Simon Templar was not often at a loss for words, but on this occasion he was tongue-tied for a long time. And then, at last, he lay back and laughed helplessly.
"Oh well," he said. "I guess they earned it."
Part VII
The charitable countess
Simon Templar's mail, like that of any other celebrity, was a thing of infinite variety. Perhaps it was even more so than that of most celebrities, for actors and authors and the other usual recipients of fan mail are of necessity a slightly smaller target for the busy letter-writer than a man who has been publicized at frequent intervals as a twentieth-century Robin Hood, to the despair and fury of the police officials at whose expense the publicity has been achieved. Of those correspondents who approached him under his better-known nom de guerre of "The Saint," about half were made up of people who thought that the nickname should be taken literally, and half of people who suspected that it stood for the exact opposite.
There were, of course, the collectors of autographs and signed photos. There were the hero-worshipping schoolboys whose ideas of a future profession would have shocked their fathers, and the romantic schoolgirls whose ideals of a future husband would have made their mothers swoon. There were also romantic maidens who were not so young, who supplied personal data of sometimes startling candour and whose propositions were correspondingly more concrete.
And then there were the optimists who thought that the Saint would like to finance a South American revolution, a hunt for buried treasure on the Spanish Main, a new night club or an invention for an auxiliary automatic lighter to light automatic lighters with. There were the plodding sportsmen who could find a job in some remote town, thereby saving their wives and children from imminent starvation, if only the Saint would lend them the fare. There were the old ladies who thought that the Saint might be able to trace their missing Pomeranians, and the old gentlemen who thought that he might be able to exterminate the damned Socialists. There were crooks and cranks, fatheads and fanatics, beggars, liars, romancers, idiots, thieves, rich men, poor men, the earnest, the flippant, the gay, the lonely, the time-wasters and the genuine tragedies, all that strange and variegated section of humanity that writes letters to total strangers; and then sometimes the letters were not from one stranger to another, but were no less significant, like a letter that came one morning from a man named Marty O'Connor:
I should of written you before but I didn't want you to think I was asking for a handout. I stuck at that job in Canada and we were doing fine. I thought we were all set but the guy was playing the markit, I didn't know he was that dumb, so the next thing is hes bust, the garage is sold up and I'm out a job. I could not get nothing else there, but I hear the heat is off in New York now so me and Cora hitchike back, I got a job as chaufer and hold that 3 weeks til the dame hears I got a police record, she won't believe I'm going strait now. I got the bums rush, haven't found nothing since, but Cora does odd jobs and I may get a job any day. When I do you got to come see us again, we never fergot what you done for us and would do the same for you anytime if we burn for it…
That was a reminder of two people whom he had helped because he liked them and because he thought they were worth helping, in one of those adventures that made all his lawlessness seem worth while to him, whatever the moralists might say. Marty O'Connor, who put off writing to his friend for fear of being suspected of begging, was a very different character from many others who wrote with no such scruples and with less excuse — such as the Countess Jannowicz, whose letter came in the same mail.
The smile which Simon had had for Marty's letter turned cynical as he read it. On the face of it, it was a very genteel and dignified epistle, tastefully engraved under an embossed coronet, and printed on expensive handmade paper. The Countess Jannowicz, it said, requested the pleasure of Mr. Simon Templar's company at a dinner and dance to be held at the Waldorf-Astoria on the twentieth of that month, in aid of the National League for the Care of Incurables, RSVP.