The tip of the Saint's cigarette glowed and died.
"Yearleigh was afraid of him," he said. "He couldn't risk any mistake — any cry or struggle that might have spoilt his scheme. He was afraid of Vould because, in his heart, he knew that Vould was so much cleverer and more desirable, so much more right and honest than he would ever be. He was fighting the old hopeless battle of age against youth. He knew that Vould had seen through the iniquity of his bill. The bill could never touch Yearleigh. He was too old for the last war, when I seem to remember that he made a great reputation by organising cricket matches behind the lines. He would be too old for the next. He had no children. But it's part of the psychology of life, whether you like it or not, that war is the time when the old men come back into their own, and the young men who are pressing on their heels are miraculously removed. Yearleigh knew that Vould despised him for it; and he was afraid… Those are only the things I think, and I can't prove any of them," he said; and Teal turned abruptly on his heel and walked back towards the house.
IX
The Damsel in Distress
"You need brains in this life of crime," Simon Templar would say sometimes; "but I often think you need luck even more."
He might have added that the luck had to be consistent.
Mr. Giuseppe Rolfieri was lucky up to a point, for he happened to be in Switzerland when the astounding Liverpool Municipal Bond forgery was discovered. It was a simple matter for him to slip over the border into his own native country; and when his four partners in the swindle stumbled down the narrow stairway that leads from the dock of the Old Bailey to the terrible blind years of penal servitude, he was comfortably installed in his villa at San Remo with no vengeance to fear from the Law. For it is a principal of international law that no man can be extradited from his own country, and Mr. Rolfieri was lucky to have retained his Italian citizenship even though he had made himself a power in the City of London.
Simon Templar read about the case — he could hardly have helped it, for it was one of those sensational scandals which rock the financial world once in a lifetime — but it did not strike him as a matter for his intervention. Four out of the five conspirators, including the ringleader, had been convicted and sentenced; and although it is true that there was a certain amount of public indignation at the immunity of Mr. Rolfieri, it was inevitable that the Saint, in his career of shameless lawlessness, sometimes had to pass up one inviting prospect in favour of another nearer to hand. He couldn't be everywhere at once — it was one of the very few human limitations which he was ready to admit.
A certain Domenick Naccaro, however, had other ideas.
He called at the Saint's apartment on Piccadilly one morning — a stout bald-headed man in a dark blue suit and a light blue waistcoat, with an unfashionable stiff collar and a stringy black tie and a luxuriant scroll of black moustache ornamenting his face — and for the first moment of alarm Simon wondered if he had been mistaken for somebody else in the same name but less respectable morals, for Signor Naccaro was accompanied by a pale pretty girl who carried a small infant swathed in a shawl.