“See that they pay you,” he said, and went on his portly and lethargic way.
Simon Templar went back to the apartment on Clarges Street. Uppingdon let him in, and even the melancholy Mr Immelbern was moved to jump up as they entered the living-room.
“Did it win?” they chorused.
The Saint held out the paper. It was seized, snatched from hand to hand, and lowered reverently while an exchange of rapturous glances took place across its columns.
“At five to one,” breathed Lieutenant-Colonel Uppingdon.
“Five thousand quid,” whispered Mr Immelbern.
“The seventh winner in succession.”
“Eighty thousand quid in four weeks.”
The Colonel turned to Simon.
“What a pity you only had a hundred pounds on,” he said, momentarily crestfallen. Then the solution struck him, and he brightened. “But how ridiculous! We can easily put that right. On our next coup, you shall be an equal partner. Immelbern, be silent! I have put up with enough interference from you. Templar, my dear boy, if you care to come in with me next time—”
The Saint shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t mind a small gamble now and again, but for business I only bet on certainties.”
“But this is a certainty!” cried the Colonel.
Simon frowned. “Nothing,” he said gravely, “is a certainty until you know the result. A horse may drop dead, or fall down, or be disqualified. The risk may be small, but it exists. I eliminate it.” He gazed at them suddenly with a sober intensity which almost held them spellbound. “It sounds silly,” he said, “but I happen to be psychic.”
The two men stared back at him.
“Wha…what?” stammered the Colonel.
“What does that mean?” demanded Mr Immelbern, more grossly.
“I am clairvoyant,” said the Saint simply. “I can foretell the future. For instance, I can look over the list of runners in a newspaper and close my eyes, and suddenly I’ll see the winners printed out in my mind, just as if I was looking at the evening edition. I don’t know how it’s done. It’s a gift. My mother had it.”
The two men were gaping at him dubiously. They were incredulous, wondering if they were missing a joke and ought to laugh politely, and yet something in the Saint’s voice and the slight uncanny widening of his eyes sent a cold supernatural draught creeping up their spines.
“Haw!” ejaculated the Colonel uncertainly, feeling that he was called upon to make some sound, and the Saint smiled distantly. He glanced at the clock on the mantelpiece.
“Let me show you. I wasn’t going to make any bets today, but since I’ve started I may as well go on.”
He picked up his lunch edition, which he had been reading in the Palace Royal lounge, and studied the racing entries on the back page. Then he put down the paper and covered his eyes. For several seconds there was a breathless silence, while he stood there with his head in his hands, swaying slightly, in an attitude of terrific concentration.
Again the supernatural shiver went over the two partners, and then the Saint straightened up suddenly, opened his eyes, and rushed to the telephone.
He dialled his number rather slowly. He had watched the movements of Mr Immelbern’s fingers closely, on every one of the gentleman’s five calls, and his keen ears had listened and calculated every click of the returning dial. It would not be his fault if he got the wrong number.
The receiver at the other end of the line was lifted. The voice spoke.
“Baby Face,” it said hollowly.
Simon Templar drew a deep breath, and a gigantic grin of bliss deployed itself over his inside. But outwardly he did not bat an eyelid.
“Two hundred pounds on Baby Face for Mr Templar,” he said, and the partners were too absorbed with other things to notice that he spoke in a very fair imitation of Mr Immelbern’s deep rumble.
He turned back to them, smiling. “Baby Face,” he said, with the quietness of absolute certitude, “will win the three o’clock race at Sandown Park.”
Lieutenant-Colonel Uppingdon fingered his superb white moustachios.
“By Gad!” he said.
Half an hour later the three of them went out together for a newspaper. Baby Face had won—at ten to one.
“Haw!” said the Colonel, blinking at the result rather dazedly.
On the face of Mr Immelbern was a look of almost superstitious awe. It is difficult to convey what was in his mind at that moment. Throughout his life he had dreamed of such things. Horseflesh was the one true love of his un-romantic soul. The fashions of Newmarket ruled his clothes, the scent of stables hung around him like a subtle perfume; he might, in prosperous times, have been a rich man in his illegal way, if all his private profits had not inevitably gravitated on to the backs of unsuccessful horses as fast as they came into his pocket.
And in the secret daydreams which coil through even the most phlegmatic bosom had always been the wild impossible idea that if by some miracle he could have the privilege of reading the next day’s results every day for a week, he could make himself a fortune that would free him for the rest of his life from the sordid labours of the confidence game and give him the leisure to perfect that infallible racing system with which he had been experimenting ever since adolescence.
And now the miracle had come to pass, in the person of that debonair and affluent young roan who did not even seem to realize the potential millions which lay in his strange gift.
“Can you do that every day?” he asked huskily.
“Oh, yes,” said the Saint.
“In every race?” said Mr Immelbern hoarsely.
“Why not?” said the Saint. “It makes racing rather a bore, really, and you soon get tired of picking up the money.”
Mr Immelbern gulped. He could not conceive what it felt like to get tired of picking up money. He felt stunned.
“Well,” said the Saint casually, “I’d better be buzzing along—”
At the sound of those words something came over Lieutenant-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon. It was, in its way, the turning of a worm. He had suffered much. The gibes of Mr Immelbern still rankled in his sedate aristocratic breast. And Mr Immelbern was still goggling in a half-witted daze—he who had boasted almost naggingly of his accessibility to new ideas.
Lieutenant-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon took the Saint’s arm, gently but very firmly.
“Just a minute, my dear boy,” he said, rolling the words succulently round his tongue. “We must not be old-fashioned. We must move with the times. This psychic gift of yours is truly remarkable. There’s a fortune in it. Damme, if somebody threw a purse into Immelbern’s lap, he’d be asking me what it was. Thank God, I’m not so dense as that, by Gad. My dear Mr Templar, my dear boy, you must—I positively insist—you must come back to my rooms and talk about what you’re going to do with this gift of yours. By Gad.”
Mr Immelbern did not come out of his trance until halfway through the bargaining that followed.
It was nearly two hours later when the two partners struggled somewhat short-windedly up the stairs to a dingy one-roomed office off the Strand. Its furniture consisted of a chair, a table with a telephone on it, and a tape machine in one corner. It had not been swept for weeks, but it served its purpose adequately.
The third and very junior member of the partnership sat on the chair with his feet on the table, smoking a limp cigarette and turning the pages of Paris Plaisirs. He looked up in some surprise not unmixed with alarm at the noisy entrance of his confederates—a pimply youth with a chin that barely contrived to separate his mouth from his sallow neck.
“I’ve made our fortunes!” yelled Mr Immelbern, and, despite the youth’s repulsive aspect, embraced him.
A slight frown momentarily marred the Colonel’s glowing benevolence.
“What d’you mean—you’ve made our fortunes?” he demanded. “If it hadn’t been for me—”
“Well, what the hell does it matter?” said Mr Im
melbern. “In a couple of months we’ll all be millionaires.”
“How?” asked the pimply youth blankly.
Mr Immelbern broke off in the middle of an improvised hornpipe.
“It’s like this,” he explained exuberantly. “We’ve got a sike—sidekick—”
“Psychic,” said the Colonel.
“A bloke who can tell the future. He puts his hands over his eyes and reads the winners off like you’d read them out of a paper. He did it four times this afternoon. We’re going to take him in with us. We had a job to persuade him—he was going off to the South of France tonight—can you imagine it, a bloke with a gift like that going away while there’s any racing here? We had to give him five hundred quid advance on the money we told him we were going to make for him to make him put it off. But it’s worth it. We’ll start tomorrow, and if this fellow Templar—”
“Ow, that’s ’is nane, is it?” said the pimply youth brightly. “I wondered wot was goin’ on.”
There was a short puzzled silence.
“How do you mean—what was going on?” asked the Colonel at length.
“Well,” said the pimply youth, “when Sid was ringing up all the afternoon, practic’ly every rice—”
“What d’you mean?” croaked Mr Immelbern. “I rang up every race?”
“Yes, an’ I was givin’ you the winners, an’ you were sayin’, ‘Two ’undred pounds on Baby Face for Mr Templar’—‘Four ’undred pounds on Cellophane for Mr Templar’—gettin’ bigger an’ bigger all the time an’ never givin’ ’im a loser—well, I started to wonder wot was ’appening.”
The silence that followed was longer, much longer, and there were things seething in it for which the English language has no words.
It was the Colonel who broke it.
“It’s impossible,” he said dizzily. “I know the clock was slow, because I put it back myself, but I only put it back five minutes, and this fellow was telephoning ten minutes before the times of the races.”
“Then ’e must ’ave put it back some more while you wasn’t watchin’ ’im,” said the pimply youth stolidly.
The idea penetrated after several awful seconds.
“By Gad!” said Lieutenant-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon in a feeble voice.
Mr Immelbern did not speak. He was removing his coat and rolling up his sleeves, with his eyes riveted yearningly on the Colonel’s aristocratic block.
THE UNFORTUNATE FINANCIER
INTRODUCTION
It will have been noticed by the connoisseur that the Saint stories of the older vintages contained considerably more physical violence than most of the later brews. I don’t mean by this that there are conspicuously fewer citizens at large whose principal ambition is to inflict upon the Saint some grave form of bodily damage. Nor do I mean that, when these citizens attempt to gratify such hearty yearnings, the Saint has lost any of his gusto for the pop of guns or the exhilarating impact of a well-placed poke on the proboscis. Such healthy joys as those can never lose their charm. But I do mean that he has meanwhile been developing an appreciation for other, perhaps even more artistically satisfying, methods of making miserable the lives of the Ungodly.
As an example of this more ethereal technique I am offering the following story, which gave me more childish pleasure than I can modestly talk about.
—Leslie Charteris (1939)
“The secret of success,” said Simon Templar profoundly, “is never to do anything by halves. If you try to touch someone for a tenner, you probably get snubbed, but if you put on a silk hat and a false stomach and go into the City to raise a million-pound loan, people fall over each other in the rush to hand you blank cheques. The wretched little thief who pinches a handful of silver spoons gets shoved into clink through a perfect orgy of congratulations to the police and the magistrates, but the bird who swindles the public of a few hundred thousands legally, gets a knighthood. A sound buccaneering business has to be run on the same principles.”
While he could not have claimed any earth-shaking originality for the theme of his sermon, Simon Templar was in the perhaps rarer position of being able to claim that he practised what he preached. He had been doing it for so long, with so much diligence and devotion, that the name of the Saint had passed into the Valhalla of all great names: it had become a household word, even as the name of Miss Amelia Bloomer, an earlier crusader, was absorbed into the tongue that Shakespeare did not live long enough to speak—but in a more romantic context. And if there were many more sharks in the broad lagoons of technically legal righteousness who knew him better by his chosen nom de guerre than by his real name, and who would not even have recognized him had they passed him in the street, that minor degree of anonymity was an asset in the Saint’s profession which more than compensated him for the concurrent gaps in his publicity.
Mr Wallington Titus Oates was another gentleman who did nothing by halves.
He was a large red-faced man who looked exactly like a City alderman or a master butcher, with a beefy solidity about him which disarmed suspicion. It was preposterous, his victims thought, in the early and expensive stages of their ignorance, that such an obvious rough diamond, such a jovial hail-fellow-well-met, such an almost startlingly lifelike reincarnation of the cartoonist’s figure of John Bull, could be a practitioner of cunning and deceit. Even about his rather unusual names he was delightfully frank.
If he had been an American he would certainly have called himself Wallington T. Oates, and the “T” would have been shrouded in a mystery that might have embraced anything from Thomas to Tamerlane. In the more reserved manner of the Englishman, who does not have a Christian name until you have known him for twenty-five years, he might without exciting extraordinary curiosity have been known simply as W. T. Oates. But he was not. His cards were printed W. Titus Oates, and he was not even insistent on the preliminary “W.” He was, in fact, best pleased to be known as plain Titus Oates, and would chortle heartily over his chances of tracing a pedigree back to the notorious inventor of the Popish Plot who was whipped from Aldgate to Newgate and from Newgate to Tyburn some three hundred years ago.
But apart from the fact that some people would have given much to apply the same discouraging treatment to Mr Wallington Titus Oates, he had little else in common with his putative ancestor. For although the better-known Titus Oates stood in the pillory outside the Royal Exchange before his dolorous tour, it is not recorded that he was interested in the dealing within; whereas the present Stock Exchange was Mr Wallington Titus Oates’s happy hunting ground.
If there was anything that W. Titus Oates understood from “A” to whatever letters can be invented after “Z,” it was the manipulation of shares. Bulls and bears were his domestic pets. Mergers and debentures were his bedfellows. It might almost be said that he danced contangos in his sleep. And it was all very profitable—so profitable that Mr Oates possessed not only three Rolls-Royces but also a liberal allowance of pocket-money to spend on the collection of postage stamps which was his joy and relaxation.
This is not to be taken to mean that Mr Oates was known in the City as a narrow evader of the law. He was, on the contrary, a highly respected and influential man, for it is one of the sublime subtleties of the laws of England that whilst the manipulation of the form of racehorses is a hideous crime, to be rewarded with expulsion from the most boring clubs and other forms of condign punishment, the manipulation of share values is a noble and righteous occupation by which the large entrance fees to such clubs may commendably be obtained, provided that the method of juggling is genteel and smooth. Mr Oates’s form as a juggler was notably genteel and smooth, and the ambition of certain citizens to whip Mr Oates at a cart’s tail from Aldgate to Newgate was based not so much on the knowledge of any actual fraud as on the fact that the small investments which represented their life savings had on occasion been skittled down the market in the course of Mr Oates’s important operations, which every right-thinking person will agree
was a very unsporting and un-British attitude to take.
The elementary principles of share manipulation are, of course, simplicity itself. If large blocks of a certain share are thrown on the market from various quarters, the word goes around that the stock is bad, the small investor takes fright and dashes in to cut his losses, thereby making matters worse, and the price of the share falls according to the first law of supply and demand. If, on the other hand, there is heavy buying in a certain share, the word goes around that it is a “good thing,” the small speculator jumps in for a quick profit, adding his weight to the snowball, and the price goes up according to the same law. This is the foundation system on which all speculative operators work, but Mr Oates had his own ways of accelerating these reactions.
“Nobody can say that Titus Oates ain’t an honest man,” he used to say in the very exclusive circle of confederates who shared his confidence and a reasonable proportion of his profits. “P’raps I am a bit smarter than some of the others, but that’s their funeral. You don’t know what tricks they get up to behind the scenes, but nobody knows what tricks I get up to, either. It’s all in the day’s work.”
He was thinking along the same lines on a certain morning, while he waited for his associates to arrive for the conference at which the final details of the manoeuvre on which he was working at that time would be decided. It was the biggest manipulation he had attempted so far, and it involved a trick that sailed much closer to the wind than anything he had done before, but it has already been explained that he was not a man who did things by halves. The economic depression which had bogged down the market for many months past, and the resultant steadfast refusal of stocks to soar appreciably however stimulated by legitimate and near-legitimate means, had been very bad for his business as well as others. Now, envisaging the first symptoms of an upturn, he was preparing to cash in on it to an extent that would compensate for many months of failure, and with so much lost ground to make up he had no time for half measures. Yet he knew that there were a few tense days ahead of him.
The Saint Intervenes (The Saint Series) Page 3