“I can’t argue—with the theory.”
“But he won’t usually gulp it, the way he might go for a fly. He knows it’s not going to run away. And I think it must taste better than a fly. Why shouldn’t he want to enjoy it? So he takes it in his mouth and swims a little way with it. That’s when most people go wrong. They feel a little tug and jerk their rod, and unless they’re lucky they snatch the egg right out of his lips, or pull the hook out of the egg, but they don’t snag him.”
“What do you do, Professor?”
“I’ve got a lot of extra line off the reel, see, like this, and I’m holding it in the tips of my fingers, just as lightly as I can, only just enough so’s the current won’t take it away, and I can feel a little pull if I get one, but not so tightly that he’ll feel a resistance and get suspicious—Look, something’s playing with it now!”
The monofilament was peeling slowly away from his poised fingertips. Two or three feet of it slipped off, and then the movement stopped. The little man lowered his thumb to grip the line again as lightly as a feather.
“Now, he’s really taking it well into his mouth. In a minute he’ll be ready to start swallowing, and then he’ll move on again to look for something else to eat…There he goes…Give him a little more to make sure…” The skinny fingers delicately released more line, then checked it gently. “Now we should have him.”
The handle began cranking, the rod tip nicked up and then bent, and the line sprang straight and taut from it for a second before a galvanized shimmer of silver erupted from an eddy downstream. In a very few seconds more the little man was hoisting his prize bodily onto the decking—it was not much over the legal minimum and couldn’t put up any appreciable struggle.
“But it’s a fish, isn’t it?” said the little man diffidently. “And I was lucky to be able to show you what I mean.”
“You must be a hell of a psychologist,” said the Saint.
“Well, I am about some things.”
The man added the trout to his string but did not put the string back in the water.
“Why don’t you take a turn here?” he said. “It’s a good spot.”
“Thanks, but you had it first.”
“No, really, I’m through. I’ve got all I want for supper, and it’s time I took them home and cleaned them and cooked them.”
He squeezed past the Saint quite decisively, and Simon took his place at the end of the pier and began working out line with false casts. The other stopped as he reached the bank, and out of the corner of an eye Simon saw him put down his rod and his string and squat down to rinse his hands in the river; then the Saint had to concentrate completely on keeping his back cast high and accurately grooved into a narrow gap between the trees behind him, a problem which the salmon-egg psychologist had not had with his spinning tackle. Simon would have been quite childishly delighted if some enchanted trout had risen as if on cue to his first cast and would have settled for any prompt action that would have entitled him to give a return lecture on technique, but by the time he had his fly drifting and sinking where he wanted it, the only audience he was immediately anxious to impress had gone.
About ten minutes and several casts later, on the swing-around, he tied into his best strike of the day. Having dared his luck by coming out with no landing net, he had to beach it after a brief but exhilarating tussle at the shore end of the pier. It was a rainbow which he estimated at almost two pounds—far from a boasting size, but big enough to dwarf anything the egg expert had to show.
After unhooking it and killing it cleanly, he squatted down again to rinse his hands, exactly as the little man had done. And it was as he turned back from this ablution that he saw the wallet.
It lay on the path just a half step off the pier, where anyone who was not purblind, leaving the pier, could hardly have missed it, or if he did could scarcely have failed to trip over it.
Simon Templar picked it up. Of course.
He looked inside it. Inevitably.
It contained remarkably little of the motley miscellanea which most men accumulate in their wallets. There was a driver’s license, an Auto Club card, and an insurance card, all bearing the name of Oliphant Quigg, with an address in San Francisco. The remaining contents were most monotonous, consisting of eleven identical pieces of paper currency, each with a face value of one hundred dollars.
One didn’t have to be a detective to assume that the name of Oliphant Quigg was the private affliction of the Saint’s newest acquaintance, and that the wallet had squeezed out of his hip-pocket when he washed his hands.
Simon Templar suddenly decided that he had done enough fishing for the day. Like Mr Quigg, he had plenty for his own dinner, and the others would keep better in the river than in his icebox, and it would soon be dark anyhow. And to the Saint, much as he might insist that he had retired, people who dropped wallets like that still promised one of the few sports that fascinated him more than fishing.
He stopped by the office to make an inquiry and was not disappointed.
“Yes, he’s staying here,” said the proprietor. “Number fourteen—the end cottage over that way.”
“I found something I think he dropped,” Simon said for explanation.
In the gathering dusk he walked over to the indicated cabin and knocked on the door. When Mr Quigg opened it, Simon was holding up the wallet in front of him. The little man looked blank at first, then appalled. His hand flew to his hip and came back empty and trembling.
“Gosh,” he gasped. “How ever could I—Do come in, won’t you?”
Simon did not need to have his arm twisted. And if the invitation had not been issued he would have doubted his own sanity.
Mr Quigg had taken the wallet and was thumbing shakily through it.
“Your money’s all there, Mr Quigg,” Simon assured him. “I couldn’t help seeing it, of course, when I looked inside to find out who it belonged to. You’re lucky it didn’t fall in the river.”
“Or am I lucky that you’re such an honest man? If you’d kept it, I could never have proved that it didn’t fall in the river.”
“Why didn’t I think of that first?”
The little man fingered out a corner of one of the bills.
“Would you be offended if I—”
“A psychologist like you should know that,” Simon told him reprovingly. “Or do you only know about fish?”
Mr Quigg pushed the bill back and put the wallet away in his pocket.
“Well, at least you won’t refuse a drink?”
“Now you’re talking.”
Mr Quigg went into the tiny kitchen and produced a bottle of Peter Dawson.
“Is this all right?”
“My favorite,” said the Saint, who had followed him in. “Mind if I put this minnow down in your sink while I’m here?”
“Please, make yourself at home, Mr—”
“Tombs.”
“That’s a nice trout, Mr Tombs. Much better than mine. I’m really happy you caught it. Especially happy, now.”
Simon accepted the glass he was handed, lifted it to eye level in a gesture of salute to his host, and said with a smile, “Maybe there’s something to this business about living right, after all.”
“That’s nothing to laugh about,” said the little man earnestly. “If there’s any justice in this world, a truly honest man ought to be specially favored by the gods. There aren’t enough of them so’s it would make a great upset in the ordinary laws of chance. Believe me, sir, I feel quite privileged to have met one like yourself.”
In the Saint’s soul was burgeoning a sensation of bliss almost too ecstatic to be borne. To have encountered a gambit of such classic if corny purity on a New York sidewalk, and to have helped it to develop in some tawdry Broadway bar would have been only a mechanically enjoyable routine. To meet it beside the Rogue River and continue it in a fishing camp cottage gave it the same spice of the miraculous that would have been experienced by a shipwrecked gourmet on discove
ring that the vessel stranded on the island with him had been laden to the Plimsoll line with a cargo of the finest canned and bottled delicacies that France could export. It gave him a dizzy feeling of being the spoiled pet of a whole brigade of guardian angels to an extent that Mr Quigg’s interpretation did not even begin to justify. But according to the protocol which he had once himself enunciated, he was categorically prohibited from leaping up and down and uttering shrill cries of jubilation. The most he could permit himself at this point was to wriggle modestly. “Oh, hell,” he said, exerting some effort not to ham it into Aw, heck. “Don’t let’s go overboard about this.”
“But I mean it,” said Mr Quigg. “If I only had a friend that I knew was absolutely honest, it’d make all the difference in the world to my life.”
“What sort of highbinders do you have in your circle, Ollie?”
“Just ordinary people. They wouldn’t dream of cheating you out a dollar, but if they had a chance to chisel a few thousands without the slightest risk of getting in trouble I wouldn’t expect them to die before they’d do it.”
Mr Quigg put down his glass and picked up a knife, but it was quickly apparent that the only butchery he intended was to be performed on his fish, which were laid out on a newspaper on the draining board.
“Will you excuse me if I finish this job?” he said, and continued with the cleaning which Simon’s knock had obviously interrupted. He was quick and neat at it. “It’s a crime not to eat trout absolutely fresh.” He pursed his lips in a final survey of his dressed-out catch. “Mmm—this is more than I can eat tonight. I’ve such a small appetite. I think I’ll preserve a couple of them.”
The unorthodox word, combined with the startling contradiction of what he had said only three sentences before, should have been enough to hold anyone’s attention on what he proceeded to do, which proved to be rewardingly extraordinary.
Perched on one of the kitchen chairs was an aluminum coffer which at first sight could have been taken for some kind of portable icebox, roughly cubical in shape and measuring about two feet on any side, until you noticed that it was plugged in to an electric outlet and had a row of dials and switches along a lower panel which suggested a television set with no screen. Then when Mr Quigg opened a door in one side it looked more like an oven. He slipped two trout into a self-sealing plastic bag, and put the bag in the box, and twiddled switches and dials.
Whereupon the cabinet ceased to resemble anything Simon had ever seen except a prop from a Hollywood science-fiction movie. A thin high-pitched humming came from it, and its interior glowed with a weird fluorescence. Violet ribbons of energy like cold, crawling streaks of lightning bridged the inside and writhed up and down between its walls like tortured disembodied snakes. And on the central griddle where Mr Quigg had placed it, the transparent plastic package was bathed in a soft rosy light that seemed to emanate from the trout themselves.
Simon Templar had seen a fine assortment of Contraptions in his time, from transmuters that made gold and diamonds out of a handful of common chemicals, to machines that printed perfect replicas of British banknotes or United States greenbacks as fast as you could turn a handle, but never before had he seen a gizmo that gizzed with such original and soul-satisfying pyrotechnical effects.
“What is that?” he demanded, and did not have to fake a fragment of his yokel’s entrancement.
“It’s my Preservator,” said Mr Quigg matter-of-factly. “I invented it. I couldn’t explain it to you very easily, unless you happen to be very well up on electronics and radiation theory. And then I’d be afraid of telling you too much, perhaps. But it preserves anything you treat with it by total sterilization, without chemicals or refrigeration.” He flicked another switch, the slow fireworks died down, and he withdrew the plastic envelope, from which the pink luminosity had already faded. “You could keep this for months now, anywhere, even in the tropics, and when you opened it those fish would be just as fresh as they are now.”
“No fooling—you’ve tried it?”
“Well, not in the tropics. But here’s something I’ve been keeping just to see how long it would last.” Mr Quigg took from a cupboard another transparent bag in which was sealed a small lettuce cut in half. “This has been down to Los Angeles a couple of times through the San Joaquin Valley, and it was with me in Sacramento for a week, and they were all plenty hot, and it’s never been in a fridge since I treated it. If you didn’t know, wouldn’t you say it could’ve been picked yesterday? But I preserved it last April. Yes, on the eighteenth. Look, you see that strip off the top of a newspaper, with the date on? I sealed that in with it so’s I couldn’t forget.”
Simon could not be so ungracious as to point out that anyone who had thoughtfully hoarded a number of old newspapers could have just as easily sealed a dateline of fifty years ago in with a lettuce packaged yesterday. Instead, he regarded the Contraption again with renewed awe.
“Where could I get one of these?” he asked.
“You couldn’t. It isn’t on the market. As a matter of fact, it isn’t even patented. It probably never will be.”
“But good Lord, man, you’re going to do something about it, aren’t you? Why, an invention like this must be worth a fortune!”
“Yes, I know,” said the inventor sadly. “All the food growers and packers, the trucking firms, the markets…even all the fishing camps like this could use it; it wouldn’t cost as much as a deep freeze, and they could preserve everything their guests caught, and people could take fish and game home wherever they lived without having to bother about keeping it iced…But it wouldn’t do me any good.”
“You mean you’re already in such a high tax bracket that you don’t care?”
“Oh no. I wouldn’t mind that so much. But I do have a problem. Quite a personal one. Somebody would have to handle the Preservator for me as if it were all his own, and I’d have to trust him to kick back some of the profits. That’s what I meant when I said if I only knew a completely honest man—someone like you…But I do know you!” A strange feverish gleam came into the little man’s wistful eyes. “If I only had time to tell you—I mean, I don’t want to bore you—oh, I know it’s too much to hope, but…
“Well, could I possibly ask you to have dinner with me? If you wouldn’t mind contributing your own trout, and you can have my two extras, as well, and I’ve got lots of vegetables and a bottle of Château Fuissé if you like wine, and if you get tired of my troubles I’ll shut up the minute you tell me.”
The Saint smiled sympathetically. The other’s babbling eagerness could not have struck a more responsive chord from his heartstrings. Already he treasured an affection for Mr Oliphant Quigg not unlike that which a tiger might have conceived for an appealing wolf cub, likewise towards dinnertime.
“You’d have to hire a bouncer to throw me out now,” he said with the utmost sincerity. “I love listening to people’s troubles, especially when they sound as unusual as yours.”
Mr Quigg’s story, he found out presently, was not quite as unusual as its advance build-up. In fact, some cynics might have said that it was not particularly unusual at all, in modern America. Mr Quigg was simply a victim of the twentieth-century philosophy, promulgated by a hard core of embattled suffragettes, and made law by a widespread gaggle of gutless jurists in mortal terror of what their own wives would do to them if they opposed it, which proclaims that any female who makes the supreme sacrifice of marrying a man and thus officially granting him the ineffable favors of her body even for a few months is thereby entitled, if they separate for any reason whatever, not only to walk off with a hog’s share of any fortune he may have been able to accumulate in all his preceding years of toil and thrift, but also to clamp an advance lien on a major percentage of anything he may earn for the rest of his life thereafter.
Mr Quigg, during twenty-five years as professor of electrical engineering at such a humble college that Simon had never heard of it, had patented two or three minor gadgets or improveme
nts on standard equipment and had succeeded in licensing his rights for royalties which eventually attained a volume on which, with the addition of a meager pension, he was able to retire in very modest comfort. He had no plans other than to indulge his passion for fishing and to tinker with a few other scientific ideas which he had been gestating—one of which was an entirely new method of food preservation. But a capable and motherly woman of less than forty whom he met one evening in a hotel on Lake Mead, where he had gone for some bass fishing, soon remedied that deficiency of purpose, and before he fully realized what was happening he was married.
Within a year he had discovered that his wife was so capable that she had taken complete control of their finances, allowing him two dollars a week pocket money, and so motherly that she treated him like a naughty child in need of stern discipline. She considered fishing messy, stupid, and a waste of time and money: when they wanted to eat fish, they could buy it at the market in a minute, and in the long run it wouldn’t cost a fraction of what he’d been spending on tackle, bait, licenses, trips to remote places, lodgings, and boat rentals. The experiments which used to happily clutter his living room were banished to a bleak cellar, but she did not dispute their potential as money-makers and in fact upbraided him for approaching them so casually: she decided that only by putting in a proper working day of eight hours, six days a week, could he expect to get anywhere with his projects and make a real fortune, and she was going to see that he did it.
When at long last he rebelled enough to go into a bar with an old friend he ran into on his way to the store where she had sent him to buy some groceries, and stayed out for more than two hours, and came home without the money or the supplies but drunk enough to tell her that he would as soon be dead as shut up in the basement for six days a week and not even allowed to go fishing on Sunday, she fled sobbing to the nearest neighbor and was next heard from through an attorney, who wanted to know if Mr Quigg was at least prepared to give her her freedom in a gentlemanly way, after all she had done for him. Mr Quigg, who was in a slight haze of hangover, but surprisingly without remorse, agreed that he would chivalrously refrain from contesting charges of persistent drunkenness and mental cruelty. He was too relieved at the prospect of the simple solution offered by this minor sacrifice to pay much attention to the papers he was asked to sign: it was September, and the steelhead were reported thick in Klamath Glen, and he had moved some of the works of the Preservator into the kitchen and had already had a new inspiration about it while waiting for his breakfast eggs to boil.
Thanks to the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 14