Saint Intervenes (5 page)

He was a
large red-faced man who looked exactly like a
City alderman or a
master butcher, with a beefy solidity about
him which disarmed
suspicion. It was preposterous, his vic
tims thought, in the
early and extensive stages of their ignor
ance, that such an
obvious rough diamond, such a jovial hail-
fellow-well-met,
such an almost startlingly lifelike incarnation
of the cartoonist’s
figure of John Bull, could be a practitioner
of cunning and
deceit. Even about his rather unusual names he was delightfully frank. If he
had been an American he would
certainly have called himself Wallington T.
Oates, and the
“T” would have been shrouded in a mystery that
might have
embraced anything from Thomas to Tamerlane. In the more
reserved
manner of the Englishman, who does not have a
Christian name until
you have known him for twenty-five
years, he might without exciting extraordinary curiosity
have
been known simply as W. T. Oates. But
he was not. His cards
were printed W.
Titus Oates; and he was not even insistent
on the preliminary “W.” He was, in fact, best pleased to be
known as plain Titus Oates, and would chortle
heartily over
his chances of tracing a
pedigree back to the notorious in
ventor
of the Popish Plot who was whipped from Aldgate to
Newgate and from Newgate to Tyburn some three
hundred
years ago.

But apart
from the fact that some people would have
given much to apply
the same discouraging treatment to Mr.
Wallington Titus
Oates, he had little else in common with his
putative ancestor.
For although the better-known Titus Oates
stood in the pillory
outside the Royal Exchange before his
dolorous tour, it was not recorded
that he was interested in
the dealings within; whereas the present
Stock Exchange was
Mr. Wallington Titus Oates’s happy hunting ground.

If there
was anything that W. Titus Oates understood from
A to whatever letter
can be invented after Z, it was the manipulation of shares. Bulls and bears
were his domestic pets.
Mergers and debentures were his bedfellows.
It might almost
be said that he danced contangos in his sleep. And it was
all
very profitable—so profitable that Mr. Oates possessed not
only three Rolls-Royces but
also a liberal allowance of pocket-
money to
spend on the collection of postage stamps which was
his joy and relaxation.

This is not
to be taken to mean that Mr. Oates was known in the City as a narrow evader of
the law. He was, on the
contrary, a highly respected and influential
man; for it is one
of the sublime subtleties of the law of England that
whilst the
manipulation of the form of racehorses is a hideous
crime, to be rewarded with expulsion from the most boring clubs and
other forms
of condign punishment, the manipulation of
share values is a
noble and righteous occupation by which the
large entrance fees to
such clubs may commendably be obtained, provided that the method of juggling
is genteel and
smooth. Mr. Oates’s form as a juggler was notably genteel
and
smooth; and the ambition of certain citizens to whip Mr. O
ates at a
cart’s tail from Aldgate to Newgate was based not
so much on the knowledge
of any actual fraud as on the fact
that the small investments which
represented the life savings
had on occasion been skittled down the market
in the course
of Mr. Oates’s important operations, which every
right-think
ing person will agree was a very unsporting and
un-British
attitude to take.

The
elementary principles of share manipulation are, of
course, simplicity
itself. If large blocks of a certain share are
thrown on the market
from various quarters, the word goes r
ound that the stock is bad, the small
investor takes fright and
dashes in to cut his losses, thereby making
matters worse, and the price of the share falls according to the first law of
supply and demand. If, on the other hand, there is heavy buying in a
certain
share, the word goes round that it is a “good thing,”
the small
speculator jumps in for a quick profit, adding his
weight to the
snowball, and the price goes up according to the
same law. This is the foundation system on
which all specu
lative operators work; but
Mr. Oates had his own ways of accelerating these reactions.

“Nobody can say that Titus
Oates ain’t an honest man,” he used to say to the very exclusive circle of
confederates who
shared his confidence and
a reasonable proportion of his prof
its.
“P’raps I am a bit smarter than some of the others, but that’s their
funeral. You don’t know what tricks they get up
to behind the scenes, but nobody knows what tricks I get up
to, either. It’s all in the day’s work.”

He was
thinking along the same lines on a certain morn
ing, while he waited for his associates to
arrive for the con
ference at which the
final details of the manoeuvre on which
he was working at that time would be decided. It was the
biggest manipulation he had attempted so far, and
it involved
a trick that sailed much
closer to the wind than anything he
had
done before; but it has already been explained that he
was not a man who did things by halves. The
economic de
pression which had
bogged down the market for many months
past,
and the resultant steadfast refusal of stocks to soar ap
preciably however stimulated by legitimate and
near-legitimate
means, had been very bad for his business as well as
others.
Now, envisaging the first symptoms
of an upturn, he was pre
paring to
cash in on it to an extent that would compensate for many months of failure;
and with so much lost ground
to make
up he had no time for half measures. Yet he knew
that there were a few tense days ahead of him.

A discreet knock on his door,
heralding the end of thought
and the
beginning of action, was almost a relief. His new
secretary entered in answer to his curt summons,
and his eyes
rested on her slim
figure for a moment with unalloyed
pleasure—she
was a remarkably beautiful girl with natural
honey-golden hair and entrancing blue eyes which in Mr.
Oates’s dreams had sometimes been known to gaze
with
Dietrichesque yearning upon his unattractive person.

“Mr.
Hammel and Mr. Costello are here,” she said.

Mr. Oates
nodded.

“Bring
them in, my
dear.” He rummaged thoughtfully
through
his pockets and produced a crumpled five-pound note,
which he pushed
towards her. “And buy yourself some silk
stockings when you go
out to lunch—just as a little gift from
me. You’ve been a
good gal. Some night next week, when
I’m not working so hard, we might have
dinner together, eh?”

“Thank
you, Mr. Oates,” she said softly, and left him with
a sweet
smile which started strange wrigglings within him.

When they
had dinner together he would make her call
him Titus, he
thought, and rubbed his hands over the romantic
prospect. But before
that happy night he had much to do; and
the entrance of
Hammel and Costello brought him back to
the stern
consideration of how that dinner and many others, with silk stockings and
orchids to match, were to be paid for.

Mr. Jules
Hammel was a small rotund gentleman whose
rimless spectacles
gave him a benign and owlish appearance,
like somebody’s very
juvenile uncle. Mr. Abe Costello was longer and much more cadaverous, and he wore
a pencil-line
of hair across his upper lip with a certain undercurrent
of
self-consciousness which might have made one think that he
went about
in the constant embarrassing fear of being mistaken
for Clark Gable.
Actually their resemblance to any such
harmless characters
was illusory—they were nearly as cunning
as Mr. Oates himself,
and not even a trifle less unscrupulous.

“Well,
boys,” said Mr. Oates, breaking the ice jovially, “I
found
another good thing last night.”

“Buy
or sell?” asked Costello alertly.

“Buy,”
said Mr. Oates. “I bought it. As far as I can find
out, there
are only about a dozen in the world. The issue was
corrected the day
after it came out.”

Hammel
helped himself to a cigar and frowned puzzledly.

“What
is this?”

“A
German 5-pfenning with the
Befreiungstag
overprint
inverted
and spelt with a P instead of a B,” explained Mr. Oates. “That’s a
stamp you could get a hundred pounds for
any day.”

His guests
exchanged tolerant glances. While they lighted
their Partagas they
allowed Mr. Oates to expatiate on the
beauties of his acquisition with all
the extravagant zeal of the
rabid collector; but as soon as the smokes
were going Costello
recalled the meeting to its agenda.

“Well,”
he said casually, “Midorients are down to 25.”

“24,”
said Mr. Oates. “I rang up my brokers just before
you came in and told
them to sell another block. They’ll be
down to 23 or 22 after
lunch. We’ve shifted them pretty well.”

“When
do we start buying?” asked Hammel.

“At
22. And you’ll have to do it quickly. The wires are
being sent off at
lunch-time tomorrow, and the news will be in
the papers before the
Exchange closes.”

Mr. Oates
paced the floor steadily, marshalling the facts of
the situation for an
audience which was already conversant
with them.

The
Midorient Company owned large and unproductive con
cessions in
Mesopotamia. Many years ago its fields had flowed
with seemingly
inexhaustible quantities of oil of excellent
quality, and the
stock had paid its original holders several thousand times over. But suddenly,
on account of those ab
struse and unpredictable geological causes to
which such things
are subject, the supply had petered out. Frenzied boring
had
failed to produce results. The output had dropped to a paltry
few hundred
barrels which sufficed to pay dividends of two
per cent on the
stock—no more, and, as a slight tempering of the wind to the shorn
stockholders, no less. The shares had
adjusted their market value
accordingly. Boring had con
tinued ever since, without showing any
improvement; and indeed the shares had depreciated still further during the
past
fortnight as a result of persistent rumours that even the small
output
which had for a long while saved the stock from be
coming entirely
derelict was drying up—rumours which, as
omniscient chroniclers
of these events, we are able to trace
back to the ingenious agency of Mr.
Titus Oates.

That was
sufficient to send the moribund stock down to the
price at which Messrs.
Oates, Costello, and Hammel desired to buy it. The boom on which they would
make their profit called for more organisation, and involved the slight decep
tion on
which Mr. Oates was basing his gamble.

Travelling
in Mesopotamia at that moment there was an
English tourist named
Ischolskov, and it is a matter of impor
tance that he was
there entirely at Mr. Oates’s instigation and
expense. During his
visit he had contrived to learn the names
of the correspondents
of the important newspaper and news
agencies in that region, and at the
appointed time it would be
his duty to send off similarly worded
cablegrams, signed with
the names of these correspondents, which
would report to
London that the Midorient Company’s engineers had struck
oil
again—had, in fact, tapped a gigantic gusher of petroleum
that would
make the first phenomenal output of the Mid-
orient Oil Fields
look like the dribbling of a baby on its bib.

“Let’s
see,” said Mr. Oates. “This is Tuesday. We buy today and tomorrow
morning at 22 or even less. The shares’ll start to go up tomorrow afternoon.
They’ll go up more on Thursday. By Friday morning they ought to be around 45—
they might
even go to 50. They’ll hang fire there. The first
boom will be over,
and people will be waiting for more information.”