"Life keeps moving," said the Saint. "Another Royal Commission has been appointed, this time to discuss whether open-air restaurants would be likely to lower the moral tone of the nation. Another law has been passed to forbid something or other. A Metropolitan Policeman has won a first prize in the Irish Sweep. And you?"
Peter helped himself to a cigarette, and eyed the Saint's blue silk Cossack pyjamas with the unconscious and unreasonable smugness of a man who has dressed for breakfast and been about for hours.
"I can see that I haven't any real criminal instincts," he remarked. "I get up too early. And what are the initials for?"
Simon glanced down at the monogram embroidered on his breast pocket.
"In case I wake up in the middle of the night and can't remember who I am," he said. "What's new about Julian?"
"He skips today," said Peter. "Or perhaps tomorrow. Anyway, he's been to the bank already and drawn out more money than I've ever seen before in hard cash. That's why I thought I'd better knock off and tell you."
Mr. Julian Lamantia should be no stranger to us. We have seen him being thrown into the Thames on a rainy night. We have seen him in his J. L. Investment Bureau, contributing to the capital required for buying a completely worthless block of shares.
If Mr. Lamantia had restricted himself to such enterprises as those in which the Saint's attention had first been directed towards him, we might still have been able to speak of him in the present tense. He had, in his prime, been one of the astutest skimmers of the Law of his generation. Unfortunately for him he became greedy, as other men like him have become before; and in the current wave of general depression he found that the bucket-shop business was not what it was. His mind turned towards more dangerous but more profitable fields.
Out through the post, under the heading of the J. L. Investment Bureau, went many thousands of beautifully printed pamphlets, in which was described the enormous profit that could be made on large short-term loans. The general public, said the pamphlet, was not in a position to supply the sums required for these loans, and therefore all these colossal profits gravitated exclusively into the pockets of a small circle of wealthy financial houses. Nevertheless, explained the pamphlet, as the hymn-book had done before it, little drops of water, little grains of sand, make the tiddly-tum-tum and the tumty-tum. It was accordingly mooted that, under the auspices of the J. L. Investment Bureau, sums of from £5 to £10 might be raised from private investors and in the aggregate provide the means for making these great short-term loans, of which the profits would be generously and proportionately shared with the investors.
It was a scheme which, in one form or another, is as old as some of the younger hills and as perennially fruitful as a parson's wife. Helped on by the literary gifts of Mr. Lamantia, it proceeded in this reincarnation as well as it always will. From the first issue of circulars thousands of pounds poured in, and after a very brief interval the first monthly dividend was announced at ten per cent — and paid. In another thirty days the second month's dividend was announced at fifteen per cent — and paid. The third month's dividend was twenty per cent— "which," a second issue of circulars hoped, "should remain as a regular working profit" — and the money was pouring in almost as fast as it could be banked. The original investors increased their investments frantically, and told their friends, who also subscribed and spread the good news. The dividends, of course, were paid straight out of the investors' own capital and the new subscriptions that were continually flowing in; but any suspicion of such low duplicity was, as usual, far from the minds of the innocent suckers who in a few months built up Mr. Julian Lamantia's bank balance to the amazing total of £85,000.