The Saint and the Happy Highwayman (17 page)

But their hands did not meet at once. Mr Urlaub’s approaching movement died slowly away, as if paralysis had gradually overtaken him, so that he finally came to rest just before they met, like a clockwork toy that had run down. His eyes became fixed, staring. His mouth opened.

Then, very slowly, he revived himself. He pushed his hand onwards again and grasped the Saint’s as if it were something precious, shaking it slowly and earnestly.

“A pupil of yours, did you say, Homer?” he asked in an awestruck voice.

“That’s right. My star pupil, in fact. I might almost say …”

Mr Urlaub paid no attention to what Quarterstone might almost have said. With his eyes still staring, he darted suddenly closer, peered into the Saint’s face, took hold of it, turned it from side to side, just as Quarterstone had once done. Then he stepped back and stared again, prowling round the Saint like a dog prowling round a tree. Then he stopped.

“Mr Tombs,” he said vibrantly, “will you walk over to the door, and then walk back towards me?”

Looking dazed, the Saint did so.

Mr Urlaub looked at him and gulped. Then he hauled a wad of typescript out of an inside pocket, fumbled through it and thrust it out with one enamelled fingernail dabbing at a paragraph.

“Read that speech—read it as if you were acting it.”

The Saint glanced over the paragraph, drew a deep breath and read with almost uncontrollable emotion.

“No, do not lie to me. You have already given me the answer for which I have been waiting. I am not ungrateful for what you once did for me, but I see now that that kind act was only a part of your scheme to ensnare my better nature in the toils of your unhallowed passions, as though pure love were a thing that could be bought like merchandise. Ah, yes, I loved you, but I did not know that that pretty face was only a mask for the corruption beneath. How you must have laughed at me! Ha, ha. I brought you a rose, but you turned it into a nest of vipers in my bosom. They have stabbed my heart! (Sobs.)”

Mr Urlaub clasped his hands together. His eyes bulged and rolled upwards.

“My God,” he breathed hoarsely.

“What?” said the Saint.

“Why?” said Mr Quarterstone.

“But it’s like a miracle!” squeaked Waldemar Urlaub. “He’s the man! The type! The face! The figure! The voice! The manner! He is a genius! Homer, where did you find him? The women will storm the theatre.” He grasped the Saint by the arm, leaning as far as he could over the desk and over Mr Quarter-stone. “Listen. He must play that part. He must. He is the only man. I couldn’t put anyone else in it now. Not after I’ve seen him. I’ll show Aaron Niementhal where he gets off. Quit, did he ? Okay. He’ll be sorry. We’ll have a hit that’ll make history!”

“But Waldemar …”

Mr Urlaub dried up. His clutching fingers uncoiled from Simon’s arm. The fire died out of his eyes. He staggered blindly back and sank into a chair and buried his face in his hands.

“Yes,” he whispered bitterly. “I’d forgotten. The play can’t go on. I’m sunk, Homer—just for a miserable fifteen grand. And now, of all times, when I’ve just seen Mr Tombs I”

“You know I’d help you if I could, Waldemar,” said Mr Quartcrstone earnestly. “But I just bought my wife a fur coat, and she wants a new car, and that ranch we just bought in California set me back a hundred thousand.”

Mr Urlaub shook his head.

“I know. It’s not your fault. But isn’t it just the toughest break?”

Quarterstone shook his head in sympathy. And then he looked at the Saint.

It was quite a performance, that look. It started casually, beheld inspiration, blazed with triumph, winked, glared significantly, poured out encouragement, pleaded, commanded and asked and answered several questions, all in a few seconds. Mr Quarterstone had not at any period in his career actually held down the job of prompter, but he more than made up with enthusiasm for any lack of experience. Only a man who had been blind from birth could have failed to grasp the idea that Mr Quarterstone was suggesting, and the Saint had not strung along so far in order to feign blindness at the signal for his entrance.

Simon cleared his throat.

“Er—did you say you only needed another fifteen thousand dollars to put on this play?” he asked diffidently, but with a clearly audible note of suppressed excitement.

After that he had to work no harder than he would have had to work to get himself eaten by a pair of hungry lions. Waldemar Urlaub, once the great light had dawned on him, skittered about like a pea on a drum in an orgy of exultant planning. Mr Tombs would have starred in the play anyhow, whenever the remainder of the necessary wind had been raised— Urlaub had already made up his mind to that—but if Mr Tombs had fifteen thousarld dollars as well as his genius and beauty, he would be more than a star. He could be co-producer as well, a sharer in the profits, a friend and an equal, in every way the heir to the position which the great Aaron Niementhal would have occupied. His name would go on the billing with double force—Urlaub grabbed a piece of paper and a pencil to illustrate it:

Sebastian Tombs

and

Waldmar Urlaub

present

SEBASTIAN TOMBS

in

“LOVE—THE REDEEMER”

There would also be lights on the theatre, advertisements, photographs, newspaper articles, news items, gossip paragraphs, parties, movie rights, screen tests, Hollywood, London, beautiful and adoring women … Mr Urlaub built up a luminous picture of fame, success and fortune, while Mr Quarterstone nodded benignly and slapped everybody on the back and beamed at the Saint at intervals with a sublimely smug expression of “I told you so.”

“And they did all that to me, too,” said Rosalind Hale wryly. “I was practically Sarah Bernhardt when they’d finished… . But I told you just how they did it. Why do you have to let yourself in for the same mess that I got into?”

“The easiest way to rob a bank is from the inside,” said the Saint cryptically. “I suppose you noticed that they really have got a play?”

“Yes. I read part of it—the same as you did.”

“Did you like it?”

She made a little grimace.

“You’ve got a right to laugh at me. I suppose that ought to have been warning enough, but Urlaub was so keen about it, and Quarterstone had already made me think he was a great producer, so I couldn’t say that I thought it was awful. And then I wondered if it was just because I didn’t know enough about plays.”

“I don’t know much about plays myself,” said the Saint. “But the fact remains that Comrade Urlaub has got a complete play, with three acts and everything, god-awful though it is. I took it away with me to read it over and the more I look at it the more I’m thinking that something might be done with it.”

Rosalind was aghast.

“You don’t mean to say you’d really put your money into producing it?”

“Stranger things have happened,” said the Saint thoughtfully. “How bad can a play be before it becomes good? And how much sense of humour is there in the movie business? Haven’t you seen those reprints of old two-reelers that they show sometimes for a joke, and haven’t you heard the audience laughing itself sick? … Listen. I only wish I knew who wrote Love —the Redeemer. I’ve got an idea …”

Mr Homer Quarterstone could have answered his question for him, for the truth was that the author of Love—the Redeemer resided under the artistic black homburg of Mr Homer Quarterstone. It was a matter of considerable grief to Mr Quarterstone that no genuine producer had ever been induced to see eye to eye with him on the subject of the superlative merits of that amorous masterpiece, so that after he had grown weary of collecting rejections Mr Quarterstone had been reduced to the practical expedient of using his magnum opus as one of the props in the more profitable but by no means less artistic drama from which he and Mr Urlaub derived their precarious incomes; but his loyalty to the child of his brain had never been shaken.

It was therefore with a strange squirmy sensation in the pit of his stomach that Mr Quarterstone sat in his office a few mornings later and gazed at a card in the bottom left-hand corner of which were the magic words, “Paragon Pictures, Inc., Hollywood, Calif.” A feeling of fate was about him, as if he had been unexpectedly reminded of a still-cherished childhood dream.

“Show her in,” he said with husky magnificence.

The order was hardly necessary, for she came in at once, shepherded by a beaming Waldemar Urlaub.

“Just thought I’d give you a surprise, Homer,” he explained boisterously. “Did your heart jump when you saw that card? Well, so did mine. Still, it’s real. I fixed it all up. Sold her the play. ‘You can’t go wrong,’ I said, ‘with one of the greatest drammers ever written.’ “

Mrs Wohlbreit turned her back on him coldly and inspected Mr Quarterstone. She looked nothing like the average man’s conception of a female from Hollywood, being gaunt and masculine with a sallow lined face and gold-rimmed glasses and mousey hair plastered back above her ears, but Mr Quarterstone had at least enough experience to know that women were used in Hollywood in executive positions which did not call for the decorative qualities of more publicized employees.

She said in her cold masculine voice: “Is this your agent?”

Mr Quarterstone swallowed.

“Ah–-“

“Part owner,” said Mr Urlaub eagerly. “That’s right, isn’t it, Homer? You know our agreement— fifty-fifty in everything. Eh? Well, I’ve been working on this deal–-“

“I asked you,” said Mrs Wohlbreit penetratingly, “because I understand that you’re the owner of this play we’re interested in. There are so many chisellers in this business that we make it our policy to approach the author first direct—if he wants to take any ten-percenters in afterwards, that’s his affair. A Mr Tombs brought me the play first, and told me he had an interest in it. I found out that he got it from Mr Ur-laub, so I went to him. Mr Urlaub told me that you were the original author. Now, who am I to talk business with?”

Mr Quarterstone saw his partner’s mouth opening for another contribution.

“With—with us,” he said weakly.

It was not what he might have said if he had had time to think, but he was too excited to be particular.

“Very well,” said Mrs Wohlbreit. “We’ve read this play, Love—the Redeemer, and we think it would make a grand picture. If you haven’t done anything yet about the movie rights …”

Mr Quarterstone drew himself up. He felt as if he was in a daze from which he might be rudely awakened at any moment, but it was a beautiful daze. His heart was thumping, but his brain was calm and clear. It was, after all, only the moment with which he had always known that his genius must ultimately be rewarded.

“Ah—yes,” he said with resonant calm. “The movie rights are, for the moment, open to—ah—negotiation. Naturally, with a drama of such quality, dealing as it does with a problem so close to the lives of every member of the thinking public, and appealing to the deepest emotions and beliefs of every intelligent man and woman–-“

“We thought it would make an excellent farce,” said Mrs Wohlbreit blandly. “It’s just the thing we’ve been looking for for a long time.” But before the stricken Mr Quarterstone could protest, she had added consolingly: “We could afford to give you thirty thousand dollars for the rights.”

“Ah—quite,” said Mr Quarterstone bravely.

By the time that Mrs Wohlbreit had departed, after making an appointment for the contract to be signed and the check paid over at the Paragon offices the following afternoon, his wound had healed sufficiently to let him take Mr Urlaub in his arms, as soon as the door closed, and embrace him fondly in an impromptu rumba.

“Didn’t I always tell you that play was a knockout?” he crowed. “It’s taken ‘em years to see it, but they had to wake up in the end. Thirty thousand dollars! Why, with that money I can–-” He sensed a certain stiffness in his dancing partner and hastily corrected himself: “I mean, we—we can–-“

“Nuts,” said Mr Urlaub coarsely. He disengaged himself and straightened the creases out of his natty suit. “What you’ve got to do now is sit down and figure out a way to crowbar that guy Tombs out of this.”

Mr Quarterstone stopped dancing suddenly and his jaw dropped.

“Tombs?”

“Yeah! He wasn’t so dumb. He had the sense to see that that play of yours was the funniest thing ever written. When we were talking about it in here he must have thought we thought it was funny, too.”

Mr Quarterstone was appalled as the idea of duplicity struck him.

“Waldemar—d’you think he was trying to–-“

“No. I pumped the old battle-axe on the way here. He told her he only had a part interest, but he wanted to do something for the firm and give us a surprise— he thought he could play the lead in the picture, too.”

“Has she told him–-“

“Not yet. You heard what she said. She gets in touch with the author first. But we got to get him before he gets in touch with her. Don’t you remember those contracts we signed yesterday? Fifty percent of the movie rights for him!”

Mr Quarterstone sank feebly on to the desk.

“Fifteen thousand dollars!” He groaned. Then he brightened tentatively. “But it’s all right, Waldemar. He agreed to put fifteen thousand dollars into producing the play, so we just call it quits and we don’t have to give him anything.”

“You great fat lame-brained slob,” yelped Mr Ur-laub affectionately. “Quits! Like hell it’s quits! D’you think I’m not going to put that play on, after this? It took that old battle-axe to see it, but she’s right. They’ll be rolling in the aisles!” He struck a Quarterstoneish attitude. ” ‘I brought you a rose,’ ” he uttered tremulously, ” ‘but you turned it into a nest of vipers in my bosom. They have stabbed my heart!’ My God! It’s a natural! I’m going to put it on Broadway whatever we have to do to raise the dough—but we aren’t going to cut that mug Tombs in on it.”

Mr Quarterstone winced.

“It’s all signed up legal,” he said dolefully. “We’ll have to spend our own dough and buy him out.”

“Get your hat,” said Mr Urlaub shortly. “We’ll cook up a story on the way.”

When Rosalind Hale walked into the Saint’s apartment at the Waldorf-Astoria that afternoon, Simon Templar was counting crisp new hundred-dollar bills into neat piles.