The Brighter Buccaneer (The Saint Series) Read online

  “Your faith in my reformed character is almost touching,” said the Saint at length, and the solicitor smiled faintly.

  “We are relying on the popular estimate of your sporting instincts.”

  “When do you want me to go?”

  The solicitor placed the tips of his fingers together with a discreet modicum of satisfaction.

  “I take it that you are prepared to accept our offer?”

  “I don’t see why I shouldn’t. A pal of mine who came over the other day told me there was a darn good show at the Folies Bergère, and since you’re only young once—”

  “Doubtless you will be permitted to include the entertainment in your bill of expenses,” said the solicitor dryly. “If the notice is not too short, we should be very pleased if you were free to visit the…ah…Folies Bergère tomorrow night.”

  “Suits me,” murmured the Saint laconically.

  The solicitor rose.

  “You will travel by air, of course,” he said. “I shall return later this evening to deliver the package into your keeping, after which you will be solely responsible. If I might give you a hint, Mr Templar,” he added, as the Saint shepherded him to the door, “you will take particular pains to conceal it while you are travelling. It has been suggested to us that the French police are not incorruptible.”

  He repeated his warning when he came back at six o’clock and left Simon with a brown-paper packet about four inches square and two inches deep, in which the outlines of a stout cardboard box could be felt. Simon weighed the package several times in his hand—it was neither particularly light nor particularly heavy, and he puzzled over its possible contents for some time. The address to which it was to be delivered was typed on a plain sheet of paper; Simon committed it to memory, and burnt it.

  Curiosity was the Saint’s weakness. It was that same insatiable curiosity which had made his fortune, for he was incapable of looking for long at anything that struck him as being the least bit peculiar without succumbing to the temptation to probe deeper into its peculiarities. It never entered his head to betray the confidence that had been placed in him, so far as the safety of the package was concerned, but the mystery of its contents was one which he considered had a definite bearing on whatever risks he had agreed to take. He fought off his curiosity until he got up the next morning, and then it got the better of him. He opened the packet after his early breakfast, carefully removing the seals intact with a hot palette-knife, and was very glad that he had done so.

  When he drove down to Croydon Aerodrome later the package had been just as carefully refastened, and no one would have known that it had been opened. He carried it inside a book, from which he had cut the printed part of the pages to leave a square cavity encircled by the margins, and he was prepared for trouble.

  He checked in his suitcase and waited around patiently during the dilatory system of preparations which for some extraordinary reason is introduced to negative the theoretical speed of air transport. He was fishing out his cigarette-case for the second time when a dark and strikingly pretty girl, who had been waiting with equal patience, came over and asked him for a light.

  Simon produced his lighter, and the girl took a packet of cigarettes from her bag and offered him one.

  “Do they always take as long as this?” she asked.

  “Always when I’m travelling,” said the Saint resignedly. “Another thing I should like to know is why they have to arrange their time-tables so that you never have the chance to get a decent lunch. Is it for the benefit of the French restaurants at dinner-time?”

  She laughed.

  “Are we fellow passengers?”

  “I don’t know. I’m for Paris.”

  “I’m for Ostend.”

  The Saint sighed.

  “Couldn’t you change your mind and come to Paris?”

  He had taken one puff from the cigarette. Now he took a second, while she eyed him impudently. The smoke had an unfamiliar, slightly bitter taste to it. Simon drew on the cigarette again thoughtfully, but this time he held the smoke in his mouth and let it trickle out again presently as if he had inhaled. The expression on his face never altered, although the last thing he had expected had been trouble of that sort.

  “Do you think we could take a walk outside?” said the girl. I’m simply stifling.”

  “I think it might be a good idea,” said the Saint.

  He walked out with her into the clear morning sunshine, and they strolled idly along the gravel drive. The rate of exchange had done a great deal to discourage foreign travel that year, and the airport was unusually deserted. A couple of men were climbing out of a car that had drawn up beside the building, but apart from them there was only one other car turning in at the gates leading from the main road, and a couple of mechanics fussing round a gigantic Handley-Page that was ticking over on the tarmac.

  “Why did you give me a doped cigarette?” asked the Saint with perfect casualness, but as the girl turned and stared at him his eyes leapt to hers with the cold suddenness of bared steel.

  “I…I don’t understand. Do you mind telling me what you mean?”

  Simon dropped the cigarette and trod on it deliberately.

  “Sister,” he said, “if you’re thinking of a Simon Templar who was born yesterday, let me tell you it was someone else of the same name. You know, I was playing that cigarette trick before you cut your teeth.”

  The girl’s hand went to her mouth, then it went up in a kind of wave. For a moment the Saint was perplexed, and then he started to turn. She was looking at something over his shoulder, but his head had not revolved far enough to see what it was before the solid weight of a sandbag slugged viciously into the back of his neck. He had one instant of feeling his limbs sagging powerlessly under him, while the book he carried dropped from his hand and sprawled open to the ground, and then everything went dark.

  He came back to earth in a small barely-furnished office overlooking the landing-field, and in the face that was bending over him he recognized the round pink countenance of Chief Inspector Teal, of Scotland Yard.

  “Were you the author of that clout?” he demanded, rubbing the base of his skull tenderly. “I didn’t think you could be so rough.”

  “I didn’t do it,” said the detective shortly. “But we’ve got the man who did—if you want to charge him. I thought you’d have known Kate Allfield, Saint.”

  Simon looked at him.

  “What—not “the Mug?” I have heard of her, but this is the first time we’ve met. And she nearly made me smoke a sleepy cigarette!” He grimaced. “What was the idea?”

  “That’s what we’re waiting for you to tell us,” said Teal grimly. “We drove in just as they knocked you out. We know what they were after all right—the Deacon’s gang beat them to the necklace, but that wouldn’t make the Green Cross bunch give up. What I want to know is when you started working with the Deacon.”

  “This is right over my head,” said the Saint, just as bluntly. “Who is this Deacon, and who the hell are the Green Cross bunch?”

  Teal faced him calmly.

  “The Green Cross bunch are the ones that slugged you. The Deacon is the head of the gang that got away with the Palfrey jewels yesterday. He came to see you twice yesterday afternoon—we got the wire that he was planning a big job and we were keeping him under observation, but the jewels weren’t missed till this morning. Now I’ll hear what you’ve got to say, but before you begin I’d better warn you—”

  “Wait a minute.” Simon took out his cigarette-case and helped himself to a smoke. “With an unfortunate reputation like mine, I expect it’ll take me some time to drive it into your head that I don’t know a thing about the Deacon. He came to me yesterday and said he was a solicitor—he wanted me to look after a valuable sealed packet that he was sending over to Paris, and I took on the job. That’s all. He wouldn’t even tell me what was in it.”

  “Oh, yes?” The detective was dangerously polite. “Then I suppose it
’d give you the surprise of your life if I told you that that package you were carrying contained a diamond necklace valued at about eight thousand pounds?”

  “It would,” said the Saint.

  Teal turned.

  There was a plainclothes man standing guard by the door, and on the table in the middle of the room was a litter of brown paper and tissue in the midst of which gleamed a small heap of coruscating stones and shining metal. Teal put a hand to the heap of jewels and lifted it up into a streamer of iridescent fire.

  “This is it,” he said.

  “May I have a look at it?” said the Saint.

  He took the necklace from Teal’s hand and studied it closely under the light. Then he handed it back with a brief grin.

  “If you could get eighty pounds for it, you’d be lucky,” he said. “It’s a very good imitation, but I’m afraid the stones are only jargoons.”

  The detective’s eyes went wide. Then he snatched the necklace away and examined it himself.

  He turned round again slowly.

  “I’ll begin to believe you were telling the truth for once, Templar,” he said, and his manner had changed so much that the effect would have been comical without the back-handed apology. “What do you make of it?”

  “I think we’ve both been had,” said the Saint. “After what you’ve told me, I should think the Deacon knew you were watching him, and knew he’d have to get the jewels out of the country in a hurry. He could probably fence most of them quickly, but no one would touch that necklace—it’s too well known. He had the rather artistic idea of trying to get me to do the job—”

  “Then why should he give you a fake?”

  Simon shrugged.

  “Maybe that Deacon is smoother than any of us thought. My God, Teal—think of it! Suppose even all this was just a blind—for you to know he’d been to see me—for you to get after me as soon as the jewels were missed—hear I’d left for Paris—chase me to Croydon—and all the time the real necklace is slipping out by another route—”

  “God damn!” said Chief Inspector Teal, and launched himself at the telephone with surprising speed for such a portly and lethargic man.

  The plainclothes man at the door stood aside almost respectfully for the Saint to pass.

  Simon fitted his hat on rakishly and sauntered out with his old elegance. Out in the waiting room an attendant was shouting, “All Ostend and Brussels passengers, please!” And outside on the tarmac a roaring aeroplane was warming up its engines. Simon Templar suddenly changed his mind about his destination.

  “I will give you thirty thousand guilders for the necklace,” said Van Roeper, the little Jew of Amsterdam to whom the Saint went with his booty.

  “I’ll take fifty thousand,” said the Saint, and he got it.

  He fulfilled another of the qualifications of a successful buccaneer, for he never forgot a face. He had had a vague idea from the first that he had seen the Deacon somewhere before, but it had not been until that morning, when he woke up, that he had been able to place the amiable solicitor who had been so anxious to enlist his dubious services, and he felt that fortune was very kind to him.

  Old Charlie Milton, who had been dragged away from his breakfast to sell him the facsimile for eighty pounds, felt much the same.

  THE UNBLEMISHED BOOTLEGGER

  INTRODUCTION

  What is now called the Prohibition Era in the United States—sometimes, I suspect, in the sentimentally reminiscent tone of voice that is meant to make you think of “old unhappy far-off things and battles long ago”—probably gave rise to more stories per square second than any comparable epoch in history. It was not to be expected that such an intense concentration of stirring events would have left Simon Templar’s life altogether untouched. But because most of the stories that stem from this period are fundamentally so much alike, I choose this story of the Saint because it is so different. And also, I must admit, because I myself saw it develop from the beginning.

  In the first pages of the story there is quoted a letter “which had been passed on to the Saint by a chance acquaintance.”

  On reading it over now, I realise that this phrase was nothing but a convenient trick designed to eliminate a longer explanation for which at the time I didn’t think I could spare the space.

  But I remember very clearly what really happened. The place was Juan-les-Pins; the time, a sultry summer afternoon. I was paddling idly around a lake-smooth Mediterranean, in a canoe, with the man who can claim as much credit as anyone else for the fact that I have been bullied into recording so many chapters of the Saint Saga.

  He said, among various other things, “By the way, just before I left London, a fellow showed me a letter that the Saint ought to have a look at…”

  Because by occupation this man is an editor, and ever since the first Saint story he has never stopped pestering me to dig into my memory for more stories of the Saint. In fact, as you see, he will go so far as to try and initiate them. But the disgraceful thing about this case is that after it was all over—he didn’t get the story. By that time I was in the middle of a series for another editor, in which this one somehow became included.

  You might think that he could never have forgiven me for a thing like that. But he did. Possibly he had to. For in due course he himself had a lapse, which I have been able to hold over him ever since.

  Obviously I can’t give his name real name here. But that story was told in the book The Saint’s Getaway, and in it I gave him the name of “Monty Hayward.”

  —Leslie Charteris (1939)

  Mr Melford Croon considered himself a very prosperous man. The brass plate outside his unassuming suite of offices in Gray’s Inn Road described him somewhat vaguely as a “Financial Consultant,” and while it is true that the gilt-edged moguls of the City had never been known to seek his advice, there is no doubt that he flourished exceedingly.

  Out of Mr Croon’s fertile financial genius emerged, for example, the great Tin Salvage Trust. In circulars, advertisements, and statements to the Press, Mr Croon raised his literary hand in horror at the appalling waste of tin that was going on day by day throughout the country. “Tins,” of course, as understood in the ordinary domestic vocabulary to mean the sepulchres of Heinz’s 57 Varieties, the Crosse & Blackwell vegetable garden, or the Chef soup kitchen, are made of thin sheet iron with the most economical possible plating of genuine tin, but nevertheless (Mr Croon pointed out) tin was used. And what happened to it? It was thrown away. The dustman removed it along with the other contents of the dustbin, and the municipal incinerators burnt it. And tin was a precious metal—not quite so valuable as gold and platinum, but not very far behind silver. Mr Croon invited his readers to think of it. Hundreds of thousands of pounds being poured into dustbins and incinerators every day of the week from every kitchen in the land. Individually worthless “tins” which in the accumulation represented an enormous potential wealth.

  The great Tin Salvage Trust was formed with a capital of nearly a quarter of a million to deal with the problem. Barrows would collect “tins” from door to door. Rag-and-bone men would lend their services. A vast refining and smelting plant would be built to recover the pure tin. Enormous dividends would be paid. The subscribers would grow rich overnight.

  The subscribers did not grow rich overnight, but that was not Mr Croon’s fault. The Official Receiver reluctantly had to admit it, when the Trust went into liquidation eighteen months after it was formed. The regrettable capriciousness of fortune discovered and enlarged a fatal leak in the scheme; without quite knowing how it all happened, a couple of dazed promoters found themselves listening to sentences of penal servitude, and the creditors were glad to accept one shilling in the pound. Mr Croon was overcome with grief—he said so in public—but he could not possibly be blamed for the failure. He had no connexion whatever with the Trust, except as Financial Consultant—a post for which he received a merely nominal salary. It was all very sad.

  In simil
ar circumstances, Mr Croon was overcome with grief at the failures of the great Rubber Waste Products Corporation, the Iron Workers’ Benevolent Guild, the Small Investors’ Co-operative Bank, and the Universal Albion Film Company. He had a hard and unprofitable life, and if his mansion flat in Hampstead, his Rolls-Royce, his shoot in Scotland, his racing stud, and his house at Marlow helped to console him, it is quite certain that he needed them.

  “A very suitable specimen for us to study,” said Simon Templar.

  The latest product of Mr Croon’s indomitable inventiveness was spread out on his knee. It took the form of a very artistically typewritten letter, which had been passed on to the Saint by a chance acquaintance.

  Dear Sir,

  As you cannot fail to be aware, a state of Prohibition exists at present in the United States of America. This has led to a highly profitable trade in the forbidden alcoholic drinks between countries not so affected and the United States.

  A considerable difference of opinion exists as to whether this traffic is morally justified. There can be no question, however, that from the standpoint of this country it cannot be legally attacked, nor that the profits, in proportion to the risk, are exceptionally attractive.

  If you should desire further information on the subject, I shall be pleased to supply it at the above address.

  Yours faithfully,

  Melford Croon

  Simon Templar called on Mr Croon one morning by appointment, and the name he gave was not his own. He found Mr Croon to be a portly and rather pale-faced man, with the flowing iron-grey mane of an impresario, and the information he gave—after a few particularly shrewd inquiries about his visitor’s status and occupation—was very much what the Saint had expected.

  “A friend of mine,” said Mr Croon—he never claimed personally to be the author of the schemes on which he gave Financial Consultations—“a friend of mine is interested in sending a cargo of wines and spirits to America. Naturally, the expenses are somewhat heavy. He has to charter a ship, engage a crew, purchase the cargo, and arrange to dispose of it on the other side. While he would prefer to find the whole of the money—and, of course, reap all the reward—he is unfortunately left short of about two thousand pounds.”