"Gasper? . . . Splendid. ... By the way, I suppose you don't happen to have such a thing as a kipper about the place, do you? I was going to suggest that we indulge at the Cri, but you didn't give me time. And this is the hour when I usually kip. ..."
4
A few days later Mr. Francis Lemuel made his first long flight with his new pilot. They went first to Paris, and then to Berlin, in a week of perfect weather; and of the Saint's share in their wanderings abroad, on that occasion, there is nothing of interest to record. He drank French and German beers with a solid yearning for good English bitter, and was almost moved to assassinate a chatty and otherwise amiable Bavarian who ventured to say that in his opinion English beer was zu stark. Mr. Lemuel went about his own business, and the Saint only saw him at sporadic mealtimes in their hotels.
Lemuel was a man of middle age, with a Lombard Street complexion and an affectation of bluff geniality of which he was equally proud.
Except when they were actually in transit, he made few calls upon his new employee's time.
"Get about and enjoy yourself, Old Man"-everyone was Old Man to Mr. Lemuel. "You can see things here that you'll never see in England."
The Saint got about; and, in answer to Lemuel's casual inquiries, magnified his minor escapades into stories of which he was heartily ashamed. He made detailed notes of the true parts of some of his stories, to be reserved for future attention; but the Saint was a strong believer in concentrating on one thing at a time, and he was not proposing to ball up the main idea by taking chances on side issues-at the moment.
He met only one of Lemuel's business acquaintances, and this was a man named Jacob Einsmann, who dined with them one night. Einsmann, it appeared, had a controlling interest in two prosperous night clubs, and he was anxious for Lemuel to arrange lavish cabaret attractions. He was a short, florid-looking man, with an underhung nose and a superfluity of diamond rings.
"I must have it der English or American girls, yes," he insisted. "Der continental-pah! I can any number for noddings get, aind't it, no? But yours---"
He kissed excessively manicured fingers.
"You're right, Old Man," boomed Lemuel sympathetically. "English or American girls are the greatest troupers in the world. I won't say they don't get temperamental sometimes, but they've got a sense of discipline as well, and they don't mind hard work. The trouble is to get them abroad. There are so many people in England who jump to the worst conclusions if you try to send an English girl abroad."
He ranted against a certain traffic at some length; and the Saint heard out the tirade, and shrugged.
"I suppose you know more about it than I do, sir," he submitted humbly, "but I always feel the danger's exaggerated. There must be plenty of honest agents."
"There are, Old Man," rumbled Lemuel. "But we get saddled with the crimes of those who aren't."
Shortly afterwards, the conversation reverted to purely business topics; and the Saint, receiving a hint too broad to be ignored, excused himself.
Lemuel and the Saint left for England the next morning, and at the hour when he took off from Waalhaven Aërodrome on the last stage of the journey (they had descended upon Rotterdam for a meal) Simon was very little nearer to solving the problem of Francis Lemuel than he had been when he left England.
The inspiration came to him as they sighted the cliffs of Kent.
A few minutes later he literally ran into the means to his end.
It had been afternoon when they left the Tempelhof, for Mr. Lemuel was no early riser; and even then the weather had been breaking. As they travelled westwards it had grown steadily worse. More than once the Saint had had to take the machine very low to avoid clouds; and, although they had not actually encountered rain, the atmosphere had been anything but serene ever since they crossed the Dutch frontier. There had been one very bumpy half-hour during which Mr. Lemuel had been actively unhappy. . . .
Now, as they came over English ground, they met the first of the storm.
"I don't like the look of it, Templar," Mr. Lemuel opined huskily, through the telephones. "Isn't there an aërodrome near here that we could land at, Old Man?"
"I don't know of one," lied the Saint. "And it's getting dark quickly-I daren't risk losing my bearings. We'll have to push on to Croydon."
"Croydon!"
Simon heard the word repeated faintly, and grinned. For in a flash he had grasped a flimsy clue, and had seen his way clear; and the repetition had confirmed him in a fantastic hope.
"Why Croydon?"
"It's the nearest aërodrome that's fitted up for night landings. I don't suppose, we shall have much trouble with the customs," added the Saint thoughtfully.
There was a silence; and the Saint flew on, as low as he dared, searching the darkening country beneath him. And, within himself, he was blessing the peculiar advantages of his favourite hobby.
Times without number, when he had nothing else to do, the Saint had taken his car and set out to explore the unfrequented byways of England, seeking out forgotten villages and unspoiled country inns, which he collected as less robust and simple-minded men collect postage stamps. It was his boast that he knew every other inch of the British Isles blindfolded, and he may not have been very far wrong. There was one village, near the Kent-Surrey border, which had suggested itself to him immediately as the ideal place for his purpose.
"I say, Old Man," spoke Lemuel again, miserably.
"Hullo?"
"I'm feeling like death. I can't go on much longer. Can't you land in a field around here while there's still a bit of light?"
"I was wondering what excuse you'd make, dear heart," said the Saint; but he said it to himself. Aloud, he answered cheer fully: "It certainly is a bit bumpy, sir. I'll have a shot at it, if you like."
As a matter of fact, he had just sighted his objective, and he throttled off the engine with a gentle smile of satisfaction.
It wasn't the easiest landing in the world to make, especially in that weather; but the Saint put the machine on the deck without a mistake, turned, and taxied back to a sheltered corner of the field he had chosen. Then he climbed out of the cockpit and stretched himself.
"I can peg her out for the night," he remarked, as Lemuel joined him on the ground, "and there shouldn't be any harm done if it doesn't blow much harder than this."
"A little more of that flying would have killed me," said Lemuel; and he was really looking rather pale. "Where are we?"
Simon told him.
"It's right off the map, and I'm afraid you won't get a train back to town to-night; but I know a very decent little pub we can stay at," he said.
"I'll phone for my chauffeur to come down," said Lemuel. "I suppose there's a telephone in this place somewhere?"
"I doubt it," said Simon; but he knew that there was.
Again, however, luck was with him. It was quite dark by the time the aëroplane had been pegged out with ropes obtained from a neighbouring farm, and a steady rain was falling, so that no one was about to watch the Saint climbing nimbly up a telegraph pole just beyond the end of the village street. . . .
Lemuel, who had departed to look up the post office, re joined him later in the bar of the Blue Dragon with a tale of woe.
"A telegraph pole must have been blown down," he said. "Anyway, it was impossible to get through."
Simon, who had merely cut the wires without doing any damage to the pole, nevertheless saw no reason to correct the official theory.
Inquiries about possible conveyance to the nearest main line town proved equally fruitless, as the Saint had known they would be. He had selected his village with care. It possessed nothing suitable for Mr. Lemuel, and no traffic was likely to pass through that night, for it was right off the beaten track.
"Looks as if we'll have to make the best of it, Old Man," said Lemuel, and Simon concurred.
After supper Lemuel's spirits rose, and they spent a convivial evening in the bar.
It was a very convivial evening
. Mr. Lemuel, under the soothing influence of many brandies, forgot his day's misadventures, and embarked enthusiastically upon the process of making a night of it. For, he explained, his conversation with Jacob Einsmann was going to lead to a lot of easy money. But he could not be persuaded to divulge anything of interest, though the Saint led the conversation cunningly. Simon smiled, and continued to drink him level-even taking it upon himself to force the pace towards closing time. Simon had had some opportunity to measure up Francis Lemuel's minor weaknesses, and an adroit employment of some of this knowledge was part of the Saint's plan. And the Saint was ordinarily a most temperate man.
"You're a goo' feller, Ole Man," Mr. Lemuel was proclaiming, towards eleven o'clock. "You stick to me, Ole Man, an' don' worrabout wha' people tell you. You stick to me. I gorra-lotta money. Show you trick one day. You stick to me. Give you a berra job soon, Ole Man. Pallomine . . ."
When at length Mr. Lemuel announced that he was going to bed, the Saint's affable "Sleep well, sir!" would have struck a captious critic as unnecessary; for nothing could have been more certain than that Mr. Lemuel would that night sleep the sleep of the only just.
The Saint himself stayed on in the bar for another hour; for the landlord was in talkative mood, and was not unique in finding Simon Templar very pleasant company. So it came to pass that, a few minutes after the Saint had said good-night, his sudden return with a face of dismay was easily accounted for.
"I've got the wrong bag," he explained. "The other two were put in Mr. Lemuel's room, weren't they?"
"Is one of them yours?" asked the publican sympathetically.
Simon nodded.
"I've been landed with the samples," he said. "And I'll bet Mr. Lemuel's locked his door. He never forgets to do that, however drunk he is. And we'd have to knock the place down to wake him up now-and I'd lose my job if we did."
"I've got a master key, sir," said the landlord helpfully. "You could slip in with that and change the bags, and he wouldn't know anything about it."
Simon stared.
"You're a blinkin' marvel, George," he murmured. "You are, really."
With the host's assistance he entered Mr. Lemuel's room, and emerged with the key of the door in his pocket and one of Lemuel's bags in his hand. Mr. Lemuel snored rhythmically through it all.
"Thanks, George," said the Saint, returning the master key. "Breakfast at ten, and in bed, I think. . . ."
Then he took the bag into his own room, and opened it without much difficulty.
Its weight, when he had lifted it out of the aëroplane, had told him not to expect it to contain clothes; but the most superficially interesting thing about it was that Mr. Lemuel had not possessed it when he left England, and it was simply as a result of intensive pondering over that fact that the Saint had arrived at the scheme that he was then carrying out. And, in view of his hypothesis, and Mr. Lemuel's reaction to the magic word "Croydon," it cannot be said that the Saint was wildly surprised when he found what the bag actually held. But he was very, very interested, nevertheless.
There were rows and rows of neatly packed square tins, plain and unlabelled. Fishing one out, the Saint gently detached the strip of adhesive tape which sealed it, and prised off the lid. He came to a white, crystalline powder . . . but that had been in his mind when he opened the tin. Almost perfunctorily, he took a tiny pinch of the powder between his finger and thumb, and laid it on his tongue; and the Saintly smile tightened a little.
Then he sat back on his heels, lighted a cigarette, and regarded his catch thoughtfully.
"You're a clever boy, Francis," he murmured.
He meditated for some time, humming under his breath, apparently quite unmoved. But actually his brain was seething.
It would have been quite easy to dispose of the contents of the bag. It would have been equally easy to dispose of Mr. Lemuel. For a while the Saint toyed with the second idea. A strong solution of the contents of one of the tins, for instance, administered with the hypodermic syringe which Simon had in his valise . . . Then he shook his head.
"Try to remember, Old Man," he apostrophized himself, "that you are a business organization. And you're not at all sure that Uncle Francis has left you anything in his will."
The scheme which he ultimately decided upon was simplicity itself-so far as it went. It depended solely upon the state of the village baker's stock.
Simon left the Blue Dragon stealthily, and returned an hour later considerably laden.
He was busy for some hours after that, but he replaced Lemuel's grip looking as if it had not been touched, opening the door with Lemuel's own key.
It is quite easy to lock a door from the outside and leave the key in the lock on the inside-if you know the trick. You tie a string to the end of a pencil, slip the pencil through the hole in the key, and pass the string underneath the door. A pull on the string turns the key; and the pencil drops out, and can be pulled away under the door.
And after that the Saint slithered into his pajamas and rolled into bed as the first grayness of dawn lightened the sky outside his bedroom window, and slept like a child.
In the morning they flew on to Hanworth, where Lemuel's car waited to take them back to London.
The Saint was dropped at Piccadilly Circus; and he walked without hesitation into the Piccadilly Hotel. Settling himself at a table within, he drew a sheet of the hotel's notepaper towards him, and devoted himself with loving care to the production of a Work of Art. This consisted of the picture of a little man, drawn with a round blank head and straight-lined body and limbs, as a child draws, but wearing above his cerebellum, at a somewhat rakish angle, a halo such as few children's drawings portray. Then he took an envelope, which he addressed to Francis Lemuel. He posted his completed achievement within the hotel.
At half-past one he burst in upon Patricia Holm, declaring himself ravenous for lunch.
"With beer," he said. "Huge foaming mugs of it. Brewed at Burton, and as stark as they make it."
"And what's Francis Lemuel's secret?" she asked.
He shrugged.
"Don't spoil the homecoming," he said. "I hate to tell you, but I haven't come within miles of it in a whole blinkin' week."
He did not think it necessary to tell her that he had deliberately signed and sealed his own death warrant, for of late she had become rather funny that way.
5
There are a number of features about this story which will always endear it-in a small way to the Saint's memory. He likes its logical development, and the neat way in which the divers factors dovetail into one another with an almost audible click; he likes the crisp precision of the earlier episodes, and purrs happily as he recalls the flawless detail of his own technique in those episodes; but particularly is he lost in speech less admiration when he considers the overpowering brilliance of the exercise in inductive psychology which dictated his manner of pepping up the concluding states of the adventure.
Thus he reviewed the child of his genius: "The snow retails at about sixty pounds an ounce, in the unauthorized trade; and I must have poured about seventy thousand pounds' worth down the sink. Oh, yes, it was a good idea-to fetch over several years' supply at one go, almost without risk. And then, of course, according to schedule, I should have been quietly fired, and no one but Uncle Francis would have been any the wiser. Instead of which, Uncle's distributing organization, whatever that may be, will shortly be howling in full cry down Jermyn Street to ask Uncle what he means by ladling them out a lot of tins of ordinary white flour. Coming on top of the letter which will be shot in by the late post tonight, this question will cause a distinct stir. And, in the still small hours, Uncle Francis will sit down to ponder the ancient problem-What Should 'A' Do?"
This was long afterwards, when the story of Francis Lemuel was ancient history. And the Saint would gesture with his cigarette, and beam thoughtfully upon the assembled congregation, and presently proceed with his exposition: "Now, what should 'A' do, dear old streptococci?
. . . Should he woofle forth into the wide world, and steam into Scotland Yard, bursting with information? . . . Definitely not. He has no information that he can conveniently lay. His egg, so to speak, has addled in the oviduct. . . . Then should he curse me and cut his losses and leave it at that? . . . Just as definitely not. I have had no little publicity in my time; and he knows my habits. He knows that I haven't finished with him yet. He knows that, unless he gets his counterattack in quickly, he's booked to travel down the drain in no uncertain manner. . . . Then should he call in a few tough guys and offer a large reward for my death certificate? ... I think not. Francis isn't that type. ... He has a wholesome respect for the present length of his neck; and he doesn't fancy the idea of having it artificially extended in a whitewashed shed by a gentleman in a dark suit one cold and frosty morning. He knows that that sort of thing is frequently happening-sometimes to quite clever murderers. ... So what does he do?"
And what Francis Lemuel did was, of course, exactly what the Saint had expected. He telephoned in the evening, three days later, and Simon went round to Jermyn Street after dinner-with a gun in his pocket in case of accidents. That was a simple precaution; he was not really expecting trouble, and he was right.
The instructions which he actually received, however, were slightly different from the ones he had anticipated. He found Lemuel writing telegrams; and the impresario came straight to the point.
"Einsmann-you remember the fellow who came to dinner?-seems to have got himself into a mess. He's opening a new night club to-morrow, and his prize cabaret attraction has let him down at the last minute. He hasn't been able to arrange a good enough substitute on the spot, and he cabled me for help. I've been able to find a first-class girl, but the trouble is to get her to Berlin in time for a rehearsal with his orchestra."
"You want me to fly her over?" asked the Saint, and Lemuel nodded.
"That's the only way, Old Man. I can't let Einsmann down when he's just on the point of signing a big contract with me. You have a car, haven't you?" "Yes, sir."
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