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 of confidence and optimistic energy from which the final strokes of action sprung as swiftly and accurately as bullets out of a gun. When he said good night to her he felt as serene and exhilarated in spirit as if the Vanderwoude emeralds were already his own. He was in such good spirits that he had walked a block from the lodginghouse before he remembered that he had left her without trying to induce her to take some money for her immediate needs, and without making any arrangement to meet her again.
He turned and walked back. Coincidence, an accident of time involving only a matter of seconds, had made incredible differences to his life before: this, he realized later, was only another of those occasions when an overworked guardian angel seemed to play with the clock to save him from disaster.
The dimly lighted desert of the hall was surrounded by dense oases of potted palms, and one of these obstructions was in a direct line from the front door, so that anyone who entered quietly might easily remain unnoticed until he had circumnavigated this clump of shrubbery. The Saint, who from the ingrained habit of years of dangerous living moved silently without conscious effort, was just preparing to step around this divinely inspired decoration when he heard someone speaking in the hall and caught the sound of a name which stopped him dead in his tracks. The name was Corrio. Simon stood securely hidden behind the fronds of imported vegetation and listened for as long as he dared to some of the most interesting lines of dialogue which he had ever overheard. When he had heard enough, he slipped out again as quietly as he had come in and went home without disturbing Janice Dixon. He would get in touch with her the next day; for the moment he had something much more urgent to occupy his mind.
It Is possible that even Lieutenant Corrio's smugness might have been shaken if he had known about this episode of unpremeditated eavesdropping, but this unpleasant knowledge was hidden from him. His elastic self-esteem had taken no time at all to recover from the effects of Fernack's reprimand; and when Fernack happened to meet him on a certain Friday afternoon he looked as offensively sleek and self-satisfied as he had, always been. It was beyond Fernack's limits of self-denial to let the occasion go by without making the/use of it to which he felt he was entitled.
"I believe Oppenheim has still got his emeralds," he remarked with a certain feline joviality.
Lieutenant Corrio's glossy surface was unscratched.
"Don't be surprised if he doesn't keep them much longer," he said. "And don't blame me if the Saint gets away with it. I gave you the tip once and you wouldn't listen."
"Yeah, you gave me the tip," Fernack agreed benevolently. "When are you goin' out to Hollywood to play Sherlock Holmes?"
"Maybe it won't be so long now," Corrio said darkly. "Paragon Pictures are pretty interested in me --apparently one of their executives happened to see me playing the lead in our last show at the Merrick Playhouse, and they want me to take a screen test."
Fernack grinned evilly.
"You're too late," he said. "They've already made a picture of Little Women."
He had reason to regret some of his jibes the next morning, when news came in that every single one of Mr Oppenheim's emeralds had been removed from their hiding place and taken out of the house, quietly and without any fuss, in the pockets of a detective* of whom the Ingerbeck Agency had never heard. They had, they said, been instructed by telephone that afternoon to discontinue the service, and the required written confirmation had arrived a few hours later, written on Mr Oppenheim's own flowery letterhead and signed with what they firmly believed to be his signature; and nobody had been more surprised and indignant than they were when Mr Oppenheim, on the verge of an apoplectic fit, had rung up Mr Ingerbeck himself and demanded to know how many more crooks they had on their payroll and what the blank blank they proposed to do about it. The impostor had arrived at the house at the usual hour in the evening, explained that the regular man had been taken ill and presented the necessary papers to accredit himself; and he had been left all night in the study, and let out at breakfast time according to the usual custom. When he went out he was worth a million and a half dollars as he stood up. He was, according to the butler's rather hazy description, a tallish man with horn-rimmed glasses and a thick crop of red hair.
"That red hair and glasses is all baloney," said Corrio, who was in Fernack's office when the news came in. "Just an ordinary wig and a pair of frames from any optician's. It was the Saint all right--you can see his style right through it. What did I tell you?"
"What th' hell d'ya think you can tell me?" Fernack roared back at him. Then he subdued himself. "Anyway, you're crazy. The Saint's out of business."
Corrio shrugged.
"Would you like me to take the case, sir?"
"What, you?" Fernack paused to take careful aim at the cuspidor. "I'll take the case myself." He glowered at Corrio thoughtfully for a moment. "Well, if you know so much about it, you can come along with me. And we'll see how smart you are."