Brighter Buccaneer (7 page)

Chief Inspector Teal reached London with a theory of his own. He expounded it to the Assistant Commissioner without enthusiasm.

“I’m afraid there’s no doubt that Larry’s telling the truth,” he said. “He’s no idea what happened to the swag, but I have. Nobody double-crossed him, because he always works alone, and he hasn’t any enemies that I know of. There’s just one man who might have done it-you know who I mean.”

The Assistant Commissioner sniffed. He had an irritating and eloquent sniff.

“It would be very tiresome if anything happened to the Saint,” he remarked pointedly. “The C.I.D. would have a job to find another stock excuse that would sound quite as convincing.”

When Mr. Teal had cooled off in his own room, he had to admit that there was an element of truth in the Assistant Commissioner’s acidulated comment. It did not mellow his tolerance of the most unpopular Police Chief of his day; he had had similar thoughts himself, without feeling as if he had discovered the elixir of life.

The trouble was that the Saint refused to conform to any of the traditions which make the capture of the average criminal a mere matter of routine. There was nothing stereotyped about his methods which made it easy to include him in the list of suspects for any particular felony. He was little more than a name in criminal circles; he had no jealous associates to give him away, he confided his plans to no one, he never boasted of his success in anyone’s hearing-he did nothing which gave the police a chance to catch him red-handed. His name and address were known to every constable in the force; but for all any of them could prove in a court of law he was an unassailably respectable citizen who had long since left a rather doubtful past behind him, an amiable young man about town blessed with plentiful private means, who had the misfortune to be seen in geographically close proximity to various lawless events for which the police could find no suitable scapegoat. And no one protested their ignorance of everything to do with him more vigorously that his alleged or prospective victims. It made things very difficult for Mr. Teal, who was a clever detective but a third-rate magician.

The taciturnity of Max Kemmler was a more recent thorn in Mr. Teal’s side.

Max Kemmler was a Dane by birth and an American by naturalization. The phase of his career in which the United States Federal Authorities were interested started in St. Louis, when he drifted into Egan’s Rats and carved the first notches in his gun. Prudently, he left St. Louis during an election clean-up and reappeared in Philadelphia as a strong-arm man in a newsstand racket. That lasted him six months, and he left in a hurry; the tabs caught up with him in New York, where he went over big for a couple of years as typewriter expert in an East Side liquor mob. He shot up the wrong speakie one night after a celebration and was lucky to be able to make a passage to Cherbourg on a French liner that sailed at dawn the next morning. How he got past the passport barriers into England was something of a mystery. He was down on the deportation list, but Scotland Yard was holding up in the hope of an extradition warrant.

He was a thick-shouldered man of middle height, with a taste for camel-hair coats and very light grey Homburgs. Those who had been able to keep on the right side of him in the States called him a good guy-certainly he could put forth a rugged geniality, when it suited him, which had its appeal for lesser lights who reckoned it a privilege to be slapped on the back by the notorious Max Kemmler. His cigars were uniformly expensive, and the large diamond set in the corner of his black onyx signet ring conveyed an impression of great substance-he had been paying for it at the rate of $32.85 a month until the laborious working-out of the instalment system bored him, and he changed his address.

Max knew from the time he landed that his days in England were numbered, but it was not in his nature to pass up any profitable enterprise on that account. In a very short space of time he had set up a club in a quiet street off the Edgware Road, of which the police had yet to learn. The club boasted a boule and a blackjack table, as well as a chemin-de-fer game which was always going: everything was as straight as a die, for Max Kemmler knew that gambling does not need to be crooked to show a long dividend for the bank; The chemin-de-fer players paid ten per cent of their winnings to the management, and even the smallest chips were priced at half a sovereign. Max did the steering himself and paid his croupiers generously, but he was the only one who made enough out of it to live at the Savoy and put three figures of real money away in his wallet every week in addition.

He had dinner one night with his chief croupier before going to open the club, and it happened that there was a zealous young detective-sergeant from Vine Street at the next table. It was a small and inexpensive chophouse in Soho, and the detective was not there on business; neither did Max Kemmler know him, for the gambling club was in a different division.

Half-way through the meal Max remembered an enigmatic telephone call that had been put through to his room while he was breakfasting, and asked the croupier about it.

“You ever heard of a guy called Saint?” he queried, and the croupier’s jaw fell open.

“Good God!-you haven’t heard from him?”

Max Kemmler was surprised, to say the least of it.

“Yeah-he phoned me,” he replied guardedly. “What’s the matter with you? Is he the wheels in this city?”

The croupier acknowledged, in his own idiom, that Simon Templar was the wheels. He was a tall, hard-faced man, with iron-grey hair, bushy grey eyebrows and moustache, and the curried complexion of a rather decayed retired major; and he knew much more about the Saint that a law-abiding member of the community should have known. He gave Max Kemmler all the information he wanted, but Max was not greatly impressed.

“What you mean is he’s a kind of hijacker, is he? Hard-boiled, huh? I didn’t know you’d got any racket like that over here. And he figures I ought to pay him for ‘protection.’ That’s funny!” Max Kemmler was grimly amused. “Well, I’d like to see him try it.”

“He’s tried a lot of things like that and got away with them, Mr. Kemmler,” said the croupier awkwardly.

Max turned down one corner of his mouth.

“Yeah? So have I. I guess I’m pretty tough myself, what I mean.”

He had a reminder of the conversation the next morning, when a plump and sleepy-looking man called and introduced himself as Chief Inspector Teal.

“I hear you’ve had a warning from the Saint, Kemmler-one of our men heard you talking about it last night.”

Max had done some thinking overnight. He was not expecting to -be interviewed by Mr. Teal, but he had his own ideas on the subject that the detective raised.

“What of it?”

“We want to get the Saint, Kemmler. You might be able to help us. Why not tell me some more about it?”

Max Kemmler grinned.

“Sure. Then you know just why the Saint’s interested in me, and I can take the rap with him. That dick at the next table ought to have listened some more-then he could have told you I was warned about that one. No, thanks, Teal! The Saint and me are just buddies together, and he called me to ask me to a party. I’m not saying he mightn’t get out of line sometime, but I can look after that. He might kind of meet with an accident.”

It was not the first time that Teal had been met with a similar lack of enthusiasm, and he knew the meaning of the word “no” when it was pushed up to him in a certain way. He departed heavily; and Simon Templar, who was sipping a Dry Sack within view of the vestibule, watched him go.

“You might think Claud Eustace really wanted to arrest me,” he remarked, as the detective’s broad back passed through the doors.

His companion, a young man with the air of a gentlemanly prize-fighter, smiled sympathetically. His position was privileged, for it was not many weeks since the Saint’s cheerful disregard for the ordinances of the law had lifted him out of a singularly embarrassing situation with a slickness that savoured of sorcery. After all, when you have been youthfully and foolishly guilty of embezzling a large sum of money from your employers in order to try and recoup the losses of an equally youthful and foolish speculation, and a cheque for the missing amount is slipped into your hands by a perfect stranger, you are naturally inclined to see that stranger’s indiscretions in an unusual light.

“I wish I had your life,” said the young man-his name was Peter Quentin, and he was still very young.

“Brother,” said the Saint good-humouredly, “if you had my life you’d have to have my death, which will probably be a sticky one without wreaths. Max Kemmler is a tough egg all right, and you never know.”

Peter Quentin stretched out his legs with a wry grimace.

“I don’t know that it isn’t worth it. Here am I, an A1 proposition to any insurance company, simply wasting everything I’ve got with no prospect of ever doing anything else. You saved me from getting pushed in the clink, but of course there was no hope of my keeping any job. They were very nice and friendly when I confessed and paid in your cheque, but they gave me the air all the same. You can’t help seeing their point of view. Once I’d done a thing like that I was a risk to the company, and next time they mightn’t have been so lucky. The result is that I’m one of the great unemployed, and no dole either. If I ever manage to get another job, I shall have to consider myself well off if I’m allowed to sit at an office desk for two hundred and seventy days out of the year, while I get fat and pasty and dream about the pension that’ll be no use to me when I’m sixty.”

“Instead of which you want to go on a bread-and-water diet for a ten-years’ sentence,” said the Saint. “I’m a bad example to you, Peter. You ought to meet a girl who’ll put all that out of your head.”

He really meant what he said. If he refused even to consider his own advice, it was because the perilous charms of the life that he had long ago chosen for his own had woven a spell about him that nothing could break. They were his meat and drink, the wine that made unromantic days worth living, his salute to buccaneers who had had better worlds to conquer. He knew no other life.

Max Kemmler was less poetic about it. He was in the game for what he could get, and he wanted to get it quickly. Teal’s visit to him that morning had brought home to him another danger that that accidentally eavesdropping plain-clothes man in the restaurant had thrown across his path. Whatever else the police knew or did not know, they now had the soundest possible reason to believe that Max Kemmler’s holiday in England had turned towards profitable business; for nothing else could provide a satisfactory reason for the Saint’s interest. His croupier had warned him of that, and Max was taking the warning to heart. The pickings had been good while they lasted, but the time had come for him to be moving.

There was big play at the club that night. Max Kemmler inspired it, putting forth all the bonhomie that he could call upon to encourage his patrons to lose their shirts and like it. He ordered in half a dozen cases of Bollinger, and invited the guests to help themselves. He had never worked so hard in his life before, but he saw the results of it when the club closed down at four in the morning and the weary staff counted over the takings. The boule table had had a skinner, and money had changed hands so fast in the chemin-de-fer parties that the management’s ten per cent commission had broken all previous records. Max Kemmler found himself with a comfortingly large wad of crumpled notes to put away. He slapped his croupiers boisterously on the back and opened the last bottle of champagne for them.

“Same time again tomorrow, boys,” he said when he took his leave. “If there’s any more jack to come out of this racket, we’ll have it.”

As a matter of fact, he had no intention of reappearing on the morrow, or on any subsequent day. The croupiers were due to collect their week’s salary the following evening, but that consideration did not influence him. His holiday venture had been even more remunerative than he had hoped, and he was going while the going was good.

Back at the Savoy he added the wad of notes from his pocket to an even larger wad which came from a sealed envelope which he kept in the hotel safe, and slept with his booty under his pillow.

During his stay in London he had made the acquaintance of a passport specialist. His passage was booked back to Montreal on the Empress of Britain, which sailed the next afternoon, and a brand-new Canadian passport established his identity as Max Harford, grain-dealer, of Calgary.

He was finishing a sketchy breakfast in his dressing-gown the next morning, when his chief croupier called. Kemmler had a mind to send back a message that he was out, but thought better of it. The croupier would never have come to his hotel unless there was something urgent to tell him, and Max recalled what he had been told about the Saint with a twinge of vague uneasiness.

“What’s the trouble, major?” he asked curtly, when the man was shown in.

The other glanced around at the display of strapped and bulging luggage.

“Are you going away, Mr. Kemmler?”

“Just changing my address, that’s all,” said Kemmler bluffly.“This place is a little too near the high spots-there’s always half a dozen gumshoes snooping around looking for con-men and I don’t like it. It ain’t healthy. I’m moving over to a quiet little joint in Bloomsbury, where I don’t have to see so many policemen.”

“I think you’re wise.” The croupier sat on the bed and brushed his hat nervously. “Mr. Kemmler-I thought I ought to come and see you at once. Something has happened.”

Kemmler looked at his watch.

“Something’s always happening in this busy world,” he said with a hearty obtuseness which did not quite carry conviction. “Let’s hear about it.”

“Well, Mr. Kemmler-I don’t quite know how to tell you. It was after we closed down this morning-I was on my way home -“

He broke off with a start as the telephone bell jangled insistently through the room. Kemmler grinned at him emptily, and picked up the receiver.

“Is that you, Kemmler?” said the somnolent voice, in which a thin thread of excitement was perceptible. “Listen-I’m going to give you a shock, but whatever I say you must not give the slightest indication of what I’m talking about. Don’t jump, and don’t say anything except ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’ “