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.
"No. But I do so at voice. Bah! I will show these dirty double-crossing crooks…"
He whipped out his fountain pen and scurried over to the desk.
"Here, wait a minute," said Fernack, but Oppenheim paid no attention to him. Fernack turned to Corrio. "I suppose you've gotta be sure of the reward before you start showin' us how clever you are," he said nastily.
"No sir. But we have to consider the theory tha't the robbery might have been committed with that in mind. Emeralds like those would be difficult to dispose of profitably — I can only think of one fence in the East who'd handle a package of stuff like that."
"Then why don't you pull him in?" snapped Fernack' unanswerably.
"Because I've never had enough evidence. But I'll take up that angle this afternoon."
He took no further part in the routine examinations and questionings which Fernack conducted with dogged efficiency, but on the way back to Centre Street he pressed his theory again with unusual humility.
"After all, sir," he said, "we've all known for a long time that there's one big fence in the East who'll handle anything that's brought him, however big it is. I've been working on him quietly for a long time, and I'm pretty certain who it is, though I've never been able to get anything on him. I even know where he can be found and where he does most of his buying, and I don't mind telling you that it's helped me a lot in tracing the loot from other jobs. Even if this isn't one of the Saint's jobs, whoever did it, there are only four things they can do with the emeralds. They can hold them for the reward, they can cut them up and sell them as small stuff, they can try to smuggle them out of the country or they can just get rid of them in one shot to this guy I've got in mind. Of course they may be planning any of the first three things, but they may just as well be planning the fourth, and we aren't justified in overlooking it. And if we're going to do anything about it, we've got to do it pretty quickly. I know you don't think much of me, sir," said Corrio with unwonted candour, "but you must admit that I was right a few days ago when you wouldn't listen to me, and now I think it 'd be only fair for you to give me another chance."
Almost against his will Fernack forced himself to be just.
"All right," he said grudgingly. "Where do we find this guy?"
"If you can be free about a quarter to five this afternoon," said Corrio, "I'd like you to come along with me."
Simon Templar walked west along Fifty-second Street. He felt at peace with the world. At such times as this he was capable of glowing with a vast and luxurious contentment, the same deep and satisfying tranquillity that might follow a perfect meal eaten in hunger or the drinking of a cool drink at the end of a hot day. As usually happened with him, this mood had made its mark on his clothes. He had dressed himself with some care for the occasion in one of the most elegant suits and brightly colored shirts from his extensive wardrobe, and he was a very beautiful and resplendent sight as he sauntered along the sidewalk with the brim of his hat tilted piratically over his eyes, looking like some swashbuckling medieval brigand who had been miraculously transported into the twentieth century and put into modern dress without losing the swagger of a less inhibited age. In one hand he carried a brown paper parcel.
Fernack's huge fist closed on his arm near the corner of Seventh Avenue, and the Saint looked around and recognized him with a delighted and completely innocent smile.
"Why, hullo there," he murmured. "The very man I've been looking for." He discovered Corrio coming up out of the background and smiled again. "Hi, Gladys," he said politely.
Corrio seized his other arm and worked him swiftly and scientifically into a doorway. Corrio kept one hand in his side pocket, and whatever he had in his pocket prodded against the Saint's stomach and kept him pinned in a corner. There was a gleam of excitement in his dark eyes. "I guess my hunch was right again," he said to Fernack.
Fernack kept his grip of the Saint's arm. His frosted grey eyes glared at the Saint angrily, but not with the sort of anger that most people would have expected.
"You damn fool," he said rather damn-foolishly. "What did you have to do it for? I told you when you came over that you couldn't get away with that stuff any more."
"What stuff?" asked the Saint innocently.
Corrio had grabbed the parcel out of his hand and he was tearing it open with impatient haste.
"I guess this is what we're looking for," he said.
The broken string and torn brown paper fluttered to the ground as Corrio ripped them off. When the outer wrappings were gone he was left with a cardboard box. Inside the box there was a layer of crumpled tissue paper. Corrio jerked it out and remained staring frozenly at what was finally exposed. This was a fully dressed and very lifelike doll with features that were definitely familiar. Tied around its neck on a piece of ribbon was a ticket on which was printed: "Film Star Series, No. 12: CLARK GABLE. 69¢.”
An expression of delirious and incredulous relief began to creep over the harsh angles of Fernack's face — much the same expression as might have come into the face of a man who, standing close by the crater of a rumbling volcano, had seen it suddenly explode only to throw off a shower of fairy lights and coloured balloons. The corners of his mouth began to twitch, and a deep vibration like the tremor of an approaching earthquake began to quiver over his chest; then suddenly his mouth opened to let out a shout of gargantuan laughter like the bellow of a joyful bull.
Corrio's face was black with fury. He tore out the rest of the packing paper and squeezed out every scrap of it between his fingers, snatched the doll out of the box and twisted and shook it to see if anything could have been concealed inside it. Then he flung that down also among the mounting fragments of litter on the ground. He thrust his face forward until it was within six inches of the Saint's.
"Where are they?" he snarled savagely.
"Where are who?" asked the Saint densely.
"You know damn well what I'm talking about," Corrio said through his teeth. "What have you done with the stuff you stole from Oppcnheim's last night? Where are the Vanderwoude emeralds?"
"Oh, them," said the Saint mildly. "That's a funny question for you to ask." He leaned lazily on the wall against which Corrio had forced him, took out his cigarette case and looked at Fernack.
"As a matter of fact," he said calmly, "that's what I wanted to see you about. If you're particularly interested I think I could show you where they went to."
The laugh died away on Fernack's lips, to be replaced by the startled and hurt look of a dog that has been given an unexpected bone and then kicked almost as soon as it has picked it up.
"So you do know something about that job," he said slowly.
"I know plenty," said the Saint. "Let's take a cab."
He straightened up off the wall. For a moment Corrio looked as if he would pin him back there, but Fernack's intent interest countermanded the movement without speaking or even looking at him. Fernack was puzzled and disturbed, but somehow the Saint's quiet voice and unsmiling eyes told him that there was something there to be taken seriously. He stepped back, and Simon walked past him unhindered and opened the door of a taxi standing by the curb.
"Where are we going to?" Fernack asked, as they turned south down Fifth Avenue.
The Saint grinned gently and settled back in "his corner with his cigarette. He ignored the question.
"Once upon a time," he said presently, "there was a smart detective. He was very smart because after some years of ordinary detecting he had discovered that the main difficulty about the whole business was that you often have to find out who committed a crime, and since criminals don't usually leave their names and addresses behind them this is liable to mean a lot of hard work and a good many disappointments. Besides which, the pay of a police lieutenant isn't nearly so big as that amount of brainwork seems to deserve. So this guy, being a smart fellow, thought of a much simpler method, which was more or less to persuade the criminals to tell him about it themselves. Of course, he couldn't arrest them even then, because if he did that they might begin to suspect that he had some ulterior motive; but there were plenty of other ways of making a deal out of it. For instance, suppose a crook got away with a tidy cargo of loot and didn't want to put it away in the refrigerator for icicles to grow on; he could bring his problem to our smart detective, and our smart detective could think it over and say, 'Well, Elmer, that's pretty easy. All you do is just go and hide this loot in an ash can on Second Avenue or hang it on a tree in Central Park, or something like that, and I'll do a very smart piece of detecting and find it. Then I'll collect the reward and we'll go shares in it.' Usually this was pretty good business for the crook, the regular fences being as miserly as they arc, and the detective didn't starve on it either. Of course the other detectives in the bureau weren't so pleased about it, being jealous of seeing this same guy collecting such a lot of credits and fat insurance company checks; but somehow it never seemed to occur to them to wonder how he did it."
He finished speaking as the taxi drew up at an apartment hotel near the corner of East Twelfth Street.
Fernack was sitting forward, with his jaw square and hard and his eyes fixed brightly on the Saint's face.
"Go on," he said gruffly.
Simon shook his head and indicated the door.
"We'll change the scene again."
He got out and paid off the driver and the other two followed him into the hotel. Corrio's face seemed to have gone paler under its olive tan.
Simon paused in the lobby and glanced at him.
"Will you ask for the key, or shall I? It might be better if you asked for it," he said softly, "because the clerk will recognize you. Even if he doesn't know you by your right name."
"I don't quite know what you're talking about," Corrio said coldly, "but if you think you can wriggle out of this with any of your wild stories, you're wasting your time." He turned to Fernack. "I have got an apartment here, sir — I just use it sometimes when I'm kept in town late and I can't get home. It isn't in my own name, because — well, sir, you understand — I don't always want everybody to know who I am. This man has got to know about it somehow, and he's just using it to try and put up some crazy story to save his own skin."
"All the same," said Fernack with surprising gentleness, "I'd like to go up. I want to hear some more of this crazy story."
Corrio turned on his heel and went to the desk. The apartment was on the third floor — an ordinary two-room suite with the usual revolting furniture to be found in such places. Fernack glanced briefly over the living room into which they entered and looked at the Saint again.
"Go on," he said. "I'm listening."
The Saint sat down on the edge of the table and blew smoke rings.
"It would probably have gone on a lot longer," he said, "if this smart detective hadn't thought one day what a supremely brilliant idea it would be to combine business with profit, and have the honour of convicting a most notorious and elusive bandit known as the Saint — not forgetting, of course, to collect the usual cash reward in the process. So he used a very good-looking young damsel — you ought to meet her sometime, Fernack, she really is a peach — having some idea that the Saint would never run away very fast from a pretty face. In which he was damn right… She had a very well-planned hard-luck story, too, and the whole act was most professionally staged. It had all the ingredients that a good psychologist would bet on to make the Saint feel that stealing Oppenheim's emeralds was the one thing he had left glaringly undone in an otherwise complete life. Even the spadework of the job had already been put in, so that she could practically tell the Saint how to pinch the jewels. So that our smart detective must have thought he was sitting pretty, with a sucker all primed to do the dirty work for him and take the rap if anything went wrong — besides being still there to take the rap when the smart detective made his arrest and earned the reward if everything went right."
Simon smiled dreamily at a particularly repulsive print on the wall for a moment.
"Unfortunately, I happened to drop in on this girl one time when she wasn't expecting me, and I heard her phoning a guy named Corrio to tell him I was well and truly hooked," he said. "On account of having read in the Daily Mail some talk by a guy of the same name about what he was going to do to me, I was naturally interested."
Corrio started forward.
"Look here, you—"
"Wait a minute." Fernack held him back with an iron arm. "I want the rest of it. Did you do the job, Saint?"
Simon shook his head sadly. It was at that point that his narrative departed, for the very first time, from the channels of pure veracity in which it had begun its course — but Fernack was not to know this.
"Would I be such a sap?" he. asked reproachfully. "I knew I could probably get away with the actual robbery because Corrio would want me to; but as soon as it was over, knowing in advance who'd done it, he'd be chasing round to catch me and recover the emeralds. So I told the girl I'd thought it all over and decided I was too busy." The Saint sighed as if he was still regretting a painful sacrifice. "The rest is pure theory; but this girl gave me a checkroom ticket on Grand Central this morning and asked me if I'd collect a package on it this afternoon and take it along to an address on Fifty-second Street. I didn't do it because I had an idea what would happen; but my guess would be that if somebody went along and claimed the parcel they'd find emeralds in it. Not all the emeralds, probably, because that 'd be too risky if I got curious and opened it; but some of them. The rest are probably here — I've been looking around since we've been here, and I think there's some new and rather amateurish stitching in the upholstery of that chair. I could do something with that reward myself."
Corrio barred his way with a gun as he got off the table.
"You stay where you are," he grated. "If you're trying to get away with some smart frame-up—"
Simon looked down at the gun.
"You talk altogether too much," he said evenly. "And I don't think you're going to be safe with that toy in a minute."
He hit Corrio very suddenly under the chin, grabbing the gun with his other hand as he did so. The gun went off crashingly as Corrio reeled backwards, but after that it remained in the Saint's hand. Corrio stood trembling against the wall, and Simon looked at Fernack again and rubbed his knuckles thoughtfully.
"Just to make sure," he said, "I fixed a dictagraph under the table yesterday. Let's see if it has anything to say."
Fernack watched him soberly as he prepared to play back the record. In Fernack's mind was the memory of a number of things which he had heard Corrio say which fitted into the picture which the Saint offered him much too vividly to be easily denied.
Then the dictagraph record began to play. And Fernack felt a faint shiver run up his spine at the uncannily accurate reproduction of Corrio's voice.
"Smart work, Leo… I'll say these must be worth every penny of the price on them."
The other voice was unfamiliar.
"Hell, it was a cinch. The layout was just like you said. But how you goin' to fix it on the other guy?" "That's easy. The broad gets him to fetch a parcel from Grand Central and take it where I tell her to tell him. When he gets there, I'm waiting for him." "You're not goin' to risk givin' him all that stuff" "Oh, don't be so thick. There 'll only be just enough in the parcel to frame him. Once he's caught, it'll be easy enough to plant the rest somewhere and find it."
Corrio's eyes were wide and staring.
"It's a plant!" he screamed hysterically. "That's a record of the scene I played in the film test I made yesterday."
Simon smiled politely, cutting open the upholstery of the armchair and fishing about for a leather pouch containing about fourteen hundred thousand dollars' worth of emeralds which should certainly be there unless somebody else had found them since he chose that ideal hiding place for his loot.
"I only hope you'll be able to prove it, Gladys," he murmured, and watched Fernack grasp Corrio's arm with purposeful efficiency.