Authors: Leslie Charteris
He rolled
up his sleeves and plunged his bare arms into the
cooling gadget with
the rather wistful expression which he
always wore when
performing that part of his task. When
he stood up again he
was clutching a round grey stone glisten
ing with water; and
for a moment or two he gazed at it
dreamily. It was at this stage of the
proceedings that Louie’s
histrionics invariably ran away with
him—when, for two or
three seconds, his imagination really allowed
him to picture
himself as the exponent of an earth-shaking scientific dis
covery, the
genuine result of those futile experiments on
which he had spent so
much of his time and so much of the
money which he had earned from the
sham.
“There
you are,” he said. “There’s your diamond—and any
dealer in
London would be glad to buy it. Here—take it yourself.” He pressed the wet
stone into Simon Templar’s
hand. “Show it to anyone you like, and
if there’s a dealer in
London who wouldn’t be glad to pay two
hundred quid for
it, I’ll give you a thousand pounds.” He picked up
his glass
again; and then, as if he had suddenly remembered the es
sential
tone of his story, his face recovered its expression of
uncontrollable
gloom. “And I’m the unhappiest man in the
world,” he said
lugubriously.
Simon
raised his eyebrows.
“But
good God!” he objected.
“How
on earth can you
be unhappy if you can turn out a two-hundred-pound
diamond
every half-hour?”
Louie shook
his head.
“Because
I haven’t a chance to spend the money,” he
replied.
He led the
way back dejectedly into the living-room and
threw himself into a
chair, thoughtfully refilling his glass
before he did so.
“You
see,” he said, when Simon Templar had taken the
chair opposite him
with his glass also refilled. “A thing like
this has got to be
handled properly. It’s no good my just
making diamonds and
trying to sell them. I might get away
with one or two, but if I brought a
sackful of them into
a shop and tried to sell ‘em the buyer would
start to wonder
whether I was trying to get rid of some illicit stuff.
He’d
want to ask all sorts of questions about where I got ‘em,
and as
likely as not he’d call in the police. And what does
that mean? It means
that either I’ve got to say nothing and
probably get taken for
a crook and put in prison——
” Louie’s
features registered
profound horror at this frightful possi
bility. “Or else
I’ve got to give away my secret. And if I
said that I made the
diamonds myself, they’d want me to
prove it; and if I proved it,
everybody would know it could
be done, and the bottom would fall out of the
diamond
market. If people knew that anybody could make diamonds
for
threepence a time, diamonds just wouldn’t be worth anything any more.”
Simon
nodded. The argument was logical and provided a
very intriguing
impasse. He waited for Mr. Fallon to point
the way out.
“What
this thing needs,” said Louie, duly coming up to
expectations, “is
someone to run it in a businesslike way. It’s
got to be scientific,
just like the way the diamonds are made.”
Mr. Fallon had worked
all this out for himself in his daydreams, and the recital was mechanically
easy. “Someone
would have to go off somewhere—not to South Africa, be
cause
that’s too much controlled, but to South America maybe
—and do some
prospectin’. After a while he’d report that he’d found diamonds, and set up a
mine. We’d set up a
company and sell shares to the public, and after a bit
the
diamonds’d start comin’ home and they could all be sold in the
regular
market quite legitimate.”
“Why
don’t you do that?” inquired the Saint perplexedly.
“I’ve
got no heart for it,” said Louie with a sigh. “I’m not
so young
as I was; and besides, I never had any kind of head
for these things. And
I don’t want to do it. I don’t want to get myself tied up in a lot of business
worries and office
work. I’ve had that all my life. I want to enjoy myself—
travel
around and meet some girls and have a good time. Be
tween you and
I,” said Mr. Fallon with a catch in his voice
and tears glistening
in his eyes, “the doctors tell me that I haven’t long to live. I’ve had a
hard life, and I want to make
the best of what I have got left. Now, if I
had a young
fellow like yourself to help me …”
He leaned
further back in his chair, with his eyes half
dosed, and went on as
if talking to himself: “It’d have to
be a chap who could
keep his mouth shut, a sport who
wouldn’t mind doing a bit of hard work for a
lot of money
—someone that I could just leave to manage everything
while
I went off and had a good time. He’d have to have a bit
of money
of his own to invest in the company, just to make
everything square and
aboveboard and legal, and in a year or
so he’d be a bloomin’
millionaire ridin’ around in a Rolls
Royce with chauffeurs and everything.
You’d think it’d be
easy to find a fellow like that, but it isn’t. There
aren’t many
chaps that I take a likin’ to—not chaps that I feel I
could
trust with anything as big as this. That’s why when I took a
fancy to
you, I wondered …” Mr. Fallon sighed again, a
sigh of heart-rending
self-pity. “But I suppose it’s no use.
Here am I with the
greatest discovery in modern science, and
I can’t do anything
with it. I suppose I was just born un
lucky, like I told you.”
The Saint
was sublimely sure that Louie Fallon was un
lucky, but he did not
dream of saying so. He allowed his face
to become illumined
with a light of breathless cupidity which
was everything that
Mr. Fallon had desired.
“Well,”
he said hesitantly, “if you’ve really taken a fancy
to me and
I can do anything to help you——
”
Louie
stared at him for a moment incredulously, as if he
had never dared to
hope that such a miracle could happen.
“No,”
he said at length, covering his eyes wearily, “it
couldn’t be true. My
luck can’t have changed. You wouldn’t
do a thing like that for a perfect
stranger.”
During the
conversation that followed, however, it ap
peared that Louie’s
luck had indeed changed. His new-found
friend, it seemed, was
quite prepared to do such a service for a perfect stranger. They talked for
another hour, discussing
ways and means, and occasionally referring in
a gentlemanly
way to terms of business; then they went out to lunch in
an
aura of mutual admiration and regard, and discussed the for
tunes
which they would assist each other to make; and when
they finally
separated, the Saint had agreed to meet Mr.
Fallon again the
following day, bringing with him (in cash)
the sum of two
thousand pounds which he was to invest in
the new industry, on
an equal partership basis, as a guarantee of his good faith.
Simon went
off with Louie Fallon’s diamond in his pocket.
As a purely formal
precaution, he took it round to a diamond
merchant of his
acquaintance who pronounced it to be unquestionably genuine; and then he
proceeded somewhat light-
headedly to make some curious purchases.
The clouds
of ill-starred melancholy seemed to have dis
persed themselves from
Mr. Fallon’s sky overnight; for
when he opened the door to Simon Templar the
next day
he was beaming. The flat, Simon noticed, was in some dis
order, and
there were three freshly labelled suitcases stand
ing in the hall.
“I
hope I’m not late,” said the Saint anxiously.
“Only
a minute or two,” said Louie heartily. “It’s my own
fault that
it seems longer. I was just nervous. I guess I
couldn’t believe that
my luck had really changed until I saw
you on the step. You
see, I’ve got my tickets and everything
—I’m ready to go as
soon as everything’s fixed up.”
The Saint
believed him. As soon as everything had been
fixed up in the way
Louie intended, Mr. Fallon would be
likely to go as fast and far as the
conveniences of modern
travel would take him. Simon made vague noises
of sympathy
and encouragement, and followed his benefactor into the
living-room.
“There’s
the contract, all drawn up ready,” said Louie, producing a large and
impressive-looking document with fat
red seals attached to it. “All
you’ve got to do is to sign on
the dotted line and put in your capital, and
you’re in charge
of the whole business. After that, if you send me two or
three
hundred pounds a week out of the profits, I’ll be quite
happy, and
I don’t much care what you do with the rest.”
With all
the eagerness that was expected of him, Simon
sat down at the table,
glanced over the document, and signed
his name over the dotted line as
requested. Then he took
out his wallet and counted out a sheaf of
crisp new banknotes;
and Louie picked them up and counted them
again with
slightly unsteady fingers.
“Well,
now,” said the Saint, “if that’s all settled, hadn’t
you better
show me your process?”
“I’ve
written it all out for you——
”
“Oh,
yes, I’d want that. But couldn’t we try it over now
just to make sure that
I understand it properly?”
“Certainly,
my dear chap—certainly.” Mr. Fallon pushed
up his sleeve to look
at his watch, and appeared to make a
calculation. “I don’t know whether
I’ll have time to see the
experiment right through to the end, but once
you’ve got it
started you can’t possibly go wrong. It’s absolutely fool
proof.
Come along.”
They went
into the bathroom and Simon poured out
magnesium and iron
filings into the crucible exactly as he
had seen Louie doing
the previous day. The composition of
the powder from which the diamonds
were actually made
gave him more trouble—it was apparently made up of the
contents of
various other unlabelled bottles, mixed up in
certain complicated
proportions. It was at this stage in the proceedings that the Saint appeared to
become unexpectedly
stupid and clumsy. He poured out too much from one bottle
and spilt
most of the contents of another on to the floor.
“You’ll
have to be more careful than that,” said Louie,
pursing his lips,
“but I can see you’ve got the idea. Well,
now, if I’m goin’ to
catch my train——
”
“I’d
like to finish the job,” said the Saint, “even if the
mixture
has gone wrong. After all, I may as well know if
there are any other
mistakes I’m likely to make.” He put a
match to his mixture
and stepped back while it flared up.
Louie watched this studiously.
“I
don’t expect you’ll get any results,” he said, “but it
can’t do
any harm for you to get some practice. Now as soon
as the thing’s
properly white hot——
”
He
supervised the tipping of the contents of the crucible
into the cooler
indulgently. He had no cause for alarm. The
proportions of the
mixture were admittedly wrong, which was
a perfectly sound
reason to give for the inevitable failure of
the experiment. He
puffed at his cigar complacently, while
the Saint went down on
his knees and groped around in the
cooling tank.
Then
something seemed to go wrong with the mechanism
of Mr. Fallon’s
heart, and for a full five seconds he was unable
to breathe. His eyes
bulged, and the smug tolerance froze
out of his face as if it had been
nipped in the bud by
the same antarctic zephyr that was playing
weird tricks up
and down his spine. For the Saint had straightened up
again
with an exclamation of delight; and in the palm of his hand
he
displayed three little round grey pebbles.