Mr. Tombs suppressed a perfunctory tear, and accompanied Benny to his suite. A couple of well-worn suit-cases and a wardrobe trunk the size of a suburban villa, all ready stacked up and labelled, confirmed Benny's avowed intentions. Only one of the parcels of currency was visible, pushed untidily to one end of the table.
"Did you bring the money, Mr. Tombs?"
Mr. Tombs took out his battered wallet and drew forth a sheaf of crisp new fivers with slightly unsteady hands. Benny took them, glanced over them casually, and dropped them on to the table with the carelessness befitting a millionaire. He waved Mr. Tombs into an armchair with his back to the window, and himself sat down in a chair drawn up to the opposite side of the table.
"Two thousand one-pound notes are quite a lot to put in your pocket," he remarked. "I'll make them up into a parcel for you."
Under Mr. Tombs's yearning eyes he flipped off the four top bundles from the pile and tossed them one by one into his guest's lap. Mr. Tombs grabbed them and examined them hungrily, spraying the edges of each pack off his thumb so that pound notes whirred before his vision like the pictures on a toy cinematograph.
"You can count them if you like — there ought to be five hundred in each pack," said Benny; but Mr. Tombs shook his head.
"I'll take your word for it, Mr. Lucek. I can see they're all one-pound notes, and there must be a lot of them."
Benny smiled and held out his hand with a businesslike air. Mr. Tombs passed the bundles back to him, and Benny sat down again and arranged them in a neat cube on top of a sheet of brown paper. He turned the paper over the top and creased it down at the open ends with a rapid efficiency that would have done credit to any professional shop assistant; and Mr. Tombs's covetous eyes watched every movement with the intentness of a dumb but earnest audience trying to spot how a conjuring trick is done.
"Don't you think it would be a ghastly tragedy for a poor widow who put all her savings into these notes and then found that she had been — um — deceived?" said Mr. Tombs morbidly; and Benny's dark eyes switched up to his face in sudden startlement.
"Eh?" said Benny. "What's that?"
But Mr. Tombs's careworn face had the innocence of a patient sheep's.
"Just something I was thinking, Mr. Lucek," he said.
Benny grinned his expansive display of pearly teeth, and continued with his packing. Mr. Tombs's gaze continued to concentrate on him with an almost mesmeric effect; but Benny was not disturbed. He had spent nearly an hour that morning making and testing his preparations. The upper sash-cords of the window behind Mr. Tombs's chair had been cut through all but the last thread, and the weight of the sash was carried on a small steel peg driven into the frame. From the steel peg a thin but very strong dark-coloured string ran down to the floor, pulleyed round a nail driven into the base of the wainscoting, and disappeared under the carpet; it pulleyed round another nail driven into the floor under the table, and came up through a hole in the carpet alongside one leg to loop conveniently over the handle of the drawer.
Benny completed the knots around his parcel, and searched around for something to trim off the loose ends.
"There you are, Mr. Tombs," he said and then, in his fumbling, he caught the convenient loop of string and tugged at it. The window fell with a crash.
And Mr. Tombs did not look around.
It was the most flabbergasting thing that had ever happened in Benny Lucek's experience. It was supernatural — incredible. It was a phenomenon so astounding that Benny's mouth fell open involuntarily, while a balloon of incredulous stupefaction bulged up in the pit of his stomach and cramped his lungs. There came over him the feeling of preposterous injury that would have assailed a practised bus-jumper who, preparing to board a moving bus as it came by, saw it evade him by rising vertically into the air and soaring away over the housetops. It was simply one of the things that did not happen.
And on this fantastic occasion it happened. In the half-opened drawer that pressed against Benny's tummy, just below the level of the table and out of range of Mr. Tombs's glassy stare, was another brown paper parcel exactly similar in every respect to the one which Benny was finishing off. Outwardly, that is. Inside, there was a difference; for whereas inside the parcel which Benny had prepared before Mr. Tombs's eyes there were undoubtedly two thousand authentic one-pound notes, inside the second parcel there was only a collection of old newspapers and magazines cut to precisely the same size. And never before in Benny's career, once the fish had taken the hook, had those two parcels failed to be successfully exchanged. That was what the providentially falling window was arranged for, and it constituted the whole simple secret of the green goods game. The victim, when he got home and opened the parcel and discovered how he had been swindled, could not make a complaint to the police without admitting that he himself had been ready to aid and abet a fraud; and forty-nine times out of fifty he would decide that it was better to stand the loss and keep quiet about it. Elementary, but effective. And yet the whole structure could be scuppered by the unbelievable apathy of a victim who failed to react to the stimulus of a loud bang as any normal human being should have reacted.
"The — the window seems to have fallen down," Benny pointed out hoarsely; and felt like a hero of a melodrama who has just shot the villain in the appointed place at the end of the third act, and sees him smilingly declining to fall down and die according to the rehearsed script.
"Yes," agreed Mr. Tombs cordially. "I heard it."
"The — the sash-cords must have broken."
"Probably that's what it was."
"Funny thing to happen so — so suddenly, wasn't it?"
"Very funny," assented Mr. Tombs, keeping up the conversation politely.
Benny began to sweat. The substitute parcel was within six inches of his hovering hands: given only two seconds with the rapt stare of those unblinking eyes diverted from him, he could have rung the changes as easily as unbuttoning his shirt; but the chance was not given. It was an impasse that he had never even dreamed of, and the necessity of thinking up something to cope with it on the spur of the moment stampeded him to the borders of panic.
"Have you got a knife?" asked Benny, with perspiring heartiness. "Something to cut off this end of string?"
"Let me break it for you," said Mr. Tombs.
He stood up and moved towards the table; and Benny shied like a horse.
"Don't bother, please, Mr. Tombs," he gulped. "I'll — I'll —"
"No trouble at all," said Mr. Tombs.
Benny grabbed the parcel, and dropped it. He was a very fine strategist and dramatic reciter, but he was not a man of violence — otherwise he might have been tempted to act differently. That grab and drop was the last artifice he could think of to save the day.
He pushed his chair back and bent down, groping for the fallen parcel with one hand and the substitute parcel with the other. In raising the fallen packet past the table the exchange might be made.
His left hand found the parcel on the floor. His right hand went on groping. It ran up and down the drawer, sensitively at first, then frantically. It plunged backwards and forwards. His fingernails scrabbled on the wood… He became aware that he couldn't stay in that position indefinitely, and began to straighten up slowly, with a cold sensation closing on his heart. And as his eyes came up to the level of the drawer he saw that the dummy parcel had somehow got pushed right away to the back: for all the use it would have been to him there it might have been in the middle of the Arizona desert.
Mr. Tombs smiled blandly.
"It's quite easy, really," he said.
He took the parcel from Benny's nerveless hand, put it on the table, twisted the loose end of string round his forefinger, and jerked. It snapped off clean and short.