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.
