Thanks to the Saint (The Saint Series) by Charteris Leslie

Author:Charteris, Leslie [Charteris, Leslie]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi
Publisher: Thomas & Mercer
Published: 2014-03-17T16:00:00+00:00

THE PERFECT SUCKER

“Don’t ever run away with the idea that any fool can play the fool,” Simon Templar was heard to say once, without a blush. “To turn in a first-class performance as the ideal chump, the answer to the bunco artist’s prayer, the way I’ve played it sometimes to hook them on their own line, takes more talent than ordinary actors win awards for. If you overdo it and make yourself look too utterly stupid, a con man might pass you up simply because you seem too dumb to have even the rudimentary larcenous instinct which he needs for his routine. If you strike any false note, you’re likely to scare him into a dead run. You have to ad-lib all your own dialog, and you don’t get any rehearsal. And the discouraging thing is that no matter how much you polish your technique, you’ll never do so well as when you aren’t even trying.”

He was certainly not trying when he met Mr Irving Jardane, or Mr Jardane met him, for he had come to the Rogue River in Oregon with no thought of hooking anything more predatory than a few rainbow trout. At such times the Saint had to make no effort to look worthy of his often incongruous nickname. In the complete relaxation which a man can only achieve when solely preoccupied with the leisured assembling of a fly rod and reel in anticipation of a peaceful evening’s fishing, all the bronze and sapphire hardness which could edge the Saint’s face at some other moments was softened to an almost unbelievable innocence, which a more bemused critic than some of the sharks he had gaffed in his lifetime might have claimed was the revelation of a wonderful childishness of heart which he had never really outgrown.

Mr Jardane was a rather stout gentleman of about sixty, with bristly white hair and the florid complexion of one who liked to live well—though perhaps not in the same sense as a dietician might define it. He came by the white frame cottage where Simon was sitting on the stoop and paused to ask, “Been doing any good here?”

The Saint did not delude himself for an instant that his interrogator was eager to know whether he had recently performed any acts of charity or beneficence. In piscatorial circles such a question has only one meaning, and Mr Jardane was very obviously a fellow fisherman. In fact, he was one of the fishingest fishermen Simon had seen for a long time, from the soles of his waders up to the crown of his special hat which was encircled with a string of small magnets to which clung a dazzling assortment of artificial flies. A plastic box of additional flies, with a magnifying lid, hung like a bib from around his neck; a creel was slung by a strap over one shoulder and a spinning tackle box by another strap over the other. He clutched both a fly rod and a spinning

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