"Look at this," he said.
He dragged a small brass image out of his pocket and set it up on the table between the glasses. Simon glanced at it, and recognized it at once. It was one of those pyramidal figures of a seated Buddha, miniatures of the gigantic statue at Kamakura, which find their place in every tourists' curio shop from Karachi to Yokohama.
"That, sir," said the sentimentalist's nephew, "was my uncle's. He bought it in Shanghai when he was a young man, and he called it his mascot. He used to burn a joss-stick in front of it every day — said the ju-ju wouldn't work without it. And then, when he died, what do you think we found in his will?"
Simon was getting accustomed to Sir Ambrose's interrogative style, but the Saint was not very easily silenced.
"A thousand quid to buy joss-sticks," he hazarded.
Sir Ambrose shook his head rather impatiently, till both his chins wobbled.
"No, sir. Something much worse than that. We found that not a penny of his money could be touched until this ridiculous thing had been sold for two thousand pounds. He said that only a man who was prepared to pay a sum like that for it would appreciate it properly and give it the attention he wanted. Personally, I think that anyone who paid a sum like that for it could be put in a lunatic asylum without a certificate. But there it is in his will, and the lawyers say we can't upset it. I've been carrying the damned thing about with me half a week, showing it to all the antique shops in London, and the best offer I've had is fifteen shillings."
"But surely," said the Saint, "you could get a friend of yours to buy it, and give him the two thousand back with a spot of interest as soon as the executors unbuttoned?"
"If anything like that could have been done, sir, I'd have done it. But the old fool thought of that himself, and he left strict instructions that the executors were to be satisfied beyond all possible doubt that the sale was a genuine one. And he made his bank the executors, damn him! If you've ever tried to put anything over on a bank you'll know what a hope we've got of doing anything like that. No — the best thing we can ever hope to do is to find some genuine stranger and sell it to him while he's drunk."
Simon picked up the image and examined it closely. It was unexpectedly heavy, and he guessed that the brass casting must have been filled with lead. On the base there was a line of Chinese characters cut into the metal and filled with red.