16 The Saint Overboard

'With discretion.'

'You've tackled some big things.'

'I pick up elephants and wring their necks.'

'Have you ever thought of stealing millions?'

'Often,' said the Saint, leaning back. 'I thought of burgling the Bank of England once, but I decided it was too easy.'

She stirred impatiently.

'Saint,' she said earnestly, 'there's one racket working to-day that steals millions. It's been running for years; and it's still running. And I don't mean any of the old things like bootlegging or kidnapping. It's a racket that goes over most of the world, wherever there's anything for it to work on; and it hits where there's no protection. I couldn't begin to guess how much money has been taken out of it since it began.'

'I know, darling,' said the Saint sympathetically. 'But you can't do anything about it. It's quite legal. It's called income tax.'

'Have you heard of the Lutine?'

He studied her with his gaze still tantalising and unsatisfied, but the eagerness of her held him more than what she was ac­tually saying. He was discovering something between her soft-lipped beauty and her fire of anger; something that belonged equally to the lurking laughter of her eyes and the sober throb of persuasion in her voice, and yet was neither of these things; something that made all contradictions possible.

'It sank, didn't it?' he said.

'In 1799—with about a million pounds' worth of gold on board. There've been plenty of attempts to salve the cargo, but so far the sand's been too much for them. Then the Lutina Company took over with a new idea: they were going to suck away the silt through a big conical sort of bell which was to be low­ered over the wreck. It was quite a simple scheme, and there's no reason why it shouldn't have worked. The company received a few letters warning them not to go on with it, but naturally they didn't pay much attention to them.'

'Well?'

'Well, they haven't tried out their sand-sucker yet. The whole thing was blown sky-high in 1933—and the explosion wasn't an accident.'

The Saint sat up slowly. In that supple movement the buffoonery slipped off him as his dressing-gown might have slipped off; and in the same transformation he was listening intently. Something like a breath of frozen feathers strolled up his spine—an instinct, a queer clairvoyance born of the years of inspired filibustering.

'Is that all the story?' he asked, and knew that it was not.

She shook her head.

'Something else happened in the same year. An American salvage ship, the Salvor, went out to search a wreck off Cape Charles. The Merida, which sank in 1911 and took the Emperor Maximilian's crown jewels to the bottom with her—another mil­lion-pound cargo. They didn't find anything. And fish don't wear jewellery.'

'I remember the Terschelling Island fireworks—the Lutine. But that's a new one.'

'It's not the only one. Two years before that another salvage company went over the Turbantia with a fine comb. She was torpedoed near the Maars Lightship in 1916, and she had seven hundred and fifty thousand pounds' worth of German bullion on her—then. The salvage company knew just where to look for it. But they didn't find it. ... That was quite a small job. But in 1928 the Sorima Company made an official search for a collec­tion of uncut diamonds and other stones worth more than a mil­lion and a quarter, which were on board the Elizabethville when another U-boat got her on her way back from South Africa dur­ing the war. Well, they found a lot of ammunition in the strong­room, and thirty shillings in the safe; which didn't show a big dividend.'

'And this has been going on for years?'

'I don't know how long. But just look at those three jobs. They average out at over a million pounds a time. Leave out all the other official treasure hunts that are going on now, and all the other millions that may have been sneaked away before the authorised salvage companies get there. Leave out all the other jobs that haven't been discovered