Also he still had a good deal of capital, without which no Green Goods man can even begin to operate.
Benny Lucek was one of the last great exponents of that gentle graft; and although they had been telling him in New York that the game was played out, he had roseate hopes of finding virgin soil for a new crop of successes among the benighted bourgeoisie of Europe. So far as he knew, the Green Goods ground had scarcely been touched on the eastern side of the Atlantic, and Benny had come across to look it over. He installed himself in a comfortable suite on the third floor of the Park Lane Hotel, changed his capital into English banknotes, and sent out his feelers into space.
In the most popular Personal Columns appeared temptingly-worded advertisements of which the one that Simon Templar saw was a fair specimen.
ANY LADY or GENTLEMAN in reduced circumstances,—
who would be interested in an enterprise showing GREAT
PROFITS for a NEGLIGIBLE RISK, should write in
STRICT CONFIDENCE, giving some personal information,
to Box No.—
Benny Lucek knew everything there was to know about letters. He was a practical graphologist of great astuteness, and a deductive psychologist of vast experience. Given a two-page letter which on the surface conveyed the vaguest particulars about the writer, he could build up in his mind a character study with a complete background filled in that fitted his subject without a wrinkle ninety-nine times out of a hundred; and if the mental picture he formed of a certain Mr. Tombs, whose reply to that advertisement was included among several scores of others, was one of the hundredth times, it might not have been entirely Benny's fault. Simon Templar was also a specialist in letters, although his art was creative instead of critical.
Patricia came in one morning and found him performing another creative feat at which he was no less adept.
"What on earth are you doing in those clothes?" she asked, when she had looked at him.
Simon glanced over himself in the mirror. His dark blue suit was neat but unassuming, and had a well-worn air as if it were the only one he possessed and had been cared for with desperate pride. His shoes were old and strenuously polished; his socks dark grey and woollen, carefully darned. He wore a cheap pin-striped poplin shirt, and a stiff white collar without one saving grace of line. His tie was dark blue, like his suit, and rather stringy. Across his waistcoat hung an old-fashioned silver watch-chain. Anything less like the Simon Templar of normal times, who always somehow infused into the suits of Savile Row a flamboyant personality of his own, and whose shirts and socks and ties were the envy of the young men who drank with him in a few clubs to which he belonged, it would have been almost impossible to imagine.
"I am a hard-working clerk in an insurance office, earning three hundred a year with the dim prospect of rising to three hundred and fifty in another fifteen years, age about forty, with an anaemic wife and seven children and a semi-detached house at Streatham." He was fingering his face speculatively, staring at it in the glass. "A little too beautiful for the part at present, I think; but we'll soon put that right."
He set to work on his face with the quick unhesitating touches of which he was such an amazing master. His eyebrows, brushed in towards his nose, turned grey and bushy; his hair also turned grey, and was plastered down to his skull so skilfully that it seemed inevitable that any barber he went to would remark that he was running a little thin on top. Under the movements of his swift fingers, cunning shadows appeared at the sides of his forehead, under his eyes, and around his chin — shadows so faint that even at a yard's range their artificiality could not have been detected, and yet so cleverly placed that they seemed to change the whole shape and expression of his face. And while he worked he talked.
"If you ever read a story-book, Pat, in which anyone disguises himself as someone else so perfectly that the impersonated bloke's own friends and secretaries and servants are taken in, you'll know there's an author who's cheating on you. On the stage it might be done up to a point; but in real life, where everything you put on has got to get by in broad daylight and close-ups, it's impossible. I," said the Saint unblushingly, "am the greatest character actor that never went on the stage, and I know. But when it comes to inventing a new character of your own that mustn't be recognised again — then you can do things."
He turned around suddenly, and she gasped. He was perfect. His shoulders were rounded and stooping; his head was bent slightly forward, as if set in that position by years of poring over ledgers. And he gazed at her with the dumb passionless expression of his part — an under-nourished, under-exercised, middle-aged man without hopes or ambitions, permanently worried, crushed out of pleasure by the wanton taxation which goes to see that the paladins of Whitehall are never deprived of an afternoon's golf, utterly resigned to the sombre purposelessness of his existence, scraping and pinching through fifty weeks in the year in order to let himself be stodgily swindled at the seaside for a fortnight in August, solemnly discussing the antics of politicians as if they really mattered and honestly believing that their cow-like utterances might do something to alleviate his burdens, holding a crumbling country together with his own dour stoicism and the stoicism of millions of his own kind…
"Will I do?" he asked.
From Benny Lucek's point of view he could scarcely have done better. Benny's keen eyes absorbed the whole atmosphere of him in one calculating glance that took in every detail from the grey hair that was running a little thin on top down to the strenuously polished shoes.
"Pleased to meet you, Mr. Tombs. Come along and have a cocktail — I expect you could do with one."
He led his guest into the sumptuous lounge, and Mr. Tombs sat down gingerly on the edge of a chair. It is impossible to refer to that man of the Saint's creation as anything but "Mr. Tombs" — the Simon Templar whom Patricia knew might never have existed inside that stoical stoop-shouldered frame.
"Er — a glass of sherry, perhaps," he said.
Benny ordered Dry Sack, and knew that the only sherry Mr. Tombs had ever tasted before came from the nearest grocer. But he was an expert at putting strangers at their ease, and the Simon Templar who stood invisibly behind Mr. Tombs's chair had to admire his technique. He chattered away with a disarming lack of condescension that presently had Mr. Tombs leaning back and chuckling with him, and ordering a return round of Dry Sack with the feeling that he had at last met a successful man who really understood and appreciated him. They went in to lunch with Benny roaring with infectious laughter over a vintage Stock Exchange story which Mr. Tombs had dug out of his memory.
"Smoked salmon, Mr. Tombs? Or a spot of caviare?.. Then we might have oeufs en cocotte Rossini — done in cream with foie gras and truffles. And roast pigeons with mushrooms and red currant jelly. I like a light meal in the middle of the day — it doesn't make you sleepy all the afternoon. And a bottle of Liebfraumilch off the ice to go with it?"
He ran through menu and wine list with an engaging expertness which somehow made Mr. Tombs an equal partner in the exercise of gastronomic virtuosity. And Mr. Tombs, whose imagination had rarely soared above roast beef and Yorkshire pudding and a bottle of Australian burgundy, thawed still further and recalled another story that had provoked howls of laughter in Threadneedle Street when he was in his twenties.
Benny did his work so well that the sordid business aspect of their meeting never had a chance to obtrude itself during the meal; and yet he managed to find out everything he wanted to know about his guest's private life and opinions. Liquefying helplessly in the genial warmth of Benny's hospitality, Mr. Tombs became almost human. And Benny drew him on with unhurried mastery.