The taciturnity of Max Kemmler was a more recent thorn in Mr. Teal's side.
Max Kemmler was a Dane by birth and an American by naturalization. The phase of his career in which the United States Federal Authorities were interested started in St. Louis, when he drifted into Egan's Rats and carved the first notches in his gun. Prudently, he left St. Louis during an election clean-up and reappeared in Philadelphia as a strong-arm man in a newsstand racket. That lasted him six months, and he left in a hurry; the tabs caught up with him in New York, where he went over big for a couple of years as typewriter expert in an East Side liquor mob. He shot up the wrong speakie one night after a celebration and was lucky to be able to make a passage to Cherbourg on a French liner that sailed at dawn the next morning. How he got past the passport barriers into England was something of a mystery. He was down on the deportation list, but Scotland Yard was holding up in the hope of an extradition warrant.
He was a thick-shouldered man of middle height, with a taste for camel-hair coats and very light grey Homburgs. Those who had been able to keep on the right side of him in the States called him a good guy — certainly he could put forth a rugged geniality, when it suited him, which had its appeal for lesser lights who reckoned it a privilege to be slapped on the back by the notorious Max Kemmler. His cigars were uniformly expensive, and the large diamond set in the corner of his black onyx signet ring conveyed an impression of great substance — he had been paying for it at the rate of $32.85 a month until the laborious working-out of the instalment system bored him, and he changed his address.
Max knew from the time he landed that his days in England were numbered, but it was not in his nature to pass up any profitable enterprise on that account. In a very short space of time he had set up a club in a quiet street off the Edgware Road, of which the police had yet to learn. The club boasted a boule and a blackjack table, as well as a chemin-de-fer game which was always going: everything was as straight as a die, for Max Kemmler knew that gambling does not need to be crooked to show a long dividend for the bank; The chemin-de-fer players paid ten per cent of their winnings to the management, and even the smallest chips were priced at half a sovereign. Max did the steering himself and paid his croupiers generously, but he was the only one who made enough out of it to live at the Savoy and put three figures of real money away in his wallet every week in addition.
He had dinner one night with his chief croupier before going to open the club, and it happened that there was a zealous young detective-sergeant from Vine Street at the next table. It was a small and inexpensive chophouse in Soho, and the detective was not there on business; neither did Max Kemmler know him, for the gambling club was in a different division.
Half-way through the meal Max remembered an enigmatic telephone call that had been put through to his room while he was breakfasting, and asked the croupier about it.
"You ever heard of a guy called Saint?" he queried, and the croupier's jaw fell open.
"Good God! — you haven't heard from him?"
Max Kemmler was surprised, to say the least of it.
"Yeah — he phoned me," he replied guardedly. "What's the matter with you? Is he the wheels in this city?"
The croupier acknowledged, in his own idiom, that Simon Templar was the wheels. He was a tall, hard-faced man, with iron-grey hair, bushy grey eyebrows and moustache, and the curried complexion of a rather decayed retired major; and he knew much more about the Saint that a law-abiding member of the community should have known. He gave Max Kemmler all the information he wanted, but Max was not greatly impressed.
"What you mean is he's a kind of hijacker, is he? Hard-boiled, huh? I didn't know you'd got any racket like that over here. And he figures I ought to pay him for 'protection.' That's funny!" Max Kemmler was grimly amused. "Well, I'd like to see him try it."
"He's tried a lot of things like that and got away with them, Mr. Kemmler," said the croupier awkwardly.
Max turned down one corner of his mouth.
"Yeah? So have I. I guess I'm pretty tough myself, what I mean."
He had a reminder of the conversation the next morning, when a plump and sleepy-looking man called and introduced himself as Chief Inspector Teal.
"I hear you've had a warning from the Saint, Kemmler — one of our men heard you talking about it last night."
Max had done some thinking overnight. He was not expecting to — be interviewed by Mr. Teal, but he had his own ideas on the subject that the detective raised.
"What of it?"
"We want to get the Saint, Kemmler. You might be able to help us. Why not tell me some more about it?"
Max Kemmler grinned.
"Sure. Then you know just why the Saint's interested in me, and I can take the rap with him. That dick at the next table ought to have listened some more — then he could have told you I was warned about that one. No, thanks, Teal! The Saint and me are just buddies together, and he called me to ask me to a party. I'm not saying he mightn't get out of line sometime, but I can look after that. He might kind of meet with an accident."
It was not the first time that Teal had been met with a similar lack of enthusiasm, and he knew the meaning of the word "no" when it was pushed up to him in a certain way. He departed heavily; and Simon Templar, who was sipping a Dry Sack within view of the vestibule, watched him go.
"You might think Claud Eustace really wanted to arrest me," he remarked, as the detective's broad back passed through the doors.
His companion, a young man with the air of a gentlemanly prize-fighter, smiled sympathetically. His position was privileged, for it was not many weeks since the Saint's cheerful disregard for the ordinances of the law had lifted him out of a singularly embarrassing situation with a slickness that savoured of sorcery. After all, when you have been youthfully and foolishly guilty of embezzling a large sum of money from your employers in order to try and recoup the losses of an equally youthful and foolish speculation, and a cheque for the missing amount is slipped into your hands by a perfect stranger, you are naturally inclined to see that stranger's indiscretions in an unusual light.
"I wish I had your life," said the young man — his name was Peter Quentin, and he was still very young.
"Brother," said the Saint good-humouredly, "if you had my life you'd have to have my death, which will probably be a sticky one without wreaths. Max Kemmler is a tough egg all right, and you never know."
Peter Quentin stretched out his legs with a wry grimace.
"I don't know that it isn't worth it. Here am I, an A1 proposition to any insurance company, simply wasting everything I've got with no prospect of ever doing anything else. You saved me from getting pushed in the clink, but of course there was no hope of my keeping any job. They were very nice and friendly when I confessed and paid in your cheque, but they gave me the air all the same. You can't help seeing their point of view. Once I'd done a thing like that I was a risk to the company, and next time they mightn't have been so lucky. The result is that I'm one of the great unemployed, and no dole either. If I ever manage to get another job, I shall have to consider myself well off if I'm allowed to sit at an office desk for two hundred and seventy days out of the year, while I get fat and pasty and dream about the pension that'll be no use to me when I'm sixty."