Thanks to the Saint

The bunco artists

At this point it may be worth reviewing just once more a field of felony in which Simon Templar won quite a few interesting tourneys in his early years, and in which he exploited most effectively the gift of assuming a pose of fabulous and even fatuous innocence (when a situation called for such a disguise) which was once partly responsible for getting him nicknamed “The Saint.”

I make my excuses to anyone to whom these routines are already old stuff, but the Saint never lost a connoisseur’s and collector’s appreciation of them, and the recapitulation I have in mind may not be entirely dull.

In the simplest basic version of the “confidence” game, the sucker or mark sees a stranger drop a wallet, and naturally picks it up and restores it to its owner. The owner thanks him and keeps on talking to reveal that he is burdened with the job of distributing a huge charitable fund, or some similar sinecure involving the handling of large sums of money: his problem is to find an absolutely trustworthy assistant, and by a happy coincidence the boob who returned the wallet has just given unsolicited proof of unusual honesty. However, the operator has associates who will demand more substantial evidence that the dupe is a man of means who can be trusted with the virtually blank checks they will be handing him, so it is suggested that he bring to a meeting the largest amount of cash he can raise, to exhibit to them to win their confidence — from which theme the racket derives its name. The fool does so, his money is examined and returned to him, his candidacy is unanimously approved with handshakes, and the session rapidly adjourns on promises that formal agreements will be signed with him in a few days. It is not until after the crooks have departed that the victim discovers that the wad of currency which he got back contains only one bill of large denomination, on the outside, while the bulk of it has been dextrously transformed into single dollars or even rectangles of blank paper of the same size.

In one of the commonest variations of this plot, the con men pretend to be making fast fortunes from inside information on horse-racing or the stock market. They allow the dimwit to join in their gambles, and before long he has won, on paper, a small fortune. But when settling time comes, another member of the gang, masquerading as a bookie or a broker, refuses to pay off until the mark shows proof that he could have met his losses if the results had gone the opposite way. Again the fathead digs up all the cash he can raise, with the identical consequence.

Although these tricks have been exposed innumerable times in articles and stories, it is a staggering fact that practitioners of such hoary devices, or closely related mutations of them, are extracting pay dirt with them to this very day.

Often erroneously referred to as forms of the confidence racket, but actually only its kissing cousins, are what the professionals call bunco jobs. In these the ultimate larceny is hardly less barefaced, but the technical difference is that the “confidence” gimmick is not employed. Nevertheless, they also have one distinguishing trait in common, which is the psychology behind the manipulation of the bait which hooks and lands the poor fish who provides the sharper with his dinner.

Simon pointed this out to Mrs Sophie Yarmouth with privileged severity.

“If only respectable people like you weren’t so fundamentally dishonest,” he said, “most of these swindlers would be starved into trying to earn an honest living themselves. But when you’re offered an outrageous bargain, you’re too greedy to stop and think that anything that looks so much like what you’d lightly call a steal is most probably exactly that. You’re so excited by the idea of making a fast buck that you don’t care if the deal involves you in something that’s frankly a little shady. That only makes you feel extra clever, and you’re so fascinated by your own newly discovered business genius that you don’t even have time for the rudimentary precautions that a schoolgirl would take before lending a pal the price of an ice-cream cone.”

“That isn’t true,” Mrs Yarmouth sniffed. “I was thinking of Howard, and how much it might do for him. And if he hadn’t gone off to play some ridiculous cowboy part on location in Wyoming, and left me alone in Palm Springs, I wouldn’t have been exposed to these crooks and made to suffer for only trying to help his career.”

Howard Mayne heroically stifled the temptation to take issue with this gem of feminine logic. He could not really help looking heroic about it, for he was blessed with all the facial qualifications of the rugged type of movie star, and his only trouble was that no Hollywood producer had yet been persuaded to give him a leading role.

“Don’t argue with the man, Aunt Sophie,” he said. “Tell him the whole story, and he may be able to tell you what you can do about it.”

Mr Copplestone Eade (to give him only one of a variety of fine-sounding names which he used) had made Mrs Yarmouth’s acquaintance without difficulty beside a Palm Springs hotel swimming pool and cemented it with a few chats in the lobby, a casual cocktail, an after-dinner coffee and Benedictine in a restaurant where they had found each other eating alone, and one no less apparently spontaneous lunch together beside the same pool where they had met. It was more than enough for Mr Eade to learn that she had a nephew who was a hopeful but not yet very successful actor, and for him to establish that he had been an executive at a couple of major studios and was now embarking on the independent production of films for television.

Mr Eade was then in his fifties, with a fairly well preserved figure, gray hair which he wore just enough beyond ordinary length to seem vaguely artistic without being arty, and the kind of strongly lined face that suggests a man of force and experience, either in business or boudoir, or perhaps both. But there was no hint of romance in his approach, for that was not one of Mr Eade’s habitual methods, and besides he had an extremely jealous wife who had too much on him to take chances with.

Mrs Yarmouth brightly mentioned that he could do worse than consider her nephew for an important part in his projected series, and Mr Eade said courteously but very non-committally that he would be happy to interview him. He had already ascertained that it would be at least two weeks before Howard Mayne would be through with the small part for which he had suddenly been sent off to Wyoming, while Mrs Yarmouth, who was only a visitor from Vermont, had still never seen the inside of a movie studio and would be returning to Hollywood within a week, so that when Mr Eade, before he left the next Monday, insisted that she must call him directly when she got in town and have lunch at the studio and let him show her how movies were made, it was with a comfortable certainty that she would take him up on it, and that he had a few invaluable days ahead in which to arrange the scenery and props which would be essential to the dénouement of the tabloid drama that he had just nursed through a neat and fertile first act.

The studio which Mr Eade used for a setting was entirely legitimate, being merely an incorporated agglomeration of real estate and architecture which was in business solely to rent space and facilities to all comers, without interest in their projects or product, so long as they had the requisite credit rating or better still the cash. Mr Copplestone Eade’s credit might have evoked no raves from Dun & Bradstreet, but he always had a working reserve of cash, since bunco is one of the most capitalistic kinds of crime, and his requirements were relatively modest, consisting at this point mainly of office space in an enclave where movies were in fact busily and evidently being made.

With this entrée he was able to guide Mrs Yarmouth authoritatively around the lot, dispensing interesting lore about the processes which brought a cinematographic masterpiece from the script to the screen — much of which, thanks to some far-off days when he had worked as an extra, was reasonably authentic. He was able to take her on a stage where scenes were being shot, introduce her to a director with whom he had previously scraped an acquaintance with talk of a possible job, present her to a famous star who did not know him from Adam but gave a friendly performance from force of habit, and show her an elaborate set under construction on another stage which he said was being built for his own forthcoming series, all with such casual aplomb that by the end of the tour it would not even have entered her head to doubt that he was exactly what he had said he was.

But when they made what he called a courtesy stop at his office, to see if there had been any vital messages while he was entertaining her, before they went on to lunch, there was an abrupt change in this placid tempo. His secretary met him with a long face.

“I’m afraid this is going to be a nasty shock for you, Mr Eade,” she said. “I tried to call Mr Traustein about the meeting this afternoon, and it seems he had a heart attack in the shower this morning, and he died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.”

“Oh no!” said Mr Eade, and collapsed into a chair as if his legs had been cut from under him.

Mrs Yarmouth felt instinctively obliged to say she was sorry.

“No, it isn’t that,” said Mr Eade, removing his hands from a face which he hoped looked convincingly haggard. “He was a fine man, I understand, but I hardly knew him at all in a personal way. Our relationship was purely business. Mr Traustein was a very rich man who privately financed movie ventures, which people like myself, on the creative side, seldom have enough capital to do. He had promised to put up the money for the series that I was expecting to start, and the papers were to be signed this afternoon.”

“And you can’t go ahead without him?” Mrs Yarmouth prompted, quite superfluously.

“Frankly, no,” said Mr Eade heavily. “Not that I couldn’t get any amount of other financing, of course. That isn’t any problem, with a property and a distribution deal like mine. But to get the right terms, you have to have time to negotiate. You’ve no idea how ruthless the vultures in this town can be. When they know you’ve got to have money in a hurry, and haven’t got time to haggle, they make you pay through the nose. And it’s their business to know everything that’s going on in the Industry — you can’t bluff them. The minute I start talking to them, they’ll know they can put me through the wringer.”

“What shall I tell the studio, Mr Eade?” asked the secretary, who had been standing patiently by.

She was a rather homely woman of primly efficient aspect, in the neighborhood of forty, so radically different from the popular conception of a Hollywood producer’s secretary that Mrs Yarmouth had approved of her on sight and had thereby been subtly strengthened in her respect for Mr Eade.

“Please don’t tell them anything,” he said urgently. “Don’t talk to anybody. Perhaps I can still think of something before the whole town knows I’m over a barrel.”

“Very well, Mr Eade.”

“You’d better get some lunch — we’ll have a lot to do this afternoon. But before you go would you bring me that last letter from Herbert and Shapiro?”

He let Mrs Yarmouth read the missive herself. On a genuine sheet of letterhead pilfered from an advertising agency so famous that jokes about it were good for a laugh even from unsophisticated audiences, it said in part:

However, we feel obliged to remind you that time is of the essence in your contract, and that failure to deliver the first film on or before May 12 will be grounds for cancellation of the entire series, as it would cause us ourselves to forfeit the time commitment which we have from the network.

“You see,” Mr Eade elucidated, “as far as a sponsor’s concerned, having a good TV show is only half the battle. Getting a good network time to put it on the air is the other half. StarSuds happen to have a perfect time spot booked for this series. But if I don’t deliver, they’ll lose it, and besides canceling my contract they could probably sue me for damages.”

“I should think it’d be more sensible if they lent you the money to make the pictures,” said Mrs Yarmouth.

“You don’t understand,” said Mr Eade patiently. “Things just aren’t done that way in this business — StarSuds is packed in boxes, but the soap-makers don’t make the boxes. Their attitude is that they’re in the soap business, not the box business. Or, to take it a step further, the motion-picture business. They expect to buy television pictures, not make them. As it is, they’re as close to subsidizing this series as they’ll ever come. Think of it.” He tapped the letter. “They’ll pay for the first film on May the twelfth. That’s in just over two weeks. And from then on, they pay for each film on delivery. They’ll cost me less than twenty thousand each to make — I can show you the budget. That’s ten thousand dollars a week clear profit. But, between now and the twelfth, I must shoot at least two pictures to keep my schedule here at the studio.”

“That means an investment of forty thousand,” said Mrs Yarmouth brightly. “And then you get back thirty—”

“But, of course, right then I have to start another picture, which means an investment of another twenty thousand—”

“So then you’re only down thirty thousand, and you get all that back the following week—”

“Precisely,” said Mr Eade, unwilling to be outclassed in arithmetic. “In other words, in two more weeks I’d be even—”

“And after that you’d actually be working with their money,” Mrs Yarmouth calculated triumphantly.

Mr Eade gracefully conceded the mathematical honors.

“But we’re only talking about might-have-beens,” he reminded her lugubriously. “It would have been a very nice deal, but now I’m afraid it’s another story.” He straightened his bowed shoulders with simple dignity and assembled his features into a heart-rendingly brave smile. “But I don’t want to bore you with my troubles, and we certainly mustn’t let them spoil your lunch.”

He sustained a valorous lightness and charm for about half an hour and then allowed the first slackening of the inevitably forced conversation to develop into a silence in which Mrs Yarmouth’s thoughts could not humanly fail to go back over the details of his predicament.

“I hope I’m not being too inquisitive,” she said, “but if you only had to borrow forty thousand dollars—”

“Twenty thousand,” he corrected her quickly. “I’m putting up half the money myself, in any case, and I’m only sorry that’s all the cash I have available.”

He had already assayed her expertly as being worth a twenty thousand dollar touch at the maximum, but he had discovered the psychological wheeze that a mark was much more easily induced to put up an amount which seemed to be only matching Mr Eade’s own investment than the same sum if it were represented as the entire capitalization of the venture.

“Well, twenty thousand,” she said. “But how much were you going to have to give Mr Traustein for that?”

“Thirty per cent of the profits.”

“That sounds like an awful lot.”

“I assure you, for television financing, it was very reasonable. Forty per cent is quite normal. Some people have had to pay fifty per cent. And in my situation I’ll be stuck for at least sixty — perhaps even seventy. In fact, if someone offered me twenty thousand dollars for only half the profits, right now, I’d think of them as a fairy godmother. But I don’t think anyone’s likely to.”

Mrs Yarmouth performed another mental computation which left her goggle-eyed.

“That’d give them five thousand dollars a week,” she said in an awed tone.

“For thirteen weeks, anyway,” corroborated Mr Eade matter-of-factly. “Longer, of course, if StarSuds renews the contract.” He smiled again, wanly. “You see how true the saying is that Money can always make money.”

Mrs Yarmouth went on thinking, visibly and intensely, but Mr Eade appeared to be temporarily mired in his own despondent reflections and did not interrupt her.

It was another refinement of his technique that he hardly ever propositioned any of his victims, having found that they were much more effectively and firmly hooked if he let them suggest participation themselves and believe that it was their very own idea. He was sure that Mrs Yarmouth would not disappoint him, and she didn’t.

“Do you suppose,” she said timidly, “that if I put up ten thousand dollars, it would help?”

Mr Eade was not crude enough to leap up and dance a jig, but after he had satisfied himself that ten thousand dollars was the most cash that she could raise quickly, by selling some Government bonds and emptying her savings account, he permitted himself to develop some controlled enthusiasm.

“I could always raise about five thousand dollars in loans from personal friends,” he mused. “I should be able to get twenty-five hundred on my Cadillac. And if I cashed in my insurance policy... You know, with your ten thousand I almost think we could swing it!”

“Would that entitle me to a quarter of the profits?” she asked.

“You could name your own terms.”

“You said you’d be glad to give up half the profits for twice that amount, but I don’t want to be greedy.”

“I can only think of you as a very generous lady,” Mr Eade said huskily.

“And what would you think about considering my nephew for the leading man?”

Mr Eade was not shocked — in fact, he had been expecting this even sooner.

“As a partner — and a very important partner — you’d certainly have a voice in the casting. Of course, we do have an option on quite a big name for the part, as you know, but I haven’t signed his contract yet, and if you insisted... I’m sure Howard Mayne could do the job — I made some inquiries about him after you mentioned his name. But he’ll be away on location for at least another week, you said. That makes it more difficult. But we could shoot around him... Yes, if you want that very badly, I won’t argue with you. It’s settled,” said Mr Eade, settling his argument with himself. He gave her his hand on it, gravely, and then permitted himself to revert with a frown of partial apology to more crassly financial problems. “But do you fully understand that what it said in that letter — ‘Time is of the essence’ — is literally true? This is Thursday. I must have this money in my bank before they close tomorrow, because most of our costs have to be put up in advance first thing on Monday morning, or else the studio and the guilds and unions won’t let us even start shooting.”

“I’ll send a wire to my bank in Middlebury this afternoon,” she said, “and tell them to wire me the money, and I ought to get it tomorrow morning.”

From then on everything was so automatic that it would be tedious to recount it in detail.

She was back before noon the next day with a cashier’s check and only realized when she laid it on Mr Eade’s desk that she had not consulted a lawyer and indeed did not know one in that city. Mr Eade thought she should not take just any lawyer but should wait until her nephew could recommend one. He produced an impressive document which actually was most conscientiously worded, for he had paid a genuine if somewhat shabby attorney fifty dollars to draw it up.

“This is the agreement that poor Mr Traustein was going to sign. I’ve simply had my secretary substitute your name for his and alter the amount of the investment and your percentage.” He pointed out the changes. “Suppose I sign it, but you don’t. Then I’m completely committed, but if you want any changes, after you’ve talked to an attorney next week, you can insist on having them made before you sign. In that way you’ll still be in the driver’s seat.”

Mrs Yarmouth found this thought very comforting over the weekend, until Monday brought her an alarmed telegram from Howard Mayne in answer to the long, excited letter she had written him. Then when she tried to call Mr Eade at the studio, she was told that he had given up his office on Saturday and they had no idea where he had moved.

“You see?” said the Saint. “If you hadn’t been in such a hurry to cash in on the poor man’s misfortune, on a scale of usury that would make Shylock look like a drunken sailor—”

“It was a very fair rate, in the circumstances,” she protested huffily. “He told me so himself.”

“He told you so. But didn’t anything tell you that with a contract with people as big as Herbert & Shapiro and StarSuds, he shouldn’t have to cut anybody in for twenty-five hundred a week in exchange for a month’s loan of ten grand?”

“Why didn’t you go to the police at once, Aunt Sophie?” Mayne put in.

“Because I’m not quite as stupid as you think. If I’d done that, it would’ve been sure to get in the papers, especially if Mr Eade were caught, and you don’t think I want everyone in Middlebury laughing at what a fool I’ve made of myself, do you?” she said paradoxically.

“That’s another thing that helps these bunco artists,” said the Saint. “Half the time the cops don’t even have a chance to do anything, because the sucker is too ashamed to let the whole story come out.”

“I wish you would stop calling me that,” said Mrs Yarmouth. “All I want to know, since Howard has persuaded me to take you into my confidence, is whether you think you can do anything about it.”

Simon rubbed his chin.

“The toughest thing about that is the needle-and-haystack part,” he murmured. “I have a couple of ideas where he might go from here, but I can only promise to keep my eyes peeled. It’s lucky that snapshot you took of him in Palm Springs turned out so well.”

Mr Eade’s movements were not completely unpredictable, for like many of his ilk he was somewhat a creature of habit. Each year, like many more respectable salesmen, he covered roughly the same circuit, which corresponded with the equally predictable migrations of human pigeons. In summer, during the tourist season, he worked the transatlantic liners and airplanes, with intermittent sojourns in London, Paris, and the Riviera. In the autumn he might shuttle between New York and Bermuda. At the turn of the year his base would be in Miami Beach, perhaps interrupted by excursions around the Caribbean, until about Easter he jumped to Southern California for the pickings of the desert season there. Then sometimes he would kill a little time in San Francisco, or cross over to Nevada, before the round started all over again.

At the Persepolis in Las Vegas, his wife reported spotting a top-grade mark. To the uninitiated, this might sound far more providential than finding a needle in a haystack, considering the ant-like swarms of variegated citizenry which seethe continuously through such casinos, but in fact, to the fully transistorized veteran of sucker prospecting, it is hardly even an effort to winnow through the densest strata of insolvent chaff and geiger in on any lode of naïve nuggets that may be present.

“He’s carrying a bale of bills that would choke a horse, but he never gambles more than a few bucks — that’s not what he’s here for,” she said. “He’s waiting for a divorce in about another week, and then he’s going to marry some Hollywood starlet. He’s a used-car dealer from Tucson, and he thinks he’s pretty sharp. I listened to him telling a bartender all about himself.”

She was the same homely and efficient woman who had played the part of his secretary in the television build-up, but now, in readiness for an entirely different rôle, she was loudly dressed, excessively rouged and powdered, and conspicuously encrusted with jewels, to add up to the instantly recognizable prototype of a graceless and probably obnoxious vulgarian who had somehow succeeded in picking up much bullion and little breeding.

“Point him out to me, my dear,” said Mr Eade.

The next time Simon Templar sat at a bar with a vacant stool beside him, she moved onto it, expanding herself arrogantly to crowd him, and demanding the instant attention of the bartender he was talking to without even allowing him to reach the end of a sentence. It would have been impossible for him not to notice her, but she seemed superbly oblivious to the disgusted stare with which he raked her from her hennaed hair down to her pink brocade shoes.

“Don’t be afraid to give me a full shot,” she said as the bartender was pouring. “I’m paying for it, and the house can afford it.”

The bartender let the jigger run over till it stood in a little puddle on the counter, moved the glass of ice cubes and the soda water towards her, rang up the ticket and placed it in front of her, and silently went away.

“The insolence of these people!” she muttered. “Chisel you out of every drop and every nickel they can get away with, and can’t even be bothered to do it with a smile.”

Simon said nothing, watching her with cold detachment while she put the ingredients of her highball together and swallowed it greedily, toying nervously between gulps with the glittering necklace ending in a large emerald pendant which she wore around her thick but wrinkled neck.

She looked at the tab, slapped a dollar bill on it, and said in a penetrating rasp, “Keep the change, boy.”

Simon studiously averted his eyes, until a sequence of rustlings and clinkings and a finally violent flouncing assured him that she had emptied her glass and left. He suffered no anxiety, for he knew that his reaction was intended to be basically emotional and that the plot would proceed whether he entered it vocally at that stage or not.

He had time for one peaceful sip of his Peter Dawson before Mr Copplestone Eade moved in.

Mr Eade introduced himself from somewhere near the level of the floor, by brushing against the Saint’s leg, and Simon glanced down to see him straightening up with something sparkling in his hand which he appeared to have retrieved from under the Saint’s feet.

“Pardon me,” said Mr Eade, “but I think the lady who was with you dropped this.”

“She wasn’t with me,” said the Saint, gallantly forbearing to quibble over whether she should be called a lady. He looked more closely at the green bauble dangling at the end of the chain of stones and recognized it at once from the way she had drawn attention to it with her fidgeting. “But I’m pretty sure that’s hers.”

Mr Eade held the item up to admire it more carefully.

“A magnificent stone,” he remarked. “Not in the necklace itself — those are real diamonds, quite nicely mounted, but very small and not very good. Notice how the settings make them look about three times their actual size. But the emerald...” He whipped out a loupe from an inner pocket, screwed it into his eye, and peered through it at the pendant. “Yes, undoubtedly genuine. A rather shabby antique setting, but a stone that would be worth at least thirty thousand dollars in today’s wholesale market.”

He handed Simon the necklace and removed his magnifying monocle with an apologetically awkward laugh.

“Excuse me being so professional,” he said. “But I’m in the wholesale jewelry business myself, and I never seem to be able to get away from it. Everyone who hears that I’m in it has something they want to ask me about.”

He produced a card which confirmed, with all the authority of tasteful engraving, that he was indeed a wholesale jeweler, with an address in New York City which not even a native of Manhattan could have stated positively, without going back to look, was an impossible location for premises of that kind.

“Maybe you’d enjoy meeting the dame who lost this,” Simon said. “I don’t know her from Eve, except that Eve must have been a lot more attractive, or Adam would never have goofed off. But a ruin well plastered with fancy rocks.”

Mr Eade pursed his lips sympathetically.

“That type, was she?”

“Definitely. And fortissimo.”

“That’s the way it goes,” said Mr Eade, as one philosopher to another. “At the Taj Mahal, where I’m staying, I had the misfortune to run into some good customers of mine who really should go back to the Indians — East or West Indians, whichever would accept them first. They buy jewels psychopathically, like an alcoholic always wants one more drink, or a hillbilly comedian who just made the big time doesn’t only want a Cadillac, he’s got to have three. Of course they’re wonderful clients to have, but sometimes I think—”

What Mr Eade thought, aside from the necessity of naming a hotel where he could be reached, and skillfully impressing it on his interlocutor with a mnemonic twist which only an outright cretin could have forgotten, was cheated of utterance by the abrupt return of the dowager they had been discussing, who came blundering through the crowd with her eyes on the ground and a haughty disregard for the people she jostled, casting to one side and the other like a bird dog, until she appeared to scent the necklace which Simon was still holding, and plunged towards it with a shrill yip worthier of a coonhound than a pointer.

“Thank you very much,” she said, snatching it from his hand. “I suppose you were wondering if you’d have more chance of getting a reward if you turned it over to the management or if you tried to find me personally.”

“Madam,” said the Saint, “I assure you—”

“And that’s giving you the benefit of the doubt,” she said malignantly. “From the way you were looking at it, you could just as well have been trying to make up your minds whether it was worth keeping and saying nothing about at all. Well, for your information, even though the pendant is only something I took a fancy to in a junk shop, the necklace is real, and it’s insured for eight thousand dollars.”

Mr Eade gave a slight but perceptible twitch and exchanged glances with the Saint.

“If you’ll forgive me,” he said with some reluctance, “I’m afraid you’re very ill advised about that pendant.”

“I wear it because I like it,” she retorted, testing the catch and then refastening the coruscating collar around her neck. “And that’s all that matters to me, even if I only paid twenty dollars for it.”

“But as a qualified appraiser and professional jeweler,” persisted Mr Eade painfully, “it’s my duty to tell you that—”

“Oh, so that’s your racket. The things some people will do to drum up business,” she commented, almost as if she was on the verge of accusing him of having caused her to lose the necklace in the first place. “Thanks very much, but when I’ve got any work of that sort I’m not likely to give it to someone I just picked up in a bar.”

She dug into her purse, came out with a couple of crumpled dollar bills, and tossed them on to the counter.

“But here’s a drink for you, anyway, so you can’t complain that you didn’t get anything for your trouble,” she sneered, and was gone, plowing like a juggernaut through the patrons who were not quick enough to give her gangway.

Simon was the first to regain his voice.

“You see what I meant?” he murmured.

“Charming.” Mr Eade shook his head numbly and incredulously. “Never once let either of us finish what we were trying to say. And to think she may never find out what that twenty-dollar ornament is really worth.”

“I suppose you couldn’t have been mistaken?”

“Positively not. You have to know about emeralds, especially with the synthetics they’re making now, but that’s my job. I examined it with a powerful glass. She may have found it in a junk shop, where the dealer didn’t know what he’d got — you hear stories like that, though I never came this close to one before. But if she wanted to sell it, I’d pay thirty thousand dollars cash for it right now, because I know I could turn right around and sell it to those people I was telling you about for fifty thousand.” He shrugged and smoothed out the crumpled currency on the bar. “What shall we do about this?”

“Since we had to take the insults anyhow,” said the Saint, “we might as well swallow the last one.”

Mr Eade signaled the barman to replenish the Saint’s glass and ordered himself a temperate St Raphael. They toasted each other perfunctorily and then lapsed into one of those brooding silences which Mr Eade was so adept at engineering.

“Why don’t you go after her and try to buy that thing?” Simon asked finally.

“After the way she behaved, could you force yourself to throw that much money into her lap?”

“You could make a nice profit.”

“You mean, by bidding for the necklace and letting her throw in the pendant?” said Mr Eade, just in case Simon had overlooked that angle. “Unfortunately, it would be most unethical for me to do that. As a professional, if I didn’t offer her a fair price, and anything ever came out about it, it would finish me in my business. It wouldn’t be the same as a layman doing it, who couldn’t be accused of taking unfair advantage. He could always claim he was just lucky.” Mr Eade tilted his glass again meditatively. “Well, let’s hope that some day she sells it for ten dollars to another junk dealer and some more deserving person has the good luck to pick it up.”

Simon lighted a cigarette and puffed at it in a jerky way that was exactly the kind of symptom Mr Eade liked to see.

“Suppose someone else brought it to you, in the next day or two — I meant someone who might have heard us talking, for instance,” he said clumsily. “Would you think you were obligated by those professional ethics to ask how much he paid for it?”

“In an ideal world I suppose I might be,” said Mr Eade thoughtfully. “But being human, and not being directly involved, I’m afraid I’d feel that it’s a kind of poetic justice when such an unpleasant person gets taken, and I wouldn’t feel bound to ask any awkward questions.”

He emptied the rest of his glass slowly, to ensure the pregnancy of the pause, and put it down, and only then permitted his eyes to twinkle.

“But you’re not likely to run into her again — not if you’re lucky, that is,” he said with an air of completely amiable understanding. With the interlude thus closed, he consulted his watch. “And now, according to my astrological chart, this is the most favorable hour for me to match my fate with a roulette wheel, so if you’ll excuse me...”

He drifted away, intuitively certain of his histrionic triumph to a degree which would have made a stage actor’s most coveted ovation seem pallid and hollow.

Simon Templar was no less satisfied with his own performance. He did not bother to go looking for the odious matron, or even worry about whether she would find him again, for he knew that his portrayal of the beatified Simple Simon infected with cupidity and dazzled by the potentialities of his own newly discovered acumen was as polished as it had ever been in the days when he used to exploit it more frequently, and he was confident that an angler like Mr Eade could be relied on not to let such an obviously well-hooked fish escape the gaff.

He was toasting himself tranquilly by the pool the next morning when the woman came by. She wore a flowered romper-style playsuit that looked like a badly fitting slip cover on her, but she was still jeweled as if for a night at the opera.

“Are you sitting out in this heat because you like it, or to give you an excuse to exhibit your beautiful physique in the hope that some stupid woman will fall for it?” she inquired.

He gazed back at her with scarcely veiled dislike in his cold blue eyes — because that would have been expected of him.

“I like it,” he said, unsmiling. “And I can always hope.”

“Don’t look at me. I’m not stupid. I know all about men who are too good-looking for their own good.”

Her painted face was even harder in daylight, and her voice had lost none of its cultivated acidity. She twisted and tugged at the necklace and pendant she was still wearing, in the nervously irritable automatism which had first made him notice it, and suddenly it came loose and fell through her fingers to the ground.

“You go on like that,” said the Saint, without moving, “and one day you’ll really lose it.”

She used a short sibilant word which no lady should have in her vocabulary and picked up the string of gems herself. She fiddled with the catch in sharp, angry movements which suggested that she only wished it had been an animate object that she could have hurt.

“I shouldn’t ever wear it at all. It’s jinxed, that’s what it is. I’ve lost it before, and had it stolen once, and each time it’s cost me money to get it back. Even last night I had to buy you a drink. And while I was away from the table, my number came up twice in a row. I ought to know better. I got it from my last husband, and he was never anything but bad luck. God damn the stinking thing,” she broke out, at the peak of her gradual crescendo of fury. “Now the catch is really busted. And you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to take it right downtown this afternoon and sell it — if I can find an honest jeweler anywhere in this clip town.”

She glowered at him suspiciously.

“You got anything to say about that? You think I wouldn’t?”

“I didn’t say a word,” Simon protested.

“When I decide anything’s no good for me, I junk it, whether it’s a piece of jewelry or a husband, or anything else. They can all be replaced. How do you like that?”

“It’s okay with me,” said the Saint. “But if you’re not kidding about selling that necklace, how much would you take for it?”

“What’s that to you?”

“I’m a used-car dealer. A trader. I might make you an offer.”

“I don’t want a used car.”

“I’m getting married pretty soon, as soon as my divorce comes through. My girl likes jewels, and you might give me a good buy.”

“I told you last night, it’s insured for eight thousand dollars.”

“That means you couldn’t get more than four for it at the most, if you had to sell it.”

She studied him shrewdly between narrowed lids.

“What did you say your name was? I wouldn’t take less than five.”

“Sebastian Tombs,” he said equably. “And I’ll split the difference with you. Forty-five hundred. Cash.”

“Show it to me,” she scoffed. “If you’ve got it.”

“I’ll have to wire my bank in Tucson. But I can have it this afternoon.”

She dropped the necklace into her bag and shut it with a snap that matched the saurian clamp-up of her mouth.

“I’ll look for you in the lobby at four,” she said. “But don’t think I’ll be surprised if I don’t see you.”

Simon freshened himself with a languid swim in the pool and went back to his room, from which he made a call to the Taj Mahal.

“Were you serious about what you said last night, about the pendant that gruesome old witch was wearing?” he asked.

Mr Eade chuckled with unfeigned delight.

“Don’t tell me you’ve stolen it!”

“I think I can buy it. Would you still be in the market for it?”

“Certainly. I never joke about business.”

“Can I bring it over to your hotel, say about four-thirty?”

“I have an engagement to play golf this afternoon,” said Mr Eade, glancing hastily over a summary of plane schedules. “And then with the usual drinks at the club, and I’d like to get showered and changed... Could you make it seven o’clock, and consider that an invitation to dinner?”

The Saint made another phone call, enjoyed a leisured lunch, and then drove downtown. But he was back and waiting in the lobby of the Persepolis punctually at four o’clock and had to cool his heels for ten minutes before he saw the woman sailing towards him like a runaway galleon.

“All right,” she said aggressively. “Have you got it all, or are you going to give me a song and dance?”

He handed her an envelope, and she counted forty-five bills and pointedly verified that each individual one was of the correct denomination. Then she opened her purse and brought out the necklace.

“Okay, here you are.”

He stared at it in dismay.

“But the pendant—”

“I didn’t say that went with it. I bought that myself. And anyway, it’s only junk.”

“But it looked perfect with the necklace, somehow,” he protested. “That’s what appealed to me. I wouldn’t want the necklace without it.”

She leered at him with insulting cynicism.

“And I suppose you’ll tell your girl it’s a real emerald, too.” She let him suffer for an artistic moment and said, “Very well, you can have it. But it wasn’t included in the price. It cost me twenty dollars, and that’s what I want for it.”

The eagerness with which he fumbled for a twenty-dollar bill imposed a severe strain on her facial self-control, but she kept her mask of misanthropic disdain intact while she exchanged the pendant for the money, although she trusted her voice to remain in character for no more than a grudging “Thank you” before she turned and stalked away as if he had once again ceased to exist for her.

In their room at the Taj Mahal, a three-minute taxi ride away, Mr Eade, dressed for travel, was smoking a thin cigar and turning the pages of a cheesecake magazine. Their bags, packed and ready to go, stood by the door.

“Couldn’t have been easier,” she said, in answer to his mildly interrogative eyebrow.

She opened her bag and counted him out twenty-three hundred-dollar bills, and he scrupulously gave her fifty dollars change.

“How long have we got, Copplestone?”

“Our plane leaves at five-forty.” He checked his watch. “I think we should leave for the airport in ten minutes at the most.”

“Then I’ve got time to take some of this war paint off.”

She disappeared into the bathroom and was quite surprisingly transformed when she came back. Without the excess jewelry and the flamboyantly clashing scarf which she had worn like a shawl collar, she was acceptably dressed, and with only normal makeup she was neither the harridan of the Persepolis nor the prim executive secretary of the Hollywood studio, but a very ordinary middle-aged woman — a chameleon waiting to be prodded into its next coloration.

“I don’t know what I’d do without you, my dear,” said Mr Eade sincerely. “We make a perfect team.”

“As long as there goes on being a sucker born every minute, we’ll do all right,” she said. “A couple more jobs like this and that Yarmouth dame, one after another, and we ought to be able to take a nice long vacation.”

There was a knock on the door, and Mr Eade opened it almost unthinkingly, and certainly without concern.

“Mr Eade?”

The man who stood there was unknown to him, but something about his bearing had a chillingly familiar air, which became an icy clutch around Mr Eade’s heart as the man flipped open a wallet to exhibit a gold metal star pinned inside. While Mr Eade sought achingly for breath, the man came on in.

“And Mrs Eade, I presume?” he remarked politely. He turned back to the door. “Come on in, Mr Tombs.” Simon Templar followed him. “Is this the guy who gave you the pitch about the emerald?”

“That, Lieutenant,” said the Saint concisely, “is him.”

“What is this all about?” demanded Mr Eade hollowly.

The Lieutenant dissected him with distantly unfriendly eyes.

“You should know all about it, Copplestone,” he said with a cruelly sarcastic inflection. “Unless you’ve been luckier all your life than you deserve. The usual bunco rap. Mr Tombs isn’t so dumb. He figured what you were up to and came to see us this afternoon. I was in the lobby, and I witnessed him giving Mrs Eade the money and her giving him the necklace. We followed her back here and waited outside the door till I’d heard enough to wrap it up double. You want me to recite it, or are you going to say Uncle?”

“You can enjoy the technicalities on the City’s time,” said the Saint gently. “Having delivered the case into your lap, I’d just like my money back.”

The Lieutenant reached out for Mrs Eade’s purse and emptied its contents onto a table, but what he presently sorted out made his face crinkle in a comical mixture of astonishment and perplexity.

“Eleven thousand eight hundred and eighty dollars in cash and traveler’s checks,” he said. “But only twenty-two of those marked hundreds you gave her.”

“This is rather ridiculous,” Mr Eade argued weakly. “Mr Tombs made a deal, on his own initiative—”

“For something that was represented as a diamond necklace, alleged to be insured for eight grand.” The Lieutenant produced it from his pocket and flung it down. “This here is a piece of paste that you couldn’t insure for eighty bucks. And that’s fraud, Pappy. Have you got the rest of that dough? If you have, we’ll find it.”

Mr Eade sadly extracted the other twenty-three bills from a distended wallet. Simon picked up the total and added one more green leaf from the pile on the table.

“That’s the extra twenty she squeezed out of me for the pendant,” he explained. “Some of that other lettuce will be part of the ten grand they got from Mrs Yarmouth, and no doubt Copplestone has the rest of it. I guess they kept everything split fifty-fifty — more or less. You’d better impound it, anyway. I’ll call Mrs Yarmouth right away and tell her it’s safe and have her go to the police in Los Angeles and get the extradition machinery started.”

Mr Copplestone Eade, after a long reproachful gaze at his spouse, turned with a sigh and conjured further wads of negotiable paper from various pockets. He was above all things a practical man and knew when to abandon a line that would obviously get him nowhere.

“Here is five thousand dollars,” he said. “My wife, I’m sure, will be glad to contribute the other five. As you surmised, we split fifty-fifty — more or less. Shall we be realistic? Extradition proceedings can be tiresome. And trials can be lengthy, and embarrassing to all parties. And during all that time the money would be tied up by the Court. Don’t you think that if she got it all back at once, like you’ve got back yours, she could be persuaded to drop the charges?”

Simon Templar only gave an impression of pondering this.

“Well, I did only tell her I’d try to get her money back,” he admitted.

“But you have to think of yourself, of course,” said Mr Eade, with increasing benignity. “I know a little about you private eyes. You’re getting a good fee from Mrs Yarmouth, naturally, but the publicity of an arrest might be even more valuable. Would — say — two thousand dollars compensate you for that?”

“Two thousand dollars,” said the Saint blandly, “from each of you, might.”

He collected seven thousand dollars from Mr Eade, and seven thousand more from the pile on the table, and only then seemed to become aware of the fourth person who was now speechlessly watching the proceedings.

“This is all right with me,” he said, “but I still don’t know how the Law feels about it. After all, I’ve taken up a lot of his afternoon.”

“Perhaps a thousand dollars for yourself, Lieutenant?” suggested Mr Eade, overanxious with incipient relief.

The officer almost choked.

“Now I’ve heard everything,” he boiled over. “First it turns into legal blackmail, if there is such a thing, and using me for an accessory — and now you’d like to make me a partner too. Thanks, but you can keep the rest of your dirty money. You’re lucky I don’t get promoted for making arrests. My job is just to keep this town clean of grifters like you, who’d give it a bad name. But don’t miss that plane, Mr Eade, and don’t let me ever run into you again, or you won’t get off so easy!”

“Why on earth did you have to turn down that extra G-note?” Simon complained later. “At least it would have paid for the special plane you had to charter to get here.”

“I thought the scene was more convincing that way,” Howard Mayne said. “Anyhow, I was only helping you out for Aunt Sophie’s sake. I don’t think I’m ready for a life of crime yet.”

The Saint grinned.

“You’re wasting a lot of talent,” he opined. “But I hope Copplestone sees you in a movie some day when you’re a star and realizes how good you really might have been as Don Juan Jones.”