Leslie Charteris: Thanks to the Saint

“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.