Saint Intervenes (4 page)

Simon
frowned.

“Nothing,”
he said gravely, “is a certainty until you know
the result. A horse
may drop dead, or fall down, or be disqualified. The risk may be small, but it
exists. I eliminate it.”
He gazed at them suddenly with a sober
intensity which al
most held them spellbound. “It sounds silly,” he
said, “but I
happen to be psychic.”

The two
men stared back at him.

“Wha—what?”
stammered the Colonel.

“What
does that mean?” demanded Mr. Immelbern, more
grossly.

“I am
clairvoyant,” said the Saint simply. “I can foretell the future. For
instance, I can look over the list of runners in a
newspaper and close my
eyes, and suddenly I’ll see the winners
printed out in my
mind, just as if I was looking at the evening
edition. I don’t know
how it’s done. It’s a gift. My mother had it.”

The two men
were gaping at him dubiously. They were incredulous, wondering if they were
missing a joke and ought
to laugh politely; and yet something in the
Saint’s voice and
the slight uncanny widening of his eyes sent a cold super
natural
draught creeping up their spines.

“Haw!”
ejaculated the Colonel uncertainly, feeling that he
was called upon to
make some sound; and the Saint smiled
distantly.

He glanced
at the clock on the mantelpiece.

“Let
me show you. I wasn’t going to make any bets today,
but since I’ve started
I may as well go on.”

He picked
up his lunch edition, which he had been reading in the Palace Royal lounge,
and studied the racing card on the back page. Then he put down the paper and
covered
his eyes. For several seconds there was a breathless silence,
while he
stood there with his head in his hands, swaying
slightly, in an
attitude of terrific concentration.

Again the
supernatural shiver went over the two partners;
and then the Saint
straightened up suddenly, opened his eyes,
and rushed to the
telephone.

He dialed
his number rather slowly. He had watched the
movements of Mr.
Immelbern’s fingers closely, on every one of that gentleman’s five calls; and
his keen ears had listened
and calculated every click of the returning
dial. It would not
be his fault if he got the wrong number.

The
receiver at the other end of the line was lifted. The
voice spoke.

“Baby
Face,”
it said hollowly.

Simon
Templar drew a deep breath, and a gigantic grin of
bliss deployed itself
over his inside. But outwardly he did not
bat an eyelid.

“Two
hundred pounds on Baby Face for Mr. Templar,” he
said; and the
partners were too absorbed with other things to
notice that he spoke
in a very fair imitation of Mr. Immelbern’s deep rumble.

He turned
back to them, smiling.

“Baby
Face,” he said, with the quietness of absolute certi
tude,
“will win the three o’clock race at Sandown Park.”

Lieut.-Colonel
Uppingdon fingered his superb white moustachios
.

“By
Gad!” he said.

Half an
hour later the three of them went out together for
a newspaper. Baby
Face had won—at ten to one.

“Haw!”
said the Colonel, blinking at the result rather
dazedly.

On the
face of Mr. Immelbern was a look of almost super
stitious awe. It is
difficult to convey what was in his mind at
that moment.
Throughout his life he had dreamed of such things. Horseflesh was the one true
love of his unromantic
soul. The fashions of Newmarket ruled his
clothes, the scent of stables hung around him like a subtle perfume; he might,
in
prosperous times, have been a rich man in his illegal way, if
all his
private profits had not inevitably gravitated on to the
backs of
unsuccessful horses as fast as they came into his
pocket. And in the
secret daydreams which coil through even the most phlegmatic bosom had always
been the wild impos
sible idea that if by some miracle he could have the
privilege
of reading the next day’s results every day for a week, he
could make himself
a fortune that would free him for the rest
of
his life from the sordid labours of the confidence game and
give him the leisure to perfect that infallible
racing system
with which he had been
experimenting ever since adolescence.

And now the
miracle had come to pass, in the person of
that debonair and affluent young man who
did not even seem
to realise the potential
millions which lay in his strange gift.

“Can you do that every
day?” he asked huskily.

“Oh,
yes,” said the Saint.

“In every race?” said
Mr. Immelbern hoarsely.

“Why
not?” said the Saint. “It makes racing rather a bore,
really, and
you soon get tired of drawing in the money.”

Mr. Immelbern gulped. He could
not conceive what it felt
like to get tired
of drawing in money. He felt stunned.

“Well,”
said the Saint casually, “I’d better be buzzing
along——
”

At the
sound of those words something came over Lieut-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon. It
was, in its way, the turning
of a worm. He had suffered much. The gibes of
Mr. Immel
bern still rankled in his sedate aristocratic breast. And
Mr.
Immelbern was
still goggling in a half-witted daze—he who
had
boasted almost naggingly of his accessibility to new ideas.

Lieut.-Colonel
Sir George Uppingdon took the Saint’s arm,
gently but very firmly.

“Just
a minute, my dear boy,” he said, rolling the words succulently round his
tongue. “We must not be old-fashioned.
We must move with the
times. This psychic gift of yours is
truly remarkable. There’s a fortune in
it. Damme, if some
body
threw a purse into Irnmelbern’s lap, he’d be asking me
what it was. Thank God, I’m not so dense as that, by Gad.
My dear Mr. Templar, my dear boy, you must—I
positively
insist—you must come back
to my rooms and talk about what
you’re
going to do with this gift of yours. By Gad!”

Mr.
Immelbern did not come out of his trance until half
way through the
bargaining that followed.

It was
nearly two hours later when the two partners strug
gled somewhat
short-windedly up the stairs to a dingy one-roomed office off the Strand. Its furniture
consisted of a chair,
a table with a telephone on it, and a tape
machine in one
corner. It had not been swept for weeks, but it served
its pur
pose adequately.

The third
and very junior member of the partnership sat on
the chair with his
feet on the table, smoking a limp cigarette
and turning the pages of
Paris
Plaisirs.
He looked up in some
surprise
not unmixed with alarm at the noisy entrance of his
confederates—a pimply youth with a chin that barely
con
trived to separate his mouth from
his neck.

“I’ve
made our fortunes!” yelled Mr. Immelbern, and,
despite the youth’s
repulsive aspect, embraced him.

A slight
frown momentarily marred the Colonel’s glowing
benevolence.

“What
d’you mean—
you’ve
made our fortunes?” he de
manded. “If it
hadn’t been for me——
”

“Well,
what the hell does it matter?” said Mr. Immelbern.
“In a
couple of months we’ll all be millionaires.”

“How?”
asked the pimply youth blankly.

Mr.
Immelbern broke off in the middle of an improvised
hornpipe.

“It’s
like this,” he explained exuberantly. “We’ve got a sike
—sidekick——
”

“Psychic,”
said the Colonel.

“A
bloke who can tell the future. He puts his hands over his eyes and reads the
winners off like you’d read them out
of a paper. He did it four times this
afternoon. We’re going
to take him in with us. We had a job to
persuade him—he
was going off to the South of France tonight—can you
imagine
it, a bloke with a gift like that going away while there’s any
racing
here? We had to give him five hundred quid advance
on the money we told
him we were going to make for him to
make him put it off. But it’s worth
it. We’ll start tomorrow,
and if this fellow Templar——
”

“Ow,
that’s ‘is nime, is it?” said the pimply youth brightly.
“I
wondered wot was goin’ on.”

There was a
short puzzled silence.

“How
do you mean—what was going on?” asked the
Colonel at length.

“Well,”
said the pimply youth, “when Sid was ringing up
all the afternoon,
practic’ly every rice——
”

“What
d’you mean?” croaked Mr. Immelbern.
“I
rang up
every race?”

“Yus,
an’ I was giving’ you the winners, an’ you were
syin’ ‘Two ‘undred
pounds on Baby Face for Mr. Templar’—
Tour ‘undred pounds on Cellophane for
Mr. Templar’—
gettin’ bigger an’ bigger all the time an’ never givin’
‘im a
loser—well,
I started to wonder wot was ‘appening.”

The silence
that followed was longer, much longer; and there were things seething in it for
which the English lan
guage has no words.

It was the
Colonel who broke it.

“It’s
impossible,” he said dizzily. “I know the clock was
slow,
because I put it back myself, but I only put it back five
minutes—and
this fellow was telephoning ten minutes before
the times of the races.”

“Then
‘e must ‘ave put it back some more while you wasn’t
watchin’ ‘im,”
said the pimply youth stolidly.

The idea
penetrated after several awful seconds.

“By
Gad!” said Lieut.-Colonel Sir George Uppingdon in a
feeble
voice.

Mr.
Immelbern did not speak. He was removing his coat
and rolling up his
sleeves, with his eyes riveted yearningly on
the Colonel’s
aristocratic block.

II

The Unfortunate Financier

“The
secret of success,” said Simon Templar profoundly, “is
never to do
anything by halves. If you try to touch someone
for a tenner, you
probably get snubbed; but if you put on a
silk hat and a false stomach and go into
the City to raise a
million-pound loan,
people fall over each other in the rush to
hand you blank cheques. The wretched little thief who pinches
a handful of silver spoons gets shoved into clink
through a
perfect orgy of congratulations to the police and the magis
trates, but the bird who diddles the public of a
few hundred thousands by legal methods gets knighthood. A sound buc
caneering business has to be run on the same
principles.”

While he
could not have claimed any earth-shaking origi
nality for the theme
of his sermon, Simon Templar was in the perhaps rarer position of being able to
claim that he practised
what he preached. He had been doing it for so long, with so
much diligence and devotion, that the name of the
Saint had
passed into the Valhalla
of all great names: it had become a
household
word, even as the name of Miss Amelia Bloomer,
an earlier crusader, was absorbed into the tongue that Shake
speare did not live long enough to speak—but in a
more
romantic context. And if there
were many more sharks in the
broad
lagoons of technically legal righteousness who knew
him better by his chosen
nom de guerre
than
by his real
name, and who would not
even have recognised him had
they
passed him in the street, that minor degree of anonymity
was an asset in the Saint’s profession which more
than com
pensated him for the
concurrent gaps in his publicity.

Mr.
Wallington Titus Oates was another gentleman who
did nothing by
halves.