“But if a few fumes like that can kill someone, from something that everybody uses, why aren’t people dropping dead all the time?”
“It’s a wonder it doesn’t happen more often. Everyone thinks carbon tet is harmless, but that’s because it doesn’t catch fire or explode. The fumes are quite poisonous — a concentration of five thousand parts per million, with an exposure of only five minutes, can cause damage that may be fatal after a week’s illness. That is, about a quart of fluid vaporized in a small space like the dressing-room where the subject slept.”
“Do you mean he was using a whole quart bottle of cleaning fluid?”
“Certainly not. But neither was he exposed for only five minutes. That’s why the average user gets away with it — even if they’re leaning over the thing they’re cleaning and inhaling lots of fumes, they don’t do it for long. The subject slept in this small room for more than four hours. In that length of time, a few ounces could have fatal results. And on top of this, there was one other factor which I was careful to emphasize.”
Simon figured that he had eaten his humble pie, so he was no longer obligated to play guessing games.
“Which was that?”
“Now, really, I should have thought any detective would have spotted that one. I refer to the fact that the subject had been drinking heavily. For some reason which is not yet fully understood, alcohol sharply reduces the ability of the liver and kidneys to detoxify carbon tetrachloride. So that for a person who is under the influence, the probably lethal dose can be cut by about thirty per cent. Put these factors together, and you can calculate that it didn’t take any extraordinary amount of fluid to kill the subject I told you about, in the circumstances I described.”
The Saint thoughtfully finished his soup, enjoying it every bit as much as the doctor had enjoyed his, and considered various angles while the traditionally venerable club waiter was replacing it with a plate of delicately browned sole meunière.
Then he said, “Perhaps it’s just as well more people don’t know all that, or there might be a whole rash of mysterious murders.”
“Don’t you believe it,” Javers said scornfully. “Carbon tet evaporates, yes, but it isn’t undetectable. Any good pathologist would recognize the effects at once, from the way it dissolves the fat in the body organs — just as it dissolves grease spots from your clothes. So any murderer who was planning to use it would have to be damn sure it could be taken for an accident. And that’s the problem with practically any other poison, as you must know.”
Simon nodded respectfully. He could see no flaw that would be a handicap to him.
He knew that his subject slept in a small room and went to bed well marinated in alcohol every night, and he could safely assume that Pierrot-le-Fût slept with the shutters tightly closed, like the average Frenchman of his class, in defense against the deleterious miasmas of the night. He also knew the hours during which Yvonne Norval would be scouring and vacuuming the corridors of the George V, consolidating any alibi she might ever need.
Dr Wilmot Javers, flicking bright gloating glances at him between dissecting operations on his sole, thought he could read the Saint’s mind like a book.
“Of course, you might have been able to get away with it, for one of those so-called ‘justice’ killings they say you did in your young days, where there was no obvious motive to connect you with the victim. It’s too bad you couldn’t think of it for yourself then. It’s too late now, because if I read in the paper about anything that sounded as if you’d made use of it, I’d feel morally bound to go to the police and tell them how I might have given you the idea. I don’t approve of people taking the law into their own hands.”
Simon Templar was able to smile beatifically. Fate, true to its kindly form, had finally paid its indemnity for the time and irritation that this odious coxcomb had cost him.
To make one more flying visit to Paris under another name, avoiding all places in the category of the George V, and wearing some simple disguise that this time would obviate the risk of accidental recognition by Archimède Quercy or any of his ilk, would present no great difficulty to the Saint. And he felt reasonably confident that the unspectacular demise of a low-echelon Parisian hood like Pierrot-le-Fût would not rate any space in the English press.
“Good heavens, chum,” he protested. “Everyone knows I gave that up years ago.”
The intemperate reformer
Copyright © 1961 by Fiction Publishing Company
Somewhere around 1933 or 1934, in a collection of short stories, I had one about a self-righteous teetotaller whom the Saint dealt with by treacherously getting him drunk and causing him to make a public spectacle of himself. On this story, the Hodders of that era lowered the boom: it was too much of an affront to a bogey known in those days as “the Non-conformist Conscience.” So out it came, and somehow or other the manuscript was actually destroyed.
But I sometimes have a long and relentless memory, and I always did like the story. So with malice aforethought, in about 1961, I re-wrote it from memory — and I think even better than the original — and another generation at Hodders, quite unaware of its tainted past, swallowed it without a peep of protest. This story is “The Intemperate Reformer” (the same original title) which can be found in Trust the Saint.
— Leslie Charteris (1962)
Simon Templar watched with a remorselessly calculating eye the quantity of caviar that was being spooned on to his plate, with the eternal-springing hope that this would intimidate the head waiter into serving a more than normally generous portion, and said, “If I had to answer such a silly question as why I want to be rich, I’d say it was so I could afford to eat those unhatched sturgeon twice a day. There must be some moral in the thought that they’re considered the national delicacy of Russia, the self-styled protector of the underprivileged.”
He waved away the tray of minced onion and chopped whites and yolks of eggs proffered by a lesser servitor, and signalled the wine steward who waited nearby with a frosted bottle.
“Romanoff caviar and Romanoff vodka — what a wonderful proletarian combination!”
“I always did like your ideas of the simple life,” said Monty Hayward comfortably.
The Saint piled a small mound of black grains on a thin slice of brown toast, tasted it reverently, and raised his glass.
“I read somewhere that the scientists have discovered a rare vitamin in caviar which greatly increases the human system’s ability to stand up to alcohol — I’m not kidding,” he remarked. “I suppose the Russians, who always claim to have discovered everything, would say that they knew this all along. That’s why they put away so much of this stuff at their banquets. Well, don’t quote me to the FBI, but I prefer this to the American excuse for vodka-tippling.”
“And what’s that?” Monty asked unguardedly.
“The sales pitch that it doesn’t change the flavor of whatever slop you dilute it with, and that it doesn’t taint your breath — so that if you wreck a few cars on the way home, and you can still stand up, the cops presumably won’t dream you’ve been drinking. This may be predicated on the erroneous assumption that cops can’t read advertisements, too, but I suppose it gives some people confidence. I shall let you drive us home, Monty. Na zdorovye!”
“Here’s to crime,” Monty said.
Simon regarded him affectionately.
They were dining at the East Arms at Hurley, a one-time English country pub which was its own sufficient answer to some of the old traditional gibes at British gastronomical facilities, and it was their first reunion in many years. It was a very far cry from the days when Monty Hayward had sometimes found himself involved in the fringes of the Saint’s lawless activities, and in particular had been embroiled in one incredible adventure which had whirled them across Austria and Bavaria in a fantastic flight that may still be remembered by senior students of these chronicles.