"I've always thought that insurance must be an interesting profession, Mr. Tombs. You've got to be pretty wide awake for it, too — I expect you always have clients who expect to take more out of you than they put in?"
Mr. Tombs, who had never found his job interesting, and who would never have detected an attempted fraud unless another department had pointed it out to him, smiled noncommittally.
"That kind of mixed morality has always interested me," said Benny, as if the point had only just occurred to him. "A man who wouldn't steal a sixpence from a man he met in the street hasn't any objection to stealing half-crowns from the Government by cutting down his income tax return or smuggling home a bottle of brandy when he comes across from France. If he's looking for a partner in business he wouldn't dream of putting a false value on his assets; but if his house is burgled he doesn't mind what value he puts on his things when he's making out his insurance claim."
Mr. Tombs shrugged.
"I suppose Governments and wealthy public companies are considered fair game," he hazarded.
"Well, probably there's a certain amount of lawlessness in the best of us," admitted Benny. "I've often wondered what I should do myself in certain circumstances. Suppose, for instance, you were going home in a taxi one night, and you found a wallet on the seat with a thousand pounds in it. Small notes that you could easily change. No name inside to show who the owner was. Wouldn't one be tempted to keep it?"
Mr. Tombs twiddled a fork, hesitating only for a second or two. But the Simon Templar who stood behind his chair knew that that was the question on which Benny Lucek's future hung — the point that had been so casually and skilfully led up to, which would finally settle whether "Mr. Tombs" was the kind of man Benny wanted to meet. And yet there was no trace of anxiety or watchfulness in Benny's frank open face.
Benny tilted the last of the Liebfraumilch into Mr. Tombs's glass, and Mr. Tombs looked up.
"I suppose I should. It sounds dishonest, but I was trying to put myself in the position of being faced with the temptation, instead of theorising about it. Face to face with a thousand pounds in cash, and needing money to take my wife abroad, I might easily — er — succumb. Not that I mean to imply —"
"My dear fellow, I'm not going to blame you," said Benny heartily. "I'd do the same thing myself. I'd reason it out that a man who carried a thousand pounds in cash about with him had plenty more in the bank. It's the old story of fair game. We may be governed by plenty of laws, but our consciences are still very primitive when we've no fear of being caught."
There was a silence after that, in which Mr. Tombs finished his last angel on horseback, mopped the plate furtively with the last scrap of toast, and accepted a cigarette from Benny's platinum case. The pause gave him his first chance to remember that he was meeting the sympathetic Mr. Lucek in order to hear about a business proposition — as Benny intended that it should. As a waiter approached with the bill, Mr. Tombs said tentatively: "About your — um — advertisement —"
Benny scrawled his signature across the account, and pushed back his chair.
"Come up to my sitting-room and we'll talk about it."
They went up in the lift, with Benny unconcernedly puffing Turkish cigarette smoke, and down an expensively carpeted corridor. Benny had an instinctive sense of dramatic values. Without saying anything, and yet at the same time without giving the impression that he was being intentionally reticent, he opened the door of his suite and ushered Mr. Tombs in.
The sitting-room was small but cosily furnished. A large carelessly-opened paper parcel littered the table in the centre, and there was a similar amount of litter in one of the chairs. Benny picked up an armful of it and dumped it on the floor in the corner.
"Know what these things are?" he asked off-handedly.
He took up a handful of the litter that remained on the chair and thrust it under Mr. Tombs's nose. It was generally green in colour; as Mr. Tombs blinked at it, words and patterns took shape on it, and he blinked still harder.
"Pound notes," said Benny. He pointed to the pile he had dumped in the corner. "More of 'em." He flattened the brown paper around the carelessly-opened parcel on the table, revealing neat stacks of treasure packed in thick uniform bundles. "Any amount of it. Help yourself."
Mr. Tombs's blue eyes went wider and wider, with the lids blinking over them rapidly as if to dispel an hallucination.
"Are they — are they really all pound notes?"
"Every one of 'em."
"All yours?"
"I guess so. I made 'em, anyway."
"There must be thousands."
Benny flung himself into the cleared armchair.
"I'm about the richest man in the world, Mr. Tombs," he said. "I guess I must be the richest, because I can make money as fast as I can turn a handle. I meant exactly what I said to you just now. I made those notes!"
Mr. Tombs touched the pile with his finger tips, as if he half expected them to bite him. His eyes were rounder and wider than ever.
"You don't mean — forgeries?" he whispered.
"I don't," said Benny. "Take those notes to the nearest bank — tell the cashier you have doubts about them — and ask him to look them over. Take 'em to the Bank of England. There isn't a forgery in the whole lot — but I made 'em! Sit down and I'll tell you."
Mr. Tombs sat down, stiffly. His eyes kept straying back to the heaps of wealth on the floor and the table, as though at each glance he would have been relieved rather than surprised if they had vanished.
"It's like this, Mr. Tombs. I'm taking you into my confidence because I've known you a couple of hours and I've made up my mind about you. I like you. Those notes, Mr. Tombs, were printed from a proof plate that was stolen out of the Bank of England itself by a fellow who worked there. He was in the engraving department, and when they were making the plates they made one more than they needed. It was given to him to destroy — and he didn't destroy it. He was like the man we were talking about — the man in the taxi. He had a genuine plate that would print genuine pound notes, and he could keep it for himself if he wanted to. All he had to do was to make an imitation plate that no one was going to examine closely — you can't tell a lot from a plate, just looking at it — and cut a couple of lines across it to cancel it. Then that would be locked up in the vaults and probably never looked at again, and he'd have the real one. He didn't even know quite what he'd do with the plate when he had it, but he kept it. And then he got scared about it being found out, and he ran away. He went over to New York, where I come from.
"He stopped in the place I lived at, over in Brooklyn. I got to know him a bit, though he was always very quiet and seemed to have something on his mind. I didn't ask what it was, and I didn't care. Then he got pneumonia.
"Nobody else had ever paid any attention to him, so it seemed to be up to me. I did what I could for him — it didn't amount to much, but he appreciated it. I paid some of the rent he owed. The doctor found he was half starved — he'd landed in New York with just a few pounds, and when those were gone he'd lived on the leavings he could beg from chop houses. He was starving himself to death with a million pounds in his grip! But I didn't know that then. He got worse and worse; and then they had to give him oxygen one night, but the doctor said he wouldn't see the morning anyhow. He'd starved himself till he was too weak to get well again.
"He came to just before the end, and I was with him. He just looked at me and said: 'Thanks, Benny.' And then he told me all about himself and what he'd done. 'You keep the plate,' he said. 'It may be some good to you.'