11 The Brighter Buccaneer

'Have one with me,' suggested the Saint half-heartedly; but Sir Ambrose waved the invitation aside.

'No, sir. I never allow a young man to pay for my drinks. Have a good time with me. The same again?'

Simon nodded, and lighted a cigarette while Sir Ambrose toddled over to the bar. He was a pompous and rather tubby little man, with a waxed moustache that matched his silver-grey spats, and a well-wined complexion that matched the carnation in his button-hole; and the Saint did not like him. In fact, running over a lengthy list of gentlemen of whom he had gravely disapproved, Simon Templar found it difficult to name anyone whom he had felt less inclined to take into his bosom with vows of eternal brotherhood.

He disliked Sir Ambrose no less heartily because he had known him less than a couple of hours. With an idle evening to spend by himself, the Saint had sailed out into the West End of London to pass it as entertainingly as he could. He had no plans whatever, but his faith in the beneficence of the gods was sublime. Thus he had gone in search of adventure before, and he had rarely been disappointed. To him, the teeming thousands of assorted souls who jostled through the sky-sign area on a Saturday night were so many oysters who might be opened by a man with the clairvoyant eye and delicate touch which the Saint claimed for his genius. It was a business of drifting where the whim guided him, following an impulse and hoping that it might lead to an interest, taking a chance and not caring if it failed.

In just that spirit of careless optimism he had wandered into a small hotel in a quiet street behind the Strand and dis­covered an almost deserted bar where he could imbibe a glass of ale while seeking inspiration for his next move. And it was there that a casual remark about the weather had floated him into the acquaintance of Sir Ambrose, who, having presented his card, pulled out the opening chord of his theme song and said: 'Have a drink?'

Simon had a drink. Even before the state of the weather arose as an introduction, he had felt a professional curiosity to know whether anybody could be quite as unsavoury a bore as Sir Ambrose looked. And he had not been disappointed. Within five minutes Sir Ambrose had him sitting in a corner listening to the details of an ingenious trick he had invented as a boy at school for swindling his contemporaries out of their weekly ration of toffee. Within ten minutes Sir Ambrose was leading on to a description of the smart deals on a larger scale which had built up his comfortable fortune. He seemed to have had several drinks on his own before he started intoning his chorus to the Saint. The effects of them had not added to his charm. And the more cordially Simon learned to detest him, the more intently Simon listened-for it had dawned on the Saint that perhaps his evening was being well spent.

Sir Ambrose returned with steps that could have been steadier, and slopped over some of the whisky as he deposited their glasses on the table. He sat down again and leaned back with a sigh of large-waisted well-being. 'Yes, sir,' he resumed tirelessly. 'Sentiment is no good. My uncle was sentimental, and what did it do for him?'

Not having known Sir Ambrose's uncle, Simon found the question unanswerable.

'It made him a pest to his heirs,' said Sir Ambrose, solving the riddle. 'That's what it did. Not that he left much for us to inherit-a beggarly ten thousand odd was all that he managed to keep out of the hands of the parasites who traded on his soft heart. But what did he do with it?'

Once again the Saint was nonplussed. Sir Ambrose, however, did not really require assistance.

'Look at this,' he said.

He dragged a small brass image out of his pocket and set it up on the table between the glasses. Simon glanced at it, and recognized it at once. It was one of those pyramidal figures of a seated Buddha, miniatures of the gigantic statue at Kamakura, which find their place in every tourists' curio shop from Kara­chi to Yokohama.

'That, sir,' said the sentimentalist's nephew, 'was my un­cle's. He bought it in Shanghai when he was a young man, and he called it his mascot. He used to burn a joss-stick in front of it every day-said the ju-ju wouldn't work without it. And then, when he died, what do you think we found in his will?'

Simon was getting accustomed to Sir Ambrose's interrogative style, but the Saint was not very easily silenced.

'A thousand quid to buy joss-sticks,' he hazarded.

Sir Ambrose shook his head rather impatiently, till both his chins wobbled.

'No, sir. Something much worse than that. We found that not a penny of his money could be touched until this ridicu­lous thing had been sold for two thousand pounds. He said that only a man who was prepared to pay a sum like that for it would appreciate it properly and give it the attention he wanted. Personally, I think that anyone who paid a sum like that for it could be put in a lunatic asylum without a certificate. But there it is in his will, and the lawyers say we can't upset it. I've been carrying the damned thing about with me half a week, showing it to all the antique shops in London, and the best offer I've had is fifteen shillings.'

'But surely,' said the Saint, 'you could get a friend of yours to buy it, and give him the two thousand back with a spot of interest as soon as the executors unbuttoned?'

'If anything like that could have been done, sir, I'd have done it. But the old fool thought of that himself, and he left strict instructions that the executors were to be satisfied be­yond all possible doubt that the sale was a genuine one. And he made his bank the executors, damn him! If you've ever tried to put anything over on a bank you'll know what a hope we've got of doing anything like that. No-the best thing we can ever hope to do is to find some genuine stranger and sell it to him while he's drunk.'

Simon picked up the image and examined it closely. It was unexpectedly heavy, and he guessed that the brass casting must have been filled with lead. On the base there was a line of Chinese characters cut into the metal and filled with red.

'Funny language,' observed Sir Ambrose, leaning over to point to the characters. 'I've often wanted to meet a Chink who could tell me what they write on things like this. Look at that thing there like a tadpole with wings. I'll bet that's a par­ticularly dirty swear-it's twice the size of the other words. Have a drink.'

The Saint looked at his watch.

'I'm afraid I'll have to be getting home,' he observed.

'Come and see me one evening,' said Sir Ambrose. 'You've got my address on my card, and I like your company. Come along one night next week, and I'll invite some girls.'

Simon reached his flat in time to see Peter Quentin and Patricia Holm climbing out of a taxi. They were in evening dress, and the Saint surveyed them rudely.