The Saint Bids Diamonds (The Saint Series) Page 3

  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 records, 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 somehow 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 anymore.”

  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. 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 nicked it up.”

  “You picked it up?”

  He grinned shamelessly.

  “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.”

  “And now they want to replace him.”

  She nodded again.

  “That’s what Graner called it. We thought we might go away, somewhere like South America, where nobody would know us and we could live and be happy. But I knew we couldn’t. Graner never meant us to. So long as Joris was working for them, it was all right. But they couldn’t let him go with all that he knew. He’d never have said anything, but they couldn’t be sure of that. I knew they’d never let him go alive. They meant to kill him…Oh, Joris!”

  Her arms tightened convulsively about the old man’s frail shoulders, and the Saint saw her eyes shining again.

  “Is that what they were trying to do when I butted in?” he asked doubtfully. “It didn’t look quite like that to me. After all, they could have shot him in the first place, instead of keeping their guns in their pockets till we were driving away.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if they meant to kill him then—”

  “But if they never let him have any money, you couldn’t have got very far.”

  She looked at him with her lip quivering, and again he saw that oddly watchful uncertainty creep into her gaze. He knew at once that she was weighing her answer, and knew also that she was going to lie.

  Then he happened to glance at the old man. Joris Vanlinden had sunk back into such a stillness, and for a time they had been so carried away by other things, that they had not been noticing him. But now Simon saw that the old man’s eyes had opened, quite quietly, as if he had a
wakened out of a deep sleep.

  Simon touched the girl’s arm.

  “Look,” he said.

  He stood up and went to pour some more whiskey, and Mr Uniatz watched the performance wistfully, chewing the extinct butt of his cigar. The greater part of the dialogue had passed harmlessly over Mr Uniatz’s head, which was only equipped to assimilate short and simple speeches very carefully addressed to him in the more common words of one syllable, and he had long ago started to flounder out of his depth and eventually given up the effort, seeing no reason to exhaust himself with agonising mental labour when, in the fulness of time, everything that it was good for him to know would be duly explained to him by the Saint. Besides, there was a much more urgent problem which had been occupying all his attention for some time.

  “Boss,” said Mr Uniatz plaintively, as if pointing out an incomprehensible oversight, “ya left a toid of de bottle.”

  “Okay,” said the Saint resignedly. “You find a home for it.”

  He went back to the bedside. The old man was touching the girl’s face and hair with nervously twitching fingers, speaking in a weak husky voice:

  “Where are we, Christine?…How did we get here?…What happened?”

  “It’s all right, darling. Darling, it’s all right. You’ve just got to rest.”

  The old man’s eyes went back to the Saint, and his hand clutched at the girl’s arm.

  “Who are these people, Christine? I haven’t seen them before. Who are they?”

  “Lie still, darling.” She was comforting him with a kind of motherly tenderness, as if he was a feverish child. “They won’t hurt you, Joris. They came and saved you when the others were fighting you.”

  “Yes, they were fighting. I remember. I never could fight very much. You remember, Christine—that other time? Did they hurt you, Christine?”

  “No, darling. Not a bit.”

  The old man’s eyes closed again, and for a moment he relaxed, as if the strain of talking had been too much for him. And then, suddenly, his eyes opened again.

  “Did they get it?” he asked hoarsely.

  “Hush, Joris. You must be quiet.”

  “But did they get it?”

  Vanlinden’s voice was louder, and his eyes were staring. She tried to press him back on the bed, but he flung off her hands. He began to feel in his breast pocket, unsteadily at first, and then more wildly; then he was feeling in all his pockets, turning them out again and again, in a pitiful sort of frenzy.

  “No, no,” he muttered incoherently. “Not there. No. It’s gone!” His voice rose and broke on something like a scream. “It’s gone!” He stared at the Saint. “Did you take it?”

  “Take what?” asked the Saint helplessly.

  “My ticket!”

  “Oh, a ticket. No, I haven’t seen it. D’you mean your ticket for going away from here? I shouldn’t worry about that. If you go and explain things to the shipping company or whatever it is—”

  “No, no, not that I,” Vanlinden’s voice had a despairing shrillness that made the Saint’s flesh creep. “My lottery ticket!”

  “What?”

  Christine got up suddenly from the bed. She faced the Saint like a tigress though her head barely reached his shoulder.

  “Yes,” she said fiercely. “Did you take it?”

  “Me?” said the Saint blankly. He spread out his arms. “Search me and strip me if you want to. Take me apart and put me together again. I never saw his lottery ticket in my life.”

  She swung round and pointed at Hoppy Uniatz.

  “He was sitting in the back of the car with Joris all the time. Did he take it?”

  “Did you take it, Hoppy?” snapped the Saint.

  Mr Uniatz swallowed nervously.

  “Yes, boss.”

  “You took it?” snapped the Saint incredulously.

  Hoppy gulped.

  “Yes, boss,” he said apologetically. “I t’ought ya said I could take it.” He pointed to the table. “Dey wasn’t so much in de bottle, at dat.”

  “You immortal ass!” snarled the Saint. “We aren’t talking about the whiskey!”

  He turned back to the girl.

  “Hoppy didn’t take it,” he said. “And neither did I. If you don’t believe us, you can go ahead and turn us inside out. I didn’t even know Joris had a lottery ticket. How much was it worth?”

  “You may as well know now,” she said dully. “It was a ticket in the Christmas lottery. It won the first prize—fifteen million pesetas.”

  CHAPTER TWO:

  HOW SIMON TEMPLAR CONVERSED WITH A PORTER AND A BRACE OF GUARDIAS WERE HAPPILY REUNITED

  1

  The Saint stared at her, and then stared again at Joris Vanlinden.

  He felt rather as if it was his own stomach, and not the receptacle of petrified leather which performed the same organic function for Mr Uniatz, that had absorbed the full effects of two thirds of a bottle of scotch. He knew all about the Christmas lottery, had bought tickets himself at various times, and shared the daydreams of almost every other man in Spain until the results were published. There is a Spanish national lottery three times every month, but the Navidad is the great event of the year, the time when nearly three million pounds sterling are distributed in prizes. Simon had read in the papers of men who had awakened to find themselves millionaires overnight, but he had never met one of them, and in his heart, like most other people, he could never quite convince himself that such things really did happen. The actual concrete proof of it, slapped right up in his face like that, made his head reel.

  “Did Joris have the whole ticket?” he asked, trying to ease the shock. “He didn’t just have a section?”

  The girl shook her head. His blank and stunned bewilderment was so obvious that it must have satisfied her that he had been speaking the truth.

  “No, he had it all. He must have been crazy, I suppose. I thought he was. But he said it was the only way. He saved up the little money they gave him now and again until he could buy it. And it won!”

  Simon made a rapid mental calculation.

  “Why hadn’t it been paid yet?”

  “Because we’re in Tenerife.”

  He grinned wryly, half unconsciously.

  “Of course, I’d forgotten that.”

  “The draw was on the twenty-first.” She was speaking almost mechanically, and yet with an intense sort of eagerness, as if talking kept her mind from dwelling on other things. “The results were cabled here the next day. That was when Graner cabled to Madrid…But they don’t pay on that. A few days ago they published a photographic reproduction of the official list, but they don’t pay on that either. You could get a bank to discount it—they charge two per cent commission—but I don’t suppose they could handle one of the big prizes. Otherwise you have to wait till the administration chooses to send a set of official lists here.”

  “It’s a great piece of Spanish organisation, isn’t it?” said the Saint aimlessly.

  “The lists were supposed to be coming on the boat that got in today,” she said.

  Simon gazed at her for a moment longer, and then he lighted another cigarette from the butt of his last one and began to pace restlessly up and down the room, while Hoppy watched him with a kind of dog-like complacency.

  It would be unfair to say that the primitive convolutions of what, on account of the limitations of the English language, can only be referred to as Mr Uniatz’s brain were incapable of registering more than one idea at a time. To be accurate, they were capable of registering two; although it must be admitted that one of them was a more or less habitual and unconscious background to whatever else was going on. And this permanent and pervasive background was his sublime faith in the infallibility and divine inspiration of the Saint.

  For the Saint, as Mr Uniatz had discovered, could think. He could concentrate upon problems and work them out without any perceptible signs of suffering. He could produce Ideas. He could make Plans. Mr Uniatz, a sim
ple-minded citizen, whose intellectual horizons had hitherto been bounded by the logic of automatics and sub-machine guns, had, on their first meetings, observed these supernatural manifestations with perplexity and awe. When they met again in London, some years later, Mr Uniatz, who had been ruminating hazily about it ever since, had just reached the conclusion that if he could only hitch his wagon to such a scintillating star his life would hold no more worries.

  Since it fitted in admirably with his plans at the time, Simon had let him do it. Whereupon Mr Uniatz had attached himself with a blind and unshakable allegiance from which, short of physical violence, it was impossible to pry him loose for more than a few weeks at a time. Left to himself, Hoppy would wander moodily about the earth, a spiritual Ishmael, until he could place his destiny once again in the hands of this superman, this invincible genius, who could find his way with such apparent ease through the terrifying and tormenting labyrinths of Thought. Whatever the problem in hand might be, then or at any other time, Hoppy Uniatz knew that the Saint would solve it.

  He leaned forward and tapped Christine on the shoulder.

  “It’s okay, miss,” he said encouragingly. “De boss’ll fix it. Wit’ a nut like his, he could of bin a big shot in de States.”

  “I was a big shot,” Simon retorted. “But there are limits.”

  He was beginning to get the finer details of the situation sorted out into a certain amount of order, but without making much difference to the dizzy turmoil into which his mind had been whirled. The more he thought about it, the more fantastic it became.

  For a Spanish lottery ticket is a documento del portador, a bearer bond of the most comprehensive and undiscriminating kind in the world. Short of the most elaborate and irrefutable evidence to the contrary, combined with warrants and court orders and God knows how many other formalities, the ticket itself is the only legal claim under heaven to any prize which it may draw. There are not even any counter foils to be retained by the original seller; so that, without that law, the administration of the lottery would be impossible. In other words, the piece of paper which Joris Vanlinden had lost, a folded sheet no more than seven inches long by four inches wide, with the thickness of the twenty sections into which a Navidad ticket is divided, was the strongest existing claim to a payment of fifteen million pesetas, two million dollars or four hundred thousand pounds at the most conservative rate of exchange—more than seven hundred pounds or thirty-five hundred dollars per square inch if you opened it out—one of the most compact and negotiable and untraceable concentrations of wealth that the world can ever have seen. The Saint had known boodle in almost every shape and form under the sun, had handled what everybody except himself would have called more than his fair share of it, but there was something about this new and hitherto unconsidered species of it that took his breath away.