Saint Intervenes (36 page)

He paused
dramatically, and the Saint wondered whether
he was expected to
offer any serious solution to the riddle;
but before he had
really made up his mind, Mr. Fallon was
solving the problem
for him.

“I’ll
tell you what happened,” said Mr. Fallon impressively,
leaning
over into a strategic position in which he could tap
the Saint on the
shoulder. Once again he paused, but there was no doubt that this hiatus at
least was motivated solely by the
requirements of theatrical suspense.
“Diamonds!”
said Mr.
Fallon, with an air of patronising pride which almost
suggested
that he personally had been responsible for the event.

The Saint
took a draught from his glass, and gazed at him
with that air of
slightly perplexed awe which was one of
the most precious
assets in his infinitely varied stock of
facial expressions. It
was a gaze pregnant with so much ingen
uous interest, such
naive wonder and curiosity, that Mr.
Fallon felt the cockles of his heart
warming to a temperature
at which, on a cold day, he would be tempted
to dispense
with his overcoat. Since he was not wearing an overcoat,
he gave rein to his emotions by insisting that he should stand
another
round of drinks.

“Yes,”
he resumed, when he had refilled their glasses.
“Diamonds. And
that’s how I make them—not,” he admitted modestly, “that I mean I
make the earth go hot and then cool
down again. But I do the same thing on
a smaller scale.”

The Saint
knitted his brows. It was the most ostentatious
sign of a functioning
brain that he could permit himself in
the part he was playing.

“Now
you tell me, I think I have heard something like
that before,” he
said. “Hasn’t somebody else done the same
thing—I mean made
synthetic diamonds by cooling chunks
of iron under pressure?”

“I did
hear of something on those lines,” confessed Mr.
Fallon magnanimously.
“But the process wasn’t any good.
They could only make
very small diamonds that weren’t worth
anything in the market
and cost ten times as much as real
ones. I make ‘em with things that you
can buy in any chemist’s
shop for a few pennies. I don’t even need a
proper laboratory.
I could make ‘em in your bathroom.” He drank, wiped
his lips
and looked at the Saint suddenly with bright plaintive
eyes.
“You don’t believe me,” he said accusingly.

“Why—yes,
of course I do,” protested the Saint, changing
his expression with a
guilty start.

Mr. Fallon
continued to shake his head.

“No,
you don’t,” he insisted morbidly, “and I can’t blame
you. I
know it sounds like a tall story. But I’m not a liar.”

“Of
course not,” agreed the Saint hastily.

“I’m
not a liar,” insisted Mr. Fallon lingeringly, as if he
was simply
aching to be called one. “Anyone who calls me a
liar is goin’ to have
to eat his words.” He was silent for a
moment, while the
idea appeared to develop in his mind; and
then he slued round
in his seat abruptly, and tapped the
Saint on the shoulder again.

“Look
here—I’ll prove it to
you.
You’re a sport—we ran into each other just
now as perfect strangers, and now here
you are havin’ a
drink with me. I don’t know whether you be
lieve in
concidences,” said Louie, waxing metaphysical, “but
you might
be the very fellow I’m lookin’ for. I like a chap
who isn’t too damned
stand-offish to have a drink with another
chap without being
introduced, and when I like a chap there
isn’t a limit to what
I wouldn’t mind doin’ for him. Why, you
might be the very
chap. Well, what d’you say?”

“I
didn’t say anything,” said the Saint innocently.

“What
d’you say I prove to you that I can make diamonds?
If you can spare half
an hour—it wouldn’t take much more
than that and you might find it
interesting. Are you game ?”

Simon
Templar was game. To put it perhaps a trifle crudely,
such occasions as this found him so game
that a two-year-old
pheasant would have had
to rise exceedingly high to catch
him.
Life, he felt, was still very much worth living while
blokes like Louie Fallen were almost falling over
themselves
with eagerness to call you
a Chap. To follow up the meta
phor
with which he was allowed to open this episode, he
considered that Mr. Fallon was certainly doing a
swell line of
clucking, and he was
profoundly interested to find out
exactly
what brand of egg would be the fruit thereof.

Mr.
Fallon, it appeared, was the proud tenant of an apart
ment in one of those
streets running down between the Tivoli
and the River which
fall roughly within the postal address
known as
“Adelphi” because it sounds so much better than
W. C. The
rooms were expensively and tastefully furnished,
and the Saint
surmised that Louie had not furnished them.
Somewhere in London there
would probably be an outraged
landlord looking for his rent—and perhaps also
the more val
uable of his rented chattels—when Mr. Fallon had finished
with the
premises; but his was not immediately Simon
Templar’s concern. He
followed Louie into the living-room,
where a bottle of whisky and two
glasses were produced
and suitably dealt with, and cheerfully
prepared to continue
with the role of open-mouthed listener which
the situation demanded of him. This called for no very fatiguing effort, for
the role of
open-mouthed listener was one in which the
Saint had perfected
himself more years ago than he could
easily remember.

“I
told you I could make my diamonds in a bathroom,”
said Louie, “and
that’s exactly what I am doin’ at the
moment.”

He led the
way onwards, glass in hand, and Simon followed
him good-humouredly.
It was quite a classy bathroom, with a
green marble bath and
generous windows looking out over
rows of smoke-stained housetops towards
the Thames; and
the materials that Louie Fallon used in making his
chemical
experiments were the only incongruous note in it. These
con
sisted of an ancient and shabby marble-topped washstand,
which had
obviously started its new lease of life in a second
hand sale room, a
fireproof crucible on a metal tripod, and
a litter of
test-tubes, burners, bottles and other paraphernalia
which Simon did not
deny were most artistically arranged.

“Just
to show you,” said Mr. Fallon generously, “I’ll make
a diamond
for you now.”

He went
over to the washstand and picked up one of the
bottles.
“Magnesium,” he said. He picked up another bottle.
“Iron
filings,” he said. He picked up a third bottle and tipped
a larger
quantity of greyish powder on top of what he had
taken from the first
two, stirring the mixture on the marble
table-top with a
commonplace Woolworth teaspoon. “And the
last thing,” he
said, “is the actual stuff that I make my
diamonds with.”

He picked
up the crucible and held it below the level of the table, scraped his little
mound of assorted powders into it, and
turned round with
didactic air.

“Now
I’ll tell you what happens,” he said. “When you
burn
magnesium with iron filings you produce a temperature
of thousands of
degrees Fahrenheit. It isn’t quite as hot as
the earth was when it
was all molten, but it’s nearly as hot.
That melts the iron
filings; and it also fuses the other mixture
I put in which is
exactly the same chemically as the stuff
that diamonds are
made of.”

He struck
a match and applied it to the crucible. There was
a sudden spurt of
eye-achingly brilliant flame, accompanied
by a faint hissing
sound. Simon could feel the intense heat of
the flare on his
cheeks, even though he was standing several
feet away; and he watched the crucible
becoming incandescent
before his eyes,
turning from a dull red through blazing pink
to a blinding white glow.

“So
there,” said Mr. Fallon, gazing at his fireworks with al
most
equally incandescent pride, “you have the heat. Right
now that
diamond powder is wrappin’ itself up inside the
melted iron filings.
The mixture isn’t quite as hot as it ought
to be, because nobody
has discovered how to produce as
much heat as there was in the world back in
those times when
it was molten; but we have to make up for that by coolin’
the
thing off quicker. That’s the reason why all the other exper
imenters
have failed—they’ve never been able to cool things
off quick enough. But
I got over that.”

From under
the washstand he dragged out a gadget which
the Saint had not
noticed before. To the callously uninitiated
eye it might have
looked rather like a Heath Robinson con
traption made up of a
couple of old oil-cans and bits of
battered gaspipe; but Louie handled it
as tenderly as an
anarchist
exhibiting his favourite bomb.

“This
is the fastest cooler that’s ever been made,” he said.
“I
won’t try to tell you how it works, because you probably
wouldn’t
understand, but it’s very scientific. When I throw
this nugget that’s
forming in the crucible into it it’ll be cooled
off quicker than
anything’s ever been cooled off before. From
four thousand degrees
Fahrenheit down to a hundred below z
ero, in less than half a second! Have
you any idea what that
means?”

Simon
realised that it was time for him to show some rudi
mentary intelligence.

“I
know,” he said slowly. “It means——
”

“It
means,” said Mr. Fallon, taking the words out of his mouth, “that you
get a pressure of thousands of millions of
tons inside that nugget
of molten iron; and when you break it
open the diamond’s inside.”

He lifted
the lid of his oil-can contraption, picked up the crucible with a pair of long
iron tongs, and poured out a blob
of luminous liquid metal the size of a
small pear. There was
a loud fizzing noise accompanied by a great
burst of steam;
and Louie replaced the lid of his cooler and looked at the
Saint triumphantly through the fog.

“Now,”
he said, “in half a minute you’ll see it with your
own eyes.”

The Saint
opened his cigarette-case and tapped a cigarette
thoughtfully on his
thumbnail.

“How
on earth did you hit on that?” he asked, with wide-
eyed admiration.

“I
used to be an assistant in a chemist’s shop when I was
a boy,” said
Louie casually. As a matter of fact, this was
perfectly true, but he
did not mention that his employment
had terminated abruptly when the
chemist discovered that
his assistant had been systematically
whittling down the con
tents of the till whenever he was left alone
in the shop.

“I
always liked playin’ around with things and tryin’ ex
periments, and I
always believed it’d be possible to make
perfectly good
synthetic diamonds whatever the other experts
said. And now I’ve
proved it.”

This also,
curiously enough, was partly true. Improbable as
it may seem, Mr. Fallon
had his dreams—dreams in which
he could produce unlimited quantities of gold
or diamonds simply by mixing chemicals together in a pail, or vast stacks
of genuine
paper money merely by turning a handle. The
psychologist, delving
into Louie’s dream-life, would probably
have found the
particular form of swindle which Mr. Fallon
had made his own
inexorably predestined by these curiously
childish fantasies—a
kind of spurious and almost self-defen
sive satisfaction of a
congenital urge for easy money.