13 The Saint Intervenes (Boodle)

Mr. Fallon, it appeared, was the proud tenant of an apart­ment in one of those streets running down between the Tivoli and the River which fall roughly within the postal address known as "Adelphi" because it sounds so much better than W. C. The rooms were expensively and tastefully furnished, and the Saint surmised that Louie had not furnished them. Somewhere in London there would probably be an outraged landlord looking for his rent—and perhaps also the more val­uable of his rented chattels—when Mr. Fallon had finished with the premises; but his was not immediately Simon Templar's concern. He followed Louie into the living-room, where a bottle of whisky and two glasses were produced and suitably dealt with, and cheerfully prepared to continue with the role of open-mouthed listener which the situation demanded of him. This called for no very fatiguing effort, for the role of open-mouthed listener was one in which the Saint had perfected himself more years ago than he could easily remember.

"I told you I could make my diamonds in a bathroom," said Louie, "and that's exactly what I am doin' at the moment."

He led the way onwards, glass in hand, and Simon followed him good-humouredly. It was quite a classy bathroom, with a green marble bath and generous windows looking out over rows of smoke-stained housetops towards the Thames; and the materials that Louie Fallon used in making his chemical experiments were the only incongruous note in it. These con­sisted of an ancient and shabby marble-topped washstand, which had obviously started its new lease of life in a second­hand sale room, a fireproof crucible on a metal tripod, and a litter of test-tubes, burners, bottles and other paraphernalia which Simon did not deny were most artistically arranged.

"Just to show you," said Mr. Fallon generously, "I'll make a diamond for you now."

He went over to the washstand and picked up one of the bottles. "Magnesium," he said. He picked up another bottle. "Iron filings," he said. He picked up a third bottle and tipped a larger quantity of greyish powder on top of what he had taken from the first two, stirring the mixture on the marble table-top with a commonplace Woolworth teaspoon. "And the last thing," he said, "is the actual stuff that I make my diamonds with."

He picked up the crucible and held it below the level of the table, scraped his little mound of assorted powders into it, and turned round with didactic air.

"Now I'll tell you what happens," he said. "When you burn magnesium with iron filings you produce a temperature of thousands of degrees Fahrenheit. It isn't quite as hot as the earth was when it was all molten, but it's nearly as hot. That melts the iron filings; and it also fuses the other mixture I put in which is exactly the same chemically as the stuff that diamonds are made of."

He struck a match and applied it to the crucible. There was a sudden spurt of eye-achingly brilliant flame, accompanied by a faint hissing sound. Simon could feel the intense heat of the flare on his cheeks, even though he was standing several feet away; and he watched the crucible becoming incandescent before his eyes, turning from a dull red through blazing pink to a blinding white glow.

"So there," said Mr. Fallon, gazing at his fireworks with al­most equally incandescent pride, "you have the heat. Right now that diamond powder is wrappin' itself up inside the melted iron filings. The mixture isn't quite as hot as it ought to be, because nobody has discovered how to produce as much heat as there was in the world back in those times when it was molten; but we have to make up for that by coolin' the thing off quicker. That's the reason why all the other exper­imenters have failed—they've never been able to cool things off quick enough. But I got over that."

From under the washstand he dragged out a gadget which the Saint had not noticed before. To the callously uninitiated eye it might have looked rather like a Heath Robinson con­traption made up of a couple of old oil-cans and bits of battered gaspipe; but Louie handled it as tenderly as an anarchist exhibiting his favourite bomb.

"This is the fastest cooler that's ever been made," he said. "I won't try to tell you how it works, because you probably wouldn't understand, but it's very scientific. When I throw this nugget that's forming in the crucible into it it'll be cooled off quicker than anything's ever been cooled off before. From four thousand degrees Fahrenheit down to a hundred below zero, in less than half a second! Have you any idea what that means?"

Simon realised that it was time for him to show some rudi­mentary intelligence.

"I know," he said slowly. "It means——"

"It means," said Mr. Fallon, taking the words out of his mouth, "that you get a pressure of thousands of millions of tons inside that nugget of molten iron; and when you break it open the diamond's inside."