13 The Saint Intervenes (Boodle)

by Leslie Charteris

  It fell on to the pavement between them and rolled away between the Saint's feet, sparkling enticingly in the sunlight. Muttering profuse apologies, Louie scuffled round to re­trieve it. The movement was so adroitly devised to en­tangle them that Simon would have had no chance to pass on and make his escape, even if he had wanted to.

  But it is dawning—slowly and reluctantly, perhaps, but dawning, nevertheless—upon the chronicler that there can be very few students of these episodes who can still be cherishing any delusion that the Saint would ever want to escape from such a situation.

  Simon stood by with a slight smile coming to his lips, while Louie wriggled round his legs and recovered his precious pos­session with a faint squeak of delight, and straightened up with the object clutched solidly in his hand.

  "Phew!" said Mr. Fallon, fanning himself with his hat. "That was near enough. Did you see where it went? Right to the edge of that grating. If it had rolled down . . ." He blew out his cheeks and rolled up his eyes in an eloquent register of horror at the dreadful thought. "For a moment I thought I'd lost it," he said, clarifying his point conclusively.

  Simon nodded. It did not require any peculiar keenness of vision to see that the object of so much concern was a very nice-looking diamond, for Louie was making no attempt to hide it—he was, on the contrary, blowing on it and rubbing it affectionately on his sleeve to remove the invisible specks of grime and dust which it had collected on its travels.

  "You must be lucky."

  Louie's face fell abruptly. The transition between his almost childish delight and the shadow of awful gloom which sud­denly passed across his countenance was quite startling. Mr. Fallon's artistry had never been disputed even by his rivals in the profession.

  "Lucky?" he practically yelped, in a rising crescendo of mournful indignation. "Why, I'm the unluckiest man that ever lived!"

  "Too bad," said the Saint, with profound sympathy.

  "Lucky!" repeated Mr Fallon, with all the pained disgust of a hypochondriac who has been accused of looking well. "Why, I'm the sort of fellow if I saw a five-pound note lying in the street and tried to pick it up, I'd fall down and break my neck!"

  It was becoming clear to Simon Templar that Mr. Fallon felt that he was unlucky.

  "There are people like that," he said, reminiscently. "I remembered an aunt of mine——"

  "Lucky?" reiterated Mr. Fallon, who did not appear to be interested in anyone else's aunt. "Why, right at this moment I'm the unluckiest man in London. Look here"—he clasped the Saint by the arm with the pathetically appealing movement of a drowning man clutching at a straw—"do you think you could help me? If you haven't got anything particular to do?

  I feel sort of—well—you look the sort of fellow who might have some ideas. Have you got time for a drink?"

  Simon Templar could never have been called a toper, but on such occasions as this he invariably had time for a drink. "I don't mind if I do," he said obligingly.

  As a matter of fact, they were standing outside a mirac­ulously convenient hostel at that moment—Louie Fallon had always believed in bringing the mellowing influence of alcohol to bear as soon as he had scraped his acquaintance, and he staged his encounters with that idea in view.

  With practised dexterity he steered the Saint towards the door of the saloon bar, cutting short the protest which Simon Templar had no intention whatsoever of making. In hardly any more time than it takes to record, he had got the Saint inside the bar, parked him at a table, invited him to name his poison, procured a double ration of the said poison from the barmaid, and settled himself in the adjoining chair to improve the shining hour. To the discerning critic it might seem that he rushed at the process rather like an unleashed investor plunging after an absconding company promoter; but Louie Fallen's conception of improving shining hours had never in­cluded any unnecessary waste of time, and he had learnt by experience that the willingness of the species Mug to listen is usually limited only by the ability of the flatcatcher to talk.

  "Yes," said Mr. Fallon, reverting to his subject. "I am the unluckiest man you are ever likely to meet. Did you see that diamond I dropped just now?"

  "Well," admitted the Saint truthfully, "I couldn't help seeing it."

  Mr. Fallon nodded. He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, brought out the jewel again, and laid it on the table.

  "I made that myself," he said.

  Simon eyed the stone and Mr. Fallon with the puzzled ex­pression which was expected of him.

  "What do you mean—you made it?"

  "I made it myself," said Mr. Fallon. "It's what you would call synthetic. It took about half an hour, and it cost me ex­actly threepence. But there isn't a diamond merchant in Lon­don who could prove that it wasn't dug up out of the ground in South Africa. Take it to anyone you like, and see if he does swear that it's a perfectly genuine stone."

  "You mean it's a fake?" said the Saint.

  "Fake my eye!" said Mr. Fallon, with emphatic if inelegant expressiveness. "It's a perfectly genuine diamond, the same as any other stone you'll ever seen. The only difference is that I made it. You know how diamonds are made?"

  The Saint had as good an idea of how diamonds are made as Louie Fallon was ever likely to have; but it seemed as if Louie liked talking, and in such circumstances as that Simon Templar was the last man on earth to interfere with anyone's enjoyment. He shook his head blankly.

  "I thought they sort of grew," he said vaguely.

  "I don't know that I should put it exactly like that," said Louie. "I'll tell you how diamonds happen. Diamonds are just carbon—like coal, or soot, or—or——"•

  "Paper?" suggested the Saint helpfully.

  Louie frowned.

  "They're carbon," he said, "which is crystallised under pressure. When the earth was all sort of hot, like you read about in your history books—before it sort of cooled down and people started to live in it and things grew on it—there was a lot of carbon. Being hot, it burnt things, and when you burn things you usually get carbon. Well, after a time, when the earth started to cool down, it sort of shrunk, like—like——"

  "A shirt when it goes to the wash?" said the Saint.

  "Anyway, it shrunk," said Louie, yielding the point and passing on. "And what happened then?"

  "It got smaller," hazarded the Saint.

  "It caused terrific pressure," said Mr. Fallen firmly. "Just imagine it. Thousands of millions of tons of rock—and—"

  "And rock."

  "And rock, cooling down, and shrinking up, and getting hard. Well, naturally, any bits of carbon that were floating around in the rock got squeezed. So what happened?" de­manded Louie, triumphantly reaching the climax of his lucid description.

  He paused dramatically, and the Saint wondered whether he was expected to offer any serious solution to the riddle; but before he had really made up his mind, Mr. Fallon was solving the problem for him.

  "I'll tell you what happened," said Mr. Fallon impressively, leaning over into a strategic position in which he could tap the Saint on the shoulder. Once again he paused, but there was no doubt that this hiatus at least was motivated solely by the requirements of theatrical suspense. "Diamonds!" said Mr. Fallon, with an air of patronising pride which almost suggested that he personally had been responsible for the event.

  The Saint took a draught from his glass, and gazed at him with that air of slightly perplexed awe which was one of the most precious assets in his infinitely varied stock of facial expressions. It was a gaze pregnant with so much ingen­uous interest, such naive wonder and curiosity, that Mr. Fallon felt the cockles of his heart warming to a temperature at which, on a cold day, he would be tempted to dispense with his overcoat. Since he was not wearing an overcoat, he gave rein to his emotions by insisting that he should stand another round of drinks.

  "Yes," he resumed, when he had refilled their glasses. "Diamonds. And that's how I make them—not," he admitted modestly, "that I mean I make the earth go hot and then cool down again.
But I do the same thing on a smaller scale."

  The Saint knitted his brows. It was the most ostentatious sign of a functioning brain that he could permit himself in the part he was playing.

  "Now you tell me, I think I have heard something like that before," he said. "Hasn't somebody else done the same thing—I mean made synthetic diamonds by cooling chunks of iron under pressure?"

  "I did hear of something on those lines," confessed Mr. Fallon magnanimously. "But the process wasn't any good. They could only make very small diamonds that weren't worth anything in the market and cost ten times as much as real ones. I make 'em with things that you can buy in any chemist's shop for a few pennies. I don't even need a proper laboratory. I could make 'em in your bathroom." He drank, wiped his lips and looked at the Saint suddenly with bright plaintive eyes. "You don't believe me," he said accusingly.

  "Why—yes, of course I do," protested the Saint, changing his expression with a guilty start.

  Mr. Fallon continued to shake his head.

  "No, you don't," he insisted morbidly, "and I can't blame you. I know it sounds like a tall story. But I'm not a liar."

  "Of course not," agreed the Saint hastily.

  "I'm not a liar," insisted Mr. Fallon lingeringly, as if he was simply aching to be called one. "Anyone who calls me a liar is goin' to have to eat his words." He was silent for a moment, while the idea appeared to develop in his mind; and then he slued round in his seat abruptly, and tapped the Saint on the shoulder again.

  "Look here—I'll prove it to you. You're a sport—we ran into each other just now as perfect strangers, and now here you are havin' a drink with me. I don't know whether you be­lieve in concidences," said Louie, waxing metaphysical, "but you might be the very fellow I'm lookin' for. I like a chap who isn't too damned stand-offish to have a drink with another chap without being introduced, and when I like a chap there isn't a limit to what I wouldn't mind doin' for him. Why, you might be the very chap. Well, what d'you say?"

  "I didn't say anything," said the Saint innocently.

  "What d'you say I prove to you that I can make diamonds? If you can spare half an hour—it wouldn't take much more than that and you might find it interesting. Are you game ?"

  Simon Templar was game. To put it perhaps a trifle crudely, such occasions as this found him so game that a two-year-old pheasant would have had to rise exceedingly high to catch him. Life, he felt, was still very much worth living while blokes like Louie Fallen were almost falling over themselves with eagerness to call you a Chap. To follow up the meta­phor with which he was allowed to open this episode, he considered that Mr. Fallon was certainly doing a swell line of clucking, and he was profoundly interested to find out exactly what brand of egg would be the fruit thereof.

  Mr. Fallon, it appeared, was the proud tenant of an apart­ment in one of those streets running down between the Tivoli and the River which fall roughly within the postal address known as "Adelphi" because it sounds so much better than W. C. The rooms were expensively and tastefully furnished, and the Saint surmised that Louie had not furnished them. Somewhere in London there would probably be an outraged landlord looking for his rent—and perhaps also the more val­uable of his rented chattels—when Mr. Fallon had finished with the premises; but his was not immediately Simon Templar's concern. He followed Louie into the living-room, where a bottle of whisky and two glasses were produced and suitably dealt with, and cheerfully prepared to continue with the role of open-mouthed listener which the situation demanded of him. This called for no very fatiguing effort, for the role of open-mouthed listener was one in which the Saint had perfected himself more years ago than he could easily remember.

  "I told you I could make my diamonds in a bathroom," said Louie, "and that's exactly what I am doin' at the moment."

  He led the way onwards, glass in hand, and Simon followed him good-humouredly. It was quite a classy bathroom, with a green marble bath and generous windows looking out over rows of smoke-stained housetops towards the Thames; and the materials that Louie Fallon used in making his chemical experiments were the only incongruous note in it. These con­sisted of an ancient and shabby marble-topped washstand, which had obviously started its new lease of life in a second­hand sale room, a fireproof crucible on a metal tripod, and a litter of test-tubes, burners, bottles and other paraphernalia which Simon did not deny were most artistically arranged.

  "Just to show you," said Mr. Fallon generously, "I'll make a diamond for you now."

  He went over to the washstand and picked up one of the bottles. "Magnesium," he said. He picked up another bottle. "Iron filings," he said. He picked up a third bottle and tipped a larger quantity of greyish powder on top of what he had taken from the first two, stirring the mixture on the marble table-top with a commonplace Woolworth teaspoon. "And the last thing," he said, "is the actual stuff that I make my diamonds with."

  He picked up the crucible and held it below the level of the table, scraped his little mound of assorted powders into it, and turned round with didactic air.

  "Now I'll tell you what happens," he said. "When you burn magnesium with iron filings you produce a temperature of thousands of degrees Fahrenheit. It isn't quite as hot as the earth was when it was all molten, but it's nearly as hot. That melts the iron filings; and it also fuses the other mixture I put in which is exactly the same chemically as the stuff that diamonds are made of."

  He struck a match and applied it to the crucible. There was a sudden spurt of eye-achingly brilliant flame, accompanied by a faint hissing sound. Simon could feel the intense heat of the flare on his cheeks, even though he was standing several feet away; and he watched the crucible becoming incandescent before his eyes, turning from a dull red through blazing pink to a blinding white glow.

  "So there," said Mr. Fallon, gazing at his fireworks with al­most equally incandescent pride, "you have the heat. Right now that diamond powder is wrappin' itself up inside the melted iron filings. The mixture isn't quite as hot as it ought to be, because nobody has discovered how to produce as much heat as there was in the world back in those times when it was molten; but we have to make up for that by coolin' the thing off quicker. That's the reason why all the other exper­imenters have failed—they've never been able to cool things off quick enough. But I got over that."

  From under the washstand he dragged out a gadget which the Saint had not noticed before. To the callously uninitiated eye it might have looked rather like a Heath Robinson con­traption made up of a couple of old oil-cans and bits of battered gaspipe; but Louie handled it as tenderly as an anarchist exhibiting his favourite bomb.

  "This is the fastest cooler that's ever been made," he said. "I won't try to tell you how it works, because you probably wouldn't understand, but it's very scientific. When I throw this nugget that's forming in the crucible into it it'll be cooled off quicker than anything's ever been cooled off before. From four thousand degrees Fahrenheit down to a hundred below zero, in less than half a second! Have you any idea what that means?"

  Simon realised that it was time for him to show some rudi­mentary intelligence.

  "I know," he said slowly. "It means——"

  "It means," said Mr. Fallon, taking the words out of his mouth, "that you get a pressure of thousands of millions of tons inside that nugget of molten iron; and when you break it open the diamond's inside."

  He lifted the lid of his oil-can contraption, picked up the crucible with a pair of long iron tongs, and poured out a blob of luminous liquid metal the size of a small pear. There was a loud fizzing noise accompanied by a great burst of steam; and Louie replaced the lid of his cooler and looked at the Saint triumphantly through the fog.

  "Now," he said, "in half a minute you'll see it with your own eyes."

  The Saint opened his cigarette-case and tapped a cigarette thoughtfully on his thumbnail.

  "How on earth did you hit on that?" he asked, with wide-eyed admiration.

  "I used to be an assistant in a chemist's shop
when I was a boy," said Louie casually. As a matter of fact, this was perfectly true, but he did not mention that his employment had terminated abruptly when the chemist discovered that his assistant had been systematically whittling down the con­tents of the till whenever he was left alone in the shop.

  "I always liked playin' around with things and tryin' ex­periments, and I always believed it'd be possible to make perfectly good synthetic diamonds whatever the other experts said. And now I've proved it."

  This also, curiously enough, was partly true. Improbable as it may seem, Mr. Fallon had his dreams—dreams in which he could produce unlimited quantities of gold or diamonds simply by mixing chemicals together in a pail, or vast stacks of genuine paper money merely by turning a handle. The psychologist, delving into Louie's dream-life, would probably have found the particular form of swindle which Mr. Fallon had made his own inexorably predestined by these curiously childish fantasies—a kind of spurious and almost self-defen­sive satisfaction of a congenital urge for easy money.

  He rolled up his sleeves and plunged his bare arms into the cooling gadget with the rather wistful expression which he always wore when performing that part of his task. When he stood up again he was clutching a round grey stone glisten­ing with water; and for a moment or two he gazed at it dreamily. It was at this stage of the proceedings that Louie's histrionics invariably ran away with him—when, for two or three seconds, his imagination really allowed him to picture himself as the exponent of an earth-shaking scientific dis­covery, the genuine result of those futile experiments on which he had spent so much of his time and so much of the money which he had earned from the sham.

  "There you are," he said. "There's your diamond—and any dealer in London would be glad to buy it. Here—take it yourself." He pressed the wet stone into Simon Templar's hand. "Show it to anyone you like, and if there's a dealer in London who wouldn't be glad to pay two hundred quid for it, I'll give you a thousand pounds." He picked up his glass again; and then, as if he had suddenly remembered the essential tone of his story, his face recovered its expression of uncontrollable gloom. "And I'm the unhappiest man in the world," he said lugubriously.