Free Brighter Buccaneer by Leslie Charteris Page B

‘em?”
    “I don’t understand you, Kemmler,” said Mr. Teal coldly. “Will you tell me exactly what’s happened?”
    “The Saint’s been here. You know it. You phoned me and told me. You told me to let him stick me up-give him everything he wanted-you wouldn’t let me put up a fight-you said you’d be waiting for him outside the door and catch him red-handed —”
    Kemmler babbled on for a while longer; and then gradually his tale petered out incoherently as he realized just how thoroughly he had been fooled. When the detective came to interview him Kemmler apologized and said he must have been drunk, which nobody believed.
    But it seemed as if the police didn’t know anything about his passage on the Empress of Britain after all. It was Max Kemmler’s only consolation.
The Bad Baron
    “IN these days of strenuous competition,” said the Saint, “it’s an extraordinarily comforting thing to know you’re at the top of your profession-unchallenged, undismayed, and wholly beautiful.”
    His audience listened to him with a very fair simulation of reverence-Patricia Holm because she had heard similar modest statements so often before that she was beginning to believe them, Peter Quentin because he was the very latest recruit to the cause of Saintly lawlessness and the game was still new and exciting.
    They had met together at the Mayfair for a cocktail; and the fact that Simon Templar’s remark was not strictly true did nothing to spoil the prospect of an innocent evening’s amusement.
    For the Saint certainly had a rival; and of recent days a combination of that rival’s boundless energy and Simon Templar’s cautious self-effacement had placed another name in the position in the headlines which had once been regularly booked for the Saint. Newspapers screamed his exploits from their bills; music-hall comedians gagged about him; detectives tore their hair and endured the scathing criticisms of the Press and their superiors with as much fortitude as they could call on; and owners of valuable jewellery hurriedly deposited their valuables in safes and found a new interest in patent burglar alarms.
    For jewels were the specialty of the man who was known as “The Fox”-there was very little else known about him. He burst upon the public in a racket of sensational banner lines when he held up Lady Palfrey’s charity ball at Grosvener House single-handed, and got clear away with nearly thirty thousand pounds’ worth of display pieces. The clamour aroused by that exploit had scarcely passed its peak when he raided Sir Barnabay Gerrald’s house in Berkeley Square and took a four-thousand-pound pearl necklace from a wall safe in the library while the Gerralds were entertaining a distinguished company to dinner in the next room. He opened and ransacked a Bond Street jeweller’s strong-room the very next night at a cost to the insurance underwriters of over twenty thousand pounds. Within a week he was the topic of every conversation: Disarmament Conferences were relegated to obscure corners of the news sheets, and even Wimbledon took second place.
    All three coups showed traces of careful preliminary spade-work. It was obvious that the Fox had mapped out every move in advance, and that the headlines were merely proclaiming the results of a scheme of operations that had been maturing perhaps for years. It was equally obvious to surmise that the crimes which had already been committed were not the beginning and the end of the campaign. News editors (who rarely possess valuable jewels) seized on the Fox as a Heavensent gift in a flat season; and the Fox worked for them with a sense of news value that was something like the answer to their blasphemous prayers. He entered Mrs. Wilbur G. Tully’s suite at the Dorchester and removed her jewel-case with everything that it contained while she was in the bathroom and her maid had been decoyed away on a false errand. Mrs. Tully sobbingly told the reporters that there was