The BRIGHTER BUCCANEER By LESLIE CHARTERIS
CONTENTS
The Brain Workers The Export Trade The Unblemished Bootlegger The Owners' Handicap The Tough Egg The Bad Baron The Brass Buddha The Perfect Crime The Appalling Politician The Unpopular Landlord The New Swindle The Five Thousand Pound Kiss The Green Goods Man The Blind Spot The Unusual Ending
The Brain Workers
"HAPPY" FRED JORMAN was a man with a grievance. He came to his partner with a tale of woe.
"It was an ordinary bit of business, Meyer. I met him in the Alexandra-he seemed interested in horses, and he looked so lovely and innocent. When I told him about the special job I'd got for Newmarket that afternoon, and it came to suggesting he might like to put a bit on himself, I'd hardly got the words out of my mouth before he was pushing a tenner across the table. Well, after I'd been to the phone I told him he'd got a three-to-one winner, and he was so pleased he almost wept on my shoulder. And I paid him out in cash. That was thirty pounds-thirty real pounds he had off me-but I wasn't worrying. I could see I was going to clean him out. He was looking at the money I'd given him as if he was watching all his dreams come true. And that was when I bought him another drink and started telling him about the real big job of the day. 'It's honestly not right for me to be letting you in at all,' I said, 'but it gives me a lot of pleasure to see a young sport like you winning some money,' I said. 'This horse I'm talking about now,' I said, 'could go twice round the course while all the other crocks were just beginning to realize that the race had started; but I'll eat my hat if it starts at a fraction less than five to one,' I said."
"Well?"
"Well, the mug looked over his roll and said he'd only got about a hundred pounds, including what he'd won already, and that didn't seem enough to put on a five-to-one certainty. 'But if you'll excuse me a minute while I go to my bank, which is just around the corner,' he said, 'I'll give you five hundred pounds to put on for me.' And off he went to get the money --"
"And never come back," said the smaller speaking part, with the air of a Senior Wrangler solving the first problem in a child's book of arithmetic.
"That's just it, Meyer," said Happy Fred aggrievedly. "He never came back. He stole thirty pounds off me, that's what it amounts to-he ran away with the ground-bait I'd given him, and wasted the whole of my afternoon, not to mention all the brain work I'd put into spinning him the yarn --"
"Brain work!" said Meyer.
Simon Templar would have given much to overhear that conversation. It was his one regret that he never had the additional pleasure of knowing exactly what his pigeons said when they woke up and found themselves bald.
Otherwise, he had very few complaints to make about the way his years of energetic life had treated him. "Do others as they would do you," was his motto; and for several years past he had carried out the injunction with a simple and unswerving wholeheartedness, to his own continual entertainment and profit. "There are," said the Saint, "less interesting ways of spending wet week-ends . . ."
Certainly it was a wet week-end when he met Ruth Eden, though he happened to be driving home along that lonely stretch of the Windsor road after a strictly lawful occasion.
To her, at first, he was only the providential man in the glistening leather coat who came striding across from the big open Hirondel that had skidded to a standstill a few yards away. She had seen his lights whizzing up behind them, and had managed to put her foot through the window as he went past-Mr. Julian Lamantia was too strong for her, and she was thoroughly frightened. The man in the leather coat twitched open the nearest door of the limousine and propped himself gracefully against it, with the broken glass crunching under his feet. His voice drawled pleasantly through the hissing rain.
"Evening, madam. This is Knight Errants Unlimited. Anything we can do?"
"If you're going towards London," said the girl quickly, "could you give me a lift?"
The man laughed. It was a short soft lilt of a laugh that somehow made the godsend of his arrival seem almost too good to be true.
An arm sheathed in wet sheepskin shot into the limousine- and Mr. Lamantia shot out. The feat of muscular prestidigitation was performed so swiftly and slickly that she took a second or two to absorb the fact that it had indubitably eventuated and travelled on into the past tense. By which time Mr. Lamantia was picking himself up out of the mud, with the rain spotting the dry portions of his very natty check suit and his vocabulary functioning on full throttle.
He stated, amongst other matters, that he would teach the intruder to mind his own unmentionable business; and the intruder smiled almost lazily.
"We don't like you," said the intruder.
