"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."
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.