'I seem to have heard of your Mr Oppenheim,' said the Saint thoughtfully. 'Didn't he just pay a million and a half dollars for a collection of emeralds?'
Her lips flickered cynically.
'That's the guy. I've seen them, too--I've been working on his daughter's trousseau because I've got more experience of better-class work than the other girls, and I've been going to the house to fit it. It's just one of those things that make you feel like turning communist sometimes.'
'You've been in the house, have you?' he said even more thoughtfully. 'And you've seen these emeralds?' He stopped himself and drew smoke from his cigarette to trickle it thoughtfully back across the counter. When he turned to her again, his dark reckless face held only the same expression of friendly interest that it had held before. 'Where are you going to sleep tonight?'
She shrugged.
'I don't know. You see, I owe three weeks' rent now, and they won't let me in until I pay it. I guess I'll take a stroll up to the park.'
'It's healthy enough, but a bit drafty.' He smiled at her suddenly with disarming frankness. 'Look here, what would you say if I suggested that we wander around to a little place close by here where I can get you a room? It's quiet and clean, and I don't live there. But I'd like to do something about you. Stay there tonight and meet me for dinner tomorrow, and let's talk it over.'
She met him the following evening, and he had to do very little more than keep his ears open to learn everything that he wanted to know.
'They're in Oppenheim's study--on the second floor. His daughter's room is next door to it, and the walls aren't very thick. He was showing them to her yesterday afternoon when I was there. He has a big safe in the study, but he doesn't keep the emeralds in it. I heard him boasting about how clever he was. He said, 'Anybody who came in looking for the emeralds would naturally think they'd be in the safe, and they'd get to work on it at once. It 'd take them a long time to open it, which would give us plenty of chances to catch them; but anyhow they'd be disappointed. They'd never believe that I had a million and a half dollars' worth of emeralds just tucked away behind a row of books on a shelf. Even the man from the detective agency doesn't know it--he thinks the safe is what he's got to look after.' '
'So they have a private detective on the job, do they?' said the Saint.
'Yes. A man from Ingerbeck's goes in at seven o'clock every evening and stays till the servants are up in the morning. The butler's a pretty tough-looking guy himself, so I suppose Oppenheim thinks the house is safe enough in his hands in the daytime. . . . Why do you want to know all this?'
'I'm interested.'
She looked at him with an unexpected clearness of understanding.
'Is that what you meant when you said you'd like to do something about me ? Did you think you could do it if you got hold of those emeralds?'
The Saint lighted a cigarette with a steady and unhurried hand, and then his blue eyes came back to her face for a moment before he answered with a very quiet and calculating directness.
'That was more or less my idea,' he said calmly.
She was neither shocked nor frightened. She studied him with as sober and matter-of-fact attention as if they were discussing where she might find another job, but a restrained intenseness with which he thought he could sympathize came into her voice. She said: 'I couldn't call anybody a criminal who did that. He really deserves to lose them. I believe I'd be capable of robbing him myself if I knew how to go about it. Have you ever done anything like that before?'
'I have had a certain amount of experience,' Simon admitted mildly.
'Who are you?'
'If you were reading newspapers a few years back you may have read about me. I'm called the Saint.'
'You? You're kidding.' She stared at him, and the amused disbelief in her face changed slowly into a weakening incredulity. 'But you might be. I saw a photograph once . . . Oh, if you only were! I'd help you to do it--I wouldn't care what it cost.'
'You can help me by telling me everything you can remember about Oppenheim's household and how it works.'
She had been there several times; and there were many useful things she remembered, which his skillful questioning helped to bring out. They went down into the back of his mind and stayed there while he talked about other things. The supremely simple and obvious solution came to him a full two hours later, when they were dancing on a small packed floor above Broadway.
He took her back to their table as the main batteries of lights went on for the floor show, lighted a cigarette and announced serenely:
'It's easy. I know just how Comrade Oppenheim is going to lose his emeralds.'
'How?'
'They have a man in from Ingerbeck's at night, don't they? And he has the run of the place while everybody else is asleep. They give him breakfast in the morning when the servants get up, and then he takes a cigar and goes home. Well, the same thing can happen just once more. The guy from Ingerbeck's comes in, stays the night and goes home. Not the usual guy, because he's sick or been run over by a truck or something. Some other guy. And when this other guy goes home, he can pull emeralds out of every pocket.'
Her mouth opened a little.
'You mean you'd do that?'
'Sure. Apart from the fact that I don't like your Mr Oppenheim, it seems to me that with a million and a half dollars' worth of emeralds one could do a whole lot of amusing things which Oppenheim would never dream of. To a bloke with my imagination----'
'But when would you do it?'
He looked at his watch mechanically.
'Eventually--why not now? Or at least this evening.' He was almost mad enough to consider it, but he restrained himself. 'But I'm afraid it might be asking for trouble. It '11 probably take me a day or two to find out a few more things about this dick from Ingerbeck's, and then I'll have to get organized to keep him out of the way on the night I want to go in. I should think you could call it a date for Friday.'
She nodded with a queer childish gravity.
'I believe you'd do it. You sound very sure of everything. But what would you do with the emeralds after you got them?'
'I expect we could trade them in for a couple of hamburgers--maybe more.'
'You couldn't sell them.'
'There are ways and means.'
'You couldn't sell stones like that. I'm sure you couldn't. Everything in a famous collection like that would be much too well known. If you took them into a dealer he'd recognize them at once, and then you'd be arrested.'
The Saint smiled. It has never been concealed from the lynx-eyed student of these chronicles that Simon Templar had his own very human weaknesses; and one of these was very much akin to the one which had contributed so generously to the unpopularity of Lieutenant Corrio. If the Saint made himself considerably less ridiculous with it, it was because he was a very different type of man. But the Saint had his own deeply planted vanities; and one of these was a deplorable weakness of resistance to the temptation to display his unique knowledge of the devious ways of crime, like a peddler spreading his wares in the market place before a suitably impressed and admiring audience.
'Three blocks north of here, on Fifty-second Street,' he said, 'there's a little bar where you can find the biggest fence in the United States any evening between five and eight o'clock. He'll take anything you like to offer him across the table, and pay top prices for it. You could sell him the English crown jewels if you had them. If I borrow Oppenheim's emeralds on Friday night I'll be rid of them by dinnertime Saturday, and then we'll meet for a celebration and see where you'd like to go for a vacation.'
He was in high spirits when he took her home much later to the lodginghouse where he had found her a room the night before. There was one virtue in the indulgence of his favourite vice : talking over the details of a coup which he was freshly planning in his mind helped him to crystallize and elaborate his own ideas, gave him a charge
