.

“The Kellman necklace,” Charlie explained, tossing it carelessly back into a drawer. “Lord Palfrey ordered it from me a month ago, and I was just finishing it when he went bankrupt. I had twenty-five pounds advance when I took it on, and I expect that’s all I shall see for my trouble. The necklace is being sold with the rest of his things, and how do I know whether the people who buy it will want my copy?”

It was not an unusual kind of conversation to find its place in the Saint’s varied experience, and he never foresaw the path it was to play in his career. Some days later he happened to notice a newspaper paragraph referring to the sale of Lord Palfrey’s house and effects; but he thought nothing more of the matter, for men like Lord Palfrey were not Simon Templar’s game.

In the days when some fresh episode of Saintly audacity was one of the most dependable weekly stand-bys of the daily press, the victims of his lawlessness had always been men whose reputations would have emerged considerably dishevelled from such a searching inquiry as they were habitually at pains to avoid; and although the circumstances of Simon Templar’s life had altered a great deal since then, his elastic principles of morality performed their acrobatic contortions within much the same limits.

That those circumstances should have altered at all was not his choice; but there are boundaries which every buccaneer must eventually reach, and Simon Templar had reached them rather rapidly. The manner of his reaching them has been related elsewhere, and there were not a few people in England who remembered that story. For one week of blazing headlines the secret of the Saint’s real identity had been published up and down the country for all to read; and although there were many to whom the memory had grown dim, and who could still describe him only by the nickname which he had made famous, there were many others who had not forgotten. The change had its disadvantages, for one of the organizations which would never forget had its headquarters at Scotland Yard; but there were occasional compensations in the strange commissions which sometimes came the Saint’s way.

One of these arrived on a day in June, brought by a sombrely-dressed man who called at the flat on Piccadilly where Simon Templar had taken up his temporary abode-the Saint was continually changing his address, and that palatial apartment, with tall windows overlooking the Green Park, was his latest fancy. The visitor was an elderly white-haired gentleman with the understanding eyes and air of tremendous discretion which one associates in imagination with the classical type of family solicitor that he immediately confessed himself to be.

“To put it as briefly as possible, Mr. Templar,” he said, “I am authorized to ask if you would undertake to deliver a sealed package to an address in Paris which will be given you. All your expenses will be paid, of course; and you will be offered a fee of one hundred pounds.”

Simon lighted a cigarette and blew a cloud of smoke at the ceiling.

“It sounds easy enough,” he remarked. “Wouldn’t it be cheaper to send it by mail?”

“That package, Mr. Templar-the contents of which I am not allowed to disclose-is insured for five thousand pounds,” said the solicitor impressively. “But I fear that four times that sum would not compensate for the loss of an article which is the only thing of its kind in the world. The ordinary detective agencies have already been considered, but our client feels that they are scarcely competent to deal with such an important task. We have been warned that an attempt may be made to steal the package, and it is our client’s wish that we should endeavour to secure the services of your own - ah - singular experience.”

The Saint thought it over. He knew that the trade in illicit drugs does not go on to any appreciable extent from England to the Continent, but rather in the reverse direction; and apart from such a possibility as that the commission seemed straight-forward enough.

“Your faith in my reformed character is almost touching,” said the Saint at length; and the solicitor smiled faintly.

“We are relying on the popular estimate of your sporting instincts.”

“When do you want me to go?”