The Saint and the Happy Highwayman (6 page)

Fernack kept his grip of the Saint’s arm. His frosted grey eyes glared at the Saint angrily, but not with the sort of anger that most people would have expected.

“You damn fool,” he said rather damn-foolishly. “What did you have to do it for? I told you when you came over that you couldn’t get away with that stuff any more.”

“What stuff?” asked the Saint innocently.

Corrio had grabbed the parcel out of his hand and he was tearing it open with impatient haste.

“I guess this is what we’re looking for,” he said.

The broken string and torn brown paper fluttered to the ground as Corrio ripped them off. When the outer wrappings were gone he was left with a cardboard box. Inside the box there was a layer of crumpled tissue paper. Corrio jerked it out and remained staring frozenly at what was finally exposed. This was a fully dressed and very lifelike doll with features that were definitely familiar. Tied around its neck on a piece of ribbon was a ticket on which was printed: “Film Star Series, No. 12: CLARK GABLE. 69˘ .”

An expression of delirious and incredulous relief began to creep over the harsh angles of Fernack’s face —much the same expression as might have come into the face of a man who, standing close by the crater of a rumbling volcano, had seen it suddenly explode only to throw off a shower of fairy lights and coloured balloons. The corners of his mouth began to twitch, and a deep vibration like the tremor of an approaching earthquake began to quiver over his chest; then suddenly his mouth opened to let out a shout of gargantuan laughter like the bellow of a joyful bull.

Corrio’s face was black with fury. He tore out the rest of the packing paper and squeezed out every scrap of it between his fingers, snatched the doll out of the box and twisted and shook it to see if anything could have been concealed inside it. Then he flung that down also among the mounting fragments of litter on the ground. He thrust his face forward until it was within six inches of the Saint’s.

“Where are they?” he snarled savagely.

“Where are who?” asked the Saint densely.

“You know damn well what I’m talking about,” Corrio said through his teeth. “What have you done with the stuff you stole from Oppcnheim’s last night? Where are the Vanderwoude emeralds?”

“Oh, them,” said the Saint mildly. “That’s a funny question for you to ask.” He leaned lazily on the wall against which Corrio had forced him, took out his cigarette case and looked at Fernack.

“As a matter of fact,” he said calmly, “that’s what I wanted to see you about. If you’re particularly interested I think I could show you where they went to.”

The laugh died away on Fernack’s lips, to be replaced by the startled and hurt look of a dog that has been given an unexpected bone and then kicked almost as soon as it has picked it up.

“So you do know something about that job,” he said slowly.

“I know plenty,” said the Saint. “Let’s take a cab.”

He straightened up off the wall. For a moment Corrio looked as if he would pin him back there, but Fernack’s intent interest countermanded the movement without speaking or even looking at him. Fernack was puzzled and disturbed, but somehow the Saint’s quiet voice and unsmiling eyes told him that there was something there to be taken seriously. He stepped back, and Simon walked past him unhindered and opened the door of a taxi standing by the curb.

“Where are we going to ?” Fernack asked, as they turned south down Fifth Avenue.

The Saint grinned gently and settled back in “his corner with his cigarette. He ignored the question.

“Once upon a time,” he said presently, “there was a smart detective. He was very smart because after some years of ordinary detecting he had discovered that the main difficulty about the whole business was that you often have to find out who committed a crime, and since criminals don’t usually leave their names and addresses behind them this is liable to mean a lot of hard work and a good many disappointments. Besides which, the pay of a police lieutenant isn’t nearly so big as that amount of brainwork seems to deserve. So this guy, being a smart fellow, thought of a much simpler method, which was more or less to persuade the criminals to tell him about it themselves. Of course, he couldn’t arrest them even then, because if he did that they might begin to suspect that he had some ulterior motive; but there were plenty of other ways of making a deal out of it. For instance, suppose a crook got away with a tidy cargo of loot and didn’t want to put it away in the refrigerator for icicles to grow on; he could bring his problem to our smart detective, and our smart detective could think it over and say, ‘Well, Elmer, that’s pretty easy. All you do is just go and hide this loot in an ash can on Second Avenue or hang it on a tree in Central Park, or something like that, and I’ll do a very smart piece of detecting and find it. Then I’ll collect the reward and we’ll go shares in it.’ Usually this was pretty good business for the crook, the regular fences being as miserly as they arc, and the detective didn’t starve on it either. Of course the other detectives in the bureau weren’t so pleased about it, being jealous of seeing this same guy collecting such a lot of credits and fat insurance company checks; but somehow it never seemed to occur to them to wonder how he did it.”

He finished speaking as the taxi drew up at an apartment hotel near the corner of East Twelfth Street.

Fernack was sitting forward, with his jaw square and hard and his eyes fixed brightly on the Saint’s face.

“Go on,” he said gruffly.

Simon shook his head and indicated the door.

“We’ll change the scene again.”

He got out and paid off the driver and the other two followed him into the hotel. Corrio’s face seemed to have gone paler under its olive tan.

Simon paused in the lobby and glanced at him.

“Will you ask for the key, or shall I? It might be better if you asked for it,” he said softly, “because the clerk will recognize you. Even if he doesn’t know you by your right name.”

“I don’t quite know what you’re talking about,” Cor-rio said coldly, “but if you think you can wriggle out of this with any of your wild stories, you’re wasting your time.” He turned to Fernack. “I have got an apartment here, sir—I just use it sometimes when I’m kept in town late and I can’t get home. It isn’t in my own name, because—well, sir, you understand—I don’t always want everybody to know who I am. This man has got to know about it somehow, and he’s just using it to try and put up some crazy story to save his own skin.”

“All the same,” said Fernack with surprising gentleness, “I’d like to go up. I want to hear some more of this crazy story.”

Corrio turned on his heel and went to the desk. The apartment was on the third floor—an ordinary two-room suite with the usual revolting furniture to be found in such places. Fernack glanced briefly over the living room into which they entered and looked at the Saint again.

“Go on,” he said. “I’m listening.”

The Saint sat down on the edge of the table and blew smoke rings.

“It would probably have gone on a lot longer,” he said, “if this smart detective hadn’t thought one day what a supremely brilliant idea it would be to combine business with profit, and have the honour of convicting a most notorious and elusive bandit known as the Saint— not forgetting, of course, to collect the usual cash reward in the process. So he used a very good-looking young damsel—you ought to meet her sometime, Fernack, she really is a peach—having some idea that the Saint would never run away very fast from a pretty face. In which he was damn right… . She had a very well-planned hard-luck story, too, and the whole act was most professionally staged. It had all the ingredients that a good psychologist would bet on to make the Saint feel that stealing Oppenheim’s emeralds was the one thing he had left glaringly undone in an otherwise complete life. Even the spadework of the job had already been put in, so that she could practically tell the Saint how to pinch the jewels. So that our smart detective must have thought he was sitting pretty, with a sucker all primed to do the dirty work for him and take the rap if anything went wrong—besides being still there to take the rap when the smart detective made his arrest and earned the reward if everything went right.”

Simon smiled dreamily at a particularly repulsive print on the wall for a moment.

“Unfortunately, I happened to drop in on this girl one time when she wasn’t expecting me, and I heard her phoning a guy named Corrio to tell him I was well and truly hooked,” he said. “On account of having read in the Daily Mail some talk by a guy of the same name about what he was going to do to me, I was naturally interested.”

Corrio started forward.

“Look here, you–-“

“Wait a minute.” Fernack held him back with an iron arm. “I want the rest of it. Did you do the job, Saint?”

Simon shook his head sadly. It was at that point that his narrative departed, for the very first time, from the channels of pure veracity in which it had begun its course—but Fernack was not to know this.

“Would I be such a sap?” he. asked reproachfully. “I knew I could probably get away with the actual robbery because Corrio would want me to; but as soon as it was over, knowing in advance who’d done it, he’d be chasing round to catch me and recover the emeralds. So I told the girl I’d thought it all over and decided I was too busy.” The Saint sighed as if he was still regretting a painful sacrifice. “The rest is pure theory; but this girl gave me a checkroom ticket on Grand Central this morning and asked me if I’d collect a package on it this afternoon and take it along to an address on Fifty-second Street. I didn’t do it because I had an idea what would happen; but my guess would be that if somebody went along and claimed the parcel they’d find emeralds in it. Not all the emeralds, probably, because that ‘d be too risky if I got curious and opened it; but some of them. The rest are probably here—I’ve been looking around since we’ve been here, and I think there’s some new and rather amateurish stitching in the upholstery of that chair. I could do something with that reward myself.”

Corrio barred his way with a gun as he got off the table.

“You stay where you are,” he grated. “If you’re trying to get away with some smart frame-up–-“

Simon looked down at the gun.

“You talk altogether too much,” he said evenly. “And I don’t think you’re going to be safe with that toy in a minute.”

He hit Corrio very suddenly under the chin, grabbing the gun with his other hand as he did so. The gun went off crashingly as Corrio reeled backwards, but after that it remained in the Saint’s hand. Corrio stood trembling against the wall, and Simon looked at Fernack again and rubbed his knuckles thoughtfully.

“Just to make sure,” he said, “I fixed a dictagraph under the table yesterday. Let’s see if it has anything to say.”

Fernack watched him soberly as he prepared to play back the record. In Fernack’s mind was the memory of a number of things which he had heard Corrio say which fitted into the picture which the Saint offered him much too vividly to be easily denied.

Then the dictagraph record began to play. And Fernack felt a faint shiver run up his spine at the uncannily accurate reproduction of Corrio’s voice.

“Smart work, Leo… . I’ll say these must be worth every penny of the price on them.”

The other voice was unfamiliar.

“Hell, it was a cinch. The layout was just like you said. But how you goin’ to fix it on the other guy?”

“That’s easy. The broad gets him to fetch a parcel from Grand Central and take it where I tell her to tell him. When he gets there, I’m waiting for him.”

“You’re not goin’ to risk givin’ him all that stuff”

“Oh, don’t be so thick. There ‘ll only be just enough in the parcel to frame him. Once he’s caught, it’ll be easy enough to plant the rest somewhere and find it.”

Corrio’s eyes were wide and staring.

“It’s a plant!” he screamed hysterically. “That’s a record of the scene I played in the film test I made yesterday.”

Simon smiled politely, cutting open the upholstery of the armchair and fishing about for a leather pouch containing about fourteen hundred thousand dollars’ worth of emeralds which should certainly be there unless somebody else had found them since he chose that ideal hiding place for his loot.

“I only hope you’ll be able to prove it, Gladys,” he murmured, and watched Fernack grasp Corrio’s arm with purposeful efficiency.

III THE WELL-MEANING MAYOR

Sam purdell never quite knew how he became Mayor. He was a small and portly man with a round blank face and a round blank mind, who had built up a moderately profitable furniture business over the last thirty-five years and acquired in the process a round pudding-faced wife and a couple of suet dumplings of daughters; but the inexhaustible zeal for improving the circumstances and morals of the community, that fierce drive of ambition and the twitching of the ears for the ecstatic screams of “Heil” whenever he went abroad, that indomitable urge to be a leader of his people from which Hitlers and Mussolinis are born, was not naturally in him.

It is true that at the local reform club, of which he was a prominent member, he had often been stimulated by an appreciative audience and a large highball to lay down his views on the way in which he thought everything on earth ought to be run, from Japanese immigration to the permissible percentage of sulphur dioxide in dried apricots; but there was nothing outstandingly indicative of a political future in that. This is a disease which is liable to attack even the most honest and respectable citizens in such circumstances. But the idea that he himself should ever occupy the position in which he might be called upon to put all those beautiful ideas into practice had never entered Sam Purdell’s head in those simple early days; and if it had not been for the drive supplied by Al Eisenfeld, it might never have materialized.

“You ought to be in politics, Sam,” Al had insisted, at the close of one of these perorations several years before.

Sam Purdell considered the suggestion.

“No, I wouldn’t be clever enough,” he said modestly.

To tell the truth, he had heard the suggestion before, had repudiated it before and had always wanted to hear it contradicted. Al Eisenfeld obliged him. It was the first time anybody had been so obliging.