11 The Brighter Buccaneer Page 16

  He glanced at her doubtfully, with that mocking curve still lingering on his lips. For some reason he refrained from asking whether her other husbands had been informed of this plan: he knew nothing about her private life. But even with the best intentions a modern Robin Hood must get that way; and he did not know why he was silent.

  And then, quite clearly, he heard the tread of leisurely feet on the other side of the clump of imported vegetation behind which they were concealed. Instinctively they glanced at one another, listening, and heard a man's fat chuckle beyond the palms.

  "I guess this new plan makes it a lot easier than the way we were going to work it."

  Simon saw the girl half rising from the settee. In a flash, he had flung one arm round her, pinning her down, and clapped his other hand over her mouth.

  "Maybe it'll save a little trouble, anyway," spoke the second man. There came the scratch of a match, and then: "What are you doing about the girl?"

  "I don't know . . . She's a pretty little piece, but she's get­ting too serious. I'll have to ditch her in Paris."

  "She'll be sore."

  "Well, she ought to know how to take the breaks. I had to keep her going to get us in here, but it ain't my fault if she wants to make it a permanency."

  "What about her share?"

  "Aw, I might send her a coupla hundred, just for conscience money. She ain't a bad kid. Too sentimental, that's all."

  A short pause, and then the second man again: "Well, that's your business. It's just a quarter past eleven. Guess I better see Watkins and make sure he's ready to fix those lights."

  The leisured feet receded again; and Simon released the girl slowly. He saw that she was as white as a sheet, and there were strange tears in her eyes. He lighted a cigarette methodically. It was a tough life for women-always had been. They had to know how to take the breaks.

  "Did you hear?" she asked, and he looked at her again.

  "I couldn't very well help it. I'm sorry, kid . . . That was your prospective husband, I suppose?"

  She nodded.

  "Anyway, you'll know it wasn't an act."

  There was nothing he could do. She stood up, and he walked beside her back to the ballroom. She left him there, with a smile that never trembled; and the Saint turned and found Peter Quentin beside him.

  "Must you keep all the fun to yourself, old boy?" pleaded Peter forlornly. "I've been treading on the toes of the fattest dowager in the world. Who's your girl friend? She looks a stunner."

  "She stunned me once," said the Saint reminiscently. "Or some pals of hers did. She's passing here as Rosamund Armi­tage; but the police know her best as Kate Allfield, and her nickname is The Mug."

  Peter's eyes were following the girl yearningly across the room.

  "There ought to be some hideous punishment for bestowing names like that," he declared; and the Saint grinned absent-mindedly.

  "I know. In a story-book she'd be Isabelle de la Fontaine; but her parents weren't thinking about her career when they christened her. That's real life in our low profession-and so is the nickname."

  "Does that mean there's competition in the field?"

  "It means just that." Simon's gaze was sweeping systematic­ally over the other guests; and at that moment he saw the men he was looking for. "You see that dark bird who looks as if he might be a gigolo? Face like a pretty boy, till you see it's just a mask cut in granite. . . . That's Philip Carney. And the big fellow beside him-just offering the Dempster-Craven a cigarette. That's George Runce. They're two of the slickest jewel thieves in the business. Mostly they work the Riviera-I don't think they've been in England for years. Kate was talk­ing in the plural all the time, and I wondered who she meant."

  Peter's mouth shaped a silent whistle.

  "What's going to happen?"

  "I don't know definitely; but I should like to prophesy that at any moment the lights will go out --"

  And as he spoke, with a promptness that seemed almost uncanny, the three enormous cut-glass chandeliers which illu­minated the ballroom simultaneously flicked out as if a magic wand had conjured them out of existence; and the room was plunged into inky blackness.

  The buzz of conversation rose louder, mingled with sporadic laughter. After trying valiantly to carry on for a couple of bars, the orchestra faded out irregularly, and the dancers shuffled to a standstill. Over in one corner, a facetious party started singing, in unison: "Where-was-moses-when-the-lights- went-out?" . . . And then, rising above every other sound, came Mrs. Dempster-Craven's hysterical shriek: "Help!"

  There was a momentary silence, broken by a few uncertain titters. And Mrs. Dempster-Craven's voice rang wildly through the room again.

  "My pendant! My pendant! Put on the lights!"

  Then came the sharp vicious smash of a fist against flesh and bone, a coughing grunt, and the thud of a fall. Peter Quentin felt around him, but the Saint had gone. He started across the room, plunging blindly among the crowd that was heaving helplessly in the darkness. Then one or two matches flared up, and the light grew as other matches and Lighters were struck to augment the illumination. And just as suddenly as they had gone out, the great chandeliers lighted up again.

  Peter Quentin looked at the scene from the front rank of the circle of guests. George Runce was lying on the floor, with blood trickling from a cut in his chin; and a couple of yards from him sat Simon Templar, holding his jaw tenderly. Be­tween them lay Mrs. Dempster-Craven's priceless pendant, with the chain broken; and while Peter looked she snatched it up with a sob, and he saw that the Star of Mandalay was missing from its centre.

  "My diamond!" she wailed. "It's gone!"

  Her private detective came elbowing through from the back of the crowd, pushing Peter aside, and grabbed the Saint's shoulder.

  "Come on you!" he barked. "What happened?"

  "There's your man," said the Saint, pointing to the unconscious figure beside him. "As soon as the lights went out, he grabbed the pendant --"

  "That's a lie!"

  Philip Carney had fallen on his knees beside Runce, and was loosening the man's collar. He turned round and yapped the denial indignantly enough; but Peter saw that his face had gone pale.

  "I was standing beside Mr. Runce." Carney pointed to the Saint. "That man snatched the pendant, and Mr. Runce tried to stop him getting away."

  "Why weren't you here, Watkins?" wailed Mrs. Dempster-Craven, shaking the detective wildly by the arm. "Why weren't you watching? I shall never see my diamond again --"

  "I'm sorry, madam," said the detective. "I just left the room for one minute to find a glass of water. But I think we've got the man all right." He bent down and hauled the Saint to his feet. "We'd better search this fellow, and one of the footmen can go for the police while we're doing it."

  Peter saw that the Saint's face had gone hard as polished teak. In Simon's right hand was the Star of Mandalay, pressed against his jaw as he was holding it. As soon as the lights had gone out he had guessed what was going to happen: he had crossed the floor like a cat, grasped it neatly as Runce tore it out of its setting, and sent the big man flying with one well-directed left. All that he had been prepared for; but there were wheels turning that he had never reckoned with.

  He looked the detective in the eyes.

  "The less you talk about the police the better," he said quietly. "I was in the conservatory a few minutes ago, and I happened to hear Mr. Carney say: 'I'd better see Watkins and make sure he's ready to fix those lights.' I didn't think any­thing of it at the time, but this looks like an explanation."

  There was an instant's deadly silence; and then Philip Car­ney laughed.

  "That's one of the cleverest tricks I've ever heard of," he remarked. "But it's a bit libellous, isn't it?"

  "Not very," said a girl's clear voice.

  Again the murmur of talk was stifled as if a blanket had been dropped on it; and in the hush Kate Allfield came into the front of the crowd. George Runce was rising on his elbows, and his jaw dr
opped as he heard her voice. She gave him one contemptuous glance, and faced Mrs. Dempster-Craven with her head erect.

  "It's perfectly true," she said. "I was with Mr. Templar in the conservatory, and I heard it as well."

  Carney's face had gone grey.

  "The girl's raving," he said; but his voice was a little shaky. "I haven't been in the conservatory this evening."

  "Neither have I," said Runce, wiping the frozen incredulity off his features with an effort. "I'll tell you what it is --"

  But he did not tell them what it was, for at this point a fresh authoritative voice interrupted the debate with a curt "Make way, please," and the crowd opened to let through the burly figure of a detective-sergeant in plain clothes. Simon looked round, and saw that he had posted a constable at the door as he came in. The sergeant scanned the faces of the group, and addressed Mrs. Dempster-Craven.

  "What's the trouble?"

  "My pendant --"

  She was helped out by a chorus of bystanders whose in­formation, taken in the mass, was somewhat confusing. The sergeant sorted it out phlegmatically; and at the end he shrugged.

  "Since these gentlemen are all accusing each other, I take it you don't wish to make any particular charges?"

  "I cannot accuse my guests of being thieves," said Mrs. Dempster-Craven imperially. "I only want my diamond."

  The sergeant nodded. He had spent twelve years in C Divi­sion, and had learned that Berkeley Square is a region where even policemen have to be tactful.

  "In that case," he said, "I think it would help us if the gentlemen agreed to be searched."

  The Saint straightened up.

  It had been a good evening; and he had no regrets. The game was worth playing for its own sake, to him: the prizes came welcomely, but they weren't everything. And no one knew better than he that you couldn't win all the time. There were chances that couldn't be reckoned with in advance; and the duplicity of Mr. Watkins was one of those. But for that, he would have played his hand faultlessly, out-bluffed and out­manoeuvred the Carney-Runce combination in a fair field, and made as clean a job of it as anything else he had done. But that single unexpected factor had turned the scale just enough to bring the bluff to a showdown, as unexpected factors always would. And yet Peter Quentin saw the Saint was smiling.

  "I think that's a good idea," said the Saint.

  Between Philip Carney and George Runce flashed one blank glance; but their mouths remained closed.

  "Perhaps there's another room we could go to," said the sergeant, almost genially; and Mrs. Dempster-Craven inclined her head like a queen dismissing a distasteful odour.

  "Watkins will show you to the library."

  Simon turned on his heel and led the way towards the door, with Mr. Watkins still gripping his arms; but as his path brought him level with Kate Allfield he stopped and smiled down at her.

  "I think you're a great gal."

  His voice sounded a trifle strange. And then, before two hundred shocked and startled eyes, including those of Lord and Lady Bredon, the Honourable Celia Mallard, three baron­ets, and the aspiring Mrs. Dempster-Craven herself, he laid his hands gently on her shoulders and kissed her outrageously on the mouth; and in the silence of appalled aristocracy which followed that performance made his stately exit.

  "How the devil did you get away with it?" asked Peter Quentin weakly, as they drove away in a taxi an hour later. "I was fairly sweating blood all the time you were being stripped."

  The Saint's face showed up in the dull glow as he drew at his cigarette.

  "It was in my mouth," he said.

  "But they made you open your mouth --"

  "It was there when I kissed Kate, anyway," said the Saint, and sang to himself all the rest of the way home.

  The Green Goods Man

  "THE secret of contentment," said Simon Templar oratori­cally, "is to take things as they come. As is the daily office-work of the City hog in his top hat to the moments when he signs his supreme mergers, so are the bread-and-butter exploits of a pirate to his great adventures. After all, one can't always be ploughing through thrilling escapes and captures with guns popping in all directions; but there are always people who'll give you money. You don't even have to look for them. You just put on a monocle and the right expression of half-witted-ness, and they come up and tip their purses into your lap."

  He offered this pearl of thought for the approval of his usual audience; and it is a regrettable fact that neither of them disputed his philosophy. Patricia Holm knew him too well; and even Peter Quentin had by that time walked in the ways of Saintly lawlessness long enough to know that such pro­nouncements inevitably heralded another of the bread-and-butter exploits referred to. It wasn't, of course, strictly true that Simon Templar was in need of bread and butter; but he liked jam with it, and a generous world had always provided him abundantly with both.

  Benny Lucek came over from New York on a falling market to try his luck in the Old World. He had half-a-dozen natty suits which fitted him so well that he always looked as if he would have burst open from his wrists to his hips if his blood-pressure had risen two degrees, he had a selection of mauve and pink silk shirts in his wardrobe trunk, pointed and beauti­fully polished shoes for his feet, a pearl pin for his tie, and no less than three rings for his fingers. His features radiated honesty, candour, and good humour; and as a stock-in-trade those gifts alone were worth several figures of solid cash to him in any state of the market.

  Also he still had a good deal of capital, without which no Green Goods man can even begin to operate.

  Benny Lucek was one of the last great exponents of that gentle graft; and although they had been telling him in New York that the game was played out, he had roseate hopes of finding virgin soil for a new crop of successes among the benighted bourgeoisie of Europe. So far as he knew, the Green Goods ground had scarcely been touched on the eastern side of the Atlantic, and Benny had come across to look it over. He installed himself in a comfortable suite on the third floor of the Park Lane Hotel, changed his capital into English bank­notes, and sent out his feelers into space.

  In the most popular Personal Columns appeared temptingly-worded advertisements of which the one that Simon Templar saw was a fair specimen.

  ANY LADY or GENTLEMAN in reduced circumstances, who would be interested in an enterprise showing GREAT PROFITS for a NEGLIGIBLE RISK, should write in STRICT CONFIDENCE, giving some personal information, to Box No. --

  Benny Lucek knew everything there was to know about letters. He was a practical graphologist of great astuteness, and a deductive psychologist of vast experience. Given a two-page letter which on the surface conveyed the vaguest particulars about the writer, he could build up in his mind a character study with a complete background filled in that fitted his subject without a wrinkle ninety-nine times out of a hundred; and if the mental picture he formed of a certain Mr. Tombs, whose reply to that advertisement was included among several scores of others, was one of the hundredth times, it might not have been entirely Benny's fault. Simon Templar was also a specialist in letters, although his art was creative instead of critical.

  Patricia came in one morning and found him performing another creative feat at which he was no less adept.

  "What on earth are you doing in those clothes?" she asked, when she had looked at him.

  Simon glanced over himself in the mirror. His dark blue suit was neat but unassuming, and had a well-worn air as if it were the only one he possessed and had been cared for with desper­ate pride. His shoes were old and strenuously polished; his socks dark grey and woollen, carefully darned. He wore a cheap pin-striped poplin shirt, and a stiff white collar without one saving grace of line. His tie was dark blue, like his suit, and rather stringy. Across his waistcoat hung an old-fashioned silver watch-chain. Anything less like the Simon Templar of normal times, who always somehow infused into the suits of Savile Row a flamboyant personality of his own, and whose shirts and socks and ties were the envy of the
young men who drank with him in a few clubs to which he belonged, it would have been almost impossible to imagine.

  "I am a hard-working clerk in an insurance office, earning three hundred a year with the dim prospect of rising to three hundred and fifty in another fifteen years, age about forty, with an anaemic wife and seven children and a semi-detached house at Streatham." He was fingering his face speculatively, staring at it in the glass. "A little too beautiful for the part at present, I think; but we'll soon put that right."

  He set to work on his face with the quick unhesitating touches of which he was such an amazing master. His eyebrows, brushed in towards his nose, turned grey and bushy; his hair also turned grey, and was plastered down to his skull so skil­fully that it seemed inevitable that any barber he went to would remark that he was running a little thin on top. Under the movements of his swift fingers, cunning shadows appeared at the sides of his forehead, under his eyes, and around his chin-shadows so faint that even at a yard's range their artificiality could not have been detected, and yet so cleverly placed that they seemed to change the whole shape and expres­sion of his face. And while he worked he talked.

  "If you ever read a story-book, Pat, in which anyone dis­guises himself as someone else so perfectly that the imper­sonated bloke's own friends and secretaries and servants are taken in, you'll know there's an author who's cheating on you. On the stage it might be done up to a point; but in real life, where everything you put on has got to get by in broad daylight and close-ups, it's impossible. I," said the Saint un­blushingly, "am the greatest character actor that never went on the stage, and I know. But when it comes to inventing a new character of your own that mustn't be recognised again-then you can do things."

  He turned around suddenly, and she gasped. He was perfect. His shoulders were rounded and stooping; his head was bent slightly forward, as if set in that position by years of poring over ledgers. And he gazed at her with the dumb passionless expression of his part-an under-nourished, under-exercised, middle-aged man without hopes or ambitions, permanently worried, crushed out of pleasure by the wanton taxation which goes to see that the paladins of Whitehall are never deprived of an afternoon's golf, utterly resigned to the sombre purpose­lessness of his existence, scraping and pinching through fifty weeks in the year in order to let himself be stodgily swindled at the seaside for a fortnight in August, solemnly discussing the antics of politicians as if they really mattered and honestly believing that their cow-like utterances might do something to alleviate his burdens, holding a crumbling country together with his own dour stoicism and the stoicism of millions of his own kind . . .