“We believe that money spent on this object is far cheaper than the money spent on keeping prisoners in jail, and at the same time is less than the damage that these men would do to the community if they were left to go on with their crimes. We ask you to believe the same thing, and to be generous.
“Everything that has been taken from you tonight can be found tomorrow at the office of the Society, which is in the Devonshire Bank Building on Piccadilly. If you wish to leave your property there, to be sold for the benefit of the Society, we shall be grateful. If it has too great a sentimental value to you, and you wish to buy it back, we shall be glad to exchange it for a cheque. And if you object to us very seriously, and simply want it back, we shall of course have to give it back. But we hope that none of you will demand that.
“That is why we ventured to take the loot away tonight. Between now and tomorrow morning, we want you to have time to think. Think of how different this holdup would have been if it had been real. Think of your feelings when you saw your jewellery vanishing out of that door. Think of how little difference it would really make to your lives”—he looked straight at the Countess—“if you were wearing imitation stones, while the money that has been locked up idly in the real ones was set free to do good and useful work. Think, ladies and gentlemen, and forgive us the melodramatic way in which we have tried to bring home our point.”
He stepped back, and there was a moment of complete silence.
The chairman had at last found his glasses. He saw the speaker retiring with a bow from the microphone. Apparently the speech was over. It seemed to be the chairman’s place to give the conventional lead. He raised his hands and clapped loudly.
It is things like that that turn tides and start revolutions. In another second the whole hall was clattering with hysterical applause.
“My dear, how do you think of these things?”
“The most divinely thrilling—”
“I was really petrified…”
The Countess Jannowicz wriggled dazedly free from the shrill jabber of compliments, managed somehow to snatch the Saint out of a circle of clamorous women of which Lady Instock was the most gushing leader. In a comparatively quiet corner of the room she faced him.
“You’re a good organiser, Mr Templar. The head waiter tells me that Mr Ullbaum telephoned this afternoon and told the staff how they were to behave during the holdup.”
He was cheerfully appreciative.
“I must remember to thank him.”
“Mr Ullbaum did no such thing.”
He smiled.
“Then he must have been impersonated. But the damage seems to be done.”
“You know that for all your talking you’ve still committed a crime?”
“I think you’d be rather a lonely prosecutor.”
Rage had made her a little incoherent.
“I shall not come to your office. You’ve made a fool of yourself. My necklace is in the bank—”
“Countess,” said the Saint patiently. “I’d guessed that much. That’s why I want you to be sure and bring me the real one. Lady Instock is going to leave her earrings and send a cheque as well, and all the rest of your friends seem to be sold on the idea. You’re supposed to be the Number One patron. What would they think of you if after all the advertising you let yourself out with a ten-guinea string of cut glass?”
“I can disclaim—”
“I know you can. But your name will still be Mud. Whereas at the moment you’re tops. Why not make the best of it and charge it to publicity?”
She knew she was beaten—that he had simply turned a trick with the cards that for days past she had been busily forcing into his hand. But she still fought with the bitterness of futility.
“I’ll have the police investigate this phoney charity—”
“They’ll find that it’s quite legally constituted, and so long as the funds last they’ll be administered with perfect good faith.”
“And who’ll get the benefit of them besides yourself?”
Simon smiled once again.
“Our first and most urgent case will be a fellow named Marty O’Connor. He helped me with the collection tonight. You ought to remember him—he was your chauffeur for three weeks. Anyone like yourself, Countess,” said the Saint rather cruelly, “ought to know that charity begins at home.”
THE MUG’S GAME
The stout, jovial gentleman in the shapeless suit pulled a card out of his wallet and pushed it across the table. The printing on it said, “Mr J. J. Naskill.”
The Saint looked at it, and offered his cigarette case.
“I’m afraid I don’t carry any cards,” he said. “But my name is Simon Templar.”
Mr Naskill beamed, held out a large moist hand to be shaken, took a cigarette, mopped his glistening forehead, and beamed again.
“Well, it’s a pleasure to talk to you, Mr Templar,” he said heartily. “I get bored with my own company on these long journeys, and it hurts my eyes to read on a train. Hate travelling, anyway. It’s a good thing my business keeps me in one place most of the time. What’s your job, by the way?”
Simon took a pull at his cigarette while he gave a moment’s consideration to his answer. It was one of the few questions that ever embarrassed him. It wasn’t that he had any real objection to telling the truth, but that the truth tended to disturb the tranquil low of ordinary casual conversation. Without causing a certain amount of commotion, he couldn’t say to a perfect stranger “I’m a sort of benevolent brigand. I raise hell for crooks and racketeers of all kinds, and make life miserable for policemen, and rescue damsels in distress, and all that sort of thing.” The Saint had often thought of it as a deplorable commentary on the stodgy unadventurousness of the average mortal’s mind, but he knew that it was beyond his power to alter.
He said, apologetically, “I’m just one of those lazy people. I believe they call it ‘independent means.’”
This was true enough for an idle moment. The Saint could have exhibited a bank account that would have dazzled many men who called themselves wealthy, but it was on the subject of how that wealth had been accumulated that several persons who lived by what they had previously called their wits were inclined to wax profane.
Mr Naskill sighed.
“I don’t blame you,” he said. “Why work if you don’t have to? Wish I was in your shoes myself. Wasn’t born lucky, that’s all. Still, I’ve got a good business now, so I shouldn’t complain. Expect you recognise the name.”
“Naskill?” The Saint frowned slightly. When he repeated it, it did have a faintly familiar ring. “It sounds as if I ought to know it—”
The other nodded.
“Some people call it No-skill,” he said. “They’re about right, too. That’s what it is. Magic for amateurs. Look.”
He flicked a card out of his pocket on to the table between them. It was the ace of diamonds. He turned it over, and immediately faced it again. It was the nine of clubs. He turned it over again, and it was the queen of hearts. He left it lying face down on the cloth, and Simon picked it up curiously and examined it. It was the three of spades, but there was nothing else remarkable about it.
“Used to be a conjurer myself,” Naskill explained. “Then I got rheumatism in my hands, and I was on the rocks. Didn’t know any other job, so I had to make a living teaching other people tricks. Most of ’em haven’t the patience to practise sleight of hand, so I made it easy for ’em. Got a fine trade now, and a two-hundred-page catalogue. I can make anybody into just as good a magician as the money they like to spend, and they needn’t practise for five minutes. Look.”
He took the card that the Saint was still holding, tore it into small pieces, folded his plump fingers on them for a moment, and spread out his hands—empty. Then he broke open the cigarette he was smoking, and inside it was a three of spades rolled into a tight cylinder, crumpled but intact.
“You can buy that one for five bob,” he said. “The first one I sh
owed you is ten. It’s daylight robbery, really, but some people like to show off at parties and they give me a living.”
Simon slid back his sleeve from his wrist-watch, and glanced out of the window at the speeding landscape. There was still about an hour to go before they would be in Torquay, and he had nothing else to take up his time. Besides, Mr Naskill was something novel and interesting in his experience, and it was part of the Saint’s creed that a modern brigand could never know too much about the queerer things that went on in the world.
He caught the eye of a waiter at the other end of the dining car and beckoned him over.
“Could you stand a drink?” he suggested.
“Scotch for me,” said Mr Naskill gratefully. He wiped his face again while Simon duplicated the order. “But I’m still talking about myself. If I’m boring you—”
“Not a bit of it.” The Saint was perfectly sincere. “I don’t often meet anyone with an unusual job like yours. Do you know any more tricks?”
Mr Naskill polished a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles, fitted them on his nose, and hitched himself forward.
“Look,” he said eagerly.
He was like a child with a new collection of toys. He dug into another of his sagging pockets, which Simon was now deciding were probably loaded with enough portable equipment to stage a complete show, and hauled out a pack of cards which he pushed over to the Saint.
“You take ’em. Look ’em over as much as you like. See if you can find anything wrong with ’em…All right. Now shuffle ’em. Shuffle ’em all you want.” He waited. “Now spread ’em out on the table. You’re doing this trick, not me. Take any card you like. Look at it—don’t let me see it. All right. Now, I haven’t touched the cards at all, have I, except to give ’em to you? You shuffled ’em, and you picked a card without me helping you. I couldn’t have forced it on you, or anything. Eh? All right. Well, I could put any trimmings I wanted on this trick—any fancy stunts I could think up to make it look more mysterious. They’d all be easy, because I know what card you’ve got all the time. You’ve got the six of diamonds.”
Simon turned the card over. It was the six of diamonds.
“How’s that?” Naskill demanded gleefully.
The Saint grinned. He drew a handful of cards towards him, face downwards as they lay, and pored over the backs for two or three minutes before he sat back again with a rueful shrug.
Mr Naskill chortled.
“There’s nothing wrong with your eyes,” he said. “You could go over ’em with a microscope and not find anything. All the same, I’ll tell you what you’ve got. The king of spades, the two of spades, the ten of hearts—”
“I’ll take your word for it,” said the Saint resignedly. “But how on earth do you do it?”
Naskill glowed delightedly.
“Look,” he said.
He took off his glasses and passed them over. Under the flat lenses Simon could see the notations clearly printed in the corners of each card—KS, 2S, 10H. They vanished as soon as he moved the glasses, and it was impossible to find a trace of them with the naked eye.
“I’ve heard of that being done with coloured glasses,” said the Saint slowly, “but I noticed that yours weren’t coloured.”
Naskill shook his head.
“Coloured glasses are old stuff. Too crude. Used to be used a lot by sharpers, but too many people got to hear about ’em. You couldn’t get into a card game with coloured glasses these days. No good for conjuring, either. But this is good. Invented it myself. Special ink, and special kind of glass. There is a tint in it, of course, but it’s too faint to notice.” He shoved the cards over the cloth. “Here. Keep the lot for a souvenir. You can have some fun with your friends. But don’t go asking ’em in for a game of poker, mind.”
Simon gathered the cards together.
“It would be rather a temptation,” he admitted. “But don’t you get a lot of customers who buy them just for that?”
“Sure. A lot of professionals use my stuff. I know ’em all. Often see ’em in the shop. Good customers—they buy by the dozen. Can’t refuse to serve ’em—they’d only get ’em some other way, or buy somewhere else. I call it a compliment to the goods I sell. Never bothers my conscience. Anybody who plays cards with strangers is asking for trouble, anyway. It isn’t only professionals, either. You’d be surprised at some of the people I’ve had come in and ask for a deck of readers—that’s the trade name for ’em. I remember one fellow…”
He launched into a series of anecdotes that filled up the time until they had to separate to their compartments to collect their luggage. Mr Naskill’s pining for company was understandable after only a few minutes’ acquaintance: it was clear that he was constitutionally incapable of surviving for long without an audience.
Simon Templar was not bored. He had already had his money’s worth. Whether his friends would allow him to get very far with a programme of card tricks if he appeared before them in an unaccustomed set of horn-rimmed windows was highly doubtful, but the trick was worth knowing, just the same.
Almost every kind of craftsman has specialised journals to inform him of the latest inventions and discoveries and technical advances in his trade, but there is as yet no publication called the Grafter’s Gazette and Weekly Skulldugger to keep a professional freebooter abreast of the newest devices for separating the sucker from his dough, and the Saint was largely dependent on his own researches for the encyclopaedic knowledge of the wiles of the ungodly that had brought so much woe to the chevaliers d’industrie of two hemispheres. Mr Naskill’s conversation had yielded a scrap of information that would be filed away in the Saint’s well-stocked memory against the day when it would be useful. It might lie fallow for a month, a year, five years, before it produced its harvest: the Saint was in no hurry. In the fullness of time he would collect his dividend—it was one of the cardinal articles of his faith that nothing of that kind ever crossed his path without a rendezvous for the future, however distant that future might be. But one of the things that always gave the Saint a particular affection for this story was the promptness with which his expectations were fulfilled.
There were some episodes in Simon Templar’s life when all the component parts of a perfectly rounded diagram fell into place one by one with such a sweetly definitive succession of crisp clicks that mere coincidence was too pallid and anaemic a theory with which to account for them—when he almost felt as if he was reclining passively in an armchair and watching the oiled wheels of Fate roll smoothly through the convolutions of a supernaturally engineered machine.
Two days later he was relaxing his long lean body on the private beach of the Palace Hotel, revelling in the clean sharp bite of the sun on his brown skin and lazily debating the comparative attractions of iced beer or a tinkling highball as a noon refresher, when two voices reached him sufficiently clearly to force themselves into his drowsy consciousness. They belonged to a man and a girl, and it was obvious that they were quarrelling.
Simon wasn’t interested. He was at peace with the world. He concentrated on digging up a small sandcastle with his toes, and tried to shut them out. And then he heard the girl say: “My God, are you so dumb that you can’t see that they must be crooks?”
It was the word ‘crooks’ that did it. When the Saint heard that word, he could no more have concentrated on sandcastles than a rabid egyptologist could have remained aloof while gossip of scarabs and sarcophagi shuttled across his head. A private squabble was one thing, but this was something else that to the Saint made eavesdropping not only pardonable but almost a moral obligation.
He rolled over and looked at the girl. She was only a few feet from him, and even at that range it was easier to go on looking than to look away. From her loose raven hair down to her daintily enamelled toenails there wasn’t an inch of her that didn’t make its own demoralising demands on the eye, and the clinging silk swimsuit she wore left very few inches any secrets.
“Why must they be crooks?
” asked the man stubbornly. He was young and towheaded, but the Saint’s keen survey traced hard and haggard lines in his face. “Just because I’ve been out of luck—”
“Luck!” The girl’s voice was scornful and impatient. “You were out of luck when you met them. Two men that you know nothing about, who pick you up in a bar and suddenly discover that you’re the bosom pal they’ve been looking for all their lives—who want to take you out to dinner every night, and take you out fishing every day, and buy you drinks and show you the town—and you talk about luck! D’you think they’d do all that if they didn’t know they could get you to play cards with them every night and make you lose enough to pay them back a hundred times over?”
“I won plenty from them to begin with—”
“Of course you did! They let you win—just to encourage you to play higher. And now you’ve lost all that back, and a lot more that you can’t afford to lose. And you’re still going on, making it worse and worse.” She caught his arm impulsively, and her voice softened. “Oh, Eddie, I hate fighting with you like this, but can’t you see what a fool you’re being?”
“Well, why don’t you leave me alone if you hate fighting? Anyone might think I was a kid straight out of school.”
He shrugged himself angrily away from her, and as he turned he looked straight into the Saint’s eyes. Simon was so interested that the movement caught him unprepared, still watching them, as if he had been hiding behind a curtain and it had been abruptly torn down.
It was so much too late for Simon to switch his eyes away without looking even guiltier that he had to go on watching and the young man went on scowling at him and said uncomfortably, “We aren’t really going to cut each other’s throats, but there are some things that women can’t understand.”
“If a man told him that elephants laid eggs he’d believe it, just because it was a man who told him,” said the girl petulantly, and she also looked at the Saint. “Perhaps if you told him—”
The Happy Highwayman (The Saint Series) Page 17