Saint Intervenes (34 page)

“That’s
what happened, Claud,” he said with quiet triumph.
“They
gave him the gun in the box.”

“And
he shot himself without knowing what he was doing,”
Teal said
witheringly.

“That’s
just
it,”
said the Saint, with a blue devil of mockery
in his
gaze. “He didn’t know what he was doing.”

Mr. Teal’s
molars clamped down cruelly on the inoffensive
merchandise of the
Wrigley Corporation.

“Well,
what did he
think
he was doing—sitting under a
rug pretending to be a
bear?”

Simon
sighed.

“That’s
what I’m trying to work out.”

Teal’s
chair creaked as his full weight slumped back in it in
hopeless
exasperation.

“Is
that what you’ve been taking up so much of my time
about?” he asked
wearily.

“But
I’ve got an idea, Claud,” said the Saint, getting up
and
stretching himself. “Come out and lunch with me, and
let’s give
it a rest. You’ve been thinking for nearly an hour,
and I don’t want your
brain to overheat. I know a new place—
wait, I’ll look up the
address.”

He looked
it up in the telephone directory; and Mr. Teal
got up and took down
his bowler hat from its peg. His baby
blue eyes were inscrutably thoughtful,
but he followed the
Saint without thought. Whatever else the Saint wanted to
say, however
crazy he felt it must be, it was something he had
to hear or else fret
over for the rest of his days. They drove
in a taxi to
Knightsbridge, with Mr. Teal chewing phlegmatically
, in a superb
affectation of bored unconcern. Presently the
taxi stopped, and
Simon climbed out. He led the way into
an apartment building
and into a lift, saying something to the
operator which Teal
did not catch.

“What
is this?” he asked, as they shot upwards. “A new
restaurant?”

“It’s
a new place,” said the Saint vaguely.

The
elevator stopped, and they got out. They went along
the corridor, and
Simon rang the bell of one of the doors. It
was opened by a
goodlooking maid who might have been
other things in her spare time.

“Scotland
Yard,” said the Saint brazenly, and squeezed past
her. He found his way
into the sitting-room before anyone
could stop him: Chief Inspector Teal,
recovering from the
momentary paralysis of the shock, followed him: then came
the maid.

“I’m
sorry, sir—Mr. Costello is out.”

Teal’s
bulk obscured her. All the boredom had smudged
itself off his face,
giving place to blank amazement and anger.

“What
the devil’s this joke?” he blared.

“It
isn’t a joke, Claud,” said the Saint recklessly. “I just
wanted to
see if I could find something—you know what we
were talking about——
”

His keen
gaze was quartering the room; and then it lighted on a big cheap kneehole desk
whose well-worn shabbiness
looked strangely out of keeping with the
other furniture. On it
was a litter of coils and wire and ebonite and
dials—all the
junk out of which amateur wireless sets are created. Simon
reached the desk in his next stride, and began pulling open the
drawers.
Tools of all kinds, various gauges of wire and
screws, odd wheels
and sleeves and bolts and scraps of sheet-
iron and brass, the
completely typical hoard of any amateur
mechanic’s workshop.
Then he came to a drawer that was
locked. Without hesitation he caught up
a large screwdriver and rammed it in above the lock: before anyone could grasp
his intentions he had splintered the drawer open with a skil
ful twist.

Teal let
out a shout and started across the room. Simon’s
hand dived into the
drawer, came out with a nickel-plated
revolver—it was exactly the same as
the one with which
Lewis Enstone had shot himself, but Teal wasn’t noticing
things like
that. His impression was that the Saint really had
gone raving mad after
all, and the sight of the gun pulled him up for a moment as the sight of a gun
in the hands of
any other raving maniac would have pulled him up.

“Put
that down, you fool!” he yelled, and then he let out another shout as he
saw the Saint turn the muzzle of the gun
close up to his right
eye, with his thumb on the trigger, exactly
as Enstone must have
held it. Teal lurched forward and
knocked the weapon aside with a sweep
of his arm; then he
grabbed Simon by the wrist. “That’s enough of
that,” he said,
without realising what a futile thing it was
to say.

Simon
looked at him and smiled.

“Thanks
for saving my life, old beetroot,” he murmured
kindly. “But it really
wasn’t necessary. You see, Claud, that’s
the gun Enstone
thought
he was playing with!”

The maid
was under the table letting out the opening note
of a magnificent fit
of hysterics. Teal let go the Saint, hauled
her out, and shook her
till she was quiet. There were more
events cascading on him in those few
seconds than he knew
how to cope with, and he was not gentle.

“It’s
all right, miss,” he growled. “I am from Scotland Yard.
Just sit down somewhere, will
you ?” He turned back to Simon.
“Now,
what’s all this about?”

“The
gun, Claud. Enstone’s toy.”

The Saint
raised it again—his smile was quite sane, and
with the feeling that
he himself was the madman, Teal let
him do what he wanted. Simon put the
gun to his eye and
pulled the trigger—pulled it, released it, pulled it
again, keeping up the rhythmic movement. Something inside the
gun
whirred smoothly, as if wheels were whizzing round under
the working
of the lever. Then he pointed the gun straight
into Teal’s face and
did the same thing.

Teal stared
frozenly down the barrel and saw the black hole
leap into a circle of
light. He was looking at a flickering cine
matograph film of a
boy shooting a masked burglar. It was
tiny, puerile in subject, but perfect.
It lasted about ten sec
onds, and then the barrel went dark again.

“Costello’s
present for Enstone’s little boy,” explained the
Saint quietly.
“He invented it and made it himself, of course-
he always had a talent
that way. Haven’t you ever seen those
electric flashlights that work without
a battery? You keep on
squeezing a lever, and it turns a miniature
dynamo. Costello
made a very small one, and fitted it into the hollow
casting of
a gun. Then he geared a tiny strip of film to it. It was a
jolly
good new toy, Claud Eustace, and he must have been proud
of it.
They took it along to Enstone’s; and when he’d turned
down their merger and
there was nothing else for them to
do, they let him play with it just to
tickle his palate, at
just the right hour of the evening. Then they
took it away
from him and put it back in its box and gave it to him.
They
had a real gun in another box ready to make the switch.”

Chief
Inspector Teal stood like a rock, his jaws clamping
a wad of spearmint
that he had at last forgotten to chew. Then
he said: “How
did they know he wouldn’t shoot his own
son?”

“That
was Hammel. He knew that Enstone wasn’t capable
of keeping his hands
off a toy like that; and just to make cer
tain he reminded
Enstone of it the last thing before they left. He was a practical
psychologist—I suppose we can begin to speak of him in the past tense
now.” Simon Templar smiled
again, and fished a cigarette out of his
pocket. “But why I
should bother to tell you all this when you
could have got it
out of a stool pigeon,” he murmured, “is more
than I can
understand. I must be getting soft-hearted in my old age,
Claud. After all, when you’re so far ahead of Sherlock
Holmes ——”

Mr.
 
Teal gulped
 
pinkly,
  
and picked
 
up
 
the
telephone.

XIV

The Mixture as Before

“Crime,”
explained Simon Templar, squeezing lemon-juice
meditatively over a
liberal slice of smoked salmon, “is a kind
of Fourth Dimenson.
The sucker moves and has his being com
pletely enclosed in a
sphere of limitations which he assumes
to be the natural
laws of the universe. When he is offered an
egg, he expects to be
given an egg—not a sewing machine.
The bloke who takes the money off him
is the bloke who
breaks the rules—the bloke who hops outside the sucker’s
dimension, skids invisibly round ahead of him, and pops in again
exactly at
the point where the sucker would never dream of
looking for him. But
the bloke who takes money off the bloke
who takes money off
the sucker—the real aristocrat of the profession—is something even brighter. He
duly delivers the
egg; only it’s also an aubergine. It’s a plant.”

He could
have continued in the same strain for some time,
and not infrequently
did.

Those
moods of contemplative contentment were an integral
part of Simon
Templar’s enjoyment of life, the restful twi
lights between
buccaneering days and adventurous nights.
They usually came upon
him when the second glass of dry
sherry had been tasted and found good, when
the initial deli
cacy of a chain of fastidiously chosen dishes had been
set be
fore him, and the surroundings of white linen and gleaming
silver and
glass had sunk into their proper place as the back
ground of that
epicurean luxuriousness which to him was
the goal of all
worth-while piracy. Those were the occasions
on which the corsair put off his harness
and discoursed on the
philosophy of
filibustering. It was a subject of which Simon
Templar never tired. In the course of a flamboyant career
which had been largely devoted to equalising what
he had always considered to be a fundamentally unjust distribution of wealth
he had developed many theories about his own chosen
field of art; and these he was always ready to
expound. It was
at such times as this
that the Saint’s keen dark head took on
its most challenging alertness of line, the mocking blue eyes
danced with their gayest humour … when
everything about
him matched the
irresponsible spirit of his nickname except
the technical morality of his discourse.

“Successful
crime,” said the Saint, “is simply the Art of the
Unexpected.”

Louis
Fallen had similar ideas, although he was no philoso
pher. The finer
abstractions of lawlessness left Louie not only cold but in a condition to make
ice cream shiver merely by breathing on it. Neither were Louie’s
interpretations of those
essential ideas particularly novel; but he was
a very sound practitioner.

“It’s
a waste of time tryin’ to think up new stunts, Sol,” Louie declared,
“while there’s all the mugs you want still
fallin’ for the old
ones. Anyone with a good uncut diamond
can draw a dividend
from it every day.”

“Anyone
who could put down five-hundred quid could float
a good uncut diamond,
Louie,” replied Mr. Solomon, sympa
thetic but cautious.

“Anyone
who could put down five hundred quid could float
a company and swindle
people like a gentleman,” said Louie.

Mr.
Solomon shook his head sadly. His business was pat
ronised by a small
and exclusive clientele which was rarely in a position to bargain with him.

“Dot’s
a pity, Louie. I like to see a good man get on.”

“Now
listen to me, you old shark,” said Louie amiably. “I want a diamond,
a real classy bit of ice, and all I can
afford is a hundred
pounds. Look over your stock and see what
you can find. And
make it snappy—I want to get started this
week.”