Mr Jobyn was not built on this heroic scale, having been a lean and often hungry cowboy until the barren section on which he was raising a few head of hamburger cattle had found itself in the very center of a circumference of deep holes which had been bored by an exploding contingent of oil-sniffing geologists. The fees he had been able to exact for letting other similar perforations be made in his land had thereafter relieved him of all financial problems other than those of making tax returns and finding ways to invest a residue which was still more than a spouse with unlimited charge accounts could spend.
In spite of these frightful burdens, Mr Jobyn had not changed very much except in such superficial details as having cleaner fingernails and a wardrobe by Neiman-Marcus instead of Levi Strauss, and his reception of the Saint was as heartily hospitable as if he had been home on the range instead of in the lobby of the fanciest hotel in La Jolla, that self-styled jewel of the Southern California coast some ten miles above San Diego.
“I sure am glad to see yuh,” he said, giving Simon a powerful bony handshake, “I’ve read so much about yuh, I feel like I’d knowed yuh ever since I was a boy. And yet yuh don’t look that old.”
“I cheat,” said the Saint. “I take things like vitamins and exercise. And I’m too stupid to worry, which is what makes dignified gray hair and distinguished wrinkles.”
“Yuh look mighty good to me,” Jobyn said. “I wish I was stupid like you. Or Felicity didn’t think she was so smart. I’m hopin’ yuh’ll be able to straighten her out about this investment I’m thinkin’ of makin’. She’s been goin’ on at me so hard, I declare yuh might think I was figurin’ on buyin’ into a bawdyhouse instead of a legitimate business.”
They perched on stools at the bar, and Simon accepted a Peter Dawson. Jobyn tasted a straight shot and told the bartender to leave them the bottle.
“Yes, sir,” he said, “anyone ’ud think I wasn’t bright enough to spot a wooden nickel if it had termites crawlin’ all over it.”
“You sound very sure that this business is legitimate,” Simon said.
“O’ course I’m, sure,” Jobyn said pettishly. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be figurin’ on buyin’ into it. Ain’t nobody told yuh nothin’ about it?”
“All I know is that Mrs Yarmouth said you were on the point of being taken for a small fortune by some faker who claims to be able to get fresh water from the sea.”
“That’s the way Sophie would put it. She’s on Felicity’s side, naturally, being as they’re cousins. And if Felicity had her way about it, there wouldn’t be any satellites goin’ around the earth, because she’d’ve called anyone who said he could send a rocket into space a faker, just because nobody ever done it before. You wait till yuh meet Doc Nemford. You’ll see for yuhself he’s a real serious scientific fella.”
Felicity Jobyn, whom Simon met at lunch, had her own version of this.
“The only serious science he knows,” she stated categorically, “is how to part a fool from his money.”
“Now, why do yuh keep sayin’ that, Felicity?” protested the tycoon plaintively. “You’ve seen him yuhself, pumpin’ sea water through this machine of his, an’ it comin’ out sweet as a mountain spring, just as fast as he puts it in.”
“I’ve seen it but I still don’t believe it, like I’ve seen a magician saw a woman in half.”
“It isn’t altogether impossible — this water business, I mean,” Simon ventured. “They already know quite a few ways of doing it. But so far they haven’t been able to make one cheap enough to be commercially attractive.”
“And they aren’t likely to,” Mrs Jobyn said crisply. “It’s against Nature, that’s all.”
If the Saint had been President, he would have appointed her ambassador to Moscow. No mere second-generation disciple of Stalin would have put anything over on her.
“You’re probably right,” he said diplomatically. “But I have met a few crackpot inventors who actually invented something. I’d like to see this trick for myself.”
“You do that,” said Mrs Jobyn, “and then tell Walt how it’s done. Maybe that’ll get some sense into his stubborn head.”
The mother of Mr Nemford, for such reasons as motivate parents, had had him christened with the name of Stanley, but that was a fact which he revealed only to such tiresome officials as insisted on a meticulous filling out of forms. To everyone else, even in his teens, he had never been anything but “Doc” — a cognomen which fitted him like the proverbial glove, and which had pointed the way to an almost predestined career from the first time he had studied himself analytically in a mirror. With the congenital advantages of intense deep-set eyes sandwiched between a bulging forehead and ascetically hollow cheeks leading to a thin artistic jaw, even before he was old enough to vote he had looked more like a doctor of something highly intellectual than most men who had worked for years to earn the title.
The house where he was living in the vicinity of Mission Beach, about six miles south of La Jolla, was perfectly appropriate for an unworldly scientist or a struggling inventor. “Cottage” would have been a determined salesman’s word for it, but “shack” would have been a description more realistic than real estate agents professionally care to be. In those days there was still a considerable colony of such clapboard shanties clustered around the lagoon which the coast road skirted on the west and the main highway to San Diego evaded inland, doomed soon to be mowed down by the inexorable march of building-code suburban progress, but surviving for a little while as one of the last relics of a more picturesque and carefree pre-boom and pre-industrial California which even a man without a gray hair on his head might remember as a dim once-upon-a-time.
From Doc Nemford’s point of view, its greatest asset, far outweighing the drafty windows, antique plumbing, and incredibly shabby furniture, was its private pier, which projected some forty feet out into the lagoon from his narrow frontage on the water. Some much earlier landlord or tenant had created it by pile-driving lengths of three-inch pipe into the bottom of the shallow bay until they stood firm, connecting them with elbows and other threaded lengths of galvanized pipe, and overlaying this framework with a series of occasionally horizontal planks. The resultant structure might not have met any conventional engineering specifications, but it did provide a platform on which a number of reasonably sized and careful people could walk out a little way over the tidal waters of the inlet.
Simon Templar was one of a small party who did this that afternoon, in the train of Doc Nemford, who was trundling his contrivance in front of him on an ordinary garden wheelbarrow. The other members of the equipage were Walt Jobyn, who had presented the Saint as a possible partner in his investment, and the Arab emissary who had sparked the Saint’s diatribe on the subject of Foreign Aid merely by being mentioned, a Colonel Hamzah.
Hamzah was a short but portly man with crinkly black hair, an enormous nose, and teeth as big as piano ivories, some of which were likewise black. He had said “How do you do?” when he was introduced, and therewith seemed to have exhausted his vocabulary, but to every other remark that was addressed to him, and some that were not, he responded with a vast if non-committal display of his keyboard incisors.
Doc Nemford, however, had welcomed the Saint with an amiable vagueness that went well with his scholarly mien, and revealed no trace of guilt or apprehension. In the Saint’s ruthless system of reasoning, this still left open the possibilities that Nemford was a consummate actor, or that he was one of an increasingly rarer breed of innocents to whom the name of Simon Templar did not immediately evoke “The Robin Hood of Modern Crime” as an almost liturgical response. But he had betrayed no reluctance whatever to the proposal that he should give another demonstration of his process.