“If that’ll make yuh happy, Doc, that’s the way it’ll be.” Jobyn frowned. “But it’ll be the day after tomorrow at the soonest before I can get those checks from my bank in Texas, unless I charter a private plane to fetch ’em.”
“That’s all right, Mr Jobyn,” Nemford said, with his normal composure coming back again. “Whenever they get here, you can give me a call and come over and we’ll make the exchange.”
“Provided somebody hasn’t stolen those blueprints meanwhile,” Simon put in. “Or are they booby-trapped, too?”
Nemford shook his head.
“I don’t think they need to be. They’re in a safe deposit box at my bank.”
“I won’t even ask yuh which bank, Doc,” Jobyn said jovially, “in case yuh think I might put Mr Templar here up to bustin’ into it.”
The joke did not seem to make any special impression on his audience.
“That’s fine, then,” Nemford said with an air of sober relief, and picked up his wrench to attack the bolts that secured his model. “Now if you won’t mind helping me get this back to the house…”
They assisted him to load his machine back on the wheelbarrow and cart it back to the shore, and there Jobyn held out his hand.
“We made a deal. Doc,” he said heartily. “I’ll be talkin’ to yuh soon with them checks in mah hand. An’ when yuh feel like takin’ a trip somewhere, you should come to Texas an’ see mah oil wells.”
He offered the same hand to Hamzah.
“Too bad yuh lost out, Colonel,” he said generously. “You should’ve made up your mind quicker—yuh could easily, not havin’ to listen to a back-seat-drivin’ wife, like me. Even if yuh got a dozen of ’em, you fellas got enough sense to keep ’em locked up in a harem. But better luck next time, anyhow.”
The Arabian delegate accepted the hand gingerly, and winced at the shake, but managed a toothily courteous grimace.
“Y’know, pardner,” Jobyn observed as they drove away, “Felicity’s goin’ to be spittin’ like a scalded bobcat when she hears this water-makin’ invention is as genuine as I been tellin’ her all along. She’ll like to tear your hair out for backin’ me up.”
“I can imagine that,” said the Saint. “So since she isn’t my wife, I’d just as soon pass up that exhilarating privilege, if it’s all the same to you.”
Jobyn seemed to wilt slightly in the mid-act of igniting a celebratory cigar of sufficient caliber to have defended the Alamo,
“But I was countin’ on you to—”
“Why should either of us ask for trouble? Is there any law in Texas that everything has to be done in your joint names? Does she add up your bank statement every month? Does it take both your signatures to write a check?”
“No, but—”
“I’ll bet that when you were courting, Walt, you thought she’d be a right cute little filly to rope and tie. But not so long after she had your name on a marriage license, you found she’d grown into a bucking bronco—and she was riding you!”
“How did yuh know that?”
“One day I’m going to write a book about the Great American Wife. But meanwhile I’ll give you a free preview of the last chapter. It says: she’s only the fault of the Great American Husband. He gave up too easily. I suppose it’s too late for him to go back to the good healthy custom of belting her in the mouth any time she opens it out of turn. But if she wants to make out she’s so much smarter than he is, on strictly intellectual terms, then he’s got a right to outsmart her if he can.”
Mr Jobyn squinted up at him sidelong.
“What yuh gettin’ at, Mr Templar?”
“You said it yourself to Hamzah. However many wives he’s got, he keeps ’em locked up and he doesn’t tell them about his business. Now, you could hardly start a harem with Felicity, but she’s only one, and you should be able to handle her. Go back and tell her you still think Nemford has a gold mine, and I said it looked good, too, but in deference to her great wisdom you decided not to invest in it. This makes her love you to death, but inside, she wonders—”
“But—”
“Then you go right ahead with what you already decided. And after it’s made you a few millions, the next time she’s getting really ornery, you can say: ‘Now I come to think of it, sweetheart, I forgot to tell you how much I made out of the last time I didn’t take your advice.’ And you sock her with the figures, for the first time…On the other hand, until this deal does pay off, and even if by sheer bad luck it never does, you’ll never have to squirm while she tells you what a dope you were.”
The immediate representative of the second biggest of the United States mulled this shamelessly pragmatic proposition under an intensely corrugated brow for several seconds, and came up jubilantly slapping his thigh.
“Goll dang it,” he said exuberantly, “I think yuh got the answer I was lookin’ for. An’ I ain’t the man to forget it. How much do you figure to invest in this here process?”
“Not much more than I already have,” said the Saint. “With taxes the way they are, I can’t afford to be a millionaire, and I can’t take a profit from giving matrimonial advice without losing my amateur standing. But someday if I get desperate I may stop at one of your wells with a bucket.”
He dropped Jobyn at the hotel in La Jolla, and firmly declined to stay for dinner or even for a drink, claiming that he was already overdue at the home of the friends he had been on his way to visit in San Diego.
“If you’re going to play it the way I suggested, you shouldn’t need any moral support when you talk to Felicity. Not at this stage, anyway,” he said. “But I’ll give you the phone number where I’m staying, and you can call me any time you have qualms.”
For his host he had a slightly different story, merely to avert the tedium of more complicated explanations.
“I have to see a fellow at Mission Beach about a small business deal that a pal of mine asked me to check on,” he said with careful casualness, as they were finishing dinner. “D’you mind if I run over there and join you at the Yacht Club later? It shouldn’t take me an hour, at the very worst.”
He had memorized the location of Doc Nemford’s shack so accurately that he did not need to drive within a hundred yards of it. He parked his car an inconspicuous block away, and strolled down an alley with a chipped and faded signboards at the entrance that offered “Boats & Bait.”
Simon had seen the boats from Nemford’s jetty, and had been less than excited as a nautical connoisseur. At close quarters they looked even less picturesque and more unseaworthy, but he was not planning an extended cruise. There were no oars or other conventional means of propulsion in sight, the livery operator having no doubt thoughtfully secured them inside the padlocked shed from which he did his business, but the Saint did not have to search far for a discarded four-foot piece of board that would serve as an adequate paddle for the voyage he had in mind.
He quietly nursed the least leaky skiff he could select along the shore line to Nemford’s property, and let it drift up to the pier and even under it.
There was only a half-moon that night, and the sky was murky, but Simon had a pencil flashlight to help him in the dark corners, though he used it with the most furtive discretion. He verified certain structural possibilities that had intrigued him, and then hitched the painter to one of the pilings and swung himself nimbly up on to the decking.
There was a glow of light behind the ground-floor curtains of Nemford’s cottage, and the Saint moved like a drifting shadow towards an open window until the murmur of voices inside resolved itself into distinct words and equally clear identifications of the speakers.
The first to emerge into this unconscious clarity was Nemford himself, who was saying, “You’re asking me to go back on my word to Mr Jobyn. I know we haven’t signed anything yet, but we shook hands on a deal.”
Simon could not see into the room from any angle, but the accent and context of the next speech made visual confirmation supererogatory.
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“I appreciate your problem, Doctor, and I am prepared to compensate you for your embarrassment. I have spoken by telephone to Cairo, and I am authorized to pay you fifty thousand dollars more to change your mind about this bargain with Mr Jobyn. I am sure that if he changed his mind, he would not be bound by the handshake.”
“But suppose, then, he wanted to offer me more?”
“If you accept my price, you need not be here to listen to him. Perhaps it would be wiser if you were not, in case he is only angry. But I cannot haggle as in a bazaar. I was talking to you first, I remind you, and I deserved the right to make the first bid. But since I made the second, it is also the last for me. A quarter of a million dollars, Doctor. The extra money will almost pay your tax on the transaction.”
There was a pause.
“But when would you expect to pay me, Colonel? You remember, I had to tell Mr Jobyn that I only had his word for his oil wells. I hate to say this sort of thing, but after all, how do I know that your Government will back you up? And meanwhile, if I alienate Mr Jobyn—”
“My Embassy is being ordered tonight to let me have the money. As soon as the bank is open in Washington tomorrow morning, they can send it to me. Because of the time difference, it can arrive here as soon as the banks open in San Diego. Tell me which bank you keep your papers in, and I’ll have it sent there. We meet, I give you the money, you give me the blueprints. It is so simple.”
“What about the model?”
“Aha. We take it with us to the bank, in a taxi. The taxi waits. When we have finished, I take the taxi to the airport. My Government would not pay so much money to compete with Mr Jobyn, it means very much to our prestige to have your invention exclusively. Of course you would not think of giving him the model with some more blueprints—you are an honorable man—but I am ordered to bring it with me, and my suggestion is most practical.”
The craftily candid exposure of teeth that must have accompanied this could be heard in the voice.
“Would you be leaving at once?”
“Yes, you will have to face Mr Jobyn alone. If you decide to wait for him. But I am afraid your Government might take his part if they knew I was taking away something they might officially lend to us for political considerations. I expect to be highly commended if I make that impossible. So, I would prefer to be out of your country before anyone complains.”
Another pause.
Simon could picture Doc Nemford chewing on his pipe, his tall taut brow furrowed with earnest deliberation.
At last: “All right, Colonel. I’ll have to accept. I just want you to realize that I’m not being influenced by the price you’re offering. The reason is, I’m ashamed of having almost let you down. As you had to remind me, you were the first customer. But with Mr Jobyn throwing his oil wells at me, and that chap he brought with him today—”
“Who was he?”
“One of the world’s greatest experts in this field, though you’d never guess it to look at him. But when he said my invention looked good, I knew I’d never be able to stop Mr Jobyn elbowing you out of the way.”
“Do not feel too unhappy about him,” Hamzah said magnanimously. “He still can throw his oil wells somewhere else. Now, let us set a time. I will call for you at ten o’clock. By then, I shall have made a box in which your model can be packed, and you will have removed the explosive. With your permission, I will take the measurements…”
Simon had no need to hear any more. He retreated as softly as he had approached, lowered himself into the dinghy, and paddled it silently back to where he had borrowed it.
He was at the Yacht Club within the hour he had allotted for the detour, and wholeheartedly enjoyed the rest of an unimportant evening without thinking it necessary to say any more about his brief digression. Nor did he feel obliged to spoil Walt Jobyn’s evening by phoning him that night.
Even after a large late breakfast the next morning he was not overpowered by any urge to make the call, but took a much livelier interest in the fact that it looked like a perfect day to go sailing, as had been tentatively proposed before they went to bed.
“I’m afraid I’ll hold you up a bit, though,” he said. “I’ve got to drop by and see this merchant I visited last night again. Some papers I have to see were at his bank, and he’s getting them out this morning. I can’t put it off, because one of the characters involved is catching a plane east around midday. Could we meet at the club for an early lunch and blast off right afterwards?”
It may be interesting for some future analyst to note that for a man of such complicated activities the Saint seldom found himself constrained to lie. He could nearly always phrase the literal truth in such a way that the listener received the exact impression that the Saint wanted him to have. It was a technique which eliminated all the hazardous overhead of keeping conflicting stories straight and mutually harmonious, while at the same time adding a certain private spice to what might otherwise have been mere routine dialogue.
In this case, it also won the Saint a sufficient margin of unquestioned time, during which he could drive peacefully back to Mission Beach, with no unseemly desperate eye glued to the clock and mileometer, and arrive within sight of the front entrance of Doc Nemford’s shack, near the same parking spot that he had found before, at a moment intelligently calculated to succeed the Nemford-Hamzah safari to the bank, but also to precede the predictable return of Nemford alone.
Thus when Doc Nemford walked back into his own temporary home, a little before noon, he found a lean bronze-faced man comfortably extended between the best chair in the living room and the handiest table-top on which a pair of very long legs could conveniently park their extremities.
“Come on in, Doc,” Simon encouraged him hospitably. “I hope you don’t mind me making myself at home.”
“No, why not?” Nemford said with pardonable vagueness. “If I’d known you were coming—but I wasn’t expecting Mr. Jobyn till tomorrow—”
“Let’s both save a little time,” Simon suggested soothingly. “I’ll put my cards on the table, and you do the same, and we’ll work out the score like well-brought-up scientists. I was still trying to make up my mind whether you knew who I was, right up until I heard you give Hamzah the clincher last night. Well, as one of the world’s greatest experts in this field, though you’d never guess it to look at me, I’d like to give you an award as the best player of a busted flush that I’ve sat in with in a long elegy of these games. Once the chips began to fly, you squeezed your hand to the last pip.”
Doc Nemford fumbled out his pipe and pouch and began the restorative mechanisms of stoking one from the other.
“What else could I do?” he said. “You kept me guessing yourself—right up until now, I was trying to decide whether I’d fooled you.”
“You weren’t so far from it, chum. You had a nice explanation of why the fresh water came out of your gadget with more pressure than you were pumping the sea water in—but if you ever do it again, it’d be better to put a pressure reducer in the circuit and not have to explain anything. Sometimes these city water systems carry an awful head of steam…You don’t have anything like that to worry about with the electric consumption, even if someone like Hamzah did hook a meter into the line: I’m sure the vibrator inside your model doesn’t draw a lot of extra juice…And even the valve that you open and shut when you’re demonstrating doesn’t give away the gimmick—in fact, it’s a good piece of business.”
“Then what actually did make you suspicious?”
“First off, only my own low dishonest mind. If I’d stood and watched the Red Sea open for the Israelites, the first thing I’d’ve wondered about was how it might have been faked. Now, the way that pier of yours is built is probably a perfectly common method of construction, but to me it suggested plumbing. And that gave me the idea that in a tubular tangle of that kind, nobody else might notice a couple of extra pipes—one of ’em joined into a piling to take the pumped-up bay water back where it came
from, and the other running back to shore to connect with your house supply. Then I tried to figure out how a crook could switch the flow—”
“And how could he?”
“With a base plate set in the dock, to which he would bolt the base of his ingenious gizmo, using outsize bolts that he took from his pocket and put back there, and which were the only incidental equipment that nobody got a good look at. Bolts which I’m certain are hollow, with outlets in the right places, so that when you screw them down they become the most miraculous part of your invention. One of ’em side-tracks the salt water you’re pumping up, and the other takes in the fresh water which is one of the civic amenities for which you are privileged to pay taxes on this dump.”
“And on this imaginative basis alone—”
“No, I’m not supernatural. I didn’t have any more to start with than interesting doubt. But before I carried it to the bitter end—which included a rather minute study of the pipe connections underneath your pier last night—I’d convinced myself with a rather more arbitrary test.”
“And what was that?” Nemford inquired, with the intensest unfeigned interest.
“I’d tasted your manufactured fresh water,” said the Saint. “I happen to have rather sensitive taste buds, which I have raised on a diet of the best vintage wines. They aren’t so familiar with water, unless it was splashing down a mountain trout stream. But they can still recognize the tang of chlorine in a city supply.”
Nemford sucked at his pipe, holding a match steadily over the bowl.
“You deserve all the things I’ve heard about you,” he said. “But why didn’t you say any of this yesterday?”
“I was interested to see how the scenario would work out. If you won’t think I’m being patronizing, I’d call it a kind of nostalgia. I admired a lot of touches in your technique. You handled the financial angles brilliantly—just the right pressure where it would do the most good. And I know you’ll do well with those traveler’s checks you were talking about—you can cash them abroad in so many places where they don’t ask questions.”
The Saint to the Rescue (The Saint Series) Page 12