The Brighter Buccaneer (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  They went in together, and Peter and Simon stood aside while the girl approached the hall porter and had her name telephoned up to Mr Lamantia’s room. The reply came back, as they had expected, that she was to be shown up, and the two men strolled along and joined her quite naturally as she was escorted to the lift.

  They got out on the third floor, and she stopped the pageboy who accompanied them with a smile.

  “I know the way,” she said.

  Simon slipped a half-crown into the midget’s hand, and they brushed past him. In a few yards they had the corridor to themselves.

  “You might wander downstairs and drift out, Kathleen,” said the Saint. “Go to the Carlton. We’ll join you there in about half an hour.”

  She nodded, and Peter’s fingers slipped away from hers as they passed on.

  They reached Mr Lamantia’s room, and Simon lifted his hand and knocked.

  Using our renowned gifts of vivid description, it would be possible for us to dilate upon Mr Lamantia’s emotions at great length, but we have not the time. Neither, in point of fact, had Mr Lamantia. He suffered more or less what a happy bonfire would suffer if the bottom fell out of a reservoir suspended directly over it. With eighty-five thousand pounds in bank-notes of small denominations in his bag, an express service to the tall timber mapped out in front of him, and his aesthetic soul ripe with the remembered beauty and tacit acquiescence of the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, he opened his door with the vision of her face rising before his eyes, and saw the vision smashed into a whirling kaleidoscope of fragments that came together again as the lean smiling figure of the man who had once come striding through the wet night to drag him out of his car and immerse him in the Thames. His eyes bulged and his jaw dropped, and then the lean figure’s hand pushed him kindly but firmly backwards and followed him on into the room, and Peter Quentin closed the door behind them and put his back to it.

  “Well, Julian,” said the Saint breezily, “how are all the little stocks and shares today?”

  A tinge of colour squeezed slowly back into Mr Lamantia’s ashen face. When he had first seen the figures of men outside his door he had had one dreadful instant of the fear that perhaps after all he had left his retirement too late.

  “How did you get up here?” he stammered.

  “We flew,” said the Saint affably.

  Suddenly his left fist shot over with the whole weight of his shoulder behind it. The upper knuckles came on the line of Mr Lamantia’s twitching mouth, the lower knuckles on the point of his jaw-bone, clean and crisp in the horizontal centre on his face, and Mr Lamantia had a hazy feeling that his brain had been knocked off its moorings and was revolving slowly and painfully inside his skull. When it had settled down again to a rhythmic but stationary singing, he became aware that the automatic which he had been trying to pull from his hip pocket was gone.

  “Tie him up, Peter,” said the Saint calmly.

  Peter Quentin came off the door and produced a coil of stout cord from under his coat. Mr Lamantia went down fighting, but Peter’s muscular handling rapidly reduced him to mere verbal protest, which was largely biological in tone.

  “I’ll get you for this, you swine,” was his only printable comment.

  “And gag him,” said the Saint.

  The process was satisfactorily completed under the Saint’s expert supervision. Simon had found Mr Lamantia’s cigar-case, and while the knots were being tested he talked and smoked.

  “I notice that the welkin hasn’t rung with your shrieks for help, Julian. Can it be that you have something on your conscience?…I’m sorry about all these formalities, but we don’t really want a disturbance, and in the heat of the moment you might have been tempted to do something rash which we should all regret. The staff are sure to find you in a year or two, and then you can explain that some pals did this on you for a joke. I’m sure you’ll decide that’s the best story to tell, but you need a little time to think it over.”

  He strolled round the room examining the items of Mr Lamantia’s baggage, and eventually chose the smallest bag.

  “Is this the one, Peter?”

  “That’s it.”

  Simon turned the lock with an instrument he had in his pocket, and glanced inside. The notes were there, in thick bundles, exactly as they had been passed across the counter of the bank. With a sigh of righteous satisfaction the Saint closed the attaché case again and picked it up.

  “Let’s go.”

  He bowed politely to the speechless man on the bed, replaced the excellent cigar between his teeth, and sauntered to the door. Without a care in the world he opened it—and looked straight into the face of Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal.

  If there had been any competition for grades of paralysis in that doorway, it would have been a thankless task for the judge. Mr Lamantia had already given his own rendering of a man being kicked in the mid-section by an invisible mule, and now for two or three strung seconds Simon Templar and Chief Inspector Teal gazed at each other in an equally cataleptic immobility. Out in the great world around them, ordinary policemen scurried innocently about their beats, the London traffic dashed hither and thither at a rate of hundreds of yards an hour, the surface of the earth was rotating at five hundred miles every half-hour, whizzing round the sun at seventy-six miles a minute and tearing through space with the rest of the solar system at over twelve miles per second, but in the midst of all this bustle of cosmic activity those two historic antagonists stared at each other across a yard of empty air without the movement of a muscle.

  On Mr Teal’s rubicund features showed no visible emotion beyond the isolated, slow, incredulous expansion of his eyes; the Saint’s tanned face was debonairly impassive, but behind the Saint’s steady blue eyes his brain was covering ground at a speed that it had already been required to make before.

  Once before, and once only, in Simon’s hectic career, Teal had caught him red-handed, but then there had been a perfect alibi prepared, a grim challenge ready, and a clear getaway in the offing. At other times, of course, there had been close calls, but they had also been anticipated and legislated for in advance. And, with that alibi or getaway at hand, events had taken their natural course. Teal had been baited, defied, dared, punched in the tummy, or pulled by the nose: those were the rich rewards of foresight. But there was none of that now.

  And the Saint smiled.

  Teal’s right hand was still poised in mid-air, raised for the official and peremptory knock that he had been about to deliver when the door opened so astonishingly in front of him he might have forgotten its existence. But the Saint reached out and drew it down and shook it, with that incomparable Saintly smile lighting his face again with as gay a carelessness as it had ever held.

  “Come in, Claud,” he said. “You’re just in time.”

  And with that breaking of the silence Teal came back to earth with a jolt that closed his mouth almost with a snap. He advanced solidly into the room, and another burly man in plain clothes who was with him followed him in. They took in the scene in a couple of purposeful glances.

  “Well?”

  The interrogation broke from the detective’s mouth with a curt bluntness that was as self-explanatory as a cannon-ball. The Saint’s eyebrows flickered.

  “This,” he murmured, with the air of a Cook’s guide conducting a tour, “is Mr Julian Lamantia, who recently revived the ancient game of inviting suckers to—”

  “I know all that,” said Teal thuddingly. “That’s what I came here about. What I want to know is why you’re here.”

  Simon’s brow puckered.

  “But did you really know all about it? Why, I thought I was doing you a good turn. In the course of my private and philanthropic investigations I happened to learn that the affairs of Julian were not all that they might be, so in order to protect his clients without risking a libel action I decided to have him watched. And this very morning my energetic agents informed me that he had drawn all the J. L. Investment
Bureau’s capital out of the bank and was preparing to skip with the simoleons—I mean abscond with the cash.”

  “Go on,” said Teal dourly. “It sounds interesting.”

  The Saint hitched one leg on to the table and drew appreciatively on Mr Lamantia’s cigar.

  “It is interesting, Claud. We also learned that Julian was catching a boat train at two-thirty, so our time was limited. The only thing seemed to be for us to toddle along and grab him before he slipped away, and phone you to come round and collect him as soon as we had him trussed. I admit it may have been a bit rash of us to take the Law into our own hands like that but you must have a spot of excitement now and again in these dull days, and we were thinking of nothing but the public weal.”

  “And what have you got in that bag?”

  “This?” Simon glanced down. “This contains the aforesaid simoleons, or mazuma. We were going to take it downstairs and ask the manager to stow it away in his safe till you arrived.”

  Mr Teal took the bag from the Saint’s hand and opened it. He sniffed, reminding himself of the Assistant Commissioner.

  “That’s a great story,” he said.

  “It’s a swell story,” said the Saint quietly. “And it’ll keep the Home Office guessing for a while. Remember that I’m a reformed character now, so far as the public are concerned, and any nasty suspicions you may have are like the flowers that bloom in the spring. They have nothing to do with the case. My reputation is as pure as the driven snow. Perhaps, as I admitted, we have been rash. The magistrate might rebuke me. He might even be rude.” The Saint sighed. “Well, Claud, if you feel you must expose me to that tragic humiliation—if you must let the newspapers tell of the magistrate’s severe criticism—”

  “I don’t want to hear any more of that,” barked the detective.

  “Just a word-picture,” explained the Saint apologetically.

  Teal bit down forcefully on his chewing-gum. He knew that the Saint was right—knew that the last useful word on the subject had been uttered—and the clear blue mocking eyes of the smiling Saint told him that Simon Templar also knew. The knowledge went down into Teal’s stomach like gall, but in the days gone by he had learned a certain fatalistic wisdom. And this time, for the first time in the long duel, the honours were fairly even.

  “If you’re quite satisfied,” murmured the Saint persuasively, “Peter and I have a date for lunch with a beautiful lady.”

  “That’s your own business,” said Mr Teal with all the restraint of which he was capable.

  He turned his broad back on them and moved over to the bed, where his assistant was wrestling with the knots that held the empurpled Mr Lamantia, and Simon winked at Peter Quentin and removed himself from the table. They sauntered unopposed to the door, and from there, without a shadow on his face, Simon turned back for his irrepressibly gay farewell.

  “Send my medal along by post, Claud,” he said.

  PUBLICATION HISTORY

  As mentioned in the introduction, these stories were first published in a now defunct Sunday newspaper called the Empire News on a weekly basis at the tail end of 1932. The book was first published in February 1933 with an American edition following in August that year. Just eight years later, Hodder & Stoughton were on their sixteenth imprint, suggesting it was perhaps one of the bestselling volumes in the Saint’s career. In 1951 this book was subsequently listed at number 86 in Queen’s Quorum, a collection of the 125 best crime short stories published since 1845, by Ellery Queen.

  The initial Spanish translation appeared in 1934 under the title of Para pillo, pillo y medio (published by regular Saint publisher Juventud) but in subsequent decades it was rechristened El Santo en la jugada, presumably following the English language logic of needing to include the Saint in the title. The Germans opted for Der Heilige ist schlauer in 1957, the Italians for Un diavolo di bucaniere in 1971, the Swedes for Helgonet bland hårdkokta herrar in 1955, and the Portuguese for the easily translatable O Santo e o crime perfeito in 1933.

  “The Appalling Politician” was adapted by Norman Hudis as “The Imprudent Politician” for Roger Moore’s version of The Saint and first aired on 6 December 1964. “The Export Trade” was adapted by Donald and Derek Ford with some help from Harry Junkin and aired as “A Double in Diamonds” on 5 May 1967, part of the first colour season for Roger Moore as The Saint.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  “I’m mad enough to believe in romance. And I’m sick and tired of this age—tired of the miserable little mildewed things that people racked their brains about, and wrote books about, and called life. I wanted something more elementary and honest—battle, murder, sudden death, with plenty of good beer and damsels in distress, and a complete callousness about blipping the ungodly over the beezer. It mayn’t be life as we know it, but it ought to be.”

  —Leslie Charteris in a 1935 BBC radio interview

  Leslie Charteris was born Leslie Charles Bowyer-Yin in Singapore on 12 May 1907.

  He was the son of a Chinese doctor and his English wife, who’d met in London a few years earlier. Young Leslie found friends hard to come by in colonial Singapore. The English children had been told not to play with Eurasians, and the Chinese children had been told not to play with Europeans. Leslie was caught in between and took refuge in reading.

  “I read a great many good books and enjoyed them because nobody had told me that they were classics. I also read a great many bad books which nobody told me not to read…I read a great many popular scientific articles and acquired from them an astonishing amount of general knowledge before I discovered that this acquisition was supposed to be a chore.”1

  One of his favourite things to read was a magazine called Chums. “The Best and Brightest Paper for Boys” (if you believe the adverts) was a monthly paper full of swashbuckling adventure stories aimed at boys, encouraging them to be honourable and moral and perhaps even “upright citizens with furled umbrellas.”2 Undoubtedly these types of stories would influence his later work.

  When his parents split up shortly after the end of World War I, Charteris accompanied his mother and brother back to England, where he was sent to Rossall School in Fleetwood, Lancashire. Rossall was then a very stereotypical English public school, and it struggled to cope with this multilingual mixed-race boy just into his teens who’d already seen more of the world than many of his peers would see in their lifetimes. He was an outsider.

  He left Rossall in 1924. Keen to pursue a creative career, he decided to study art in Paris—after all, that was where the great artists went—but soon found that the life of a literally starving artist didn’t appeal. He continued writing, firing off speculative stories to magazines, and it was the sale of a short story to Windsor Magazine that saved him from penury.

  He returned to London in 1925, as his parents—particularly his father—wanted him to become a lawyer, and he was sent to study law at Cambridge University. In the mid-1920s, Cambridge was full of Bright Young Things—aristocrats and bohemians somewhat typified in the Evelyn Waugh novel Vile Bodies—and again the mixed-race Bowyer-Yin found that he didn’t fit in. He was an outsider who preferred to make his own way in the world and wasn’t one of the privileged upper class. It didn’t help that he found his studies boring and decided it was more fun contemplating ways to circumvent the law. This inspired him to write a novel, and when publishers Ward Lock & Co. offered him a three-book deal on the strength of it, he abandoned his studies to pursue a writing career.

  When his father learnt of this, he was not impressed, as he considered writers to be “rogues and vagabonds.” Charteris would later recall that “I wanted to be a writer, he wanted me to become a lawyer. I was stubborn, he said I would end up in the gutter. So I left home. Later on, when I had a little success, we were reconciled by letter, but I never saw him again.”3

  X Esquire, his first novel, appeared in April 1927. The lead character, X Esquire, is a mysterious hero, hunting down and killing the businessmen trying to wi
pe out Britain by distributing quantities of free poisoned cigarettes. His second novel, The White Rider, was published the following spring, and in one memorable scene shows the hero chasing after his damsel in distress, only for him to overtake the villains, leap into their car…and promptly faint.

  These two plot highlights may go some way to explaining Charteris’s comment on Meet—the Tiger!, published in September 1928, that “it was only the third book I’d written, and the best, I would say, for it was that the first two were even worse.”4

  Twenty-one-year-old authors are naturally self-critical. Despite reasonably good reviews, the Saint didn’t set the world on fire, and Charteris moved on to a new hero for his next book. This was The Bandit, an adventure story featuring Ramon Francisco De Castilla y Espronceda Manrique, published in the summer of 1929 after its serialisation in the Empire News, a now long-forgotten Sunday newspaper. But sales of The Bandit were less than impressive, and Charteris began to question his choice of career. It was all very well writing—but if nobody wants to read what you write, what’s the point?

  “I had to succeed, because before me loomed the only alternative, the dreadful penalty of failure…the routine office hours, the five-day week…the lethal assimilation into the ranks of honest, hard-working, conformist, God-fearing pillars of the community.”5

  However his fortunes—and the Saint’s—were about to change. In late 1928, Leslie had met Monty Haydon, a London-based editor who was looking for writers to pen stories for his new paper, The Thriller—“The Paper with a Thousand Thrills.” Charteris later recalled that “he said he was starting a new magazine, had read one of my books and would like some stories from me. I couldn’t have been more grateful, both from the point of view of vanity and finance!”6