"I've heard of that being done with coloured glasses," said the Saint slowly, "but I noticed that yours weren't coloured."
Naskill shook his head.
"Coloured glasses are old stuff. Too crude. Used to be used a lot by sharpers but too many people got to hear about 'em. You couldn't get into a card game with coloured glasses these days. No good for conjuring, either. But this is good. Invented it myself. Special ink and special kind of glass. There is a tint in it, of course, but it's too faint to notice." He shoved the cards over the cloth. "Here. Keep the lot for a souvenir. You can have some fun with your friends. But don't go asking 'em in for a game of poker, mind."
Simon gathered the cards together.
"It would be rather a temptation," he admitted. "But don't you get a lot of customers who buy them just for that?"
"Sure. A lot of professionals use my stuff. I know 'em all. Often see 'em in the shop. Good customers — they buy by the dozen. Can't refuse to serve 'em — they'd only get 'em some other way or buy somewhere else. I call it a compliment to the goods I sell. Never bothers my conscience. Anybody who plays cards with strangers is asking for trouble, anyway. It isn't only professionals, either. You'd be surprised at some of the people I've had come in and ask for a deck of readers — that's the trade name for 'em. I remember one fellow…"
He launched into a series of anecdotes that filled up the time until they had to separate to their compartments to collect their luggage. Mr. Naskill's pining for company was understandable after only a few minutes' acquaintance; it was clear that he was constitutionally incapable of surviving for long without an audience.
Simon Templar was not bored. He had already had his money's worth. Whether his friends would allow him to get very far with a programme of card tricks if he appeared before them in an unaccustomed set of horn-rimmed windows was highly doubtful; but the trick was worth knowing, just the same.
Almost every kind of craftsman has specialized journals to inform him of the latest inventions and discoveries and technical advances in his trade, but there is as yet no publication called the Grafter's Gazette and Weekly Skulldugger to keep a professional freebooter abreast of the newest devices for separating the sucker from his dough, and the Saint was largely dependent on his own researches for the encyclopedic knowledge of the wiles of the ungodly that had brought so much woe to the chevaliers d'industrie of two hemispheres. Mr. Naskill's conversation had yielded a scrap of information that would be filed away in the Saint's well-stocked memory against the day when it would be useful. It might lie fallow for a month, a year, five years, before it produced its harvest: the Saint was in no hurry. In the fulness of time he would collect his dividend — it was one of the cardinal articles of his faith that nothing of that kind ever crossed his path without a rendezvous for the future, however distant that future might be. But one of the things that always gave the Saint a particular affection for this story was the promptness with which his expectations were fulfilled.
There were some episodes in Simon Templar's life when all the component parts of a perfectly rounded diagram fell into place one by one with such a sweetly definitive succession of crisp clicks that mere coincidence was too pallid and anemic a theory with which to account for them — when he almost felt as if he was reclining passively in an armchair and watching the oiled wheels of Fate roll smoothly through the convolutions of a supernaturally engineered machine.