The Saint and the Happy Highwayman (5 page)

Her mouth opened a little.

“You mean you’d do that?”

“Sure. Apart from the fact that I don’t like your Mr Oppenheim, it seems to me that with a million and a half dollars’ worth of emeralds one could do a whole lot of amusing things which Oppenheim would never dream of. To a bloke with my imagination–-“

“But when would you do it?”

He looked at his watch mechanically.

“Eventually—why not now? Or at least this evening.” He was almost mad enough to consider it, but he restrained himself. “But I’m afraid it might be asking for trouble. It ‘11 probably take me a day or two to find out a few more things about this dick from Ingerbeck’s, and then I’ll have to get organized to keep him out of the way on the night I want to go in. I should think you could call it a date for Friday.”

She nodded with a queer childish gravity.

“I believe you’d do it. You sound very sure of everything. But what would you do with the emeralds after you got them?”

“I expect we could trade them in for a couple of hamburgers—maybe more.”

“You couldn’t sell them.”

“There are ways and means.”

“You couldn’t sell stones like that. I’m sure you couldn’t. Everything in a famous collection like that would be much too well known. If you took them into a dealer he’d recognize them at once, and then you’d be arrested.”

The Saint smiled. It has never been concealed from the lynx-eyed student of these chronicles that Simon Templar had his own very human weaknesses; and one of these was very much akin to the one which had contributed so generously to the unpopularity of Lieutenant Corrio. If the Saint made himself considerably less ridiculous with it, it was because he was a very different type of man. But the Saint had his own deeply planted vanities; and one of these was a deplorable weakness of resistance to the temptation to display his unique knowledge of the devious ways of crime, like a peddler spreading his wares in the market place before a suitably impressed and admiring audience.

“Three blocks north of here, on Fifty-second Street,” he said, “there’s a little bar where you can find the biggest fence in the United States any evening between five and eight o’clock. He’ll take anything you like to offer him across the table, and pay top prices for it. You could sell him the English crown jewels if you had them. If I borrow Oppenheim’s emeralds on Friday night I’ll be rid of them by dinnertime Saturday, and then we’ll meet for a celebration and see where you’d like to go for a vacation.”

He was in high spirits when he took her home much later to the lodginghouse where he had found her a room the night before. There was one virtue in the indulgence of his favourite vice : talking over the details of a coup which he was freshly planning in his mind helped him to crystallize and elaborate his own ideas, gave him a charge of confidence and optimistic energy from which the final strokes of action sprung as swiftly and accurately as bullets out of a gun. When he said good night to her he felt as serene and exhilarated in spirit as if the Vanderwoude emeralds were already his own. He was in such good spirits that he had walked a block from the lodginghouse before he remembered that he had left her without trying to induce her to take some money for her immediate needs, and without making any arrangement to meet her again.

He turned and walked back. Coincidence, an accident of time involving only a matter of seconds, had made incredible differences to his life before: this, he realized later, was only another of those occasions when an overworked guardian angel seemed to play with the clock to save him from disaster.

The dimly lighted desert of the hall was surrounded by dense oases of potted palms, and one of these obstructions was in a direct line from the front door, so that anyone who entered quietly might easily remain unnoticed until he had circumnavigated this clump of shrubbery. The Saint, who from the ingrained habit of years of dangerous living moved silently without conscious effort, was just preparing to step around this divinely inspired decoration when he heard someone speaking in the hall and caught the sound of a name which stopped him dead in his tracks. The name was Corrio. Simon stood securely hidden behind the fronds of imported vegetation and listened for as long as he dared to some of the most interesting lines of dialogue which he had ever overheard. When he had heard enough, he slipped out again as quietly as he had come in and went home without disturbing Janice Dixon. He would get in touch with her the next day; for the moment he had something much more urgent to occupy his mind.

It Is possible that even Lieutenant Corrio’s smugness might have been shaken if he had known about this episode of unpremeditated eavesdropping, but this unpleasant knowledge was hidden from him. His elastic self-esteem had taken no time at all to recover from the effects of Fernack’s reprimand; and when Fernack happened to meet him on a certain Friday afternoon he looked as offensively sleek and self-satisfied as he had, always been. It was beyond Fernack’s limits of self-denial to let the occasion go by without making the/use of it to which he felt he was entitled.

“I believe Oppenheim has still got his emeralds,” he remarked with a certain feline joviality.

Lieutenant Corrio’s glossy surface was unscratched.

“Don’t be surprised if he doesn’t keep them much longer,” he said. “And don’t blame me if the Saint gets away with it. I gave you the tip once and you wouldn’t listen.”

“Yeah, you gave me the tip,” Fernack agreed benevolently. “When are you goin’ out to Hollywood to play Sherlock Holmes?”

“Maybe it won’t be so long now,” Corrio said darkly. “Paragon Pictures are pretty interested in me —apparently one of their executives happened to see me playing the lead in our last show at the Merrick Playhouse, and they want me to take a screen test.”

Fernack grinned evilly.

“You’re too late,” he said. “They’ve already made a picture of Little Women.”

He had reason to regret some of his jibes the next morning, when news came in that every single one of Mr Oppenheim’s emeralds had been removed from their hiding place and taken out of the house, quietly and without any fuss, in the pockets of a detective* of whom the Ingerbeck Agency had never heard. They had, they said, been instructed by telephone that afternoon to discontinue the service, and the required written confirmation had arrived a few hours later, written on Mr Oppenheim’s own flowery letterhead and signed with what they firmly believed to be his signature; and nobody had been more surprised and indignant than they were when Mr Oppenheim, on the verge of an apoplectic fit, had rung up Mr Ingerbeck himself and demanded to know how many more crooks they had on their payroll and what the blank blank they proposed to do about it. The impostor had arrived at the house at the usual hour in the evening, explained that the regular man had been taken ill and presented the necessary papers to accredit himself; and he had been left all night in the study, and let out at breakfast time according to the usual custom. When he went out he was worth a million and a half dollars as he stood up. He was, according to the butler’s rather hazy description, a tallish man with horn-rimmed glasses and a thick crop of red hair.

“That red hair and glasses is all baloney,” said Corrio, who was in Fernack’s office when the news came in. “Just an ordinary wig and a pair of frames from any optician’s. It was the Saint all right—you can see his style right through it. What did I tell you?”

“What th’ hell d’ya think you can tell me?” Fernack roared back at him. Then he subdued himself. “Anyway, you’re crazy. The Saint’s out of business.”

Corrio shrugged.

“Would you like me to take the case, sir?”

“What, you?” Fernack paused to take careful aim at the cuspidor. “I’ll take the case myself.” He glowered at Corrio thoughtfully for a moment. “Well, if you know so much about it, you can come along with me. And we’ll see how smart you are.”

Ten minutes later they were in a taxi on their way to Oppenheim’s house.

It was a silent journey, for Fernack was too full of a vague sort of wrath to speak, and Corrio seemed quite content to sit in a corner and finger his silky moustache with an infuriatingly tranquil air of being quite well satisfied with the forthcoming opportunity of demonstrating his own brilliance.

In the house they found a scene of magnificent confusion. There was the butler, who seemed to be getting blamed for having admitted the thief; there was a representative of Ingerbeck’s, whose temper appeared to be fraying rapidly under the flood of wild accusations which Oppenheim was flinging at him; there was a very suave and imperturbable official of the insurance company which had covered the jewels; and there was Mr Oppenheim himself, a short fat yellow-faced man, dancing about like an agitated marionette, shaking his fists in an ecstasy of rage, screaming at the top of his voice, and accusing everybody in sight of crimes and perversions which would have been worth at least five hundred years in Sing Sing if they could have been proved. Fernack and Corrio had to listen while he unburdened his soul again from the beginning.

“And now vat you think?” he wound up. “These dirty crooks, this insurance company vat takes all my money, they say they don’t pay anything. They say they repudiate the policy. Just because I tried to keep the emeralds vere they couldn’t be found, instead of leaving them in a safe vat anyone can open.”

“The thing is,” explained the official of the insurance company, with his own professional brand of unruffled unctuousness, “that Mr Oppenheim has failed to observe the conditions of the policy. It was issued on the express understanding that if the emeralds were to be kept in the house, they were to be kept in this safe and guarded by a detective from some recognized agency. Neither of these stipulations have been complied with, and in the circumstances–-“

“It’s a dirty svindle!” shrieked Oppenheim. “Vat do I care about your insurance company? I vill cancel all my policies. I buy up your insurance company and throw you out in the street to starve. I offer my own reward for the emeralds. I vill pay half a mil—I mean a hundred thousand dollars to the man who brings back my jewels!”

“Have you put that in writing yet?” asked Lieutenant Corrio quickly.

“No. But I do so at vonce. Bah! I vill show these dirty double-crossing crooks …”

He whipped out his fountain pen and scurried over to the desk.

“Here, wait a minute,” said Fernack, but Oppenheim paid no attention to him. Fernack turned to Corrio. “I suppose you’ve gotta be sure of the reward before you start showin’ us how clever you are,” he said nastily.

“No sir. But we have to consider the theory tha’t the robbery might have been committed with that in mind. Emeralds like those would be difficult to dispose of profitably—I can only think of one fence in the East who’d handle a package of stuff like that.”

“Then why don’t you pull him in?” snapped Fernack’ unanswerably.

“Because I’ve never had enough evidence. But I’ll take up that angle this afternoon.”

He took no further part in the routine examinations and questionings which Fernack conducted with dogged efficiency, but on the way back to Centre Street he pressed his theory again with unusual humility.

“After all, sir,” he said, “we’ve all known for a long time that there’s one big fence in the East who’ll handle anything that’s brought him, however big it is. I’ve been working on him quietly for a long time, and I’m pretty certain who it is, though I’ve never been able to get anything on him. I even know where he can be found and where he does most of his buying, and I don’t mind telling you that it’s helped me a lot in tracing the loot from other jobs. Even if this isn’t one of the Saint’s jobs, whoever did it, there are only four things they can do with the emeralds. They can hold them for the reward, they can cut them up and sell them as small stuff, they can try to smuggle them out of the country or they can just get rid of them in one shot to this guy I’ve got in mind. Of course they may be planning any of the first three things, but they may just as well be planning the fourth, and we aren’t justified in overlooking it. And if we’re going to do anything about it, we’ve got to do it pretty quickly. I know you don’t think much of me, sir,” said Corrio with unwonted candour, “but you must admit that I was right a few days ago when you wouldn’t listen to me, and now I think it ‘d be only fair for you to give me another chance.”

Almost against his will Fernack forced himself to be just.

“All right,” he said grudgingly. “Where do we find this guy?”

“If you can be free about a quarter to five this afternoon,” said Corrio, “I’d like you to come along with me.”

Simon Templar walked west along Fifty-second Street. He felt at peace with the world. At such times as this he was capable of glowing with a vast and luxurious contentment, the same deep and satisfying tranquillity that might follow a perfect meal eaten in hunger or the drinking of a cool drink at the end of a hot day. As usually happened with him, this mood had made its mark on his clothes. He had dressed himself with some care for the occasion in one of the most elegant suits and brightly colored shirts from his extensive wardrobe, and he was a very beautiful and resplendent sight as he sauntered along the sidewalk with the brim of his hat tilted piratically over his eyes, looking like some swashbuckling medieval brigand who had been miraculously transported into the twentieth century and put into modern dress without losing the swagger of a less inhibited age. In one hand he carried a brown paper parcel.

Fernack’s huge fist closed on his arm near the corner of Seventh Avenue, and the Saint looked around and recognized him with a delighted and completely innocent smile.

“Why, hullo there,” he murmured. “The very man I’ve been looking for.” He discovered Corrio coming up out of the background and smiled again. “Hi, Gladys,” he said politely.

Corrio seized his other arm and worked him swiftly and scientifically into a doorway. Corrio kept one hand in his side pocket, and whatever he had in his pocket prodded against the Saint’s stomach and kept him pinned in a corner. There was a gleam of excitement in his dark eyes. “I guess my hunch was right again,” he said to Fernack.