He played a steadily aggressive game, waiting patiently for the change that he knew must come as soon as the basis of the play had had time to settle down and establish itself. His nerves were cool and serene, and he smiled often with an air of faint amusement, but something inside him was poised and gathered like a panther crouched for a spring.
Presently Kilgarry called Mercer on the third raise and lost a small jackpot to three nines. Mercer scowled as he stacked the handful of chips.
“Hell, what’s the matter with this game?” he protested. “This isn’t the way we usually play. Let’s get some life into it.”
“It does seem a bit slow,” Simon agreed. “How about raising the ante?”
“Make it twenty pounds,” Mercer said sharply. “I’m getting tired of this. Just because my luck’s changed we don’t have to start playing for peanuts.”
Simon drew his cigarette to a bright glow.
“It suits me.”
Yoring plucked at his lower lip with fingers that were still shaky.
“I dunno, ole man—”
“Okay.” Kilgarry pushed out two ten-pound chips with a kind of fierce restraint. “I’ll play for twenty.”
He had been playing all the time with grim concentration, his shoulders hunched as if he had to give some outlet to a seethe of violence in his muscles, his jaw thrust out and tightly clamped, and as the time went by he seemed to have been regaining confidence. “aybe the game is on the level” was the idea expressed by every line of his body, “but I can still take a couple of mugs like this in any game.”
He said, almost with a resumption of his former heartiness, “Are you staying long, Mr Templar?”
“I expect I’ll be here for quite a while.”
“That’s fine! Then after Mr Yoring’s got some new glasses we might have a better game.”
“I shouldn’t be surprised,” said the Saint amiably.
He was holding two pairs. He took a card, and still had two pairs. Kilgarry stood pat on three kings. Mercer drew three cards to a pair, and was no better off afterwards. Yoring took two cards and filled a flush.
“Twenty,” said Yoring nervously.
Mercer hesitated, threw in his hand.
“And forty,” snapped Kilgarry.
“And a hundred,” said the Saint.
Yoring looked at them blearily. He took a long time to make up his mind. And then, with a sigh, he pushed his hand into the discard.
“See you,” said Kilgarry.
With a wry grin the Saint faced his hand. Kilgarry grinned also, with a sudden triumph, and faced his.
Yoring made a noise like a faint groan.
“Fix us another drink, Eddie,” he said huskily.
He took the next pack and shuffled it, clumsily. His fingers were like sausages strung together. Kilgarry’s mouth opened on one side, and he nudged the Saint as he made the cut.
“Lost his nerve,” he said. “See what happens when they get old.”
“Who’s old?” said Mr Yoring plaintively. “There aren’t more ’n three years—”
“But you’ve got old ideas,” Kilgarry jeered. “You could have beaten both of us.”
“You never had to wear glasses—”
“Who said you wanted glasses to play poker? It isn’t always the cards that win.”
Kilgarry was smiling, but his eyes were almost glaring at Yoring as he spoke. Yoring avoided his gaze guiltily, and squinted at the hand he had dealt himself. It contained the six, seven, eight, and nine of diamonds, and the queen of spades. Simon held two pairs again, but the card he drew made it a full house. He watched while Yoring discarded the queen of spades, and felt again the sensation of supernatural omniscience as he saw that the top card of the pack, the card Yoring had to take, was the ten of hearts.
Yoring took it, fumbled his hand to the edge of the table, and turned up the corners to peep at them. For a second he sat quite still, with only his mouth working. And then, as if the accumulation of all his misfortunes had at last stung him to a wild fearful reaction like the turning of a worm, a change seemed to come over him. He let the cards flatten out again with a defiant click, and drew himself up. He began to count off twenty-pound chips…
Mercer, with only a pair of sevens, bluffed recklessly for two rounds before he fell out in response to the Saint’s kick under the table.
There were a thousand pounds in the pool before Kilgarry, with three twos, shrugged surrenderingly and dropped his hand into the discard.
The Saint counted two stacks of chips and pushed them in.
“Make it another four hundred,” he said.
Yoring looked at him waveringly. Then he pushed in two stacks of his own.
“There’s your four hundred.” He counted the chips he had left, swept them with a sudden splash into the pile.
“And six hundred more,” he said.
Simon had two hundred left in chips. He pushed them in, opened his wallet and added crisp new notes.
“Making six hundred more than that for you to see me,” he said coolly.
Mercer sucked in his breath and whispered, “Oh, boy!”
Kilgarry said nothing, hunching tensely over the table.
Yoring blinked at him.
“Len’ me some chips, old man.”
“Do you know what you’re doing?” Kilgarry asked, in a harsh strained voice.
Yoring picked up his glass and half emptied it. His hand wobbled so that some of it ran down his chin.
“I know,” he snapped.
He reached out and raked Kilgarry’s chips into the pile.
“Three hunnerd an’ fifty,” he said. “I gotta buy some more. I’ll write you a cheque—”
Simon shook his head.
“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I’m playing table stakes. We agreed on that when we started.”
Yoring peered at him.
“You meanin’ something insultin’ about my cheque?”
“I don’t mean that,” Simon replied evenly. “It’s just a matter of principle. I believe in sticking to the rules. I’ll play you a credit game some other time. Tonight we’re laying it on the line.”
He made a slight gesture towards the cigar-box where they had each deposited ten hundred-pound notes when they bought their chips.
“Now look here,” Kilgarry began menacingly.
The Saint’s clear blue eyes met him with sapphire smoothness.
“I said cash, brother. Is that clear?”
Yoring groped through his pockets. One by one he untangled crumpled bills from various hiding-places until he had built his bet up to six hundred and fifty pounds. Then he glared at Kilgarry.
“Len’ me what you’ve got.”
“But—”
“All of it!”
Reluctantly Kilgarry passed over a roll. Yoring licked his thumb and numbered it through. It produced a total raise of eight hundred and thirty pounds. He gulped down the rest of his drink, and dribbled some more down his chin.
“Go on,” he said thickly, staring at the Saint. “Raise that.”
Simon counted out eight hundred-pound banknotes. He had one more, and he held it poised. Then he smiled.
“What’s the use?” he said. “You couldn’t meet it. I’ll take the chance and see you.”
Yoring’s hand went to his mouth. He didn’t move for a moment, except for the wild swerve of his eyes.
Then he picked up his cards. With trembling slowness he turned them over one by one. The six, seven, eight, nine, and ten of diamonds.
Nobody spoke, and for some seconds the Saint sat quite still. He was summarising the whole scenario for himself, in all its inspired ingenuity and mathematical precision, and it is a plain fact that he found it completely beautiful. He was aware that Mercer was shaking him inarticulately, and that Yoring’s rheumy eyes were opening wider on him with a flame of triumph.
And suddenly Kilgarry guffawed and thumped the table.
“Go to it,” he said. “Pick it up
, Yoring. I take it all back. You’re not so old, either!”
Yoring opened both his arms to embrace the pool.
“Just a minute,” said the Saint.
His voice was softer and gentler than ever, but it stunned the room to another immeasurable silence. Yoring froze as he moved, with his arms almost shaped into a ring. And the Saint smiled very kindly.
Certainly it had been a good trick, and an education, but the Saint didn’t want the others to fall too hard. He had those moments of sympathy for the ungodly in their downfall.
He turned over his own cards, one by one. Aces. Four of them. Simon thought they looked pretty. He had collected them with considerable care, which may have prejudiced him.
“My pot, I think,” he remarked apologetically.
Kilgarry’s chair was the first to grate back.
“Here,” he snarled, “that’s not—”
“The hand he dealt me?” The texture of Simon’s mockery was like gossamer. “And he wasn’t playing the hand I thought he had, either. I thought he’d have some fun when he got used to being without his glasses,” he added cryptically.
He tipped up the cigar box and added its contents to the stack of currency in front of him, and stacked it into a neat sheaf.
“Well, I’m afraid that sort of kills the game for tonight,” he murmured, and his hand was in his side pocket before Kilgarry’s movement was half started. Otherwise he gave no sign of perturbation, and his languid self-possession was as smooth as velvet. “I suppose we’d better call it a day,” he said, without any superfluous emphasis.
Mercer recovered his voice first.
“That’s right,” he said jerkily. “You two have won plenty from me other nights. Now we’ve got some of it back. Let’s get out of here, Templar.”
They walked along the Parade, past the gloomy antiquated shapes of the hotels, with the rustle of the surf in their ears.
“How much did you win on that last hand?” asked the young man.
“About three thousand pounds,” said the Saint contentedly.
Mercer said awkwardly, “That’s just about what I’d lost to them before…I don’t know how I can ever thank you for getting it back. I’d never have had the nerve to do it alone…And then when Yoring turned up that straight flush—I don’t know why—I had an awful moment thinking you’d made a mistake.”
The Saint put a cigarette in his mouth and struck his lighter.
“I don’t make a lot of mistakes,” he said calmly. “That’s where a lot of people go wrong. It makes me rather tired, sometimes. I suppose it’s just professional pride, but I hate to be taken for a mug. And the funny thing is that with my reputation there are always people trying it. I suppose they think that my reactions are so easy to predict that it makes me quite a setup for any smart business.” The Saint sighed, deploring the inexplicable optimism of those who should know better. “Of course I knew that a switch like that was coming—the whole idea was to make me feel so confident of the advantage I had with those glasses that I’d be an easy victim for any ordinary card-sharping. And then, of course, I wasn’t supposed to be able to make any complaint because that would have meant admitting that I was cheating too. It was a grand idea, Eddie—at least you can say that for it.”
Mercer had taken several steps before all the implications of what the Saint had said really hit him.
“But wait a minute,” he got out. “How do you mean they knew you were wearing trick glasses?”
“Why else do you imagine they planted that guy on the train to pretend he was J. J. Naskill?” asked the Saint patiently. “That isn’t very bright of you, Eddie. Now, I’m nearly always bright. I was so bright that I smelt a rat directly after you lugged that pack of marked cards out of your beach robe—that was really carrying it a bit too far, to have them all ready to produce after you’d got me to listen in on your little act with Josephine. I must say you all played your parts beautifully, otherwise, but it’s little details like that that spoil the effect. I told you at the time that you were a mug,” said the Saint reprovingly. “Now why don’t you paddle off and try to comfort Yoring and Kilgarry? I’m afraid they’re going to be rather hurt when they hear that you didn’t manage to at least make the best of a bad job and get me to hand you my winnings.”
But Mercer did not paddle off at once. He stared at the Saint for quite a long time, understanding why so many other men who had once thought themselves clever had learned to regard that cool and smiling privateer as something closely allied to the devil himself. And wondering, as they had, why the death penalty for murder had ever been invented.
THE MAN WHO LIKED ANTS
“I wonder what would have happened if you had gone into respectable business, Saint,” Ivar Nordsten remarked one afternoon.
Simon Templar smiled at him so innocently that for an instant his nickname might almost have seemed justified—if it had not been for the faint lazy twinkle of unsaintly mocker that stirred at the back of his blue eyes.
“The question is too far-fetched, Ivar. You might as well speculate about what would have happened if I’d been a Martian or a horse.”
They sat on the veranda of the house of Ivar Nordsten—whose name was not really Ivar Nordsten, but who was alive that day and the master of fabulous millions only because the course of one of the Saint’s lawless escapades had once crossed his path at a time when death would have seemed a happy release. He of all living men should have had no wish to change the history of that twentieth-century Robin Hood whose dark reckless face could be found photographed in half the police archives of the world, and whose gay impudence of outlawry had in its time set the underworlds of five continents buzzing like nests of infuriated wasps. But in that mood of idle fantasy which may well come with the after-lunch contentment of a warm Devonshire afternoon, Nordsten would have put forward almost any preposterous premise that might give him the pleasure of listening to his friend.
“It isn’t as far-fetched as that,” he said. “You will never admit it, but you have many respectable instincts.”
“But I have so many more disreputable ones to keep them under control,” answered the Saint earnestly. “And it’s always been so much more amusing to indulge the disreputable instincts…No, Ivar, I mustn’t let you make a paragon out of me. If I were quite cynically psycho-analysing myself, I should probably say that the reason why I only soak the more obvious excrescences on the human race is because it makes everything okay with my respectable instincts and lets them go peacefully to sleep. Then I can turn all my disreputable impulses loose on the mechanical problem of soaking this obvious excrescence in some satisfying, novel, and juicy manner, and get all the fun of original sin out of it without any qualms of conscience.”
“But you contradict yourself. The mere fact that you speak in terms of what you call ‘an obvious excrescence on the human race’ proves that you have some moral standards by which you judge him, and that you have some idealistic interest in the human race itself.”
“The human race,” said the Saint sombrely, “is a repulsive, dull, bloated, ill-conditioned, and ill-favoured mass of dimly conscious meat, the chief justification for whose existence is that it provides a contrasting background against which my beauty and spiritual perfections can shine with a lustre only exceeded by your own.”
“You have a natural modesty which I had never suspected,” Nordsten observed gravely, and they both laughed.
“But,” he added, “I think you will get on well with Dr Sardon.”
“Who is he?”
“A neighbour of mine—we are dining with him tonight.”
Simon frowned.
“I warned you that I was travelling without any dress clothes,” he began, but Nordsten shook his head maliciously.
“Dr Sardon likes dress clothes even less than you do. And you never warned me that you were coming here at all. So what could I do? I accepted his invitation a week ago, so when you arrived I could only tell Sardon what had happe
ned. Of course he insisted that you must come with me. But I think he will interest you.”
The Saint sighed resignedly, and swished the highball gently around in his glass so that the ice clinked.
“Why should I be interested in any of your neighbours?” he protested. “I didn’t come here to commit any crimes, and I’m sure all these people are as respectable as millionaires can be.”
“Dr Sardon is not a millionaire. He is a very brilliant biologist.”
“What else makes him interesting?”
“He is very fond of ants,” said Nordsten seriously, and the Saint got up.
Then he finished his drink deliberately and put down the glass.
“Now I know that this climate doesn’t agree with you,” he said. “Let’s get changed and go down to the tennis court—I’ll put you in your place before we start the evening.”
Nevertheless he drove over to Dr Sardon’s house that evening in a mood of open-minded curiosity. Scientists he had known before, men who went down thousands of feet into the sea to look at globigerina ooze, and men who devised complicated electrical gadgets in laboratories to manufacture gold, but this was the first time that he had heard of a biologist who was fond of ants. Everything that was out of the ordinary was prospective material for the Saint—it must be admitted that in simplifying his own career to elementary equations by which obvious excrescences on the human race could be soaked, he did himself less than justice.
But there was nothing about the square smooth-shaven man who was introduced to him as Dr Sardon to take away the breath of any hardened outlaw. He might perhaps have been an ordinary efficient doctor, possibly with an exclusive and sophisticated practice; more probably he could have been a successful stockbroker, or the manager of any profitable commercial business. He shook hands with them briskly and almost mechanically, seeming to summarise the Saint in one sweeping glance through his crisp-looking rimless pince-nez.
The Happy Highwayman (The Saint Series) Page 19