Leslie Charteris - The Happy Highwayman

"My pot, I think," he remarked apologetically.

Kilgarry's chair was the first to grate back.

"Here," he snarled, "that's not—"

"The hand he dealt me?" The texture of Simon's mockery was like gossamer. "And he wasn't playing the hand I thought he had, either. I thought he'd have some fun when he got used to being without his glasses," he added cryptically.

He tipped up the cigar box and added its contents to the stack of currency in front of him, and stacked it into a neat sheaf.

"Well, I'm afraid that sort of kills the game for tonight," he murmured, and his hand was in his side pocket before Kilgarry's movement was half started. Otherwise he gave no sign of perturbation, and his languid self-possession was as smooth as velvet. "I suppose we'd better call it a day," he said without any superfluous emphasis.

Mercer recovered his voice first.

"That's right," he said jerkily. "You two have won plenty from me other nights. Now we've got some of it back. Let's get out of here, Templar."

They walked along Ocean Drive, past the variegated modernistic shapes of the hotels, with the rustle of the surf in their ears.

"How much did you win on that last hand?" asked the young man.

"About fourteen thousand dollars," said the Saint contentedly.

Mercer said awkwardly: "That's just about what I'd lost to them before… I don't know how I can ever thank you for getting it back. I'd never have had the nerve to do it alone… And then when Yoring turned up that straight flush — I don't know why — I had an awful moment thinking you'd made a mistake."

The Saint put a cigarette in his mouth and struck his lighter.

"I don't make a lot of mistakes," he said calmly. "That's where a lot of people go wrong. It makes me rather tired, sometimes. I suppose it's just professional pride, but I hate to be taken for a mug. And the funny thing is that with my reputation there are always people trying it. I suppose they think that my reactions are so easy to predict that it makes me quite a setup for any smart business." The Saint sighed, deploring the inexplicable optimism of those who should know better. "Of course I knew that a switch like that was coming — the whole idea was to make me feel so confident of the advantage I had with those glasses that I'd be an easy victim for any ordinary cardsharping. And then, of course, I wasn't supposed to be able to make any complaint because that would have meant admitting that I was cheating, too. It was a grand idea, Eddie — at least you can say that for it."

Mercer had taken several steps before all the implications of what the Saint had said really hit him.

"But wait a minute," he got out. "How do you mean they knew you were wearing trick glasses?"

"Why else do you imagine they planted that guy on the train to pretend he was J. J. Naskill?" asked the Saint patiently. "That isn't very bright of you, Eddie. Now, I'm nearly always bright. I was so bright that I smelt a rat directly you lugged that pack of marked cards out of your beach robe — that was really carrying it a bit too far, to have them all ready to produce after you'd got me to listen in on your little act with Josephine. I must say you all played your parts beautifully, otherwise; but it's little details like that that spoil the effect. I told you at the time that you were a mug," said the Saint reprovingly. "Now why don't you paddle off and try to comfort Yoring and Kilgarry? I'm afraid they're going to be rather hurt when they hear that you didn't manage to at least make the best of a bad job and get me to hand you my winnings."

But Mercer did not paddle off at once. He stared at the Saint for quite a long time, understanding why so many other men who had once thought themselves clever had learned to regard that cool and smiling privateer as something closely allied to the devil himself. And wondering, as they had, why the death penalty for murder had ever been invented.

"I wonder what would have happened if you had gone into a respectable business, Saint," Ivar Nordsten remarked one afternoon.

Simon Templar smiled at him so innocently that for an instant his nickname might almost have seemed justified — if it had not been for the faint lazy twinkle of unsaintly mockery that stirred at the back of his blue eyes.

"The question is too farfetched, Ivar. You might as well speculate about what would have happened if I'd been a Martian or a horse."

They sat on the veranda of the house of Ivar Nordsten — whose name was not really Ivar Nordsten, but who was alive that day and the master of fabulous millions only because the course of one of the Saint's lawless escapades had once crossed his path at a time when death would have seemed a happy release. He of all living men should have had no wish to change the history of that twentieth-century Robin Hood, whose dark reckless face could be found photographed in half the police archives of the world, and whose gay impudence of outlawry had in its time set the underworlds of five continents buzzing like nests of infuriated wasps. But in that mood of idle fantasy which may well come with the after-lunch contentment of a warm Florida afternoon, Nordsten would have put forward almost any preposterous premise that might give him the pleasure of listening to his friend.

"It isn't as farfetched as that," he said. "You will never admit it, but you have many respectable instincts."

"But I have so many more disreputable ones to keep them under control," answered the Saint earnestly. "And it's always been so much more amusing to indulge the disreputable instincts… No, Ivar, I mustn't let you make a paragon out of me. If I were quite cynically psychoanalyzing myself, I should probably say that the reason why I only soak the more obvious excrescences on the human race is because it makes everything okay with my respectable instincts and lets them go peacefully to sleep. Then I can turn all my disreputable impulses loose on the mechanical problem of soaking this obvious excrescence in some satisfyingly novel and juicy manner, and get all the fun of original sin out of it without any qualms of conscience."

"But you contradict yourself. The mere fact that you speak in terms of what you call 'an obvious excrescence on the human race' proves that you have some moral standards by which you judge him, and that you have some idealistic interest in the human race itself."

"The human race," said the Saint sombrely, "is a repulsive, dull, bloated, ill-conditioned and ill-favoured mass of dimly conscious meat, the chief justification for whose existence is that it provides a contrasting background against which my beauty and spiritual perfections can shine with a lustre only exceeded by your own."

"You have a natural modesty which I had never suspected," Nordsten observed gravely, and they both laughed. "But," he added, "I think you will get on well with Dr. Sardon."

"Who is he?"

"A neighbour of mine. We are dining with him tonight."

Simon frowned.

"I warned you that I was travelling without any Dr.ess clothes," he began, but Nordsten shook his head maliciously.

"Dr. Sardon likes Dr.ess clothes even less than you do. And you never warned me that you were coming here at all. So what could I do? I accepted his invitation a week ago, so when you arrived I could only tell Sardon what had happened. Of course he insisted that you must come with me. But I think he will interest you."

The Saint sighed resignedly and swished the highball gently around in his glass so that the ice clinked.

"Why should I be interested in any of your neighbours?" he protested. "I didn't come here to commit any crimes; and I'm sure all these people are as respectable as millionaires can be."

"Dr. Sardon is not a millionaire. He is a very brilliant biologist."