Thanks to the Saint - Leslie Charteris - the perfect sucker

Thanks to the Saint - Leslie Charteris
the perfect sucker

"DON'T EVER run away with the idea that any fool can play the fool," Simon Templar was heard to say once, without a blush. "To turn a first-class performance as the ideal chump, the answer to the bunco artist's prayer, the way I've played it sometimes to hook them on their own line, takes more talent than ordinary actors win awards for. If you overdo it and make yourself look too utterly stupid, a con man might pass you up simply because you seem too dumb to have even the rudimentary larcenous instinct which he needs for his routine. If you strike any false note, you're likely to scare him into a dead run. You have to ad-lib all your own dialog, and you don't get any rehearsal. And the discouraging thing is that no matter how much you polish your technique, you'll never do so well as when you aren't even trying."

He was certainly not trying when he met Mr Irving Jardane, or Mr Jardane met him; for he had come to the Rogue River in Oregon with no thought of hooking anything more predatory than a few rainbow trout. At such times the Saint had to make no effort to look worthy of his often incongruous nickname. In the complete relaxation which a man can only achieve when solely preoccupied with the leisured assembling of a fly rod and reel in anticipation of a peaceful evening's fishing, all the bronze and sapphire hardness which could edge the Saint's face at some other moments was softened to an almost unbelievable innocence, which a more bemused critic than some of the sharks he had gaffed in his lifetime might have claimed was the revelation of a wonderful childishness of heart which he had never really outgrown.

...
And it was as he turned back from this ablution that he saw the wallet.

It lay on the path just a half step off the pier, where anyone who was not purblind, leaving the pier, could hardly have missed it, or if he did could scarcely have failed to trip over it.

Simon Templar picked it up. Of course.

He looked inside it. Inevitably.

It contained remarkably little of the motley miscellanea which most men accumulate in their wallets.. The remaining contents were most monotonous, consisting of eleven identical pieces of paper currency, each with a face value of $100.

One didn't have to be a detective to assume that the name of Oliphant Quigg was the private affliction of the Saint's newest acquaintance, and that the wallet had squeezed out of his hip pocket when he washed his hands.

...
"Oh, hell," he said, exerting some effort not to ham it into Aw, heck. "Don't let's go overboard about this."

"But I mean it," said Mr Quigg. "If I only had a friend that I knew was absolutely honest, it'd make all the difference in the world to my life."

...
"Look, you see that strip off the top of a newspaper, with the date on? I sealed that in with it so's I couldn't forget."

Simon could not be so ungracious as to point out that anyone who had thoughtfully hoarded a number of old newspapers could have just as easily sealed a dateline of fifty years ago in with a lettuce packaged yesterday. Instead, he regarded the Contraption again with renewed awe.

"Where could I get one of these?" he asked.

...
"What else do you know about him--aside from what he wrote on the card when he registered?"

The proprietor blinked in a shocked but rather puzzled way.

"He was a classmate of mine in college. Worked his own way through--the real hard-driving kind. I watched him start with one truck that he drove himself, and build up that Transamerican Transport System, while I was in business in Portland. He's been coming here for the last five years, ever since I retired and bought this place."

An oddly empty sensation lodged in Simon Templar's stomach like a bullet and expanded hollowly. He lighted a cigarette, moving rather slowly and stiffly, while a clammy chill stroked his skin into goose-pimples.

"Thanks, Ben," he said at length. "You just saved me from pulling the most fabulous boner of all my life. Some day I may tell you both how gorgeously ghastly it could have been, but right now I don't feel strong enough. However, I just changed my mind again, and I'm going to stay out the week in the cottage."

"Whatever you say," answered the other agreeably, if in some pardonable fog.

Simon drove back to his cabin, unloaded his gear again, and took from his suitcase the checkbook of a Swiss bank in which, for many obvious reasons, he had for some time found it convenient to carry an account in the name of Sebastian tombs. He wrote a check for $10,000 and made another pilgrimage to the cottage at the other end of the camp.

"Your bank should be able to get this cleared by airmail and cable within three days," he said. For the time being, here's the three thousand option money he was talking about."

The little man peered at the crumpled cash mistily through his bifocals.

"But according to our verbal agreement, half of this is yours."

"You know how you feel about your your ex-wife?" said the Saint lightly. "That's how I feel about tax collectors. I'm going to do this for free. Call it my contribution to the cause of the downtrodden male, which wouldn't normally be a deductible item. Or a sop to my own conscience. Just do me a favor and stop dropping your wallet and telling the story of your life to anyone who picks it up. You might make some innocent con man feel like a perfect sucker."

"I don't understand this at all," said Mr Quigg.

Thanks to the Saint - Leslie Charteris

"I'm going to show you how wrong you were."

"Don't try it, Nat," said the Saint soberly. "I can't give you a fairer warning than that."

"This isn't a warning," Grendel said.

"I'm going to kill you, you bastard. But right now. I just wanted to tell you about it, so that the last thing you know'll be that I'm doing it myself. Now."

Simon prudently moved the receiver a little further from his ear; but the detective, who was caught unprepared, jumped at the loudness of the clack that came from the diaphragm.

"What was that?"

Simon Templar listened a moment longer, to nothing, and then quietly put down the phone.

"That was the accident I was talking about. I got the idea from Shakespeare. Your remember that line about 'the Engineer hoist with his own petard'? You didn't ask me how I got rid of the petard that they fixed for me. I suppose it was rather naughty, but the only thing I could think of was to put it inside a piece of china that he was interested in and send it back to him. It wouldn't 've hurt him if he hadn't pressed the button." The Saint went back into the living room and finished his drink. "Well, I guess we'd better get in that car I told you to have waiting and go see how much mess it made."

Thanks To The Saint - Leslie Charteris - The Good Medicine

Thanks To The Saint - Leslie Charteris

The Good Medicine

Simon looked towards the corner table again. The woman who sat there with the pale-blond, delicate-featured, expensively tailored and shirted and accessoried type, for which a previous generation's graphic term "lounge lizard" has never been bettered, was not constructed to the conventional specifications of a female tycoon. Even to refer to her as a "woman" seemed slightly heavy, although the much-abused word "girl" was equally inapplicable. She could easily have passed for much less than thirty and could not have ranked forty by the most vicious estimate: the Saint would have personally favored the lower estimate, being a man and vulnerable to certain figures, of which she had a honey, unless the couturiers had cooked up some new gimmicks which could falsify even such a candid decollete as she was wearing. Incontrovertibly above that she had a face of petulant but exciting beauty, capped by casque of darkly burnished copper hair. If she could have walked many blocks outside without eliciting an appreciative whistle, it would only have been in a blackout that coincided with a dense fog.

She was completely aware of the boldly appraising way that Simon had been looking at her, he knew, and he did not have any impression that it displeased her at all. He observed that she did not seem to have brought it to her escort's attention, as a woman will when she is annoyed by such a scrutiny.

...

"The Count of Cristamonte," Stern said with the obligatory gesture. "Mrs Ashville."

The momentary widening of her eyes might have been hard to measure without a micrometer, but Simon did not miss it. They were brown eyes with flecks of green, and there were hardly any telltale wrinkles around them. Even at close quarters her skin had the clear and silky texture coveted by the users of Dreemicreem. There was no doubt that simply as a female she was what almost any male would have classified to himself as a Dish.

..

She continued to look the Saint over, not a whit less candidly than he had been studying her a few minutes earlier.

"How long are you here for?"

..

With a last flashing glance at the Saint she swept on. 

..

"But more women are natural actresses than end up in Hollywood. If they're born with the spark, and given the opportunity, they don't take long to learn the princess routines. Cinderella had to have a fairy godmother, but all the modern gal needs is the confidence that comes with a little success and a lot of money. And I say the performance can be just as much fun if you forget the pedigree."

..

"If she threw herself at me, I can't pretend it wouldn't be nice to have an excuse not to duck."

..

"Will you be long?"

"No longer than this taxi will take," he said.

One reason why Simon Templar's nervous system had survived his extraordinary life with so little damage by strain and fraying was that he had an amazing gift of closing his mind to unprofitable speculation. When there was obviously nothing to be gained by trying to foreguess a situation that would soon supply its own answers, he was able to simply switch off the futile circuit and wait with only philosophical anticipation for the future to unroll itself. He saved his prophetic energy for the occasions when life and death might depend on how many moves he could stay ahead of the game, but he felt reasonably sure that this was not that kind of game.

..

He was even more sure when she unlocked the inside door at which the automatic elevator stopped in obedience to the small green button and let him step out into a room that could only have been designed by an interior decorator who had studied his subject by watching old movies on television. It cried aloud for a sinuous slumber-eyed siren in a long clinging robe, possibly fondling a tame ocelot. Elise Ashville was too palpably charged with corpuscles and vitamins for that role, and she had not even conceded to the diaphanous negligee which any writer of a certain modern school would have considered a formal necessity for such an occasion; but the suggestion of untrammeled nakedness under the demurely neck-high and ankle-deep housecoat she had changed into was no less positive and even more effective. And her approach had a refreshing timesaving candor.

..

"Then you would not misunderstand my impatience to kiss the most exciting woman I have seen in America?"

It was a purely Arabian Nights kind of episode that the Saint would never have dared to relate to anyone who he did not already know to be convinced that in this amazing world anything can happen; but this subtracted nothing from his enjoyment of it, since he was not in the habit of telling that kind of story.

...

"You and me and the mosquitoes," she said, though his dramatic enthusiasm was so enchanting that her tone of voice was softened in spite of herself. "Darling. We'd be eaten alive!"

He shook his head.

"I had already thought of that too."

He reached for her hand and held it open, and took a small gold box from his pocket and tipped out a pill into her upturned palm.

...

Innumerable flying things fluttered and dived drunkenly around the lamps, and from the shadows came myriads of mosquitoes with a ceaseless hum of tiny tireless wings. She could even see them flickering speckily pas her eyes, and hear the rise and fall of individual hungry hoverings around her, while even tinier gnats whined thinly pas like diminutive rockets. But not once did the whine build into the typical infuriating crescendo of a gnat's kamikaze plunge directly into the earhole, and she could watch her bare gleaming arms without seeing them darkened by the settling of a single mote of disrespectful voracity. Her expectant shoulders and back and legs waited for the hair-touch of an almost weightless landing and the microscopic stab of the first probing sting, but time went on and they felt nothing. And she knew that to be first on the market with a pill that would accomplish such a miracle would make what by any standards could be literally called a fortune.

There was soft music coming from the portable player, and he was spooning caviar on to the first plates on the neatly laid table.

"Come, Elise, sit down and relax," he said. "You know by now that nothing is going to bite you."

"It's amazing," she said as she let him seat her. "I must know -- did those pill makers give you a good deal?"

..

When Mrs Elise Ashville let herself wake up by sybaritically easy stages the next morning, and finally focused her eyes on the bedside clock, it showed ten minutes past eleven.

She squirmed, yawned, stretched and sprawled again int he enormous bed, draining the last raptures of sleepy recollection, until she suddenly realized that some faint sounds of activity in the apartment should have aroused her somewhat before that. Either the new maid was going to prove as unreliable as her predecessors, or she was a potential jewel who crept in and moved around like a mouse.

Mrs Ashville yawned again and sat up, in an unwontedly agreeable and optimistic mood which could not have been solely due to the single pink vitamin-complex pill what Simon Templar had persuaded her to take the night before.

"Germaine," she called -- quite dulcetly, at first.

There was no response, even after louder repetitions. Germaine Ashville, having done her part by giving her sister-in-law a facial with almost pure ethylhexanediol, and pouring two full quarts of it into her bubble bath, and even spiking all her colognes and perfumes with the same popular odorless insect repellent, was already boarding a plane to Denver with her brother, and the Saint was seeing them off.