The Saint Intervenes (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “Which box?”

  “The cardboard box—on his table, with the brown paper. You know Fowler said that he thought either Hammel or Costello left it. Have you got it here?”

  “I expect it’s somewhere in the building.”

  “Could we have it up?”

  With the gesture of a blasé hangman reaching for the noose, Teal took hold of the telephone on his desk.

  “You can have the gun, too, if you like,” he said.

  “Thanks,” said the Saint. “I wanted the gun.”

  Teal gave the order, and they sat and looked at each other in silence until the exhibits arrived. Teal’s silence explained in fifty different ways that the Saint would be refused no facilities for nailing down his coffin in a manner that he would never be allowed to forget, but for some reason his facial register was not wholly convincing. When they were alone again, Simon went to the desk, picked up the gun, and put it in the box. It fitted very well.

  “That’s what happened, Claud,” he said with quiet triumph. “They gave him the gun in the box.”

  “And he shot himself without knowing what he was doing,” Teal said witheringly.

  “That’s just it,” said the Saint, with a blue devil of mockery in his gaze. “He didn’t know what he was doing.”

  Mr Teal’s molars clamped down cruelly on the inoffensive merchandise of the Wrigley Corporation.

  “Well, what did he think he was doing—sitting under a rug pretending to be a bear?”

  Simon sighed. “That’s what I’m trying to work out.”

  Teal’s chair creaked as his full weight slumped back in it in hopeless exasperation.

  “Is that what you’ve been taking up so much of my time about?” he asked wearily.

  “But I’ve got an idea, Claud,” said the Saint, getting up and stretching himself. “Come out and lunch with me, and let’s give it a rest. You’ve been thinking for nearly an hour, and I don’t want your brain to overheat. I know a new place—wait, I’ll look up the address.”

  He looked it up in the telephone directory, and Mr Teal got up and took down his bowler hat from its peg. His baby blue eyes were inscrutably thoughtful, but he followed the Saint without thought. Whatever else the Saint wanted to say, however crazy he felt it must be, it was something he had to hear or else fret over for the rest of his days.

  They drove in a taxi to Knightsbridge, with Mr Teal chewing phlegmatically, in a superb affectation of bored unconcern. Presently the taxi stopped, and Simon climbed out. He led the way into an apartment building and into a lift, saying something to the operator which Teal did not catch.

  “What is this?” he asked, as they shot upwards. “A new restaurant?”

  “It’s a new place,” said the Saint vaguely.

  The elevator stopped, and they got out. They went along the corridor, and Simon rang the bell at one of the doors. It was opened by a good-looking maid who might have been other things in her spare time.

  “Scotland Yard,” said the Saint brazenly, and squeezed past her. He found his way into the sitting-room before anyone could stop him. Chief Inspector Teal, recovering from the momentary paralysis of the shock, followed him; then came the maid.

  “I’m sorry, sir—Mr Costello is out.”

  Teal’s bulk obscured her. All the boredom had smudged itself off his face, giving place to blank amazement and anger.

  “What the devil’s this joke?”

  “It isn’t a joke, Claud,” said the Saint recklessly. “I just wanted to see if I could find something—you know what we were talking about—”

  His keen gaze was quartering the room, and then it alighted on a big cheap kneehole desk whose well-worn shabbiness looked strangely out of keeping with the other furniture. On it was a litter of coils and wire and ebonite and dials—all the junk out of which amateur radio sets are created.

  Simon reached the desk in his next stride, and began pulling open the drawers. Tools of all kinds, various sizes of wire and screws, odd wheels and sleeves and bolts and scraps of aluminium and brass, the completely typical hoard of any amateur mechanic’s workshop. Then he came to a drawer that was locked. Without hesitation he caught up a large screwdriver and rammed it in above the lock; before anyone could grasp his intentions he had splintered the drawer open with a skilful twist.

  Teal let out a shout and started across the room. Simon’s hand dived into the drawer, came out with a nickel-plated revolver—it was exactly the same as the one with which Lewis Enstone had shot himself, but Teal wasn’t noticing things like that. His impression was that the Saint really had gone raving mad after all, and the sight of the gun in the hands of any other raving maniac would have pulled him up.

  “Put that down, you fool!” he yelled, and then he let out another shout as he saw the Saint turn the muzzle of the gun close up to his right eye, with his thumb on the trigger, exactly as Enstone must have held it. Teal lurched forward and knocked the weapon aside with a sweep of his arm; then he grabbed Simon by the wrist.

  “That’s enough of that,” he said, without realizing what a futile thing it was to say.

  Simon looked at him and smiled. “Thanks for saving my life old beetroot,” he murmured kindly. “But it really wasn’t necessary. You see, Claud, that’s the gun Enstone thought he was playing with!”

  The maid was under the table letting out the opening note of a magnificent fit of hysterics. Teal let go the Saint, hauled her out, and shook her till she was quiet. There were more events cascading on him in those few seconds than he knew how to cope with, and he was not gentle.

  “It’s all right, miss,” he growled. “I am from Scotland Yard. Just sit down somewhere, will you?” He turned to Simon. “Now, what’s all this about?”

  “The gun. Enstone’s toy.”

  The Saint raised it again—his smile was quite sane, and with the feeling that he himself was the madman, Teal let him do what he wanted. Simon put the gun to his eye and pulled the trigger—pulled it, released it, pulled it again, keeping up the rhythmic movement. Something inside the gun whirred smoothly, as if wheels were whizzing around under the working of the lever. Then he pointed the gun straight into Teal’s face and did the same thing.

  Teal stared frozenly down the barrel and saw the black hole leap into a circle of light. He was looking at a flickering movie film of a boy shooting a masked burglar. It was tiny, puerile in subject, but perfect. It lasted about ten seconds, and then the barrel went dark again.

  “Costello’s present for Enstone’s little boy,” explained the Saint quietly. “He invented it and made it himself, of course—he always had a talent that way. Haven’t you ever seen those electric flashlights that work without a battery? You keep on squeezing a lever, and it turns a miniature dynamo. Costello made a very small one, and fitted it into the hollow casting of a gun. Then he geared a tiny strip of film to it. It was a damn good new toy, Claud Eustace, and he must have been proud of it.

  “They took it along to Enstone’s, and when he’d turned down their merger and there was nothing else for them to do, they let him play with it just enough to tickle his palate, at just the right hour of the evening. Then they took it away from him and put it back in its box and gave it to him. They had a real gun in another box ready to switch.”

  Chief Inspector Teal stood like a rock, his jaws clamping a wad of spearmint that he had at last forgotten to chew. Then he said, “How did they know he wouldn’t shoot his own son?”

  “That was Hammel. He knew that Enstone wasn’t capable of keeping his hands off a toy like that, and just to make certain he reminded Enstone of it the last thing before they left. He was a practical psychologist—I suppose we can begin to speak of him in the past tense now.”

  Simon Templar smiled again, and fished a cigarette out of his pocket. “But why I should bother to tell you all this when you could have got it out of a stool pigeon,” he murmured, “is more than I can understand. I must be getting soft-hearted in my old age, Claud. After all, when
you’re so far ahead of Holmes.”

  Mr Teal gulped pinkly, and picked up the telephone.

  THE MIXTURE AS BEFORE

  “Crime,” explained Simon Templar, squeezing a lemon-juice meditatively over a liberal slice of smoked salmon, “is a kind of Fourth Dimension. The sucker moves and has his being completely enclosed in a sphere of limitations which he assumes to be the natural laws of the universe. When he is offered an egg, he expects to be given an egg—not a sewing machine. The lad who takes the money off him is the lad who breaks the rules—the lad who hops outside the sucker’s dimension, skids invisibly round ahead of him, and pops in again exactly at the point where the sucker would never dream of looking for him.

  “But the lad who takes money off the lad who takes money off the sucker—the real aristocrat of the profession—is something even brighter. He duly delivers the egg; only it’s also an aubergine. It’s a plant.”

  The Saint could have continued in the same strain for some time, and not infrequently did.

  Those moods of contemplative contentment were an integral part of Simon Templar’s enjoyment of life, the restful twilights between buccaneering days and adventurous nights. They usually came upon him when the second glass of dry sherry had been tasted and found good, when the initial delicacy of a chain of fastidiously chosen dishes had been set before him, and the surroundings of white linen and gleaming silver and glass had sunk into their proper place as the background of that epicurean luxuriousness which to him was the goal of all worthwhile piracy. Those were the occasions on which the corsair put off his harness and discoursed on the philosophy of filibustering. It was a subject of which Simon Templar never tired, in the course of a flamboyant career which had been largely devoted to equalizing what he had always considered to be a fundamentally unjust distribution of wealth he had developed many theories about his own chosen field of art, and these he was always ready to expound. It was at such times as this that the Saint’s keen dark head took on its most challenging alertness of line, the mocking blue eyes danced with their gayest humour…when everything about him matched the irresponsible spirit of his nickname except the technical morality of his discourse.

  “Successful crime,” said the Saint, “is simply the Art of the Unexpected.”

  Louie Fallon had similar ideas, although he was no philosopher. The finer abstractions of lawlessness left Louie not only cold but in a condition to make ice cream shiver merely by breathing on it. Neither were Louie’s interpretations of those essential ideas particularly novel, but he was a very sound practitioner.

  “It’s a waste of time tryin’ to think up new stunts, Olli,” Louie declared, “while there’s all the suckers you want still fallin’ for the old ones. Anyone with a good uncut diamond can draw a dividend from it every day.”

  “Anyone who can put down two thousand pounds can have a good uncut diamond, Louie,” replied Mr Olomo, sympathetic but cautious.

  “Anyone who could put down two thousand quid could float a company and swindle people like a gentleman,” said Louie.

  Mr Olomo shook his head sadly. His business was patronized by a small and exclusive clientele which was rarely in a position to bargain with him.

  “That’s a pity, Louie. I like to see a good man get on.”

  “Now listen to me, you old shark,” said Louie amiably. ‘I want a diamond, a real high-class bit of ice, and all I can afford is three hundred pounds. Look over your stock and see what you can find. And make it snappy. I want to get started this week.”

  “Three hundred pounds is for a cheap bit of paste,” said Mr Olomo pathetically. “You know I haven’t got anything like that in my shop, Louie.”

  Half an hour later he parted grudgingly with an excellent stone, for which Louie Fallen was persuaded to pay two hundred pounds, and the business-like tension of the interview relaxed in an exchange of cheap cigars. In the estimation of Mr Olomo, who had given seventy pounds for the stone, it was a highly satisfactory afternoon’s work.

  “You got a gift there, Louie,” he said gloomily.

  “I’ve got a gold-mine,” said Louie confidently. “All I need beside this is psychology, and I don’t have to pay for that. I’m just naturally psychological. You got to pick out the right kind of sucker. Then it goes like this.”

  The germ of that elusive quality which turns an otherwise normal and rational human being into a sucker has yet to be isolated. Louie Fallon, the man of action, had never bothered to probe into it.

  He recognized one when he saw one, without analysing whys and wherefores, exactly as he was accustomed to recognizing a piece of cheese without a thought of the momentous dawn of life which it enshrines. Simon Templar himself had various theories.

  Probably the species Sucker is the same as the common cold—there is no single virus to account for it. Nor is there likely to be any rigid definition of that precise shade of covetous innocence, that peculiarly grasping guilelessness, which stamps the hard-boiled West Country farmer, accustomed to prying into the pedigrees of individual oats before disgorging a penny on them, as a potential purchaser of the Tower of London for five hundred pounds down and the balance by instalments.

  But whatever these symptoms may be, Simon Templar possessed them in their richest beauty. He had only to saunter in his most natural manner down the highways of the world, immaculate and debonair, with his soft hat slanted blithely over one eye, and the passing pageant of humanity crystallized into men who had had their pockets picked and only needed five shillings to get home, men with gold bricks, men with oil wells in Texas, men needing assistance in the execution of eccentric wills, men with charts showing the authenticated cemetery of Captain Kidd’s treasure, men with horses that could romp home on one leg and a crutch, and men who just thought he might like a game of cards.

  It was one of the Saint’s most treasured assets, and he never ordered strawberries in December without a toast to the benign Providence that had endowed him with the gift of having all that he asked of life poured into his lap.

  As a matter of fact he was sauntering down the Strand when he met Louie Fallon. He didn’t actually run into him, but he did walk into him. There was nothing particularly remarkable about that, for the Strand is a street which contains more crooks to the square yard than any other area of ground outside a prison wall—which may be partly accounted for by the fact that it also has the reputation of being the favourite promenading ground of more potential suckers than any other thoroughfare in London.

  Louie Fallon had a theory that he couldn’t walk down the Strand on any day in the week without bumping into a perambulating gold-mine which only required skilful scratching to yield him its gilded harvest.

  He walked towards the Saint, fumbling in his pockets with a preoccupied air and the kind of flurried abstraction of a man who has forgotten where he put his railway ticket on his way down the platform, with his eyes fluttering over every item of the perspective except those which were included in the direction in which he was going.

  At any rate, the last person in the panorama whom he appeared to see was the Saint himself. Simon saw him, and swerved politely. But with the quick-witted agility of long practice, Louie Fallon blundered off to the same side. They collided with a slight bump, at the very moment when Louie had apparently discovered the article for which he had been searching.

  It fell on to the pavement between them and rolled away between the Saint’s feet, sparkling enticingly in the sunlight. Muttering profuse apologies, Louie scuffled round to retrieve it. The movement was so adroitly devised to entangle them that Simon would have had no chance to pass on and make his escape, even if he had wanted to.

  But it is dawning—slowly and reluctantly, perhaps, but dawning, nevertheless—upon the chronicler that there can be very few students of these episodes who can still be cherishing any delusion that the Saint would ever want to escape from such a situation.

  Simon stood by with a slight smile coming to his lips, while Louie wrigg
led round his legs and recovered his precious possession with a faint squeak of delight, and straightened up with the object clutched solidly in his hand.

  “Phew!” said Mr Fallon, fanning himself with his hat. “That was near enough. Did you see where it went? Right to the edge of that grating. If it had rolled down…” He blew out his cheeks and rolled up his eyes in an eloquent register of horror at the dreadful thought. “For a moment I thought I’d lost it,” he said, clarifying his point conclusively.

  Simon nodded. It did not require any peculiar keenness of vision to see that the object of so much concern was a very nice-looking diamond, for Louie was making no attempt to hide it—he was, on the contrary, blowing on it and rubbing it affectionately on his sleeve to remove the invisible specks of grime and dust which it had collected on its travels.

  “You must be lucky.”

  Louie’s face fell abruptly. The transition between his almost childish delight and the shadow of awful gloom which suddenly passed across his countenance was quite startling. Mr Fallon’s artistry had never been disputed even by his rivals in the profession.

  “Lucky?” he practically yelped in a rising crescendo of mournful indignation. “Why, I’m the unluckiest man that ever lived!”

  “Too bad,” said the Saint, with profound sympathy.

  “Lucky!” repeated Mr Fallon, with all the pained disgust of a hypochondriac who has been accused of looking well. “Why, I’m the sort of fellow if I saw a five-pound note lying in the street and tried to pick it up, I’d fall down and break my neck!”

  It was becoming clear to Simon Templar that Mr Fallon felt that he was unlucky.

  “There are people like that,” the Saint said, reminiscently. “I remember an aunt of mine—”

  “Lucky?” reiterated Mr Fallon, who did not appear to be interested in anyone else’s aunt. “Why, right at this moment I’m the unluckiest man in London. Look here”—he clasped the Saint by the arm with the pathetically appealing movement of a drowning man clutching at a straw—“do you think you could help me? If you haven’t got anything particular to do? I feel sort of—well—you look the sort of fellow who might have some ideas. Have you got time for a drink?”