11 The Brighter Buccaneer Page 9

  Simon beckoned the waiter who had just poured out his coffee, and asked for another cup.

  "Well," he said, "where's Peter?"

  "His girl friend stopped in a shop window to look at some stockings, so I came on." Her eyebrows were faintly question­ing. "I thought you were lunching with that American."

  Simon dropped two lumps of sugar into his cup and stirred it lugubriously.

  "Pat," he said, "you may put this down in your notes for our textbook on Crime-the perfect confidence trick, Version Two. Let me tell you about it."

  She lighted a cigarette slowly, staring at him.

  "The Mug," said the Saint deliberately, "meets an Unpleas­ant Man. The Unpleasant Man purposely makes himself out to be so sharp that no normally healthy Mug could resist the temptation to do him down if the opportunity arose; and he may credit himself with a title just to remove all suspicion. The Unpleasant Man has something to sell-it might be a brass Buddha, valued at fifteen shillings, for which he's got to realize some fantastic sum like two thousand quid under the terms of an eccentric will. The Mug admits that the problem is difficult, and passes out into the night."

  Simon annexed Patricia's cigarette, and inhaled from it.

  "Shortly afterwards," he said, "the Mug meets the Nice American who is looking for a very special brass Buddha val­ued at fifteen thousand bucks. The nice American gives away certain information which allows the Mug to perceive, beyond all possible doubt, that this rare and special Buddha is the very one for which the Unpleasant Man was trying to get what he thought was the fantastic price of two thousand quid. The Mug, therefore, with the whole works taken right down into his stomach-hook, line and sinker-dashes around to the Un­pleasant Man and gives him his two thousand quid. And he endorses a receipt saying he knows it's only worth fifteen bob, so that the Unpleasant Man can prove himself innocent of deception. Then the Mug goes to meet the Nice American and collect his profit . . . And, Pat, I regret to say that he pays for his own lunch."

  The Saint gazed sadly at the folded bill which a waiter had just placed on the table.

  Patricia was wide-eyed.

  "Simon! Did you --"

  "I did. I paid two thousand quid of our hard-won boodle to the perambulating sausage --"

  He broke off, with his own jaw sinking.

  James G. Amberson was flying across the room, with his Panama hat waving in his hand and his spectacles gleaming. He flung himself into a chair at the Saint's table.

  "Say, did you think I was dead? My watch musta stopped while I was huntin' through junk stores in Limehouse-I saw the clock outa the taxi window as 1 was comin' back, and al­most had a heart attack. Gosh, I'm sorry!"

  "That's all right," murmured the Saint. "Pat, you haven't met Mr. Amberson. This is our Nice American. James G.-Miss Patricia Holm."

  "Say, I'm real pleased to meet you, Miss Holm. Guess Mr. Templar told you how I fainted in his arms yesterday." Am­berson reached over and wrung the girl's hand heartily. "Well, Mr. Templar, if you've had lunch you can have a liqueur," He waved to a waiter. "And, say, did you find me that Buddha?"

  Simon bent down and hauled a small parcel out from under the table.

  "This is it."

  Amberson gaped at the package for a second; and then he grabbed it and tore it open. He gaped again at the contents- then at the Saint.

  "Well, I'm a son of a-Excuse me, Miss Holm, but --"

  "Is that right?" asked the Saint.

  "I'll say it is!" Amberson was fondling the image as if it were his own long-lost child. "What did I promise you? Fifteen thousand berries?"

  He pulled out his wallet and spilled American bills on to the table.

  "Fifteen grand it is, Mr. Templar. And I guess I'm grateful. Mind if I leave you now? I gotta get on the transatlantic phone to Lou Froussard and tell him, and then I gotta rush this little precious into a safe deposit. Say, let me ring you up and invite you to a real dinner next week."

  He shook hands again, violently, with Patricia and the Saint, caught up his Panama, and vomited out of the room again like a human whirligig.

  In the vestibule a podgy and pompous little man with bushy moustachios was waiting for him. He seized James G. Amberson by the arm. "Did you get it, Jim?"

  "You bet I did!" Amberson exhibited his purchase. His excessively American speech had disappeared. "And now d'you mind telling me why we've bought it! I'm just packing up for our getaway when you rush me over here to spend fifteen thousand dollars --"

  "I'll tell you how it was, Jim," said the other rapidly. "I'm sitting on top of a bus, and there's a man and a girl in front of me. The first thing I heard was 'Twenty thousand pounds' worth of black pearls in a brass Buddha.' I just had to listen. This chap seemed to be a solicitor's clerk, and he was telling his girl about an old miser who shoved these pearls into a brass Buddha after his wife had died, and nobody found the letter where he said what he'd done till long after he was buried. 'And we've got to try and trace the thing,' says this young chap. 'It was sold to a junk dealer with a lot of other stuff, and heaven knows where it may be now.' 'How d'you know you've got it when you find it?" says the girl. 'Easy,' says this chap. 'It's got a mark on it like this." He drew it on his paper, and I nearly broke my neck getting a look. Come on, now-let's get it home and open it."

  "I hope Ambrose and James G. are having lots of fun looking for your black pearls, Peter," drawled the Saint piously, as he stood at the counter of Thomas Cook and watched American bills translating themselves into English bank notes with a fluency that was all the heart could desire.

  The Perfect Crime

  "THE defendants," said Mr. Justice Goldie, with evident dis­taste, "have been unable to prove that the agreement between the plantiff and the late Alfred Green constituted a money-lending transaction within the limits of the Act; and I am therefore obliged to give judgment for the plantiff. I will con­sider the question of costs tomorrow."

  The Saint tapped Peter Quentin on the shoulder as the court rose, and they slipped out ahead of the scanty assembly of spectators, bored reporters, dawdling solicitors, and tradi­tionally learned counsel. Simon Templar had sat in that stuffy little room for two hours, bruising his marrowbones on an astonishingly hard wooden bench and yearning for a cigarette; but there were times when he could endure many discomforts in a good cause.

  Outside, he caught Peter's arm.

  "Mind if I take another look at our plantiff?" he said. "Just over here-stand in front of me. I want to see what a snurge like that really looks like."

  They stood in a gloomy corner near the door of the court, and Simon sheltered behind Peter Quentin's hefty frame and watched James Deever come out with his solicitor.

  It is possible that Mr. Deever's mother loved him. Perhaps, holding him on her knee, she saw in his childish face the fulfilment of all those precious hopes and shy incommunicable dreams which (if we can believe the Little Mothers' Weekly) are the joy and comfort of the prospective parent. History does not tell us that. But we do know that since her death, thirty years ago, no other bosom had ever opened to him with any­thing like that sublime mingling of pride and affection.

  He was a long cadaverous man with a face like a vulture and shaggy white eyebrows over closely-set greenish eyes. His thin nose swooped low down over a thin gash of a mouth, and his chin was pointed and protruding. In no respect whatsoever was it the kind of countenance to which children take an instinc­tive shine. Grown men and women, who knew him, liked him even less.

  His home and business address were in Manchester; but the City Corporation had never been heard to boast about it. Si­mon Templar watched him walk slowly past, discussing some point in the case he had just won with the air of a parson con­ferring with a churchwarden after matins, and the reeking hypocrisy of the performance filled him with an almost irre­sistible desire to catch Mr. Deever's frock-coated stern with the toe of his shoe and start him on one sudden magnificent flight to the foot of the stairs. The Manchester City Corporation, Simon
considered, could probably have kept their ends up without Mr. Deever's name on the roll of ratepayers. But the Saint restrained himself, and went on peaceably with Peter Quentin five minutes afterwards.

  "Let us drink some Old Curio," said the Saint.

  They entered a convenient tavern, lighting cigarettes as they went, and found a secluded corner in the saloon bar. The court had sat on late, and the hour had struck at which it is lawful for Englishmen to consume the refreshment which can only be bought at any time of the day in uncivilised foreign countries.

  And for a few minutes there was silence . . .

  "It's wonderful what you can do with the full sanction of the law," Peter Quentin said presently, in a rather sourly reflective tone; and the Saint smiled at him wryly. He knew that Peter was not thinking about the more obvious inanities of the English licensing laws.

  "I rather wanted to get a good close-up of James, and watch him in action," he said. "I guess all the stories are true."

  There were several stories about James Deever; but none of them ever found their way into print-for libel actions mean heavy damages, and Mr. Deever sailed very comfortably within the law. His business was plainly and publicly that of a money­lender, and as a money-lender he was duly and legally reg­istered according to the Act which had done so much to bring the profession of usury within certain humane restrictions.

  And as a plain and registered money-lender Mr. Deever retained his offices in Manchester, superintending every detail of his business in person, trusting nobody, sending out beauti­fully-worded circulars in which he proclaimed his readiness to lend anybody any sum from Ł10 to Ł50,000 on note of hand alone, and growing many times richer than the Saint thought anyone but himself had any right to be. Nevertheless, Mr. Deever's business would probably have escaped the Saint's attentions if those few facts had covered the whole general principle of it.

  They didn't. Mr. Deever, who, in spite of the tenor of his artistically-printed circulars, was not in the money-lending business on account of any urge to go down to mythology as the little fairy godmother of Manchester, had devised half a dozen ingenious and strictly legal methods of evading the lim­itations placed on him by the Act. The prospective borrower who came to him, full of faith and hope, for the loan of Ł10 to Ł50,000 was frequently accommodated-not, one must admit, on his note of hand alone, but eventually on the basis of some very sound security. And if the loan were promptly repaid, there the matter ended-at the statutory rate of interest for such transactions. It was only when the borrower found him­self in further difficulties that Mr. Deever's ingenious schemes came into operation. It was then that the victim found himself straying little by little into a maze of complicated mortgages, discounted checks, "nominal" promissory notes, mysterious "conversions," and technically-worded transfers-straying into that labyrinth so gradually at first that it all seemed quite harmless, slipping deeper into it over an easy path of documents and signatures, floundering about in it at last and losing his bearings more and more hopelessly in his struggles to climb back-finally awakening to the haggard realisation that by some incomprehensible jugglery of papers and figures he owed Mr. Deever five or six times as much money as Mr. Deever had given him in cash, and having it proved to him over his own signature that there was no question of the statutory rate of interest having been exceeded at any time.

  Exactly thus had it been proved to the widow of a certain victim in the case that they had listened to that afternoon; and there were other similar cases that had come to the Saint's receptive knowledge.

  "There were days," remarked the Saint, rather wistfully, "when some lads of the village and I would have carved Brother Deever into small pieces and baited lobster-pots with him from the North Foreland to the Lizard."

  "And what now?" queried Peter Quentin.

  "Now," said the Saint, regretfully, "we can only call on him for a large involuntary contribution to our Pension Fund for Deserving Outlaws."

  Peter lowered the first quarter of his second highball.

  "It'll have to be something pretty smart to catch that bird," he said. "If you asked me, I should say you couldn't take any story to him that wouldn't have to pass under a microscope."

  "For which reason," murmured Simon Templar, with the utmost gravity, "I shall go to him with a story that is abso­lutely true. I shall approach him with a hook and line that the cleverest detective on earth couldn't criticise. You're right, Peter-there probably isn't a swindle in the encyclopedia that would get a yard past Brother James.

  "It's a good thing we aren't criminals, Pete-we might get our fingers burned. No, laddie. Full of righteousness and good Scotch, we shall draw nigh to Brother James with our haloes fairly glistening. It was just for a man like him that I was sav­ing up my Perfect Crime."

  If the Saint's halo was not actually visibly luminous when he called at Mr. Deever's offices the next morning, he at least looked remarkably harmless. A white flower ("for purity," said the Saint) started in his button-hole and flowed in all direc­tions over his coat lapel; a monocle was screwed into his right eye; his hat sat precariously on the back of his head; and his face was relaxed into an expression of such amiably aristo­cratic idiocy that Mr. Deever's chief clerk-a man hardly less sour-visaged than Mr. Deever himself-was even more ob­sequious than usual.

  Simon said he wanted a hundred pounds, and would cheer­fully give a jolly old note of hand for it if some Johnnie would explain to him what a jolly old note of hand was. The clerk explained, oleaginously, that a jolly old note of hand was a somewhat peculiar sort of thing that sounded nice in adver­tisements, but wasn't really used with important clients. Had Mr.-er-Smith? had Mr. Smith any other kind of security?

  "I've got some jolly old premium bonds," said the Saint; and the clerk nodded his head in a perfect sea of oil.

  "If you can wait a moment, sir, perhaps Mr. Deever will see you himself."

  The Saint had no doubt that Mr. Deever would see him. He waited around patiently for a few minutes, and was ushered into Mr. Deever's private sanctum.

  "You see, I lost a bally packet at Derby yesterday-every blinkin' horse fell down dead when I backed it. I work a sys­tem, but of course you can't back a winner every day. I know I'll get it back, though-the chappie who sold me the system said it never let him down."

  Mr. Deever's eyes gleamed. If there was anything that satisfied every one of his requirements for a successful loan, it was an asinine young man with a monocle who believed in racing systems.

  "I believe you mentioned some security, Mr.-er-Smith. Naturally we should be happy to lend you a hundred pounds without any formalities, but --"

  "Oh, I've got these jolly old bonds. I don't want to sell 'em, because they're having a draw this month. If you hold the lucky number you get a fat bonus. Sort of lottery business, but quite gilt-edged an' all that sort of thing."

  He produced a large envelope, and passed it across Mr. Deever's desk. Deever extracted a bunch of expensively water­marked papers artistically engraved with green and gold letter­ing which proclaimed them to be Latvian 1929 Premium Loan (British Series) Bonds, value Ł25 each.

  The financier crunched them between his fingers, squinted at the ornate characters suspiciously through a magnifiying glass, and looked again at the Saint.

  "Of course, Mr. Smith, we don't keep large sums of money on the premises. But if you like to leave these bonds with me until, say, two o'clock this afternoon, I'm sure we can make a satisfactory arrangement."

  "Keep 'em by every manner of means, old bean," said the Saint airily. "So long as I get the jolly old quidlets in time to take 'em down to the three-thirty today, you're welcome."

  Conveniently enough, this happened to be the first day of the Manchester September meeting. Simon Templar paraded again at two o'clock, collected his hundred pounds, and re­joined Peter Quentin at their hotel.

  "I have a hundred pounds of Brother James's money," he announced. "Let's go and spread it around on the most frantic outsiders we ca
n find."

  They went to the races, and it so happened that the Saint's luck was in. He had doubled Mr. Deever's hundred pounds when the result of the last race went up on the board-but Mr. Deever would not have been seriously troubled if he had lost the lot. Five hundred pounds' worth of Latvian Bearer Bonds had been deposited as security for the advance, and in spite of the artistic engraving on them there was no doubt that they were genuine. The interval between Simon Templar's visit to Mr. Deever in the morning and the time when the money was actually paid over to him had been devoted to an expert scru­tiny of the bonds, coupled with inquiries at Mr. Deever's brokers, which had definitely established their authenticity- and the Saint knew it.

  "I wonder," Simon Templar was saying as they drove back into the town, "if there's any place here where you could buy a false beard. With all this money in our pockets, why should you wait for Nature to grow it?"

  Nevertheless, it was not with the air of a man who has col­lected a hundred pounds over a couple of well-chosen winners that the Saint came to Mr. Deever the next day. It was Satur­day, but that meant nothing to Mr. Deever. He was a man who kept only the barest minimum of holidays and much good business might be done with temporarily embarrassed members of the racing fraternity on the second day of the meeting.

  It appeared very likely on this occasion.

  "I don't know how the horse managed to lose," said the Saint mournfully.

  "Dear me!" said Mr. Deever unctuously. "Dear me! Did it lose?"

  The Saint nodded.

  "I don't understand it at all. The chappie who sold me this system said it had never had more than three losers in succession. And the stakes go up so frightfully fast. You see, you have to put on more money each time, so that when you win you get back your losses as well. But it simply must win today --"

  "How much do you need to put on today, Mr. Smith?"

  "About eight hundred pounds. But what with buzzing around an' having a few drinks and what not, don't you know -if you could make it an even thou --"

  Mr. Deever rubbed his hands over each other with a face of abysmal gloom.