by Otto Penzler
“The Invisible Millionaire” was first published in the June 1938 issue of Black Mask.
The Invisible Millionaire
Leslie Charteris
I
The girl’s eyes caught Simon Templar as he entered the room, ducking his head instinctively to pass under the low lintel of the door; and they followed him steadily across to the bar. They were blue eyes with long lashes, and the face to which they belonged was pretty without any distinctive feature, crowned with curly yellow hair. And besides anything else, the eyes held an indefinable hint of strain.
Simon knew all this without looking directly at her. But he had singled her out at once from the double handful of riverside week-enders who crowded the small barroom as the most probable writer of the letter which he still carried in his pocket—the letter which had brought him out to the Bell that Sunday evening on what anyone with a less incorrigibly optimistic flair for adventure would have branded from the start as a fool’s errand. She was the only girl in the place who seemed to be unattached: there was no positive reason why the writer of that letter should have been unattached, but it seemed likely that she would be. Also she was the best looker in a by no means repulsive crowd; and that was simply no clue at all except to Simon Templar’s own unshakable faith in his guardian angel, who had never thrown any other kind of damsel in distress into his buccaneering path.
But she was still looking at him. And even though he couldn’t help knowing that women often looked at him with more than ordinary interest, it was not usually done quite so fixedly. His hopes rose a notch, tentatively; but it was her turn to make the next move. He had done all that had been asked of him when he walked in there punctually on the stroke of eight.
He leaned on the counter, with his wide shoulders seeming to take up half the length of the bar, and ordered a pint of beer for himself and a bottle of Vat 69 for Hoppy Uniatz, who trailed up thirstily at his heels. With the tankard in his hands, he waited for one of those inevitable moments when all the customers had paused for breath at the same time.
“Anyone leave a message for me?” he asked.
His voice was quiet and casual, but just clear enough for everyone in the room to hear. Whoever had sent for him, unless it was merely some pointless practical joker, should need no more confirmation than that. He hoped it would be the girl with the blue troubled eyes. He had a weakness for girls with eyes of that shade, the same color as his own.
The barman shook his head.
“No, sir. I haven’t had any messages.”
Simon went on gazing at him reflectively, and the barman misinterpreted his expression. His mouth broadened and said: “That’s all right, sir. I’d know if there was anything for you.”
Simon’s fine brows lifted a little puzzledly.
“I haven’t seen you before,” he said.
“I’ve seen your picture often enough, sir. I suppose you could call me one of your fans. You’re the Saint, aren’t you?”
The Saint smiled slowly.
“You don’t look frightened.”
“I never had the chance to be a rich racketeer, like the people you’re always getting after. Gosh, though, I’ve had a kick out of some of the things you’ve done to ‘em! And the way you’re always putting it over on the police—I’ll bet they’d give anything for an excuse to lock you up….”
Simon was aware that the general buzz of conversation, after starting to pick up again, had died a second time and was staying dead. His spine itched with the feel of stares fastening on his back. And at the same time the barman became feverishly conscious of the audience which had been captured by his runaway enthusiasm. He began to stammer, turned red and plunged confusedly away to obliterate himself in some unnecessary fussing over the shelves of bottles behind him.
The Saint grinned with his eyes only, and turned tranquilly round to lean his back against the bar and face the room.
The collected stares hastily unpinned themselves and the voices got going again; but Simon was as oblivious of those events as he would have been if the rubber-necking had continued. At that moment his mind was capable of absorbing only one fearful and calamitous realisation. He had turned to see whether the girl with the fair curly hair and the blue eyes had also been listening, and whether she needed any more encouragement to announce herself. And the girl was gone.
She must have got up and gone out even in the short time that the barman had been talking. The Saint’s glance swept on to identify the other faces in the room—faces that he had noted and automatically catalogued as he came in. They were all the same, but her face was not one of them. There was an empty glass beside her chair, and the chair itself was already being taken by a dark slender girl who had just entered.
Interest lighted the Saint’s eyes again as he saw her, awakened instantly as he appreciated the subtle perfection of the sculptured cascade of her brown hair, crystallised as he approved the contours of her slim yet mature figure revealed by a simple flowered cotton dress. Then he saw her face for the first time, and held his tankard a shade tighter. Here, indeed, was something to call beautiful, something on which the word could be used without hesitation even under his most dispassionate scrutiny. She was like— “Peaches in autumn,” he said to himself, seeing the fresh bloom of her cheeks against the russet shades of her hair. She raised her head with a smile, and his blood sang carillons. Perhaps after all….
And then he saw that she was smiling and speaking to an ordinarily good-looking young man in a striped blazer who stood possessively over her; and inward laughter overtook him before he could feel the sourness of disappointment.
He loosened one elbow from the bar to run a hand through his dark hair, and his eyes twinkled at Mr. Uniatz.
“Oh well, Hoppy,” he said. “It looks as if we can still be taken for a ride, even at our age.”
Mr. Uniatz blinked at him. Even in isolation, the face that nature had planted on top of Mr. Uniatz’ bull neck could never have been mistaken for that of a matinee idol with an inclination toward intellectual pursuits and the cultivation of the soul; but when viewed in exaggerating contrast with the tanned piratical chiselling of the Saint’s features it had a grotesqueness that was sometimes completely shattering to those who beheld it for the first time. To compare it with the face of a gorilla which had been in violent contact with a variety of blunt instruments during its formative years would be risking the justifiable resentment of any gorilla which had been in violent contact with a variety of blunt instruments during its formative years. The best that can be said of it is that it contained in mauled and primitive form all the usual organs of sight, smell, hearing and ingestion, and prayerfully let it go at that. And yet it must also be said that Simon Templar had come to regard it with a fondness which even its mother could scarcely have shared. He watched it with good-humoured patience, waiting for it to answer.
“I dunno, boss,” said Mr. Uniatz.
He had not thought over the point very deeply. Simon knew this, because when Mr. Uniatz was thinking his face screwed itself into even more frightful contortions than were stamped on it in repose. Thinking of any kind was an activity which caused Mr. Uniatz excruciating pain. On this occasion he had clearly escaped much suffering because his mind—if such a word can be used without blasphemy in connection with any of Mr. Uniatz’ cerebral processes—had been elsewhere.
“Something is bothering you, Hoppy,” said the Saint. “Don’t keep it to yourself, or your head will start aching.”
“Boss,” said Mr. Uniatz gratefully, “do I have to drink dis wit’ de paper on?”
He held up the parcel he was nursing.
Simon looked at him blankly for a moment, and then felt weak in the middle.
“Of course not,” he said. “They only wrapped it up because they thought we were going to take it home. They haven’t got to know you yet, that’s all.”
An expression of sublime relief spread over Mr. Uniatz’ homely countenance as he pawed off the wrappi
ng paper from the bottle of Vat 69. He pulled out the cork, placed the neck of the bottle in his mouth and tilted his head back. The soothing fluid flowed in a cooling stream down his asbestos gullet. All his anxieties were at rest.
For the Saint, consolation was not quite so easy. He finished his tankard and pushed it across the bar for a refill. While he was waiting for it to come back, he pulled out of his pocket and read over again the note that had brought him there. It was on a plain sheet of good note paper, with no address.
DEAR SAINT,
I’m not going to write a long letter, because if you aren’t going to believe me it won’t make any difference how many pages I write.
I’m only writing to you at all because I’m utterly desperate. How can I put it in the baldest possible way? I’m being forced into making myself an accomplice in one of the most gigantic frauds that can ever have been attempted, and I can’t go to the police for the same reason that I’m being forced to help.
There you are. It’s no use writing any more. If you can be at the Bell at Hurley at eight o’clock on Sunday evening I’ll see you and tell you everything. If I can only talk to you for half an hour, I know I can make you believe me.
Please, for God’s sake, at least let me talk to you.
My name is
NORA PRESCOTT
Nothing there to encourage too many hopes in the imagination of anyone whose mail was as regularly cluttered with crank letters as the Saint’s; and yet the handwriting looked neat and sensible, and the brief blunt phrasing had somehow carried more conviction than a ream of protestations. All the rest had been hunch—that supernatural affinity for the dark trails of ungodliness which had pitchforked him into the middle of more brews of mischief than any four other freebooters of his day.
And for once the hunch had been wrong. If only it hadn’t been for that humdrumly handsome excrescence in the striped blazer….
Simon looked up again for another tantalizing eyeful of the dark slender girl.
He was just in time to get a parting glimpse of her back as she made her way to the door, with the striped blazer hovering over her like a motherly hen. Then she was gone; and everyone else in the bar suddenly looked nondescript and obnoxious.
The Saint sighed.
He took a deep draught of his beer and turned back to Hoppy Uniatz. The neck of the bottle was still firmly clamped in Hoppy’s mouth, and there was no evidence to show that it had ever been detached therefrom since it was first inserted. His Adam’s apple throbbed up and down with the regularity of a slow pulse. The angle of the bottle indicated that at least a pint of its contents had already reached his interior.
Simon gazed at him with reverence.
“You know, Hoppy,” he remarked, “when you die we shan’t even have to embalm you. We’ll just put you straight into a glass case, and you’ll keep for years.”
The other customers had finally returned to their own business, except for a few who were innocently watching for Mr. Uniatz to stiffen and fall backwards; and the talkative young barman edged up again with a show of wiping off the bar.
“Nothing much here to interest you tonight, sir, is there?” he began chattily.
“There was,” said the Saint ruefully, “but she went home.”
“You mean the dark young lady, sir?”
“Who else?”
The man nodded knowingly.
“You ought to come here more often, sir. I’ve often seen her in here alone. Miss Rosemary Chase, that is. Her father’s Mr. Marvin Chase, the millionaire. He just took the New Manor for the season. Had a nasty motor accident only a week ago….”
Simon let him go on talking, without paying much attention. The dark girl’s name wasn’t Nora Prescott, anyhow. That seemed to be the only important item of information—and with it went the last of his hopes. The clock over the bar crept on to twenty minutes past eight. If the girl who had written to him had been as desperate as she said, she wouldn’t come as late as that—she’d have been waiting there when he arrived. The girl with the strained blue eyes had probably been suffering from nothing worse than biliousness or thwarted love. Rosemary Chase had happened merely by accident. The real writer of the letter was almost certainly some fat and frowsy female among those he had passed over without a second thought, who was doubtless still gloating over him from some obscure corner, gorging herself with the spectacle of her inhibition’s hero in the flesh.
A hand grasped his elbow, turning him round, and a lightly accented voice said: “Why, Mr. Templar, what are you looking so sad about?”
The Saint’s smile kindled as he turned.
“Giulio,” he said, “if I could be sure that keeping a pub would make anyone as cheerful as you, I’d go right out and buy a pub.”
Giulio Trapani beamed at him teasingly.
“Why should you need anything to make you cheerful? You are young, strong, handsome, rich— and famous. Or perhaps you are only waiting for anew romance?”
“Giulio,” said the Saint, “that’s a very sore point, at the moment.”
“Ah! Perhaps you are waiting for a love letter which has not arrived?”
The Saint straightened up with a jerk. All at once he laughed. Half-incredulous sunshine smashed through his despondency, lighted up his face. He extended his palm.
“You old son of a gun! Give!”
The landlord brought his left hand from behind his back, holding an envelope. Simon grabbed it and ripped it open. He recognized the handwriting at a glance. The note was on a sheet of hotel paper.
Thank God you came. But I daren’t be seen speaking to you after the barman recognised you.
Go down to the lock and walk up the tow-path. Not very far along on the left there’s a boathouse with green doors. I’ll wait for you there. Hurry.
The Saint raised his eyes, and sapphires danced in them.
“Who gave you this, Giulio?”
“Nobody. It was lying on the floor outside when I came through. You saw the envelope— ‘Deliver at once to Mr. Templar in the bar.’ So that’s what I do. Is it what you were waiting for?”
Simon stuffed the note into his pocket, and nodded. He drained his tankard.
“This is the romance you were talking about—maybe,” he said. “I’ll tell you about it later. Save some dinner for me. I’ll be back.” He clapped Trapani on the shoulder and swung round, newly awakened, joyously alive again. Perhaps, in spite of everything, there was still adventure to come…. “Let’s go, Hoppy!”
He took hold of Mr. Uniatz’ bottle and pulled it down. Hoppy came upright after it with a plaintive gasp.
“Chees, boss—”
“Have you no soul?” demanded the Saint sternly as he herded him out of the door. “We have a date with a damsel in distress. The moon will be mirrored in her beautiful eyes, and she will pant out a story while we fan the gnats away from her snowy brow. Sinister eggs are being hatched behind the scenes. There will be villains and mayhem and perhaps even moider….”
He went on talking lyrical nonsense as he set a brisk pace down the lane toward the river; but when they reached the towpath even he had dried up. Mr. Uniatz was an unresponsive audience, and Simon found that some of the things he was saying in jest were oddly close to the truth that he believed. After all, such fantastic things had happened to him before.
He didn’t fully understand the change in himself as he turned off along the riverbank beside the dark shimmering sleekness of the water. The ingrained flippancy was still with him—he could feel it like a translucent film over his mind—but underneath it he was all open and expectant, a receptive void in which anything might take shape. And something was beginning to take shape there—something still so nebulous and formless that it eluded any conscious survey, and yet something as inescapably real as a promise of thunder in the air. It was as if the hunch that had brought him out to the Bell in the first place had leapt up from a whisper to a great shout; and yet everything was silent. Far away, to his sensitive ears,
there was the ghostly hum of cars on the Maidenhead road; close by, the sibilant lap of the river, the lisp of leaves, the stertorous breathing and elephantine footfalls of Mr. Uniatz; but those things were only phases of the stillness that was everywhere. Everything in the world was quiet, even his own nerves, and they were almost too quiet. And ahead of him, presently, loomed the shape of a building like a boathouse. His pencil flashlight stabbed out for a second and caught the front of it. It had green doors.
Quietly he said: “Nora.”
There was no answer, no hint of movement anywhere. And he didn’t know why, but in the same quiet way his right hand slid up to his shoulder rig and loosened the automatic in the spring clip under his arm.
He covered the last two yards in absolute silence, put his hand to the handle of the door and drew it back quickly as his fingers slid on a sticky dampness. It was queer, he thought even then, even as his left hand angled the flashlight down, that it should have happened just like that, when everything in him was tuned and waiting for it, without knowing what it was waiting for. Blood—on the door.
II
Simon stood for a moment, and his nerves seemed to grow even calmer and colder under an edge of sharp bitterness.
Then he grasped the door handle again, turned it and went in. The inside of the building was pitch dark. His torch needled the blackness with a thin jet of light that splashed dim reflections from the glossy varnish on a couple of punts and an electric canoe. Somehow he was quite sure what he would find, so sure that the certainty chilled off any rise of emotion. He knew what it must be; the only question was, who? Perhaps even that was not such a question. He was never quite sure about that. A hunch that had almost missed its mark had become stark reality with a suddenness that disjointed the normal co-ordinates of time and space: it was as if, instead of discovering things, he was trying to remember things he had known before and had forgotten. But he saw her at last, almost tucked under the shadow of the electric canoe, lying on her side as if she were asleep.
