Leslie Charteris - The Saint to the Rescue

“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 accompanied 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 expect to be highly commended if I make that impossible. So, I would prefer to be out of your country before anyone complains.”

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 customer. 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 too unhappy about him,” Hamzah said magnanimously. “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 received 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 dialogue.

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 parking 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 temporary 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 and 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 explanation 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.”

“Then what actually did make you suspicious?”

“First off, only my own low dishonest mind. If I’d stood and watched the Red Sea open for the Israelites, the first thing I’d’ve wondered about was how it might have been faked. Now, the way that pier of yours is built is probably a perfectly common method of construction, but to me it suggested plumbing. And that gave me the idea that in a tubular tangle of that kind, nobody else might notice a couple of extra pipes — one of ’em joined into a piling to take the pumped-up bay water back where it came from, and the other running back to shore to connect with your house supply. Then I tried to figure out how a crook could switch the flow—”

“And how could he?”

“With a base plate set in the dock, to which he would bolt the base of his ingenious gizmo, using outsize bolts that he took from his pocket and put back there, and which were the only incidental equipment that nobody got a good look at. Bolts which I’m certain are hollow, with outlets in the right places, so that when you screw them down they become the most miraculous part of your invention. One of ’em side-tracks the salt water you’re pumping up, and the other takes in the fresh water which is one of the civic amenities for which you are privileged to pay taxes on this dump.”

“And on this imaginative basis alone—”

“No, I’m not supernatural. I didn’t have any more to start with than interesting doubt. But before I carried it to the bitter end — which included a rather minute study of the pipe connections underneath your pier last night — I’d convinced myself with a rather more arbitrary test.”