Call for the Saint

Chapter one

“Sins of commission,” said Simon Templar darkly, “are very bad for the victim. But sins of omission are usually worse for the criminal.”

The only perceptible response was a faint ping as a BB shot ricochetted from an imitation Sèvres vase which had been thoughtfully placed in a corner. Hoppy Uniatz shrugged shoulders that would not have disgraced a gorilla, popped another BB in his mouth, and expelled it in the wake of its predecessor, with better aim. This time the ping was followed by a faint rattle.

“Bull’s-eye,” he announced proudly. “I’m getting better.”

“That,” said the Saint, “depends on what field of endeavour you’re talking about.”

Mr Uniatz felt no offence. His speed and accuracy on the draw might be highly regarded in some circles, but he had never claimed to compete in tournaments of subtlety. Anything the Saint said was okay with him.

He had not yet even wondered why they had stayed in Chicago for three days without any disclosed objective. In the dim abyss of what must perfunctorily be called Hoppy’s mind was some vague idea that they were hiding out, though he could not quite understand why. Murder, arson, and burglary had not figured in the Saint’s recent activities, which in itself was an unusual circumstance.

However, Mr Uniatz had spent some time in Chicago before, and he still found it difficult to walk along State Street without instinctively ducking whenever he saw brass buttons. If Simon Templar chose to remain in this hotel suite, there were probably reasons. Hoppy’s only objection was that he would have liked to kill time at the burlesque show three blocks south, but since this didn’t seem to be in the cards, he had bought himself a bagful of BB shot and was taking a simple childlike pleasure in practising oral marksmanship.

Meanwhile the Saint sat by the window with a pair of high-powered binoculars in his hand, staring from time to time through the lenses at the street below. Mr Uniatz did not understand this either, but he had no wish to seem uncooperative on that account.

“Boss,” he said, “maybe I should take a toin wit’ de peepers.”

Simon lowered the glasses again.

“And just what would you look for?” he inquired interestedly.

“I dunno, boss,” confessed Mr Uniatz. “But I could look.”

“You’re such a help to me,” said the Saint.

Strange emotions chased themselves across Hoppy’s unprepossessing face, not unlike those of a man who has been butted in the midriff by an invisible goat. His mouth hung open, and his small eyes had a stricken expression.

The Saint had a momentary qualm of conscience. Perhaps his sarcasm had been unduly harsh. He hastened to soften the affront to an unprecedented sensitivity.

“No kidding,” he said. “I’m going to have plenty for you to do, soon enough.”

“Boss,” Mr Uniatz said anxiously, “I think I swallered a BB.”

Simon sighed.

“I don’t think it’ll hurt you. Anyone who’s eaten as much canned heat as you have shouldn’t worry about the ingestion of a tiny globule of lead.”

“Yeah,” Hoppy said blankly. “Well, watch me make another bull’s-eye.”

Reassured, he popped another BB in his mouth and expelled it at the vase.

Simon picked up the binoculars again. Outside, the traffic hummed past dimly, ten stories below. From the distance came the muted roar of the Elevated. For several seconds he focused on the street intently.

Then he said, “You might as well keep up with the play. We were talking about sins of omission, and have you noticed that woman across the street, near the alley?”

“De witch? Chees, what a bag,” Mr Uniatz said. “Sure I seen her. I drop a coin in her cup every time I go by.” He grimaced. “When I get dat old, I hope I drop dead foist.”

“So she’s a professional beggar. But she’s only been there two days. There was a blind man on that corner before. What do you think happened to him?”

“Maybe he ain’t so blind, at dat. He gets a load of her and beats it.”

The Saint shook his head.

“She’s been committing sins, Hoppy.”

“At her age?”

“Sins of omission. She’s never on her corner at night. And she wasn’t there Saturday afternoon.”

“Okay. Maybe she gets tired.”

“Beggars don’t get tired at the most profitable homes,” Simon said. “It’s the theatre crowds that pay off. I’m wondering why she’s never around when she’d have a chance to get some real moola.”

Hoppy had a flash of perspicacity.

“Is dat why we been hanging around her?”

“I’ve been waiting for something. I don’t know what, but... I think this is it!”

The Saint was suddenly standing up, dropping the binoculars into a chair which seemed to have ejected him with a spontaneous convulsion of its springs. He was out of the apartment before Hoppy could decide what to do with the BB in his mouth.

This problem, proved far too difficult for snap judgment. Hoppy was still rolling the shot on his tongue when he joined the Saint at the elevator.

“This is the first time I’ve regretted being ten stories up,” Simon said, leaning heavily on the button. His eyes were no longer lazy; they were blue flames. “Hoppy, I’m going to walk down. You take the elevator. If you win the race, find out why that beggar woman just went up the alley with a man who looked exactly as if he had a gun in her back.”

“But—” Mr Uniatz began, and closed his mouth as the Saint whipped out of sight through a door marked “STAIRWAY.” He made sure that his Betsy was with him, in Betsy’s comfortable leather nest under his coat. But he still kept the last BB on his tongue. A guy never knew when he might need ammunition.

Chapter two

Simon Templar turned into the alley and was instantly alone in improbable isolation. Two blocks away, on Michigan Boulevard, sleek cars were tooling along their traffic lanes, and people were strolling on the sidewalks, safe and secure, because dozens of casual eyes were flicking past them. But as he turned the corner that world dropped into another dimension, forcing remembrance of itself only by the roar of traffic coming in from behind him and before him, yet at the same time made even more remote by the knowledge that the sound of a shot would probably go unheard in Chicago’s noisy morning song. And in the backwater where he had landed there was nothing but the old woman, the gunman, and himself.

The man was backed up against a wall, rubbing his eyes furiously with his left hand, while his right waved a heavy automatic jerkily before him. The beggar woman was holding a gun, too, but her finger was not on the trigger. She seemed to be trying to get close enough to grab the automatic from the man’s grip. Her rags flapped grotesquely as she jigged about with surprising agility for a woman who had previously seemed to be crippled by a combination of rheumatism, arthritis, and senility.

A whiff of something sharp and acrid stung the Saint’s nostrils. He recognised ammonia, and instantly realised why the gunman was scrubbing so frantically at his eyes. But the advantage of an ammonia gun is to disarm the enemy through surprise. The cursing gentleman with the automatic was not yet disarmed, and at any moment he was just as likely to start shooting at random.

The Saint stopped running, side-stepped silently, and came on again on his toes. He took two quick steps forward and brought the edge of his hand down sharply on the gunman’s wrist, and the automatic clattered to the ground. The Saint’s swooping movement was almost continuous, and when he straightened he had the butt of the automatic cuddled into his palm. He listened for a moment.

“What language!” he remarked reprovingly. “You’re liable to bite your tongue, Junior.”

He batted the gunman lightly on the chin with his automatic, and the resultant inarticulate mouthings seemed to prove that the Saint’s warning had been justified.

The beggar woman looked like a puppet whose strings had stopped moving. Her dirt-rimmed eyes glared at the Saint in indecision, and her puffy features twisted unpleasantly. And yet as the Saint gazed at her he felt the stirring of a preposterous intuition.

“What’s eatin’ de old witch?” Mr Uniatz demanded from somewhere in the background. “No ya don’t!” He deftly intercepted the woman as she made a dart for safety. “Not wit’out ya broomstick ya don’t make no getaway. Gimme dat rod.”

The Saint finished frisking the gunman. Then he stepped back a pace and regarded the beggar woman again, with a small crinkle forming between his brows.

Hoppy said, “Hey, what kind of a heater is dis?”

“It squirts ammonia,” Simon said. “Junior here got a whiff of it in his eyes. I wonder—” He glanced along the alley. “Perhaps at this point we should adjourn. This alley would be perfect for a quiet murder, but it isn’t private enough for a confessional, and I want Junior to open his heart to me.”

Junior profanely denied any intention of making Simon Templar his confidant. The Saint rapped him across the head again and said, “Quiet. We’ll be bosom pals before you know it.” He turned his clear blue gaze on the beggar woman, who had subsided into sullen quiet. “My hotel’s across the street,” he said. “Shall we have an audition there?”

For an instant her eyes flashed across his, startlingly bright and alert. The thing Simon had already sensed — the incongruous vitality under those shapeless rags and puffy features — was unmistakable for that fleeting moment before the mask dropped again.

“I dunno what this is all about, mister. I don’t know nothing. I got my own troubles...”

Simon said, “You’ll be back in time for the performance.”

Her eyes searched his face. When she spoke, her voice had changed. It was deeper, more resonant.

“All right,” she said. “I’ll take a chance.”

“The service elevator is indicated, I think. Hoppy, if you’ll escort the lady, I’ll follow with Junior.”

“Okay, boss.”

Simon Templar captured the gunman’s arm and bent it deftly upward.

“You’re going to be a good boy and come quietly, aren’t you?”

“Like hell,” Junior said.

Simon applied a little more torque.

“I’m not an unreasonable man,” he remarked. “I’ll give you a choice. Either stop wriggling and keep your mouth shut, or let me break your arm and give you something to yell about. I should warn you that I have a weakness for compound fractures. But don’t feel that I’m trying to influence you. You’re perfectly free to take your pick.”

Chapter three

Junior, by request, sat cross-legged in the middle of the carpet, his unclean hands in his lap.

“Should we tie him up?” Hoppy asked.

The Saint had a better idea. He wound a piece of wire several times around Junior’s thumbs and twisted the ends tight.

“There,” he said, stepping back and beaming down at Junior. “He’s safe as houses. Besides, we may need the rope later to hang him.”

The captive remained silent, his thin, pinched face sulkily intent on the carpet. Aside from the fact that he rather strikingly resembled a rat, he had few distinguishing characteristics.

“All right,” the Saint said. “Keep an eye on him, Hoppy. Kick his protruding teeth in if he tries to get up.”

He moved to a side table and did things lovingly with ice and bourbon. But his eyes kept returning to the beggar woman.

She had come alive. There was no other word for it. Even under the patched and threadbare dress her body had shed thirty years. And her eyes were no longer dull.

She said, “You’re the Saint, aren’t you?”

Simon said, “You’re one up on me. I don’t know your name... yet.”

“I recognised you. That’s why I came along.”

“What will you have?”

She nodded at the glass he was holding and Simon moved across the room and gave her the drink. Then he knew that he had been right. His fingers touched hers, and what he felt was proof enough. Her hand was firm and yet soft, the skin like satin.

She had done a beautiful job of make-up. The Saint could appreciate it. Quite frankly, he stared. And through the muddy blotched surface and cunningly drawn wrinkles her real face began to come into view, the clear, clean sculpture that even disfiguring rolls of wax padding in mouth and nostrils could not entirely hide.

She looked away.

The Saint did not. Presently he murmured,

She opened her mouth to speak, but Simon Templar’s low voice went on,

Hoppy said, “Huh?”

It was a young woman’s laughter that sounded then. And it was not the cracked voice of the beggar woman that said, “Mr Templar, I’m beginning to understand the reasons for your reputation. How did you know I was an actress? You didn’t recognise me?”

The Saint replaced his drink, gave Hoppy a bottle to himself, and sat down, stretching his long legs.

“I just realised why you were never at your corner during theatre hours. A real beggar would have been. That’s when the money flows fastest. Saturday afternoon you weren’t there either — a matinée, I suppose? But I didn’t recognise you, no.”

She said, “I’m Monica Varing.”

The Saint raised his brows. Varing was one of the great names, as well-known in theatrical circles as he was himself in his own peculiar field. Drew, Barrymore, Terry, Varing — they were all names that had blazed across the marquees of the world’s capitals. For ten years Monica Varing had been that rare thing, an actress — not merely a star, but a follower of the tradition that has come down through the London Globe from the Greek amphitheatres. More than that, if he remembered other pictures of her, she was the most unchanged beauty of the modern stage. She nodded towards the man squatting on the rug and said, “I don’t know whether I should say any more in front of him.”

“In case he gets away — or talks, you mean?” Simon suggested, his blue eyes faintly amused. “You needn’t worry about that. Junior’s not going to talk indiscriminately from now on. We can manage that, can’t we, Hoppy?”

Hoppy said broodingly, “I never hoid nobody talk after dey was dropped in de lake wit’ deir feet in a sack of cement.”

“Listen!” Junior yelped. “You can’t do this to me!”

“Why not?” the Saint asked, and in the face of that logical query Junior was silent.

Monica Varing said, “I never thought this would happen. I set a trap, with myself as the bait—”

“Start at the beginning,” Simon interrupted. “With your predecessor, say. What happened to him?”

Monica said, “John Irvine. He was blind. He was a stage manager in vaudeville — where a lot of us started. He was blinded ten years ago, and got a begging permit. Whenever I played Chicago, I’d look him up and put something in his cup. It was a — well, a libation, in the classic sense. But it wasn’t only that. No matter how long it would be between runs, John would always recognise my footsteps. He’d say hello and wish me luck. On opening night I always gave him a hundred dollars. I wasn’t the only one, either. Plenty of other troupers were big enough to remember.”

“Last Wednesday,” Simon went on for her, “a bum named John Irvine was found shot to death in that alley where we met. He’d been beaten up first... He left a widow and children, didn’t he?”

“Three children,” Monica said.

The Saint looked at Junior, and his face was not friendly.

“Quite a few beggars have been beaten up in Chicago in the last few weeks. The ones who were able to talk said the same thing. Something about a mysterious character called the King of the Beggars.”

“The beggars have to pay off a percentage of their earnings to His Majesty,” Monica said bitterly. “Or else they’re beaten up.

The gang made an example of Irvine. To frighten the others. It just happened to be him; it might have been any beggar. The police — well, why should they make a big thing of it?”

“Why should you?” Simon asked.

She met his impersonal gaze no less directly.

“You may think I’m crazy, but it meant something to me. I knew the cops should have taken care of it, but I knew just as well they wouldn’t. There weren’t any headlines in it, and no civic committees were going to raise hell if they let it drop... I’m a damned good actress and I know make-up — the kind that’ll even get by in daylight. I thought I might get a lead on something. I’d rather catch that King of the Beggars than star in another hit on Broadway.”

“Me too,” said the Saint. “Not that anyone ever offered me Broadway.”

But there it was — the Robin Hood touch that would undoubtedly be the death of him some day... but literally. The whisper of a new racket which couldn’t help reaching his hypersensitive ears, tuned as they were to every fresh stirring in the endless ferment of ungodliness. Something big and ugly, but preying on small and helpless people... A penny-ante racket, until there were enough pennies... So you wanna be a beggar, pal? Okay, but you gotta pay off, pal. You gotta have protection, pal. We can make sure you don’t have no competition on your beat, see? But you gotta join the Protective Association, pal. You gotta kick in your dues. Otherwise you dunno what might happen. You might get run off the streets; you might even get hurt bad, pal. We’re all for you, but you gotta play ball...

...And somewhere at the top, as always, some smooth and bloated spider grew fat on the leechings from the little uncoordinated jerks who paid their tax to Fear.

The Saint said, “That’s why I’ve been sitting in this joint for days. That’s why I watched you, until Junior hustled you into the alley. I’m just trying to move a step up the ladder.”

Monica Varing said, “I’m going to find out—”

“You’ve got courage,” Simon told her. “We know that. But this job needs more than that. Let’s say — a certain skill in unusual fields. For example, the trick of getting people to confide in you.” He turned to his silent guest. “Who’s the King, Junior?”

Junior said rude things.

“You see?” said the Saint. “The atmosphere isn’t right. But just wait till I have a heart-to-heart talk with him. I’ll even bribe him, if necessary. I’ll introduce him to a good dentist. I know he can’t enjoy being mistaken for a rat every time he passes an exterminator service. Besides, I’m sure he can’t chew his food properly. Bad digestion probably soured his temper in youth and led him into a life of crime. We can fix that. We take him to a dentist, and just ask him whether he’ll have it with or without Novocaine. Now if you call me tomorrow—”

Monica Varing, to her astonishment, found that she was at the door.

“Wait a minute!” she protested. “I started this—”

“And a nice job you did,” said the Saint sincerely. “But Junior’s vocabulary may shock you when we really go to work on him. And I promised you wouldn’t be late for your curtain. But I’ll report progress — do you get up for lunch?”

He closed the door after her, and came back to stand thoughtfully over Junior.

“Chees,” said Hoppy, giving voice to a profound conclusion. “Who’d ever tink dat old sack was an actress?”

“She may surprise you next time you see her,” said the Saint, “even if she doesn’t use fans in her act... She’s given me an idea, too. Hoppy, I feel Thespian urges.”

Mr Uniatz appeared shocked. Luckily, before he could speak, Simon set his mind at ease.

“I’m going to be an actor. I’m going to play the role of a beggar. After all, I can be bait just as well as Monica Varing... First, though, we’d better put Junior on ice.”

“Dat’s gonna be tough, boss,” Hoppy said dubiously. “Won’t de cement stores be shut?”

“Then we’ll have to try something else,” said the Saint cheerfully. “Do you know where we can park Junior till they open? A warm, cosy oubliette?”

Hoppy considered.

“Lemme see. I useta know a guy called Sammy de Leg.”

“Then by all means pick up the phone and call Samuel. Ask him if he’d like to have a house guest.”

“Listen!” the latter burst out. “I don’t know nothing about this beggar racket! That dame chased me up the alley—”

“With your gun in her back,” Simon agreed. “I saw it. You need protection. If beggar women keep chasing you up alleys, you won’t be safe till you’re locked up where they can’t get at you. Hoppy and I feel we must take care of you.”

He finished his drink contentedly while Mr Uniatz completed a cryptic conversation.

“It’s all set, boss,” Hoppy announced finally. “We can go dere right now.”

“I ain’t goin’ nowhere!” Junior cried desperately.

“How you do talk,” said the Saint.

Chapter four

Two miles north of Wheaton, Simon Templar turned his car, at Hoppy’s direction, into a driveway bordered by high hedges.

Even the Saint’s fortitude was slightly shaken by the rambling lunatic monstrosity of a house that squatted like Tom o’ Bedlam in the midst of well-kept lawns. Simon was no great authority on architecture, but he felt that the man who had designed this excrescence should have been shot, preferably in the cradle. It had once been a mansion; there was a carriage house, converted into a garage, and servants’ quarters hung precariously on the structure’s grey scaling back, like a laggard extra hump on a camel. Gambrels, cupolas, balconies, railings, warts, wens, and minor scrofulous scraps were all over the house. It was a fine example of the corniest period in unfunctional design.

“Dis is it,” Hoppy said proudly. “De classiest jernt in de county, when Capone had it.”

Simon brought the car to a halt, and smiled encouragingly upon the troubled passenger beside him.

“Don’t let the rococo touch scare you, Junior,” he said. “I’ve seen mortuaries that looked like night clubs, too — Unpack him, Hoppy.”

Mr Uniatz, the other half of the sandwich whose ham was Junior, had already emerged. He jerked the rug from Junior’s knees and deftly unbuckled the strap that had immobilised the gunman’s ankles.

“C’mon,” he said. “I seen lotsa better guys dan you walk in here, even if dey was carried out.”

The rickety front porch creaked under them. Hoppy rang the bell, and almost instantly something resembling a beer barrel covered with a thick pelt of black fur rolled out and began beating Hoppy violently about the ears. Simon watched in amazement. Yells, curses, and jovial threats curdled the air. Mr Uniatz, a horrible grin splitting his anthropoid face, locked in a death struggle with his opponent, and in this manner they revolved across the threshold and vanished into the house. A muffled bellowing leaked out behind them.

“Don’t leave us,” the Saint said, reaching out to collar Junior. “You wouldn’t get anywhere.”

He lugged his burden through the doorway, where he found that the brawl had broken up, and Hoppy and the beer barrel were lumbering around each other, cursing furiously.

“Is this Queensberry rules, or would anyone like a knife?” Simon asked interestedly.

A voice boomed from the beer barrel.

“I be Gat-damned,” it said. “So you’re this here Saint character? What kinda mob you runnin’ round with now, Uniatz? Hey, mitt me, bud. Any friend o’ Hoppy’s a pal o’ mine, chum.”

“Meet Sammy de Leg,” Hoppy said unnecessarily.

“What a grip,” Sammy yelled, extricating his paw from Simon’s palm and shaking it vigorously. “Come on in. Have a beer.”

With shouts and cries he fell upon Mr Uniatz and bore him beyond a beaded portière. The Saint followed at a discreet distance, propelling his Junior ahead of him.

There was a huge white refrigerator set up in one corner of an old-fashioned living-room, and Sammy the Leg was already extracting bottles and handing them around. He paused before Junior.

“This is the guy you want put away?” he asked. “Well, he don’t get none. Siddown an’ shaddup.”

He thrust Junior violently into the depths of a chair and made faces at him.

The Saint relaxed and drank beer. Its cold, catnip flavour tingled pleasantly at the back of his throat. He felt agreeably at home. Simon Templar had a feeling that he was going to like Sammy the Leg very much indeed. The man had a certain directness that was refreshing, once you decided to sidetrack Emily Post.

“For a pal,” Sammy said, waving his bottle, “anything in the whole wide world, as far south as Indianapolis. You don’t need to say a word. Since I bought this here place, I’m my own boss. Nobody bothers me. I can keep a guy under wraps here, but indefinitely.”

The Saint leaned back more comfortably. He nodded towards his prisoner.

“Ever seen Junior before?”

Sammy’s small eyes dug tiny holes in the specimen. “Uh-uh. He’s imported. Not one of the Chi boys. Though I could be wrong, at that, I guess. Where’d you blow from, bub?

“You go to hell,” Junior said unoriginally, but his voice cracked.

Sammy the Leg bellowed with laughter. “Tells me to go to hell! What a joker. Ja hear him?”

“A character,” the Saint said. “I’ve an idea he’s working for another character. Somebody called the King of the Beggars.”

“Look, pal,” Sammy said cautiously, “I don’t know from nothin’. I just rent rooms. Now I’m gonna take a walk. When you want me, ring that bell over there by you, Saint. Then I’ll put your chum under wraps for you. There’s more beer in the icebox.”

He grinned, and waddled out.

Simon listened to the tinkling of the beaded portière as it fell back into place. It jingled again as Sammy the Leg thrust his face back through it.

“Get that there electric broiler down from that shelf an’ stick his feet in it,” he advised. “It works well.”

He vanished; and the Saint gazed speculatively at the indicated shelf.

“Not a bad idea,” he drawled. “Hoppy, what goes with Sammy?”

“Huh?” Hoppy said. “He went out.”

“Yes, I noticed. What I want to know is whether you’re sure Sammy the Leg is levelling with us.”

“Lissen,” Hoppy said, almost indignantly, “Sammy an’ me was in Joliet togedder.”

He made this statement more devastatingly than any Harvard graduate identifying a brother alumnus, and in the face of such credentials Simon relaxed.

“In that case,” he said, “go ahead and plug in the broiler.”

Junior jumped out of his chair. The Saint did not rise. His foot shot forward, and Junior sat down again abruptly.

“My God,” Junior gasped. “You wouldn’t d... do...”

Simon’s eyebrows were an angelic arch.

“Why not? Prosthetic devices are being improved all the time. You should be able to get along beautifully with an artificial leg. Maybe you’ll only need a foot, though. It’ll depend on how soon you start talking.”

Junior said frantically, “I’m talking right now. Keep that damn thing away from me. I’m talking, see? For God’s sake ask me some questions.”

“Hold it, Hoppy,” the Saint said. “You might leave the broiler plugged in, though. Our friend can look at it to cover awkward lulls in the conversation. There’s only one question you need to answer, though, Junior. Who’s the King?”

“Believe me,” Junior said earnestly, “I wish to God I knew. I’d spill it. After that I’d start travelling. For my health. But I never seen the King.”

He was telling the truth. Simon knew that; he was a connoisseur in such matters. Junior was obviously afraid of the King’s power, but he was more afraid of the Saint. After all, Simon Templar was only a few feet from him, and the King of the Beggars was not — at the moment.

Simon said, “I’d have been surprised if you’d said anything different, this early in the story. Still, there must be a few precious pearls of information nestling in your head. I’d love to hear them. Start where you first heard of the King.”

Junior was talking before the Saint had finished. He was, it seemed, a native of San Francisco. Travelling for his health a few months ago, he had landed in Chicago and naturally gravitated to the lower depths. There he had been approached by one of the King’s ambassadors, who had been intrigued by Junior’s obviously criminal appearance.

“But I never seen the King,” Junior repeated. “Frankie’s my contact.”

“Frankie who?”

“Frankie Weiss. I’m just a collector, that’s all. I make the rounds and collect the percentage off the beggars. I hand the dough over to Frankie an’ he pays me off. That’s all I got to do with it.”

“A beautiful, literate, well-motivated story,” the Saint said. “Except one point. You forgot to say why you took Miss Varing up an alley.”

“She was a new one. She hadn’t joined our... She told me to go to hell. People what don’t want to kick in, we sorta convince ’em.” Junior’s voice trailed off weakly.

“A beating usually does the trick, I imagine,” Simon said very lightly. “Did you by any chance help to convince a beggar named John Irvine?”

“I didn’t have nothing to do with that. Honest to God!”

“Then who did?”

Junior swallowed.

“It could have been Frankie.”

There was an almost inaudible ping, and Junior clapped a hand to his cheek with a startled expression, as if he had been sharply stung by some unsuspected insect.

“It should have been in de eye,” Hoppy Uniatz said enigmatically. “Ya lousy stool-pigeon.”

“Don’t discourage him yet,” said the Saint. “Tell me, Junior, what happens when a beggar does agree to kick in?”

“Well, then he joins the Society.”

“Society?”

“The Metropolitan Benevolent Society... Then I take him to Frankie. But that’s all I got to do with it. Frankie’s waiting somewhere in his car and drives off with the guy. It ain’t my business after that. I don’t ask questions.”

“Where do you meet Frankie?”

“It’s different all the time. I was to see him next Wednesday night, at eight o’clock — corner of State and Adams.”

“I hope he won’t be too disappointed when you don’t show up,” said the Saint gently.

Junior gulped.

“Now lissen,” he pleaded. “I told you everything. I run off at the mouth—”

“You certainly do,” Simon conceded. “What worries me is that it may be a habit with you. And I certainly don’t want you going to the King, or Frankie Weiss, and running off some more about this little tête-à-tête of ours. So while we decide whether we’re going to kill you, we’ll just have to keep you out of circulation... Can you get Samuel back, Hoppy?”

Mr Uniatz solved this problem by exposing his tonsils in a stentorian bellow which made the chandelier vibrate. In a few seconds Sammy the Leg came in, beaming hospitably.

“All through?” he shouted softly. “Oh — I forgot. This is Fingers Schultz. You remember Fingers, Hoppy?”

“Sure,” Hoppy said. “Where is he?”

Sammy stepped aside, revealing a small, colourless man who blinked blankly at the Saint. Hoppy said, “Hi, Fingers.”

Mr Schultz nodded and kept on blinking.

Sammy the Leg said, “Can’t run a joint like this alone. Fingers gives me a hand.” He looked startled. “Hey. I made a joke. Fingers — hand. It ain’t bad.”

Nobody laughed. Simon said, “Will you keep Junior on ice for a few days?”

“It’ll be a pleasure,” Sammy said. “At twenty-five a day, that’ll be one seventy-five. I always get a week in advance.” He kept his palm extended. “Board and room,” he explained. “Cut rate to you, though.”

Simon opened his wallet and laid several bills on the waiting paw.

“Thanks,” Sammy said. “If you want to stop keeping him, lemme know, an’ maybe we can take care of that, too.”

“I’ll let you know,” Simon assured him gravely. “Come along, Hoppy.”

He had a last glimpse of Junior’s white, staring face as they went out.

Chapter five

He met her for lunch at the Pump Room, and almost failed to recognise her as the head-waiter ushered her to his booth. Half-remembered pictures of her were too posed and static, and the last time he had seen her across the footlights was a year or more ago, in a costume piece with powdered wig and baroque skirt.

In the flesh, and modern dress, she was not less beautiful but different. And certainly a thousand times different again from the character part in which he had first met her.

She crossed the room towards him with splendid assurance in every motion. Someone had spent a great deal of loving thought upon the cut of her Scotch tweed suit, which managed deftly to emphasise breath-taking lines beneath the tweed. The Saint permitted himself to dwell admiringly upon the exquisite long curve that swept from waist to knee with every long, sure step, and on other unmasculine curves beneath the tailored jacket. The time-honoured banalities of greeting seemed more than ordinarily empty as he rose to let her slide into the seat beside him.

He ordered cocktails for them both, and then there was a little silence while Monica Varing looked at him, and Simon leaned back and allowed himself the ordinarily quite expansive pleasure of gazing his fill upon Monica Varing. That wonderful mutable face was never twice quite the same, and the warm vitality that radiated from it gave her a transcendent vividness which critics had hymned and artists tried in vain to capture. Three generations of actresses named Varing had carried that inner illumination, the Saint thought; it must have come down from mother to daughter like a burning flame handed along the unbroken line.

She looked world-weary today — and eager as a schoolgirl beneath the weariness. She was exciting to look at and exciting to inhale; the perfume that floated across the table was just elusive enough to tempt Simon to edge closer and closer to identify it.

“Well, Mr Templar,” she said at last, her voice pitched so low that it ran a velvety finger along Simon’s nerves and made them tingle, “do you always stare like that?”

“Always, when there’s anything like you to stare at,” he said shamelessly.

She made a face that still didn’t reject the obvious compliment entirely.

“Give me a cigarette,” she said, “and tell me what I really want to hear.”

As he offered his pack and a light he thought it all out again.

He knew quite well that the old, wise course would have been to avoid Monica Varing entirely. Monica was used to a starring role. She had been the centre of her own stage long enough to feel the limelight was hers by right, and her essay at detection in beggar garb proved her resourceful and determined, if not strictly sensible. She was unlikely to sit quiet and let the Saint take over her part without wanting to share in the fun — and the King played for keeps. There would be no coming out for smiling bows after the curtains fell on a performance before the King of the Beggars.

The Saint’s logic told him all this. But the impatience to see her again, and without disguise, had been stronger than any logic. And now that she was here, and all her real loveliness within inches of him, logic became almost meaningless.

“There really isn’t much to tell.” he tried to hedge.

“What happened last night?” Monica demanded, leaning forward distractingly and clasping long coral-tipped fingers on the table, “Remember, this was my party before you crashed it.”

“I had the impression it was open to the public,” he said. “I just asked myself in to help an old woman. I was watching before that, and I’m going to have to watch some more. I want to see what men are on the board. The King’s got himself protected very thoroughly. Getting close to him is liable to be dangerous.”

“You can’t leave me out. I want to do something, Saint. I had a reason for getting into this business, if you haven’t forgotten.”

“You’ll have your chance. I don’t know yet where I’m going to need you most.”

He quirked an eyebrow at her and his eyes brightened with an interestingly irrelevant tangent to that idea, but Monica was not to be diverted.

“Keep that wicked look out of your eyes,” she said, “and stick to the subject. What did you find out from Junior?”

“Not very much, I’m afraid.”

He told her just what he had learned; holding back nothing but Sammy the Leg’s address. There was nothing much else to withhold.

“I think Junior came clean — as clean as he could,” he concluded. “The King wouldn’t last long if any little jerk like Junior could put the finger on him. The only thing Junior may have weaselled on is how much he really had to do with the Irvine killing. We might burn that out of him, but it wouldn’t stand up in court. So maybe we’ll have to kill him anyway, just to make sure.”

His tone was casually serious enough to make her shiver.

“Then we might get further if I went out and played beggar again,” she said, but the Saint shook his head.

“I hate to criticise your performance, but I think the part is going to have to be played another way. And that’s a way I wouldn’t let you risk.”

It took three days. For Frankie Weiss did not appear at his rendezvous with Junior on Wednesday night, and, after the Saint had waited for an hour, he began to feel a familiar tingling sensation at the roots of his hair. The move had been taken away from him. The best he could hope was that Junior’s disappearance from his usual haunts had been reported without making Frankie suspect anything more than that Junior had skipped town — with some of the take.

But there had to be other agents than Junior, and they would still be operating, and that was what Simon’s plan was based on.

In the evenings he became a beggar. It took an elaborate make-up to disguise the fact that Monica Varing would have needed to beg for anything, but for him it was easier. A few skilful lines to put ten years on his face, a slack vacancy of expression, a pair of dark glasses, and he was half-dressed for the part. An old suit, picked up at a Halstead Street pawnshop, a white cane, a battered hat, a tin cup and a sheaf of pencils, and a few smears of grime artfully applied to his face — for a blind man cannot use a mirror — and he was ready to pass any scrutiny. Hoppy lounged by at intervals to check with him, and continued his practice in the art of spitting BBs. He found it more satisfactory now to work with living targets, as he strolled along the streets, and his aim was improving prodigiously.

And then there were lunches with Monica Varing, and superbly wasted afternoons, and late suppers after the theatre; and quite naturally and in no time at all it became accepted that it must be lunch again tomorrow and supper again that night, and the same again the day after tomorrow and the day after that.

So three days went by much faster than they sound, too fast, it seemed, sometimes; and while they talked a lot about the King of Beggars, a very different community of interest began to supersede him as the principal link between them.

It was Mrs Laura Wingate who brought the Saint luck. Or perhaps it was Stephen Elliott, though the grey-haired philanthropist was not the one who dropped a coin in Simon’s cup.

“You poor dear man,” a treacly voice said sympathetically. “I always feel so sorry for the blind. Here.”

She was a woman out of a Mary Petty drawing, protruding fore and aft, with several powdered chins and a look of determined charity. The man was a nonentity beside her, spare and white-haired and silent, his gaze fixed abstractedly on the far distances and his fingers fumbling with the watch-chain stretched across his vest.

“Thank you,” the Saint mumbled. “God bless you, ma’am.”

“Oh, you’re welcome,” the treacly voice said, and, startlingly, giggled. “I always feel I must give to the poor unfortunates.”

“What?” The man let go of his watch chain. “Laura, we’ll be late.”

“Oh, dear. Of course—”

She went on, her ridiculously high heels clicking busily and helping to exaggerate the undulant protrusion of her behind.

Hoppy Uniatz, coming by on one of his visits just then, leaned against the wall by the Saint and craned to peer into the cup.

“A lousy dime,” he observed disgustedly. “An’ I could get ten grand right around de corner for dem rocks she’s wearin’.”

“It’s the spirit that counts,” said the Saint. “Didn’t you recognise her?”

“She ain’t anudder of dem actresses, is she?”

“No. But she doesn’t do all her charity with dimes. That’s Mrs Laura Wingate. I’ve seen her in the papers lately. She’s been backing Stephen Elliott — the abstracted gentleman you just saw.”

“What’s his racket?”

“Founding missions and homes for the poor. Philanthropy... Take a walk, Hoppy,” the Saint said abruptly, in the same low tone, and Mr Uniatz’s eyelids flickered. But he did not look around. With a grunt he reached for a coin, dropped it into the tin cup, and moved away.

“God bless you,” the Saint said, more loudly now. Another man stood in front of him. He was tall, bitter faced, sharply dressed. Pale blond hair showed under an expensive hat. A hairline moustache accentuated the thin lines of the down-curved mouth.

Simon intoned, “Help a poor blind man... Buy a pencil?”

The man said, “I want to talk to you.”

“Yes, sir?”

“You’re new here, aren’t you?”

Simon nodded.

“Yes, sir. A friend told me this was a good corner — and the man who had it died just lately—”

“That’s right,” the clipped, harsh voice said. “He died, sure enough. Know why he died?”

“No, sir.”

“He wasn’t smart. That’s why he died. Maybe you’re smarter. Think so?”

“I... don’t quite understand.”

“I’m telling you. Ever hear of the Metropolitan Benevolent Society?”

Simon moved his head slowly, with the helpless searching motion of the blind.

“I’m new in town,” he whined. “Nobody told—”

“The head guy is the King of the Beggars.” It sounded unreal in the mechanical hubbub of the Chicago street. It belonged in the time of François Villon, or in the lands of the Arabian Nights. Yet the fantastic title came easily from the thin, twisted lips of the blond man, but without even the superficial glamour of those periods. In terms of today it was as coldly sinister as a levelled gun-barrel. Simon had a moment’s fastidious, cat-like withdrawal from that momentary evil, but it was purely an inward motion. To all appearances he was still the same — a blind beggar, a little frightened now, and very unsure of himself.

Even his voice was high-pitched and hesitant.

“I’ve... heard of him. Yes, sir. I’ve heard of him.”

The blond man said, “Well, the King sent me especially to invite you to join the Society.”

“But suppose I don’t—”

“Suit yourself. The guy who had this corner before you didn’t want to join, either. So?”

The Saint said nothing. Presently, very slowly, he nodded.

“Smart boy,” the blond man said. “I’ll pick you up at ten tonight, right here.”

“Yes, sir,” Simon Templar whispered.

The blond man went away.

Chapter six

“Dat was Frankie,” Mr Uniatz announced a few minutes later. “He ain’t changed much.”

“Frankie himself, eh?” Simon smiled. “Well, we’re moving at last. Frankie is going to initiate me into the Metropolitan Benevolent Society, and it’s just possible that I might get an introduction to the King.”

“An’ den we give him de woiks, huh?”

“You know, Hoppy, I’ve never committed regicide.” For a brief second the blind-beggar face showed the same lawless grin that had heralded the end of more than one particularly obnoxious career. “It might be a new sensation... But it’s not going to be so easy.”

“If I get next to him wit’ my Betsy—”

“The trouble is, you weren’t invited. And it might look strange if I showed up with an escort. This time, anyway, your job is going to be to Lurk.”

He gave more detailed instructions.

By ten o’clock the Saint’s profit for the day amounted to thirty dollars, twenty-seven cents, and a Los Angeles streetcar token, which he evaluated at six and a quarter cents. Since he expected to be searched, he carried no lethal weapon, not even the ivory-hilted throwing knife which in his hands was as fast and deadly as any gun. This trip would be an advanced reconnaissance, and nothing would have been more foolish than to count on turning it extemporaneously into a frontal assault.

At ten o’clock he carefully ignored the unobtrusive dark sedan that rolled silently to a stop at the curb a few feet away. The driver’s features were in shadow under a low-pulled hat, but the hands that lay on the steering wheel were not those of a King.

The nails, Simon decided, were too septic to belong to royalty, even a racket royalty. Besides, when did royalty ever drive its own cars, except such rare cases as ex-King Alfonso. And look what happened to him, the Saint told himself as he stared at nothing through his dark glasses and apparently did not see Frankie Weiss get out of the car and move towards him.

The blond man looked no more sunny and warm-hearted than he had before dinner. His shark’s mouth had presumably just grabbed for a tasty mackerel and got hold of an old boot instead. Working this organ slightly, Mr Weiss paused before the Saint and stared down.

Simon jingled his cup.

“Help a blind man, sir?”

“Lay off the act,” Frankie said. “You remember me.”

The Saint hesitated.

“Oh. Oh, yes. You’re the man who... I know your voice. But I’m blind—”

“Maybe,” Frankie said sceptically. “Let’s get going.”

“Why... yes, sir. But I’d like to know a little more about this... this business.”

Frankie grasped the Saint’s arm with bony fingers that dug deliberately into the flesh.

“Come on,” he said, and the Saint had only time to assure himself that Hoppy Uniatz was at his post half a block away before he was in the back of the sedan, the clash of the closing door committing him irrevocably to this chapter of the adventure.

The chauffeur’s unkempt neckline confirmed his opinion that the man was a subordinate. Simon had little chance to study his subject, for as the car slid smoothly into gear Frankie lifted the dark-lensed glasses from the Saint’s nose, dropped them casually into Simon’s lap, and replaced them with a totally opaque elastic bandage. Simon slipped the spectacles into a pocket and put up a mildly protesting hand.

“What’s that? I don’t need a blindfold.”

The driver laughed shortly. But Frankie’s tone held no amusement as he said, “Maybe. And maybe not.”

“But—”

“Forget it,” Frankie said. “Save it for the cops. What the hell do you think we care whether you’re blind or not? A guy’s got a right to make a living.” Unpleasant mockery sounded in his voice now. “That’s where we don’t hold with the authorities. We don’t make any stink about handing out begging licences. If you’re sharp enough to get away with anything, that’s fine — as long as you don’t try it with us.”

Simon was silent. Frankie slapped the Saint’s knee.

“That’s none of our business. There’s only one question we ask. How much?”

“Yeah,” the driver said, laughing again. “This guy’s gonna be a smart apple, though, ain’t he, Frankie?”

“Shut up,” Frankie said without rancour. “Sure he is. But nobody’s asking you.”

His hands worked over the Saint, efficiently exploring every inch from head to foot where a weapon could have been concealed.

Simon said pleadingly, “I don’t understand this. Where are we going?”

“It’s like a lodge, see?” Frankie told him. “You gotta be introduced and sworn in, see?”

Simon tried to keep up with their route by ear, but even a man born and bred in Chicago would have been finally baffled by the turns and back-tracks the car took. He could only hope that they would not be confusing enough to shake off Hoppy in spite of the trained blood hound talents which, like his celerity on the draw, were among the few useful legacies of his vocation during the Volstead Era.

A little more than half an hour later, as near as the Saint could judge, the car stopped and the door clicked open. Simon put up a hand to his blindfold, but Frankie slapped it down. The same cruelly probing fingers gripped his arm again and guided him out of the sedan and across a paved area where the wind blew mildly against his face. There was very little noise of traffic now, and the air had the cleaner smell of a residential district.

A door opened and shut. Simon could hear his footsteps echoed, and presently another latch clicked, and he was guided down a steep flight of steps.

“Okay, turn on the lights,” Frankie said. The guiding hand let go. Frankie said, “Stay where you are.”

The Saint stood still, and in the hushed pause that followed he was aware of tiny scuffs and rustles of movement, such as would come from a small group of people waiting in conscious silence.

Then the blindfold was lifted from his eyes, and a painful intensity of light blazed directly into his face.

He did not wince, though the glare was brutal. The new blindness which it induced made little difference — he knew that it would have been impossible to see past those spotlights at any time. This was the police line-up, with a difference. He stood motionless, knowing that eyes were studying him from behind the lights, but that these were not the eyes of guardians of the law and peace. They belonged to brothers-in-arms of Junior, alert to recognise him if he were a spy for any opposition gang, or memorising his features in readiness for future shakedowns.

A voice began to speak, artificially through a crude public-address system.

“We welcome you to the Metropolitan Benevolent Society,” it said unctuously, “an organisation designed for the aid and protection we can give will be at your service...”

It was a formalised little speech, which might have been a phonograph recording for all Simon could tell; he guessed that it had been used often before and was a part of the regular routine. Again that flash of monstrous incongruity struck through him at the situation — ruthless killers making a Rotary Club speech, the Arabian Nights in Chicago. But his face showed nothing but a slightly vacuous listening intentness.

The speaker went on to observe that begging was one of the most ancient and honourable professions, that ancient monks had practised it respectably, as the Salvation Army did today, but that in these times the individual practitioner was in danger of all kinds of arbitrary persecution. And just as exploited Labour had been forced to band together to safeguard the rights which no lone individual could defend, so the professional mendicants had been obliged to band together and declare a closed shop for their fraternity — this same fraternity, of course, being the Metropolitan Benevolent Society.

It sounded good, the Saint admitted to himself. He was beginning to be able to see a little now, through the swimming spots and dazzles of his maltreated retinas, but there was not a great deal to see — only part of a bare cement-walled room with one door in it, and a portable loudspeaker on the floor to one side, with wires trailing from it and disappearing behind the lights.

The voice went on smoothly:

“In return for your protection,” it said paternally, “you will turn in one-half of your daily take to Big Hazel Green, manager of the Elliott Hotel, where you will be given lodgings at a nominal price. She will be your contact with headquarters, and will supply you with all information and assign you your territory. One thing more...” The voice became more greasily friendly than ever. “Don’t try any chiselling. You will be watched constantly, and any violation of our rules will be severely punished. If you have any questions now, Frankie will answer them.”

The Saint had many questions, but he knew that this was no time to ask them. He realised that he had not under-estimated the cautiousness of the King. Even if the King was actually there at all, which Simon now doubted more than ever. His Majesty or any of his privy council could have potted him like a sitting rabbit before he even got through the shield of lights.

There was going to be no quick checkmate. This was not even the time to give check.

“No, sir,” he said weakly. “No questions now.”

“Let’s go,” Frankie said.

He replaced the elastic bandage and gripped the Saint’s arm. Again the latch clicked, and they went up the stairs. Again there was a cool wind and concrete underfoot.

Something clinked in the Saint’s pocket and rattled on the pavement. Simon stopped and bent over, groping hesitantly, but Frankie’s hand jerked him upright again. Suspicion rasped in the man’s voice.

“Hey, what’s the idea?”

Then the chauffeur, “It’s only half a buck the guy dropped. Here it is.”

“I’m sorry,” Simon stammered. “I guess I’m... kind of nervous.”

That carried conviction, and both men laughed briefly.

“You won’t get rich that way,” the chauffeur said, and put the coin in the Saint’s hand. “Come on. We’re taking another little ride.”

“Where to?”

“Around,” Frankie said. “Just around. And back where we picked you up. Just so you won’t come back without being invited. The King don’t like visitors.”

Chapter seven

Simon had cocktails already ordered when Monica Varing came into the Buttery at noon the next day. She was the most punctual woman he had ever met. He had discovered that you could set a clock by her, and it amused him to have the drinks arriving, freshly chilled, at the very moment she walked in.

“Well,” he said as she sat down while their hands still held, “I am fraternally yours as of last night.”

Her beautifully drawn eyebrows rose.

“What have I done?”

“A figure of speech,” he explained hastily. “I don’t feel at all fraternal. But I am now an accredited member of your fraternity of beggars. I even had an audience with the King.”

“Tell me everything.”

The Saint told her.

“When I dropped the coin,” he concluded, “it was the signal to Hoppy that everything was under control and that was the joint he had to get the address of. He got it all right — they hadn’t shaken him off with their zig-zagging around the town — and we went back there later and did a small job of housebreaking. Unfortunately it didn’t pay off. It’s a vacant house. The electricity’s turned on, and there was that loudspeaker and a mike in the basement room, but nothing else except the spotlights.”

“Who owns the house?” Monica asked, and the Saint shrugged.

“I’m trying to find out. Meanwhile, we have another lead. There’s this Big Hazel Green, manageress of the Elliott Hotel. And you know who that joint belongs to? Stephen Elliott.”

“Stephen Elliott? The philanthropist?”

“It says here. At any rate, the Elliott Hotel is more or less a charity, according to the inquiries I’ve made. The point is, does Elliott know that his manageress is a liaison officer for the King of the Beggars?”

“Or,” she said slowly, “could Elliott be the King?” The Saint nodded.

“Just like a detective story. But such things have happened... I should like to have a talk with Brother Elliott in an official sort of way.” Monica wrinkled her brow. “Could I help?”

“I read in a society column this morning that Mrs Laura Wingate is giving a cocktail party for him today. Do you happen to know her?”

“No, but I’m sure to know somebody who does. Let me make a few phone calls.”

Simon called a waiter, and lighted a cigarette for her while a telephone was brought and plugged in. Then he went to a phone booth outside and made a call for himself. “Hoppy?” he said. “Did you get a report from that real-estate company yet?”

“No, boss.” Mr Uniatz’s voice, which had never been distinguished by any flutelike purity of tone, had a perturbed croak in it which registered on the Saint’s sensitive ear just a second before he blurted out its cause and explanation. “I got a cop here, boss. I dunno what goes on, but he wants to talk to ya. Only he ain’t got no warrant.”

“No warrant is required for that,” Simon said. “If he longs to hear my dulcet tones, we can accommodate him. Put him on. It’s all right, Hoppy.”

“I hope so,” Mr Uniatz muttered dubiously.

Then a cool, deep-pitched voice sounded in the Saint’s ear.

“Mr Templar?”

“Yes.”

“This is Detective Lieutenant Alvin Kearney. I’d like to see you about a matter.”

Simon drew a slow, careful breath.

“Are you selling subscriptions to the police fund?” he inquired genially. “If so, you can count on me. This business of taking out old policemen and shooting them has always struck me as unnecessarily cruel.”

“What?” Kearney said. “Look, Mr Templar. I want to see you.”

“So you said,” the Saint agreed. “About a Matter. But just at the moment I’m already seeing someone about a Matter. Perhaps if you told me the nature of this Matter of yours I’d be more co-operative. How do I know it’s important?”

“We’ve got a body down at the morgue, and we’d like you to look at it. That’s all.”

“Ah,” said the Saint, and was briefly silent while he lighted a thoughtful cigarette. “I’d love to, Lieutenant. I’ve always said that Chicago is one of the most hospitable cities in the world. But I’ve already seen the Art Institute and Marshall Field’s and the Natural History Museum, and I don’t think I need a corpse to increase my liking for your city. Unless it’s got two heads. Has it got two heads?”

Kearney said doggedly, “It’s only got one head and we want you to look at it. I’m being polite, Mr Templar. But I don’t have to be, you know.”

Simon knew it. He had heard that tone of voice before. And he was very definitely curious.

“I know,” he murmured. “It’s just your better nature. Well, I’d do almost anything to make you happy. When and where do you want me to ogle this cadaver?”

“If you could come on down to the morgue right now, I could meet you there. It would help.”

“Fine,” Simon said. “In about twenty minutes?”

“That’ll suit me. Thanks, Mr Templar.”

“Not at all,” said the Saint, and went more soberly back to the table.

Monica had finished her calls. The dark richness of her hair tossed like a wave of night as she looked up at him.

“It’s all set,” she said cheerfully. “We’re going with the Kennedys. I didn’t tell them about you. You’ll be a surprise.”

Simon said, “I hope I can make it. Somehow the police seldom see things my way.” He sat down. “There’s been a corpse found, and it seems they want me to identify it. Why anyone should think I might supply the clue is something else again. It isn’t my corpse or yours or Hoppy’s — we know that.”

Her face was only a shade paler — or that might have been a change of lighting on her camellia skin.

“Then — who could it be?”

“As a betting proportion,” said the Saint, “I’ll take three guesses. And Stephen Elliott is not one of them.”

Chapter eight

The last time Simon Templar had seen the man who lay on the morgue slab was in the parlour of Sammy the Leg. Junior’s rat face was as unattractive in death as in life — less so, in view of the small blue-rimmed hole that marred his forehead. As the Saint looked at it, he was conscious of a curious urgency to dematerialise himself, drift like smoke towards the house near Wheaton, and ask Sammy questions.

Lieutenant Alvin Kearney was a very tall, very thin man with protruding brown eyes and a bobbing Adam’s apple. He seemed to be mainly fascinated by the body, in a sort of dull, desperate way.

“Know him?” he asked.

“What makes you think I would?” Simon countered cautiously.

“Ever seen him before?” Kearney insisted.

The Saint said plaintively, “I very seldom meet people with bullet-holes in their foreheads. They’re so taciturn they bore me.”

Kearney closed his mouth and juggled his Adam’s apple. His cheeks darkened a trifle.

“You’re funny as a crutch,” he said. “I want a straight answer.”

Simon’s innocent blue gaze met Kearney’s squarely.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t help you. I can’t even tell you the man’s name. Who is he?”

“Dunno,” Kearney said. “Unidentified so far.”

“Oh. Did he have a note in his hand directing that his remains be sent to me?”

“Not quite,” Kearney said. “There was a sort of tie-up, though. We found him in a house just north of Wheaton. Ever been there?”

The Saint took out a cigarette and turned it between his fingers, correcting minute flaws in its roundness. His face wore no more reaction than a slight, thoughtful frown, but a prescient vacuum had suddenly created itself just below his ribs. It had always been obvious that Kearney hadn’t called him out of sheer civic hospitality. Now the showing of cards, led up to with almost Oriental obliquity, was starting to uncork a Sunday punch. But it was starting from such a fantastic direction that the Saint’s footwork felt stiff and stumbling.

He said, “Wait a minute, Lieutenant. You found this man in the house, you say?”

“Not me personally. But he was in a basement room there, yes.”

“Does the local patrolman’s beat include the inside of houses?”

Kearney said, “I get it. No, there was a phone call. An anonymous tip. The usual thing. We gave it a routine check-up, and there was this house with this guy in it.”

“No clues?” Simon said.

“Clues!” Kearney chewed the word. “Well — maybe one. We checked up to see who the house belongs to.”

He was staring at the Saint. Simon merely nodded and looked brightly interested.

Kearney said, “It belonged to an ex-con called Sammy the Leg, up to yesterday. Then a deed of gift was filed. Now it belongs to Mr Simon Templar.”

So that was it... The hollow space under the Saint’s wishbone filled up abruptly with fast-setting cement.

It was nightmarish, absurd, impossible; it was something that not only shouldn’t but happily couldn’t happen to a dog. He could only theoretically sympathise with the emotions of this hypothetical hound upon watching some rival pooch dig up a treasured bone miles away from its established burial-ground — and upon discerning that the bone had also been booby-trapped in transit.

Somehow he managed to strike a match and set it to his cigarette without a quiver.

“Somebody should have told me,” he murmured. “I always wanted to be a real-estate tycoon.”

“You didn’t know about it, huh?” Kearney said. “I kind of thought you didn’t. You ever meet Sammy the Leg?”

The Saint shook his head.

“Of course not. I didn’t sign any deed of gift either.”

“Uh-huh. We’re checking. We got plenty of records on Sammy.” Kearney produced a pad and pen. “Mind signing this? I want to compare a few signatures.”

Simon obligingly scribbled his name.

“If you’d show the deed to me, I could tell you right away if it was a forgery. In fact, I can tell you that now.”

“Can’t take your word for it,” Kearney said flatly. “I admit it looks like a frame, and a lousy one. On the other hand, we’ve got to be sure. You got a certain reputation, Saint.”

“So they tell me,” Simon said. “I’m surprised you don’t lock me up.”

Kearney suddenly grinned.

“We thought of it. But the Commissioner said no. You must have done him a favour some time.”

Which happened to be true. But Simon didn’t answer the implied question. He was staring thoughtfully at Junior’s corpse.

“That house at Wheaton — isn’t anyone living there?”

“Nobody’s shown up there since we got the call.”

“With this housing shortage, too,” Simon drawled. “You’d think they’d have been around it like ants as soon as a dead body was taken out... Well, it seems as if someone’s adopted me for an heir. I’m only sorry I can’t help you. If I do run across anything, I’ll let you know, though. All right?”

Kearney said, “Sure, that’s all right. Of course, if this is a frame, it might mean you’re mixed up in something. It might mean somebody’s gunning for you. You wouldn’t know about that, would you?”

Simon’s attitude changed. He leaned forward confidentially.

“Well,” he said, “if you’ll consider this just between ourselves, and not for publication. I can tell you that I am engaged in a small crusade just at present.”

Kearney’s eyes opened.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Simon said, and brought his mouth close to the detective’s ear. “Don’t breathe a word of it, but I’ve decided to kill everyone in Chicago.”

He went back to the hotel and told Hoppy the story, and Mr Uniatz’s jaw sagged lower and lower as it proceeded.

“I don’t get it,” Mr Uniatz said finally, making a great confession.

“Neither do I, to put it mildly,” said the Saint. “And fortunately, neither does Kearney. But he’s no fool. I didn’t want him to start asking me the wrong questions. He was on the right track, you know.”

“Yeah?” Hoppy said.

“He knows I’m mixed up in something. And I can’t let the police in on this yet. If I did, the King would simply go underground. As long as I keep His Majesty thinking there’s only one man on his track, he won’t be frightened into a strategic retreat. Ever try to scrape a sea anemone off a rock?”

“What would I wanna do a t’ing like dat for?” Hoppy inquired aggrievedly.

The Saint considered the question solemnly.

“Let’s say the anemone had murdered a great-aunt of yours, if you must have a motive. The aunt’s name was Abigail. She used to eke out a precarious living by blackmailing anemones. Got that straight?”

“Sure,” said Hoppy, satisfied.

“If you scoop fast, you can scrape up the anemone. But if you aren’t quite fast enough, it’ll retract and fold up into such a tight knot that you can’t pry it loose. I don’t want the King to retract.”

Hoppy said, “Sure.”

“The King doesn’t know I’m the blind beggar — I hope. That’s something. And I don’t think his murder frame has a chance to stick.” Simon frowned. “Or... perhaps he’s smarter than I thought. We’ll have to wait and see. At worst, you can get an anemone to reopen by feeding it.”

“Hey,” Hoppy said suddenly. “What’s an anemone?”

Simon decided it would be more discreet to leave this alone.

“What we want to know,” he said grimly, “is how this all happened. Who did what to who? Did Junior dig through a wall and escape? Then who bumped him off and called the cops? Is something wrong about that stooge — what was his name? — Fingers Schultz. Who talked too much to who — and brought my name into it? And how much too much has been said? Most important of all, what made Sammy run?”

“It couldn’t of been Sammy,” Hoppy said miserably. “I’d trust Sammy wit’ my right eye. If he signs a receipt, dat is.”

“We didn’t get a receipt,” Simon pointed out.

Chapter nine

The Saint had expected Mrs Laura Wingate’s penthouse on Lake Shore Drive to be fairly palatial, but he was not quite prepared for the rococo perspectives that opened before him as he followed Monica Varing out of the elevator and the cocktail party exploded around them like a startled barnyard.

“My God,” he said in a dazed undertone, as he fought their way through the seething throngs. “Monica, are you sure this is the right place?”

“I think so. We could have crashed the gate without any trouble. Everybody’s here.”

This seemed fairly correct. Across the broad acres of terrace, tables were set up, beach umbrellas made gay patterns, and trays of cocktails were levitated towards thirsty throats. The Saint seized two passing Martinis and shared his loot with Monica.

“Let’s cruise around,” he suggested. “I don’t know exactly what we’re looking for, but there’s one way to find out. If you stumble on a clue, such as a rigid body with a knife-hilt protruding from its back, whistle three times.”

“I wouldn’t be too hopeful,” she said. “The servants must be too well trained to leave rubbish cluttering up the lawn. Still, there may be some rigid bodies around here before the day’s over,” Monica pondered, watching a sleek young socialite tossing off drink after drink with the desperation of a fire-breathing dragon trying to put itself out.

They drifted through the yammer of high-pitched voices, conveniently allowing an eddy among the other guests to cut them off from their sponsors, the Kennedys. The Saint’s casually roving eyes inventoried the crowd without finding in it anything to give direction to his unformed questions. It seemed to be composed of fairly standard ingredients — playboys old and young, business men, and politicians, blended with their wives, mistresses, and prospectives. He sought and failed exasperatingly to find a single sinister aroma in the brew.

Then through a gap in the crowd he glimpsed a white head that looked like Stephen Elliott, and started to steer Monica towards it. Before they had made much progress the throng parted in another quarter, spilling away like a bow wave before the onrush of a monumental figure that bore down upon them like an ocean liner. Simon had only a moment to hope that it could stop in time before it rammed them with its monstrous bosom. “I thought I recognised you,” Mrs Wingate cried, ignoring Simon to concentrate on his companion. “It must be Monica Varing. Imagine!”

Monica smiled and said, “I’m afraid I wasn’t invited, Mrs Wingate, but I was with the Kennedys this afternoon, and they insisted I come along with them. I do hope you won’t mind.”

She played the gracious lady with such perfect restraint and charm that even Simon was impressed, while Mrs Wingate almost swooned.

“I’m so glad. How could I possibly mind? I’ve admired your art for so long, my dear Miss Varing — oh! A cocktail?”

She beckoned urgently, and a servant came with his tray. He offered it to Simon last, and Mrs Wingate’s attention was directed to Monica’s escort.

“Oh, dear — I should know you, too,” she gushed — and giggled helplessly. “I’m sure I should. I have such a dreadful memory for names.”

“There’s no reason why you should know mine,” said the Saint amiably. “I’m uninvited, too. I came with Miss Varing. My name is Templar. Simon Templar.”

“Simon Templar,” Mrs Wingate echoed, looking at him along her nose, over a battery of chins. “It’s familiar, somehow. Oh, I know. The Senator from—”

Behind the Saint a deep, mild, slightly treacly voice said, “Not quite, Laura. Not quite.”

Stephen Elliott moved into the group with a sort of apologetic benevolence that reminded the Saint of an undertaker associating with the bereaved.

Seen without interference by the dark glasses through which Simon had observed him first, there was a fresh pink tint to his long, aristocratic features rather similar in contour to those of a well-bred horse, which suggested that he had arrived fresh from a facial. His skin strengthened the impression with a smooth softness which implied the same attention daily. Whatever his other philanthropies may have been, it was evident that he must have been a benison to his barber.

Simon admitted him to their circle with an easy geniality that contained no hint of recognition.

“I’m not in the public eye just now,” he said. “Though there was a time when I was, rather painfully.”

Mrs Wingate fixed him with a sharp stare.

“I can’t remember names, but I have a wonderful memory for faces. I — oh, no. Of course not.”

But her eyes were puzzled.

Stephen Elliott’s deprecating smile and unnaturally soothing voice implied that all was for the best as he said, “Mr Templar is the Saint, Laura. Surely you’ve heard of the Saint?”

“Oh, heavens,” Mrs Wingate said, losing her poise and clutching at a sapphire pendant sitting like a mahout on the elephantine bulge of her bosom.

“My dear Mrs Wingate,” Simon said lightly, “even if I were still actively pursuing my profession, I could never bring myself to swipe sapphires from such a charming throat.”

Mrs Wingate giggled, but she relinquished her grip on the pendant rather reluctantly.

“Surely you’re not — I mean—”

She glanced around apprehensively. Simon smiled at her.

“Even Jack the Ripper must have had his social hours,” he said. “Please consider me on my best behaviour. You need have no fears for your sapphires, your silver, or your honour, though the latter...” He beamed at Mrs Wingate, who snickered again, unaware that the sentence might have been finished in many more ways than one, and at least half of them unflattering.

Elliott introduced himself. “—since Laura is too flustered, I gather,” he said gravely. “Miss Varing? How do you do? Meeting two such notable figures is rather an event. I’ll celebrate it by joining you in a drink.”

He beckoned to a passing tray.

“To crime,” the Saint suggested, and they drank, though Mrs Wingate had a moment’s startled pause first.

“To crime,” Elliott repeated. “I’m surprised to hear that from you, Mr Templar. I thought the Saint changed sides a while ago.”

“There was a war on at the time,” Simon said casually, “and some of it seemed sort of important. But now I’m back to stirring up my own trouble. You might call it my private reconversion problem... As a matter of fact, I’m working on a case now, and I find I haven’t lost much of my knack.”

“A case?” Elliott asked.

“Yes. It should interest you, in view of the work you’ve been doing among Chicago’s poor. Have you ever heard of someone called the King of the Beggars?”

Simon threw out the phrase with perfect carelessness, and just as airily made no point of watching for a reaction.

It would have made little difference if he had. Stephen Elliott’s Santa Claus eyebrows merely drew together in a vaguely worried way; while Mrs Wingate bridled as if her position in the Social Register had been questioned, and then said, “It’s fantastic. Utterly fantastic. I’ve heard rumours, of course, but — Mr Templar, you must realise that such things are... are...”

“Fantastic?” the Saint prompted.

“Not too much so, in my opinion,” Stephen Elliott answered him. “There certainly is some sort of criminal organisation victimising the poor in Chicago. I’m not blind, Mr Templar. But just how widespread is it?”

Simon shrugged.

Elliott’s distinguished equine face worked uncomfortably.

“I know,” he said at last. “It’s a pernicious racket, no matter how small. It should be stamped out. And you say you’re going after it?”

The Saint flipped a mental coin, and decided to hold his course.

“Yes. I haven’t been able to find out much yet. I wonder if you could help me?”

Elliott pursed his lips.

“I’m afraid they don’t talk to me. Not about that. It’s hard to break down the wall of reticence a socially unfortunate man has had to build up. I can inquire, if that will help.”

“You haven’t been interested enough so far to ask questions?” Monica put in.

“It’s a police matter. I feel that I can do more good in my own way... Of course, if I could be of any use—”

Mrs Wingate said abruptly, “Why, you’re the blind beggar!”

This time the Saint was naturally watching Elliott. He saw blank startled astonishment leap into the man’s eyes. He held his own reflexes frozen under an unmoving mask of bronze and waited, while Mrs Laura Wingate babbled on.

“I don’t understand. I’m sure I can’t be mistaken. But... but... I never forget a face, Mr Templar. What in the world—”

Elliott’s hand moved towards the watch-chain stretched across his vest.

“What do you mean, Laura?”

“I’m sure I must be making a fool of myself. But, Stephen, you know I’ve got a photographic memory. I think you were with me, too... Yesterday! Mr Templar—”

The coin had come down and bedded itself flatly in hot solder. There wasn’t even a theoretical chance any more of its landing on its edge. Its verdict had been delivered with more finality even than the Saint had played for. But he had always been a sucker for the fast showdown, the cards on the table and the hell with complicated stratagems...

He relaxed with an infinitude of relaxation, and smiled at Laura Wingate with a complete happiness that could only stem from that.

“She’s perfectly right,” he said. “I often travel incognito. As a matter of fact, I was trying to get some information about the King’s organisation. To do that I had to pose as a beggar, I hope you’ll keep it confidential.”

“Oh, goodness,” Mrs Wingate said breathlessly. “How romantic!”

Stephen Elliott maintained his mildly worried expression.

“Since we’ve stumbled on something that’s apparently secret,” he said temperately, “I suspect we’d better not ask any more questions. If Mr Templar really has taken up the chase, and if his quarry should learn about it, it might be extremely dangerous for him. Perhaps even” — he shot the Saint a deliberate measuring glance — “fatal.”

“I wouldn’t dream of telling a soul,” Mrs Wingate protested. “I just wish I weren’t so curious!”

Elliott’s attention remained on the Saint.

“In fact,” he said, “I’m not at all sure that it’s wise for you to go on with this project, even now. From what little I have heard, the King of the Beggars protects his absolute sovereignty as ruthlessly as any despot. I have a great admiration for your exploits, and I should hate to see anything happen to you.”

“Thank you,” Simon said. “I’ve a great admiration for yours.”

Elliott hesitated, staring.

“Scarcely in the same category—”

“I mean your charities. The Elliott Hotel, for example.”

The philanthropist nodded.

“I am trying to follow a plan,” he said, a slightly fanatical glaze coming into his eyes. “I’ll admit that the several rooming-houses I own in Chicago aren’t in the same class as the Palmer House, but I think all told, I have more guests in my various establishments than any single Chicago hotel. The greatest good for the greatest number of the needy automatically means that one must supply bread, not éclairs.”

“Also,” said the Saint, holding his gaze directly, “the dispenser of bread can hardly stand by while some racketeer taxes the needy for the privilege of receiving it.”

“I can only work within my limitations and in my own way—”

Mrs Wingate was off on a tangent, figuratively clutching Elliott’s coat-tails and riding along.

“There must be roses, too,” she remarked, and everyone looked at her blankly.

Finally Simon said, “Chacun à son goût” in such a significant manner that Mrs Wingate nodded several times with intense solemnity, as if she had heard the Pope affirm a historic dogma.

“Man does not live by bread alone,” she said. “Stephen is concerned with the bodies of the poor. My interest is in their souls. The unfortunates do have souls, you know. I try to bring something more than bread into their dark, narrow lives. You should see... Stephen! Do you think—”

“What, Laura?”

“I’m sure you’d be willing to help us, Mr Templar. You’re notorious for your charities—”

Elliott said, “Notorious is perhaps the wrong word, Laura. And, if I may say so, the Saint’s charities are not exactly in line with what we’re trying to do.”

Mrs Wingate plunged on excitedly, as if she had not even heard him.

“And you, Miss Varing — of course. You see, we try to make the unfortunates realise something of the higher things. It gives them incentive. We arrange to put on little entertainments for them sometimes. Now tomorrow night there’s one at the Elliott Hotel—”

“In the boiler-room,” Elliott said with dry humour. “You mustn’t give the impression that it’s like the Drake.”

“But it’s an enormous room,” Mrs Wingate went on, no whit dashed. “There’ll be songs and coffee and... and... speeches, and it would be simply wonderful if you both could drop in for just a few moments. If you could do a reading, Miss Varing, and Mr Templar, if you, could... ah...”

“Now, just what could I do?” Simon asked thoughtfully. “A lecture on safe-cracking would hardly be quite the thing.”

“A speech, perhaps, showing that crime does not pay?” Elliott seemed in earnest, but the Saint could not be sure.

Mrs Wingate clasped her hands in front of her bust.

“At eight-thirty? We would so appreciate it!”

“I’m afraid eight-thirty is my curtain time,” Monica said, with an excellent air of regret. “Otherwise I’d have loved it.”

Mrs Wingate blinked.

“Oh, of course. I’d forgotten. I’m so sorry. Thank you, my dear.” She forgot Monica completely as she turned back to the Saint. “But you’ll be able to make it, won’t you, Mr Templar?”

Simon only hesitated a moment.

“I’d be delighted,” he said. “I don’t think I can get much heart into the speech till I work myself into the right mood, but I’ll do my best. You see,” he added, beaming at Elliott, “it’s been my experience that crime pays very well indeed. But, as I said before—”

“Chacun à son goût?” Elliott suggested unsmilingly.

“How true,” Mrs Wingate said vaguely. “Another cocktail, perhaps?”

Chapter ten

Simon left Monica at the theatre and went back to his hotel to receive a purely negative report from a discouraged Hoppy Uniatz. Hoppy had spent the afternoon circulating among various pool halls and saloons where he had old acquaintances, and where Sammy the Leg was also known. That his peregrinations had done little to satisfy his chronic thirst for bourbon was understandable; the distilling industry had been trying in vain to cope with that prodigious appetite for years. But that his thirst for information had been unslaked by as much as one drop of news was a more baffling phenomenon.

Sammy the Leg had been seen in none of his usual haunts, and none of his dearest cronies had heard either of or from him. Nor had rumour any theories to advance. He had not been reported dead, sick, drunk, in love, in hiding, or departed from town. He had simply dropped out of the local scene, without a word or a hint to anyone.

“I don’t get it, boss,” Mr Uniatz summed up, confirming his earlier conclusion.

Simon rescued the bottle from which Hoppy was endeavouring to fill some of the vacua which had defied the best efforts of Chicago’s bar-tenders, and poured himself a modest portion.

“We now have,” he said, “a certain problem.”

“Dat’s right, boss,” Hoppy agreed.

He waited hopefully for the solution, experience having taught him that it was no use trying to compete with the Saint in such flights of speculation. A man without intellectual vanity, he was content to leave such scintillations to nimbler minds. Also this saved overloading his own brain, a sensitive organ under its osseous overcoat.

“The question is, who knows how much about what?” said the Saint. ‘‘If anyone at that cocktail party is connected with the King of the Beggars, I might as well walk barefooted into a den of rattlesnakes as show up to claim my reservation at the Elliott Hotel. But by the same token, if I don’t show up, I’m announcing that I have reasons not to — which may be premature.”

“Yeah,” Hoppy concurred, with the first symptoms of headache grooving his brow.

“On the other hand,” Simon answered himself, “if the ungodly are expecting me tomorrow, they won’t be expecting me tonight, and this might be a chance to keep them off balance while I case the joint.”

“I give up,” said Mr Uniatz sympathetically.

The Saint paced the room with long, restless strides. He was at a crossroads before which far more subtle strategists than Mr Uniatz might well have been bewildered, with the signpost spinning over them like a windmill. Simon even felt his own cool judgment growing dizzy with its own contortions. He was in a labyrinth of ifs and buts to which there seemed to be no key...

Mr Uniatz pinged BBs monotonously through his teeth at the electric light, drawing from it the clear, sharp notes of repeated bull’s-eyes.

“I get better at dis all de time, boss,” he remarked, as if in consolation. “Dis afternoon I stop in a boilicue an’ get in de toid row. Dey is a stripper on who is but lousy — she should stood home wit’ her grandchildren. Well, I start practisin’ on her wit’ my BBs. I keep hittin’ her just where I’m aimin’, and she can’t figure where dey come from. It breaks up de act—”

The Saint halted in the middle of a step and swung around.

“Hoppy,” he said, “I never expected to see you cut Gordian knots, but I think you’ve done it.”

“Chees, boss, dat’s great,” said Mr Uniatz. “What did I do?”

“You’ve given me an idea,” said the Saint. “In your own words — if the ungodly can’t figure where it’s coming from, it might break up the act.”

“Sure,” Hoppy agreed sagely. “But who is dis guy Gordian?”

Simon Templar had always lived by inspiration, even by hunches, but his recklessness had no relation to any unconsciousness of danger. On the contrary, he was never more watchful and calculating than in his rashest moves. He diced with fate like a seasoned gambler, taking mathematical risks with every shade of odds coldly tabulated in his head. It was simply that once his bet was down he gave himself up to the unalloyed delight of seeing how it would turn out. After that there was only the excitement of riding with them, and the taut invigoration of waiting poised like a fencer to respond to the next flick of steel.

“Which is a nice trick if you can do it,” he mused, blinking through his dark glasses as he tapped his way along the sidewalk towards the Elliott Hotel a couple of hours later.

He looked interestedly at the huge ramshackle structure, which, despite its new coat of brown paint, could scarcely have brought much inspiration to the souls of the poor unfortunates who inhabited it. The building had been constructed after the Chicago fire, but not much later; and it had an air of rather desperately sterile cheer, like an asthmatic alderman wheezing out Christmas carols.

The front door yawned, more rudely than invitingly, Simon decided. He made pleading gestures at a passing pedestrian.

“Excuse me, sir. I’m looking for the Elliott Hotel. Can you tell me—”

“Right here,” said the florid man Simon had accosted. “Want to go in?” He took the Saint’s arm and guided him up the steps to the door. “Okay now?”

“Thank you, sir. God bless you,” Simon said, and the florid man, who does not hereafter appear in this record, vanished into the Chicago evening.

The Saint stood in a broad, high-ceilinged hall. There were doors and a drab carpet and merciless light bulbs overhead. Fresh paint could not disguise the essential squalor of the place. A few framed mottoes told any interested unfortunates it might concern that there was no place like home, that it was more blessed to give than to receive, that every cloud had a silver lining, and that a fixed and rigid smile was, for some unexplained reason, an antidote to all ills. The effect of these bromides was to create a settled feeling of moroseness in the beholder, and Simon had no difficulty in maintaining his patiently resigned expression beneath the dark glasses.

Through an open door at the Saint’s left a radio was playing. At the back of the hall were closed doors, and facing Simon was the desk clerk’s cubby-hole, occupied now by an inordinately fat woman who belonged in a freak show, though not for her obesity. The Saint greatly admired the woman’s beard. It was not so black as a skunk’s nor so long as Monty Woolley’s, but ’twas enough, ’twould serve.

The woman said, “Well?”

Simon said tremulously, “I’m looking for Miss Green. Miss Hazel Green.”

“Big Hazel Green?”

“Yes — yes, that’s right.”

“You’re talking to her,” the woman said, placing enormous forearms on the counter and leaning forward to stare at the Saint. “What is it?”

“I was advised to come here. A Mr Weiss...” Simon let his voice die away.

Big Hazel Green rubbed her furry chin. “Yeah,” she said slowly. “Mr Weiss, huh? I guess you want to move in here. Is that it?”

Simon nodded.

Big Hazel said, “Shouldn’t you have been here before?”

“I don’t know,” Simon said feebly. “Mr Weiss did say something about... But I had my rent paid in advance at... at the place where I was staying. I couldn’t afford to waste it. I... I hope I haven’t done anything wrong.”

He could feel her eyes boring into him like gimlets.

“That isn’t for me to say. I just take reservations and see who checks in.”

The woman rang a bell. A thin meek little man came from somewhere and blinked inquiringly.

Big Hazel said, “Take over. Be back pretty soon.” She forced her bulk out of the cubby-hole and took Simon’s arm in strong fingers. “I’ll show you your room. Right up here.”

The Saint let her guide him towards the back of the hall, through a door, and up winding stairs. Behind the glasses, his blue eyes were busy — charting, noting, remembering. Like many old Chicago structures, this one was a warren. There was more than one staircase, he saw, which might prove useful later.

“How much higher is it?” he asked plaintively.

“Up top,” Big Hazel told him, wheezingly. “We’re crowded. But you’ve got a room all to yourself.”

It was not a large room, as the Saint found when Big Hazel conducted him into it. The single window overlooked a sheer drop into darkness. The furniture was clean but depressingly plain.

Big Hazel said, “Find your way around. I’ll register you later.”

She went out, closing the door softly. Simon stood motionless, listening, and heard the lock snap.

The shadow of a smile touched his lips. In his pocket was a small instrument that would cope with any ordinary lock. The lock didn’t bother him — only the reason why it had been used. The vital point was whether it was merely a house custom, or a special courtesy...

He felt his way methodically around the room. Literally felt it. There were such things as peepholes: there were creaking boards, and floors not soundproofed against footsteps. He was infinitely careful to make no movement that a blind man might not have made. He tapped and groped and fumbled from one landmark to another, performing all the laborious orientations of a blind man. And in fact those explorations told him almost as much as his eyes.

There was an iron bedstead, a chair, a lavatory basin, a battered bureau — all confined within a space of about seventy square feet. The walls were dun-painted plaster, relieved only by a framed printing of Kipling’s “If.” There was the one little window, of the sash variety, which he was able to open about six inches. He stood in front of it, as if sniffing the grimy air, and noted that the glass panes had wire mesh fused into them.

After a while he took off some of his clothes and lay down on the bed. He did not switch off the one dim light that Big Hazel had left him. He might have been unaware of its existence.

He dozed. That was literally true. The Saint had an animal capacity for rest and self-refreshment. But not for an instant was he any more stupefied than a prize watchdog, and he heard Big Hazel’s cautious steps outside long before she unlatched the door.

He didn’t know how much time had gone by, but it must have been about three hours.

He was wide awake, instantly, and alert as a strung bow, but without the least movement.

“Who is it?” he mumbled grumpily, and even then he could see her clearly in the doorway.

“It’s Hazel Green. I didn’t mean to disturb you. Some people came in late and held me up.”

“That’s all right,” he said, and sat up.

She came in and shut the door behind her, and stood looking down at him.

“Everything all right?”

“Yes, thank you, ma’am.”

“What’s your name?”

He remembered that she had never asked him before.

“Smith,” he said. “Tom Smith.”

“Like all the rest of ’em,” she observed, without rancour. “You been in town long?”

“No, not long.”

“How’s it going?”

“Not bad.”

“You’re not a bad-looking guy to end up in a dump like this.”

“That’s how it goes.” He took a chance, keeping his eyes averted. “You’ve got a nice voice, to be running a dump like this.”

“It’s a job.”

“I suppose so.” He ventured another lead, making himself querulous again. “Why did you lock me in? I wanted to go to the bathroom—”

“There’s a thing under the bed. We lock everybody in. It isn’t only men who come here. You have to keep a place like this respectable. Women sleep here too.”

For no good reason, an electric tingle squirmed up the Saint’s spine. There was nothing he could directly trace it to, and yet it was unmistakable, a fleeting draught from the flutter of psychic wings. Without time to analyse it, without knowing why, he deadened every response except that of his mind, exactly as he had controlled his awakening when she walked in, and turned the instinctive quiver into a bitter chuckle.

“You wouldn’t expect them to give people like me any trouble, would you?”

“You never can tell.” Big Hazel moved closer, her hands dropping into the pockets of her voluminous skirt. Her voice was still brisk and businesslike as she went on: “I’ll make out your registration tomorrow, and you can put a cross on it or whatever you do.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Would you like a drink?”

The Saint stirred a little on the bedside, as if in mild embarrassment, as the same reflex prickle retraced its voyage over his ganglions. But he still kept his face expressionless behind the blank windows of his smoked glasses.

“Thank you, ma’am, but I don’t drink anything. Not being able to see, it sort of makes me a bit dizzy.”

“You won’t mind if I do?”

Without encouraging an answer, she pulled a pint bottle of a cheap blend out of the folds of her skirt and attacked the screw cap. She held the bottle and the cap in pleats of her clothing for a better purchase, but even her massive paws seemed to make no impression on their union.

The Saint paid only incidental attention to her heavy breathing until she said, “The damn thing’s stuck. Can you open it?”

He found the bottle in his hands, and unscrewed the cap with a brief effort of steel fingers.

“Thanks, Mr Smith.”

She took a quick gulp from the bottle, and guided his groping hand to replace the cap.

“Well, have a good night,” she said.

She went out, and the door closed behind her. And once again he heard the lock click.

Simon lay back on the hard bed, remembering vividly that she had never touched the bottle except through the cloth of her skirt pocket. He rested all night in the same vigilant twilight between sleep and waking, revolving a hundred speculations and surmises, but nothing else disturbed him except his own goading thoughts.

Chapter eleven

It was surprisingly easy to get out — almost too easy. In the early morning feet crept past the door again, and the lock clicked stealthily. “When he tried the door, after a while, it opened without obstruction. He tapped his way downstairs, and the thin meek man at the desk scarcely looked up as he went by. Big Hazel was nowhere to be seen.

In the role of a blind man it would have been difficult to shake off any possible shadowers, but that seemed an unnecessary precaution. If he was suspected at all, everything would be known about him anyway, if not, he would not be shadowed. But he thought he knew which it was.

He showered and shaved at his own hotel, and he was finishing a man-sized breakfast of bacon and eggs when the telephone rang.

“Listen, Mr Templar,” Lieutenant Kearney said. “You’re not figuring on leaving town, are you?”

“My plans are nearly completed,” Simon informed him. “At the stroke of midnight a small blimp, camouflaged as a certain well-known Congressman, will drop a flexible steel ladder to the roof of this hotel. I shall mount it like a squirrel and flee southward, while the sun sinks behind beautiful Lake Michigan. It all depends on the sun,” he added reflectively. “If I can only induce it to put off sinking until midnight, and do it in the east for a change, the plan will go without a hitch.”

“Listen—” Kearney said, and sighed. “Oh, well. So you know the Commissioner. So I’ve got to give you a break. Just the same—” His tone changed. “I’ve been getting some information around Chicago.”

“Fine,” Simon approved. “If you run across a good floating crap game, by all means tell me. I need a stake before I make my getaway.”

Kearney went on doggedly, “This stiff we got in the morgue — we found out who he was. His name’s Cleve Friend. He’s a grifter from Frisco.”

“You ought to make a song out of that,” Simon told him.

“Yeah. Well, anyhow, what was the idea saying you didn’t know him?”

“Did I say that?” Simon asked blandly.

“You implied it,” Kearney snapped. “And that don’t check with what I’ve been hearing.”

Simon paused.

“Just what have you been hearing?” he asked.

“Things from people. People around town. Not in your social circle, of course.” Kearney’s voice was heavy with sarcasm. “Bums, poolroom touts, beggars.”

“Beggars?”

“We ran Friend’s picture in the paper today,” Kearney said. “The photographer retouched it a little — that hole in his head, you know. And some people came in to look at him. They recognised him. He’s a grifter, or I mean he was, and quite a few people have seen him around Chicago the last month or so. Some of them saw you, too. Some of them even saw you both together.”

“Those chatter-boxes knew me by name, of course?”

“Listen,” Kearney said, “don’t kid yourself. The Saint’s picture has been in the papers too, a lot of times. What was it you were seeing Friend about lately.”

“I can’t tell you,” Simon said.

“You won’t?”

“I can’t. I’m too shy.”

“God damn it,” Kearney roared. “Maybe you can tell me why the autopsy on Friend showed he’d been shot full of scopolamine, then!”

Simon’s eyes changed. “Scopolamine? That wasn’t what killed him?”

“You know damn well what killed him. You saw the bullet hole. I’m not doing any more talking to you. Not yet. I will later. I don’t care if you know the Commissioner or the Mayor or the President of the United States! Just don’t leave town, understand?”

“Yes,” Simon said. “I get it. All right, Alvin. I’ll string along. In fact—” He hesitated. “I’ll even tell you why I was seeing Cleve Friend.”

Kearney said suspiciously, “Yeah? Another gag?”

“No. You might as well know, I suppose. I can’t keep it quiet for ever.”

“Okay,” Kearney snapped. “Spill it.” He could not quite keep the eagerness out of his voice.

The Saint said mildly, “We were plotting his murder. Goodbye, Alvin.”

He hung up, leaving the detective gibbering inarticulately, and poured himself another cup of coffee.

“This is what is known as a cumulative frame,” he remarked to Hoppy, who was starting his morning target practice. “I wonder how thorough it’s going to be.”

Mr Uniatz bounded a BB accurately off the coffee-pot.

“I don’t get it, boss,” he said automatically.

“It works backwards,” Simon explained. “First an unidentified body is found, and the only connection between it and me was a deed of gift. Now some people have recognised the body and say that I’ve been seen foregathering with Junior, hereinafter referred to as the unlamented Mr Cleve Friend, a grifter from Frisco. It’s significant that some of these witnesses are beggars. Later, perhaps, a witness to the murder will pop up. By sheer accident, he happened to be passing when I bumped off Friend.”

“But ya didn’t bump him off,” Hoppy said. “Did ya?”

“No, Hoppy, I didn’t.”

“Den it’s okay, ain’t it?”

The Saint lighted a cigarette and leaned back.

“I wish I could be sure of that.” He blew a procession of three reflective smoke-rings towards the ceiling. “Do you happen to know anything about scopolamine?”

“I never hoid of him. Is he in de same mob with dat Gordian?”

“It’s a drug, Hoppy. It makes people tell the truth. And it seems that somebody gave it to Friend before he was bumped off. They wanted to know how much he’d spilled, and he must have told them. We can also be sure that they asked him all he knew about us... So we can take it the blind-beggar act is dead and has been for some time.”

A scowl of dutiful concentration formed like a sluggish cloud below Mr Uniatz’s hairline as he worked this out and tried to reconcile its components. His mental travail appeared to deepen through successive minutes to a painful degree, and at last he brought forth the root of it.

“Den why,” he asked, “don’t dey give ya de woiks last night?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out,” said the Saint slowly. “Unless they’re taking their time to cook up a much bigger and better frame... Big Hazel has a whisky bottle with my fingerprints on it now, and there wasn’t a thing I could do to stop her getting away with it. She really had me off balance — I was so busy turning down a drink that I was sure would be a knockout that the other angle just went by under my nose.”

He blew another smoke-ring very deliberately, devoting everything to the perfection of its rich full roundness, while he tried to make his inward thoughts match the calm of his outward movement.

“Also,” he said, and he was really talking to himself, “it seemed to me that there was just the slightest sinister emphasis — just the merest trace of it — in the way Big Hazel talked about having women in the hotel. I wonder...”

He picked up the telephone and called Monica Varing’s hotel, but her room didn’t answer.

They had parted on a tentative agreement to lunch again, and it was not likely that anyone so punctual as she was would be careless about an engagement. Probably, he told himself, she had gone shopping.

He called again every half-hour until one-thirty, and stayed in his own room for fear of missing her if she called him.

It was not an afternoon to remember with any pleasure or any pride. He must have walked several miles, pacing the room steadily like a caged lion and taking months of normal wear out of the carpet. He tried to tell himself that his imagination was running away with him, that he was giving himself jitters over nothing. He told himself that he should have kept Monica entirely out of it, that he should never have let her learn anything, that he would only have himself to blame if she tried to steal the play from him. He saw her all the time in his mind’s eye, a composite of all her tantalising facets — sultry, impish, arrogant, venturesome, languorous, defiant, tender. He felt angry and foolish and frightened in turn.

Mr Uniatz worked on his BB marksmanship with untroubled single-mindedness. He could learn nothing from the Saint’s face, and to him the operations of the Saint’s mind would always be a mystery. It was enough for him that there was a mind there, and that it worked. All he had to do was carry out its orders when they were issued. It was a panacea for all the problems of life which over the years had never failed to pay off, and which had saved untold wear and tear on the rudimentary convolutions of his brain.

At five o’clock Simon remembered that Monica might have a matinée, and verified it from the newspaper. He walked to the Martin Beck Theatre and went in the stage door.

“Miss Varing ain’t on this afternoon,” said the doorman. “She’s sick.”

With lead settling in his heart, Simon sought out the stage manager.

“That’s right,” said the man, who remembered him. “She called me this morning and said she wouldn’t be able to go on. She said if I hadn’t heard from her by this time she wouldn’t be doing the evening performance either.”

“She isn’t sick,” said the Saint. “She hasn’t been in her hotel all day.”

The stage manager looked only slightly perturbed. He said nothing about artistic temperament, but his discretion itself implied that he could think of plausibly mundane explanations.

Simon took a taxi to the Ambassador and finally corralled an assistant manager whom he could charm into co-operation. A check through various departments established that room service had delivered breakfast to Monica Varing’s apartment at nine, that she had been gone when the maid came in at eleven. But her key had not been left at the desk, and no one had seen her go out.

“No one knows they saw her,” Simon corrected, and asked his last questions of the doorman.

Already he knew what the answer would be, and wondered what forlorn hope kept him trying to prove himself wrong.

“An old ragged woman, looked like she might be a beggar?... Yes, sir, I did see her come out. Matter of fact, I wondered how she got in. Must have been while I was calling someone a cab.”

“On the contrary,” said the Saint, with surprising gentleness, “you opened the door for her yourself.”

He left the man gaping, and went back into the hotel to call Lieutenant Kearney.

Chapter twelve

The boiler-room in the basement of the Elliott Hotel was not quite as bleak as the description implies. This was only because the description does not mention several rows of hard wooden benches, the bodies of several dozen apathetic occupants of them, a few paper decorations left over from some previous Christmas, and the platform at one end where Stephen Elliott was filling in with some merry ad-libs as the Saint found his way in.

“And... ah... as the stove said to the kettle, I hope you’re having a hot time.” Nobody laughed, and Elliott went on, “We want you to enjoy yourselves, friends, and the next item on tonight’s programme is a song by Mrs Laura Wingate.”

He handed Mrs Wingate up to the platform, and the connection between his two statements became somewhat obscure as the piano began to twinkle out an uncertain accompaniment, and Mrs Wingate cut loose with an incredibly piercing and off-key soprano.

Stephen Elliott was taking Mrs Wingate’s place beside a tall, thin, man to whom she had been talking when she was called. As Simon edged up behind them he recognised the tall, thin shape as Lieutenant Alvin Kearney.

“I’m sure I don’t know what it’s about,” the detective was saying, in a voice that had no need to drop its level to avoid interfering with the ear-splitting stridencies that were welling from Mrs Wingate’s throat. “For all I know, it may be just another of his funny gags. But I’d look plenty silly if anything happened and I wasn’t here.”

Elliott took out a handkerchief and patted his temples, while Mrs Wingate continued to liken her heart to various other improbable objects.

“I don’t know anything about it,” he said mildly. “But if he’s working on a case—”

“Oh, is he?” Kearney snapped that up with the avidity of a starving shark. “What case?”

Elliott hesitated.

“I really can’t say,” he replied at last. “Why don’t you ask him?”

“Yes, why not?” Simon agreed, and they both turned.

Kearney’s lip thinned over his teeth as he met the Saint’s affable smile. There was no thoroughly defensible reason for his reaction, yet it was a basic reflex which in its time had produced fundamentally identical effects upon such widely separated personalities as Chief Inspector Teal of Scotland Yard, Inspector Fernack of New York City, Lieutenant Ed Connor of Los Angeles, Sheriff Newt Haskins of Miami, and many others who will be remembered by the unremitting followers of this saga. It was perhaps something that sprang from the primal schism of law and disorder, an aboriginal cleavage between policeman and outlaw whose roots were lost in the dank dawns of sociology.

Lieutenant Alvin Kearney of Chicago liked the Saint, admired him, respected him, envied him, and hated him with an inordinate bitterness that loaded stygian tints into his scowl as he rasped, “All right, wise guy, you tell me. What was the idea phoning me to meet you here tonight because there might be a riot?”

“I guess it was a form of stage fright,” said the Saint, with an aplomb which made Kearney feel as if he had two days’ growth of beard and a dirty neck. “I’m not very used to these personal appearances, and I felt nervous. You can’t tell what an audience like this might do, so I thought I should have some protection.”

What the detective thought would have been inaudible even in the volume of voice which his congested face portended, for at that moment Mrs Wingate’s vocal analysis of her heart attained a screeching fortissimo that almost scraped the paint off the walls.

As silence finally settled upon tortured eardrums, there was some perfunctory applause. It was rather nicely adjusted to show grateful appreciation without encouraging an encore. Since apparently the coffee and doughnuts would not be served until after the entertainment, the audience could not walk out, but it did not have to be hysterical.

Mrs Wingate panted and bowed twitteringly to the very last handclap, which naturally came from Stephen Elliott.

“Thank you, thank you, my dear friends... And now I see that our special guest of the evening has arrived, and I’m going to ask him to come up here and say a few words to you. It is a great privilege to be able to introduce — Mr Simon Templar.”

Simon stepped up on the platform to the resigned acclamation of the coffee-and-doughnuts claque. He raised Mrs Wingate’s ugly hand to his lips and ushered her off in giggling confusion. Then he made a sigh of dismissal to the piano player.

“I’m not going to sing,” he said.

While the accompanist withdrew, he waved cheerily to the gaping Lieutenant Kearney, and ran friendly blue eyes over the faces of the rest of the audience. A few of them looked like the respectable struggling poor, some were ordinary shiftless-down-and-outs; these would be bona fide beggars, helpless victims of the King’s racket; and undoubtedly there were others who worked directly for the King. Big Hazel Green was nowhere in evidence, but he saw Frankie Weiss sitting a few rows back from the dais.

“Ladies, gentlemen, and others,” Simon began. “Some of you may have heard of me. Some of you may not. I’m sometimes known as the Saint.”

He waited till the low, resultant buzz died down, and little dancing devils of mischief showed in his eyes.

“I won’t make a long speech,” he said. “I know you’re probably anxious to get at the refreshments. Anyway, I’m no good at speeches. I’d rather show you a few tricks which might come in useful, since it’s been brought to my attention that some of you have been victimised by unscrupulous extortionists, which is a polite name for some dirty racketeering rats.”

He ignored the dead silence that suddenly brimmed the room, and went blandly on:

“Now I’m sure it wouldn’t need Detective Lieutenant Kearney, who is also here with us tonight, to remind you that carrying concealed weapons is illegal. But it’s quite possible for a man to protect himself without carrying firearms. One good judo hold is often worth as much as a gun. So for the benefit of some of you who might want to defend yourselves one day, I thought I’d demonstrate a few for you. If I’m to show them properly, of course, I’ll need a volunteer to work with.”

There was no rush to volunteer. Mrs Wingate chirped brightly, “Come on, somebody!”

Stephen Elliott stood up and beamed around with vaguely schoolmasterish encouragement.

Simon pointed a finger.

“You. No, not you — I mean the gentleman with the moustache. You look able to defend yourself. How about giving me a hand?”

Frankie Weiss huddled deeper in his chair and shook his head.

“Oh, come now,” Simon insisted. “You never know when a little judo might come in handy. How do you know you won’t meet some goon with a gun one of these days? Here!”

He bounced down from the stage and hurried up the aisle. Frankie tried to ignore everything, but the Saint was as irresistible as a radio interviewer. His hand appeared to stroke lightly over Frankie’s arm and pause there. Only those in the immediate vicinity heard Frankie’s yelp of pain, immediately smothered by the Saint’s laughter.

“The man’s got muscle!” he announced jovially. “You’ll give me a fight, won’t you, my friend? Come on, don’t disappoint the audience.”

He practically yanked Frankie out of his chair and caught him in a hold that left the man completely helpless, his legs in the air and his neck imprisoned under the Saint’s arm.

“Just like that,” Simon proclaimed. “Let’s go up on the stage where the audience can enjoy it. We’ll try it again more slowly.”

He retraced his steps as resiliently as though he were not burdened with a tight-lipped, glaring assistant.

Lieutenant Kearney moved to get a better view. His face was a study in perplexed suspicion. Common sense told him that there was more in this than met the eye, but he couldn’t guess what it was; and Simon hoped the detective’s mind would continue, for a little while, to move slowly. He had his hands full with Frankie Weiss, who was struggling like a bear-cat and growling unprintable inarticulacies which were fortunately smothered in the Saint’s coat.

Laura Wingate gazed up in a glow of girlish eagerness, twisting her hands together in her overflowing lap. Stephen Elliott clung to a benign if somewhat nervous smile. The rest of the audience was divided between those who merely sensed a welcome variation in the schedule of innocent entertainment, those who derived personal gratification from the choice of the victim, and a smaller group of hard-featured hombres who seemed to be sweating out a purely private anguish of frustrated indecision.

“Let’s do it again,” Simon lectured, releasing his victim. “More slowly now. Watch!”

Frankie showed his teeth. He ducked away from the Saint, felt a long arm snake around his waist, and, turning swiftly, drove a vicious punch at Simon’s groin. The Saint evaded it easily.

“Fine!” he exclaimed. “That’s right. Fight me — make it look realistic. Now I’ll do it slowly.”

He did it slowly, and Frankie presently found himself involved in another excruciating posture from some manual of satanic yoga.

His mouth nearly touching Frankie’s ear, Simon breathed, “Where’s Monica Varing?”

“Let go of me! You goddam—”

“Shh! Lieutenant Kearney’s out in front, Frankie. Don’t give him any ideas.”

The Saint wrenched slightly, eliciting a howl of pain from Frankie, and brought him back to his feet with dislocating solicitude.

“Everyone get that?” he asked. “Now let’s try another one. This is harder.”

He collared Frankie and tied him in an even more complex knot.

“What about Monica?”

“You son of a — ”

“If you think I won’t break your arm,” the Saint whispered icily, “you’re crazy. I can say it was an accident. I can even break your neck.”

He proved this by applied pressure, with one hand gagging Frankie, though the audience could not see that.

It took three more holds, each a little more agonising than the last, with Frankie trying desperately to escape, while none of his putative allies dared lift a finger to help him because Kearney was watching.

“So we’ve got her. Let go!”

“Where?”

“Second floor. Room by the stairs — uh!”

“Front or back?”

“Back—”

“Thank you, Frankie,” Simon said, and his hands moved swiftly.

He jumped up. Frankie did not.

“He’s fainted,” the Saint gasped in well-simulated alarm. “It may be his heart... Get a doctor!”

He leaped down from the platform and hurried towards the nearest exit, but Kearney caught him before he had gone more than a few steps.

“Just a minute,” Kearney snarled. “What did you do to that guy?”

“I gave him a mild chiropractic treatment,” said the Saint wintrily. “I know it wasn’t as good as you could have done at headquarters, but I thought a rubber hose might have been rather conspicuous. He’ll wake up in about ten minutes and be as good as new.”

The detective kept hold of his arm.

“What’s the idea, anyway? And where do you think you’re going?”

“I think I’m going to search this hotel, without bothering about a warrant,” Simon answered in a flat voice. “Because my idea is that Monica Varing is being kept a prisoner here.”

“The actress? Are you crazy?”

“I don’t think so. In fact, just before Frankie passed out he told me she was upstairs.”

Those of the audience who had moved were crowding towards the stage to obstruct the efforts of the first eager beavers who had moved to offer Frankie Weiss first aid. The others cast glances at the Saint but did not try to get near him, being probably kept at a distance by the presence of Kearney as much as anything else, so that the two of them might almost have been alone in the crowded room. At least until Mrs Wingate bore down upon them, with Stephen Elliott bobbing like a towed dinghy in her wake.

“Whatever is the matter?” she squeaked frantically. “This is terrible—”

“You tell them, Alvin,” Simon suggested; and with a side-step as swift and light as a ballet dancer he made way for Mrs Wingate to plough into a berth between them, and vanished through the door he had originally been heading for before the detective had the remotest chance of circumnavigating Mrs Wingate’s bulk to intercept him.

Simon raced up the stairs to the ground floor and from there to the second without interference. There were four doors back of the stairs, and he flung each of them open in turn. None of them was locked. Two of the rooms were six-bed dormitories, empty, but smelling rancidly of habitation. In the third room a very old man with a pock-marked face looked up with an idiotic grin from a game of solitaire.

The fourth room was empty — not only empty, but so cleaned out that it had the same prison bareness that he had found in the room he himself had occupied the night before. There were rumples in the bed that didn’t follow the same contours as careless bed making, and he saw that the opaque window glass contained the same fused-in-netting as his own window had had, even before his nostrils detected the mustiness of the air, a clear fragrance that could only be Monica...

Kearney caught up with him there a moment later and stuck a gun into his ribs.

“All right, Mr Saint,” he grated. “Don’t try anything else, or I’ll blast you.”

“You blathering nitwit,” said the Saint, with icy calm. “Why couldn’t you stay downstairs and make sure they wouldn’t smuggle her out?”

“From where?” Kearney jeered.

“From here. Frankie told me the truth. She was in this room. Don’t you smell anything?”

The detective sniffed.

“It smells lousy to me.”

Simon’s eye caught a gleam on the floor. He ignored Kearney’s revolver entirely to step forward and pick it up.

“Look.”

“A tooth out of a comb,” Kearney said scornfully. “So what?”

“A spring tooth,” Simon said, “from the kind of comb women wear in their hair. And dark red-brown — the colour she’d use.”

Chapter thirteen

Mrs Wingate and Stephen Elliott caught both of them up at that point. The philanthropist was quivering with a kind of pale-lipped restraint.

“This is the most outrageous suggestion I’ve ever heard, Mr Templar,” he said. “Lieutenant Kearney tells me—”

“Oh. I do hope you’re mistaken!” babbled Laura Wingate. “She’s such a sweet person. I’d die if anything happened to her.”

“If anything happened to her, it would not be here,” Elliott stated frostily. “Lieutenant, I think you’d better take Mr Templar and his accusations to the proper authority.”

Kearney nodded.

“It’ll be a pleasure, Mr Elliott.”

“In spite of the comb?” Simon persisted.

“We have quite a number of lady guests,” Elliott said stiffly. “If that is any grounds for this kind of behaviour—”

“It isn’t,” Kearney said. “And I’m going to enjoy booking the Saint on charges of disturbing the peace, just to keep him quiet for a while.” He prodded Simon again with his gun. “Come along, you.”

“I loved your show,” Mrs Wingate trilled, apparently feeling that some expression was due from her. “You must do it for us again one day.”

Simon and Kearney went downstairs, passing a barrage of eyes that had seeped up from the basement.

“By the way,” Simon said, “Frankie is wearing a gun.”

“He has a permit,” Kearney said. “I know the judge who issued it. Keep going.”

They went out to the sidewalk, and there was a brief but awkward pause while the total cablessness of the street established itself.

“Why don’t we take my car?” suggested the Saint accommodatingly. “It’s right here.”

“Okay,” Kearney said belligerently. “I’ll let you drive it — and just don’t try anything.”

He opened the door and followed Simon in. While the Saint was still fitting the key in the lock he reached over and snapped one loop of a pair of handcuffs over Simon’s left wrist. The other cuff he secured to the steering wheel.

“All right,” he said grimly. “Let’s go.”

Simon started the engine and nursed the car north for a few blocks. Kearney held the revolver in his lap and glowered with rather strenuously sustained triumph.

“How about your big case against me?” Simon asked after a while. “Aside from my breaches of the peace, I mean. Is that coming along?”

Kearney flexed his jaw muscles.

“We got a letter this afternoon. It was addressed to the Chief, and it was signed by Cleve Friend. It said he was mixed up in some deal with you and he was trying to get out of it because he’d got cold feet. And he was afraid you wouldn’t let him get out. You’d threatened to kill him unless he played along. The letter said he was leaving it with a friend, to be mailed if he — died.”

The Saint kept his eyes straight ahead.

“Did you check the signature?”

“It was Friend’s signature all right. A little shaky, but it compared.”

“Shaky?” Simon pondered. “And I bet the letter itself was typewritten.”

“It was.”

“It would be. Either Friend signed under the influence of scopolamine — which is a hypnotic — or else he was tortured into signing it.”

“You can explain anything, can’t you?” Kearney gibed. “Somebody’s trying to frame you, of course.”

“Of course,” Simon agreed coolly. “That should be obvious, even to a policeman.”

“Yeah? And how did they make this Varing dame disappear?”

“Probably through a secret passage...”

His voice trailed away as the thought hit him like a splash of cold water between the eyes.

“My God,” he said softly. “Secret passages. Of course. What a feeble-minded flop I am!”

“Hey!” Kearney squawked suddenly. “Where do you think you’re going? This ain’t the way to Headquarters.”

“It’s the way I’m taking,” said the Saint. “Come in, Hoppy.”

Mr Uniatz rose from behind the front seat and applied the muzzle of his Betsy to the nape of Kearney’s neck. “Okay, copper,” he said. “Take it easy.”

The detective’s face went white, then red.

“You can’t get away with this,” he said desperately.

“We can try,” said the Saint. “I’ve just had an inspiration, and I’m going to be much too busy to horse around with any footling rap about disturbing the peace.”

He sped the car west on Roosevelt, and presently turned up Central Avenue to Columbus Park, where he stopped.

“Okay, Hoppy,” he said.

“De woiks, boss?”

“Just let him take a nap,” Simon said hastily.

Mr Uniatz raised his gun and brought it down with professional precision, and the detective napped...

Simon found Kearney’s keys, unlocked the handcuffs, and transferred them to the detective’s wrists. He took Kearney’s badge and identification, figuring that a handcuffed man without credentials would be more than ordinarily delayed in starting a hue and cry. Then they took Kearney out of the car and laid him under a tree with his hat over his face, and drove quickly away.

The Saint’s brain flogged itself pitilessly under the impassive mask of his face.

“Secret passages,” he repeated, as he opened up the headlights on the road to Wheaton. “Hoppy, I ought to have my head examined.”

“What for, boss?”

“Maggots. What the hell’s the first thing you’d expect to find in a hide-out that used to belong to Al Capone? And don’t you remember Sammy said he had a safe place to hide Junior?”

“Sure.”

“Well, it was safe. So safe that Kearney couldn’t find it. But we’ll find it this time, if we have to blast for it. And then we’ll know whether Sammy and his friend Fingers double-crossed us, or if the King caught up with them.”

He reconnoitered the house carefully, but there were no signs of a police guard, and a ground-floor window succumbed in short order to the Saint’s expert manipulation. It was after that that the problems began to multiply, and it took two hours of methodical labour to work them out.

They finally found the “safe place” by tortuously tracing a ventilating pipe that seemed to have an outlet but no inlet. Even then the field was merely narrowed down to the cellar, and it took an inch-by-inch investigation to settle on the probable entrance. Hoppy’s reminiscences of bootlegging days were helpful and diverting, sometimes gruesome, but in the end they had to use crowbars to break down the brick wall. There was a steel plate beneath that, but once its locking mechanism was revealed it surrendered to a piece of bailing wire. It let them into a small, comfortably furnished room with a ventilating plate in the ceiling, where Sammy the Leg, trussed like an unsinged chicken, lay philosophically on a cot, and looked at them.

“Chees, pal,” Hoppy said, as he worked on Sammy’s ropes with a jack-knife. “We t’ought ya’d been bumped or sump’n.”

“Not me,” Sammy grunted. He tested his limbs experimentally. “Thanks, Saint. I figured I was gonna cash in for sure. Those lousy swine just meant me to lie here and starve.”

“Didn’t you hear us?” Simon asked. “You could have saved us some time if you’d yelled.”

“It wouldn’t have done no good. This room’s soundproofed. I heard you just now, sure, but you couldn’t of heard me. Besides, how did I know who it was? I could tell somebody was busting in, so I let ’em bust. Not that I could have stopped you.” Sammy walked stiffly back and forth like a shaggy bear, pausing at the door. “Had to break in, didn’t you? It’ll cost dough to fix that.” He grimaced. “Hell. C’mon upstairs. I’m starving.”

But the first thing Sammy the Leg did was to extract a beer bottle from his refrigerator, uncap it, and guzzle the contents. He wiped his mouth with a hairy hand, sighed, and eyed the Saint malevolently.

“Lousy double-crosser,” he said. “Nope, not you. I mean Fingers. Go on, sit down. Have a beer. Wait a sec.”

He went back to the refrigerator and brought out a plate of pig’s knuckles.

“How did it happen?” Simon asked.

“Fingers Schultz,” Sammy said, gnawing a knuckle. “Just goes to show. Never trust nobody. That little snake’s been with me for three years. Thought I could depend on him. Sure I could — till he started figuring I was a has-been and somebody else could pay off better, and protect him.”

“Like the King of the Beggars?” Simon prompted.

“I wouldn’t know about that. Fingers brought Frankie Weiss here. They stuck me up. Fingers knew about that room downstairs and how to get into it. They took that guy you left here away with them, and left me like you found me. Funny — he didn’t seem so happy about them finding him, like you’d expect.”

“Junior’s hunches were working fine,” Simon told him cold-bloodedly. “They asked him all the questions they had to, and then rubbed him out.”

Sammy reflectively chewed a knucklebone, his small eyes studying the Saint. Finally he sighed.

“That’s too bad. I guess he had it coming, but that don’t do you no good.” A pig’s knuckle cracked disconcertingly in Sammy’s huge grip. He got up, found another bottle, and lifted it to his mouth. “Who’s gonna pay for messing up my cellar?” he demanded abruptly. “All it takes to open it is to stick a wire in the right place between the bricks. You didn’t have to wreck it like that.”

“How much will the repairs cost?” Simon asked.

“Say two hundred.”

The Saint smiled.

“That’s a coincidence. My charge for rescuing people who are tied up and left to die is exactly two hundred fish. Shall we call it square?”

Sammy said without rancour, “I didn’t figure it would work on you, but there was no harm trying. Fingers is the guy who ought to pay for it. But when I catch up with Fingers he won’t be in no shape to sign cheques.”

Simon lighted a cigarette. “You’re right about Junior’s rubbing-out doing me no good,” he said. “As a matter of fact, they’re working pretty hard at trying to frame me for it. You’ll be interested to know that part of the frame was a deed of gift on this house from you to me. Now we know more about it, it wasn’t such a bad set-up at all. You’d never show up to contest the title; and if anyone ever did find your body, it’d have been in my house and looked just as if I’d bumped you and forged the deed... The King is quite a sweet little schemer, it turns out.”

Sammy the Leg was staring at him with a mixture of grief and consternation that made him look as if he was going to cry.

“You mean... they gave you my house?”

His eyes actually grew moist as they stole lingeringly around the appalling interior.

“Don’t worry — I’ll give it back to you,” said the Saint generously. “All I want from you is just as much as you can tell me. For instance: when Frankie and Fingers were talking, did they let anything drop that would give you any idea where the King of the Beggars has his main hideaway? Or where they might have kept Junior if they’d wanted to keep him?”

Sammy chewed thoughtfully for a while, and made a decision.

“I ain’t no squealer,” he said, “but after what those two rats done to me... They didn’t say much, either. But Fingers said, ‘Why not work him over here?’ and Frankie said, ‘They’re waiting for us at Elliott’s, and we got a better trick there.’ ”

Mr Uniatz came out of a prolonged silence during which he had been refreshing himself from a pint bottle of bourbon which he had discovered among Sammy’s supplies. His return to the conversation might have been due to the stirring of a thought, or to the fact that the bottle was now empty.

“De Elliott Hotel?” he said. “But we just come from dere—”

“And we didn’t search it,” Simon said. “That was only the place where I started thinking about secret passages. So naturally I was too dumb to start there... Wait a minute!” He came to his feet suddenly, and his eyes were alight. “Sammy — did he say ‘Elliott’s’ or ‘the Elliott Hotel’?”

Sammy stared at him.

“He said ‘Elliott’s,’ ” he stated positively. “I never heard of an Elliott Hotel.”

“Of course, he did,” said the Saint, with a lilt in his quiet voice like muted trumpets. “Of course he did. Anyone who meant the Elliott Hotel would say so, or call it ‘the Hotel’ or ‘the Elliott.’ They wouldn’t call it ‘Elliott’s.’... Hoppy, we’re on our way!”

Hoppy struggled obediently but foggily to his feet.

“Okay, boss.”

“That’ll be five bucks for the bourbon,” Sammy said. He closed his hairy fist on the bill that Simon placed in it, and added, “Just one thing. Try to leave Fingers for me, will you? I sort of feel I ought to get him myself, for the looks of things.”

“We’ll try,” Simon promised.

He drove back into Chicago with the speedometer needle exactly on the legal limit, for this was one time when he did not want to be stopped. His first destination was his own hotel: he was gambling that that might well be the last place where Kearney would expect him to show up again, but in any case he was riding a hunch that justified the chance.

And the piece fell into place as if it had been machined to fit, with the uncanny smoothness that so often seemed to lubricate the gears of Simon Templar’s destiny.

There was a letter in his box at the desk, a product of the last delivery. It was addressed to Hoppy, but Simon opened it as soon as he saw the name of the firm of realtors it came from.

Simon read no more. He stuffed the letter into his pocket, and sapphires danced in his eyes. “Let’s go, Hoppy,” he said, “and arrange an abdication.”

Chapter fourteen

The telephone at the clerk’s elbow buzzed. He picked it up and said, “Night clerk speaking...” His eyes went to the Saint and he said, “Yes, he just came in—”

Then his eyes bulged while they still rested on the Saint. Simon watched them grow wider and rounder before the man backed away from the counter and turned his head.

The Saint deliberately dawdled over lighting a cigarette, but even his supersensitive ears could pick nothing up, for all the rest of the conversation came from the other end of the line, until the clerk muttered, “Okay, I’ll do my best.”

Simon started to move away.

“Er... Mr Templar...”

He turned.

“Yes?”

The clerk was sweating. His face had a slightly glazed surface from the strain of trying to look natural.

“The manager just called, Mr Templar, and wanted to speak to you about... about an overcharge on your bill.”

“I’ll be glad to speak to him in the morning,” said the Saint co-operatively. “We should have lots to talk about — everything on my bill looks like an overcharge to me.”

“He’s on his way here now, sir,” said the clerk from his tonsils. If you could wait a few minutes—”

The Saintly smile would have glowed ethereally in a stained-glass window.

“I’m afraid I haven’t time,” he said. “But when Lieutenant Kearney gets here, do congratulate him for me on his new job. Oh, and give him this letter, will you?”

He laid the communication from the real-estate agents on the desk, and hurried Hoppy out of the lobby before the clerk could reassemble his wits for another attempt to delay him.

Again his car snaked through the traffic at the maximum speed that would still leave it immune from legal interference.

The Saint’s hands were light and steady on the wheel, his keen tanned profile implacably calm against the passing street lights. And while he drove like a precision machine he thought about Monica. Monica drugged, her velvet voice incoherent, her enigmatic eyes blank, her proud body listless and helpless... He thought of worse things than that, and a black coldness lanced through him with an aching intensity that froze his eyes as they stared ahead.

“I’m the dope, Hoppy,” he said in a dead toneless level. “I should have known better than to think I could push her off the stage... She put on that beggar woman’s outfit again, of course. She went back to the Elliott Hotel. But on account of what Junior had spilled, she didn’t last a minute. They were probably taking care of her last night while I was lying there wondering why they didn’t do anything about me.” His voice had a bitterness beyond emotion. “By this time they’ve given her a treatment and they know all the rest about me. Except where I am now. This is the showdown.”

“Who’d’a t’ought it,” Hoppy said amazedly. “Elliott — de old goat!”

Simon said nothing.

The house on Kelly Drive was as dark as the last time they had seen it, an unimaginative two-storey pile of brick with drawn blinds that made the windows look like sightless eyes.

Simon went to the back door, with Hoppy at his heels. Having picked the lock once before, he took a mere few seconds to open it again.

They stepped into darkness and silence broken only by the monotonous slow pulse of a dripping tap. This was the kitchen. On the other side of the room was the door at the head of the stairs that led down to the basement where initiations into the brotherhood of the beggars were performed. As Simon touched it, it gave way a fraction: it was not quite closed, but the darkness was blacker still beyond the slight opening. He stopped and listened again, and heard nothing. The darkness of the house had not seemed to indicate that there was a guard, but he was jumping to no rash conclusions.

He balanced the gun in his hand and pushed the door wider.

Then he heard it — a faint but clear rustle of movement that threw a momentary uncontrollable syncopation into his heartbeats and sent a flying column of eskimo beetles skirmishing up into his scalp. And with the rustle, a low, sleepy, inarticulate moan.

“What’s dat?” breathed Mr Uniatz hoarsely.

The Saint hardly bothered to whisper. After the first instant’s shock, he understood the rustle and the moan so vividly that the needlessness of further stealth seemed to be established.

“That’s Monica,” he said, and went down the steps.

His pencil flashlight broke the darkness as he reached the bottom, and in the round splash where the beam struck, he saw her.

She lay on a canvas cot in one corner of the cellar. Her wrists were strapped to the side members. As he had expected, she was dressed in the grimy shapeless rags in which he had first met her, but most of the beggar-woman make-up had been roughly wiped from her face. Her eyes were closed, but as the light fell on them her eyelids lifted a little as if with an infinite effort.

“No,” she mouthed huskily. “No...”

“Monica,” he said.

He checked the eagerness of his stride as he reached the cot, to come up to her gently.

“It’s me,” he said. “Simon. Simon Templar.”

Her eyes sought for him as he touched her, and he could see the pin-point contraction of the pupils. He turned the flashlight on his own face, then back to her.

She knew him — the sound of his voice and the glimpse of him. Even through the mists of the drug he saw the awareness of him struggle into her mind, and saw the tiny smile that lighted her whole face for an instant. She tried to raise her head, and her lips formed his name: “Simon...”

The effort was all she could make. Her head fell back and the lids closed over that shining look.

And then suddenly there was a blaze of lights that smashed away all shadows and wiped out the beam of his pencil light like a deluge would put out a match.

“Okay,” said the saw-toothed voice of Frankie Weiss. “This is a tommy gun. Don’t try anything, or I’ll blast all three of you.”

The Saint turned.

The stairs behind him had horizontal treads but no solid rises. Thus a man concealed behind them had a good vantage point. The unmistakable nozzle of a sub-machine-gun projected through one of the openings, and behind the Saint, Monica Varing lay directly in the line of fire.

“Drop your guns and reach,” Frankie said.

Simon obeyed.

Hoppy said, “Boss—”

“No,” said the Saint. “You haven’t a chance. Do what Frankie tells you.”

Hoppy’s Betsy clattered ignominiously on the floor.

The gross bulk of Big Hazel Green came out from behind the stairs. She circled around them, kicked their guns out of reach, and searched them with competent hamlike hands. Then she stepped aside again, and Frankie Weiss moved out into the open.

There was a small dew of perspiration on his face, but the weapon he held was perfectly steady.

“How nice to see you, Frankie,” Simon drawled. “You’re looking well, too. That work-out we had together must have done you good.”

“You think you’re smart, don’t you?” Frankie bit out of the side of his mouth. “Well, when I get through giving you a work-out—”

“The same old dialogue,” sighed the Saint. “I wish I could remember how many times I’ve heard that line. Frankie, you kill me.”

“Maybe you’re not kidding,” Frankie sneered. “Sit down on the bed and keep your hands where I can see ’em.”

The Saint sat down, and Monica Varing stirred again uneasily. He felt very calm and quiet now. The inward exultation that danger could always ignite in him had steadied down and chilled. He had a cold estimate of all their chances, an equally cold watchfulness for his own first opening, an arrogant confidence that when the time came he could do more than any other human being could do.

“I just want you to know,” he said, “that if you’ve done anything to Monica Varing—”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Mr Templar,” said a new voice from the top of the stairs. “We may have to kill Miss Varing, but I would never allow that sort of thing.”

It was Mrs Laura Wingate.

Chapter fifteen

The Saint watched her come down the stairs, while his brain struggled dizzily to recover its balance. It was fantastic, preposterous. In a story, of course, he would have guessed it long ago, but he had been thinking strictly in realities. This was unreal, and yet he was seeing it with his own eyes.

She was still the same fantastic figure out of a Helen Hokinson drawing. She protruded fore and aft, a plump, apparently brainless woman whose thoughts should have dealt with nothing more dangerous than planning theatre parties or buying Renoirs she couldn’t appreciate. Her lower lip protruded a little; that was the only change.

She looked at the Saint, and he felt one small flicker of chill as their eyes met. The glaring light seemed to bleach all colour out of her eyes, and the ruthless ophidian coldness of the gaze in that powdered face was shocking.

“Good evening, Your Majesty,” he said.

He started to stand up.

“Siddown!” Frankie barked, and the Saint raised his eyebrows as he subsided.

“Excuse me. It was just my old-world manners. I was always taught to stand up when a lady comes into the room — especially if she’s a queen.”

Hoppy said incredulously, “Ya mean dat’s de King of de Beggars? Dat old bag?”

“Shut up,” Frankie snarled.

“It doesn’t matter what they say now,” Mrs Wingate said. “Hazel—”

Big Hazel nodded and went to a small side table. She pulled out a drawer and took out the materials for a hypodermic injection — a syringe, ampules, cotton, alcohol. She began to fit a needle on the glass barrel of the syringe, as efficiently as a trained nurse. Simon realised that she might once have been one.

“Do we get the treatment, too?” he asked.

Mrs Wingate gave him a pale-eyed glance.

“Of course. There are several things I need to know immediately. I want to be sure you tell the truth.”

“You want to know how many people I’ve talked to, is that it?”

“A good deal depends on that, Mr Templar. I have made my arrangements to disappear if necessary. But I hope it will not be necessary yet — or ever.”

“I see,” Simon murmured. “If you can keep your secret safe by a few more murders — very wise of you, Mrs Wingate. I should have remembered my chess better — it’s the Queen that’s the most dangerous piece in the game. Not the King.”

“Chess,” Hoppy said blankly. “A dame — de King of de Beggars. An’ I t’ought—”

“That it was Elliott. Well, we had some reason to. We were looking for a man in the first place. That’s exactly the false scent Mrs Wingate meant to leave when she coined her title. You know, Hoppy, there was an Egyptian woman a long time ago who had herself crowned Pharaoh. She even insisted on appearing in public with a beard on state occasions. Mrs Wingate never went quite that far, but the disguise was good enough, anyhow. And then she made such good use of Stephen Elliott’s property. The hotel, and this. She seems to specialise in that sort of operation — like giving me Sammy the Leg’s house. I don’t doubt that if anyone else gets hot on the trail, Elliott is the one who’s going to have the explaining to do.” He gazed at Mrs Wingate thoughtfully. “Just between ourselves, and since it won’t go any farther, Laura, I wouldn’t mind betting now that Elliott isn’t even in the racket at all.”

A chilly smile lifted the corners of the woman’s mouth.

“Just between ourselves — and since it won’t go any farther, Mr Templar — you win that bet.”

Simon nodded and watched Big Hazel break the neck of an ampule and begin to fill the syringe.

“In the same vein,” he said, “would it be inquisitive to ask what happens to us after I’ve told you that Lieutenant Kearney knows where we are and is on his way after us?” Laura Wingate’s fat face gave no visible response. “An old bluff like that doesn’t frighten me,” she said. “Especially since I shall know the truth in a few minutes. But I’m glad to answer your question. As you may remember, we have a whisky bottle which you were kind enough to open for Big Hazel. I had meant to plant that in Sammy the Leg’s house, to help fix the Cleve Friend killing on you. Now, Miss Varing’s interference has made me change my plans. I shall use it somewhere else to prove that you killed your man Uniatz in a quarrel over some stolen jewels — I think I shall arrange for them to be stolen from me. Shortly afterwards you and Miss Varing will be found in your car, both shot with your gun, with a suitable farewell note which you will write while you are drugged — the victims of a sensational suicide pact... Go ahead, Hazel.”

The room felt colder to Simon Templar when she had ceased to speak. He lost then any compunctions he might have entertained before. Those bleached, cold eyes regarded him dispassionately as Big Hazel advanced on him with the syringe in one hand and an alcohol-sodden scrap of cotton in the other.

“Roll up your sleeve, Saint,” Mrs Wingate said. “Unless, of course, you would prefer Frankie to start shooting now. But I think common sense will tell you that this will be much the most painless way — for all of you.”

It was paralysing to think that this was the same woman speaking whose verbal italics and vapid girlish giggle had once made him think of her a ludicrous caricature of a stock type.

Slowly Simon began to take off his coat. His deliberate calm of a short while ago had congealed to a glacial calculation. He had left a broad enough clue for Kearney, but he had no guarantee that it would click, or click in time. He knew with great clarity what he would have to do, and what split-second timing it would demand of him.

“Hoppy,” he said, “I’m afraid we’ve made a few mistakes. If you’d only kept up with your marksmanship — like a busy bee... bee...”

Hoppy blinked.

“Yuh?”

The Saint resignedly began on his sleeve.

“Forget it. You can’t hit the bull’s eye every time.”

He finished rolling up the sleeve, and from a corner of his eye he saw dawning comprehension break over Hoppy’s face.

Simon said, “An underground chamber and all the props of violent melodrama. This calls for a last-minute rescue by the Marines, Mrs Wingate.”

The woman flickered her icy glance at him. “Put your arm out, Mr Templar.”

Simon sighed, and offered his brown left forearm to Big Hazel. She dabbed the cotton on it, and grasped his wrist with a wrestler’s hand.

One quick glance assured him that Frankie’s tommy gun was almost obstructed by Big Hazel’s huge frame, after that he didn’t look at it. He watched the approach of the syringe, that was all but engulfed in her giant paw, and all his whipcord muscles were relaxed and waiting.

“Now, Hoppy,” he said coolly.

There came a sound he recognised — the indescribable noise, akin to pthoo! that marked the expulsion of a BB shot from between Hoppy Uniatz’s teeth...

For weeks Hoppy had been improving in accuracy, force, and the principles of oral ballistics. Had the interior of his mouth been rifled like a gun-barrel, his aim might have been bettered, but at this close range there was no chance of a miss. The BB, impelled with velocity and violence, completed the last touch of outrageous grotesquerie by hitting Big Hazel Green in the left eye.

“Next to a custard pie,” the Saint reflected, with some irrepressibly cynical part of his mind that sat in judgement with an eyebrow raised, “I couldn’t think of an improvement. Now—”

The balance of the situation tipped with dazzling suddenness. Big Hazel’s instant reaction to the introduction of a foreign particle into her optic apparatus was to bellow like a wounded bull, let go the Saint’s wrist, and clap her free hand to the injured organ. But simultaneously, without even waiting for that release, the Saint’s free right hand was moving.

If he had merely tried to seize Big Hazel, or to hit her on the jaw, the woman would probably have got away. But Simon Templar’s arm flashed down with a speed that almost blurred the vision, and his hand closed with murderous suddenness over hers. And the hand it closed on was holding a hypodermic syringe of brittle glass.

The barrel of the syringe became instantly a non-cohesive assortment of razor-sharp fragments, slicing agonisingly deeper into Big Hazel’s flesh as the Saint’s merciless grip ground tighter. All of her faculties were concentrated, to the exclusion of every other thought, on the immediate, vital, and hysterical necessity of opening her hand before the fingers began falling off. And being thus occupied, she was in no condition to realise that the Saint’s hand had also swung her around until she completely blocked Frankie’s line of fire.

At the same moment, Mr Uniatz moved with an agility that threw a surprising sidelight on his nickname. He dived for the nearest gun on the floor, and fired almost as his paw closed on it. The only sound Frankie Weiss made was a queer sort of choking cough as he went down, and the tommy gun never spoke at all...

“All right,” Kearney’s voice said from the top of the stairs. “Break it up, or I’ll let all of you have it.”

Simon pushed Big Hazel away and smiled up at him... “Good old Alvin,” he said. “Never too late to take a bow.”

Chapter sixteen

Monica Varing turned her head upon the pillow, and her hair moved with it in a shining skein on the bare satin of her shoulder. The robe she wore swooped downward from there in a “V” so deep that Simon Templar, leaning on the high footboard of her hospital bed, was aware of not wholly inexplicable vertigo whenever his eyes wandered that way.

He sighed ostentatiously.

Monica smiled. Her voice was warm temptation.

“Is anything wrong? I thought all your problems were wound up nicely.”

“They are — nearly all.” He grinned rather wryly. “Kearney got a promotion, Elliott cleared his good name, Laura Wingate—” The blue darkened. “Laura Wingate held out a lot longer than I expected, but she’s finally made a confession. Even Fingers Schultz.” The grin came back. “It seems that a gunsel named Fingers Schultz was picked up in the street last night with tyre-marks all over him, apparently the victim of a hit-run driver, but I haven’t asked Sammy the Leg what his car looks like.”

Monica leaned forward, clasping her knees, and smiled at him dazzlingly. The Saint enjoyed his ensuing vertigo.

“Why all the deep sighs, then?”

“Because now we’ll have hardly any excuse for seeing each other. How soon do you expect to get out of this joint?”

“By evening. It was nonsense bringing me in at all, but my manager insisted on a few days’ rest. Tonight I play Nora as usual.”

“And after the show?”

“I was waiting to be asked. What were you thinking of?”

The Saint smiled.

“Exactly the same thing as you,” he said.