Brighter Buccaneer (23 page)

“Two thousand one-pound notes are quite a lot to put in your pocket,” he remarked. “I’ll make them up into a parcel for you.”

Under Mr. Tombs’s yearning eyes he flipped off the four top bundles from the pile and tossed them one by one into his guest’s lap. Mr. Tombs grabbed them and examined them hungrily, spraying the edges of each pack off his thumb so that pound notes whirred before his vision like the pictures on a toy cinematograph.

“You can count them if you like-there ought to be five hundred in each pack,” said Benny; but Mr. Tombs shook his head.

“I’ll take your word for it, Mr. Lucek. I can see they’re all one-pound notes, and there must be a lot of them.”

Benny smiled and held out his hand with a businesslike air. Mr. Tombs passed the bundles back to him, and Benny sat down again and arranged them in a neat cube on top of a sheet of brown paper. He turned the paper over the top and creased it down at the open ends with a rapid efficiency that would have done credit to any professional shop assistant; and Mr. Tombs’s covetous eyes watched every movement with the intentness of a dumb but earnest audience trying to spot how a conjuring trick is done.

“Don’t you think it would be a ghastly tragedy for a poor widow who put all her savings into these notes and then found that she had been-um-deceived?” said Mr. Tombs morbidly; and Benny’s dark eyes switched up to his face in sudden startlement.

“Eh?” said Benny. “What’s that?”

But Mr. Tombs’s careworn face had the innocence of a patient sheep’s.

“Just something I was thinking, Mr. Lucek,” he said.

Benny grinned his expansive display of pearly teeth, and continued with his packing. Mr. Tombs’s gaze continued to concentrate on him with an almost mesmeric effect; but Benny was not disturbed. He had spent nearly an hour that morning making and testing his preparations. The upper sash-cords of the window behind Mr. Tombs’s chair had been cut through all but the last thread, and the weight of the sash was carried on a small steel peg driven into the frame. From the steel peg a thin but very strong dark-coloured string ran down to the floor, pulleyed round a nail driven into the base of the wainscoting, and disappeared under the carpet; it pulleyed round another nail driven into the floor under the table, and came up through a hole in the carpet alongside one leg to loop conveniently over the handle of the drawer.

Benny completed the knots around his parcel, and searched around for something to trim off the loose ends.

“There you are, Mr. Tombs,” he said and then, in his fumbling, he caught the convenient loop of string and tugged at it. The window fell with a crash.

And Mr. Tombs did not look around.

It was the most flabbergasting thing that had ever happened in Benny Lucek’s experience. It was supernatural-incredible. It was a phenomenon so astounding that Benny’s mouth fell open involuntarily, while a balloon of incredulous stupefaction bulged up in the pit of his stomach and cramped his lungs. There came over him the feeling of preposterous injury that would have assailed a practised bus-jumper who, preparing to board a moving bus as it came by, saw it evade him by rising vertically into the air and soaring away over the housetops. It was simply one of the things that did not happen.

And on this fantastic occasion it happened. In the half-opened drawer that pressed against Benny’s tummy, just below the level of the table and out of range of Mr. Tombs’s glassy stare, was another brown paper parcel exactly similar in every respect to the one which Benny was finishing off. Outwardly, that is. Inside, there was a difference; for whereas inside the parcel which Benny had prepared before Mr. Tombs’s eyes there were undoubtedly two thousand authentic one-pound notes, inside the second parcel there was only a collection of old newspapers and magazines cut to precisely the same size. And never before in Benny’s career, once the fish had taken the hook, had those two parcels failed to be successfully exchanged. That was what the providentially falling window was arranged for, and it constituted the whole simple secret of the green goods game. The victim, when he got home and opened the parcel and discovered how he had been swindled, could not make a complaint to the police without admitting that he himself had been ready to aid and abet a fraud; and forty-nine times out of fifty he would decide that it was better to stand the loss and keep quiet about it. Elementary, but effective. And yet the whole structure could be scuppered by the unbelievable apathy of a victim who failed to react to the stimulus of a loud bang as any normal human being should have reacted.

“The-the window seems to have fallen down,” Benny pointed out hoarsely; and felt like a hero of a melodrama who has just shot the villain in the appointed place at the end of the third act, and sees him smilingly declining to fall down and die according to the rehearsed script.

“Yes,” agreed Mr. Tombs cordially. “I heard it.”

“The-the sash-cords must have broken.”

“Probably that’s what it was.”

“Funny thing to happen so-so suddenly, wasn’t it?”

“Very funny,” assented Mr. Tombs, keeping up the conversation politely.

Benny began to sweat. The substitute parcel was within six inches of his hovering hands: given only two seconds with the rapt stare of those unblinking eyes diverted from him, he could have rung the changes as easily as unbuttoning his shirt; but the chance was not given. It was an impasse that he had never even dreamed of, and the necessity of thinking up something to cope with it on the spur of the moment stampeded him to the borders of panic.

“Have you got a knife?” asked Benny, with perspiring heartiness. “Something to cut off this end of string?”

“Let me break it for you,” said Mr. Tombs.

He stood up and moved towards the table; and Benny shied like a horse.

“Don’t bother, please, Mr. Tombs,” he gulped. “I’ll-I’ll —”

“No trouble at all,” said Mr. Tombs.

Benny grabbed the parcel, and dropped it. He was a very fine strategist and dramatic reciter, but he was not a man of violence-otherwise he might have been tempted to act differently. That grab and drop was the last artifice he could think of to save the day.

He pushed his chair back and bent down, groping for the fallen parcel with one hand and the substitute parcel with the other. In raising the fallen packet past the table the exchange might be made.

His left hand found the parcel on the floor. His right hand went on groping. It ran up and down the drawer, sensitively at first, then frantically. It plunged backwards and forwards. His fingernails scrabbled on the wood … He became aware that he couldn’t stay in that position indefinitely, and began to straighten up slowly, with a cold sensation closing on his heart. And as his eyes came up to the level of the drawer he saw that the dummy parcel had somehow got pushed right away to the back: for all the use it would have been to him there it might have been in the middle of the Arizona desert.

Mr. Tombs smiled blandly.

“It’s quite easy, really,” he said.

He took the parcel from Benny’s nerveless hand, put it on the table, twisted the loose end of string round his forefinger, and jerked. It snapped off clean and short.

“A little trick of mine,” said Mr. Tombs chattily. He picked up the parcel and held out his hand. “Well, Mr. Lucek, you must know how grateful I am. You mustn’t let me keep you any longer from your-um-widow. Good-bye, Mr. Lucek.”

He wrung Benny Lucek’s limp fingers effusively, and retired towards the door. There was something almost sprightly in his gait, a twinkle in his blue eyes that had certainly not been there before, a seraphic benevolence about his smile that made Benny go hot and cold. It didn’t belong to Mr. Tombs of the insurance office …

“Hey-just a minute,” gasped Benny; but the door had closed. Benny jumped up, panting. “Hey, you —”

He flung open the door, and looked into the cherubic pink fullmoon face of a very large gentleman in a superfluous overcoat and a bowler hat who stood on the threshold.

“Morning, Mr. Lucek,” said the large gentleman sedately. “May I come in?”

He took the permission for granted, and advanced into the sitting-room. The parcel on the table attracted his attention first, and he took up a couple of bundles from the stack and looked them over. Only the top notes in each bundle were genuine pound notes, as the four whole bundles which departed with Mr. Tombs had been: the rest of the thickness was made up with sheets of paper cut to the same size.

“Very interesting,” remarked the large gentleman.

“Who the devil are you?” blustered Benny; and the round rosy face turned to him with a very sudden and authoritative directness.

“I am Chief Inspector Teal, of Scotland Yard, and I have information that you are in possession of quantities of forged banknotes.”

Benny drew breath again hesitatingly.

“That’s absurd, Mr. Teal. You won’t find any phoney stuff here,” he said; and then the detective’s cherubic gaze fell on the sheaf of five-pound notes that Mr. Tombs had left behind in payment.

He picked them up and examined them casually, one by one.

“H’m-and not very good forgeries, either,” he said, and called to the sergeant who was waiting in the corridor outside.

1. The Blind Spot
   

IT is rather trite to remark that the greatest and sublimest characters always have concealed in them somewhere a speck of human jelly that wobbles furtively behind the imposing armour-plate, as if Nature’s sense of proportion refused to tolerate such a thing as a perfect superman. Achilles had his heel. The hard-boiled hoodlum weeps openly to the strains of a syncopated Mammy song. The learned judge gravely inquires: “What is a gooseberry?” The Cabinet Minister prances pontificalty about the badminton court. The professor of theology knows the Saint Saga as well as the Epistle to the Ephesians. These things are familiar to every student of the popular newspapers.

But to Simon Templar they were more than mere curious facts, to be ranked with “Believe-it-or-not” strips or popular articles describing the architectural principles of the igloo. They were the very practical psychology of his profession.

“Every man on earth has at least one blind spot somewhere,” Simon used to say, “and once you’ve found that spot you’ve got him. There’s always some simple little thing that’ll undermine his resistance, or some simple little trick that he’s never heard of. A high-class card-sharper might never persuade him to play bridge for more than a penny a hundred, and yet a three-card man at a race track might take a fiver off him in five minutes. Develop that into a complete technique, and you can live in luxury without running any risks of getting brain fever.”

One of Simon Templar’s minor weaknesses was an insatiable curiosity. He met Patricia at Charing Cross underground station one afternoon with a small brown bottle.

“A man at the Irving Statue sold me this for a shilling,” he said.

The broad reach of pavement around the Irving Statue, at the junction of Green Street and Charing Cross Road, is one of the greatest open-air theatres in London. Every day, at lunchtime, idle crowds gather there in circles around the performers on the day’s bill, who carry on their work simultaneously like a three-ring circus. There is the Anti-Socialist tub-thumper, the numerologist, the strong man, the Indian selling outfits to enable you to do the three-card trick in your own home, the handcuff escape king, the patent medicine salesman, every kind of huckster and street showman takes up his pitch there on one day or another and holds his audience spellbound until the time comes for passing the hat. Simon rarely passed there without pausing to inspect the day’s offerings, but this was the first occasion on which he had been a buyer.

His bottle appeared to contain a colourless fluid like water, with a slight sediment of brownish particles.

“What is it?” asked Patricia.

“Chromium plating for the home,” he said. “The greatest invention of the century-according to the salesman. Claimed to be the same outfit sold by mail-order firms for three bob. He was demonstrating it on a brass shell-case and old brass doorknobs and what not, and it looked swell. Here, I’ll show you.”

He fished a penny out of his pocket, uncorked the bottle, and poured a drop of the liquid on to the coin. The tarnished copper cleared and silvered itself under her eyes, and when he rubbed it with his handkerchief it took a silvery polish like stainless steel.

“Boy, that’s marvellous!” breathed Patricia dreamily. “You know that military sort of coat of mine, the one with the brass buttons? We were wanting to get them chromed —”

The Saint sighed.

“And that,” he said, “is approximately what the cave woman thought of first when her battle-scarred Man dragged home a vanquished leopard. My darling, when will you realize that we are first and foremost a business organization?”

But at that moment he had no clear idea of the profitable purposes to which his purchase might be put. The Saint had an instinct and a collecting passion for facts and gadgets that “might come in useful,” but at the times when he acquired them he could rarely have told you what use they were ever likely to be.

He corked the bottle and put it away in his pocket. The train they were waiting for was signalled, and the rumble of its approach could be felt underfoot. Down in the blackness of the tunnel its lights swept round a bend and drove towards the platform; and it was quite by chance that the Saint’s wandering glance flickered over the shabbily-dressed elderly man who waited a yard away on his left, and fixed on him with a sudden razor-edged intentness that was more intuitive than logical. Or perhaps the elderly man’s agitation was too transparent to be ordinary, his eyes too strained and haggard to be reassuring… . Simon didn’t know.

The leading draught of the train fanned on his face, and then the elderly man clenched his fists and jumped. A woman screamed.

“You blithering idiot!” snapped the Saint, and jumped also.

His feet touched down neatly inside the track. By some brilliant fluke the shabby man’s blind leap had missed the live rail, and he was simply cowering where he had landed with one arm covering his eyes. The train was hardly more than a yard away when the Saint picked him up and heaved him back on to the platform, flinging himself off the line in the opposite direction as he did so. The train whisked so close to him that it brushed his sleeve, and squeaked to a standstill with hissing brakes.