18 The Saint Bids Diamonds (Thieves' Picnic) Read online

  "You know," Simon burbled genially on, "these things always make me wonder for a bit whether it's safe to look a policeman in the eye for the next few days. I remember the last time anything like this happened to me-it was in Innsbruck, but it was almost exactly the same sort of thing. A friend of mine and myself horned in on a scrap where one harmless-looking little bird was getting the hide pasted off him by three large, ferocious-looking thugs. We laid them out and heaved them into the river, and it started no end of trouble. You see, it turned out that the harmless-looking little bird was carrying a bag full of stolen jewels, and the three ferocious-looking thugs were perfectly respectable detectives trying to arrest him. It only shows you how careful you have to be with this knight-errant business. -- Is anything the matter?"

  Her face had gone as white as milk, and she was leaning back against the side of the lift, staring at him.

  "It's nothing," she said. "Just-all these other things."

  "I know."

  The lift stopped at his floor, and he opened the doors for her and followed her out.

  "I've got a bottle of vintage lemonade that'll have you turning cartwheels again in no time," he remarked as they walked round the passage. "That is, if Hoppy hasn't drunk it all to try and revive the invalid."

  "I hope you'll turn him inside out if he has," she answered; and he was amazed by the sudden change in her voice.

  She was still pale, pale as death, but the terror had gone far from her eyes as if a mask had been drawn over them. She smiled up at him-it was the first time he had seen her smile, and he couldn't help noticing that he had been right about her mouth. It was turned up to him in a way that at any other time would have put irresistible ideas into his head, and she slipped a hand through his arm as they came to the door of his room. Her small fingers moved over his biceps.

  "You must be terrifically strong," she said; and the Saint shrugged.

  "I can usually manage to get a glass to my mouth."

  A queer ghostly tingle touched the base of his spine as he opened the door and let her into the room. It wasn't anything she had said: coming from most women, her last remark would have made him wince, but she had a fresh young voice that made it seem perfectly natural. It wasn't even the new personality which she had started to take on, for that fitted her so perfectly that it was hard to imagine her with any other. The feeling was almost subconscious, a stirring of uncompleted intuition that gave him an odd sensation of walking blindfold along the edge of a precipice; and again he knew, beyond all doubt, that he was nowhere near the end of the consequences of that night's work.

  The old man lay motionless on the bed, exactly as Mr Uniatz must have dumped him. Hoppy himself, as the Saint had feared, had started the work of resuscitation on himself, and half the contents had disappeared from a bottle of Haig that had been unopened when Simon left it on the table. He arrived just in time, for Mr Uniatz had the bottle in his hand when Simon opened the door and he was on the point of repeating his previous experiments. Simon took it away from him and replaced the cork.

  "Thank God for non-refillable bottles," he said fervently. "They pour so slowly. If this had been the ordinary kind there wouldn't have been a drop left by now."

  He went to the bed and unbuttoned the old man's coat and shirt. His pulse was all right, making due allowances for his age, and there were no bones broken: but his body was terribly bruised and his face scratched and swollen. Whether he had internal injuries, and what the effects of shock might be, would have to be decided when he recovered consciousness. He was breathing stertorously, with his mouth hang­ing open, and for the moment he seemed to be in no imminent danger of death.

  Simon went to the bathroom and soaked a towel in cold water. He began to bathe the old man's face and clean it up as well as he could, but the girl stopped him.

  "Let me do it. Will he be all right?"

  "I'll lay you odds on it," said the Saint convincingly.

  He left her with the towel and went back to the table to pour out some of the whiskey which he had rescued. She held up the old man's head while he forced some of it between the puffed and bleeding lips. The old man groaned and stirred weakly.

  "That ought to help him," murmured Simon. "You'd better have the rest yourself-it 'll do you good."

  She nodded, and he gave her the glass. There were tears in her eyes, and while he looked at her they welled over and ran down her cheeks. She drank quickly, without a grimace, and put the glass down be­fore she turned back to the old man. She sat on the bed, holding him with his head pillowed on her breast and her arm round him, rocking a little as if she were cradling a child, wiping his grimed and battered face with the wet towel while the tears ran unheeded down her cheeks.

  "Joris," she whispered. "Joris darling. Wake up, darling. It's all right now. . . . You're all right, aren't you, Joris? Joris, my sweet . . ."

  The Saint was on his way back to the table to pour a drink for himself, and he stopped so suddenly that if she had been looking at him she must have noticed it. For a second or two he stood utterly motionless, as if he had been turned to stone; and once again that weird uncanny tingle laid its clammy touch on the base of his spine. Only this time it didn't pass away almost as quickly as it had begun. It crept right up his back until the chill of it crawled over his scalp; and then it dropped abruptly into his stomach and left his heart thumping to make up for the time it had stood still.

  To the Saint it seemed as if a century went by while he stood there petrified; but actually it could have been hardly any time at all. And at last he moved again, stretching out his hand very slowly and deliberately for the bottle that he had been about to pick up. With infinite steadiness he measured a ration of whiskey into his glass, and unhurriedly splashed soda on top of it.

  "Joris," he repeated, in a voice that miraculously managed to be his own. "That's rather an unusual name. . . . Who is he?"

  The fear that flashed through her eyes was suppressed so swiftly this time that if he had not been watching her closely he would probably have missed it altogether.

  "He's my father," she said, almost defiantly. "But I've always called him Joris."

  "Dutch name, isn't it?" said the Saint easily. "Hullo -he seems to be coming round."

  The old man was moving a little more, shaking his head mechanically from side to side and moaning like a man recovering from an anaesthetic. Simon returned to the bedside, but the girl waved him away.

  "Please-leave him with me for a minute."

  The Saint nodded sympathetically and sauntered over to a chair. The first breath-taking shock was gone now, and once again his mind was running as cool and clear as an alpine stream. Only the high-strung tension of his awakened nerves, a pulse of vivid expectation too deeply pitched and infinitesimal in its vibration to be perceptible to any senses but his own, remained to testify to the thunderbolt of realisation that had flamed through his brain.

  He slipped a cigarette from his case, tapped it, set it between his lips without a tremor in his hands, and lighted it without haste. Then he opened his wallet and took out a folded piece of blue paper.

  It was a Spanish telegram form; and he read it through again for the twentieth time since it had come into his possession, though he already knew every word of it by heart. It had been sent from Santa Cruz on the twenty-second of December, and it was addressed to a certain Mr Rodney Felson at the Palace Hotel, Madrid. The message ran: MUST REPLACE JORIS IMMEDIATELY CAN YOU SECURE SUBSTITUTE VERY URGENT GRANER Simon folded the sheet and put it carefully away again, but the words still danced before his eyes. He drew the smoke of his cigarette deep into his lungs and let it trickle out towards the ceiling, "What's the rest of the name?" he enquired, as if he was merely making idle conversation.

  A moment passed before she answered.

  "Vanlinden," she said, in the same half-defiant way; and then the Saint knew that he had been right in the wild hunch that had come to him five nights ago in Madrid and sent him driving recklessly thro
ugh the night to Cadiz to catch the boat that left for Tenerife the next day.

  Simon looked up and realised that the scarecrow physiognomy of Mr Uniatz was becoming convulsed with the same sort of expression that might have been found on the face of a volcano preparing to erupt-if a volcano had a face. His eyes were bulging out of his head like a crab's, and his whole face was turning purple with such an awful congestion, that anyone who did not know him well might have thought that he was being strangled. The Saint, who was not in that innocent category, knew in a flash that these horrible symptoms were only the outward and visible signs of the dawning of a Thought somewhere in the dark un-fathomed caves of Mr Uniatz' mind. His eyes blazed a warning that would have paralysed a more sensitive man; but all the sensitiveness in Mr Uniatz would have made a rhinoceros look like a wilting gazelle. Besides, Hoppy's cerebrations had gone too far to be suppressed: he had to get them out of his system or asphyxiate.

  "Boss," he exploded, "dijja hear dat? Joris Vanlinden! Ain't dat de guy - "Yes, Hoppy, of course that's the guy," said the Saint soothingly.

  He went quickly over to the bed and sat down facing the girl. It was a moment when he had to act faster than he could think, before Hoppy's blundering feet blotted out every trace of the fragile bridge that he had been trying to build. He held out his hand and smiled disarmingly into her eyes.

  "Lady," he said solemnly, "this is a great moment. Will you shake?"

  Her fingers met his almost immediately.

  "But why?" she said.

  "Just to keep me going till I can shake hands with Joris himself. I've always wanted to meet one of the boys who pulled off that job at Troschman's-it was one of the classics of the century."

  "I don't think I know what you're talking about."

  He was still smiling.

  "I think you do. I said your father had an uncommon name, but I knew I'd heard it before. Now it's all come back to me. I knew I should never forget it."

  And he was speaking nothing but the most candid truth, though she might not understand it.

  When some persons unknown got into Troschman's diamond fabriek down on Maiden Lane one rainy night in April, and cleaned out a safe that had held two hundred thousand dollars' worth of cut and uncut stones, the police were particularly interested in the fact that the raid could hardly have been better timed had the raiders been partners in the business. This was impossible, for Troschman had no partners; Troschman's was a small concern which employed only one permanent cutter, taking on other workers when they were needed. As a matter of fact, this cutter was the nearest approach to a partner that Troschman had, for he was acknowledged to be one of the finest craftsmen in the trade, and had been with Troschman ever since the business was started. So that it was natural for him to be given more confidence than an ordinary employee would have received; and when the stones were collected to fill the biggest order that Troschman had ever secured in his career, this cutter was the only other man who knew when the collection was complete. His name was Joris Vanlinden.

  The only reason he was not arrested at once was because the police hoped that, by keeping watch on him, they might net the whole gang at one swoop. And then, three days later, he vanished as if the earth had swallowed him up; and the hue and cry which followed had sought him for four years in vain. Only in various police headquarters did his name and description re­main on record, with appropriate instructions. In vari­ous police headquarters-and in the almost equally relentless memory of the Saint. . . .

  Simon Templar could have sat down and listed the authors of every important crime committed in the last fifteen years; and that list would have included a num­ber of names that no police headquarters had on record, and a number of crimes that no police headquar­ters had even recognised as crimes. He could have told you when and where and how they were committed, the exact value of the boodle, and very often what had happened to it. He could have told you the personal descriptions of the participants, their habits, haunts, specialties, weaknesses, aliases, previous record and modus operandi. He had a memory for those details that would have been worth thirty years' seniority to any police officer; but to the Saint it was worth more than that. It was half the essentials of his profession, the broad foundations on which his career had been built up, the knowledge and research on which the plans for his amazing forays against the underworld were based; and again and again ingenious felons had thought themselves safe with their booty, only to wake up too late when that unparalleled twentieth-century privateer was already sailing into their stronghold to plunder them of all that they had, until there were countless men who feared him more than the police, and unnumbered places where his justice was known to be swifter and more deadly than the Law.

  The Saint said nothing about that, though there was no native modesty in his make-up. He looked the girl in the eyes and kept that frank and friendly smile on his lips.

  "Don't look so scared," he said. "You've nothing to worry about. I'm in the business myself."

  "You aren't anything to do with the police?"

  "Oh, I have lots to do with them. They're always trying to arrest me for something or other, but so far it hasn't been a great success."

  She laughed rather hysterically, a sharp and some how jarring contrast to the panic that he had seen in her face a few moments before.

  "So I needn't try to keep up my party manners any more."

  She shook her head and rubbed a hand over her eyes with a sort of gasp; and then all at once she was serious again, desperately serious, with that queer sort of sob in her voice. "But it's not true! It isn't true! Joris didn't get anything out of it. He wasn't one of them, whatever they say."

  "That doesn't sound like very good management."

  "He-he wasn't one of them. Yes, he helped them. He told them what they wanted to know. He was hard up. He lost all his savings in the stock market-and more money that he couldn't pay. And there was me. . . . They offered him a share, and he knew that Troschman's insurance was all right. But they cheated him. . . . They took him away when they thought he'd break down if he was arrested. Besides, they could use him. They brought him out here. But they never gave him his share. There was always some excuse. The stones would take a long time to get rid of, or they couldn't find a buyer, or something. And all the time he had to go on working for them."

  "That was Graner, I suppose?"

  He was still holding her hand, and he could feel her trembling.

  "Do you know him?"

  "Not personally."

  "Yes, that was Reuben Graner." She shuddered. "But if you don't know him you couldn't understand.

  24THIEVES' PICNIC He's -- I can't tell you. Sometimes I don't think he's human. . . . But how did you know?"

  Simon took out his cigarette case and offered it to her. Her hand was still shaking, so that she could hardly keep the cigarette in the flame when he gave her a light. He smiled and steadied her hand with cool, strong fingers.

  "Reuben isn't here now, anyway," he said quietly. "And if he does walk in, Hoppy and I will beat him firmly over the head with the wardrobe. So let's take things calmly for a bit."

  "But how did you know?"

  "More or less by accident. You see, I came here from Madrid." He saw the awakening of understanding in her eyes and nodded. "Rodney Felson and George Holby were there."

  "Do you know them?"

  "Not to talk to. But I know lots of people that I don't talk to. I just happened to see them. You know Chicote's Bar?"

  "I've never been to Madrid."

  "If you ever go there, look in and give Pedro my love. Chicote's is one of the great bars of the world. Everybody in Madrid goes there. So did Rodney and George. Rodney had a telegram. He talked it over with George-I wasn't near enough to hear what they were saying, but in the end they screwed it up and dropped it under the table. Which was careless of them, because when they went out I picked it up."

  "You picked it up ?"

  He grinned shamelessly.

&
nbsp; "I told you I was in the business myself. There may be honour among thieves, but I never saw very much. I knew that Rodney and George were one of the six cleverest pairs of jewel thieves at present operating in Europe, so I just naturally thought that anything they were interested in might interest me. It did."

  He took out the telegram again and gave it to her. He watched her as she read it through, and saw a trace of colour burn for a moment in her cheeks-burn till it burnt itself out and left them white again.

  "He sent it as soon as he heard," she whispered. "I thought it would be like that. I could feel it. He never meant to let Joris and me go away. Oh, I knew!"

  He would have guessed her age at barely twenty-one; but when she raised her eyes again there was an age of weariness in them that tied a strange knot in his throat. He took the telegram from her and put it away again.

  "Did you want to go away?" he asked gently.

  She nodded without speaking.

  "Joris was working at his old job, I suppose," he said.

  "Yes. They made him work for them. He cut and polished all the stones that came from Troschman's. Sometimes they went out and stole more, and when they brought them back he had to re-cut them so that they couldn't be identified. He had to do what they told him, because they could always have sent him back to the police. And there was me-but I told him that that didn't matter, only he wouldn't believe me."