"I'll say it is!" Amberson was fondling the image as if it were his own long-lost child. "What did I promise you? Fifteen thousand berries?"
He pulled out his wallet and spilled American bills on to the table.
"Fifteen grand it is, Mr. Templar. And I guess I'm grateful. Mind if I leave you now? I gotta get on the transatlantic phone to Lou Froussard and tell him, and then I gotta rush this little precious into a safe deposit. Say, let me ring you up and invite you to a real dinner next week."
He shook hands again, violently, with Patricia and the Saint, caught up his Panama, and vomited out of the room again like a human whirligig.
In the vestibule a podgy and pompous little man with bushy moustachios was waiting for him. He seized James G. Amberson by the arm. "Did you get it, Jim?"
"You bet I did!" Amberson exhibited his purchase. His excessively American speech had disappeared. "And now d'you mind telling me why we've bought it! I'm just packing up for our getaway when you rush me over here to spend fifteen thousand dollars —"
"I'll tell you how it was, Jim," said the other rapidly. "I'm sitting on top of a bus, and there's a man and a girl in front of me. The first thing I heard was 'Twenty thousand pounds' worth of black pearls in a brass Buddha.' I just had to listen. This chap seemed to be a solicitor's clerk, and he was telling his girl about an old miser who shoved these pearls into a brass Buddha after his wife had died, and nobody found the letter where he said what he'd done till long after he was buried. 'And we've got to try and trace the thing,' says this young chap. 'It was sold to a junk dealer with a lot of other stuff, and heaven knows where it may be now.' 'How d'you know you've got it when you find it?" says the girl. 'Easy,' says this chap. 'It's got a mark on it like this." He drew it on his paper, and I nearly broke my neck getting a look. Come on, now — let's get it home and open it."
"I hope Ambrose and James G. are having lots of fun looking for your black pearls, Peter," drawled the Saint piously, as hestood at the counter of Thomas Cook and watched American bills translating themselves into English bank notes with a fluency that was all the heart could desire.
8. The Perfect Crime
"The defendants," said Mr. Justice Goldie, with evident distaste, "have been unable to prove that the agreement between the plaintiff and the late Alfred Green constituted a money-lending transaction within the limits of the Act; and I am therefore obliged to give judgment for the plaintiff. I will consider the question of costs tomorrow."