The Saint and the Happy Highwayman (18 page)

“What have you been doing?” she said. “Burgling a bank?”

The Saint grinned.

“The geetus came out of a bank, anyway,” he murmured. “But Comrades Quarterstone and Urlaub provided the checks. I just went out and cashed them.”

“You mean they bought you out?”

“After a certain amount of haggling and squealing —yes. Apparently Aaron Niementhal changed his mind about backing the show, and Urlaub didn’t want to offend him on account of Aaron offered to cut him in on another and bigger and better proposition at the same time; so they gave me ten thousand dollars to tear up the contracts, and the idea is that I ought to play the lead in Niementhal’s bigger and better show.”

She pulled off her hat and collapsed into a chair. She was no longer gaunt and masculine and forbidding, for she had changed out of a badly fitting tweed suit and removed her sallow make-up and thrown away the gold-rimmed glasses and fluffed out her hair again so that it curled in its usual soft brown waves around her face, so that her last resemblance to anyone by the name of Wohlbreit was gone.

“Ten thousand dollars,” she said limply. “It doesn’t seem possible. But it’s real. I can see it.”

“You can touch it, if you like,” said the Saint. “Here.” He pushed one of the stacks over the table towards her. “Fifteen hundred that you paid Quarter-stone for tuition.” He pushed another. “Four thousand that you put into the play.” He drew a smaller sheaf towards himself. “One thousand that I paid for my lessons. Leaving three thousand five hundred drops of gravy to be split two ways.”

He straightened the remaining pile, cut it in two and slid half of it on to join the share that was accumulating in front of her. She stared at the money helplessly for a second or two, reached out and touched it with the tips of her fingers, and then suddenly she came round the table and flung herself into his arms. Her cheek was wet where it touched his face.

“I don’t know how to say it,” she said shakily. “But you know what I mean.”

“There’s only one thing bothering me,” said the Saint some time later, “and that’s whether you’re really entitled to take back those tuition fees. After all, Homer made you a good enough actress to fool himself. Maybe he was entitled to a percentage, in spite of everything.”

His doubts, however, were set at rest several months afterwards, when he had travelled a long way from New York and many other things had happened, when one day an advertisement in a New York paper caught his eye:

14th Week! Sold out 3 months ahead!

The Farce Hit of the Season:

LOVE—THE REDEEMER

by Homer Quarterstone

Imperial Theatre A Waldemar Urlaub Production

Simon Templar was not often at a loss for words, but on this occasion he was tongue-tied for a long time. And then, at last, he lay back and laughed helplessly.

“Oh well,” he said. “I guess they earned it.”

VII THE CHARITABLE COUNTESS

Simon templar’s mail, like that of any other celebrity, was a thing of infinite variety. Perhaps it was even more so than that of most celebrities, for actors and authors and the other usual recipients of fan mail are of necessity a slightly smaller target for the busy letter-writer than a man who has been publicized at frequent intervals as a twentieth-century Robin Hood, to the despair and fury of the police officials at whose expense the publicity has been achieved. Of those correspondents who approached him under his better-known nom de guerre of “The Saint,” about half were made up of people who thought that the nickname should be taken literally, and half of people who suspected that it stood for the exact opposite.

There were, of course, the collectors of autographs and signed photos. There were the hero-worshipping schoolboys whose ideas of a future profession would have shocked their fathers, and the romantic schoolgirls whose ideals of a future husband would have made their mothers swoon. There were also romantic maidens who were not so young, who supplied personal data of sometimes startling candour and whose propositions were correspondingly more concrete.

And then there were the optimists who thought that the Saint would like to finance a South American revolution, a hunt for buried treasure on the Spanish Main, a new night club or an invention for an auxiliary automatic lighter to light automatic lighters with. There were the plodding sportsmen who could find a job in some remote town, thereby saving their wives and children from imminent starvation, if only the Saint would lend them the fare. There were the old ladies who thought that the Saint might be able to trace their missing Pomeranians, and the old gentlemen who thought that he might be able to exterminate the damned Socialists. There were crooks and cranks, fatheads and fanatics, beggars, liars, romancers, idiots, thieves, rich men, poor men, the earnest, the flippant, the gay, the lonely, the time-wasters and the genuine tragedies, all that strange and variegated section of humanity that writes letters to total strangers; and then sometimes the letters were not from one stranger to another, but were no less significant, like a letter that came one morning from a man named Marty O’Connor:

/ should of writen you before but I didnt want you to think I was asking for a handout. I stuck at that job in Canada and we were doing fine. I thought we were all set but the guy was playing the markit, I didnt know he was that dumb, so the nex thing is hes bust, the garage is sold up and Im out a job. I could not get nothing else there, but I hear the heat is off in New York now so me and Cora hitchike back, I got a job as chaufer and hold that 3 weeks til the dame hears I got a police record, she won’t believe Im going strait now. I got the bums rush, havent found nothing since, but Cora does odd jobs and I may get a job any day. When I do you got to come see us again, we never fergot what you done for us and would do the same for you anytime if we burn for it… .

That was a reminder of two people whom he had helped because he liked them and because he thought they were worth helping, in one of those adventures that made all his lawlessness seem worth while to him, whatever the moralists might say. Marty O’Connor, who put off writing to his friend for fear of being suspected of begging, was a very different character from many others who wrote with no such scruples and with less excuse—such as the Countess Jannowicz, whose letter came in the same mail.

The smile which Simon had had for Marty’s letter turned cynical as he read it. On the face of it, it was a very genteel and dignified epistle, tastefully engraved under an embossed coronet, and printed on expensive handmade paper. The Countess Jannowicz, it said, requested the pleasure of Mr Simon Templar’s company at a dinner and dance to be held at the Waldorf-Astoria on the twentieth of that month, in aid of the National League for the Care of Incurables, RSVP.

That in itself would have been harmless enough, but the catch came in very small copperplate at the foot of the invitation, in the shape of the words, “Tickets $25”—and in the accompanying printed pamphlet describing the virtues of the League and its urgent need of funds.

Simon had heard from her before, as had many other people in New York, for she was a busy woman. Born as Maggie Oaks in Weehauken, New Jersey, resplendent later as Margaretta Olivera in a place of honour in the nuder tableaux at the Follies, she had furred her nest with a notable collection of skins, both human and animal, up to the time when she met and married Count Jannowicz, a Polish boulevardier of great age and reputedly fabulous riches. Disdaining such small stuff as alimony, she had lived with him faithfully and patiently until the day of his death, which in defiance of all expectations he had postponed for an unconscionable time through more and more astounding stages of senility, only to discover after the funeral that he had been living for all that time on an annuity which automatically ceased its payments forthwith; so that after nineteen years of awful fidelity his widowed countess found herself the proud inheritor of a few more furs, a certain amount of jewelery, a derelict castle already mortgaged for more than its value and some seventeen kopeks in hard cash.

Since she was then forty-four, and her outlines had lost the voluptuousness which had once made them such an asset to the more artistic moments of the Follies, many another woman might have retired to the companionable obscurity of her fellow unfortunates in some small Riviera pension. Not so Maggie Oaks, who had the stern marrow of Weehauken in her bones. At least she had the additional intangible asset of a genuine title, and during her spouse’s doggedly declining years she had whiled away the time consolidating the social position which her marriage had given her; so that after some sober consideration which it would have educated a bishop to hear, she was able To work out a fairly satisfactory solution to her financial problems.

Unlike Mr Elliot Vascoe, of whom we have heard before, who used charity to promote his social ambitions, she used her social position to promote charities. What the charities were did not trouble her much, so long as they paid her the twenty-five percent of the proceeds which was her standard fee. She had been known to sponsor, in the same day, a luncheon in aid of the Women’s Society for the Prosecution of Immorality, and a ball in aid of the Free Hospital for Unmarried Mothers. As a means of livelihood, it had been a triumphant inspiration. Social climbers fought to serve, expensively, on her committees; lesser snobs scrambled to attend her functions and get their names in the papers in such distinguished company; charitable enterprises, struggling against depressions, were only too glad to pass over some of the labour of extracting contributions from the public to such a successful organizer; and the Countess Jannowicz, nee Maggie Oaks, lived in great comfort on Park Avenue and maintained a chauffeur-driven Packard out of her twenty-five per-, cents, eked out by other percentages which various restaurants and hotels were only too glad to pay her for bringing them the business.

The Saint had had his piratical eye on her for a long time; and now, with the apt arrival of that last invitation at a period when he had no other more pressing business on his hands, it seemed as if the discounting of the charitable countess was a pious duty which could no longer be postponed.

He called on her the same afternoon at her apartment, for when once the Saint had made up his mind to a foray the job was as good as done. A morning’s meditation had been enough for him to sketch out a plan of campaign, and after that he saw no good reason to put it aside while it grew whiskers.

But what the plan was is of no importance, for he never used it. He had sent in a card bearing his venerable alias of Sebastian Tombs, but when the countess sailed into the luxuriously modernistic drawing room in which the butler had parked him, she came towards him with outstretched hand and a grim smile that promised surprises a split second before she spoke.

“Mr Templar?” she said coolly. “I’m sorry I had to keep you waiting.”

It would be unfair to say that the Saint was disconcerted—in a buccaneer’s life nothing could be foreseen, anyway, and you had to be schooled to the unexpected. But a perceptible instant went by before he answered.

“Why, hullo, Maggie,” he murmured. “I was going to break it to you gently.”

“A man with your imagination should have been able to do better. After all, Mr Sebastian Tombs is getting to be almost as well known as the great Simon Templar—isn’t he?”

The Saint nodded, admitting his lapse, and making a mental note that the time had come to tear himself finally away from the alter ego to which he had clung with perverse devotion for too many years.

“You keep pretty well up-to-date,” he remarked.

“Why not?” she returned frankly. “I’ve had an idea for some time that I’d be getting a visit from you one day.”

“Would that be the voice of conscience?”

“Just common sense. Even you can’t have a monopoly on thinking ahead.”

Simon studied her interestedly. The vats of champagne which had sparkled down her gullet in aid of one charity or another over the past six years had left their own thin dry tang in her voice, but few of her other indulgences had left their mark. The cargoes of caviar, the schools of smoked salmon, the truckloads of foie gras, the coveys of quail, the beds of oysters and the regiments of lobsters which had marched in eleemosynary procession through her intestines, had resolved themselves into very little solid flesh. Unlike most of her kind, she had not grown coarse and flabby; she had aged with a lean and arid dignity. At fifty, Maggie Oaks, late of Weehauken and the Follies, really looked like a countess, even if it was a rather tart and dessi-cated countess. She looked like one of those brittle fish-blooded aristocrats who stand firm for kindness to animals and discipline for the lower classes. She had hard bright eyes and hard lines cracked into the heavy layers of powder and enamel on her face, and she was a hard bad woman in spite of her successful sophistication.

“At least that saves a lot of explanations,” said the Saint, and she returned his gaze with her coldly quizzical stare.

“I take it that I was right—that you’ve picked me for your next victim.”

“Let’s call it ‘contributor,’ ” suggested the Saint mildly.

She shrugged.

“In plain language, I’m either to give you, or have stolen from me, whatever sum of money you think fit to assess as a fine for what you would call my misdeeds.”

“Madam, you have a wonderful gift of coming to the point.”

“This money will be supposedly collected for charity,” she went on, “but you will take your commission for collecting it before you pass it on.”

“That was the general idea, Maggie.”

She lighted a cigarette.

“I suppose I shouldn’t be allowed to ask why it’s a crime for me to make a living in exactly the same way as you do?”

“There is a difference. I don’t set myself up too seriously as a public benefactor. As a matter of fact, most people would tell you that I was a crook. If you want that point of view, ask a policeman.”

Her thin lips puckered with watchful mockery.

“That seems to make me smarter than you are, Mr Templar. The policeman would arrest you, but he’d tip his hat to me.”