The Saint to the Rescue (20 page)

The immediate representative of the second
biggest of the United States mulled this shamelessly pragmatic proposition
under an
intensely corrugated brow for several seconds, and
came up jubilantly
slapping his thigh.

“Goll dang it,” he said
exuberantly, “I think yuh got the
answer I was lookin’
for. An’ I ain’t the man to forget it.
How much do
you
figure
to invest in this here process?”

“Not much more than I already have,”
said the Saint.
“With taxes the way they are, I can’t afford to be a
million
aire; and I can’t take a profit from giving matrimonial advice
without losing
my amateur standing. But some day if I get
desperate I may stop
at one of your wells with a bucket.”

He dropped Jobyn at the hotel in La Jolla, and
firmly de
clined to stay for dinner or even for a drink, claiming
that he was already overdue at the home of the friends he had
been on
his way to visit in San Diego.

“If you’re going to play it the way I
suggested, you
shouldn’t need any moral support when you talk to
Felicity.
Not at this stage, anyway,” he said. “But I’ll
give you the phone number where I’m staying, and you can call me any
time you
have qualms.”

For his host he had a slightly different
story, merely to
avert the tedium of more complicated explanations.

“I have to see a fellow at Mission Beach
about a small
business deal that a pal of mine asked me to check
on,” he
said with careful casualness, as they were finishing
dinner.
“D’you mind if I run over there and join you at the Yacht
Club
later? It shouldn’t take me an hour, at the very worst.”

He had memorized the location of Doc Nemford’s
shack
so accurately that he did not need to drive within a hundred
yards of
it. He parked his car an inconspicuous block away,
and strolled down an
alley with a chipped and faded sign
board at the entrance that offered
Boats
& Bait.

Simon had seen the boats from Nemford’s jetty,
and had been less than excited as a nautical connoisseur. At close
quarters
they looked even less picturesque and more unseaworthy
; but he was not
planning an extended cruise. There
were no oars or other conventional
means of propulsion in sight, the livery operator having no doubt thoughtfully
se
cured them inside the padlocked shed from which he did his
business,
but the Saint did not have to search far for a dis
carded four-foot piece
of board that would serve as an ade
quate paddle for the voyage he had in
mind.

He quietly nursed the least leaky skiff he
could select along
the shore line to Nemford’s property, and let it drift up
to
the pier and even under it.

There was only a half moon that night, and the
sky was
murky, but Simon had a pencil flashlight to help him in the
dark
corners, though he used it with the most furtive dis
cretion. He verified
certain structural possibilities that had
intrigued him, and
then hitched the painter to one of the
pilings and swung
himself nimbly up on to the decking.

There was a glow of light behind the
ground-floor curtains
of Nemford’s cottage, and the Saint moved like
a drifting
shadow towards an open window until the murmur of voices
inside
resolved itself into distinct words and equally clear
identifications of the
speakers.

The first to emerge into this unconscious
clarity was Nemford
himself, who was saying: “You’re asking me to go
back
on my word to Mr. Jobyn. I know we haven’t signed anything
yet, but
we shook hands on a deal.”

Simon could not see into the room from any
angle, but
the accent and context of the next speech made visual confirmation
supererogatory.

“I appreciate your problem, Doctor, and
I am prepared to
compensate you for your embarrassment. I have spoken by
telephone
to Cairo, and I am authorized to pay you fifty
thousand dollars more
to change your mind about this bar
gain with Mr. Jobyn. I am sure that if
he changed his mind,
he
would not be bound by
the handshake.”

“But suppose, then, he wanted to offer
me more?”

“If you accept my price, you need not be
here to listen
to him. Perhaps it would be wiser if you were not, in
case
he is only angry. But I cannot haggle as in a bazaar. I was
talking to
you first, I remind you, and I deserved the right
to make the first
bid. But since I make the second, it is also
the last for me. A
quarter of a million dollars, Doctor. The
extra money will
almost pay your tax on the transaction.”

There was a pause.

“But when would you expect to pay me,
Colonel? You re
member, I had to tell Mr. Jobyn that I only had his word
for his oil
wells. I hate to say this sort of thing, but after all,
how do I
know that your Government will back you up?
And meanwhile, if I
alienate Mr. Jobyn—”

“My Embassy is being ordered tonight to
let me have the
money. As soon as the bank is open in Washington tomorrow
morning, they can send if to me. Because of the time differ
ence, it
can arrive here as soon as the banks open in San
Diego. Tell me which
bank you keep your papers in, and I’ll
have it sent there. We meet, I give
you the money, you
give me the blueprints. It is so simple.”

“What about the model?”

“Aha. We take it with us to the bank, in
a taxi. The taxi
waits. When we have finished, I take the taxi to the
airport.
My Government would not pay so much money to compete with
Mr. Jobyn, it means very much to our prestige to have
your invention
exclusively. Of course you would not think
of giving him the
model with some more blueprints—you
are an honorable man—but I am ordered
to bring it with me,
and my suggestion is most practical.”

The craftily candid exposure of teeth that
must have ac
companied this could be heard in the voice.

“Would you be leaving at once?”

“Yes, you will have to face Mr. Jobyn
alone. If you decide
to wait for him. But I am afraid your
Government might take
his part if they knew I was taking away
something they
might officially lend to us for political considerations.
I ex
pect to be highly commended if I make that impossible. So,
I would
prefer to be out of your country before anyone com
plains.”

Another pause.

Simon could picture Doc Nemford chewing on his
pipe,
his tall taut brow furrowed with earnest deliberation.

At last——

“All right, Colonel. I’ll have to
accept. I just want you to
realize that I’m not being influenced by the
price you’re
offering. The reason is, I’m ashamed of having almost let
you
down. As you had to remind me, you
were
the first cus
tomer. But
with Mr. Jobyn throwing his oil wells at me, and
that chap he brought
with him today—”

“Who was he?”

“One of the world’s greatest experts in
this field, though
you’d never guess it to look at him. But when
he
said
my
invention looked good, I knew I’d never be able to stop
Mr. Jobyn
elbowing you out of the way.”

“Do not feel so unhappy about him,”
Hamzah said mag
nanimously. “He still can throw his oil wells
somewhere else.
Now, let us set a time. I will call for you at ten
o’clock.
By then, I shall have made a box in which your model can
be packed,
and you will have removed the explosive. With
your permission, I
will take the measurements… .”

Simon had no need to hear any more. He
retreated as
softly as he had approached, lowered himself into the
dinghy,
and paddled it silently back to where he had borrowed it.

He was at the Yacht Club within the hour he
had allotted
for the detour, and wholeheartedly enjoyed the rest of an
unimportant evening without thinking it necessary to say any
more about
his brief digression. Nor did he feel obliged to spoil Walt Jobyn’s evening by
phoning him that night.

Even after a large late breakfast the next
morning he was
not overpowered by any urge to make the call, but took a
much
livelier interest in the fact that it looked like a perfect
day to go
sailing, as had been tentatively proposed before
they went to bed.

“I’m afraid I’ll hold you up a bit,
though,” he said. “I’ve
got to drop by and see this merchant I
visited last night
again. Some papers I have to see were at his bank, and
he’s
getting them out this morning. I can’t put it off, because one of the
characters involved is catching a plane east around
midday. Could we meet
at the Club for an early lunch and
blast off right afterwards?”

It may be interesting for some future analyst
to note that for a man of such complicated activities the Saint seldom
found
himself constrained to lie. He could nearly always
phrase the literal
truth in such a way that the listener re
ceived the exact
impression that the Saint wanted him to
have. It was a technique which eliminated
all the hazardous
overhead of keeping
conflicting stories straight and mutually
harmonious, while at the same
time adding a certain private
spice to what
might otherwise have been mere routine dia
logue.

In this case, it also won the Saint a
sufficient margin of
unquestioned time, during which he could drive
peacefully
back to Mission Beach, with no unseemly desperate eye
glued
to the clock and mileometer, and arrive within sight of the
front
entrance of Doc Nemford’s shack, near the same park
ing spot that he had found before, at a
moment intelligently
calculated to succeed
the Nemford-Hamzah safari to the
bank, but also to precede the
predictable return of Nemford
alone.

Thus when Doc Nemford walked back into his own tem
porary home, a little before noon, he found a lean
bronze-
faced man comfortably extended
between the best chair in
the living
room and the handiest table-top on which a pair
of very long legs could conveniently park their extremities.

“Come on in, Doc,” Simon encouraged him hospitably.
“I
hope you don’t mind me making myself
at home.”

“No, why not?” Nemford said with pardonable vagueness.
“If I’d known you were coming—but I wasn’t
expecting Mr.
Jobyn till
tomorrow—”

“Let’s both save a little time,”
Simon suggested soothingly.
“I’ll put my cards on the table, and you
do the same, and
we’ll work out the score like well-brought-up scientists.
I
was still trying to make up my mind whether you knew who
I was,
right up until I heard you give Hamzah the clincher
last night. Well, as
one of the world’s greatest experts in
this field, though
you’d never guess it to look at me, I’d like
to give you an award
as the best player of a busted flush that I’ve sat in with in a long elegy of
these games. Once
the chips began to fly, you squeezed your hand to the last
pip.”

Doc Nemford fumbled out his pipe and pouch
arid began
the restorative mechanisms of stoking one from the other.

“What else could I do?” he said.
“You kept me guessing
yourself—right up until now, I was trying to
decide whether
I’d fooled you.”

“You weren’t so far from it, chum. You
had a nice expla
nation of why the fresh water came out of your gadget
with
more pressure than you were pumping the sea water in—
but if you
ever do it again, it’d be better to put a pressure
reducer in the
circuit and not have to explain anything.
Sometimes these city
water systems carry an awful head of
steam… . You don’t have anything
like that to worry
about with the electric consumption, even if someone like
Hamzah did hook a meter into the line: I’m sure the vibrator
inside your
model doesn’t draw a lot of extra juice… .
And even the valve
that you open and shut when you’re
demonstrating doesn’t give away the
gimmick—in fact, it’s
a good piece of business.”