“I am a hard-working clerk in an insurance office, earning three hundred a year with the dim prospect of rising to three hundred and fifty in another fifteen years, age about forty, with an anaemic wife and seven children and a semi-detached house at Streatham.” He was fingering his face speculatively, staring at it in the glass. “A little too beautiful for the part at present, I think, but we’ll soon put that right.”
He set to work on his face with the quick unhesitating touches of which he was such an amazing master. His eyebrows, brushed in towards his nose, turned grey and bushy; his hair also turned grey, and was plastered down to his skull so skilfully that it seemed inevitable that any barber he went to would remark that he was running a little thin on top. Under the movements of his swift fingers, cunning shadows appeared at the sides of his forehead, under his eyes, and around his chin—shadows so faint that even at a yard’s range their artificiality could not have been detected, and yet so cleverly placed that they seemed to change the whole shape and expression of his face. And while he worked he talked.
“If you ever read a story-book, Pat, in which anyone disguises himself as someone else so perfectly that the impersonated bloke’s own friends and secretaries and servants are taken in, you’ll know there’s an author who’s cheating on you. On the stage it might be done up to a point, but in real life, where everything you put on has got to get by in broad daylight and close-ups, it’s impossible. I,” said the Saint unblushingly, “am the greatest character actor that never went on the stage, and I know. But when it comes to inventing a new character of your own that mustn’t be recognized again—then you can do things.”
He turned round suddenly, and she gasped. He was perfect. His shoulders were rounded and stooping; his head was bent slightly forward, as if set in that position by years of poring over ledgers. And he gazed at her with the dumb passionless expression of his part—an under-nourished, under-exercised, middle-aged man without hopes or ambitions, permanently worried, crushed out of pleasure by the wanton taxation which goes to see that the paladins of Whitehall are never deprived of an afternoon’s golf, utterly resigned to the sombre purposelessness of his existence, scraping and pinching through fifty weeks of the year in order to let himself be stodgily swindled at the seaside for a fortnight in August, solemnly discussing the antics of politicians as if they really mattered and honestly believing that their cow-like utterances might do something to alleviate his burdens, holding a crumbling country together with his own dour stoicism and the stoicism of millions of his own kind…
“Will I do?” he asked.
From Benny Lucek’s point of view he could scarcely have done better. Benny’s keen eyes absorbed the whole atmosphere of him in one calculating glance that took in every detail from the grey hair that was running a little thin on top down to the strenuously polished shoes.
“Please to meet you, Mr Tombs. Come along and have a cocktail—I expect you could do with one.”
He led his guest into the sumptuous lounge, and Mr Tombs sat down gingerly on the edge of a chair. It is impossible to refer to that man of the Saint’s creation as anything but “Mr Tombs”—the Simon Templar whom Patricia knew might never have existed inside that stoical stoop-shouldered frame.
“Er…a glass of sherry, perhaps,” he said.
Benny ordered Amontillado, and knew that the only sherry Mr Tombs had ever tasted before came from the nearest grocer. But he was an expert at putting strangers at their ease, and the Simon Templar who stood invisibly behind Mr Tombs’s chair had to admire his technique. He chattered away with a disarming lack of condescension that presently had Mr Tombs leaning back and chuckling with him, and ordering a return round of Amontillados with the feeling that he had at last met a successful man who really understood and appreciated him. They went in to lunch with Benny roaring with infectious laughter over a vintage Stock Exchange story which Mr Tombs had dug out of his memory.
“Smoked salmon, Mr Tombs? Or a spot of caviar?…Then we might have oeufs en cocotte Rossini—done in cream with foie gras and truffles. And roast pigeons with mushrooms and red currant jelly. I like a light meal in the middle of the day—it doesn’t make you sleepy all the afternoon. And a bottle of Liebfraumilch off the ice to go with it?”
He ran through menu and wine list with an engaging expertness which somehow made Mr Tombs an equal partner in the exercise of gastronomic virtuosity. And Mr Tombs, whose imagination had rarely soared above roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and a bottle of Australian burgundy, thawed still further and recalled another story that had provoked howls of laughter in Threadneedle Street when he was in his twenties.
Benny did his work so well that the sordid business aspect of their meeting never had a chance to obtrude itself during the meal, and yet he managed to find out everything he wanted to know about his guest’s private life and opinions. Liquefying helplessly in the genial warmth of Benny’s hospitality, Mr Tombs became almost human. And Benny drew him on with unhurried mastery.
“I’ve always thought that insurance must be an interesting profession, Mr Tombs. You’ve got to be pretty wide awake for it too—I expect you always have clients who expect to take more out of you than they put in?”
Mr Tombs, who had never found his job interesting, and who would never have detected an attempted fraud unless another department had pointed it out to him, smiled non-committally.
“That kind of mixed morality has always interested me,” said Benny, as if the point had only just occurred to him. “A man who wouldn’t steal a sixpence from a man he met in the street hasn’t any objection to stealing half-crowns from the Government by cutting down his income-tax return or smuggling home a bottle of brandy when he comes across from France. If he’s looking for a partner in business he wouldn’t dream of putting a false value on his assets, but if his house is burgled he doesn’t mind what value he puts on his things when he’s making out his insurance claim.”
Mr Tombs shrugged.
“I suppose Governments and wealthy public companies are considered fair game,” he hazarded.
“Well, probably there’s a certain amount of lawlessness in the best of us,” admitted Benny. “I’ve often wondered what I should do myself in certain circumstances. Suppose, for instance, you were going home in a taxi one night, and you found a wallet on the seat with a thousand pounds in it. Small notes that you could easily change. No name inside to show who the owner was. Wouldn’t one be tempted to keep it?”
Mr Tombs twiddled a fork, hesitating only for a second or two. But the Simon Templar who stood behind his chair knew that that was the question on which Benny Lucek’s future hung—the point that had been so casually and skilfully led up to, which would finally settle whether “Mr Tombs” was the kind of man Benny wanted to meet. And yet there was no trace of anxiety or watchfulness in Benny’s frank open face. Benny tilted the last of the Liebfraumilch into Mr Tombs’s glass, and Mr Tombs looked up.
“I suppose I should. It sounds dishonest, but I was trying to put myself in the position of being faced with the temptation, instead of theorizing about it. Face to face with a thousand pounds in cash, and needing money to take my wife abroad, I might easily…er…succumb. Not that I mean to imply—”
“My dear fellow, I’m not going to blame you,” said Benny heartily. “I’d do the same thing myself. I’d reason it out that a man who carried a thousand pounds in cash about with him had plenty more in the bank. It’s the old story of fair-game. We may be governed by plenty of laws, but our consciences are still very primitive when we’ve no fear of being caught.”
There was a silence after that, in which Mr Tombs finished his last angel on horse-back, mopped the plate furtively with the last scrap of toast, and accepted a cigarette from Benny’s platinum case. The pause gave him his first chance to remember that he was meeting the sympathetic Mr Lucek in order to hear about a business proposition—as Benny intended that it should. As a waiter approached with the bill, Mr Tombs said tentatively, “
About your…um…advertisement…”
Benny scrawled his signature across the account, and pushed back his chair.
“Come up to my sitting room and we’ll talk about it.”
They went up in the lift, with Benny unconcernedly puffing Turkish cigarette-smoke, and down an expensively carpeted corridor. Benny had an instinctive sense of dramatic values. Without saying anything, and yet at the same time without giving the impression that he was being intentionally reticent, he opened the door of his suite and ushered Mr Tombs in.
The sitting room was small but cosily furnished. A large carelessly-opened brown-paper parcel littered the table in the centre, and there was a similar amount of litter in one of the chairs. Benny picked up an armful of it and dumped it on the floor in the corner.
“Know what these things are?” he asked off-handedly.
He took up a handful of the litter that remained on the chair and thrust it under Mr Tombs’s nose. It was generally green in colour, as Mr Tombs blinked at it, words and patterns took shape on it, and he blinked still harder.
“Pound notes,” said Benny. He pointed to the pile he had dumped in the corner. “More of ’em.” He flattened the brown paper around the carelessly-opened parcel on the table, revealing neat stacks of treasure packed in thick uniform bundles. “Any amount of it. Help yourself.”
Mr Tombs’s blue eyes went wider and wider, with the lids blinking over them rapidly as if to dispel a hallucination.
“Are they…are they really all pound notes?”
“Every one of ’em.”
“All yours?”
“I guess so. I made ’em, anyway.”
“There must be thousands.”
Benny flung himself into the cleared armchair.
“I’m about the richest man in the world, Mr Tombs,” he said. “I guess I must be the richest, because I can make money as fast as I can turn a handle. I meant exactly what I said to you just now. I made those notes!”
Mr Tombs touched the pile with his finger-tips, as if he half expected them to bite him. His eyes were rounder and wider than ever.
“You don’t mean—forgeries,” he whispered.
“I don’t,” said Benny. “Take those notes round to the nearest bank—tell the cashier you have your doubts about them—and ask him to look them over. Take ’em to the Bank of England. There isn’t a forgery in the whole lot—but I made ’em! Sit down and I’ll tell you.”
Mr Tombs sat down, stiffly. His eyes kept straying back to the heaps of wealth on the floor and the table, as though at each glance he would have been relieved rather than surprised if they had vanished.
“It’s like this, Mr Tombs. I’m taking you into my confidence because I’ve known you a couple of hours and I’ve made up my mind about you. I like you. Those notes, Mr Tombs, were printed from a proof plate that was stolen out of the Bank of England itself by a fellow who worked there. He was in the engraving department, and when they were making the plates they made one more than they needed. It was given to him to destroy—and he didn’t destroy it. He was like the man we were talking about—the man in the taxi. He had a genuine plate that would print genuine pound notes, and he could keep it for himself if he wanted to. All he had to do was to make an imitation plate that no one was going to examine closely—you can’t tell a lot from a plate, just looking at it—and cut a couple of lines across it to cancel it. Then that would be locked up in the vaults and probably never looked at again, and he’d have the real one. He didn’t even know quite what he’d do with the plate when he had it, but he kept it. And then he got scared about it being found out, and he ran away. He went over to New York, where I come from.
“He stopped in the place I lived at, over in Brooklyn. I got to know him a bit, though he was always very quiet and seemed to have something on his mind. I didn’t ask what it was, and I didn’t care. Then he got pneumonia.
“Nobody else had ever paid any attention to him, so it seemed to be up to me. I did what I could for him—it didn’t amount to much, but he appreciated it. I paid some of the rent he owed. The doctor found he was half starved—he’d landed in New York with just a few pounds, and when those were gone he’d lived on the leavings he could beg from chop-houses. He was starving himself to death with a million pounds in his grip! But I didn’t know that then. He got worse and worse, and then they had to give him oxygen one night, but the doctor said he wouldn’t see the morning anyhow. He’d starved himself till he was too weak to get well again.
“He came round just before the end, and I was with him. He just looked at me and said, ‘Thanks, Benny.’ And then he told me all about himself and what he’d done. ‘You keep the plate,’ he said. ‘It may be some good to you.’
“Well, he died in the morning, and the landlady told me to hurry up and get his things out of the way as there was another lodger coming in. I took ’em off to my own room. There wasn’t much, but I found the plate.
“Maybe you can imagine what it meant to me, after I’d got it all figured out. I was just an odd-job man in a garage then, earning a few dollars a week. I was the man in the taxi again. But I had a few dollars saved up: I’d have to find the right paper, and get the notes printed—I didn’t know anything about the technical side of it. It’d cost money, but if it went through all right that poor fellow’s legacy would make me a millionaire. He’d starved to death because he was too scared to try it; had I got the guts?”
Benny Lucek closed his eyes momentarily, as if he were reliving the struggle with his conscience.
“You can see for yourself which way I decided,” he said. “It took time and patience, but it was still the quickest way of making a million I’d ever heard of. That was six years ago. I don’t know how much money I’ve got in the bank now, but I know it’s more than I can ever spend. And it was like that all of three years ago.
“And then I started thinking about the other people who needed money, and I began to square my conscience by helping them, I was working over in the States then, of course, changing this English money in small packets at banks all over the continent. And I started giving it away—charities, down-and-outs, any good thing I could think of. That was all right so far as it went. But then I started thinking, that fellow who gave me the plate was English, and some of the money ought to go back to people in England who needed it. That’s why I came across. Did I tell you that fellow left a wife behind when he ran away? It took me two months to find her with the best agents I could buy, but I located her at last serving in a tea-shop, and now I’ve set her on her feet for life, though she thinks it was an uncle she never had who died and left her the money. But if I can find any other fellow whose wife needs some money he can’t earn for her,” said Benny nobly, “I want to help him too.”
Mr Tombs swallowed. Benny Lucek was a master of elocution among his other talents, and the manner of his recital was calculated to bring a lump into the throat of an impressionable listener.
“Would you like some money, Mr Tombs?” he inquired.
Mr Tombs coughed.
“I…er…well…I can’t quite get over the story you’ve told me.”
He picked up a handful of the notes, peered at them minutely, screwed them in his fingers, and put them down again rather abruptly and experimentally, as if he were trying to discover whether putting temptation from him would bring a glow of conscious virtue that would compensate for the worldly loss. Apparently the experiment was not very satisfactory, for his mouth puckered wistfully.
“You’ve told me all about yourself,” said Benny. “And about your wife being delicate and needing to go away for a long sea voyage. I expect there’s trouble about getting your children a proper education that you haven’t mentioned at all. You’re welcome to put all that right. You can buy just as many of those notes as you like, and twenty pounds per hundred is the price to you. That’s exactly what they cost me in getting the special paper and inks and having them printed—the man I found to print ’em for me gets a big rake-
off, of course. Four shillings each is the cost price, and you can make yourself a millionaire if you want to.”
Mr Tombs gulped audibly.
“You’re…you’re not pulling my leg, are you?” he stammered pathetically.
“Of course I’m not. I’m glad to do it.” Benny stood up and placed one hand affectionately on Mr Tombs’s shoulders. “Look here, I know all this must have been a shock to you. It wants a bit of getting used to. Why don’t you go away and think it over? Come and have lunch with me again tomorrow, if you want some of these notes, and bring the money with you to pay for them. Call me at seven o’clock and let me know if I’m to expect you.” He picked up a small handful of money and stuffed it into Mr Tombs’s pocket. “Here—take some samples with you and try them on a bank, just in case you still can’t believe it.”
Mr Tombs nodded, blinking.
“I’m the man in the taxi again,” he said with a weak smile. “When you really do find the wallet—”
“Who loses by it?” asked Benny, with gently persuasive rhetoric. “The Bank of England, eventually. I never learnt any economics, but I suppose they’ll have to meet the bill. But are they going to be any the worse off for the few thousands you’ll take out of them? Why, it won’t mean any more to them than a penny does to you now. Think it over.”
“I will,” said Mr Tombs, with a last lingering stare at the littered table.
“There’s just one other thing,” said Benny. “Not a word of what I’ve told you to any living soul—not even to your wife. I’m trusting you to treat it as confidentially as you’d treat anything in your insurance business. You can see why, can’t you? A story like I’ve told you would spread like wild-fire, and once it got to the Bank of England there’d be no more money in it. They’d change the design of their notes and call in all the old ones as quick as I can say it.”
The Brighter Buccaneer (The Saint Series) Page 18
