Corrio barred his way with a gun as he got off the table.
"You stay where you are," he grated. "If you're trying to get away with some smart frame-up----"
Simon looked down at the gun.
"You talk altogether too much," he said evenly. "And I don't think you're going to be safe with that toy in a minute."
He hit Corrio very suddenly under the chin, grabbing the gun with his other hand as he did so. The gun went off crashingly as Corrio reeled backwards, but after that it remained in the Saint's hand. Corrio stood trembling against the wall, and Simon looked at Fernack again and rubbed his knuckles thoughtfully.
"Just to make sure," he said, "I fixed a dictagraph under the table yesterday. Let's see if it has anything to say."
Fernack watched him soberly as he prepared to play back the record. In Fernack's mind was the memory of a number of things which he had heard Corrio say which fitted into the picture which the Saint offered him much too vividly to be easily denied.
Then the dictagraph record began to play. And Fernack felt a faint shiver run up his spine at the uncannily accurate reproduction of Corrio's voice.
"Smart work, Leo. . . . I'll say these must be worth every penny of the price on them."
The other voice was unfamiliar.
"Hell, it was a cinch. The layout was just like you said. But how you goin' to fix it on the other guy?"
"That's easy. The broad gets him to fetch a parcel from Grand Central and take it where I tell her to tell him. When he gets there, I'm waiting for him."
"You're not goin' to risk givin' him all that stuff"
"Oh, don't be so thick. There 'll only be just enough in the parcel to frame him. Once he's caught, it'll be easy enough to plant the rest somewhere and find it."
Corrio's eyes were wide and staring.
"It's a plant!" he screamed hysterically. "That's a record of the scene I played in the film test I made yesterday."
Simon smiled politely, cutting open the upholstery of the armchair and fishing about for a leather pouch containing about fourteen hundred thousand dollars' worth of emeralds which should certainly be there unless somebody else had found them since he chose that ideal hiding place for his loot.
"I only hope you'll be able to prove it, Gladys," he murmured, and watched Fernack grasp Corrio's arm with purposeful efficiency.
III THE WELL-MEANING MAYOR
Sam purdell never quite knew how he became Mayor. He was a small and portly man with a round blank face and a round blank mind, who had built up a moderately profitable furniture business over the last thirty-five years and acquired in the process a round pudding-faced wife and a couple of suet dumplings of daughters; but the inexhaustible zeal for improving the circumstances and morals of the community, that fierce drive of ambition and the twitching of the ears for the ecstatic screams of "Heil" whenever he went abroad, that indomitable urge to be a leader of his people from which Hitlers and Mussolinis are born, was not naturally in him.
It is true that at the local reform club, of which he was a prominent member, he had often been stimulated by an appreciative audience and a large highball to lay down his views on the way in which he thought everything on earth ought to be run, from Japanese immigration to the permissible percentage of sulphur dioxide in dried apricots; but there was nothing outstandingly indicative of a political future in that. This is a disease which is liable to attack even the most honest and respectable citizens in such circumstances. But the idea that he himself should ever occupy the position in which he might be called upon to put all those beautiful ideas into practice had never entered Sam Purdell's head in those simple early days; and if it had not been for the drive supplied by Al Eisenfeld, it might never have materialized.
"You ought to be in politics, Sam," Al had insisted, at the close of one of these perorations several years before.
Sam Purdell considered the suggestion.
"No, I wouldn't be clever enough," he said modestly.
To tell the truth, he had heard the suggestion before, had repudiated it before and had always wanted to hear it contradicted. Al Eisenfeld obliged him. It was the first time anybody had been so obliging.
This was three years before the columnist of the Elmford News was moved to inquire:
"How long does our mayor think he can kid reporters and deputations with his celebrated pose of injured innocence?
"We always thought it was a good act while it lasted; but isn't it time we had a new show?"
It was not the first time that it had been suggested in print that the naive and childlike simplicity which was Sam Purdell's greatest charm was one of the shrewdest fronts for ingenious corruption which any politician had ever tried to put over on a batch of sane electors, but this was the nearest that any commentator had ever dared to come to saying that Sam Purdell was a crook.
It was a suggestion which left Sam a pained and puzzled man. He couldn't understand it. These adopted children of his, these citizens whose weal occupied his mind for twenty-four hours a day, were turning round to bite the hand that fed them. And the unkindest cut of all, the blow which struck at the roots of his faith in human gratitude, was that he had only tried to do his best for the city which had been delivered into his care.
For instance, there was the time when, dragged forth by the energy of one of his rotund daughters, he had climbed laboriously one Sunday afternoon to the top of the range of hills which shelter Elmford on the north. When he had got his wind and started looking round, he realized that from that vantage point there was a view which might have rejoiced the heart of any artist. Sam Purdell was no artist, but he blinked with simple pleasure at the panorama of rolling hills and wooded groves with the river winding between them like the track of a great silver snail; and when he came home again he had a beautiful idea.
"You know, we got one of the finest views in the state up there on those hills! I never saw it before, and I bet you didn't either. And why? Because there ain't no road goes up there; and when you get to my age it ain't so easy to go scrambling up through those trees and brush."
"So what?" asked Al Eisenfeld, who was even less artistic and certainly more practical.
"So I tell you what we do," said Sam, glowing with the ardour of his enthusiasm almost as much as with the aftereffects of his unaccustomed exercise. "We build a highway up there so they can drive out in their automobiles week ends and look around comfortably. It makes work for a lot of men, and it don't cost too much; and everybody in Elmford can get a lot of free pleasure out of it. Why, we might even get folks coming from all over the country to look at our view."
He elaborated this inspiration with spluttering eagerness, and before he had been talking for more than a quarter of an hour he had a convert.
"Sure, this is a great idea, Sam," agreed Mr Eisenfeld warmly. "You leave it to me. Why, I know--we'll call it the Purdell Highway. . . ."
The Purdell Highway duly came into being at a cost of four million dollars. Al Eisenfeld saw to it. In the process of pushing Sam Purdell up the political tree he had engineered himself into the strategic post of Chairman of the Board of Aldermen, a position which gave him an interfering interest in practically all the activities of the city. The fact that the cost was about twice as much as the original estimate was due to the unforeseen obstinacy of the owner of the land involved, who held out for about four times the price which it was worth. There were rumours that someone in the administration had acquired the territory under another name shortly before the deal was proposed, and had sold it to the city at his own price--rumours which shocked Sam Purdell to the core of his sensitive soul.