The Saint and the Happy Highwayman (24 page)

Mercer, with only a pair of sevens, bluffed recklessly for two rounds before he fell out in response to the Saint’s kick under the table.

There were five thousand dollars in the pool before Kilgarry, with a straight, shrugged surrenderingly and dropped his hand in the discard.

The Saint counted two stacks of chips and pushed them in.

“Make it another two grand,” he said.

Yoring looked at him waveringly. Then he pushed in two stacks of his own.

“There’s your two grand.” He counted the chips he had left, swept them with a sudden splash into the pile. “And twenty-nine hundred more,” he said.

Simon had twelve hundred left in chips. He pushed them in, opened his wallet and added crisp new bills.

“Making three thousand more than that for you to see me,” he said coolly.

Mercer sucked in his breath and whispered: “Oh boy!”

Kilgarry said nothing, hunching tensely over the table.

Yoring blinked at him.

“Len’ me some chips, ole man.”

“Do you know what you’re doing?” Kilgarry asked in a harsh strained voice.

Yoring picked up his glass and half emptied it. His hand wobbled so that some of it ran down his chin.

“I know,” he snapped.

He reached out and raked Kilgarry’s chips into the pile.

“Eighteen hunnerd,” he said. “I gotta buy some more. I’ll write you a check–-“

Simon shook his head.

“I’m sorry,” he said quietly. “I’m playing table stakes. We agreed on that when we started.”

Yoring peered at him.

“You meanin’ something insultin’ about my check?”

“I don’t mean that,” Simon replied evenly. “It’s just a matter of principle. I believe in sticking to the rules. I’ll play you a credit game some other time. Tonight we’re putting it on the line.”

He made a slight gesture towards the cigar box where they had each deposited five thousand-dollar bills when they bought their chips.

“Now look here,” Kilgarry began menacingly.

The Saint’s clear blue eyes met his with sapphire smoothness.

“I said cash, brother. Is that clear?”

Yoring groped through his pockets. One by one he untangled crumpled bills from various hiding places until he had built his bet up to thirty-two hundred and fifty dollars. Then he glared at Kilgarry.

“Len’ me what you’ve got.”

“But–-“

“All of it!”

Reluctantly Kilgarry passed over a roll. Yoring licked his thumb and numbered it through. It produced a total raise of four thousand one hundred and fifty dollars. He gulped down the rest of his drink and dribbled some more down his chin.

“Go on,” he said thickly, staring at the Saint. “Raise that.”

Simon counted out four thousand-dollar bills. He had one more, and he held it poised. Then he smiled.

“What’s the use?” he said. “You couldn’t meet it. I’ll take the change and see you.”

Yoring’s hand went to his mouth. He didn’t move for a moment, except for the wild swerve of his eyes.

Then he picked up his cards. With trembling slowness he turned them over one by one. The six, seven, eight, nine—and ten of diamonds.

Nobody spoke; and for some seconds the Saint sat quite still. He was summarizing the whole scenario for himself, in all its inspired ingenuity and mathematical precision, and it is a plain fact that he found it completely beautiful. He was aware that Mercer was shaking him inarticulately and that Yoring’s rheumy eyes were opening wider on him with a flame of triumph.

And suddenly Kilgarry guffawed and thumped the table.

“Go to it,” he said. “Pick it up, Yoring. I take it all back. You’re not so old, either!”

Yoring opened both his arms to embrace the pool.

“Just a minute,” said the Saint.

His voice was softer and gentler than ever, but it stunned the room to another immeasurable silence. Yoring froze as he moved, with his arms almost shaped into a ring. And the Saint smiled very kindly.

Certainly it had been a good trick, and an education, but the Saint didn’t want the others to fall too hard. He had those moments of sympathy for the ungodly in their downfall.

He turned over his own cards, one by one. Aces. Four of them. Simon thought they looked pretty. He had collected them with considerable care, which may have prejudiced him. And the joker.

“My pot, I think,” he remarked apologetically.

Kilgarry’s chair was the first to grate back.

“Here,” he snarled, “that’s not–-“

“The hand he dealt me?” The texture of Simon’s mockery was like gossamer. “And he wasn’t playing the hand I thought he had, either. I thought he’d have some fun when he got used to being without his glasses,” he added cryptically.

He tipped up the cigar box and added its contents to the stack of currency in front of him, and stacked it into a neat sheaf.

“Well, I’m afraid that sort of kills the game for tonight,” he murmured, and his hand was in his side pocket before Kilgarry’s movement was half started. Otherwise he gave no sign of perturbation, and his languid self-possession was as smooth as velvet. “I suppose we’d better call it a day,” he said without any superfluous emphasis.

Mercer recovered his voice first.

“That’s right,” he said jerkily. “You two have won plenty from me other nights. Now we’ve got some of it back. Let’s get out of here, Templar.”

They walked along Ocean Drive, past the variegated modernistic shapes of the hotels, with the rustle of the surf in their ears.

“How much did you win on that last hand?” asked the young man.

“About fourteen thousand dollars,” said the Saint contentedly.

Mercer said awkwardly: “That’s just about what I’d lost to them before. … I don’t know how I can ever thank you for getting it back. I’d never have had the nerve to do it alone… . And then when Yoring turned up that straight flush—I don’t know why—I had an awful moment thinking you’d made a mistake.”

The Saint put a cigarette in his mouth and struck his lighter.

“I don’t make a lot of mistakes,” he said calmly. “That’s where a lot of people go wrong. It makes me rather tired, sometimes. I suppose it’s just professional pride, but I hate to be taken for a mug. And the funny thing is that with my reputation there are always people trying it. I suppose they think that my reactions are so easy to predict that it makes me quite a setup for any smart business.” The Saint sighed, deploring the inexplicable optimism of those who should know better. “Of course I knew that a switch like that was coming —the whole idea was to make me feel so confident of the advantage I had with those glasses that I’d be an easy victim for any ordinary cardsharping. And then, of course, I wasn’t supposed to be able to make any complaint because that would have meant admitting that I was cheating, too. It was a grand idea, Eddie— at least you can say that for it.”

Mercer had taken several steps before all the implications of what the Saint had said really hit him.

“But wait a minute,” he got out. “How do you mean they knew you were wearing trick glasses ?”

“Why else do you imagine they planted that guy on the train to pretend he was J. J. Naskill?” asked the Saint patiently. “That isn’t very bright of you, Eddie. Now, I’m nearly always bright. I was so bright that I smelt a rat directly you lugged that pack of marked cards out of your beach robe—that was really carrying it a bit too far, to have them all ready to produce after you’d got me to listen in on your little act with Josephine. I must say you all played your parts beautifully, otherwise; but it’s little details like that that spoil the effect. I told you at the time that you were a mug,” said the Saint reprovingly. “Now why don’t you paddle off and try to comfort Yoring and Kilgarry? I’m afraid they’re going to be rather hurt when they hear that you didn’t manage to at least make the best of a bad job and get me to hand you my winnings.”

But Mercer did not paddle off at once. He stared at the Saint for quite a long time, understanding why so many other men who had once thought themselves clever had learned to regard that cool and smiling privateer as something closely allied to the devil himself. And wondering, as they had, why the death penalty for murder had ever been invented.

IX THE MAN WHO LIKED ANTS

“I WONDER what would have happened if you had gone into a respectable business, Saint,” Ivar Nordsten remarked one afternoon.

Simon Templar smiled at him so innocently that for an instant his nickname might almost have seemed justified—if it had not been for the faint lazy twinkle of unsaintly mockery that stirred at the back of his blue eyes.

“The question is too farfetched, Ivar. You might as well speculate about what would have happened if I’d been a Martian or a horse.”

They sat on the veranda of the house of Ivar Nordsten—whose name was not really Ivar Nordsten, but who was alive that day and the master of fabulous millions only because the course of one of the Saint’s lawless escapades had once crossed his path at a time when death would have seemed a happy release. He of all living men should have had no wish to change the history of that twentieth-century Robin Hood, whose dark reckless face could be found photographed in half the police archives of the world, and whose gay impudence of outlawry had in its time set the underworlds of five continents buzzing like nests of infuriated wasps. But in that mood of idle fantasy which may well come with the after-lunch contentment of a warm Florida afternoon, Nordsten would have put forward almost any preposterous premise that might give him the pleasure of listening to his friend.

“It isn’t as farfetched as that,” he said. “You will never admit it, but you have many respectable instincts.”

“But I have so many more disreputable ones to keep them under control,” answered the Saint earnestly. “And it’s always been so much more amusing to indulge the disreputable instincts… . No, Ivar, I mustn’t let you make a paragon out of me. If I were quite cynically psychoanalyzing myself, I should probably say that the reason why I only soak the more obvious excrescences on the human race is because it makes everything okay with my respectable instincts and lets them go peacefully to sleep. Then I can turn all my disreputable impulses loose on the mechanical problem of soaking this obvious excrescence in some satisfyingly novel and juicy manner, and get all the fun of original sin out of it without any qualms of conscience.”

“But you contradict yourself. The mere fact that you speak in terms of what you call ‘an obvious excrescence on the human race’ proves that you have some moral standards by which you judge him, and that you have some idealistic interest in the human race itself.”

“The human race,” said the Saint sombrely, “is a repulsive, dull, bloated, ill-conditioned and ill-favoured mass of dimly conscious meat, the chief justification for whose existence is that it provides a contrasting background against which my beauty and spiritual perfections can shine with a lustre only exceeded by your own.”

“You have a natural modesty which I had never suspected,” Nordsten observed gravely, and they both laughed. “But,” he added, “I think you will get on well with Dr Sardon.”

“Who is he?”

“A neighbour of mine. We are dining with him tonight.”

Simon frowned.

“I warned you that I was travelling without any dress clothes,” he began, but Nordsten shook his head maliciously.

“Dr Sardon likes dress clothes even less than you do. And you never warned me that you were coming here at all. So what could I do? I accepted his invitation a week ago, so when you arrived I could only tell Sardon what had happened. Of course he insisted that you must come with me. But I think he will interest you.”

The Saint sighed resignedly and swished the highball gently around in his glass so that the ice clinked.

“Why should I be interested in any of your neighbours?” he protested. “I didn’t come here to commit any crimes; and I’m sure all these people are as respectable as millionaires can be.”

“Dr Sardon is not a millionaire. He is a very brilliant biologist.”

“What else makes him interesting?”

“He is very fond of ants,” said Nordsten seriously, and the Saint sat up.

Then he finished his drink deliberately and put down the glass.

“Now I know that this climate doesn’t agree with you,” he said. “Let’s get changed and go down to the tennis court. I’ll put you in your place before we start the evening.”

Nevertheless he drove over to Dr Sardon’s house that evening in a mood of open-minded curiosity. Scientists he had known before, men who went down thousands of feet into the sea to look at globigerina ooze and men who devised complicated electrical gadgets in laboratories to manufacture gold; but this was the first time that he had heard of a biologist who was fon,d of ants. Everything that was out of the ordinary was prospective material for the Saint. It must be admitted that in simplifying his own career to elementary equations by which obvious excrescences on the human race could be soaked, he did himself less than justice.

But there was nothing about the square smooth-shaven man who was introduced to him as Dr Sardon to take away the breath of any hardened outlaw. He might perhaps have been an ordinary efficient doctor, possibly with an exclusive and sophisticated practice; more probably he could have been a successful stockbroker, or the manager of any profitable commercial business. He shook hands with them briskly and almost mechanically, seeming to summarize the Saint in one sweeping glance through his crisp-looking rimless pince-nez.

“No, you’re not a bit late, Mr Nordsten. As a matter of fact I was working until twenty minutes ago. If you had come earlier I should have been quite embarrassed.”

He introduced his niece, a dark slender girl with a quiet and rather aloof beauty which would have been chilling if it had not been relieved by the friendly humour of her brown eyes. About her, Simon admitted, there might certainly have been things to attract the attention of a modern buccaneer.

“Carmen has been assisting me. She has a very good degree from Columbia.”

He made no other unprompted reference to his researches, and Simon recognized him as the modern type of scientist whose carefully cultivated pose of matter-of-fact worldliness is just as fashionable an affectation as the mystical and bearded eccentricity of his predecessors used to be. Dr Sardon talked about politics, about his golf handicap and about the art of Otto Soglow. He was an entertaining and effective conversationalist but he might never have heard of such a thing as biology until towards the close of dinner Ivar Nordsten skilfully turned a discussion of gardening to the subject of insect pests.