Brighter Buccaneer (21 page)

“What’s the trouble?”

“My pendant —”

She was helped out by a chorus of bystanders whose information, taken in the mass, was somewhat confusing. The sergeant sorted it out phlegmatically; and at the end he shrugged.

“Since these gentlemen are all accusing each other, I take it you don’t wish to make any particular charges?”

“I cannot accuse my guests of being thieves,” said Mrs. Dempster-Craven imperially. “I only want my diamond.”

The sergeant nodded. He had spent twelve years in C Division, and had learned that Berkeley Square is a region where even policemen have to be tactful.

“In that case,” he said, “I think it would help us if the gentlemen agreed to be searched.”

The Saint straightened up.

It had been a good evening; and he had no regrets. The game was worth playing for its own sake, to him: the prizes came welcomely, but they weren’t everything. And no one knew better than he that you couldn’t win all the time. There were chances that couldn’t be reckoned with in advance; and the duplicity of Mr. Watkins was one of those. But for that, he would have played his hand faultlessly, out-bluffed and outmanoeuvred the Carney-Runce combination in a fair field, and made as clean a job of it as anything else he had done. But that single unexpected factor had turned the scale just enough to bring the bluff to a showdown, as unexpected factors always would. And yet Peter Quentin saw the Saint was smiling.

“I think that’s a good idea,” said the Saint.

Between Philip Carney and George Runce flashed one blank glance; but their mouths remained closed.

“Perhaps there’s another room we could go to,” said the sergeant, almost genially; and Mrs. Dempster-Craven inclined her head like a queen dismissing a distasteful odour.

“Watkins will show you to the library.”

Simon turned on his heel and led the way towards the door, with Mr. Watkins still gripping his arms; but as his path brought him level with Kate Allfield he stopped and smiled down at her.

“I think you’re a great gal.”

His voice sounded a trifle strange. And then, before two hundred shocked and startled eyes, including those of Lord and Lady Bredon, the Honourable Celia Mallard, three baronets, and the aspiring Mrs. Dempster-Craven herself, he laid his hands gently on her shoulders and kissed her outrageously on the mouth; and in the silence of appalled aristocracy which followed that performance made his stately exit.

“How the devil did you get away with it?” asked Peter Quentin weakly, as they drove away in a taxi an hour later. “I was fairly sweating blood all the time you were being stripped.”

The Saint’s face showed up in the dull glow as he drew at his cigarette.

“It was in my mouth,” he said.

“But they made you open your mouth —”

“It was there when I kissed Kate, anyway,” said the Saint, and sang to himself all the rest of the way home.

1. The Green Goods Man
   

“THE secret of contentment,” said Simon Templar oratorically, “is to take things as they come. As is the daily office-work of the City hog in his top hat to the moments when he signs his supreme mergers, so are the bread-and-butter exploits of a pirate to his great adventures. After all, one can’t always be ploughing through thrilling escapes and captures with guns popping in all directions; but there are always people who’ll give you money. You don’t even have to look for them. You just put on a monocle and the right expression of half-witted-ness, and they come up and tip their purses into your lap.”

He offered this pearl of thought for the approval of his usual audience; and it is a regrettable fact that neither of them disputed his philosophy. Patricia Holm knew him too well; and even Peter Quentin had by that time walked in the ways of Saintly lawlessness long enough to know that such pronouncements inevitably heralded another of the bread-and-butter exploits referred to. It wasn’t, of course, strictly true that Simon Templar was in need of bread and butter; but he liked jam with it, and a generous world had always provided him abundantly with both.

Benny Lucek came over from New York on a falling market to try his luck in the Old World. He had half-a-dozen natty suits which fitted him so well that he always looked as if he would have burst open from his wrists to his hips if his blood-pressure had risen two degrees, he had a selection of mauve and pink silk shirts in his wardrobe trunk, pointed and beautifully polished shoes for his feet, a pearl pin for his tie, and no less than three rings for his fingers. His features radiated honesty, candour, and good humour; and as a stock-in-trade those gifts alone were worth several figures of solid cash to him in any state of the market.

Also he still had a good deal of capital, without which no Green Goods man can even begin to operate.

Benny Lucek was one of the last great exponents of that gentle graft; and although they had been telling him in New York that the game was played out, he had roseate hopes of finding virgin soil for a new crop of successes among the benighted bourgeoisie of Europe. So far as he knew, the Green Goods ground had scarcely been touched on the eastern side of the Atlantic, and Benny had come across to look it over. He installed himself in a comfortable suite on the third floor of the Park Lane Hotel, changed his capital into English banknotes, and sent out his feelers into space.

In the most popular Personal Columns appeared temptingly-worded advertisements of which the one that Simon Templar saw was a fair specimen.

ANY LADY or GENTLEMAN in reduced circumstances,
who would be interested in an enterprise showing GREAT
PROFITS for a NEGLIGIBLE RISK, should write in
STRICT CONFIDENCE, giving some personal information,
to Box No. —

Benny Lucek knew everything there was to know about letters. He was a practical graphologist of great astuteness, and a deductive psychologist of vast experience. Given a two-page letter which on the surface conveyed the vaguest particulars about the writer, he could build up in his mind a character study with a complete background filled in that fitted his subject without a wrinkle ninety-nine times out of a hundred; and if the mental picture he formed of a certain Mr. Tombs, whose reply to that advertisement was included among several scores of others, was one of the hundredth times, it might not have been entirely Benny’s fault. Simon Templar was also a specialist in letters, although his art was creative instead of critical.

Patricia came in one morning and found him performing another creative feat at which he was no less adept.

“What on earth are you doing in those clothes?” she asked, when she had looked at him.

Simon glanced over himself in the mirror. His dark blue suit was neat but unassuming, and had a well-worn air as if it were the only one he possessed and had been cared for with desperate pride. His shoes were old and strenuously polished; his socks dark grey and woollen, carefully darned. He wore a cheap pin-striped poplin shirt, and a stiff white collar without one saving grace of line. His tie was dark blue, like his suit, and rather stringy. Across his waistcoat hung an old-fashioned silver watch-chain. Anything less like the Simon Templar of normal times, who always somehow infused into the suits of Savile Row a flamboyant personality of his own, and whose shirts and socks and ties were the envy of the young men who drank with him in a few clubs to which he belonged, it would have been almost impossible to imagine.

“I am a hard-working clerk in an insurance office, earning three hundred a year with the dim prospect of rising to three hundred and fifty in another fifteen years, age about forty, with an anaemic wife and seven children and a semi-detached house at Streatham.” He was fingering his face speculatively, staring at it in the glass. “A little too beautiful for the part at present, I think; but we’ll soon put that right.”

He set to work on his face with the quick unhesitating touches of which he was such an amazing master. His eyebrows, brushed in towards his nose, turned grey and bushy; his hair also turned grey, and was plastered down to his skull so skilfully that it seemed inevitable that any barber he went to would remark that he was running a little thin on top. Under the movements of his swift fingers, cunning shadows appeared at the sides of his forehead, under his eyes, and around his chin-shadows so faint that even at a yard’s range their artificiality could not have been detected, and yet so cleverly placed that they seemed to change the whole shape and expression of his face. And while he worked he talked.

“If you ever read a story-book, Pat, in which anyone disguises himself as someone else so perfectly that the impersonated bloke’s own friends and secretaries and servants are taken in, you’ll know there’s an author who’s cheating on you. On the stage it might be done up to a point; but in real life, where everything you put on has got to get by in broad daylight and close-ups, it’s impossible. I,” said the Saint unblushingly, “am the greatest character actor that never went on the stage, and I know. But when it comes to inventing a new character of your own that mustn’t be recognised again-then you can do things.”

He turned around suddenly, and she gasped. He was perfect. His shoulders were rounded and stooping; his head was bent slightly forward, as if set in that position by years of poring over ledgers. And he gazed at her with the dumb passionless expression of his part-an under-nourished, under-exercised, middle-aged man without hopes or ambitions, permanently worried, crushed out of pleasure by the wanton taxation which goes to see that the paladins of Whitehall are never deprived of an afternoon’s golf, utterly resigned to the sombre purposelessness of his existence, scraping and pinching through fifty weeks in the year in order to let himself be stodgily swindled at the seaside for a fortnight in August, solemnly discussing the antics of politicians as if they really mattered and honestly believing that their cow-like utterances might do something to alleviate his burdens, holding a crumbling country together with his own dour stoicism and the stoicism of millions of his own kind …

“Will I do?” he asked.

From Benny Lucek’s point of view he could scarcely have done better. Benny’s keen eyes absorbed the whole atmosphere of him in one calculating glance that took in every detail from the grey hair that was running a little thin on top down to the strenuously polished shoes.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Tombs. Come along and have a cocktail-I expect you could do with one.”

He led his guest into the sumptuous lounge, and Mr. Tombs sat down gingerly on the edge of a chair. It is impossible to refer to that man of the Saint’s creation as anything but “Mr. Tombs”-the Simon Templar whom Patricia knew might never have existed inside that stoical stoop-shouldered frame.

“Er-a glass of sherry, perhaps,” he said.

Benny ordered Dry Sack, and knew that the only sherry Mr. Tombs had ever tasted before came from the nearest grocer. But he was an expert at putting strangers at their ease, and the Simon Templar who stood invisibly behind Mr. Tombs’s chair had to admire his technique. He chattered away with a disarming lack of condescension that presently had Mr. Tombs leaning back and chuckling with him, and ordering a return round of Dry Sack with the feeling that he had at last met a successful man who really understood and appreciated him. They went in to lunch with Benny roaring with infectious laughter over a vintage Stock Exchange story which Mr. Tombs had dug out of his memory.

“Smoked salmon, Mr. Tombs? Or a spot of caviare? … Then we might have oeufs en cocotte Rossini-done in cream with foie gras and truffles. And roast pigeons with mushrooms and red currant jelly. I like a light meal in the middle of the day-it doesn’t make you sleepy all the afternoon. And a bottle of Liebfraumilch off the ice to go with it?”

He ran through menu and wine list with an engaging expertness which somehow made Mr. Tombs an equal partner in the exercise of gastronomic virtuosity. And Mr. Tombs, whose imagination had rarely soared above roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and a bottle of Australian burgundy, thawed still further and recalled another story that had provoked howls of laughter in Threadneedle Street when he was in his twenties.

Benny did his work so well that the sordid business aspect of their meeting never had a chance to obtrude itself during the meal; and yet he managed to find out everything he wanted to know about his guest’s private life and opinions. Liquefying helplessly in the genial warmth of Benny’s hospitality, Mr. Tombs became almost human. And Benny drew him on with unhurried mastery.

“I’ve always thought that insurance must be an interesting profession, Mr. Tombs. You’ve got to be pretty wide awake for it, too-I expect you always have clients who expect to take more out of you than they put in?”

Mr. Tombs, who had never found his job interesting, and who would never have detected an attempted fraud unless another department had pointed it out to him, smiled noncommittally.

“That kind of mixed morality has always interested me,” said Benny, as if the point had only just occurred to him. “A man who wouldn’t steal a sixpence from a man he met in the street hasn’t any objection to stealing half-crowns from the Government by cutting down his income tax return or smuggling home a bottle of brandy when he comes across from France. If he’s looking for a partner in business he wouldn’t dream of putting a false value on his assets; but if his house is burgled he doesn’t mind what value he puts on his things when he’s making out his insurance claim.”

Mr. Tombs shrugged.

“I suppose Governments and wealthy public companies are considered fair game,” he hazarded.

“Well, probably there’s a certain amount of lawlessness in the best of us,” admitted Benny. “I’ve often wondered what I should do myself in certain circumstances. Suppose, for instance, you were going home in a taxi one night, and you found a wallet on the seat with a thousand pounds in it. Small notes that you could easily change. No name inside to show who the owner was. Wouldn’t one be tempted to keep it?”

Mr. Tombs twiddled a fork, hesitating only for a second or two. But the Simon Templar who stood behind his chair knew that that was the question on which Benny Lucek’s future hung-the point that had been so casually and skilfully led up to, which would finally settle whether “Mr. Tombs” was the kind of man Benny wanted to meet. And yet there was no trace of anxiety or watchfulness in Benny’s frank open face.