As a matter of fact, they were standing outside a miraculously convenient hostel at that moment—Louie Fallon had always believed in bringing the mellowing influence of alcohol to bear as soon as he had scraped his acquaintance, and he staged his encounters with that idea in view.
With practised dexterity he steered the Saint towards the door of the saloon bar, cutting short the protest which Simon Templar had no intention whatsoever of making. In hardly any more time than it takes to record, he had got the Saint inside the bar, parked him at a table, invited him to name his poison, procured a double ration of the said poison from the barmaid, and settled himself in the adjoining chair to improve the shining hour. To the discerning critic it might seem that he rushed at the process rather like an unleashed investor plunging after an absconding company promoter; but Louie Fallen's conception of improving shining hours had never included any unnecessary waste of time, and he had learnt by experience that the willingness of the species Mug to listen is usually limited only by the ability of the flatcatcher to talk.
"Yes," said Mr. Fallon, reverting to his subject. "I am the unluckiest man you are ever likely to meet. Did you see that diamond I dropped just now?"
"Well," admitted the Saint truthfully, "I couldn't help seeing it."
Mr. Fallon nodded. He fumbled in his waistcoat pocket, brought out the jewel again, and laid it on the table.
"I made that myself," he said.
Simon eyed the stone and Mr. Fallon with the puzzled expression which was expected of him.
"What do you mean—you made it?"
"I made it myself," said Mr. Fallon. "It's what you would call synthetic. It took about half an hour, and it cost me exactly threepence. But there isn't a diamond merchant in London who could prove that it wasn't dug up out of the ground in South Africa. Take it to anyone you like, and see if he does swear that it's a perfectly genuine stone."
"You mean it's a fake?" said the Saint.
"Fake my eye!" said Mr. Fallon, with emphatic if inelegant expressiveness. "It's a perfectly genuine diamond, the same as any other stone you'll ever seen. The only difference is that I made it. You know how diamonds are made?"
The Saint had as good an idea of how diamonds are made as Louie Fallon was ever likely to have; but it seemed as if Louie liked talking, and in such circumstances as that Simon Templar was the last man on earth to interfere with anyone's enjoyment. He shook his head blankly.
"I thought they sort of grew," he said vaguely.
"I don't know that I should put it exactly like that," said Louie. "I'll tell you how diamonds happen. Diamonds are just carbon—like coal, or soot, or—or——"•
"Paper?" suggested the Saint helpfully.
Louie frowned.
"They're carbon," he said, "which is crystallised under pressure. When the earth was all sort of hot, like you read about in your history books—before it sort of cooled down and people started to live in it and things grew on it—there was a lot of carbon. Being hot, it burnt things, and when you burn things you usually get carbon. Well, after a time, when the earth started to cool down, it sort of shrunk, like—like——"
"A shirt when it goes to the wash?" said the Saint.
"Anyway, it shrunk," said Louie, yielding the point and passing on. "And what happened then?"
"It got smaller," hazarded the Saint.
"It caused terrific pressure," said Mr. Fallen firmly. "Just imagine it. Thousands of millions of tons of rock—and—"
"And rock."
"And rock, cooling down, and shrinking up, and getting hard. Well, naturally, any bits of carbon that were floating around in the rock got squeezed. So what happened?" demanded Louie, triumphantly reaching the climax of his lucid description.
He paused dramatically, and the Saint wondered whether he was expected to offer any serious solution to the riddle; but before he had really made up his mind, Mr. Fallon was solving the problem for him.
"I'll tell you what happened," said Mr. Fallon impressively, leaning over into a strategic position in which he could tap the Saint on the shoulder. Once again he paused, but there was no doubt that this hiatus at least was motivated solely by the requirements of theatrical suspense. "Diamonds!" said Mr. Fallon, with an air of patronising pride which almost suggested that he personally had been responsible for the event.
The Saint took a draught from his glass, and gazed at him with that air of slightly perplexed awe which was one of the most precious assets in his infinitely varied stock of facial expressions. It was a gaze pregnant with so much ingenuous interest, such naive wonder and curiosity, that Mr. Fallon felt the cockles of his heart warming to a temperature at which, on a cold day, he would be tempted to dispense with his overcoat. Since he was not wearing an overcoat, he gave rein to his emotions by insisting that he should stand another round of drinks.
"Yes," he resumed, when he had refilled their glasses. "Diamonds. And that's how I make them—not," he admitted modestly, "that I mean I make the earth go hot and then cool down again. But I do the same thing on a smaller scale."
The Saint knitted his brows. It was the most ostentatious sign of a functioning brain that he could permit himself in the part he was playing.
"Now you tell me, I think I have heard something like that before," he said. "Hasn't somebody else done the same thing—I mean made synthetic diamonds by cooling chunks of iron under pressure?"
"I did hear of something on those lines," confessed Mr. Fallon magnanimously. "But the process wasn't any good. They could only make very small diamonds that weren't worth anything in the market and cost ten times as much as real ones. I make 'em with things that you can buy in any chemist's shop for a few pennies. I don't even need a proper laboratory. I could make 'em in your bathroom." He drank, wiped his lips and looked at the Saint suddenly with bright plaintive eyes. "You don't believe me," he said accusingly.
"Why—yes, of course I do," protested the Saint, changing his expression with a guilty start.
Mr. Fallon continued to shake his head.
"No, you don't," he insisted morbidly, "and I can't blame you. I know it sounds like a tall story. But I'm not a liar."
"Of course not," agreed the Saint hastily.
"I'm not a liar," insisted Mr. Fallon lingeringly, as if he was simply aching to be called one. "Anyone who calls me a liar is goin' to have to eat his words." He was silent for a moment, while the idea appeared to develop in his mind; and then he slued round in his seat abruptly, and tapped the Saint on the shoulder again.
"Look here—I'll prove it to you. You're a sport—we ran into each other just now as perfect strangers, and now here you are havin' a drink with me. I don't know whether you believe in concidences," said Louie, waxing metaphysical, "but you might be the very fellow I'm lookin' for. I like a chap who isn't too damned stand-offish to have a drink with another chap without being introduced, and when I like a chap there isn't a limit to what I wouldn't mind doin' for him. Why, you might be the very chap. Well, what d'you say?"
"I didn't say anything," said the Saint innocently.
"What d'you say I prove to you that I can make diamonds? If you can spare half an hour—it wouldn't take much more than that and you might find it interesting. Are you game ?"
Simon Templar was game. To put it perhaps a trifle crudely, such occasions as this found him so game that a two-year-old pheasant would have had to rise exceedingly high to catch him. Life, he felt, was still very much worth living while blokes like Louie Fallen were almost falling over themselves with eagerness to call you a Chap. To follow up the metaphor with which he was allowed to open this episode, he considered that Mr. Fallon was certainly doing a swell line of clucking, and he was profoundly interested to find out exactly what brand of egg would be the fruit thereof.
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.