Part I

The man who was lucky

"The rebel of yesterday is the hero of tomorrow. Simon Templar, known as The Saint, whose arrest was the ambition of every policeman in the city two years ago on account of his extralegal activities against the gangs of the bootleg era, comes back to New York on a pleasure trip with the tacit consent of the Police Department. "The converse is also true. "Lucky Joe Luckner, last surviving great name of the racketeers of the same period, once the friend of judges and the privileged pet of politicians, stands his trial for income-tax evasions with a life term on Alcatraz Island in prospect. "We see no need for Simon Templar to go back to his old games. The crooks are being taken care of as they should be, by the men who are employed to do so, with the whole force of an aroused public opinion behind them."

Thus somewhat optimistically spoke the editorial writer of the New York Daily Mail, on a certain morning in the beginning of the spring.

Simon Templar kept the cutting. He had a weakness for collecting the miscellaneous items of publicity with which the press punctuated his career from time to time. He had been publicly called a great many names in his life and they all interested him. To those who found themselves sadder or poorer or even deader by reason of his interference in their nefarious activities, he was an unprintable illegitimate; to those whose melancholy duty it was to discourage his blithe propensity for taking the law into his own hands, he was a perpetually disturbing problem; to a few people he was a hero; to himself he was only an adventurer, finding the best romance he could in a dull mechanical age, fighting crime because he had to fight something, and not caring too much whether he himself transgressed the law in doing so. Sometimes his adventures left him poorer, more often they left him richer; but always they were exciting. Which was all that the Saint asked of life.

He showed the cutting to Inspector John Fernack down on Centre Street a few days after his arrival, and the detective rubbed his square pugnacious chin.

"There's somethin' in it," he said.

Simon detected the faintly hesitant inflection in the other's voice and raised his eyebrows gently.

"Why only something?"

"You've seen the papers?"

The Saint shrugged.

"Well, he hasn't been acquitted."

"No, he hasn't been acquitted." The detective's tone was blunt and sardonic. "Lucky Joe's luck didn't hold that far. But what the hell? The next jury that takes the case can't help rememberin' that the first jury disagreed, and that means it '11 be twice as hard to make 'em find him guilty. And nobody cares so much about a second trial. I don't say we won't get him eventually — the Feds might have got him this time if one of the witnesses hadn't been taken for a ride and a couple of others hadn't disappeared. But look what they're tryin' to get him for. Income tax!"

"It's been used before."

"Income tax!" Fernack took the words in his teeth and worried it like a dog. The smouldering heat of his indignation came up into his eyes. "What did think that means? All it means is that everybody else who ought to of put Luckner away has fallen down. All it means is that so many crooked politicians and crook lawyers an' crook police chiefs have been playing ball with him so long that now there ain't any other charge left to bring against him. All it means is that for fifteen years this guy Luckner has been a racketeer and a murderer, and now the only rap they can stick on him is that he never paid any income tax!"

The Saint nodded thoughtfully. "You know all these things about him are true?" "Listen," said Fernack with fierce and caustic restraint. "When a guy who tried to muscle in on Luckner's territory was found dead in a ditch in the Bronx, you bet Luckner didn't have nothin' to do with it. When a cop tried to stop one of Luckner's beer trucks back in prohibition days and got shot in the belly, you bet Luckner was sorry for him. Yeah, Luckner would always be sorry for a fool cop who butted in when the guys higher up said to lay off. When half-a-dozen poolroom keepers got beaten up because they don't join Luckner's poolroom union, you bet Luckner cried when he heard about it. And when one of the witnesses against him in this trial gets bumped off and two others fade away into thin air, you take your shirt off and bet everything you've got it just makes Lucky Joe's heart bleed to think about it." Fernack took the cigar out of his mouth and spat explosively. "You know your way around as well as I do, Saint, or you used to. And you ask me that!"

Simon swung a long leg over the arm of his chair and gazed at the detective through the drifting smoke of his cigarette with a glimpse of idle mockery twinkling; deep down in his blue eyes.

"One gathers that Lucky Joe wouldn't be so lucky if you got him alone in a back alley on a dark night," he remarked.

"Say, listen." Fernack's huge hands rested on the top of his desk, solid as battering rams, looking as if they could have crashed clean through the fragile timber if he had thumped it to emphasize his point. "If they put Luckner in the chair six days runnin' and fried him six times he wouldn't get more than the law's been owin' him for the last ten years. That guy's a rat an' a killer — a natural born louse from the day he was weaned—"

He stopped rather abruptly, as though he had only just realised the trend of his argument. Perhaps the quietly speculative smile on the Saint's lips, and the rakish lines of the dark fighting face, brought back too many memories to let him continue with an easy conscience. For there had been days, before that tacit amnesty to which the editorial writer of the New York Daily Mail had referred, when that lean debonair outlaw lounging in his armchair had led the New York police a dance that would be remembered in their annals for many years — when the elusive figure of the Saint had first loomed up on the dark horizons of the city's underworld and taken the law into his own hands to such effect that fully half-a-dozen once famous names could be found carved on tombstones in certain cemeteries to mark the tempestuousness of his passing.

"I don't mean what you're thinkin'," Fernack said heavily. "Luckner is goin' to be taken care of. Even if he only gets a life term on Alcatraz it'll be somethin'. I know you did a few things for us a coupla years back that we couldn't do ourselves on account of the way all the politicians were holding onto us. But that's all changed now. We got a different setup. Luckner isn't goin' to the chair now because the politicians of a coupla years back let him loose; but anybody who tries to pull any of that stuff now isn't goin' to find it so easy to get away with. That goes for you too. Just stick around and have a good time, and you won t be interfered with. Go back to your old line, and you and me will be fightin' again. With this difference — that you won't have the excuse that you had the last time."

The Saint grinned lazily.

"Okay," he murmured, "I'll remember it."

His tone was so innocent and docile that Fernack glared at him for a moment suspiciously; but the Saint laughed at him and took him out to lunch and talked to him so engagingly about the most harmless topics that that momentary flash of uneasiness had faded from the detective's mind by the time they parted. Which was exactly what the Saint meant it to do. The Saint never asked for superfluous trouble — quite enough of it came his way in the normal course of events without encouraging him to invite extra donations without good reason.

As a matter of fact, the luck of Lucky Joe Luckner might well have slipped away into the background of his memory and remained there permanently. He had really come back to America for a holiday, with no thoughts of crime in his head. For a few days, at least, the bright lights of Broadway would provide all the excitement he needed; and after that he would move on somewhere else.

He had thought no more about it a couple of days later when he saw a face that he remembered coming out of a travel agency on Fifth Avenue. The girl was so intent on hurrying through the crowd that she might not have noticed him, but he caught her armas she went by and turned her round.

"Hello, Cora," he drawled.

She looked at him with a queer mixture of fear and defiance that surprised him. The look had vanished a moment after she recognized him, but it remained in his memory with the beginning of a question mark after it. He kept his hand on her arm.

"Why — hello, Saint!"

He smiled.

"Hush," he said. "Not so loud. I may be an honest citizen to all intents and purposes, but I haven't got used to it. Come and have a drink and tell me the story of your life."

"I'm sorry." Did he imagine that she still seemed a trifle breathless, just as he might have imagined that swift glimmer of fright in her eyes when he caught hold of her? "Not just now. Can't we have lunch or something tomorrow? I–I've got an appointment."

"With Marty?"

He was sure now. There was a perceptible hesitation before she answered, exactly as if she had paused to consider whether she should tell him the truth or invent a story.

"Yes. Please — I'm in a hurry…"

"So am I." The Saint's voice was innocently persuasive. "Can I give you a lift? I'd like to see Marty again."

"I'm afraid he's ill."

This was a lie. The Saint knew it, but the genial persuasion of his smile didn't alter. Those who knew him best had learned that that peculiarly lazy and aimless smile was the index of a crystallizing determination which was harder to resist than most other men's square-jawed aggression.

A taxi stood conveniently empty by the curb. He opened the door; and he still held her arm.

"Where to?" he asked as they settled down.

She leaned her head back and closed her eyes. After a moment she gave him an address. He relayed it to the driver and took out a packet of cigarettes. They rode on for a while in silence, and he studied her thoughtfully without seeming to stare. She had always been pretty in a fair-haired and rather fluffy way, but now for the first time he was aware of a background of character which he hadn't noticed particularly when he had known her before. Perhaps it had always been there, but he hadn't observed her closely enough to see it.

He cast his mind back over the time when they had first met. She was going around with Marty O'Connor then, and apparently they were still going around. That indicated some kind of character at least — he wasn't quite sure what kind. After they had driven a few blocks he reached forward and closed the glass partition to shut them off from the driver.

"Well, dear heart, do you tell me about it or do I drag it out of you? Is Marty in trouble again?"

She nodded hesitantly.

The Saint drew at his cigarette without any visible indications of surprise. When one is a minor racketeer, strong-arm man and reputed gunman like Marty O'Connor, one is liable to be in trouble pretty frequently. Simon concentrated for a moment on trying to blow a couple of smoke rings. The draft from the open window broke them up, and he said: "Who started it?"

"Why do you want to know?"

"Marty did something for me once. If he's in trouble I'd like to do something for him. I suppose it's immoral, but I always had a soft spot for that old thug. On the level, Cora."

"You're not tied up with the cops any more?"

"I never was. I just did some of their work for them once, but they never thanked me. And if I'd ever had anything to take out on Marty I'd have done it years ago."

She looked at him for some seconds before she answered, and then her answer was only made indirectly. She leaned forward and opened the partition again just long enough to change the address he had given the driver to another two blocks north of it.

"You know the game," said the Saint appreciatively, and for the first time she looked him full in the eyes.

"I have to," she said. "The G-men have been combing the town for Marty for the last three months."

Simon raised his eyebrows without emotion.

"What did he do? Did he take up kidnapping, or is he another of these income-tax defaulters?"

She looked at him queerly for a moment, and when she laughed there was a sharp note of strain in the sound.

"The trouble is he knows too much about income tax. He'd be the star witness against Luckner if they could get his evidence."

"And he doesn't want to give it?"

"He doesn't want to die," said the girl brutally.

Simon put his feet up on the spare scat opposite him and smoked placidly. Coincidence was a queer thing, but he had ceased to marvel at its complexities. Once again, through that chance encounter, lie found the subject of Lucky Joe Luckner thrust into his mind, and the repetition gave it enough weight to make it stay there. But he was wise enough not to press the girl for any more details during the drive. In due course of time he would know all that he wanted to know; and he was prepared to wait. He would see Marty himself.

The cab stopped outside a dingy brick house between Ninth and Tenth avenues. A half-dozen grimy guttersnipes were playing raucous baseball in the street. The windows in the front of the house were clouded with the accumulated dirt of ages. Inside the front door, the dark hall was paved with a strip of threadbare linoleum, and Simon felt the slithery gloss of thick dust under his finger tips when he put his hand on the banister as they climbed the stairs to the second floor. His nose wrinkled in response to a faint pervasive odour of ancient cooking. And a slight frown creased itself into his forehead. He was still a long way from having all his questions answered. To find Marty O'Connor in a place like this, even as a hideout, was a mystery in itself — Marty who had always been such a swell dresser with a highly developed taste for spring mattresses and Turkey carpets and flashy decoration.

The girl opened the door and they went into the living room. The furniture there was in keeping with what anyone would have expected from a preliminary glance of the building — cheap, shoddy and shabby — but Simon noticed that unlike the rest of the place it appeared to be clean. Cora pulled off her hat.

"Hello, Marty," she called. "I brought a friend to see you."

Marty O'Connor appeared in the doorway of the bedroom. He was in his shirt sleeves, a shirt open at the neck, and he kept one hand in his pocket. He stared at the Saint blankly, and then his homely face broke into a slow gold-and-ivory grin.

"Well for… Where the hell did you come from?"

The Saint chuckled. Marty took his right hand out of his pocket for the first time and Simon grasped it.

"I wouldn't have believed you could get any uglier, Marty, but you made it."

The gunman hauled him towards a chair and sat him down. He looked a little less plump than he had been when the Saint saw him last, and there seemed to be a trace of hollowness in his unshaven cheeks; but the feckless twinkle in his faded eyes was the same as that by which Simon had first been beguiled from his antipathy for the ordinary run of hoodlums.

"I sure am glad to see you here again, Saint. It's a long time since we had a drink together." O'Connor dusted the table with his handkerchief and sat on it. He turned round. "Cora! See if you got any of that gin left we had the other night… Say!" He looked at the Saint again, beaming with a simple pleasure that had temporarily wiped away the furtive defensiveness with which he had emerged from the bedroom. "Where you been all this time?"

"Here and there," said the Saint vaguely. "I've covered a good deal of ground. Have you been looking after yourself?"

"Not so badly."

The girl came back into the room, bearing a garishly labelled bottle and three cheap glasses.

"It's okay, Marty," she said. "I told him."

The gunman scratched his head. For a moment his heavy face sank back into its mask of dour suspicion. And then he grinned rather ruefully, like an unrepentant urchin.

"Well, ya know how it is, Saint," he said apologetically.

Simon shook his head.

"That's just what I don't quite know."

Marty tipped liquor into the three glasses and passed one of them over. He sat down again.

"Well…" He picked a half-smoked cigarette out of the ash tray and relighted it. "All the good business folded after repeal. Sure, you could always give somebody a bit of protection, but you couldn't get the same dough. Besides, Luckner couldn't keep the connections he used to have since the city got a new administration. Some of the mob took up kidnapping but that ain't my idea of a man's job. It got too dangerous at that. I just about decided the best thing was to go on the legit if I could find a job anywhere — and then this Luckner case blew up. Did you read about it in the papers?"

"I've heard of it."

"I useta work with Luckner once — you know when. I never liked him, but it was just business. You know we nearly had a fight lotsa times when he was tryin' to make Cora go out with him."

"He never did any harm," said the girl lightly.

"And that wasn't for want of tryin'," growled O'Connor. "Why, I never see a guy make such a play for a girl like he done for Cora. Why, he once told her he'd have me taken for a ride and marry her himself if she'd say the word." Marty laughed in his throat, but the sound was without humour. "You only can trust that guy as far as you can trust a rattlesnake. Still, I wouldn't stop him findin' his own way outta this income-tax rap if he can do it. I hear the G-men wanted me for a witness — I useta keep his accounts once — so I pulled out and went underground. I know things that wouldn't 've let him get away with a hung jury last time. But what's that worth?"

"It might have been worth a fresh start to you, Marty," said the Saint speculatively.

The other grinned slowly.

"Yeah, a fresh start under a slab of marble. I wouldn't lift a finger for Lucky if he was gonna burn tomorrow. But hell, I ain't a squealer. Besides, you know what happened to Snaky Romaro and those other two guys what were going to give evidence?" Marty's big mouth turned down at the corners with cynical significance. "I ain't no Little Lord Fauntleroy, but I know Lucky, and I know his gang has orders what to do about any guy that turns up as a witness against him. So, Cora and me we come here where we figger nobody will ever look for us, and we stay here ever since. It ain't been easy, with no dough comin' in — but we're still alive."

The Saint's blue eyes travelled slowly over the apartment again; took in the dingy carpet worn down almost to its backing, the wobble of the rickety table on which Marty had perched, the hideous upholstery of the gimcrack chairs.

"I suppose it would be difficult," he said.

Marty nodded.

"We had our bit of luck," he said. "I got a job the other day. Just wonderin' what we we're gonna do next. I remembered a pal of mine who went to Canada two-three years back and got himself a garage. He ain't got so much money either, but he wrote back he could give me a job startin' at twenny bucks a week if I could find my way up there. Cora went around and borrowed some dough — she had to be pretty careful 'cause they're lookin' for her too, knowin' she'd probably lead 'em back to me. She went out an' bought our tickets today — I guess that's when you must of met her. So if I can get clear without bein' stopped we oughta get along all right."

Simon didn't laugh, although for a moment the idea of Marty O'Connor, who had seen the big money and flashed it around as liberally as anyone else in his class, washing cars for twenty dollars a week was humorous enough. But he looked round the apartment again and his gaze came to rest on the face of the girl Cora with a certain understanding. He knew now what subconscious intuition had made him revise his casual opinion of her, even in those brief minutes in the taxi. Stranger things have happened in that unpredictable substratum of civilisation with which he had spent half his life.

"It's a pity you can't take some dough with you and buy a share in this garage business," he said; and knew before he started to elaborate the suggestion into an offer that it would be refused.

Later on in the evening he had an even better idea, and he talked for half an hour before he was able to induce Marty to accept it. What argument it was that finally turned the scale he would have found it hard to remember. But once the Saint was on the trail of an inspiration he had a gift of persuasiveness that would have sold a line of rubber boots to a colony of boa constrictors.

Lucky Joe Luckner, recuperating from the ordeal of his trial in his hotel suite at Briarcliff, was still satisfied with his consistent good luck in spite of the two quiet and inconspicuous men who sat around in the hotel lobby all day and followed him at a discreet distance whenever he went out. He had no intention of jumping his bail. The drastic entry of the Department of Justice into the war with crime had made the role of a fugitive from justice even less attractive than it had been before. Luckner had never been a fugitive — he couldn't imagine himself in the part. Quite confidently, he was waiting for an acquittal in his next trial which would leave him a free man without a single legal stain on his character; and if his attorney did not quite share this sublime confidence, he had to admit that the result of the first trial lent some support to it.

"Betcha they can't box me in twenty years," he declared boastfully, to his personal bodyguard.

The saturnine Mr. Toscelli agreed encouragingly, which was one of his lighter duties, and Lucky Joe rewarded him with a slap on the back and a cigar. Few men are offended by hearing their boasts enthusiastically echoed, and Luckner was known to be rather more than ordinarily vulnerable.

He was a short, thickset man who looked rather more like a truck driver than a beer baron, with small close-set eyes and a big coarse laugh. His extravagances were of a type that ran to loud check suits, yellow spats, strangely hued hats and large diamonds; and he imagined that these outward evidences of good taste and prosperity were part of the secret of his hypnotic power over women. This hypnotic power was one of his more whimsical fantasies, but his associates had found it healthier to accept it with tactful solemnity. He boasted that he had never failed to conquer any woman whom he had desired to possess, and he had a convenient faculty for forgetting the many exceptions which tended to disprove the rule. But apart from this one playful weakness he was as sentimental as a scorpion; and the Saint estimated the probabilities with some care before he approached Lucky Joe in person.

If he had been cautious he would never have gone at all, but Simon Templar was a confirmed believer in direct action, and he knew exactly the strength of his hand.

He drove out to Briarcliff on a pleasant sunny day and sauntered up the steps under the critical eyes of a dozen disapproving residents who were sunning themselves on the terrace. The Saint could see no good reason why they should be disapproving, for he felt very contented with himself that morning and considered that he was more than ordinarily beautiful and definitely an ornament to the scenery; but he realized that the knowledge that Lucky Joe Luckner was a fellow guest must have cast a certain amount of cloud over the tranquillity of the other inmates of that highly respectable hostelry, and made his own excuses for their lack of visible appreciation. Perhaps they had some good reason to fear that a man with that loose and rather buccaneering stride and that rather reckless cut of face was only another manifestation of the underworld invasion which had disturbed the peace of their rural retreat, and in a way they were right; but the Saint didn't care. With his hands in his pockets and his spotless white Panama tilted jauntily over one eye, he wandered on into the lounge and identified two blue-chinned individuals, who lifted flat fishlike eyes from their newspapers at his advent, as being more deserving of the reception committee's disapproving stares than himself. There were also two large men with heavy shoulders and big feet sitting in another corner of the lounge, who inspected him with a similar air of inquiry; but neither party knew him, and he went up the stairs unquestioned.

The door of Luckner's suite opened at his knock to exhibit another blue chin and flat fishlike stare similar to those which had greeted him downstairs. It stayed open just far enough for that, and the stare absorbed him with the expressionlessness of a dead cod.

"Hullo, body," murmured the Saint easily. "When did they dig you up?"

The stare darkened, without taking on any more expression.

"Whaddaya want?" it asked flatly.

"I want to see Lucky Joe."

"He ain't here."

"Tell him it's about Marty O'Connor," said the Saint gently. "And tell him he doesn't know how lucky he is."

The man looked at him for a moment longer and then closed the door suddenly. Simon lighted a cigarette and waited patiently. The door opened again.

"Come in."

Simon went in. The man who had let him in stayed behind him, with his back to the door. Another man of similarly taciturn habits and lack of facial expression sat on the arm of a chair by the window, with one hand in his coat pocket, thoughtfully picking his teeth with the other. Luckner sat on the settee, in his shirt sleeves, with his feet on a low table. He took the cigar out of his mouth and looked at the Saint reflectively.

Simon came to a halt in front of him and touched two fingers to the brim of his hat in a lazy and ironical salute. He smiled, with a faint twinkle in his blue eyes, and Luckner glowered at him uncertainly.

"Well — what is it?"

The Saint put his cigarette to his lips.

"I just dropped in," he said. "I wondered if you looked quite as nasty in the flesh as the stories I've read about you made you out to be. Also because I heard you'd be interested in any news about Marty O'Connor."

"Where is he?"

Simon's smile widened by a vague seraphic fraction.

"That's my secret."

Luckner took his feet off the table and got up slowly until he faced the Saint. He was six inches shorter than Simon but he thrust his lumpy red face up as close as he could under the Saint's nose.

"Where is he?"

"It's just possible," said the Saint in his slow soft voice, without a shift of his eyes, "that you've got some mistaken ideas about what I am and what I've come here for. If you had an idea, for instance, that your ugly mug was so terrifying that I'd fold up as soon as I saw it, or that I'd tell you anything until I was ready to tell it — well, we'd better go back to the beginning and start again."

Luckner glared at him silently for a second, and then he said in a very level tone: "Who the hell are you?"

"I am the Saint."

The man on the arm of the chair took the toothpick out of his mouth and forgot to close his mouth behind it. The man by the door sucked in his breath with a sharp hiss like a squirt of escaping steam. Only Luckner made no active expression of emotion, but his face went a shade lighter in color and froze into wooden restraint.

Simon allowed the announcement to sink into the brains of his audience at its own good leisure, while he let the smoke of his cigarette trickle through his lips to curl in a faintly mocking feather before Luckner's stony eyes. There was something so serene, something so strong and quietly dangerous about him which coupled with his almost apologetic self-introduction was like the revelation of an unsheathed sword, that none of the men made any move towards him. He looked at Luckner unruffledly with those very clear and faintly bantering blue eyes.

"I am the Saint," he said. "You should know the name. I know where to find Marty O'Connor. The only question you have to answer is — how much is he worth to you?"

Luckner's knees bent until he reached the level of the settee. He put the cigar back in his mouth.

"Sit down," he said. "Let's talk this over."

The Saint shook his head.

"Why spend the time, Joe? You ought to know how much Marty's worth. I hear he used to keep your accounts once, and he could make a great squeal if they got him on the stand. It 'd put three new lives into the prosecution. Not that I'd lose any sleep if they were going to send you to the chair; but I suppose we can't put everything right at once. You'll get what's coming to you. Sooner or later. But just for the moment, this is more important." Simon studied his fingernails. "I owe Marty something, but I can't give it to him myself — that's one of the disadvantages of the wave of virtue which seems to have come over this great country. But I don't see why you shouldn't give him what he deserves." The Saint's eyes lifted again suddenly to Luckner's face with a cold and laconic directness. "I don't care what you do about Marty so long as I get what I think he's worth."

"And what's that?"

"That is just one hundred grand."

Luckner stiffened as if a spear had been rammed up his backbone from his sacrum to his scalp.

"How much?"

"One hundred thousand dollars," said the Saint calmly. "And cheap at the price. After all, that's less than a third of what you offered the Revenue to get this income-tax case dropped altogether… You will pay it in twenty-dollar bills, and I shall want it by ten o'clock tonight."

The dilated incredulity of Luckner's eyes remained set for a moment, and then they narrowed back to their normal size and remained fixed on the Saint's face like glittering beads. It was symptomatic of Luckner's psychology that he made no further attempt to argue. The Saint didn't have the air of a man who was prepared to devote any time to bargaining, and Luckner knew it. It didn't even occur to him to question the fundamental fact of whether Simon Templar was really in a position to carry out his share of the transaction. The Saint's name, and the reputation which Luckner still remembered, was a sufficient guarantee of that. There was only one flimsy quibble that Luckner could see at all, and he had a premonition that even this was hopeless before he tried it.

"Suppose we kept you here without any hundred grand and just saw what we could do about persuading you to tell us where Marty is?"

The Saint smiled rather wearily.

"Of course I'd never have thought of that. It wouldn't have occurred to me to have somebody waiting outside here who'd start back for New York if I didn't come out of this room safe and sound in" — he looked at his watch — "just under another three minutes. And I wouldn't have thought of telling this guy that if he had to beat it back to the city without me he was to get Marty and take him straight along to the D.A.'s office… You're taking an awful lot for granted, Joe, but if you think you can make me talk in two and a half minutes go ahead and try."

Luckner chewed his cigar deliberately across from one side of his mouth to the other. He was in a corner, and he was capable of facing the fact.

"Where do we make the trade?"

"You can send a couple of guys with the money down the Bronx River Parkway tonight. I'll be waiting in a car one mile south of a sign on the right which says City of Yonkers. If the dough is okay I'll tell them where to find Marty, and they can have him in five minutes. What they do when they see him is none of my business." The Saint's blue eyes rested on Luckner again with the same quiet and deadly implication. "Is that all quite clear?"

Luckner's head remained poised for a moment before it jerked briefly downwards.

"The dough will be okay," he said, and the Saint smiled again.

"They didn't know how lucky you were going to be when they gave you your nickname, Joe," he said.

For some time after he had gone, Luckner sat in the same position, with his hands on his spread knees, chewing his cigar and staring impassively in front of him. The man with the toothpick continued his endless foraging. The man who had guarded the door lighted a cigarette and gazed vacantly out of the window.

The situation was perfectly clear, and Luckner had enough cold-blooded detachment to review it with his eyes open. After a while he spoke.

"You better go, Luigi," he said. "You and Karlatta. Take a coupla typewriters, and don't waste any time."

Toscelli nodded phlegmatically and garaged his toothpick in his vest pocket.

"Do we take the dough?"

"You're damn right you take the dough. You heard what he said? You give him the dough an' he tells you where to find Marty. I'll write some checks and you can go to New York this afternoon and collect it. An' don't kid yourselves. If there are any tricks, that son of a bitch has thought of them all. You know how he took off Morrie Ualino an' Dutch Kuhlmann?"

"It's a lot of dough, Lucky," said Mr. Toscelli gloomily.

Joe Luckner's jaw hardened.

"A life on Alcatraz is a lot of years," he said stolidly. "Never mind the dough. Just see that Marty keeps his mouth shut. Maybe we can do something about the dough afterwards."

Even then he kept his belief in his lucky star, although the benefit it had conferred on him was somewhat ambiguous. A more captious man might have quibbled that a price ticket of one hundred thousand dollars was an expensive present, but to Luckner it represented fair value. Nor did he feel any compunction about the use to which he proposed to put the gift.

In this respect, at least, Toscelli was able to agree with him without placing any strain on his principles. The chief load on his mind was the responsibility of the cargo of twenty-dollar bills which he had collected from various places during the afternoon; and he felt a certain amount of relief when ke arrived at the rendezvous and found a closed car parked by the roadside and waiting for him exactly as the Saint had promised that it would be. Even so, he kept one hand on his gun while the Saint received the heavy packages of currency through the window.

Simon examined each packet carefully under the dashboard light and satisfied himself that there was no deception.

"A very nice little haul," he murmured. "You must be sorry to see it go, Luigi… By the way, you can let go your gun — I've got you covered from here, and you're a much better target than I am."

Toscelli wavered, peering at him sombrely out of the gloom. It was true that it grieved him to see so much hard cash taken out of his hands; but he remembered Luckner's warning, and he had heard of the Saint's reputation himself.

"Where do we go?" he growled.

The shiny barrel of the Saint's automatic, resting on the edge of the window, moved in a briefly indicative arc towards the north.

"Straight on up the Parkway for exactly three miles. Park your wagon there and wait for results. He'll be travelling south, looking for a car parked exactly where you're going to be — but he won't expect you to be in it. You won't make any mistake, because I've marked his car: the near-side headlight has a cross of adhesive tape on the lens, and I hope it will give you pious ideas. On your way, brother… "

Simon drove slowly south. In about half a mile he pulled in to the side of the road again and stopped there. He flicked his headlights two or three times before he finally switched them out, and he was completing the task of distributing a measured half of Toscelli's hundred-thousand-dollar payment over his various pockets when a subdued voice hailed him cautiously from the shadows at the roadside.

The Saint grinned and opened the door.

"Hullo there, Marty." He settled his pockets, buttoned his coat and slipped out. "Are you ready to travel?"

"If there's nothing to stop us."

"There isn't." Simon punched him gently in the stomach and their hands met. "The car is yours, and you'll find about fifty thousand bucks lying about in it. The earth is yours between here and the Canadian border; but if I were you I'd strike east from here and go up through White Plains. And any time I'm in Canada I'll drop by your garage for some gas. Maybe it '11 go towards evening up what you did for me one time." He gripped Marty's shoulder for a moment and then turned to the other slighter figure which stood beside them. "Take care of him, Cora — and yourself too."

"I'll do that."

A match flared in the Saint's hands for an instant, but his eyes were intent on the cigarette he was lighting.

"You called Lucky Joe as I told you to?" he asked casually. "Told him you were through with Marty and couldn't bear to wait another day to take up with the new love?"

"Yes. Half an hour ago."

"I bet he fell for it."

"He said he'd be there." She hesitated. "I don't know why you've done all this for us, Saint, and I don't know how you did it — but why did you want me to do that?"

The Saint smiled invisibly in the dark.

"Because I made an appointment for him and I wanted to be sure he'd keep it. Some friends of his will be there to meet him. I have to work in these devious ways these days because Inspector Fernack warned me to keep out of trouble. Don't lose any sleep over it, kid. Be good."

He kissed her, and held the door while they got into the car. From somewhere far to the north the faint rattle of machine guns came down the wind.

Part II

The smart detective

Lieutenant Corrio was on the carpet. This was a unique experience for him, for he had a rather distinguished record on the New York Detective Bureau. Since the time when he was admitted to it, he had achieved a series of successes which had earned him more than ordinarily rapid promotion without winning him any of the affection of his colleagues and superiors. While he had made comparatively few sensational arrests, he had acquired an outstanding reputation in the field of tracing stolen property, and incidentally in pursuit of this specialty had earned a large number of insurance company rewards which might have encouraged the kindhearted observer to list a very human jealousy among the chief causes of his unpopularity. But apart from this plausible explanation there were even more human reasons why Lieutenant Corrio had so conspicuously failed to make himself the darling of Centre Street — he was a very smug man about his successes, and he had other vanities which were even less calculated to endear him to the other detectives whom his inspired brilliance had more than once put in the shade.

None of these things, however, were sufficient to justify his immediate superiors in administering the official flattening which they had long been yearning to bestow; and it was with some pardonable glow of satisfaction that Inspector John Fernack, who was as human as anyone else if not more so, had at last found the adequate excuse for which his soul had been pining wistfully for many moons.

For at last Lieutenant Corrio's smug zeal had overreached itself. He had made an entirely gratuitous, uncalled for and unauthorized statement to a reporter on the New York Daily Mail, which had been featured under two-column headlines and decorated with Lieutenant Corrio's favourite photograph of himself on the first inside sheet of that enterprising tabloid.

This copy of the paper lay on Inspector Fernack's desk while he spoke his mind to his subordinate, and he referred to it several times for the best quotations which he had marked off in blue pencil in preparation for the interview.

One of these read:

"If you ask me why this man Simon Templar was ever allowed to come back to New York, I can't tell you. I don't believe in idealistic crooks any more than I believe in reformed crooks, and the Police Department has got enough work to do without having any more hoodlums of that kind spilled onto us. But I can tell you this. There have been a lot of changes in the Detective Bureau since Templar was last here, and he won't find it so easy to get away with his racket as he did before."

There was another one:

"If this cheap gunman that they call the Saint doesn't believe me, he's only got to start something. I'm taking care of him myself, and if he pulls so much as a traffic violation while he's in the city I'll get him put away where he won't give anyone any more trouble."

Fernack read out these extracts in his most scorching voice, which was a very scorching voice when he put his heart into it.

"I hadn't heard the news about your bein' appointed Police Commissioner," Fernack said heavily, "but I'd like to be the first to congratulate you. Of course a guy with your looks will find it a pretty soft job."

Lieutenant Corrio shrugged his shoulders sullenly. He was a dark and rather flashily good-looking man, who obviously had no illusions about the latter quality, with a wispy moustache and the slimmest figure consistent with the physical requirements of the force.

"I was just having a friendly chat with a guy," he said. "How was I to know he was going to print what I said? I didn't know anything about it until I saw it in the paper myself."

Fernack turned to page eleven and read out from another of his blue-pencilled panels: "Lieutenant Corrio is the exact reverse of the popular conception of a detective. He is a slender, well-dressed man who looks rather like Clark Gable and might easily be mistaken for an idol of the silver screen."

"You didn't know that he'd say that either, did you?" Fernack inquired in tones of acid that would have seared the skin of a rhinoceros.

Corrio glowered and said nothing; and Fernack passed on to what was to his mind the brightest and juiciest feature of the Daily Mail reporter's story. He read it out:

"After I left Lieutenant Corrio, it occurred to me to find out what Simon Templar thought about the subject.

"I found him without any difficulty in his suite at the Waldorf. The Robin Hood of the modern underworld, who was once the favourite target of gangsters and police alike on account of his ruthless free-lance campaign against the criminals whom the law could not or would not touch, listened with his laziest smile while I read over Lieutenant Corrio's statements to him.

"I asked him if he had any answer to make.

"The Saint uncoiled his six feet two of steel-and-leathery length from the armchair where he had been sitting, and his clear blue eyes twinkled maliciously as he showed me to the door.

" 'I think Lieutenant Corrio will put Clark Gable out of business one of these days,' he said."

If there was anything that could have been guaranteed to increase Inspector Fernack's long-established secret sympathy for the Saint, it was this climax of a quotation. It is true that he would have preferred to have originated it himself, but the other compensations far outweighed this minor disadvantage.

Lieutenant Corrio's face reddened. He was particularly proud of his presidency of the Merrick Maskers, and he had never been able to see anything humorous in his confirmed conviction that his destined home was in Hollywood and that his true vocation was that of the dashing hero of a box-office-shattering series of romantic melodramas.

Having dealt comprehensively with these lighter points Fernack opened his shoulders and proceeded to the meatier business of the conference in a series of well-chosen sentences. He went on to summarize his opinion of Lieutenant Corrio's ancestry, past life, present value, future prospects, looks, clothes, morals, intelligence and assorted shortcomings, taking a point of view which made up in positiveness and vigour for anything which it may have lacked in absolute impartiality.

"An' get this," he concluded. "The Saint hasn't come here to get into any trouble. I know him an' he knows me, an' he knows me too damn well to try to pull anything while I'm still gettin' around on my own feet. An' what's more, if anybody's got to take care of him I can do it. He's a man-sized proposition, an' it takes a man-sized cop to look after him. An' if any statements have to be made to the papers about it, I'll make 'em."

Gorrio waited for the storm to pass its height, which took some time longer.

"I'm sure you know best, sir — especially after the way he helped you on that Valcross case," he said humbly, while Fernack glared at him speechlessly. "But I have a theory about the Saint."

"You have a what?" repeated Fernack as if Corrio had uttered an indecent word.

"A theory, sir. I think the mistake that's been made all along is in trying to get something on the Saint after he's done a job. What we ought to do is pick out a job that he looks likely to do, watch it, and catch him red-handed. After all, his character is so well known that any real detective ought to be able to pick out the things that would interest him with his eyes shut. There's one in that paper on your desk — I noticed it this morning."

"Are you still talking about this?" Fernack demanded unsympathetically. "Because if so—"

Corrio shook his head.

"I mean that man Oppenheim who owns the sweatshops. It says in the paper that he's just bought the Vanderwoude emerald collection for a million and a half dollars to give to his daughter for a wedding present. Knowing how Oppenheim got his money, and knowing the Saint's line, it's my idea that the Saint will make a play for those jewels."

"An' make such a sucker play that even a fairy like you could catch him at it," snarled Fernack discouragingly. "Go back and do your detecting at the Merrick Playhouse — I hear there's a bad ham out there they've been trying to find for some time."

If he had been less incensed with his subordinate Fernack might have perceived a germ of sound logic in Corrio's theory, but he was in no mood to appreciate it. Two days later he did not even remember that the suggestion had been made; which was an oversight on his part, for it was at that time that Simon Templar did indeed develop a serious interest in the unpleasant Mr. Oppenheim.

This was because Janice Dixon stumbled against him late one night as he was walking home along Forty-eighth Street in the dark and practically deserted block between Sixth and Seventh avenues. He had to catch her to save her from falling.

"I'm sorry," she muttered.

He murmured some absent-minded commonplace and straightened her up, but her weight was still heavy on his hand. When he let her go she swayed towards him and clung onto his arm.

"I'm sorry," she repeated stupidly.

His first thought was that she was drunk, but her breath was innocent of the smell of liquor. Then he thought the accident might be only the excuse for a more mercenary kind of introduction, but he saw that her face was not made up as he would have expected it to be in that case. It was a pretty face, but so pale that it looked ghostly in the semidarkness between the far-spaced street lamps; and he saw that she had dark circles under her eyes and that her mouth was without lipstick.

"Is anything the matter?" he asked.

"No — it's nothing. I'll be all right in a minute. I just want to rest."

"Let's go inside somewhere and sit down."

There was a drugstore on the corner and he look her into it. It seemed to be a great effort for her to walk and another explanation of her unsteadiness flashed into his mind. He sat her down at the counter and ordered two cups of coffee.

"Would you like something to eat with it?"

Her eyes lighted up and she bit her lip.

"Yes. I would. But — I haven't any money."

"I shouldn't worry about that. We can always hold up a bank." The Saint watched her while she devoured a sandwich, a double order of bacon and eggs and a slice of pie. She ate intently, quickly, without speaking. Without seeming to stare at her, his keen eyes took in the shadows under her che'ekbones, the neat patch on one elbow of the cheap dark coat, the cracks in the leather of shoes which had long since lost their shape.

"I wish I had your appetite," he said gently, when at last she had finished.

She smiled for the first time, rather faintly.

"I haven't had anything to eat for two days," she said. "And I haven't had as much to eat as this all at once for a long time."

Simon ordered more coffee and offered her a cigarette. He put his heels up on the top rung of his stool and leaned his elbows on his knees. She told him her name, but for the moment he didn't answer with his own.

"Out of a job?" he asked quietly.

She shook her head.

"Not yet."

"You aren't on a diet by any chance, are you?"

"Yes. A nice rich diet of doughnuts and coffee, mostly." She smiled rather wearily at his puzzlement. "I work for Oppenheim."

"Doesn't he pay you?"

"Sure. But maybe you haven't heard of him. I'm a dressmaker. I work with fifty other girls in a loft down near the East River, making handmade underwear. We work ten hours a day, six days a week, sewing. If you're clever and fast you can make two pieces in a day. They pay you thirty cents apiece. You can buy them on Fifth Avenue for four or five dollars, but that doesn't do us any good. I made three dollars last week, but I had to pay the rent for my room."

It was Simon Templar's first introduction to the economics of the sweatshop; and hardened as he was to the ways of chiselers and profiteers, the cold facts as she stated them made him feel slightly sick to his stomach. He realized that he had been too long in ignorance of the existence of such people as Mr. Oppenheim.

"Do you mean to say he gets people to work for him on those terms?" he said incredulously. "And how is it possible to live on three dollars a week?"

"Oh, there are always girls who'll do it if they can't get anything else. I used to get forty dollars a week doing the same work on Madison Avenue, but I was sick for a couple of weeks and they used it as an excuse to let me go. I didn't have any job at all for three months, and three dollars a week is better than nothing. You learn how to live on it. After a while you get used to being hungry; but when you have to buy shoes or pay a dentist's bill, and the rent piles up for a couple of weeks, it doesn't do you any good."

"I seem to have heard of your Mr. Oppenheim," said the Saint thoughtfully. "Didn't he just pay a million and a half dollars for a collection of emeralds?"

Her lips flickered cynically.

"That's the guy. I've seen them, too — I've been working on his daughter's trousseau because I've got more experience of better-class work than the other girls, and I've been going to the house to fit it. It's just one of those things that make you feel like turning communist sometimes."

"You've been in the house, have you?" he said even more thoughtfully. "And you've seen these emeralds?" He stopped himself and drew smoke from his cigarette to trickle it thoughtfully back across the counter. When he turned to her again, his dark reckless face held only the same expression of friendly interest that it had held before. "Where are you going to sleep tonight?"

She shrugged.

"I don't know. You see, I owe three weeks' rent now, and they won't let me in until I pay it. I guess I'll take a stroll up to the park."

"It's healthy enough, but a bit drafty." He smiled at her suddenly with disarming frankness. "Look here, what would you say if I suggested that we wander around to a little place close by here where I can get you a room? It's quiet and clean, and I don't live there. But I'd like to do something about you. Stay there tonight and meet me for dinner tomorrow, and let's talk it over."

She met him the following evening, and he had to do very little more than keep his ears open to learn everything that he wanted to know.

"They're in Oppenheim's study — on the second floor. His daughter's room is next door to it, and the walls aren't very thick. He was showing them to her yesterday afternoon when I was there. He has a big safe in the study, but he doesn't keep the emeralds in it. I heard him boasting about how clever he was. He said, 'Anybody who came in looking for the emeralds would naturally think they'd be in the safe, and they'd get to work on it at once. It 'd take them a long time to open it, which would give us plenty of chances to catch them; but anyhow they'd be disappointed. They'd never believe that I had a million and a half dollars' worth of emeralds just tucked away behind a row of books on a shelf. Even the man from the detective agency doesn't know it — he thinks the safe is what he's got to look after.' "

"So they have a private detective on the job, do they?" said the Saint.

"Yes. A man from Ingerbeck's goes in at seven o'clock every evening and stays till the servants are up in the morning. The butler's a pretty tough-looking guy himself, so I suppose Oppenheim thinks the house is safe enough in his hands in the daytime… Why do you want to know all this?"

"I'm interested."

She looked at him with an unexpected clearness of understanding.

"Is that what you meant when you said you'd like to do something about me? Did you think you could do it if you got hold of those emeralds?"

The Saint lighted a cigarette with a steady and unhurried hand, and then his blue eyes came back to her face for a moment before he answered with a very quiet and calculating directness.

"That was more or less my idea," he said calmly.

She was neither shocked nor frightened. She studied him with as sober and matter-of-fact attention as if they were discussing where she might find another job, but a restrained intenseness with which he thought he could sympathize came into her voice. She said: "I couldn't call anybody a criminal who did that. He really deserves to lose them. I believe I'd be capable of robbing him myself if I knew how to go about it. Have you ever done anything like that before?"

"I have had a certain amount of experience," Simon admitted mildly.

"Who are you?"

"If you were reading newspapers a few years back you may have read about me. I'm called the Saint."

"You? You're kidding." She stared at him, and the amused disbelief in her face changed slowly into a weakening incredulity. "But you might be. I saw a photograph once… Oh, if you only were! I'd help you to do it — I wouldn't care what it cost."

"You can help me by telling me everything you can remember about Oppenheim's household and how it works."

She had been there several times; and there were many useful things she remembered, which his skillful questioning helped to bring out. They went down into the back of his mind and stayed there while he talked about other things. The supremely simple and obvious solution came to him a full two hours later, when they were dancing on a small packed floor above Broadway.

He took her back to their table as the main batteries of lights went on for the floor show, lighted a cigarette and announced serenely:

"It's easy. I know just how Comrade Oppenheim is going to lose his emeralds."

"How?"

"They have a man in from Ingerbeck's at night, don't they? And he has the run of the place while everybody else is asleep. They give him breakfast in the morning when the servants get up, and then he takes a cigar and goes home. Well, the same thing can happen just once more. The guy from Ingerbeck's comes in, stays the night and goes home. Not the usual guy, because he's sick or been run over by a truck or something. Some other guy. And when this other guy goes home, he can pull emeralds out of every pocket."

Her mouth opened a little.

"You mean you'd do that?"

"Sure. Apart from the fact that I don't like your Mr. Oppenheim, it seems to me that with a million and a half dollars' worth of emeralds one could do a whole lot of amusing things which Oppenheim would never dream of. To a bloke with my imagination—"

"But when would you do it?"

He looked at his watch mechanically.

"Eventually — why not now? Or at least this evening." He was almost mad enough to consider it, but he restrained himself. "But I'm afraid it might be asking for trouble. It '11 probably take me a day or two to find out a few more things about this dick from Ingerbeck's, and then I'll have to get organized to keep him out of the way on the night I want to go in. I should think you could call it a date for Friday."

She nodded with a queer childish gravity.

"I believe you'd do it. You sound very sure of everything. But what would you do with the emeralds after you got them?"

"I expect we could trade them in for a couple of hamburgers — maybe more."

"You couldn't sell them."

"There are ways and means."

"You couldn't sell stones like that. I'm sure you couldn't. Everything in a famous collection like that would be much too well known. If you took them into a dealer he'd recognize them at once, and then you'd be arrested."

The Saint smiled. It has never been concealed from the lynx-eyed student of these chronicles that Simon Templar had his own very human weaknesses; and one of these was very much akin to the one which had contributed so generously to the unpopularity of Lieutenant Corrio. If the Saint made himself considerably less ridiculous with it, it was because he was a very different type of man. But the Saint had his own deeply planted vanities; and one of these was a deplorable weakness of resistance to the temptation to display his unique knowledge of the devious ways of crime, like a peddler spreading his wares in the market place before a suitably impressed and admiring audience.

"Three blocks north of here, on Fifty-second Street," he said, "there's a little bar where you can find the biggest fence in the United States any evening between five and eight o'clock. He'll take anything you like to offer him across the table, and pay top prices for it. You could sell him the English crown jewels if you had them. If I borrow Oppenheim's emeralds on Friday night I'll be rid of them by dinnertime Saturday, and then we'll meet for a celebration and see where you'd like to go for a vacation."

He was in high spirits when he took her home much later to the lodging house where he had found her a room the night before. There was one virtue in the indulgence of his favourite vice: talking over the details of a coup which he was freshly planning in his mind helped him to crystallize and elaborate his own ideas, gave him a charge of confidence and optimistic energy from which the final strokes of action sprung as swiftly and accurately as bullets out of a gun. When he said good night to her he felt as serene and exhilarated in spirit as if the Vanderwoude emeralds were already his own. He was in such good spirits that he had walked a block from the lodging house before he remembered that he had left her without trying to induce her to take some money for her immediate needs, and without making any arrangement to meet her again.

He turned and walked back. Coincidence, an accident of time involving only a matter of seconds, had made incredible differences to his life before: this, he realized later, was only another of those occasions when an overworked guardian angel seemed to play with the clock to save him from disaster.

The dimly lighted desert of the hall was surrounded by dense oases of potted palms, and one of these obstructions was in a direct line from the front door, so that anyone who entered quietly might easily remain unnoticed until he had circumnavigated this clump of shrubbery. The Saint, who from the ingrained habit of years of dangerous living moved silently without conscious effort, was just preparing to step around this divinely inspired decoration when he heard someone speaking in the hall and caught the sound of a name which stopped him dead in his tracks. The name was Corrio. Simon stood securely hidden behind the fronds of imported vegetation and listened for as long as he dared to some of the most interesting lines of dialogue which he had ever overheard. When he had heard enough, he slipped out again as quietly as he had come in and went home without disturbing Janice Dixon. He would get in touch with her the next day; for the moment he had something much more urgent to occupy his mind.

It Is possible that even Lieutenant Corrio's smugness might have been shaken if he had known about this episode of unpremeditated eavesdropping, but this unpleasant knowledge was hidden from him. His elastic self-esteem had taken no time at all to recover from the effects of Fernack's reprimand; and when Fernack happened to meet him on a certain Friday afternoon he looked as offensively sleek and self-satisfied as he had, always been. It was beyond Fernack's limits of self-denial to let the occasion go by without making the/use of it to which he felt he was entitled.

"I believe Oppenheim has still got his emeralds," he remarked with a certain feline joviality.

Lieutenant Corrio's glossy surface was unscratched.

"Don't be surprised if he doesn't keep them much longer," he said. "And don't blame me if the Saint gets away with it. I gave you the tip once and you wouldn't listen."

"Yeah, you gave me the tip," Fernack agreed benevolently. "When are you goin' out to Hollywood to play Sherlock Holmes?"

"Maybe it won't be so long now," Corrio said darkly. "Paragon Pictures are pretty interested in me — apparently one of their executives happened to see me playing the lead in our last show at the Merrick Playhouse, and they want me to take a screen test."

Fernack grinned evilly.

"You're too late," he said. "They've already made a picture of Little Women."

He had reason to regret some of his jibes the next morning, when news came in that every single one of Mr. Oppenheim's emeralds had been removed from their hiding place and taken out of the house, quietly and without any fuss, in the pockets of a detective* of whom the Ingerbeck Agency had never heard. They had, they said, been instructed by telephone that afternoon to discontinue the service, and the required written confirmation had arrived a few hours later, written on Mr. Oppenheim's own flowery letterhead and signed with what they firmly believed to be his signature; and nobody had been more surprised and indignant than they were when Mr. Oppenheim, on the verge of an apoplectic fit, had rung up Mr. Ingerbeck himself and demanded to know how many more crooks they had on their payroll and what the blank blank they proposed to do about it. The impostor had arrived at the house at the usual hour in the evening, explained that the regular man had been taken ill and presented the necessary papers to accredit himself; and he had been left all night in the study, and let out at breakfast time according to the usual custom. When he went out he was worth a million and a half dollars as he stood up. He was, according to the butler's rather hazy description, a tallish man with horn-rimmed glasses and a thick crop of red hair.

"That red hair and glasses is all baloney," said Corrio, who was in Fernack's office when the news came in. "Just an ordinary wig and a pair of frames from any optician's. It was the Saint all right — you can see his style right through it. What did I tell you?"

"What th' hell did think you can tell me?" Fernack roared back at him. Then he subdued himself. "Anyway, you're crazy. The Saint's out of business."

Corrio shrugged.

"Would you like me to take the case, sir?"

"What, you?" Fernack paused to take careful aim at the cuspidor. "I'll take the case myself." He glowered at Corrio thoughtfully for a moment. "Well, if you know so much about it, you can come along with me. And we'll see how smart you are."

Ten minutes later they were in a taxi on their way to Oppenheim's house.

It was a silent journey, for Fernack was too full of a vague sort of wrath to speak, and Corrio seemed quite content to sit in a corner and finger his silky moustache with an infuriatingly tranquil air of being quite well satisfied with the forthcoming opportunity of demonstrating his own brilliance.

In the house they found a scene of magnificent confusion. There was the butler, who seemed to be getting blamed for having admitted the thief; there was a representative of Ingerbeck's, whose temper appeared to be fraying rapidly under the flood of wild accusations which Oppenheim was flinging at him; there was a very suave and imperturbable official of the insurance company which had covered the jewels; and there was Mr. Oppenheim himself, a short fat yellow-faced man, dancing about like an agitated marionette, shaking his fists in an ecstasy of rage, screaming at the top of his voice, and accusing everybody in sight of crimes and perversions which would have been worth at least five hundred years in Sing Sing if they could have been proved. Fernack and Corrio had to listen while he unburdened his soul again from the beginning.

"And now vat you think?" he wound up. "These dirty crooks, this insurance company vat takes all my money, they say they don't pay anything. They say they repudiate the policy. Just because I tried to keep the emeralds were they couldn't be found, instead of leaving them in a safe vat anyone can open."

"The thing is," explained the official of the insurance company, with his own professional brand of unruffled unctuousness, "that Mr. Oppenheim has failed to observe the conditions of the policy. It was issued on the express understanding that if the emeralds were to be kept in the house, they were to be kept in this safe and guarded by a detective from some recognized agency. Neither of these stipulations have been complied with, and in the circumstances—"

"It's a dirty svindle!" shrieked Oppenheim. "Vat do I care about your insurance company? I will cancel all my policies. I buy up your insurance company and throw you out in the street to starve. I offer my own reward for the emeralds. I will pay half a mil — I mean a hundred thousand dollars to the man who brings back my jewels!"

"Have you put that in writing yet?" asked Lieutenant Corrio quickly.