crazy story.'
Corrio turned on his heel and went to the desk. The apartment was on the third floor--an ordinary two-room suite with the usual revolting furniture to be found in such places. Fernack glanced briefly over the living room into which they entered and looked at the Saint again.
'Go on,' he said. 'I'm listening.'
The Saint sat down on the edge of the table and blew smoke rings.
'It would probably have gone on a lot longer,' he said, 'if this smart detective hadn't thought one day what a supremely brilliant idea it would be to combine business with profit, and have the honour of convicting a most notorious and elusive bandit known as the Saint-- not forgetting, of course, to collect the usual cash reward in the process. So he used a very good-looking young damsel--you ought to meet her sometime, Fernack, she really is a peach--having some idea that the Saint would never run away very fast from a pretty face. In which he was damn right. . . . She had a very well-planned hard-luck story, too, and the whole act was most professionally staged. It had all the ingredients that a good psychologist would bet on to make the Saint feel that stealing Oppenheim's emeralds was the one thing he had left glaringly undone in an otherwise complete life. Even the spadework of the job had already been put in, so that she could practically tell the Saint how to pinch the jewels. So that our smart detective must have thought he was sitting pretty, with a sucker all primed to do the dirty work for him and take the rap if anything went wrong--besides being still there to take the rap when the smart detective made his arrest and earned the reward if everything went right.'
Simon smiled dreamily at a particularly repulsive print on the wall for a moment.
'Unfortunately, I happened to drop in on this girl one time when she wasn't expecting me, and I heard her phoning a guy named Corrio to tell him I was well and truly hooked,' he said. 'On account of having read in the Daily Mail some talk by a guy of the same name about what he was going to do to me, I was naturally interested.'
Corrio started forward.
'Look here, you----'
'Wait a minute.' Fernack held him back with an iron arm. 'I want the rest of it. Did you do the job, Saint?'
Simon shook his head sadly. It was at that point that his narrative departed, for the very first time, from the channels of pure veracity in which it had begun its course--but Fernack was not to know this.
'Would I be such a sap?' he. asked reproachfully. 'I knew I could probably get away with the actual robbery because Corrio would want me to; but as soon as it was over, knowing in advance who'd done it, he'd be chasing round to catch me and recover the emeralds. So I told the girl I'd thought it all over and decided I was too busy.' The Saint sighed as if he was still regretting a painful sacrifice. 'The rest is pure theory; but this girl gave me a checkroom ticket on Grand Central this morning and asked me if I'd collect a package on it this afternoon and take it along to an address on Fifty-second Street. I didn't do it because I had an idea what would happen; but my guess would be that if somebody went along and claimed the parcel they'd find emeralds in it. Not all the emeralds, probably, because that 'd be too risky if I got curious and opened it; but some of them. The rest are probably here--I've been looking around since we've been here, and I think there's some new and rather amateurish stitching in the upholstery of that chair. I could do something with that reward myself.'
Corrio barred his way with a gun as he got off the table.
'You stay where you are,' he grated. 'If you're trying to get away with some smart frame-up----'
Simon looked down at the gun.
'You talk altogether too much,' he said evenly. 'And I don't think you're going to be safe with that toy in a minute.'
He hit Corrio very suddenly under the chin, grabbing the gun with his other hand as he did so. The gun went off crashingly as Corrio reeled backwards, but after that it remained in the Saint's hand. Corrio stood trembling against the wall, and Simon looked at Fernack again and rubbed his knuckles thoughtfully.
'Just to make sure,' he said, 'I fixed a dictagraph under the table yesterday. Let's see if it has anything to say.'
Fernack watched him soberly as he prepared to play back the record. In Fernack's mind was the memory of a number of things which he had heard Corrio say which fitted into the picture which the Saint offered him much too vividly to be easily denied.
Then the dictagraph record began to play. And Fernack felt a faint shiver run up his spine at the uncannily accurate reproduction of Corrio's voice.
'Smart work, Leo. . . . I'll say these must be worth every penny of the price on them.'
The other voice was unfamiliar.
'Hell, it was a cinch. The layout was just like you said. But how you goin' to fix it on the other guy?'
'That's easy. The broad gets him to fetch a parcel from Grand Central and take it where I tell her to tell him. When he gets there, I'm waiting for him.'
'You're not goin' to risk givin' him all that stuff'
'Oh, don't be so thick. There 'll only be just enough in the parcel to frame him. Once he's caught, it'll be easy enough to plant the rest somewhere and find it.'
Corrio's eyes were wide and staring.
'It's a plant!' he screamed hysterically. 'That's a record of the scene I played in the film test I made yesterday.'
Simon smiled politely, cutting open the upholstery of the armchair and fishing about for a leather pouch containing about fourteen hundred thousand dollars' worth of emeralds which should certainly be there unless somebody else had found them since he chose that ideal hiding place for his loot.
'I only hope you'll be able to prove it, Gladys,' he murmured, and watched Fernack grasp Corrio's arm with purposeful efficiency.
III THE WELL-MEANING MAYOR
Sam purdell never quite knew how he became Mayor. He was a small and portly man with a round blank face and a round blank mind, who had built up a moderately profitable furniture business over the last thirty-five years and acquired in the process a round pudding-faced wife and a couple of suet dumplings of daughters; but the inexhaustible zeal for improving the circumstances and morals of the community, that fierce drive of ambition and the twitching of the ears for the ecstatic screams of 'Heil' whenever he went abroad, that indomitable urge to be a leader of his people from which Hitlers and Mussolinis are born, was not naturally in him.
It is true that at the local reform club, of which he was a prominent member, he had often been stimulated by an appreciative audience and a large highball to lay down his views on the way in which he thought everything on earth ought to be run, from Japanese immigration to the permissible percentage of sulphur dioxide in dried apricots; but there was nothing outstandingly indicative of a political future in that. This is a disease which is liable to attack even the most honest and respectable citizens in such circumstances. But the idea that he himself should ever occupy the position in which he might be called upon to put all those beautiful ideas into practice had never entered Sam Purdell's head in those simple early days; and if it had not been for the drive supplied by Al Eisenfeld, it might never have materialized.
'You ought to be in politics, Sam,' Al had insisted, at the close of one of these perorations several years before.
Sam Purdell considered the suggestion.
'No, I wouldn't be clever enough,' he said modestly.
To tell the truth, he had heard the suggestion before, had repudiated it before and had always wanted to hear it contradicted. Al Eisenfeld obliged him. It was the first time anybody had been so obliging.
This was three years before the columnist of the Elmford News was moved to inquire:
'How long does our mayor think he can kid reporters and deputations with his celebrated pose of injured innocence?
'We always thought it was a good act while it lasted; but isn't it time we had a new show?'
It was not the first time that it had been suggested in print that the naive and childlike simplicity which was Sam Purdell's greatest charm was one of the shrewdest fronts for ingenious corruption which any politician had ever tried to put over on a batch of sane electors, but this was the nearest that any commentator had ever dared to come to saying that Sam Purdell was a crook.
