Saint Intervenes (3 page)

“But
think, Sir George. Think of the risk!”

“Nonsense,”
snorted the Colonel. “It’s all in your imagina
tion. In
fact”—the idea suddenly appeared to strike him—
“I’m damned if I
don’t tell him what it’s all about.”

Mr.
Immelbern opened his mouth, closed it again, and
sank back wearily without speaking. His
attitude implied that
he had already
exhausted himself in vain appeals to an ob
vious lunatic, and he was beginning to realise that it was of
no avail. He could do no more.

“It’s
like this, my dear chap,” said the Colonel, ignoring
him.
“All that this mystery amounts to—all that Immelbern
here is so
frightened of telling you—is that we are profes
sional gamblers. We
back racehorses.”

“That
isn’t all of it,” contradicted Mr. Immelbern sullenly.

“Well,
we have certain advantages. I, in my social life, am
very friendly with a
large number of racehorse owners. Mr.
Immelbern is friendly with trainers
and jockeys. Between the
two of us, we sometimes have infallible
information, the re
sult of piecing together everything we hear from various
sources,
of times when the result of a certain race has posi
tively been arranged.
Then all we have to do is to make our
bets and collect the money. That
happens to be our business this afternoon. We have an absolutely certain winner
for the two o’clock race at Sandown Park, and in a few minutes we
shall be
backing it.”

Mr.
Immelbern dosed his eyes as if he could endure no
more.

“That
seems quite harmless,” said Templar.

“Of
course it is,” agreed the Colonel. “What Immelbern is
so
frightened of is that somebody will discover what we’re
doing—I
mean that it might come to the knowledge of some
of our friends who
are owners or trainers or jockeys, and
then our sources of
information would be cut off. But, by
Gad, I insist on the privilege of being
allowed to know when
I can trust my own friends.”

“Well,
I won’t give you away,” Simon told him obligingly.

The Colonel
turned to Immelbern triumphantly.

“There
you are! So there’s no need whatever for our little
party to break up
yet, unless Mr. Templar has an engagement.
Our business will be
done in a few minutes. By Gad, damme,
I think you owe Mr. Templar an apology!”

Mr. Immelbern sighed, stared at
his finger-nails for a while
in grumpy
silence, and consulted his watch again.

“It’s
nearly five to two,” he said. “How much can we get on?”

“About
a thousand, I think,” said the Colonel judiciously.

Mr. Immelbern got up and went
to the telephone, where he
dialed a number.

“This is Immelbern,”
he said, in the voice of a martyr responding to the roll-call for the all-in
lion-wrestling event. “I
want two
hundred pounds on Greenfly.”

He heard
his bet repeated, pressed down the hook, and
dialed again.

“We
have to spread it around to try and keep the starting
price from
shortening,” explained the Colonel.

Simon
Templar nodded, and leaned back with his eyes half-
closed, listening to
the click and tinkle of the dial and Immelbern’s afflicted voice. Five times
the process was repeated, and
during the giving of the fifth order Uppingdon
interrupted
again.

“Make
it two-fifty this time, Sidney,” he said.

Mr.
Immelbern said:
 
“Just a moment,
will you hold on?” to the transmitter, covered it with his hand, and
turned aggrievedly
.

“I
thought you said a thousand. That makes a thousand and
fifty.”

“Well,
I thought Mr. Templar might like to have fifty on.”
Simon
hesitated.

“That’s
about all I’ve got on me,” he said.

“Don’t
let that bother you, my dear boy,” boomed Colonel
Uppingdon.
 
“Your credit’s good with me, and I feel
that I
owe you something to compensate for what you’ve put up
with. Make
it a hundred if you like.”

“But
Sir George!” wailed Mr. Immelbern.

“Dammit,
will you stop whining ‘But Sir George!’?” ex
ploded the Colonel.
“That settles it. Make it three hundred—-
that will be a hundred
on for Mr. Templar. And if the horse doesn’t win, I’ll stand the loss
myself.”

A somewhat
strained silence prevailed after the last bet had
been made. Mr.
Immelbern sat down again and chewed the
unlighted end of a
cigar in morbid meditations. The Colonel
twiddled his thumbs as
if the embarrassment of these recur
rent disputes was hard to shake off.
Simon Templar lighted a
cigarette and smoked calmly.

“Have
you been doing this long?” he inquired. “For about two years,”
said the Colonel. “By Gad, though,
we’ve made money at it.
Only about one horse in ten that we
back doesn’t romp home, and most of
‘em are at good prices.
Sometimes our money does get back to the
course and spoil
the price, but I’d rather have a winner at evens than a
loser
at ten to one any day. Why, I remember one race meeting we
had at
Delhi. That was the year when old Stubby Featherstone
dropped his cap in
the Ganges—he was the fella who got
killed at Cambrai… .”

He
launched off on another wandering reminiscence, and
Simon listened to him
with polite attention. He had some
thinking to do, and he was grateful for
the gallant Colonel’s
willingness to take all the strain of
conversation away from
him. Mr. Immelbern chewed his cigar in chronic
pessimism
until half an hour had passed; and then he glanced at his
watch again, started up, and broke into the middle of
one of
his host’s
rambling sentences.

“The result ought to be
through by now,” he said abruptly.
“Shall
we go out and get a paper?”

Simon stood
up unhurriedly. He had done his thinking.

“Let
me go,” he suggested.

“That’s
awfully good of you, my dear boy. Mr. Immelbern
would have gone.
Never mind, by Gad. Go out and see how
much you’ve won. I’ll open another bottle.
Damme, we must
have a drink on this, by
Gad!”

Simon
grinned and sauntered out; and as the door dosed
behind him the eyes of
the two partners met.

“Next
time you say ‘damme’ or ‘by Gad,’ George,” said
Mr. Immelbern,
“I will knock your block off, so help me.
Why don’t you get some
new ideas?”

But by
that time Lieut-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon was beyond taking offence.

“We’ve
got him,” he said gleefully.

“I
hope so,” said Mr. Immelbern, more cautiously.

“I
know what I’m talking about, Sid,” said the Colonel
stubbornly.
“He’s a serious young fellow, one of these conservative chaps like
myself—but that’s the best kind. None of
this dashing around,
keeping up with the times, going off like
a firework and
fizzling out like a pricked balloon. I’ll bet you
anything you like, in
another hour he’ll be looking around for a thousand pounds to give us to put on
tomorrow’s certainty.
His kind starts slowly, but it goes a lot
further than any of
you fussy Smart Alecs.”

Mr.
Immelbern made a rude noise.

Simon
Templar bought a
Star
at Devonshire House and
turned without anxiety
to the stop press. Greenfly had won the two o’clock at five to one.

As he
strolled back towards Clarges Street he was smiling.
It was a peculiarly
ecstatic sort of smile; and as a matter of
fact he had
volunteered to go out and buy the paper, even
though he knew what
the result would be as certainly as
Messrs. Uppingdon and Immelbern knew it, for the sole and
sufficient reason that he wanted to give that
smile the freedom
of his face and let
it walk around. To have been compelled to
sit around any longer in Uppingdon’s apartment and sustain
the
necessary mask of gravity and sober interest without a
breathing spell would have sprained every muscle within six
inches of his mouth.

“Hullo,
Saint,” said a familiar sleepy voice beside him.

A hand
touched his arm, and he turned quickly to see a
big baby-faced man in
a bowler hat of unfashionable shape,
whose jaws moved rhythmically like
those of a ruminating
cow.

“Hush,”
said the Saint. “Somebody might hear.”

“Is
there anybody left who doesn’t know?” asked Chief Inspector Teal
sardonically.

Simon
Templar nodded.

“Strange
as it may seem, there is. Believe it or not, Claud
Eustace, somewhere in
this great city—I wouldn’t tell you
where, for anything—there are left two
trusting souls who
don’t even recognise my name. They have just come down
from their
hermits’ caves in the mountains of Ladbroke Grove,
and they haven’t yet
heard the news. The Robin Hood of
modern crime,” said the Saint
oratorically, “the scourge of the
ungodly, the defender
of the faith—what
are
the newspaper headlines?—has come back to raise
hell over the length and
breadth of England—and they don’t know.”

“You
look much too happy,” said the detective suspiciously.
“Who
are these fellows?”

“Their
names are Uppingdon and Immelbern, if you want
to know—and you’ve
probably met them before. They have
special information about racehorses,
and I am playing my
usual role of the Sucker who does not Suck too long. At
the
moment they owe me five hundred quid.”

Chief
Inspector Claud Eustace Teal’s baby blue eyes looked
him over thoughtfully.
And in Chief Inspector Teal’s mind there were no illusions. He did not share
the ignorance of
Messrs. Uppingdon and Immelbern. He had known the Saint
for many
years, and he had heard that he was back. He
knew that there was
going to be a fresh outbreak of buc
caneering through the fringes of
London’s underworld,
exactly as there had been so many times
before; he knew that
the feud between them was going to start
again, the endless
battle between the gay outlaw and the guardian of the Law;
and he knew that his troubles were at the beginning of a new
lease of
life. And yet one of his rare smiles touched his
mouth for a fleeting
instant.

“See
that they pay you,” he said, and went on his portly
and
lethargic way.

Simon
Templar went back to the apartment on Clarges Street. Uppingdon let him in; and
even the melancholy Mr.
Immelbern was moved to jump up as they entered
the living-
room.

“Did
it win?” they chorused.

The Saint
held out the paper. It was seized, snatched from
hand to hand, and
lowered reverently while an exchange of
rapturous glances
took place across its columns.

“At
five to one,” breathed Lieut.-Colonel Uppingdon.

“Five
thousand quid,” whispered Mr. Immelbern.

“The
seventh winner in succession.”

“Eighty
thousand quid in four weeks.”

The
Colonel turned to Simon.

“What
a pity you only had a hundred pounds on,” he said, momentarily
crestfallen. Then the solution struck him, and he
brightened. “But
how ridiculous! We can easily put that right.
On our next coup, you
shall be an equal partner. Immelbern,
be silent! I have put up with enough
interference from you.
Templar, my dear boy, if you care to come in
with me next
time—”

The Saint
shook his head.

“I’m
sorry,” he said. “I don’t mind a small gamble now
and again,
but for business I only bet on certainties.”

“But
this is a certainty!” cried the Colonel.