Saint Intervenes (35 page)

“Vun
honderd pounds iss for a cheap bit of paste,” said
Mr. Solomon
pathetically. “You know I ain’t got nothing like
dot in my shop,
Louie.”

Half an
hour later he parted grudgingly with an excellent
stone, for which
Louie Fallen was persuaded to pay a hun
dred and fifty
pounds, and the business-like tension of the in
terview relaxed in an
exchange of cheap cigars. In the estima
tion of Mr. Solomon,
who had given thirty pounds for the s
tone, it was a highly satisfactory
afternoon’s work.

“You
got a gift there, Louie,” he said gloomily.

“I’ve
got a gold-mine,” said Louie confidently. “All I need
beside
this is psychology, and I don’t have to pay for that. I’m
just
naturally psychological. You got to pick out the right
kind of sucker. Then
it goes like this.”

The germ
of that elusive quality which turns an otherwise
normal and rational
human being into a sucker has yet to
be isolated. Louie Fallon, the man of
action, had never both
ered to probe into it: he recognised one when
he saw one,
without
analysing whys and wherefores, exactly as he was ac
customed to recognising a piece of cheese without a thought of the
momentous dawn of life which it enshrines. Simon
Templar himself had various theories.

Probably
the species Mug is the same as the common cold
—there is no single
bacillus to account for it. Nor is there
likely to be any
rigid definition of that precise shade of
covetous innocence,
that peculiarly grasping guilelessness, which stamps the hard-boiled West
Country farmer, accus
tomed to prying into the pedigrees of
individual oats before
disgorging a penny on them, as a potential
purchaser of the
Tower of London for two hundred pounds down and the
balance by
installments. But whatever these symptoms may
be, Simon Templar
possessed them in their richest beauty.
He had only to saunter
in his most natural manner down the
highways of the world immaculate and
debonair, with his soft
hat slanted blithely over one eye, and the
passing pageant of
humanity crystallised into men who had had their pockets
picked and
only needed five shillings to get home, men with
gold bricks, men with
oil wells in Texas, men needing
assistance in the execution of eccentric
wills, men with charts
showing the authenticated cemetery of Captain
Kidd’s treas
ure, men with horses that could romp home on one leg and
a crutch,
and men who just thought he might like a game of
cards. It was one of the Saint’s most
treasured assets; and he
never ordered
strawberries in December without a toast to the
benign Providence that had endowed him with the gift of
having all that he asked of life poured into his
lap.

As a
matter of fact he was sauntering down the Strand
when he met Louie
Fallon. He didn’t actually run into him,
but he did walk into
him; but there was nothing particularly
remarkable about that,
for the Strand is a street which con
tains more crooks to the square yard
than any other area of
ground outside a prison wall—which may be
partly ac
counted for by the fact that it also has the reputation
of
being the favourite promenading ground of more potential
suckers
than any other thoroughfare in the Metropolis.

Louie Fallon had a theory that
he couldn’t walk down the
Strand on any day
in the week without bumping into a per
ambulating
gold-mine which only required skilful scratching
to yield him its gilded
harvest.

He walked
towards the Saint, fumbling in his pockets with
a preoccupied air and
the kind of flurried abstraction of a man
who has forgotten where he put his season
ticket on his way
down the platform, with
his eyes fluttering over every item
of
the perspective except those which were included in the di
rection in which he was going. At any rate, the
last person in
the panorama whom he
appeared to see was the Saint him
self.
Simon saw him, and swerved politely; but with the quick
witted agility of long practice, Louie Fallon
blundered off to
the same side. They
collided with a slight bump, at the very
moment when Louie had apparently discovered the article for
which he had been searching.

It fell on to the pavement
between them and rolled away
between the Saint’s
feet, sparkling enticingly in the sunlight.
Muttering profuse apologies, Louie scuffled round to re
trieve it. The movement was so adroitly devised to
en
tangle them that Simon would have had no chance to pass on
and make his escape, even if he had wanted to.

But it is
dawning—slowly and reluctantly, perhaps, but
dawning,
nevertheless—upon the chronicler that there can be very few students of these
episodes who can still be cherishing
any delusion that the Saint would ever
want to escape from
such a situation.

Simon
stood by with a slight smile coming to his lips, while
Louie wriggled round his legs and
recovered his precious pos
session with a
faint squeak of delight, and straightened up with the object clutched solidly
in his hand.

“Phew!”
said Mr. Fallon, fanning himself with his hat.
“That was near
enough. Did you see where it went? Right to
the edge of that
grating. If it had rolled down …” He blew out his cheeks and rolled up
his eyes in an eloquent register
of horror at the dreadful thought. “For a
moment I thought
I’d lost it,” he said, clarifying his point
conclusively.

Simon
nodded. It did not require any peculiar keenness
of vision to see
that the object of so much concern was a very
nice-looking diamond,
for Louie was making no attempt to
hide it—he was, on the contrary,
blowing on it and rubbing
it affectionately on his sleeve to remove the
invisible specks of grime and dust which it had collected on its travels.

“You
must be lucky.”

Louie’s
face fell abruptly. The transition between his almost
childish delight and
the shadow of awful gloom which sud
denly passed across his countenance
was quite startling. Mr.
Fallon’s artistry had never been disputed even
by his rivals
in the profession.

“Lucky?”
he practically yelped, in a rising crescendo of
mournful indignation.
“Why, I’m the unluckiest man that ever
lived!”

“Too
bad,” said the Saint, with profound sympathy.

“Lucky!”
repeated Mr Fallon, with all the pained disgust
of a hypochondriac
who has been accused of looking well.
“Why, I’m the sort of fellow if I
saw a five-pound note lying
in the street and tried to pick it up, I’d
fall down and break
my neck!”

It was
becoming clear to Simon Templar that Mr. Fallon
felt that he was
unlucky.

“There
are people like that,” he said, reminiscently. “I re
membered an
aunt of mine——
”

“Lucky?”
reiterated Mr. Fallon, who did not appear to be
interested in anyone
else’s aunt. “Why, right at this moment
I’m the unluckiest
man in London. Look here”—he clasped
the Saint by the arm
with the pathetically appealing movement
of a drowning man
clutching at a straw—“do you think you
could help me? If you
haven’t got anything particular to do?

I feel
sort of—well—you look the sort of fellow who might have some ideas. Have you
got time for a drink?”

Simon
Templar could never have been called a toper, but
on such occasions as
this he invariably had time for a drink.
“I don’t mind if
I do,” he said obligingly.

As a matter
of fact, they were standing outside a mirac
ulously convenient
hostel at that moment—Louie Fallon had
always believed in
bringing the mellowing influence of alcohol
to bear as soon as he
had scraped his acquaintance, and he
staged his encounters with that idea in
view.

With
practised dexterity he steered the Saint towards the
door of the saloon
bar, cutting short the protest which Simon
Templar had no
intention whatsoever of making. In hardly
any more time than it
takes to record, he had got the Saint
inside the bar, parked him at a table,
invited him to name his poison, procured a double ration of the said poison
from the
barmaid, and settled himself in the adjoining chair to
improve
the shining hour. To the discerning critic it might seem that
he rushed
at the process rather like an unleashed investor
plunging after an
absconding company promoter; but Louie
Fallen’s conception of
improving shining hours had never included any unnecessary waste of time, and
he had learnt by
experience that the willingness of the species Mug to
listen is
usually limited only by the ability of the flatcatcher to
talk.

“Yes,”
said Mr. Fallon, reverting to his subject. “I am the
unluckiest
man you are ever likely to meet. Did you see that
diamond I dropped just
now?”

“Well,”
admitted the Saint truthfully, “I couldn’t help
seeing it.”

Mr. Fallon
nodded. He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket,
brought out the jewel
again, and laid it on the table.

“I
made that myself,” he said.

Simon eyed
the stone and Mr. Fallon with the puzzled ex
pression which was
expected of him.

“What
do you mean—you made it?”

“I
made it myself,” said Mr. Fallon. “It’s what you would call
synthetic. It took about half an hour, and it cost me ex
actly
threepence. But there isn’t a diamond merchant in Lon
don who could prove
that it wasn’t dug up out of the ground
in South Africa. Take
it to anyone you like, and see if he does
swear that it’s a
perfectly genuine stone.”

“You
mean it’s a fake?” said the Saint.

“Fake
my eye!” said Mr. Fallon, with emphatic if inelegant
expressiveness.
“It’s a perfectly genuine diamond, the same
as any other stone
you’ll ever seen. The only difference is that I made it. You know how diamonds
are made?”

The Saint
had as good an idea of how diamonds are made
as Louie Fallon was
ever likely to have; but it seemed as if
Louie liked talking,
and in such circumstances as that Simon
Templar was the last
man on earth to interfere with anyone’s enjoyment. He shook his head blankly.

“I
thought they sort of grew,” he said vaguely.

“I
don’t know that I should put it exactly like that,” said
Louie.
“I’ll tell you how diamonds happen. Diamonds are
just carbon—like
coal, or soot, or—or——
“•

“Paper?”
suggested the Saint helpfully.

Louie
frowned.

“They’re
carbon,” he said, “which is crystallised under pres
sure. When
the earth was all sort of hot, like you read about
in your history
books—before it sort of cooled down and
people started to live
in it and things grew on it—there
was a lot of carbon. Being hot, it
burnt things, and when you
burn things you usually get carbon. Well,
after a time, when
the earth started to cool down, it sort of shrunk, like—
like——
”

“A
shirt when it goes to the wash?”
 
said the Saint.

“Anyway,
it shrunk,” said Louie, yielding the point and passing on. “And what happened
then?”

“It
got smaller,” hazarded the Saint.

“It
caused terrific pressure,” said Mr. Fallen firmly. “Just
imagine
it. Thousands of millions of tons of rock—and—”

“And
rock.”

“And
rock, cooling down, and shrinking up, and getting
hard. Well,
naturally, any bits of carbon that were floating
around in the rock got
squeezed. So what happened?” de
manded Louie, triumphantly reaching the
climax of his lucid
description.