Brighter Buccaneer (11 page)

“Say, that’s easy. It’s got a little Chinese dedication carved in the base and filled with red paint. I don’t know any language except plain English, but this daughter’s name comes in the dedication and I got a Chink to show me what it looked like- Gosh, is that cigar sour or something?”

“No-it’s a swell cigar. Would you mind showing me what this name looks like?”

The other’s eyes opened rather blankly, but he took out a pencil and sketched a character on the back of the envelope.

“There she is, friend. Say, you’re looking at me like I was a mummy come to life. What’s the matter?”

The Saint filled his lungs. For him, the day had suddenly bloomed out into a rich surpassing beauty that only those who have shared his delight in damaging the careers of pompous old sinners with bushy grey face-hair can understand. The radiance of his own inspiration dazzled him.

“Nothing’s the matter,” he said seraphically. “Nothing on earth could be the matter on a day like this. How many millions will your Mr. Froussard give for that Buddha?”

“Well, millions is a large word,” said Amberson, cautiously, looking at the Saint in not unreasonable perplexity. “But I guess I could pay fifteen thousand bucks for it.”

“You find the bucks, and I’ll find your Buddha,” said the Saint.

Amberson grinned, and stood up.

“I don’t know whether you’ve got an ace in the hole or whether you’re just pulling my leg,” he remarked; “but if you can find that Buddha the fifteen grand are waitin’ for you. Say, I’m real grateful to you for helpin’ me out like this. Come to the Savoy and have lunch tomorrow-and you can bring the Buddha with you, if you’ve found it.”

“Thanks,” said the Saint. “I’ll do both.”

He showed Amberson to the door, and came straight back to grab the telephone. Sir Ambrose Grange was out, he was informed, but he was expected back about six. Simon bought his evening paper, found that the favourite had won-he never backed favourites-and was at the telephone again, when the hour struck.

“I’m taking you at your word and coming over to see you, Sir Ambrose.”

“Delighted, my dear sir,” said the knight, somewhat plaintively. “But if you’d told me I could have got hold of some girls —”

“Never mind the girls,” said Simon.

He arrived at the lodgings in Seymour Street where Sir Ambrose maintained his modest bachelor pied-a-terre half an hour later, and plunged into his business without preliminaries.

“I’ve come to buy your Buddha,” he said. “Two thousand was what your uncle wanted, wasn’t it?”

Sir Ambrose goggled at him for some seconds; and then he laughed feebly.

“Ho, ho, ho! I bought that one, didn’t I, by gad! Getting a bit slow on the uptake, what? Never mind, sir-have a drink.”

“I’m not being comic,” said the Saint. “I want your Buddha and I’ll give you two thousand for it. I backed sixteen losers last week, and if I don’t get a good mascot I shall be in the bankruptcy court.”

After several minutes he was able to convince Sir Ambrose that his lunacy, if inexplicable, was backed up by a ready chequebook. He wrote the figures with a flourish, and Sir Ambrose found himself fumbling for a piece of paper and a stamp to make out the receipt.

Simon read the document through-it was typical.

Received from Mr. Simon Templar, by cheque, the sum of Two Thousand Pounds, being payment for a Brass Buddha which he knows is only worth fifteen shillings.

Ambrose Grange.

“Just to prove I knew what I was doing? I expected that.”

Sir Ambrose looked at him suspiciously.

“I wish I knew what you wanted that thing for,” he said. “Even my uncle only wanted us to get a thousand for it, but I thought I’d double it for luck. Two thousand couldn’t be much more impossible than one.” He heaved with chin-quivering mirth. “Well, my dear sir, if you can make a profit on two thousand, I shan’t complain. Ho, ho, ho, ho! Have a drink.”

“Sometimes,” said the Saint quite affably, “I wonder why there’s no law classifying men like you as vermin, and authorizing you to be sprayed with DDT on sight.”

He routed out Peter Quentin before going home that night, and uttered the same philosophy to him-even more affably. The brass Buddha sat on a table beside his bed when he turned in, and he blew it a kiss before he switched out the light and sank into the dreamless sleep of a contented corsair.

He paraded at the Savoy at twelve-thirty the next day.

At two o’clock Patricia Holm found him in the grill room.

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.

1. 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.