13 The Saint Intervenes (Boodle)

He lifted the lid of his oil-can contraption, picked up the crucible with a pair of long iron tongs, and poured out a blob of luminous liquid metal the size of a small pear. There was a loud fizzing noise accompanied by a great burst of steam; and Louie replaced the lid of his cooler and looked at the Saint triumphantly through the fog.

"Now," he said, "in half a minute you'll see it with your own eyes."

The Saint opened his cigarette-case and tapped a cigarette thoughtfully on his thumbnail.

"How on earth did you hit on that?" he asked, with wide-eyed admiration.

"I used to be an assistant in a chemist's shop when I was a boy," said Louie casually. As a matter of fact, this was perfectly true, but he did not mention that his employment had terminated abruptly when the chemist discovered that his assistant had been systematically whittling down the con­tents of the till whenever he was left alone in the shop.

"I always liked playin' around with things and tryin' ex­periments, and I always believed it'd be possible to make perfectly good synthetic diamonds whatever the other experts said. And now I've proved it."

This also, curiously enough, was partly true. Improbable as it may seem, Mr. Fallon had his dreams—dreams in which he could produce unlimited quantities of gold or diamonds simply by mixing chemicals together in a pail, or vast stacks of genuine paper money merely by turning a handle. The psychologist, delving into Louie's dream-life, would probably have found the particular form of swindle which Mr. Fallon had made his own inexorably predestined by these curiously childish fantasies—a kind of spurious and almost self-defen­sive satisfaction of a congenital urge for easy money.

He rolled up his sleeves and plunged his bare arms into the cooling gadget with the rather wistful expression which he always wore when performing that part of his task. When he stood up again he was clutching a round grey stone glisten­ing with water; and for a moment or two he gazed at it dreamily. It was at this stage of the proceedings that Louie's histrionics invariably ran away with him—when, for two or three seconds, his imagination really allowed him to picture himself as the exponent of an earth-shaking scientific dis­covery, the genuine result of those futile experiments on which he had spent so much of his time and so much of the money which he had earned from the sham.

"There you are," he said. "There's your diamond—and any dealer in London would be glad to buy it. Here—take it yourself." He pressed the wet stone into Simon Templar's hand. "Show it to anyone you like, and if there's a dealer in London who wouldn't be glad to pay two hundred quid for it, I'll give you a thousand pounds." He picked up his glass again; and then, as if he had suddenly remembered the essential tone of his story, his face recovered its expression of uncontrollable gloom. "And I'm the unhappiest man in the world," he said lugubriously.

Simon raised his eyebrows.

"But good God!" he objected.  "How on earth can you be unhappy if you can turn out a two-hundred-pound diamond every half-hour?"

Louie shook his head.

"Because I haven't a chance to spend the money," he replied.

He led the way back dejectedly into the living-room and threw himself into a chair, thoughtfully refilling his glass before he did so.

"You see," he said, when Simon Templar had taken the chair opposite him with his glass also refilled. "A thing like this has got to be handled properly. It's no good my just making diamonds and trying to sell them. I might get away with one or two, but if I brought a sackful of them into a shop and tried to sell 'em the buyer would start to wonder whether I was trying to get rid of some illicit stuff. He'd want to ask all sorts of questions about where I got 'em, and as likely as not he'd call in the police. And what does that mean? It means that either I've got to say nothing and probably get taken for a crook and put in prison——" Louie's features registered profound horror at this frightful possi­bility. "Or else I've got to give away my secret. And if I said that I made the diamonds myself, they'd want me to prove it; and if I proved it, everybody would know it could be done, and the bottom would fall out of the diamond market. If people knew that anybody could make diamonds for threepence a time, diamonds just wouldn't be worth any­thing any more."

Simon nodded. The argument was logical and provided a very intriguing impasse. He waited for Mr. Fallon to point the way out.