The Saint Bids Diamonds (Thieves' Picnic)

THE SAINT BIDS DIAMONDS

LESLIE CHARTERIS

CONTENTS

IHow Simon Templar Took Exercise, and Hoppy Uniatz Quenched His Thirst IIHow Simon Templar Conversed with a Porter, and a Brace of Guardias Were Happily Reunited IIIHow Simon Templar Read a Newspaper, and Reuben Graner Put on His Hat IVHow Simon Templar Rose to the Occasion, and the Thieves' Picnic Got Further Under Way VHow Reuben Graner Took Back His Gun, and a Taxi Driver Was Uncon­vinced VIHow Simon Templar Ate without En­thusiasm, and Mr Uniatz Was also Troubled about His Beakfast VII How Mr Palermo Continued to Be Unlucky, and Hoppy Uniatz Obeyed Orders VIII How Mr Uniatz Was Bewildered about Bopping, and Simon Templar Was Polite to a Lady IXHow Simon Templar Enjoyed a Joke, and How Mr Lauber Was Not Amused XHow Simon Templar Paid His Debt, and Christine Vanlinden Remembered Hers

THE SAINT BIDS DIAMONDS

I

How Simon Templar Took Exercise, and Hoppy Uniatz Quenched His Thirst

SIMON TEMPLAR yanked the hand brake back into the last notch as the huge cream-and-red Hirondel shot past the little knot of struggling men, and stood up while the tires were still screaming for a hold on the cobblestones. The Hirondel rocked to a shuddering standstill just beyond the other car that was pulled in to the side of the road; and Simon sat on the back of the seat and swung long, immaculately trousered legs over the side. From under the jauntily tilted brim of his hat he gazed back at the inspiring scene with a glimmer of reckless delight beginning to dawn in gay blue eyes which should have seemed entirely misplaced in a man who was better known as the Saint than by any other name.

In the seat beside him, Hoppy Uniatz screwed his head round on his thick neck and also surveyed the scenery, with the strain of intense thought creasing its unmistakable contortions into the rugged contours of what, from its geographical situation rather than any­thing else, must reluctantly be called his face. Somewhere inside him an awe-inspiringly lucid deduction was struggling for delivery.

"Boss," said Mr Uniatz, with growing conviction, "dat looks like a fight."

"It is a fight," said the Saint contentedly, and dropped lightly to the ground.

He had made the deduction several seconds earlier than Mr Uniatz, and with much less difficulty. From the moment when the headlights of the Hirondel swept round the bend and caught the "group of writhing figures in their sudden blaze of illumination, it had been comparatively obvious that the nocturnal peace of the road up to La Laguna from Santa Cruz de Tenerife was being vigorously disturbed by physical dissension and all manner of mayhem-so obvious, in fact, that the Saint was treading on the brake pedal and flicking the gear lever into neutral almost as soon as the spectacle met his eyes. He had only paused for that one brief instant to decide whether the fight was merely an ordinary vulgar brawl, or whether it possessed any features which might make it interesting to a connoisseur. And, while he perched up there on the back of his seat, he had seen the vague mass of seething bodies split up into two component nuclei. In one section, two burly males were apparently trying to hammer the insides out of a third whose hair gleamed silver under the dim light; and in the other section, which more or less clinched the matter, a girl who had been trying to help him was being dragged away, fighting like a wildcat, by another of the strong-arm deputation.

Either because the combatants were so absorbed in their own business that they hadn't noticed the stopping of his car, or else because they proposed to continue operations in defiance of any casual interference, the tempo of the conflict showed no signs of slowing up as the Saint drew nearer; and a gentle and rather speculative smile shaped itself on his lips. The man who was wrestling with the girl had one hand over her mouth, and just at that moment her teeth must have managed to find one of his fingers, for his hand moved quickly and he let out a hoarse profanity which was cut off by her sharp scream for help. The Saint's smile became even gentler.

"Not so loud, lady," he murmured. "Help has ar­rived."

She had a face which was definitely worth fighting for, Simon realised as the man swung her round as a shield between them; and the artistic perfection of the discovery sent blissful anthems carolling through his soul. That was just as it should be-beauty in distress, and repulsive blackguards to punch firmly in the eye. . . .

The latter ingredient struck Simon's imagination as being particularly sound. The desire to prove whether it was as satisfactory in practice as in theory became almost simultaneously irresistible. The Saint saw no reason to resist it. He shot out an exploratory fist that whizzed past the girl's ear like a bullet, and felt his knuckles smash terrifically into something crispy-soft which could have been nothing else but the desired objective in the pan of the man behind her.

The jolt ran up his arm and spread itself through­out his body in a warm tingle of ineffable beatitude. He had not been mistaken. The sensation left nothing to be improved on. It lifted up the heart and made the world a brighter and rosier place. It was the works.

"Lend me your other eye, brother," said the Saint.

The man let go the girl and kicked at him viciously; but the Saint had learnt most of his fighting in places where there were no referees, and the savagely rearing foot that would probably have crippled anyone else, hissed harmlessly past him as he stepped smoothly aside. The foot swung on upwards under its undischarged momentum, and Simon cupped his hand under the heel and helped it enthusiastically on its way. The kicker's other leg slipped from under him and he went crashing down on his back; and the Saint trod on his face and assisted the back of his head to collide with the pavement a second time, to remove all doubt.

He took the trembling girl's hand for a moment in a cool grip.

"Get along to my car," he said. "The red-and-yellow one. I'll collect Uncle."

She stared at him for a second or two, hesitantly and, it seemed, fearfully, as if she still couldn't realise that he had helped her, and as if she was terrified of a trap. The Saint turned his head so that the light fell on his face; and there must have been something in his smile that answered her doubts, for she nodded and turned obediently away.

The Saint moved on.

Three or four paces from him the other two mem­bers of the tough brigade had made good use of their time. The old man was out, out of the fight for keeps, as Simon had known he must be after a few minutes of the treatment he had been taking. He lay sprawled on the ground like a rag doll, with his head fallen limply back over the edge of the curb. One of his opponents was kneeling on his chest; and the other turned round from the diverting pastime of kicking him in the ribs to meet the Saint's approach with a rush of savagely swinging fists.

The Saint side-stepped like a dancer, blocked one blow, ducked another, and slid in with the same move­ment to catch him in the exact centre of his stomach with a blow that doubled him up as if he had stepped into the path of a runaway pile driver. After which something happened that the victim could never after­wards quite believe, and was inclined to attribute to the dizziness induced by the maltreatment of his solar plexus. But in the fog of agonising nausea which numbed his brain, it felt exactly as if two hands of incredible strength took hold of him at the waist and swept him high in the air, and a voice laughed softly and mockingly before the hands let him go. After which he had a feeling of floating gracefully through the air for one or two short pulsebeats before the earth rose up and hit him a frightful blow in the back that almost shattered his spine. . . .

Simon Templar relaxed his muscles and drew a long, deep breath of sheer content. Even viewed purely in the light of healthy exercise, the dull mechanical movements which less-adventurous souls employed to de­velop impressive bulges on every limb were not in the same street. This, undoubtedly, as he had always been convinced, was what the doctor ordered. This was the real McCoy. And he laughed again, softly and almost inaudibly, as the last man leapt at him.

He was the largest of them all, with shoulders like an ox, though the Saint topped him in height by a couple of inches; and he came in a swerving charge that gave him the space to jerk something dark and glistening from his hip pocket. The Saint saw it and lunged like a flash of lightning for the wrist behind it. He found it and fastened on it with a grip like iron, swinging the gun out of the line of his body. The man tried to wrench free, impatiently, as he might have done from the interference of a child; and a queer look of amazement spread over his broad face when his arm stayed riveted where it was held, as if it had been pinioned in solid rock. The Saint's teeth flashed white in the gloom, and his free fist pistoned up and cracked under the other's outthrust jaw like a gunshot. It should have dropped the large man in his tracks, but he only grunted and shook his head and hit back. Simon slipped under the punch, and they grappled breast to breast. And then there was another sharp thud, and the big man went unexpectedly limp.

Simon let him slide to the ground; and as he folded up he revealed, like an unveiled monument, the homely but supremely happy features of Hoppy Uniatz stand­ing behind him with an automatic in his hand. For a second the Saint's memory flashed backwards in a spurt of sobering alarm, searching for a more precise definition of the timbre of the sharp thud which had preceded his opponent's collapse.

"You didn't shoot him, did you?" he asked anxiously.

"Chees no, boss," Hoppy reassured him. "I just pat him on de roof wit' de end of my Betsy. He ain't hoit."

Simon breathed again.

"I'm not quite sure whether he'd agree with you about that," he remarked. "Although I suppose it's better than being dead. . . . But it looked like the makings of a good fight before you butted in."

He gazed around him somewhat regretfully. The high peak of vivacity in the proceedings seemed to have gone by, leaving a certain atmosphere of anti­climax. The man with the damaged face was trying to get blindly to his feet. The man who had made the short but exciting flight through the air was leaning against the back of the sedan, holding his stomach and looking as if he would like to die. The man whose roof had been patted with the end of Mr Uniatz' Betsy appeared to sleep. What with one thing and another, a shroud of appalling tranquillity had settled upon the scene.

The Saint sighed. And then he grinned vaguely and clapped Hoppy on the shoulder.

"Anyway," he said, "let's see what we fished out of the pot."

He went over to where the old man still lay with his head in the gutter, and picked him up as if he was a child. Whatever else might develop, a strategic withdrawal from the field of victory was the first indi­cated move. Simon carried the old man over to the Hirondel, dumped him in the tonneau, where he told Hoppy to look after him, and opened the front door for the girl.

She hesitated with one foot on the running board; and again he glimpsed that cloud of suspicion darken­ing her eyes.

"Really-you needn't bother. ... We can walk -"

"Not with Uncle," said the Saint firmly. "He doesn't feel like walking." Without waiting for her, he slid in behind the wheel and touched the starter. "Besides, your sparring partners might start walking too-they still have some life left in them --"

Crack!

The shot whined over his head and smacked into the wall beyond, and the Saint smiled as if it amused him. He caught the girl's wrist, dragged her down into the seat beside him, slammed the door and let in the clutch more quickly than the separate movements can be described. A second shot crashed harmlessly into the night; and then Mr Uniatz' Betsy answered. Then a side turning caught the Saint's eye, and he spun the wheel and sent the Hirondel screaming round in a skidding right angle. In another moment they were coasting smoothly down into the outskirts of Santa Cruz.

A little later, he heard far behind him a ragged fusillade which puzzled him for the next twelve hours.

2 But the general aspect of the affair met with his complete approval. He had no fault to find with it-, even if it had temporarily interrupted the urgent and fascinating business that brought him to the Canary Islands. Adventure was still adventure, and there was always room for more-that was the fundamental article of faith which had blazed the Saint's trail of debonair outlawry through all the continents and half the countries of the world. Besides which, there were points about this adventure which were beginning to make it look more than ordinarily interesting. . . .

He glanced at the girl again as they turned out into the wide, open space fronting the harbour.

"Where do you live?" he enquired; and his tone was as casual as if he had been driving her home from a dance.

"Nowhere!" she said quickly. And then, as if the word had come out before she realised what a ridiculous answer it was and how many more questions must inevitably follow it, she said: "I mean-I don't want to give you any more trouble. You've been awfully kind . . . but you can drop us anywhere around here, and we'll be quite all right."

Simon turned the car slowly round into the Plaza de la Republica and tilted his head significantly towards the tonneau.

"I'm sure you will," he agreed patiently. "But I have to keep on reminding you about Uncle. Or will you carry him?"

"Is he all right?"

She turned round quickly, and the Saint also looked back as he brought the Hirondel to a stop outside the Hotel Orotava. The only person visible in the back seat was Hoppy Uniatz, who did not seem to have fully grasped his obligations as an administrator of first aid. Mr Uniatz was lighting a large cigar; and, for all the evidence to the contrary, he might have been sitting on his patient.

"Sure, de old buzzard is okay, miss," said Mr Uni­atz cheerfully. "He just took a bit of massage, but dat's nut'n. You oughta seen what de cops done to me one time when dey had me in de kitchen."

Simon saw the pain in her eyes.

"We must take him to a doctor," she said.

"By all means," he assented amiably. "Who is your doctor?"

She passed a hand shakily over her forehead.

"I'm afraid I don't know one --"

"Nor do I. And from what I do know about Spanish doctors, if he's not dead yet they'll soon find a way to finish him off. I could look after him much better myself. Why not let's take him in here and see about fixing him up?"

"I don't want to go on bothering you."

The Saint chuckled and reached back to open the rear door.

"Take him inside, Hoppy," he ordered. "Pretend he's passed out, and get him up to my room-you'd better act a bit squiffy yourself to complete the pic­ture. We'll follow in a few minutes so it won't look too much like a party."

Mr Uniatz nodded and hauled the patient out like a sack. As he started across the pavement, he lifted up his unmelodious voice in a song of which the distinguishable words made the Saint mildly thankful that no English-speaking residents were likely to be within earshot.

Again the girl made an involuntary movement of protest; but Simon took her by the arm.

"What's on your mind?" he asked quietly; and she shrugged helplessly.

He could feel the tenseness of her under his touch.

"Let me look at you," she said.

He took off his hat and turned towards her. Her eyes searched his face. They were brown eyes, he noticed, and her hair shone copper-brown under the lamplight. He realised that if her mouth had been happy it would have been very happy, a soft, red, full-lipped mouth that would have tantalised the imagina­tion of any man whose impulses were human.

She saw a face coloured with the warm tan of un-walled horizons and lighted with the clearest blue eyes that she had ever seen. It was a face that might have leapt to life from the portrait of some sixteenth-century buccaneer; a face that managed to harmonise a dozen strange contradictions between the firm chin and finely chiselled lips and the broad artist's fore­head, and yet altogether cast in such a gay and reckless mould that it took all contradictions in its stride and made them insignificant. It was the face of a poet with the dare-devil humour of a cavalier, the face of an unrepentant outlaw with the calm straightforwardness of an idealist. It was the sort of face that she thought Robin Hood might have had-and did not know then that a thousand newspapers had unanimously named its owner the Robin Hood of modern crime.

But Simon Templar opened his face for inspection in the main square of Santa Cruz without a twinge of anxiety even for the two guardias who were strolling by; though he knew that photographic reproductions of it were to be found in the police archives of almost every civilised country in the world. For at that particular time the Saint was not officially wanted by the police of any country-a fact which many citizens who had met him in the past had reason to regard with grave indignation.

"I'm just-rather upset," she said, as if she was satisfied with the result of her scrutiny.

"That's only natural," said the Saint lightly. "Getting beaten up by a bunch of toughs isn't what they usually recommend for soothing the nerves. Now let's go and see what we can do for Uncle."

He got out and opened the door for her; and the music that was still lilting through the depths of his being opened itself up and sent its rapturous diapasons warbling towards the moon. He knew now that his inspiration must be right.

Somewhere in the vicinity of Santa Cruz there was the material for even more fun and games than he had optimistically expected-and he had come there in the definite expectation of a good deal. And he had tumbled straight into it within a few hours of getting off the boat. Which was only the normal course of events, for him. If there was trouble brewing any­where, he tumbled into it: it was his destiny, the sublime compensation for all the other things that his outlawry might have denied him.

It never occurred to him to doubt that it had hap­pened again. Otherwise, why had the three toughs been so very determined to beat up the old man whom he had rescued? And why, when he interfered, did they fight to the last man for the privilege of going on with the job? And why, when he had dealt with them once, had they brought their artillery into play to try and start the fight over again? And why was the girl still so afraid even of her rescuer, still suspicious of him even after he had indicated which side he was on in no uncertain manner? And why, most intriguing point of all, hadn't she volunteered one single word of explana­tion about how the fight started, as anyone else would automatically have done? The whole episode fairly bristled with questions, and none of them could be satisfactorily answered by the circumstances of commonplace highway robbery.

"You know," Simon burbled genially on, "these things always make me wonder for a bit whether it's safe to look a policeman in the eye for the next few days. I remember the last time anything like this happened to me-it was in Innsbruck, but it was almost exactly the same sort of thing. A friend of mine and myself horned in on a scrap where one harmless-looking little bird was getting the hide pasted off him by three large, ferocious-looking thugs. We laid them out and heaved them into the river, and it started no end of trouble. You see, it turned out that the harmless-looking little bird was carrying a bag full of stolen jewels, and the three ferocious-looking thugs were perfectly respectable detectives trying to arrest him. It only shows you how careful you have to be with this knight-errant business. -- Is anything the matter?"

Her face had gone as white as milk, and she was leaning back against the side of the lift, staring at him.

"It's nothing," she said. "Just-all these other things."

"I know."

The lift stopped at his floor, and he opened the doors for her and followed her out.

"I've got a bottle of vintage lemonade that'll have you turning cartwheels again in no time," he remarked as they walked round the passage. "That is, if Hoppy hasn't drunk it all to try and revive the invalid."

"I hope you'll turn him inside out if he has," she answered; and he was amazed by the sudden change in her voice.

She was still pale, pale as death, but the terror had gone far from her eyes as if a mask had been drawn over them. She smiled up at him-it was the first time he had seen her smile, and he couldn't help noticing that he had been right about her mouth. It was turned up to him in a way that at any other time would have put irresistible ideas into his head, and she slipped a hand through his arm as they came to the door of his room. Her small fingers moved over his biceps.

"You must be terrifically strong," she said; and the Saint shrugged.

"I can usually manage to get a glass to my mouth."

A queer ghostly tingle touched the base of his spine as he opened the door and let her into the room. It wasn't anything she had said: coming from most women, her last remark would have made him wince, but she had a fresh young voice that made it seem perfectly natural. It wasn't even the new personality which she had started to take on, for that fitted her so perfectly that it was hard to imagine her with any other. The feeling was almost subconscious, a stirring of uncompleted intuition that gave him an odd sensation of walking blindfold along the edge of a precipice; and again he knew, beyond all doubt, that he was nowhere near the end of the consequences of that night's work.

The old man lay motionless on the bed, exactly as Mr Uniatz must have dumped him. Hoppy himself, as the Saint had feared, had started the work of resuscitation on himself, and half the contents had disappeared from a bottle of Haig that had been unopened when Simon left it on the table. He arrived just in time, for Mr Uniatz had the bottle in his hand when Simon opened the door and he was on the point of repeating his previous experiments. Simon took it away from him and replaced the cork.

"Thank God for non-refillable bottles," he said fervently. "They pour so slowly. If this had been the ordinary kind there wouldn't have been a drop left by now."

He went to the bed and unbuttoned the old man's coat and shirt. His pulse was all right, making due allowances for his age, and there were no bones broken: but his body was terribly bruised and his face scratched and swollen. Whether he had internal injuries, and what the effects of shock might be, would have to be decided when he recovered consciousness. He was breathing stertorously, with his mouth hang­ing open, and for the moment he seemed to be in no imminent danger of death.

Simon went to the bathroom and soaked a towel in cold water. He began to bathe the old man's face and clean it up as well as he could, but the girl stopped him.

"Let me do it. Will he be all right?"

"I'll lay you odds on it," said the Saint convincingly.

He left her with the towel and went back to the table to pour out some of the whiskey which he had rescued. She held up the old man's head while he forced some of it between the puffed and bleeding lips. The old man groaned and stirred weakly.

"That ought to help him," murmured Simon. "You'd better have the rest yourself-it 'll do you good."

She nodded, and he gave her the glass. There were tears in her eyes, and while he looked at her they welled over and ran down her cheeks. She drank quickly, without a grimace, and put the glass down be­fore she turned back to the old man. She sat on the bed, holding him with his head pillowed on her breast and her arm round him, rocking a little as if she were cradling a child, wiping his grimed and battered face with the wet towel while the tears ran unheeded down her cheeks.

"Joris," she whispered. "Joris darling. Wake up, darling. It's all right now. . . . You're all right, aren't you, Joris? Joris, my sweet . . ."

The Saint was on his way back to the table to pour a drink for himself, and he stopped so suddenly that if she had been looking at him she must have noticed it. For a second or two he stood utterly motionless, as if he had been turned to stone; and once again that weird uncanny tingle laid its clammy touch on the base of his spine. Only this time it didn't pass away almost as quickly as it had begun. It crept right up his back until the chill of it crawled over his scalp; and then it dropped abruptly into his stomach and left his heart thumping to make up for the time it had stood still.

To the Saint it seemed as if a century went by while he stood there petrified; but actually it could have been hardly any time at all. And at last he moved again, stretching out his hand very slowly and deliberately for the bottle that he had been about to pick up. With infinite steadiness he measured a ration of whiskey into his glass, and unhurriedly splashed soda on top of it.

"Joris," he repeated, in a voice that miraculously managed to be his own. "That's rather an unusual name. . . . Who is he?"

The fear that flashed through her eyes was suppressed so swiftly this time that if he had not been watching her closely he would probably have missed it altogether.

"He's my father," she said, almost defiantly. "But I've always called him Joris."

"Dutch name, isn't it?" said the Saint easily. "Hullo -he seems to be coming round."

The old man was moving a little more, shaking his head mechanically from side to side and moaning like a man recovering from an anaesthetic. Simon returned to the bedside, but the girl waved him away.

"Please-leave him with me for a minute."

The Saint nodded sympathetically and sauntered over to a chair. The first breath-taking shock was gone now, and once again his mind was running as cool and clear as an alpine stream. Only the high-strung tension of his awakened nerves, a pulse of vivid expectation too deeply pitched and infinitesimal in its vibration to be perceptible to any senses but his own, remained to testify to the thunderbolt of realisation that had flamed through his brain.

He slipped a cigarette from his case, tapped it, set it between his lips without a tremor in his hands, and lighted it without haste. Then he opened his wallet and took out a folded piece of blue paper.

It was a Spanish telegram form; and he read it through again for the twentieth time since it had come into his possession, though he already knew every word of it by heart. It had been sent from Santa Cruz on the twenty-second of December, and it was addressed to a certain Mr Rodney Felson at the Palace Hotel, Madrid. The message ran: MUST REPLACE JORIS IMMEDIATELY CAN YOU SECURE SUBSTITUTE VERY URGENT GRANER Simon folded the sheet and put it carefully away again, but the words still danced before his eyes. He drew the smoke of his cigarette deep into his lungs and let it trickle out towards the ceiling, "What's the rest of the name?" he enquired, as if he was merely making idle conversation.

A moment passed before she answered.

"Vanlinden," she said, in the same half-defiant way; and then the Saint knew that he had been right in the wild hunch that had come to him five nights ago in Madrid and sent him driving recklessly through the night to Cadiz to catch the boat that left for Tenerife the next day.

Simon looked up and realised that the scarecrow physiognomy of Mr Uniatz was becoming convulsed with the same sort of expression that might have been found on the face of a volcano preparing to erupt-if a volcano had a face. His eyes were bulging out of his head like a crab's, and his whole face was turning purple with such an awful congestion, that anyone who did not know him well might have thought that he was being strangled. The Saint, who was not in that innocent category, knew in a flash that these horrible symptoms were only the outward and visible signs of the dawning of a Thought somewhere in the dark un-fathomed caves of Mr Uniatz' mind. His eyes blazed a warning that would have paralysed a more sensitive man; but all the sensitiveness in Mr Uniatz would have made a rhinoceros look like a wilting gazelle. Besides, Hoppy's cerebrations had gone too far to be suppressed: he had to get them out of his system or asphyxiate.

"Boss," he exploded, "dijja hear dat? Joris Vanlinden! Ain't dat de guy - "Yes, Hoppy, of course that's the guy," said the Saint soothingly.

He went quickly over to the bed and sat down facing the girl. It was a moment when he had to act faster than he could think, before Hoppy's blundering feet blotted out every trace of the fragile bridge that he had been trying to build. He held out his hand and smiled disarmingly into her eyes.

"Lady," he said solemnly, "this is a great moment. Will you shake?"

Her fingers met his almost immediately.

"But why?" she said.

"Just to keep me going till I can shake hands with Joris himself. I've always wanted to meet one of the boys who pulled off that job at Troschman's-it was one of the classics of the century."

"I don't think I know what you're talking about."

He was still smiling.

"I think you do. I said your father had an uncommon name, but I knew I'd heard it before. Now it's all come back to me. I knew I should never forget it."

And he was speaking nothing but the most candid truth, though she might not understand it.

When some persons unknown got into Troschman's diamond fabriek down on Maiden Lane one rainy night in April, and cleaned out a safe that had held two hundred thousand dollars' worth of cut and uncut stones, the police were particularly interested in the fact that the raid could hardly have been better timed had the raiders been partners in the business. This was impossible, for Troschman had no partners; Troschman's was a small concern which employed only one permanent cutter, taking on other workers when they were needed. As a matter of fact, this cutter was the nearest approach to a partner that Troschman had, for he was acknowledged to be one of the finest craftsmen in the trade, and had been with Troschman ever since the business was started. So that it was natural for him to be given more confidence than an ordinary employee would have received; and when the stones were collected to fill the biggest order that Troschman had ever secured in his career, this cutter was the only other man who knew when the collection was complete. His name was Joris Vanlinden.

The only reason he was not arrested at once was because the police hoped that, by keeping watch on him, they might net the whole gang at one swoop. And then, three days later, he vanished as if the earth had swallowed him up; and the hue and cry which followed had sought him for four years in vain. Only in various police headquarters did his name and description re­main on record, with appropriate instructions. In vari­ous police headquarters-and in the almost equally relentless memory of the Saint. . . .

Simon Templar could have sat down and listed the authors of every important crime committed in the last fifteen years; and that list would have included a num­ber of names that no police headquarters had on record, and a number of crimes that no police headquar­ters had even recognised as crimes. He could have told you when and where and how they were committed, the exact value of the boodle, and very often what had happened to it. He could have told you the personal descriptions of the participants, their habits, haunts, specialties, weaknesses, aliases, previous record and modus operandi. He had a memory for those details that would have been worth thirty years' seniority to any police officer; but to the Saint it was worth more than that. It was half the essentials of his profession, the broad foundations on which his career had been built up, the knowledge and research on which the plans for his amazing forays against the underworld were based; and again and again ingenious felons had thought themselves safe with their booty, only to wake up too late when that unparalleled twentieth-century privateer was already sailing into their stronghold to plunder them of all that they had, until there were countless men who feared him more than the police, and unnumbered places where his justice was known to be swifter and more deadly than the Law.

The Saint said nothing about that, though there was no native modesty in his make-up. He looked the girl in the eyes and kept that frank and friendly smile on his lips.

"Don't look so scared," he said. "You've nothing to worry about. I'm in the business myself."

"You aren't anything to do with the police?"

"Oh, I have lots to do with them. They're always trying to arrest me for something or other, but so far it hasn't been a great success."

She laughed rather hysterically, a sharp and some how jarring contrast to the panic that he had seen in her face a few moments before.

"So I needn't try to keep up my party manners any more."

She shook her head and rubbed a hand over her eyes with a sort of gasp; and then all at once she was serious again, desperately serious, with that queer sort of sob in her voice. "But it's not true! It isn't true! Joris didn't get anything out of it. He wasn't one of them, whatever they say."

"That doesn't sound like very good management."

"He-he wasn't one of them. Yes, he helped them. He told them what they wanted to know. He was hard up. He lost all his savings in the stock market-and more money that he couldn't pay. And there was me. . . . They offered him a share, and he knew that Troschman's insurance was all right. But they cheated him. . . . They took him away when they thought he'd break down if he was arrested. Besides, they could use him. They brought him out here. But they never gave him his share. There was always some excuse. The stones would take a long time to get rid of, or they couldn't find a buyer, or something. And all the time he had to go on working for them."

"That was Graner, I suppose?"

He was still holding her hand, and he could feel her trembling.

"Do you know him?"

"Not personally."

"Yes, that was Reuben Graner." She shuddered. "But if you don't know him you couldn't understand.

24THIEVES' PICNIC He's -- I can't tell you. Sometimes I don't think he's human. . . . But how did you know?"

Simon took out his cigarette case and offered it to her. Her hand was still shaking, so that she could hardly keep the cigarette in the flame when he gave her a light. He smiled and steadied her hand with cool, strong fingers.

"Reuben isn't here now, anyway," he said quietly. "And if he does walk in, Hoppy and I will beat him firmly over the head with the wardrobe. So let's take things calmly for a bit."

"But how did you know?"

"More or less by accident. You see, I came here from Madrid." He saw the awakening of understanding in her eyes and nodded. "Rodney Felson and George Holby were there."

"Do you know them?"

"Not to talk to. But I know lots of people that I don't talk to. I just happened to see them. You know Chicote's Bar?"

"I've never been to Madrid."

"If you ever go there, look in and give Pedro my love. Chicote's is one of the great bars of the world. Everybody in Madrid goes there. So did Rodney and George. Rodney had a telegram. He talked it over with George-I wasn't near enough to hear what they were saying, but in the end they screwed it up and dropped it under the table. Which was careless of them, because when they went out I picked it up."

"You picked it up ?"

He grinned shamelessly.

"I told you I was in the business myself. There may be honour among thieves, but I never saw very much. I knew that Rodney and George were one of the six cleverest pairs of jewel thieves at present operating in Europe, so I just naturally thought that anything they were interested in might interest me. It did."

He took out the telegram again and gave it to her. He watched her as she read it through, and saw a trace of colour burn for a moment in her cheeks-burn till it burnt itself out and left them white again.

"He sent it as soon as he heard," she whispered. "I thought it would be like that. I could feel it. He never meant to let Joris and me go away. Oh, I knew!"

He would have guessed her age at barely twenty-one; but when she raised her eyes again there was an age of weariness in them that tied a strange knot in his throat. He took the telegram from her and put it away again.

"Did you want to go away?" he asked gently.

She nodded without speaking.

"Joris was working at his old job, I suppose," he said.

"Yes. They made him work for them. He cut and polished all the stones that came from Troschman's. Sometimes they went out and stole more, and when they brought them back he had to re-cut them so that they couldn't be identified. He had to do what they told him, because they could always have sent him back to the police. And there was me-but I told him that that didn't matter, only he wouldn't believe me."

"And now they want to replace him."

She nodded again.

"That's what Graner called it. We thought we might go away, somewhere like South America, where nobody would know us and we could live and be happy. But I knew we couldn't. Graner never meant us to. So long as Joris was working for them, it was all right. But they couldn't let him go with all that he knew. He'd never have said anything, but they couldn't be sure of that. I knew they'd never let him go alive. They meant to kill him. . . . Oh, Joris!"

Her arms tightened convulsively about the old man's frail shoulders, and the Saint saw her eyes shining again.

"Is that what they were trying to do when I butted in?" he asked doubtfully. "It didn't look quite like that to me. After all, they could have shot him in the first place, instead of keeping their guns in their pockets till we were driving away."

"I don't know. I don't know if they meant to kill him then --"

"But if they never let him have any money, you couldn't have got very far."

She looked at him with her lip quivering; and again he saw that oddly watchful uncertainty creep into her gaze. He knew at once that she was weighing her an­swer, and knew also that she was going to lie.

Then he happened to glance at the old man. Joris Vanlinden had sunk back into such a stillness, and for a time they had been so carried away by other things, that they had not been noticing him. But now Simon saw that the old man's eyes had opened, quite quietly, as if he had awakened out of a deep sleep.

Simon touched the girl's arm.

"Look," he said.

He stood up and went to pour some more whiskey; and Mr Uniatz watched the performance wistfully, chewing the extinct butt of his cigar. The greater part of the dialogue had passed harmlessly over Mr Uniatz' head, which was only equipped to assimilate short and simple speeches very carefully addressed to him in the more common words of one syllable; and he had long ago started to flounder out of his depth and eventually given up the effort, seeing no reason to exhaust himself with agonising mental labour when, in the fulness of time, everything that it was good for him to know would be duly explained to him by the Saint. Besides, there was a much more urgent problem which had been occupying all his attention for some time.

"Boss," said Mr Uniatz plaintively, as if pointing out an incomprehensible oversight, "ya left a toid of de bottle."

"Okay," said the Saint resignedly. "You find a home for it."

He went back to the bedside. The old man was touching the girl's face and hair with nervously twitching fingers, speaking in a weak husky voice: "Where are we, Christine ? . . . How did we get here? . . . What happened?"

"It's all right, darling. Darling, it's all right. You've just got to rest."

The old man's eyes went back to the Saint, and his hand clutched at the girl's arm.

"Who are these people, Christine? I haven't seen them before. Who are they?"

"Lie still, darling." She was comforting him with a kind of motherly tenderness, as if he was a feverish child. "They won't hurt you, Joris. They came and saved you when the others were fighting you."

"Yes, they were fighting. I remember. I never could fight very much. You remember, Christine-that other time ? Did they hurt you, Christine ?"

"No, darling. Not a bit."

The old man's eyes closed again, and for a moment he relaxed, as if the strain of talking had been too much for him. And then, suddenly, his eyes opened again.

"Did they get it?" he asked hoarsely.

"Hush, Joris. You must be quiet."

"But did they get it?"

Vanlinden's voice was louder, and his eyes were staring. She tried to press him back on the bed, but he flung off her hands. He began to feel in his breast pocket, unsteadily at first, and then more wildly; then he was feeling in all his pockets, turning them out again and again, in a pitiful sort of frenzy.

"No, no," he muttered incoherently. "Not there. No. It's gone!" His voice rose and broke on some­thing like a scream. "It's gone!" He stared at the Saint. "Did you take it?"

"Take what?" asked the Saint helplessly.

"My ticket!"

"Oh, a ticket. No, I haven't seen it. D'you mean your ticket for going away from here? I shouldn't worry about that. If you go and explain things to the shipping company or whatever it is --"

"No, no, not that!" Vanlinden's voice had a despairing shrillness that made the Saint's flesh creep. "My lottery ticket!"

"What?"

Christine got up suddenly from the bed. She faced the Saint like a tigress though her head barely reached his shoulder.

"Yes," she said fiercely. "Did you take it ?"

"Me?" said the Saint blankly. He spread out his arms. "Search me and strip me if you want to. Take me apart and put me together again. I never saw his lottery ticket in my life."

She swung round and pointed at Hoppy Uniatz.

"He was sitting in the back of the car with Jon's all the time. Did he take it?"

"Did you take it, Hoppy?" snapped the Saint.

Mr Uniatz swallowed nervously.

"Yes, boss."

"You took it ?" snapped the Saint incredulously.

Hoppy gulped.

"Yes, boss," he said apologetically. "I t'ought ya said I could take it." He pointed to the table. "Dey wasn't so much in de bottle, at dat."

"You immortal ass!" snarled the Saint. "We aren't talking about the whiskey!"

He turned back to the girl.

"Hoppy didn't take it," he said. "And neither did I.

If you don't believe us, you can go ahead and turn us inside out. I didn't even know Joris had a lottery ticket. How much was it worth?"

"You may as well know now," she said dully. "It was a ticket in the Christmas lottery. It won the first prize-fifteen million pesetas."

II How Simon Templar Conversed with a Porter, and a Brace of Guardias Were Happily Reunited

THE SAINT stared at her, and then stared again at Joris Vanlinden.

He felt rather as if it was his own stomach, and not the receptacle of petrified leather which performed the same organic function for Mr Uniatz, that had ab­sorbed the full effects of two thirds of a bottle of scotch. He knew all about the Christmas lottery, had bought tickets himself at various times, and shared the daydreams of almost every other man in Spain until the results were published. There is a Spanish national lottery three times every month; but the Navidad is the great event of the year, the time when nearly three million pounds sterling are distributed in prizes. Simon had read in the papers of men who had awakened to find themselves millionaires overnight; but he had never met one of them, and in his heart, like most other people, he could never quite convince himself that such things really did happen. The actual concrete proof of it, slapped right up in his face like that, made his head reel.

"Did Joris have the whole ticket?" he asked, trying to ease the shock. "He didn't just have a section?"

The girl shook her head. His blank and stunned bewilderment was so obvious that it must have satisfied her that he had been speaking the truth.

"No, he had it all. He must have been crazy, I suppose. I thought he was. But he said it was the only way. He saved up the little money they gave him now and again until he could buy it. And it won !"

Simon made a rapid mental calculation.

"Why hadn't it been paid yet?"

"Because we're in Tenerife."

He grinned wryly, half unconsciously.

"Of course, I'd forgotten that."

"The draw was on the twenty-first." She was speaking almost mechanically, and yet with an intense sort of eagerness, as if talking kept her mind from dwelling on other things. "The results were cabled here the next day. That was when Graner cabled to Madrid. . . . But they don't pay on that. A few days ago they published a photographic reproduction of the official list; but they don't pay on that either. You could get a bank to discount it-they charge two per cent commission-but I don't suppose they could handle one of the big prizes. Otherwise you have to wait till the administration chooses to send a set of official lists here."

"It's a great piece of Spanish organisation, isn't it?" said the Saint aimlessly.

"The lists were supposed to be coming on the boat that got in today," she said.

Simon gazed at her for a moment longer; and then he lighted another cigarette from the butt of his last one and began to pace restlessly up and down the room, while Hoppy watched him with a kind of dog-like complacency.

It would be unfair to say that the primitive convolutions of what, on account of the limitations of the English language, can only be referred to as Mr Uniatz' brain were incapable of registering more than one idea at a time. To be accurate, they were capable of registering two; although it must be admitted that one of them was a more or less habitual and unconscious background to whatever else was going on. And this permanent and pervasive background was his sublime faith in the infallibility and divine inspiration of the Saint.

For the Saint, as Mr Uniatz had discovered, could think. He could concentrate upon problems and work them out without any perceptible signs of suffering. He could produce Ideas. He could make Plans. Mr Uniatz, a simple-minded citizen, whose intellectual horizons had hitherto been bounded by the logic of automatics and sub-machine guns, had, on their first meetings, observed these supernatural manifestations with perplexity and awe. When they met again in London, some years later, Mr Uniatz, who had been ruminating hazily about it ever since, had just reached the conclusion that if he could only hitch his wagon to such a scintillating star his life would hold no more worries.

Since it fitted in admirably with his plans at the time, Simon had let him do it. Whereupon Mr Uniatz had attached himself with a blind and unshakable allegiance from which, short of physical violence, it was impossible to pry him loose for more than a few weeks at a time. Left to himself, Hoppy would wander moodily about the earth, a spiritual Ishmael, until he could place his destiny once again in the hands of this superman, this invincible genius, who could find his way with such apparent ease through the terrifying and tormenting labyrinths of Thought. Whatever the problem in hand might be, then or at any other time, Hoppy Uniatz knew that the Saint would solve it.

He leaned forward and tapped Christine on the shoulder.

"It's okay, miss," he said encouragingly. "De boss 'll fix it. Wit' a nut like his, he could of bin a big shot in de States."

"I was a big shot," Simon retorted. "But there are limits."

He was beginning to get the finer details of the situation sorted out into a certain amount of order, but without making much difference to the dizzy turmoil into which his mind had been whirled. The more he thought about it, the more fantastic it became.

For a Spanish lottery ticket is a documento del portador, a bearer bond of the most comprehensive and undiscriminating kind in the world. Short of the most elaborate and irrefutable evidence to the contrary, combined with warrants and court orders and God knows how many other formalities, the ticket itself is the only legal claim under heaven to any prize which it may draw. There are not even any counterfoils to be retained by the original seller; so that, without that law, the administration of the lottery would be impossible. In other words, the piece of paper which Joris Vanlinden had lost, a folded sheet no more than seven inches long by four inches wide, with the thickness of the twenty sections into which a Navidad ticket is divided, was the strongest existing claim to a payment of fifteen million pesetas, two million dollars or four hundred thousand pounds at the most conservative rate of exchange-more than seven hundred pounds or thirty-five hundred dollars per square inch if you opened it out-one of the most compact and negotiable and untraceable concentrations of wealth that the world can ever have seen. The Saint had known boodle in almost every shape and form under the sun, had handled what everybody except himself would have called more than his fair share of it, but there was something about this new and hitherto tmconsidered species of it that took his breath away.

He stopped walking and looked at Vanlinden again. The old man, shivering with nervous reaction and clinging pathetically to his daughter's hand, had sunk back exhausted on to the pillow. His weak, tired eyes stared mutely up at the Saint; but even he must have been convinced that Simon knew nothing, for the fire had died out of them and left only the anguish.

Simon turned to the girl.

"If Graner's idea was what you say it was, why did he let you go at all?"

"He didn't. He said he was going to, but I never, believed him. Every day I was terrified that something -something would happen to Joris. When I knew that the official lists were supposed to arrive tonight, I was ... I was sure they . . . they would see that some­thing happened to Joris before he woke up tomorrow."

"So you decided to make a dash for it."

She nodded.

"We said we were going to bed early and we got out of a window. Graner hadn't let the dogs out then. . . ."

"There are dogs, are there?"

He heard her catch her breath.

"Yes. But they weren't out. . . . We got away, and we ran. But they must have missed us. They came after us and caught us on the road. That was when you arrived."

The Saint blew two smoke rings, very carefully putting the second through the middle of the first.

"So they took the ticket," he said. "But they didn't have to kill Joris. Or did they?" His eyes pinned her again, very clear and level and bright like sapphires. "Does anything strike you about that?"

She pushed her fingers through her disordered hair.

"My God," she said, "how can I think?"

"Well, doesn't anything strike you? They may have wanted to put Joris away because he knew too much. But there may have been another reason. If he was running about loose after they'd pinched his ticket, he might make a fuss about it. It wouldn't be easy, but I suppose he could make a fuss. People don't buy a whole two-thousand-peseta Navidad ticket all to themselves so often, especially in a place like this, that the shop wouldn't be likely to remember him. If he was dead, anybody could say they bought it off him; but if he was alive and raising hell --"

"How could he? He couldn't go near the police --"

"That's a matter of opinion. Admittedly he'd be getting himself into trouble at the same time; but anyone who turns state's evidence can usually count on a good deal of leniency, and Joris has a lot less to lose than the others have. Just looking at it theoretically, when a bloke is in Joris' position, and a miracle has tossed him up within a finger's length of getting every­thing he wants most in the world, and then somebody snatches it away from him at the last moment and shoves him back again, it's liable to make him crazy enough to do anything for revenge. I don't know what sort of a psychologist Reuben Graner is, but I'd be inclined to look at it that way if I were in his place. What do you think, Hoppy?"

The unornamental features of Mr Uniatz marshalled themselves into an expression of reproachful anguish. Even in their moments of most undisturbed serenity, they tended to resemble something which an amateur sculptor had beaten out of a lump of clay with a large hammer, in the vain hope that his most polite friends would profess to recognise it as a human face; but when twisted out of repose they looked even more like an unfortunate essay in ultrafuturistic art, and could probably have commanded a high price from an advanced museum. Mr Uniatz, however, was not concerned about his beauty. A man of naive and elemental tastes, there was something about the mere sound of the word "think" which made him wince.

"What-me?" he said painfully.

"Yes, you."

Mr Uniatz bit another piece off the end of his cigar and swallowed it absent-mindedly.

"I dunno, boss," he began weakly; and then, with the Saint's clear and accusing blue eye fixed on him, he returned manfully to his torment. "Dis guy Graner," he said. "Is he de guy wit' de oughday?"

"We were hoping he had some."

"De guy wit' de ice?"

"That's right."

"De guy ya tell me about in Madrid?"

"Exactly."

"De guy we come here to take?"

"The same."

"De lottery guy?" said Hoppy, leaving no stone unturned in his anxiety to make sure of his ground before committing himself.

Simon nodded approvingly.

"You seem to have grasped some of it, anyway," he said. "I suppose you could call Graner the lottery guy for the present. Anyway, he's got the ticket. So the question is-what happens next?"

"Dat looks like a cinch," said Mr Uniatz airily; and the Saint subsided limply into a chair.

"One of two things has happened to you for the first time in your life," he said sternly. "Either the whiskey has had some effect, or an idea has got into your head."

Mr Uniatz blinked.

"Sure, it's a cinch, boss. All we gotta do is, we go to dis guy an' say 'Lookit, mug; eider you split wit' us on your racket, or we toin ya in to de cops.' Sure, he comes t'ru. It's a pipe," said Mr Uniatz, driving home his point.

The Saint gazed at him pityingly.

"You poor fathead," he said. "It isn't a racket. This is the Spanish official lottery. It's perfectly legal. Graner isn't running it. He's simply got the ticket that won it."

Mr Uniatz looked unhappy. The Spanish government, he felt, had done him a personal injury. He brooded glumly.

"I dunno, boss," he said at length, reverting to his original platform.

"It looks plain enough to me," said the Saint.

He sprang up again. To Christine Vanlinden, watch­ing him, fascinated, there was an atmosphere of buoy­ant and invincible power about him like nothing she had ever felt about a man before. Whether he could be trusted or not, whatever scruples he might or might not have, his personality filled the room and absorbed everyone in it. And yet he was smiling, and his gesture had the faint half-amused swagger which was insep­arable from every movement he made.

"Graner has got the ticket," he said. "But we've got Joris. So long as Joris is out of sight and an unknown quantity, I think Graner will be afraid to risk trying to cash the ticket. He'll try to get hold of Joris again to find out exactly how he stands. He can afford to wait a few days, and meanwhile he'll probably be trying to figure out some other way to get round the difficulty. But I don't think he'll be on the doorstep of the lottery agent first thing in the morning asking for the prize. So we hold exactly half the stakes each. And while Graner is trying to fill his hand, we can be try­ing to fill ours. Therefore, the next move from our side is to go and have a talk with Reuben."

He saw the quick pressure of white teeth on her lip.

"Talk to Graner?" she gasped. "You can't do that --"

"Can't I?" said the Saint grimly. "He's expecting me!"

2 Her eyes widened.

"You?"

"Yours sincerely. We got off the boat late, and then they didn't have any proper tackle to land the car. Every time they rigged up some gimcrack contraption the ropes broke, and then they all stood around waving their arms about and telling each other why it didn't work. When we did get off, I had to hang around for the other half of the day trying to get the carnet stamped. Tenerife again. After that was all over we came and fixed ourselves up here, and what with one thing and another we seemed to need a few drinks and a spot of food before we plunged into any more excite­ment. So we had them. Eventually we did make some enquiries about Graner, and after six people had given us sixteen different directions, we were on our way to try and find him when we met you." The Saint smiled. "But Reuben is expecting me all right!"

"Why?"

Simon looked at his watch.

"Do you know that it's just about midnight?" he said. "I think there are a few other things to be done before we talk any more. Joris needs some rest, if no­body else does." He took another quick turn up and down the room, and came back. "What's more, I don't think we'd better make any noise about having him here-the first thing Graner's crowd will do is to beat around the hotels. Hoppy brought him in as a drunk, and the night man doesn't know who's staying here and who isn't. So Hoppy had better keep him for to­night without any advertisement, and maybe tomor­row we'll think of something else to do with him. Is that okay with you, Hoppy? You can sleep on the floor or put yourself in the bath or something."

"Sure, boss," said Mr Uniatz obligingly. "Anyt'ing is jake wit' me."

"Good." Simon smiled at the girl again. "In that case, I'll just toddle down and organize a room for you."

He left the room and ran briskly downstairs. After Waking more noise than half-a-dozen inexperienced burglars trying to enter the hotel by knocking the front door down with a battering-ram, he finally suc­ceeded in rousing the night porter from his slumbers and explained his requirement.

The man looked at him woodenly.

"Mańana," he said, with native resourcefulness. "Tomorrow, when there is someone who knows about rooms, you will be able to arrange it."

"Tomorrow," said the Saint, "the Teide may start to erupt, and the inhabitants of this God-forsaken place may move quickly for the first time in their lives. I want a room tonight. What about going to the office and looking at the books?"

" 'Stá cerrao," said the other pessimistically. "It is shut."

The Saint sighed.

"It is for a lady," he explained, attempting an appeal to the well-known Spanish spirit of romance.

The man continued to gape at him foggily. If it was a seńorita, he appeared to be thinking, why should there be so much fuss about getting her a room?

"You have a room," he pointed out.

"I know," said the Saint patiently. "I've seen it. Now I want another. Haven't you got a list of the rooms occupied, so that you know how many people you have to check in before you lock up?"

"There is the list," admitted the porter cautiously.

"Well, where is it?"

The man rummaged behind his desk and finally pro­duced a soiled sheet of paper. Simon looked at it.

"Now," he said, "does it occur to you that the rooms which are not on this list will be empty?"

"No," said the porter, "because they do not always put all the numbers on the list."

Simon drew a deep breath.

"Are you waiting for anybody else to come in?"

"Only number fifty-one," said the man, who apparently had his own clairvoyant method of checking the homing guests.

"Then the other keys in those boxes belong to empty rooms," persisted the Saint, whose association with Hoppy Uniatz had made him more than ordinarily skilful at making his points with pellucid clarity.

The porter sullenly acknowledged that this was probably true.

"Then I'll have one of them," said the Saint.

He reached over and helped himself to the key which hung in the box numbered forty-nine, which was the next number to his own. Then he opened the doors of the automatic elevator and got in. He pressed the button for the top floor. Nothing happened.

"No funciona," said the porter, with a certain morose satisfaction; and Simon heard him snoring again before he had climbed the first flight of stairs.

He recovered his good humour on the way back, partly because his mind was too taken up with other things to brood for long over the deficiencies of the Canary Island character. He had more things to think about than he really wanted, and already he began to feel the beginnings of a curious dread of the time which must come when certain questions could no longer be postponed. . . .

"You ought to stay here and settle down, Hoppy," he remarked, as he re-entered the bedroom. "Compared with the natives, you'd look such a genius that they'd probably make you mayor. All the same, I got a room,"

He went over to the bed and felt Vanlinden's pulse again.

"Do you think you could walk a little way?" he said.

"I'll try."

Simon helped him up and kept an arm round him.

"Give me five minutes to get him undressed and into bed," he said to Christine, "and then Hoppy can bring you along."

Hoppy's room was two doors along the passage, with the room Simon had taken for Christine in between. Nearly all Vanlinden's emaciated weight hung on the Saint's strong arm.

"Don't you think I could look after myself?" he said when they got there; and the Saint dubiously let him go for a moment.

The old man started to take off his coat. He got one arm out of its sleeve; and then he stood still, and a queerly childish perplexity crinkled over his face, "Perhaps I'm not very well," he said huskily, and sat down suddenly on the bed.

Simon undressed him. Stripped naked, the old man was not much more than skin and bones. Where the skin was not raw or starting to turn black and blue, it was very white and almost transparent, with characteristic soft creases round the neck and shoulders that told their own story. Simon examined him again and treated his more obvious injuries with deft and amaz­ingly gentle fingers. Then he wrapped him up in a suit of Mr Uniatz' eye-paralysing silk pajamas, and had just tucked him up when Hoppy and Christine ar­rived. Simon went back to his own room then returned to the bedside with a couple of tiny white tablets and a glass of water.

"Will you take these?" he said. "They'll help you to rest."

He supported the old man's head while he drank the water, and laid him gently back. Vanlinden looked up at him.

"You've been kind," he said. "And I am tired."

"Tomorrow you'll be crowing like a fighting cock," said the Saint.

He took Hoppy by the arm and drew him out of the room; but as soon as he turned away from the bed, the cheerfulness went out of his face. There was no doubt that Joris Vanlinden was an old man, old not only in body but also in mind; and Simon knew that, in that subtle process which is called growing old, the hopelessness of the last four years must have played more than their full part. What would be the effect of that night's beating on the old man's ebbing vitality? And how much more would the crowning blow of the stolen ticket drain from his failing strength?

Simon sat on the rail of the veranda and smoked down half an inch of his cigarette, quietly considering the questions. They were still unanswered when he forced his mind away from them. He pointed to the room.

"When you go back in there, Hoppy," he said, "lock the door and put the key in your pocket and keep it there. Don't let anybody in or out till I come round in the morning-not even yourself, unless you have to call me during the night."

"Okay, boss."

Mr Uniatz struck a match and relighted as much of his cigar as he had not yet eaten. He looked at the Saint with an expression which in anyone else might have been called reflective.

"Dis lottery ticket," he said. "It must be woit plenty."

"It is, Hoppy. It's worth two million dollars."

"Chees, boss --" Mr Uniatz counted on his fingers. "What I couldn't do wit' five hundred grand!"

Simon frowned at him.

"What do you mean-five hundred grand?"

"I t'ought ya might make dat my end, boss. De last time, ya cut me in two bits on de buck. Half a million for me an' one an' a half for you. Or is dat too much?" said Hoppy wistfully.

"Let's work it out when we get it," said the Saint shortly; and then the door opened and Christine came out.

She nodded in answer to his question.

"He's asleep already," she said. And then: "I don't see why I should turn your friend out of his bed. I can sleep in a chair and keep an eye on Joris quite easily."

"Good Lord, no," said the Saint breezily. "Hoppy can sleep anywhere. He sleeps on his feet most of the day. You can't even tell the difference until you get used to him. If Joris wants anything, Hoppy will fix it; and if Hoppy can't fix it he'll call me; and if it's anything serious I'll call you. But you need all the rest you can get, the same as Joris."

He pushed Hoppy gently but firmly away towards his vigil and unlocked the other room with the key he had taken from downstairs. He switched on the lights and followed her in, locking the door after him and taking the key out to give to her.

"Keep it like that-just in case of accidents. It's not so much for tonight as for tomorrow, in case Graner and company get up early. You can lock the communicating door on your side."

He unlocked it and went through into his own room to rake a dressing gown out of his suitcase. When he turned round she had followed him. He hung the robe over her arm.

"It's the best I can do," he said. "I'm afraid my pajamas would be a bit loose on you, but you can have some if you like. Can you think of anything else ?"

"Have you got a spare cigarette?"

He took a packet off the dressing table and gave it to her.

"So if that's all we can do for you --"

She didn't make a move to go. She stood there with her hands in the pockets of her light coat and the dress­ing gown looped over her arm, looking at him with dried eyes that he suddenly realised might be impish. The light picked the burnished copper out of the curls on her russet head. Her coat was belted at the waist, and thrown open under the belt; under it the thin dress she wore flowed over slender curves that would have been disturbing to watch too closely.

"You didn't tell me why Graner's expecting you," she said.

He sank on to the end of the bed.

"That's easy. You see, I answered his telegram."

"You did?"

"Naturally. I knew Felson and Holby were jewel thieves. I recognised the name of Joris as ... Well, frankly, it was associated with a rather famous job of jewel borrowing. And an unknown Mr Graner seemed to be tied up with the whole party. So I figured that Comrade Graner would be worth looking at. I wired him 'Know very man. Have phoned him. Says he will leave immediately'-and signed it 'Felson.'"

"You mean you were going to work for him?"

"I never cut a diamond in my life, darling. And I don't work with anybody. I just thought it might pay a dividend if I got to know Reuben a little better. Reuben would pay the dividend-but not for services rendered."

"I see." There was a quirk of humour in her straightforward brown eyes. "You thought you could blackmail him."

His fine brows slanted up at her in a line of gay, unscrupulous mockery.

"I shouldn't put it like that myself. It probably wouldn't even be literally true. I'm an idealist. You could call me an adjuster of unjust differences. Why should Graner have such a lot of diamonds when I haven't any? If he's anything like what he sounds like from the way you talk about him, it's almost a sacred duty to adjust him. Hence my telegram."

"But suppose Rodney wired him something different?"

The Saint smiled.

"I don't think either Rodney or George is sending any wires just now," he said carefully. "After I picked up the telegram I followed them out of Chicote's to keep an eye on them. As soon as they got outside, a couple of birds in plain clothes flashed badges at them, and then they all got into a taxi and drove away. From the smug expressions of the badge merchants and the worried looks of Rodney and George, I gathered that whatever they were doing in Madrid must have sprung a leak. Anyway, it was good enough to take a chance on."

"But the others 'll recognise you."

"I doubt it. It was pretty dark on the road. I wouldn't be too sure of recognising them, apart from the identification marks I left on them-and I had a hat pulled down over my eyes. That's good enough to take a chance on too."

He put out his cigarette and stood up. The move­ment brought them face to face; and he put his hands on her shoulders.

"Don't worry any more tonight, Christine," he said. "I know it's pretty hard to take your mind off it, but you've got to try. In the morning we'll do some more work on it."

"Joris said it," she answered; "you've been very kind."

"For only doing half a job?" Simon asked flip­pantly.

"For being so confident and practical. I needed pull­ing together. It seems quite different now, with you helping us. It must be something about you. . . ."

Her face was turned up to his, and she was So close that he could almost feel the warmth of her body. His pulses beat faster, irresistibly, but his mind was cool. He smiled at her; and suddenly she turned away and went out of the room without looking back.

The Saint took another cigarette and lighted it with elaborately unhurried precision. For quite half a min­ute he stood still where she had left him, before he strolled over to the wardrobe mirror and examined himself with dispassionate interest.

"You're being seduced," he said.

Then he remembered that the Hirondel was still parked outside the hotel. It couldn't stay there all night; and a faint frown touched his forehead at the thought that perhaps it had stood out there too long already. But that couldn't be helped, he had had too many other things to think of before. Fortunately he had located a garage during the afternoon. He opened the door of his room very quietly and went downstairs again.

Already the square was almost deserted-Santa Cruz goes to bed early, for the convincing reason that there is nothing else to do. Simon got into the car and drove up the Calle Castillo. He drove slowly, feeling the effortless purr of the powerful engine soothing and smoothing out his mind, a cigarette slanting be­tween his lips and his finger tips lightly caressing the wheel. The deep hum of the machine distilled itself into his senses, taking possession of him until it was as if the car led him on without any direction of his will. He had had no such thoughts when he left the hotel to put the car away. . . . But there was a turn­ing on the right which he should have taken to go to the garage. . . . He passed it without a glance. The Hirondel droned on, up on to the La Laguna road- towards the house of Reuben Graner.

3 Simon Templar began to sing, a faint fragment of almost inaudible melody that harmonised with the soft undertones of the engine. The cool night air was refreshing on his face. He was smiling.

Possibly he was quite mad. If so, he always had been, and it was too late in life to worry about it. But it was his creed that adventure waited for no timetables, and everything he had ever done or ever would do was built up on that reckless faith. He was bound to visit Reuben Graner sometime. At the moment he felt as fresh and wide awake as if he had just got out of a cold bath; and the brief but breezy episode by the roadside a couple of hours before had only whet­ted his appetite. Why should he wait for some Spanish mańana to carry on with the good work?

Not that he had a single plan of campaign in his head. His mind was a clean slate on which impulse or circumstance or destiny might write anything that happened to amuse them. The Saint was broadmindedly prepared to co-operate in the business of being amused. . . .

A gleam of reminiscent humour touched his eyes as he recognised the spot where Joris Vanlinden had introduced himself so appropriately into the general course of events; and then he trod suddenly on the brakes in time to save the lives of a pareja, or brace, of guardias de asalto who stepped out into the path of his headlights and waved to him to stop. Looking around him he discovered that the road was littered with guardias of all shapes and sizes. He saw the sheen of the black oilcloth napoleonic hats of guardias civiles and the dull glint of carbines. There are various species of guardias in Spain, intended between them to perform the various functions of police work; and it is popularity believed that the word has no singular, since they are only seen in parejas, or braces, as inevitably as grouse. Even allowing for that, it seemed an unusual concentration; and the Saint's gaze narrowed slightly as the pareja which had stopped him closed in on either side of the car. A torch flashed in his face.

"Where are you going?" asked half the brace curtly, in Spanish; and Simon answered in the same language: "To visit a friend. He's expecting me."

"Baje usted."

Simon got out. The other guardia came round the car and attached himself again to his comrade. It was like a reunion of Siamese twins. Half the brace kept him covered while the other half searched him rapidly.

The Saint remembered that since he had left the hotel with no nefarious intent he had not even troubled to take a gun. He had only one weapon-the slim razor-edged throwing knife strapped to his left forearm under his sleeve which he would not have exchanged for all the firearms in the world-but the search was not thorough enough to discover that.

"ż Su documentación?"

Simon produced his passport. It was examined and returned to him.

"żTurista?"

"Si."

"Bueno. Siga usted."

The Saint scratched his head.

"What is this?" he inquired curiously.

"That does not concern you," replied the talking half of the brace uncommunicatively and stepped back.

Simon got into the car again and drove on thoughtfully. Certainly, now that he recollected it, the rescue of Joris Vanlinden had not been accomplished in complete silence; in fact, he remembered that one or two shots had been fired in the later stages which would doubtless have been audible for some distance; but the convention of guardias gathered on the spot seemed somewhat disproportionate to the occasion, even under an administration which has always been convinced that posting a herd of police on the scene of a past crime is an infallible method of preventing another crime being committed somewhere else. He puzzled over it for a few moments, trying to recall some other factor which seemed to have slipped his memory; and then he saw the long white wall which he had been told to look out for, and the sight temporarily diverted his mind from other problems.

He drove slowly past it, and a hundred yards farther on he came to a narrow side turning into which he backed the car. He switched off the engine, turned out the lights and returned on foot. In the middle of the wall there was a wide gateway, wide enough to admit a big car-which it probably did, for the sidewalk was cut away in front of it. The gates were solid wood, studded and bound with iron, and they filled the whole archway so that it was impossible to get a glimpse of the garden inside. In the lower part of one of the gates was a smaller door. Simon scanned it in the subdued beam of a flashlight no larger than a fountain pen, and spelled out the name on the tarnished brass plate-"Las Mariposas." It was Graner's house.

He walked on, along the wall; and when it ended he climbed over the rough wire fence of the adjoining field and worked along the other side. In this way he made a complete circuit of the property, and presently found himself in the road again. The wall ran all the way round it without a break, two feet over his head the whole time; and the Saint smiled with professional satisfaction. In the circumstances, the household seemed to have all the hallmarks of really well-organised villainy, and Simon Templar approved of well-organised villains. They made life so much more exciting.

The house itself stood in one angle of the square, so that one corner of the surrounding wall was actually formed by the walls of the house itself; but the only opening in those walls was formed by two or three barred windows on the top floor. Apart from those small apertures, the walls rose sheer from the ground for thirty feet without any break or projection that would have given foothold to a lizard. There was no hope of feloniously entering the property by that route.

He returned to the first field he had entered, and inspected the wall again from that side. He reached up to the top, and felt a closely woven mesh of barbed wire under his fingers-anyone a little shorter than himself would have had to make a jump for the grip, and would have collected a pair of badly lacerated hands for compensation.

Simon bent down and took off his shoes. He placed them side by side on top of the wall, hooked his fingers over them, and in that way drew himself up. In that way he discovered something else.

A fine copper wire ran along the top of the wall, stretched between brackets in such a way that it projected about eight inches from the wall itself and also leaned slightly towards the outside. It had been invisi­ble until he almost put his face into it, and he only just stopped pulling himself up in time. If he had been even a little clumsy with placing his shoes on top of the wall he would have touched it. He studied it intently for a few seconds. And then he lowered himself carefully to the ground, pulled his shoes down after him, and put them on again.

Exactly what useful purpose that wire served he didn't know, but he didn't like the look of it. It certainly didn't seem strong enough to hold anyone back who intended to go through it, and it wasn't even barbed. But it was so placed that no one could even pull himself up sufficiently to see over the wall without touching the wire; certainly it was impossible to scram­ble over it without doing so. A ladder placed up against the wall would have touched it just the same.

It might have been connected with some system of alarms, it might even have carried a charge of high-voltage electricity, it might have fired guns or sent up rockets or played martial music; but the one certain thing of which the Saint was profoundly convinced was that it hadn't been put there for fun. He was beginning to acquire a wholesome respect for Reuben Graner which nevertheless failed to depress his spirits.

"Life," said the Saint, to his guardian angel, "is starting to look more and more entertaining."

As he stood there under the wall, allowing the full flavour of the entertainment to circulate meditatively around his palate, he became conscious of a sound on the other side of the wall. It was hardly more than a faint rustle such as a tree might have made stirring in the breeze; and then the hairs prickled instinctively on the back of his neck as he realised that there was no breeze. . . .

He listened, standing so still that he could feel the throbbing of the blood in his arteries. The rustling went on; and now that he could analyse it logically he knew that it was too abrupt and irregular to be caused by a wind. It was made by something alive, something heavy and yet stealthy moving about among shrubbery on the other side of the wall. He heard the sound of a subdued sniffing; and all at once the words of Christine Vanlinden rushed through his mind. "They hadn't let the dogs out then . . ."

He remained frozen to immobility, expecting at any moment to hear the tranquillity of the night shattered by the fierce clamour of barking; but nothing happened. He heard the muffled blare of a ship's siren away down in the harbour, and a car whined up the hill and vanished in a whispering diminuendo; but in between those sounds there was nothing but the drumming in his own ears. When at last he ventured to move, the uproar still failed to break out. Nothing broke the stillness except that occasional stealthy rustle that followed him all the way back to the road, keeping pace with him on the other side of the wall. In the unnatural muteness of that invisible following there was something eerie and horrible that set his nerves tingling.

Again he stood in front of the arched gateway, lighting a cigarette and considering the situation. Very few things seemed more certain than that it was practically impossible to get into the grounds without raising an alarm-he had discovered a fair number of reasons for that; but they only provided additional reasons for believing that there were other equally ingenious gadgets waiting on the inside of the wall for the resourceful intruder who managed to pass the first line of defence. Besides all of which, of course, there were still the dogs; and their utter and uncanny silence gave the Saint a queer chilly intuition that their purpose was not so much to give alarms as to deal in their own way with intruders. . . .

One of the cardinal articles of Simon Templar's philosophy, however, was that the more elaborately insoluble such complex problems became, the more pellucidly simple the one and only key to the riddle became -if one could only see it. And in this case the solution was so staggeringly elementary that it left the Saint dumb with awe for a full half-minute.

And then, very deliberately and accurately, he placed the end of his forefinger on the bell beside the gateway, and pushed.

There was an interval of silence before he heard the sound of footsteps advancing over flagstones towards the gate. A grille opened in the smaller door, but it was too dark to see the face that looked out from behind it.

"żQuién es?"

For the time being the Saint saw no need to advertise the fact that he spoke Spanish as well as any Castilian.

"Mr Graner is expecting me," he said.

"Who is it?" repeated the voice, in English.

"Mr Felson sent me."

"Just a minute."

There was another pause. Simon heard a low whistle, the scuffle of claws on the stone, and the tinkle and creak of chains. Then a key was turned, bolts thudded back and the small door opened.

"Come in."

Simon ducked through the narrow opening and straightened up inside. The man who had admitted him was bending to close the door and fasten the bolts. The Saint noted that there were no less than five of them-two on the lock side, one on the hinge side, and one each in the centre of the top and bottom of the door-and all of them were connected with curious bright metal contacts.

He glanced thoughtfully around him. The dogs had been tied up to a post set in the flagged pathway with short loops of chain riven through rings in their collars. They were huge, bristling grey brutes, larger than police dogs-he had no idea what breed they were. The chains scraped and rattled as they strained stead­ily towards him, their slavering jaws a little open and their lips curled snarling back from glistening white fangs; but even then neither of them gave tongue. They simply leaned towards him, their feet scrabbling on the paving, quivering with a voiceless intensity of lusting ferocity and power that was more vicious than anything of its kind that the Saint had ever seen before. And a grim little smile touched his lips as he mentally acknowledged the fact that if it was difficult enough to get into that garden, it would be just about as difficult to get out. . . .

"Come this way," said the man who had let him in; and they walked along the paved pathway that ran around the house. "I'm Graner. What's your name?"

"Tombs," said the Saint.

He had cherished for years an eccentric affection for that morbid alias.

There was a light over the porch outside the front door, and for the first time he was able to inspect his host, while Graner looked at him. From Simon's side the inspection was something of a shock.

Reuben Graner was a full head shorter than himself, and as thin as a lath; and his skinny shape was accentuated by a mauve-striped suit which fitted him so tightly that it looked as if it had been shrunk on to him. Between his green suede shoes and the ends of his clinging trousers appeared a pair of bright yellow spats; and what could be seen of his shirt behind a tie like a patchwork quilt was a pale rose pink. Above that, his sallow face was as thin and sharp as an axe blade. From either side of his inordinately long and narrow nose hard, deeply graven lines ran down like brackets to enclose a mouth that was merely a horizontal slit in the tight-drawn skin, which was so smoothly stretched over the forehead and high cheek-Hones that it seemed as if there was no flesh between it and the skull. At that first inspection, only his eyes seemed to justify the uncontrollable horror with which Christine Vanlinden had spoken of him; they peered out with an odd unblinking intentness from behind large tortoise-shell spectacles, black and beady and inscrutable as damp pebbles.

"Come in," Graner said again.

He opened the door, which led into a bare narrow hall beyond which Simon could see palm trees in a dimly illuminated patio. On either side of the hall there were other doors, and one of them was ajar-Simon saw the strip of light along the edge of the frame. And as he crossed the threshold the Saint heard something that made him feel as if he had been hurled suddenly into the air and spun round three or four times before he was dumped back on the doorstep with a jar that left his heart thumping. It was a man's voice raised in blustering anger, with a subtle note of fear pulsing it in. Simon heard every word as distinctly as if the speaker had been standing next to him.

"I tell you I never had the blasted ticket. I was hunting through Joris' pockets for it when that swine jumped on me. If anybody's got it, he has!"

III How Simon Templar Read a Newspaper, and Reuben Graner Put on His Hat

BY SOME SUPERHUMAN EFFORT of unconscious will, the Saint let his weight follow the step he had started to take. He never quite knew how it was done, but somehow he went on his way into the house without an instant's check in the natural flow of his movements; and since Graner had stood aside to let him go first it was impossible for his face to give him away. By the time he was in the hall and had turned round so that Graner could see him again, the dizzy moment had passed. He stood there lighting a cigarette, aware of the sudden sharp scrutiny of Graner's beady eyes, without giving any sign that he noticed it. He might have heard nothing more than a meaningless fragment of any commonplace conversation. Only the vertiginous whirl that was still turning his mind upside down remained to bear witness to the quality of the shock that he had received.

Graner seemed to be satisfied that the words had made no particular impression. He turned away and pressed a button switch beside the door; and the Saint was momentarily puzzled, for no lights went on or off. Then he heard a swift scurrying outside, a light thud on the door and the scratch of claws; and all at once he understood the pressing of the switch and the reason for those unusually short chains on the post to which the dogs had been fastened. Doubtless the switch released them again by some electrical mechanism after any visitor had been taken inside the house.

No other voice had spoken from the room opening off the hall, and the dead silence continued as Graner strutted towards it in his pompous, affected way and pushed open the door.

"These are some friends of mine, Mr Tombs."

Simon took in the room with a leisured glance. It was furnished in the modern style, but with a garishness that contrived to be more eye-aching than chintz and brocades. The curtains were bright scarlet, the carpet was chequered purple and orange, the chairs were upholstered in grass-green tapestry. The solid comfort of the chairs was mixed up with little spindle-legged, glass-topped tables which looked as if a sneeze would blow them over; and every available horizontal surface was littered with a collection of cheap nondescript vases and tasteless bits of china that might have been taken straight out of an old-fashioned, middle-class drawing room. It was a room into which Reuben Graner fitted so perfectly that, after seeing him in it, it was impossible to imagine him in any other setting.

But Simon Templar was not looking so much at the room, as at the men in it. There were three of them; he suppressed a smile of unholy glee as he noted that at least two of them showed unmistakable signs of having been on a party.

"Mr Palermo," said Graner, in his high-pitched, mincing voice.

He indicated a dark, slender gentleman with a swarthy skin and a natty little moustache, whose beauty was somewhat impaired by the radiant sunset effects surrounding his right eye and the swollen heelprint on the other side of his face "Mr Aliston --"

Mr Aliston was tall and sandy-haired, with prominent pale blue eyes and a willowy slouch. What was left of his complexion was pink and white, like that of a freshly scrubbed schoolboy; but much of it was obscured by a raw-looking graze that ran up from his chin to terminate in a large black-and-blue lump near his left temple.

"-and Mr Lauber."

The third member of the party was a big, raw-boned, heavy-jowled man whom Simon recognised without difficulty as his last opponent in the exchange of pleasantries that had started the picnic. He looked easily the least damaged of the trio; but the Saint knew that he would be carrying a souvenir of Mr Uniatz' Betsy on the back of his head that would have been highly misleading to a phrenologist.

"Pleased to know you," Lauber said heartily; and as soon as he spoke Simon knew also that he was the man whose voice he had heard as he entered the house.

The Saint's eyes summed up the big man interestedly, without seeming to give him more attention than they gave everybody else. Certainly Lauber had been the last warrior to fling himself into the battle: he had been busily kneeling on Joris Vanlinden's chest until the shortage of other gladiators had forced him to take part in the festivities. And a slow squirm of delight began to crawl around Simon Templar's inside as some understanding of Lauber's amazing protestation started to sink into his brain.

"Mr Tombs," Graner explained, "is the friend that Felson wired us about."

The others kept silence. They were grouped at the end of the table, with Lauber in the middle; and they stayed there without moving, as if they were still bent on keeping Lauber in a corner. Only their eyes turned to meet the Saint, and remained fixed on him with cold intentness. Even Lauber, whose solitary answering welcome hinted that it had been prompted more by relief at the temporary diversion than by any natural cordiality, relapsed into silence after that one remark, and stared at him with the same watchful expectancy. They were like a cage of wild animals summing up a new trainer.

"Sit down," said Graner.

Palermo extended his foot without shifting any of the rest of him, and pushed a chair towards the Saint. Graner took another chair. He deposited himself primly on the edge of it and crossed his legs-a movement which disclosed an expanse of brilliant blue silk sock above the top of his spats.

"Felson said very little about you." Graner searched through his pockets and eventually encountered a telegraph form. He read it through, pulling his long upper lip. "Didn't he give you a letter or anything?"

Simon shook his head. -- "I didn't see him. He phoned me in London, and I left at once."

"You got here very quickly."

"I flew to Seville. I tried to phone Rodney in Ma­drid from there, but I couldn't get him. I couldn't wait to get hold of him because I had to catch the boat, and he'd told me it was urgent."

"Didn't the boat get in this morning?" Graner's tone held no more than conventional interest.

The Saint nodded easily.

"I made some friends on board, and they wanted to go over to Orotava for a farewell lunch party. I didn't know it was so far away, and once I was over there I couldn't leave until they were ready to go. And they wanted a lot of shifting. Then I had to get fixed up at a hotel, and then we had to have dinner, and then we had to have some more drinks, and then I had to see them back to the boat --" He shrugged apologetically. "You know how these parties go on. I suppose this is rather late to introduce myself, but I thought I'd better check in before I went to bed."

Graner frowned.

"You went to a hotel?"

"Of course," said the Saint innocently. "It's a nice climate, but I didn't feel like sleeping under a tree."

Graner gazed at him steadily for a few seconds without smiling.

"We will leave that for the moment," he said at length. "What is your experience?"

"I was fourteen years with Asscher's, in Amsterdam."

"You look young for that."

"I started very young."

"Why did you leave?"

"They missed some stones," answered the Saint, with a sly and significant grin.

"Were you ever in the hands of the police?"

"No. It was just suspicion."

"What have you been doing since then?"

"Odd jobs, when I could get them."

Reuben Graner took an apple-green silk handker­chief out of his breast pocket, folded it neatly, and fanned himself delicately with it. A whiff of expensive perfume crept into the air.

"Did Felson tell you what was expected of you?" he asked.

"I gathered that you want me to cut up some stones without being too inquisitive about where they came from."

"That is more or less correct."

The Saint settled himself more comfortably in his chair.

"As far as I'm concerned, it's a bet," he remarked. "But what about the strong-arm stuff?"

Graner's thin fingers drummed on the edge of the table.

"I don't understand you."

"The sleeping-beauty chorus. The three little pigs." Simon waved his hand in a lazy gesture of explanation. "They look as if they'd been up to something rougher than cutting diamonds and doing a bit of knitting on the side."

Again that intense silence settled on the room. Palermo moved slightly in his chair, and the creak of the leather sounded deafening in the stillness. Simon could feel the eyes boring into him from four directions, rigid and unwinking in their sockets; but he filtered a streamer of smoke through his lips with languid unconcern.

"We also missed some stones," Graner said evenly. "Your predecessor had been becoming-difficult. It was necessary to deal with him."

Simon surveyed the other three again and raised his eyebrows admiringly.

"He must have been pretty useful with his hands, anyway," he murmured. "He seems to have done a spot of dealing on his own."

Aliston's pink face became a shade pinker, but none of the men moved or answered. They just sat there, watching him steadily in silence.

Graner refolded his handkerchief, tucked it back into his pocket and occupied himself with arranging for just too much of it to peep out. Presently he spoke as if he hadn't noticed the Saint's comment: "You had better leave your hotel, Tombs. There is quite enough room for you here."

"That's very hospitable," Simon said dubiously. "But---"

"We need not discuss the matter. It is simply an elementary and advisable precaution. If you are staying in a hotel you are obliged to register with the police, which for our purposes may be an inconvenience. The police call for lists of all the guests staying in the hotels here, and if you're not registered you can get into trouble. But nobody can call for a list of my guests, so nobody knows whether they have registered or not."

The Saint nodded comprehendingly, and the movement was quite spontaneous. A few hours ago he would have said that he knew everything there was to know about the world of crime, but this was an aspect of it. that had never occurred to him. Santa Cruz de Tenerife was the last place on earth to which he would have set out on a blind search for boodle, if it had not been for the clue that had fallen accidentally into his hands. And yet the more he thought of it, now, the more perfect a location it seemed to be. A free port, where anything the gang brought with them from their expeditions in Europe could be disembarked without any of the attendant risks of a customs examination. A Spanish province that was nevertheless a long way from Spain and on the routes of some of the main seaways of the world, where anyone coming from the peninsula could land without even being asked to show identification papers at the time of landing. A place where such police as there were not only shared all the characteristic inertia and incompetence of their brethren on the mainland, but combined with them some original Canarian fatuities of their own. And, finally, the last spot on the globe where anyone would think of even starting to look for the headquarters of a gang of international thieves-even as the Saint himself had never thought of looking there before.

"You certainly have thought of everything, haven't you?" he said lightly. "All the same, if I beetle up herefirst thing in the morning --"

"You will stay here tonight." The Saint frowned.

"A couple of girls that I met on the boat are staying at the hotel, and I made a date to give them lunch tomorrow," he pointed out. "They'll think it odd if I don't turn up."

"You can make your excuses."

"But --"

"You will stay here tonight."

Graner's tone was flat and expressionless, and yet it had a smug insolence that brought the blood to the Saint's head. He stood up, and Graner stood up also.

"That's all very well, dear old bird," Simon said gently. "But what is this-a job or a prison? Even with your beauty --"

Without the flicker of an eyelash, Graner brought up his left hand and slapped the Saint sharply across the face. Almost in the same movement a gun appeared in his right, levelled quite steadily at the centre of the Saint's chest.

Simon felt as if a sudden torrent of liquid fire poured along his veins, and every muscle in his body went tense. The fingernails cut into his palms with the vio­lent contraction of his fists. How he ever managed to hold himself in check was a miracle beyond his understanding.

"There are one or two things you had better make up your mind to understand, Tombs," Graner was say­ing, in the same flatly arrogant tone. "In the first place, I dislike flippancy-and familiarity."

He made a slight movement with the automatic.

"Also-apart from this-it is impossible for any­body to leave this house without my permission."

His gaze did not shift from the Saint's face, where the marks of his fingers were printed in dark red on the tanned skin.

"If you intend to work for me, you will accept any orders I give-without question."

Simon looked down at the gun. Without knowing how quick the other was with the trigger, he estimated that he had a sporting chance of knocking the gun aside and landing an iron, fist where it would obliterate the last traces of any beauty that Graner might ever have had, before anyone else could move. But there were still the other three men who were behind him now-besides the dogs outside, and however many more discouraging gadgets there might be outside the house.

That moment's swift and instinctive reckoning of his chances was probably what helped to save him. And in that time he also forced himself to realise that the fleeting pleasure of pushing Graner's front teeth through the back of his neck would ring down the curtain on his only hope of doing what he had come there to do.

The liquid fire cooled down in his veins-cooled down below normal until it was like liquid ice. The red mist cleared from before his eyes and was absorbed invisibily but indelibly by the deepest wellsprings of his will. Reuben Graner would live long enough to be dealt with. The Saint could wait; and the waiting would only make the reckoning more enjoyable when the time came.

"If you put it like that," he said, with as much sheepishness as he could infuse into his voice, "I guess you're probably right."

Slowly the tension that had crept into the room relaxed. Simon almost fancied he could hear the other three draw the first breaths they had taken since the incident started. Only Graner did not need to relax, because he had never been gripped in the same tension. He put the gun away and fanned himself again with his scented handkerchief, as if nothing had happened, with his cold, unblinking eyes still fixed on the Saint.

"I will show you to your room," he said. "In the morning I will drive you down to the hotel to collect your luggage."

2 Which, looked at upwards or downwards or sideways, was just about as jolly a complication as one could imagine, Simon Templar reflected when he was left alone.

He sat on the side of the bed and lighted another cigarette, considering the situation.

After all, he had asked for it. If he had waited a little longer to think what his impulse might lead to, he might have realised that it was open for something like that to happen. He could see Graner's point of view with the greatest clarity. To leave a new and untried recruit to go wandering about Santa Cruz, talking to anyone he might pick up, was a fairly obvious error to avoid. And thinking it over, the Saint feared that in his conversation with Graner he hadn't exactly given the impression that he was a man who could be relied on to guard his tongue.

But that was done, and it wasn't much use worrying about it. Anyway he was in the house, which was where he had wanted to be-only he had got there about twelve hours too early. And the only thing left was to decide what he was going to do about it.

Presently he got up and walked over to the window. It was shuttered in the Spanish style, but as far as he could discover the shutters were not made to open. The louvres could be turned up or down, to let in as much air or daylight as the inhabitant wanted; but the inhabitant would have had to slice himself into rashers to get himself out through the openings.

Simon looked around the room. It was furnished comfortably enough, although the optical effect was shattered by the same dreadful conflict of colour schemes that characterised the room downstairs. But it contained nothing which could have been used to open the shuttering-unless one heaved the bed through it, which would be difficult to do without caus­ing a certain amount of commotion.

He moved very softly to the door and turned the handle without a sound. Somewhat to his surprise it was not locked: it opened without a creak of the hinges, and he slipped noiselessly out on to the veranda that ran round the patio. Down below he could hear a muffled mutter of voices, but it was so faint that it seemed impossible that the men who were speaking could have heard anyone moving about upstairs, even with a normal tread. The Saint didn't even take that risk. He could move as silently as a cat, and the tiled flooring ruled out the possibility of any squeaking boards that might have given him away. He stood looking at the veranda. It was enclosed from top to bottom with fine-meshed fly-netting which was almost as effective an obstacle as the window shutters. Whether he could open some of it up with his knife -- "Wanting anything?"

The voice made him spin round. He had not heard anyone come up the stairs; but Aliston was there, standing at the head of them with his hands in his pockets.

"I was just looking for the bathroom," answered the Saint calmly.

"Second door down."

The Saint went on and let himself in. He was there long enough to note that the bathroom window was also closed with a similar shutter to the one in his own room. He was ready to believe that all the windows in the house were the same; and he realised that be­sides making it difficult to get out, the arrangement was also another difficulty in the way of getting in.

When he came out of the bathroom Aliston was still standing at the head of the stairs. The Saint said good night to him, and Aliston answered conventionally.

Simon sat on his bed again and gazed sourly at the heliotrope-distempered walls. He was inside, all right -he didn't have to worry about that any more. And he knew now why Graner hadn't locked him up. There was nothing about the door to indicate it, but he was certain that it contained some device which gave a warning when it was opened. Graner seemed to have a weakness for electrical gadgets, and very effective the Saint had to admit they were. . . . He also knew why Aliston had spoken to him instead of remaining hidden to watch him. They had let him use up the only plausible excuse he had for leaving the bedroom, so that any future excursions would want much more explaining.

And that made him wonder if they were only waiting for a chance to trap him. Simon faced the possibility cold-bloodedly. From the beginning he had known that he was gambling on the darkness and the hat that had been pulled down over his eyes during the fight, as much as on the psychological fact that by walking straight into the lion's den immediately afterwards he was giving himself as good an alibi as he could hope to have. But one of the three men might have had suspicions, although nothing had been said when he was downstairs. Even now they might be talking about it.

He put the thought firmly out of his mind again. If they suspected him, they suspected him. But if it had been more than suspicion, he doubted whether he would have been sent to bed so peacefully. And if there was any suspicion, a lot of things could happen before it became certainty.

Meanwhile there were more urgent things to think about. Joris and Christine Vanlinden were still at the hotel, and he could do nothing about them. The only help they had was Hoppy Uniatz, and the Saint smiled a little wryly as he computed how much help Mr Uni­atz was likely to be.

He undressed himself slowly, visualising every other angle of the situation that he could think of.

He was about ready for bed when he heard the noise of a car that sounded as if it stopped very close to the house, and he went to the window again and looked out. But he was on the side of the house farthest from the road, and he could see nothing. The sound of a door slamming certainly came from within the grounds. He stood there listening, and presently the car started up again. It came slowly round the corner of the house and passed underneath his window on its way to the garage; but although he waited for several minutes longer he could discover nothing else. The voices went on downstairs, and they were still talking when he fell asleep.

His problems were still unsolved when he was awakened by his door opening. Lauber put an unshaven face into the room.

"Time to get up," he said shortly, and went out again.

The sky outside, which had apparently not been informed of what the guidebooks were saying about it, was leaden and overcast, and there was a damp chill in the air that smelt like impending rain. Still, with all its defects, it was a new day; and the Saint was pre­pared to be hopeful about it. He went along to the bathroom, where he found and borrowed somebody else's razor; and he had just finished dressing when Lauber came in again.

"I'll show you the dining room."

"Is the weather always like this?" Simon asked as they went down the stairs.

Lauber's only response to the conversational opening was a vague mumble; and Simon wondered whether his sulky humour was solely due to the sore head from which he must have been suffering or whether it had some other contributory cause.

Graner was already in the dining room, sitting up in his prim old-maidish way behind the coffee pot and reading a book. He looked up and said good morning to the Saint, and returned at once to his reading. Palermo and Aliston were not visible.

Since there was no obvious encouragement to idle chatter, Simon picked up a newspaper that was lying on the table and glanced over it while he tried un­satisfactorily to break his fast with the insipid ration of rolls and butter which the Latin countries seem to consider sufficient foundation for a morning's work, reflecting that that was probably why they never man­aged to do a morning's work.

Almost as soon as he took up the sheet the headlines leapt to his eye. The press of Tenerife is accustomed to devote three or four columns inside the paper to the inexplicable gyrations of Spanish politicians; a European war can count on two or three paragraphs in the "Information from Abroad"; the front page leads are invariably devoted to a solemn discussion of the military defence of the Canary Islands, which every good Canarian is convinced that other nations are only waiting for an opportunity to seize; and the local red-hot news, the sizzling sensation of the day, rates half a column under the standard heading of "The Event of Last Night"-there never having been more than one event in a day, and that usually being something like the earth-shaking revelation that a couple of citizens started a fight in some tavern and were thrown out. But for once the military defence of the Canary Islands and the prospects of luring more misguided tourists to Tenerife had been ousted from their customary place of honour.

Under the headings of "The Shocking Outrage of Last Night" and "Unprecedented Outbreak of Gangsterismo in Tenerife" a thrilling story was unfolded. It appeared that a pareja of guardias de asalto had been patrolling the outskirts of Santa Cruz the previous night when they heard the sound of shooting. Hastening towards the nearest telephone to give the alarm, they happened to come upon two sinister individuals who were assisting a third, who appeared to be unconscious, into a car. The circumstances seeming suspicious, the guardias called on them to stop, whereupon the criminals opened fire. One of the guardias, Arturo Solona, of the Calle de la Libertad, whose father is Pedro Solona, the popular proprietor of the butcher shop in the Calle Ortega, whose younger daughter, as everyone will remember, was recently married to Don Luis Hernándéz y Perez, whose brother, Don Francisco Hernándéz y Perez is the manager of the sewage works, fell to the ground cry­ing, "They have killed me!" (Anyone who is shot in a Spanish newspaper nearly always falls to the ground crying, "They have killed me," just for luck; but this one was right, they had killed him.) The other guardia, Baldomero Gil, who is the nephew of Ramon Jalan, who won the first prize at the recent horticul­tural exhibition with his three-kilo banana, advanced courageously towards a pile of stones which were a little way behind him, from which he continued to ex­change shots with the fugitives, emptying his magazine twice, but apparently without hitting any of them.

At the same time, a pareja of guardias civiles, Jose Benitez and Guillermo Diaz, having heard the shoot­ing, were on their way to headquarters to report the occurrence when they also chanced to encounter the criminals, who were driving off. They also fired many shots, apparently without effect; but at an answering volley from the gangsters, Benitez fell to the ground, endeavouring to uphold the reputation of his unit for lightning diagnosis by crying as he fell, "They have wounded me!" He had indeed got a bullet through his ear, and the paper took pains to point out that only a miracle could have saved his life, because the bullet had clearly been travelling in the direction of his head.

Unfortunately a miracle hadn't saved his life; because in the stop press it was revealed that he had subsequently died in the small hours of the morning, leaving Arturo Solona unquestionably supreme in the field of prophecy, after which the doctors had discovered that he had another bullet in his stomach which nobody had noticed until then. The bandits meanwhile had been swallowed up by the night, and the police were still searching for them.

"You understand Spanish, Mr Tombs?"

Graner's thin voice broke into the Saint's thoughts; and Simon looked up from the paper and saw that Graner's eyes were fixed on him.

"I learnt about six words on the boat coming down here," he said casually. "But I can't make head or tail of this. I suppose I'll have to learn a bit if I'm going to stay here."

"That will not be necessary --"

Graner might have been going to say more, but the shrill call of the telephone bell interrupted him. He got up, folded his napkin neatly and went out into the hall. Simon could hear him speaking outside.

"Yes. . . . No? . . . You have made enquiries?" There was a longish pause. "I see. Well, you had better come back here." A briefer pause; then a curt, "All right."

The instrument rattled back on its hook, and Graner returned. The Saint saw Lauber look up at him curi­ously, and tried ineffectually to interpret the glance. There was nothing in what he had overheard, not even a change in the inflection of Graner's voice, that might have given him a clue; and he tried in vain to fathom the subtle tenseness which he seemed to feel in Lau­ber's questioning silence.

Graner himself said nothing, and his yellow face was as uncommunicative as a mummy's. He sat down again in his place and caressed the lace tablecloth me­chanically with his thin fingers, gazing straight ahead of him without a trace of expression in his beady eyes.

Presently he turned to the Saint.

"When you're ready," he said, "I will show you your workroom."

"Any time you like," said the Saint.

He finished his cup of the bitter brown fluid mixed with boiled milk which the Canary Islanders fondly believe to be coffee, and got to his feet as Graner rose from the table.

They went up the stairs to the veranda above the patio, and halfway around that they came to another flight of stairs that ran up to the top floor of the house. At the top of these stairs there was a narrow landing with a door on each side. Graner unlocked one of the doors, and they went in.

The room was hardly more than an attic; and the Saint realised at once that it was lighted by one of those small barred windows which he had seen high up in the outside wall of the house. A heavy safe stood in one corner, and along one wall was a wooden bench littered with curious tools. At one end was what looked like a small electric furnace; and at the other end was a glistening machine unlike anything else that the Saint had encountered, which he took to be the principal instrument for cutting or polishing stones.

He ran his eye over the bench with what he hoped was a glance of professional approval.

"You will find everything here that you need," Graner was saying. "Everything was provided exactly as your predecessor wanted it. I will show you what you have to do."

He went over to the safe; and as he bent down and touched the combination Simon heard a faint moan something like an American police siren rising from somewhere in the house.

Graner's body concealed his movements as he turned the combination back and forth. Then he straightened up and turned the handle; and as he did so the moan of the siren, which had held evenly on its note until then, rose suddenly to a piercing scream that filled the air for fully thirty seconds. Then it stopped just as suddenly, leaving the air quivering with the abrupt contrast; and at that moment Simon knew its explanation. The same warning would sound the instant anyone touched the combination, and if he was still left undisturbed for long enough to get the safe open, the mere act of turning the handle would send the alarm whining up to that final crescendo of urgency.

Graner left the inference to make its own impression. It was not until the door was wide open that he turned round.

"Your predecessor did most of the work that we had in hand," he said. "But in a few days there will be a good deal more for you."

Simon Templar looked past him into the safe and almost gasped. From top to bottom it was divided into horizontal partitions by velvet-lined trays; and on the trays the light glittered and flamed from tier upon tier of lambent jewels, carefully sorted according to colour and species. One shelf shone with the blood-red lustre of rubies, another burned with the cold green fire of emeralds, others scintillated with the hard white bril­liance and pale blue and violet half-lights of diamonds. In that amazing hoard the hues of the rainbow danced and clashed and blended in one dazzling flood of liv­ing color. It made the elaborate precautions which Reuben Graner took to guard his house suddenly seem very natural and ordinary. There was enough wealth in that safe to make any burglar think he had picked the locks on the gates of heaven.

3 Simon glanced over the tray that Graner held out to him, and fingered one or two of the stones.

"It's excellent work," he said, when he had recovered his voice.

"It was done by one of the best men in the business," Graner said complacently. "But we are hoping that you will be able to equal it."

He put the tray back again and took out a wooden box from the bottom of the safe. It held twenty or thirty diamonds, none of which could have weighed less than ten carats, and all of them perfectly matched.

"These are to be altered," he said. "It is a pity to have to break them up, but they belonged to a set which was once rather well-known."

He handed the box to the Saint, and Simon took it over to the workbench and put it down. Graner closed the door of the safe and spun the combination. He took out an ornate leather case and fitted a long cigar into an amber holder. He seemed to be in no hurry.

Simon turned over some of the implements on the bench and began to sort them out into what looked like their various categories, although he hadn't the faintest idea what any of them were.

He did as much as he could think of in that line, and then he hesitated. Graner was strutting slowly up and down the room, with his hands clasped behind his back.

"Don't pay any attention to me," he said. "I'm interested to see how you work."

Simon turned the implements over again. He felt as if a strap was being tightened about his chest.

"There isn't a chucker," he said.

Graner stopped strutting and looked at him.

"What is that?"

"It's the best tool there is for making the first cuts," said the Saint, who had just invented it. "We always cut stones with a chucker."

"Your predecessor didn't seem to find it necessary."

Simon looked surprised.

"He didn't use a chucker? How long had he been out of a job when you took him up?"

"He had been working for me for about four years," said Graner; and the Saint nodded understandingly.

"Of course-that explains it. They only came in about three years ago, but now everybody uses them. They save a tremendous amount of waste."

Graner took the cigar out of his mouth, trimmed the ash on his thumbnail, and put it back.

"We will send to England for a chucker by the next mail," he said. "But if you have been in the trade for fourteen years you will doubtless be able to use the older tools for the time being."

The Saint picked up one of the diamonds and held it to the light, peering at it from various angles. And at the same time he measured up Graner's position in the room. He knew that Graner carried a gun, and he had already seen how quickly he could draw it; he himself had nothing but his knife-but that had won split-second contests with guns before, when the Saint had been ready and waiting for them. Even so, it left the rest of the house and the outer fortifications . . .

The base of the cutting or polishing machine, whatever it was, consisted of a copper cup in which the diamond under operation was presumably supposed to rest. Simon took the stone he was holding along to it and began to fiddle with trying to fix it in place.

"By the way," he said, "what about my luggage?"

There was no immediate answer, and after a moment the Saint looked up. Graner was standing at the window with his back to him, looking out.

Simon felt under his left sleeve for the hilt of his little knife. His nerves were quite cool now: he knew exactly what a chance he would be taking, and how much he had to lose. But there might be no other remedy.

And then he realised why Graner was standing there. There was the sound of a car manœuvring outside, and Graner must have been watching it. All at once the hum of the engine rose and died again rap­idly, and Simon knew that it had entered the grounds.

Graner turned away from the window and stepped towards the door.

"Go on with your work," he said. "I shall be back in a few minutes."

The door closed behind him, and Simon Templar sagged back on the bench and wiped his forehead.

A few seconds later, with the irrepressible grin which was the crystallisation of all his philosophy, he took out his cigarette case and lighted a cigarette.

With the smoke going gratefully down into his lungs, he took another look at his position. And the longer he looked at it the less he liked it. The Saint was immune to panic, but he had an unflinching grasp on realities. The reality in this case was that, if one adopted the most optimistic of the two possible theories, Reuben Graner wasn't a bloke who left very much to chance. At the moment his attention was di­vided by the disappearance of Joris Vanlinden and his lottery ticket, and the mysterious comings and goings in the household which were undoubtedly connected with it; but that wouldn't distract him forever. In fact, from the way things had progressed by that early hour of the day, it wasn't likely to be more than a few hours before Graner's investigation of his newly acquired Mr Tombs found the spare half-hour which would be about all the time it needed.

Simon gazed morosely at the closed safe and won­dered if it would relieve his emotions to weep tenderly over it for awhile. The occasion seemed to call for something of the sort. Within its unresponsive steel sides there was enough boodle to satisfy the most am­bitious buccaneer, a collection of concentrated loot that deserved to be ranked with Vanlinden's lottery ticket; but for all the good it seemed likely to do him it might just as well have been a collection of empty beer bottles.

He went to the window and examined it. The bars were set solidly into the concrete of the walls-it might be possible to dig them out, but it would cer­tainly take a good deal of time. And in any case he knew already that there was a sheer drop of thirty feet underneath it. Still, the road ran below. ... It was the first ray of hope he had seen since he entered the house. When he had been in Tenerife before he had made a number of incidental friends who might be useful; although if he met any of them when he was with Graner they might prove more dangerous than helpful. But that would have to be faced when the time came. . . .

He took a piece of paper from his pocket and tore it in half. On one piece he wrote rapidly, in English: Come and stand under the window of Las Mari­posas on the La Laguna road at four o'clock. I will drop a message to you out of the window. If I'm un­able to do this within half an hour, go away and come back at seven. Wait the same time. If nothing happens then, come back at nine-thirty and wait till you hear from me. This is a matter of life and death. Say noth­ing to anyone.

He read the message over again and grinned ruefully. It certainly read like something out of a melodrama; but that couldn't be helped. Maybe it was something out of a melodrama - his stay in Tenerife was beginning to look like that.

He signed his name to it; and on the second scrap of paper he wrote a translation in Spanish. He folded each piece of paper inside a twenty-five-peseta note and put the notes in separate pockets; he had just finished when he heard Graner's footstep again on the stairs.

Graner hardly glanced at his attempts to adjust the diamond in the copper cup under the machine.

"You can leave that for now," he said. "We will go down and collect your luggage."

His voice was sharper than it had been before, and Simon wondered what else had happened to put that grating timbre into it. There were things going on all the time that he knew nothing about, and the strain of trying to make sense of them took half the relief out of this second reprieve. Graner said nothing as they went downstairs; and all that the Saint could deduce of his state of mind had to be more intuitive than logical, which was not much satisfaction.

Through the door of the living room he had a glimpse of Aliston's boneless back while Graner stood in front of the mirror fitting on his purple hat like a woman. Presumably Aliston, and probably the natty Mr Palermo as well, had been out in the car that had returned a little while ago. Possibly it had been one or the other of them who had telephoned Graner during breakfast. It was a fairly obvious deduction that they had been scouring the town for a trace of Joris Vanlinden; and in that case the meaning of what he had overheard of the telephone conversation, and Graner's agitation, became easier to understand. But the Saint still had a queer feeling that there were gaps in the theory somewhere, a feeling that came from some kind of sixth sense for which he could not intelli­gently account, which told him that although the pieces of the jigsaw appeared to fit together so neatly there was something not quite right about the complete picture that they made up.

"Tombs!"

Graner's acrid voice jerked him out of the brown study, and they went outside to where the car was waiting. The chauffeur who stood beside it was unmistakably Spanish, and part of his villainous aspect might have been due to the fact that it was still only Saturday morning and the traditions of his country required him to shave only on Saturday afternoons; but the Saint doubted it. He wondered how many more of Graner's menagerie he had still to meet.

"What hotel did you go to?"

"The Orotava," answered Simon; and Graner's passionless black eyes rested on him a second or two longer before he passed the order on to the driver.

It was another of those puzzling rough edges in the smooth outline of the Saint's theory.

Simon pulled himself together with an abrupt effort. He told himself that his nerves must have been getting the better of him-he was beginning to imagine threats and suspicions in every trivial incident. After all, there were only about three hotels in Santa Cruz that could be called at all inviting, and the Orotava was the nearest to the harbour and the easiest choice for a man looking vaguely around for some place to stay. Why should the mention of it make any particular impression?

He knew that there could be only one reason, and felt as though a cold wind lapped his spine for a moment before he insisted to himself that it was absurd.

There was still a brace of guardias de asalto and a brace of guardias civiles mounting guard over the scene of the previous night's outbreak of gangsterismo, although they did not stop the car; and the Saint's mind switched back to the newspaper story he had read. That had at least explained a good many things to him without introducing any new riddles. It explained the way he had been stopped on the road when he was driving up to Graner's, and incidentally also explained the scattered volley which he had heard in the distance sometime earlier when he was driving away with Joris Vanlinden. What else it might lead to he had still to decide; but the humorous thought crossed his mind that he was probably even then riding in the very car for which the whole detective genius of Santa Cruz was at that moment searching. Only, of course, they were considerably handicapped by none of the guardias having remembered the number. . . .

The car stopped at the hotel, and they got out. As they went up to the desk, which was now in charge of a beautiful boy with the sweetest wave in his hair, Graner turned to the Saint.

"You will remember to cancel your luncheon engagement," he said.

"Of course," said the Saint, who had never forgotten it since they left the house. "Would you ask the Fairy Queen to see if he can get me room fifty?-I don't think he speaks English."

Graner interpreted; and Simon lounged quietly against the counter while the youth went to the telephone switchboard.

His pulses were ticking over like clockwork. Now, if only by some miracle he could make Hoppy grasp the idea . . . He would be able to say nothing that Reuben Graner didn't overhear, and Mr Uniatz' alertness to subtlety and innuendo was approximately as quick-witted as that of a slightly imbecile frog. It was a flimsy enough chance, but it was a chance. He wished he could have called Christine, but he dared not take the risk of drawing attention to a room so close to his own. . . . The youth seemed to be taking a long time. . . .

He came back at last, and what he said made the Saint feel as though he had been jolted under the chin.

"No contestan."

Simon didn't move. With every trace of emotion schooled out of his face, he looked enquiringly at Graner.

"They don't answer," Graner translated.

The Saint placed his cigarette between his lips and drew at it steadily. He knew that Graner was watching him, but for once he wasn't worried about his own reaction. He knew that he couldn't be giving anything away, for the simple reason that he had nothing to give. A dull haze seemed to have filled his brain, through which one or two futile questions could only rise blurrily into his consciousness. Could it only have been that Hoppy was sleeping his usual loglike sleep? But the boy must have been ringing the room for a long time. Besides, there was Joris Vanlinden; and there could hardly be two people in the world who slept as heavily as Hoppy Uniatz. What else could have happened? Graner had been agitated before, but none of it had looked for an instant like the kind of agitation that springs from an excess of rejoicing. Besides which, he hadn't batted an eyelid when the Saint mentioned the number of the room, which he would certainly have done if ... Besides which, there wasn't even a flickering indication of triumph in his attitude now. Besides which, there was the telephone call at breakfast time. Besides which . . .

"You had better write them a note," Graner was saying.

Simon nodded and walked through the lounge like an automaton to one of the writing desks. His mind was reeling under such a disordered inrush of ques­tions that none of them made any individual impres­sion. Presently he would be able to restore some sort of order and tackle them one by one, but that first in­sane confusion left him in a daze.

He sat down and drew a sheet of paper towards him, aware that Graner had followed him and was standing over him while he wrote. He unscrewed his fountain pen, and gained a few seconds' respite while he addressed an envelope to Miss H. Uniatz-hoping that the wavy-haired boy's knowledge of English was as incomplete as he reckoned it to be. Then he wrote: DEAR MISS UNIATZ : I'm terribly sorry that I shall have to break our appointment for lunch today. As you know, I am not here on a pleasure trip, and the firm I am employed by insists that I must start at once.

I'm sorry, too, that I shan't have time to help you find an apartment as I had promised; although I still think it would be the best thing for you to do. Your best plan would be to ask Camacho's Excursions about it-they are the local Cook's agents, and very useful people. I hope you'll soon be successful, because I quite see that you won't want to stay at a hotel any longer than you have to.

With more apologies, and all good wishes, Sincerely yours, S. Tombs.

He sealed the envelope and gave it to the boy at the desk with a silent prayer that some of its insinuations would percolate into the globe of seasoned ivory on which Mr Uniatz wore his hat-or, if they didn't, that he would ask Christine what she made of it.

"The gentleman is leaving today," Graner explained in Spanish. "Will you make out his bill and send someone up for his luggage?"

"En seguida."

Graner rode up with Simon in the elevator, which had apparently been induced to function again since the previous night. The cigar burned down evenly in the amber holder clipped between his teeth. Simon studied him inconspicuously and found it incredible that, if there was any secret jubilation going on in Reuben Graner's mind, there should be so little sign of it on his face. Besides, if Graner's suspicions had been so aroused, would he be taking the risk of going up alone to a room where he could so easily be silently and efficiently knocked over the head? Or would he have let the Saint come there at all, where he could so easily announce that he intended to stay-where Graner could do nothing to prevent him? But there was still the inexplicable failure of Hoppy Uniatz to answer the telephone. . . . The Saint felt as if his brain was being torn apart with unanswerable ques­tions.

They came to the door of his room, and he turned the handle and walked in-he hadn't even troubled to lock the door when he went out to put the Hirondel away the night before. And he was inside the room before he saw that Christine Vanlinden was sitting on the bed.

IV How Simon Templar Rose to the Occasion, and the Thieves' Picnic Got Further Under Way

IT WAS SO UNEXPECTED that the Saint had no chance to do anything. He was too far into the room to draw back; and Graner was so close behind him that he knew Graner must have seen. He wondered if there was still time to pretend he had blundered into the wrong room-but then, there was his luggage. And Graner wouldn't leave it at that, anyhow, whether it was the wrong room or the right one.

Simon stared at the girl blankly.

"What are you doing here ?" he demanded.

It was simply the first thing that came into his head; but the instant he had said it he knew that his instinct must have worked faster than his brain.

"I think you must have lost your way," he said coldly.

He heard the door close softly behind him, and was aware that Graner had moved up to his side. He felt something round and hard jab into his waist, and knew exactly what it was. But for the moment he pretended not to notice it.

Christine had stopped looking at him. Her eyes were fixed on Graner, and they were growing wider with terror.

"Yes, Christine." There was a catlike purr in Graner's precious accents. "You did lose your way, didn't you?"

Simon swung round on him.

"Do you know her?"

The other barely glanced at him.

"An excessively stupid question," he said drily.

"Then what's the game?" Simon shot back at him raspily. "Did you send her here?"

Graner looked at him a second time, swinging his thin little malacca cane in his left hand. His right hand bulged in the side pocket of his coat. But this time his small beady eyes didn't switch away again at once. The Saint read something in them that even Graner's self-control couldn't conceal; and at that instant he knew that nothing less than his own overworked guardian angel could have put into his head the wild inspiration on which he had acted. His unhesitating comeback had thrown Graner completely off his balance. For the first time since they had met, the other was actually at a disadvantage.

Simon drove on into the breach that his counterattack had opened up in Graner's guard.

"Is she supposed to be seeing what I've got in my luggage, or what's she doing?" he insisted furiously. "I'm telling you, Graner-there are too damn many fishy things about this job to suit me. I'll put up with a lot; but if you're not playing square with me, we're through!"

Graner's stick swung a little more jerkily.

"You have nothing to worry about," he replied harshly, as if that was intended to dismiss the subject; but the bluff lacked force, "Well, what's she doing?"

"I have no idea."

"Then how did you know she'd lost her way?"

"That is not your business."

"Then why d'you have to stick that gun in my ribs when you find her here ?"

"Be quiet!"

Simon leaned one shoulder on the wall and looked down contemptuously at the gun that was still stretching Graner's pocket out of shape.

"What are you playing with it for?" he jeered. "If you want it to shut me up, you've got to use the trigger. Of course you're not at home now, so it might be a bit awkward for you."

"I'm trying to prevent you making a scene," said Graner, and his voice was not as steady as it had been. "If you will stop making so much noise, we shall be able to get this straightened out."

He turned away abruptly; and Christine Vanlin­den's eyes flashed from one face to the other like the eyes of a hunted animal. Her lips were parted, and one hand was crushed against her breast as if it hurt her.

Graner began to step towards her.

"It is fortunate that we found you so soon," he said silkily. "Santa Cruz is not a good place for you to be put on your own. I trust you are ready to come home now?"

She sprang suddenly to her feet.

"No!"

"My dear Christine! You must not let yourself get hysterical. Where is Joris? Perhaps we can take him as well."

"No!" she sobbed. "I won't go back! I'm never going back. You can't take me --"

His clawlike hand made a snatch and caught her wrist.

"Perhaps you have Joris' ticket?" he snarled.

She shrank back until the wall stopped her, staring at him as if she had been hypnotised by a snake, with the breath labouring in her throat. And at that mo­ment there was a knock on the door.

Involuntarily her eyes turned towards the sound. Simon saw her take a quick breath that could have only one purpose, and flung himself off the wall against which he had been lounging as if a spring had been released behind him.

In three strides he was across the room and between Graner and the girl. He clapped one hand over her mouth and spun her round. His other arm whipped round her waist and lifted her off her feet. The bathroom door was ajar, and he moved on towards it almost without a check.

"Tell 'em to come back presently," he snapped over his shoulder.

In another second he was inside the bathroom and kicking the door shut behind him.

He still held the girl, but the feel of her slim young body under his arm pressed against him fought a duel with his resolution that she could never have been aware of. He bent his head so that his lips touched her ear, and the smell of her hair filled his nostrils.

"For heaven's sake don't give me away!" he whispered. "This is a gag-d'you understand?"

He had no idea how much she understood or believed, but he had no chance to say more. He heard the closing of the outer door of the room, and a moment later the bathroom door opened.

"All right," said Graner.

Simon carried the girl out and let her go. He straightened his coat and opened his cigarette case.

"Now, Graner," he said, "we'll hear from you."

Graner looked at him unblinkingly. His right hand still rested in his jacket pocket, but the Saint's keyed-up senses registered every fraction of the change in his manner. The man was still intrinsically the same, but for the time being, at any rate, he had been bluffed over one point in the game. The Saint's trick of hitting back at a catastrophe with a riposte of such incredible audacity that his opponent could never make himself believe that it was nothing but the last desperate resource of a cornered man had worked for the latest of countless similar occasions in his life; even if it really provided no more than a spidery tightrope on which the abyss had still to be crossed. But it had worked; and his swift, decisive action in silencing the girl must have driven it home.

"There is nothing more to say," Graner rapped at him. "We shall take the young lady back with us-that is all."

"Why?"

"I thought we settled that last night," answered Graner stonily. "While you're working for me you will obey all my orders-without argument."

The Saint smiled at him.

"And suppose I don't?"

Graner's hand came out of his pocket.

Simon gazed at the gun with blue eyes full of mockery. He flicked his lighter and held the flame placidly under the end of his cigarette.

"I thought we'd arranged all that," he murmured. "But if you want to go over it again I suppose I can't stop you." He sauntered over to the bed, where he lay down and settled himself comfortably. "If I fix myself like this I shan't hurt myself when I fall down," he explained. "Oh, and there's just one other thing. Before you let off that little popgun and fetch all the hotel in, you must tell me the name of your tailor. I couldn't bear to die without knowing that."

Graner stared down at him without expression.

"You're being ridiculous."

"I was born that way," said the Saint regretfully.

"If you intend to go on like this," Graner said curtly, "we had better consider our arrangement at an end."

The Saint closed his eyes.

"Okay, Reuben. But leave the damsel here when you go out. I could use her."

Graner put the gun back in his pocket. The yellow cane twirled between his fingers for a few seconds' deathly silence. His eyes glistened like moist marbles behind the lenses of his spectacles.

"I am not accustomed to answering impertinent questions," he said grittily, "but on this occasion I will make an exception to save unnecessary trouble. I told you last night that your predecessor had been foolish. I might have explained that the others had been unsuccessful in bringing him back. He still has some property of ours, and we are still looking for him. This girl is his daughter, and she may help us to find him. That is the whole explanation."

"Yeah?" drawled the Saint. "And how much is this ticket worth?"

A new silence blanketed the room, so complete that with his hands clasped behind his head the Saint could hear the ticking of his watch, at the same time as he could hear the girl breathing and the faint rustle of Graner's fingers sliding over his cane. Simon lay still and let the silence spread itself around and have its fun. He might have been asleep.

"What ticket?"

Graner's voice jarred gratingly into the quiet; and Simon opened one eye at him.

"I don't know. But you mentioned it just now."

"That is quite a different matter. It really has nothing to do with what I was telling you."

"It seemed to be pretty important when Lauber was talking about it last night!"

The silence fell back again, almost substantial in its intenseness, as though the room were filled with some deadening material through which a few slight and insignificant sounds penetrated from a great distance. And then, as if to give the lie to the illusion, it was horribly shattered-not by any noise from inside the room, but by the ear-piercing shriek of the locomotive which runs through Santa Cruz between the quarries and the mole, dragging rocks to a break­water that never gets any nearer to completion.

"In a way that is true." Graner's delayed response cut into a momentary hiatus in the din. "When he ran away, Joris also took with him a lottery ticket which we had all subscribed to buy --"

"That's a lie!"

Christine flung the accusation at him while he was still speaking; and Graner's gaze turned to her with an icy malignance.

"My dear girl --"

The locomotive, coming nearer, let out another eldritch screech which might have come from a soul in torment that was being tormented conveniently close to a powerful microphone. The Saint covered his ears.

Graner was saying: "The ticket won quite a small prize, but naturally we had no wish to lose it --"

"He's lying --"

"My dear Christine, I should advise you to be more careful of your tongue --"

"He's lying, he's lying!" The girl was shaking Simon's shoulder. "You mustn't believe him. It won the first prize-it won fifteen million pesetas --"

The engine seemed to be almost under the window; and the engineer, warming to his work, was letting out a series of toots with scarcely a second between them. If the makers of the whistle had set out to create a synthetic reproduction of the nerve racking squeak of a knife blade on a plate amplified fifty thousand times, they couldn't have succeeded more brilliantly. It was a screaming, torturing, agonising, indescribably fiendish cacophony that seemed to tear the flesh and drive stabbing needles through the eardrums. Perhaps it was just loud enough to attract the attention of a Canary Islander and induce him to move out of the way.

"Don't all talk at once," said the Saint. "I can't hear the music."

"He's lying!" Christine's voice was broken and in­coherent. "Oh God-can't you see it? He'd lie to anybody!"

The Saint opened both eyes.

"Are you lying, Graner?" he asked quietly.

"The exact amount of the prize isn't material --"

"In other words, you are lying."

Graner licked his lips.

"Certainly not. Why should I be? I should think it was more obvious that this girl is lying to try and win your sympathy."

Simon sat up. The locomotive was puffing away down the mole, its ear-splitting squeals growing mercifully fainter as they receded into the distance.

"I'll tell you what I think," he said. "I heard on the boat coming down here that the Christmas lottery had been won in Tenerife, and when I was knocking about the town yesterday somebody told me that no one had been able to find out who had got it. That makes Christine's story sound more likely than yours-not to mention that I can't see why everybody should be in such a stew about this ticket if it wasn't worth much. In this room, about the first thing you wanted to ask her was where the ticket was. You didn't seem half so excited about the stones that this predecessor of mine is supposed to have knocked off. Lauber wasn't worried about them, either-all he was talking about last night was the ticket. And the others must have been pretty worked up about it, too, or he wouldn't have been talking about it to them in that tone of voice. In fact, you want to tell me that this ticket that everybody's turning handsprings about is really just chicken feed. Which just smells like good ripe sausage to me. So that makes you a part of a liar, anyway."

Graner stared at him malevolently, but there was no answer that he could make. The Saint's relentless logic had nailed him up in a corner from which there simply wasn't a back exit. And Simon Templar knew it.

"Well?"

The Saint's crisp monosyllable drove in another nail that made Graner's head jerk back.

"I may have minimised the value of the ticket a little --"

"Or in plain language, you're just a God-damn liar! So now we know where we are. That's the first point. . . . Point two: this predecessor of mine-what did you call him-Joris?-this guy Joris has got the ticket. I can believe that, from the way all of you have been behaving. And it doesn't seem to matter very much to me who it originally belonged to. Having once been pinched, it becomes anybody's boodle; because somebody's got to pinch it back before they can get any profit out of it. That's what you and your precious gang were trying to do. And you were trying to cut me out!"

2 Graner's hand went to his breast pocket and took out his perfumed handkerchief.

"You didn't contribute to buying the ticket."

"I haven't seen any proof yet that you did, either," retorted the Saint. "But I've told you that that isn't the point. That ticket is out on the loose now, and you'd have a job to prove that it didn't belong to anybody who'd got it. The point is that you and your boys are looking for it, and you wanted to save my share."

"It has no connection with your work."

"Nor has opening safes. But Felson told me I came in for a share of everything you did, and I want to know why you were being so smart and cagey about this."

It was a shot in the dark that Simon had to take, although it was a fairly safe one. And it didn't make Graner blink.

"This is something that happened before you joined us," he said.

"But getting hold of the ticket again isn't," said the Saint. "It hasn't happened yet."

Graner went up and down on his toes. The vicious lines around his mouth had deepened; and if his eyes had possessed any lethal power the Saint would have been burned to a cinder by that time.

"In due course," he said, "the subject would probably have been mentioned --"

"Oh, Reuben darling!"

Graner made a brusque gesture.

"It was my idea to do so," he said, "but the others objected."

"I thought all your orders had to be obeyed without question."

"This was a matter of policy, not of organisation."

"So you let them talk you round."

"I had to admit that there seemed to be justice in their arguments --"

"I'll bet that wasn't difficult for you." The Saint rolled over on his elbow to douse his cigarette in an ash tray; and then his relentless blue eyes went back to the other's face. "So once again we know where we stand. You've already given up pretending you aren't a liar. Now you're going to give up pretending you aren't a cheap double-crossing skunk as well."

A dark flush appeared in Graner's sunken cheeks. He took a step towards the bed, and the stick moved in his hand.

Simon watched him without batting an eyelid.

"If you hit me again," he said gently, "I can assure you it'll hurt you more than it hurts me,"

Their stares crossed like swords. Graner's face was twisted with rage, but the Saint was smiling. It was only the shadow of a smile, but it matched the reckless, derision in his eyes.

It did something more. It gave vent to the chortle of delirious ecstasy that was swelling up inside him until his ribs ached with the strain of keeping it under control. He had to use half his muscles to keep himself from laughing in Graner's face. The tables had been turned in a way that thousands of spiritualists would have given their back teeth to achieve, if they had any back teeth. The Saint had bluffed on an empty hand against an opponent who, he knew, held at least three aces; and he was scooping the kitty away from under Graner's long nose. In fifteen or twenty minutes he had slammed Reuben Graner down from dominating the situation to trying feebly to make excuses. The unpredictable suddenness and violence of his attack had swept the other off his feet in the first exchanges, and since then the Saint hadn't let up for an instant. His voice went on, stabbing in blow after blow with the crackling precision of a machine gun, never giving Graner a second's pause in which to recover his wind.

"You thought you saw your chance to cut me out of my share of fifteen million pesetas, and you grabbed at it. That's the truth, isn't it? And that's my intro­duction to the privileges of joining up with your lousy outfit. I'm supposed to take that home with me and put it in the bank. You couldn't have thought up anything better, Reuben. So next time it's a matter of splitting up any boodle I'll just have to tell myself I don't have to worry. Reuben's a good guy. He's always been a square shooter. He proved it the first day I was with him. I don't have anything more to worry about. Like hell I don't!"

The flush washed itself slowly out of Graner's cheeks and left them pasty. The hand with the stick in it sank down to his side, and his weight settled down on his heels.

He cleared his throat.

"You may have some justification," he said thickly. "But I've told you-I protested about it, and I was overruled. The others have been with me for a good many years, and naturally they have some influence --"

"That's still a lie," said the Saint dispassionately. "But we've already dealt with that. The question you've got to answer is-where do we go from here?"

"Naturally I shall take it up with the others as soon as we get back to the house --"

"And naturally you'll cook up a few more fairy tales as soon as you get the chance. Let's have some more truth before you lose the habit again. Where is this Joris guy?"

"I have no idea."

"Well, what are your ideas?"

"I fail to see --"

"Give your gig lamps a wipe over. Are we through or are we not?"

Graner's stick rattled on the floor, beating a nerv­ous tattoo on the tiles.

"I am beginning to think that that would be the best solution."

"Just as you like." The Saint stood up. "I've told you what I think about that. The door's behind you, and nobody's holding you back. But this girl stays here. If there's a fifteen-million-peseta lottery ticket knocking around Santa Cruz, and she's one of the clues, I'll keep her. I saw her first, anyway. . . . And you can take that hand out of your pocket again. If you emptied two of those little toys into me I'd still wring your skinny neck before I went out."

Graner's finger was itching on the trigger, and Simon Templar had no illusions about it. But his poise didn't waver by so much as a fraction of an inch. He simply stood there, his hands on his hips and his shoul­ders lined wide and sinewy against the murky sky out­side the window, looking down at Graner with care­less, unimpressed blue eyes and that shadow of a sar­donic smile on his lips. He knew exactly the strength of the new hand he had dealt himself, and he was ready to take a few chances to make it better while the cards were running his way.

"I don't want to do anything like that," Graner said at last. "If you are prepared to let me put this misunderstanding right --"

"I see." Simon's answer came back like a gunshot. "So you've got some good reason for wanting to keep me if you can."

"If you think you are indispensable --"

"If I wasn't something like that, why didn't you shoot me ten minutes ago?"

"Naturally I want you, if it can be arranged. That is why you were sent for."

"And why was that so urgent?"

The glimpse of an outlet did just what the Saint meant it to do. It made Graner grab for it like a fish going for a baited hook.

"That is easier to answer. As you know, Felson and another of my men, Holby, are in Madrid on business. The wife of the American ambassador there has some jewels which we have been interested in for some time. If everything goes according to plan, my men will be arriving here with them on Sunday, when, of course, we shall need you."

The Saint drew a deep silent breath. So a few more things were being explained. It was like scratching bits of gold out of a rock seam with a toothpick, but all the time he was getting somewhere. He thought about that for a moment, and stopped thinking again. The thoughts he had made him feel a trifle lightheaded. First a fifteen-million-peseta lottery ticket. Then Graner's amazing collection of stolen jewels. Then the jewels of the wife of the American ambassador in Madrid, just for good measure-although the last he had seen of Messrs Felson and Holby made their ar­rival as per schedule seem rather less probable than Graner fondly believed. But the sum total of what he was adding up began to make it seem as if he had butted into a thieves' picnic that made Ali Baba and his forty stooges look like so many scroungers in abandoned ash cans.

He lighted another cigarette and sat down again.

"That's a start, anyway," he murmured. "Let's keep the ball rolling. Give me the rest of the dope about this guy Joris and the lottery ticket-and give it me straight this time."

Graner laid his cane down on the dressing table and took out his cigar case. He fitted a fresh cigar into his amber holder. Simon knew that he was playing for a breathing spell, weighing one thing against another; and this time he let Graner work it out his own way. He knew that it could have only one result.

"If it will help to rectify your unfortunate impres­sion of our methods," Graner said, "it may be best to be candid with you. I do not know where Joris is. He escaped from the house last night, taking his daughter and the lottery ticket. We discovered their absence soon afterwards, and Lauber and Palermo and Aliston went after them to bring them back. They would probably have been able to do this if some confeder­ates of Joris, whom we knew nothing about, had not arrived in the nick of time and interfered. Joris and his accomplices escaped, but Palermo took a note of the car in which they went off, which was quite conspicuous. As soon as they reported to me, I sent my chauffeur, Manoel, to search Santa Cruz for the car. He found it outside this hotel, but he had a breakdown on his way back and did not arrive until after you had gone to bed. It was then too late to do anything; but first thing this morning I sent Palermo and Aliston down here to do what they could. They telephoned me that they had discovered that Joris and some other man, probably this confederate of his, had stayed at the hotel the night before, but they had left very early in the morning without leaving any address. That is as much as any of us know."

Simon leaned back and trickled puffs of smoke towards the ceiling, sorting the story out in his mind. Certainly it explained the car which had arrived at the house when he was undressing. Also it explained the absence of Aliston and Palermo at breakfast time. And in a way it explained what he had heard of Graner's telephone conversation at breakfast, as well as the interruption that had intervened in time to save the Saint from having to demonstrate his skill as a diamond cutter, and Graner's agitation when he returned to the workroom. All of those things fitted in very nicely and neatly.

But at the same time it let loose a cataract of new questions. It didn't explain why Graner's gang hadn't found Hoppy and Joris, once they had got that far. It didn't explain why Hoppy Uniatz hadn't answered the telephone a little more than half an hour ago. It reaped one crop of enigmas, and left whole rows of freshly germinating riddles sprouting up behind it that made the Saint feel as if his universe had been turned upside down.

His eyes raked Graner like rapiers from under lazily drooping lids, skinned him alive and turned his soul inside out. But for the first time he was convinced that Graner was telling the truth as far as he knew it. He couldn't have invented a new fairy tale like that, on the spur of the moment, that matched so flawlessly with all the circumstances-or if he could, he was an immortal genius to whom the Saint was prepared to erect an altar. Graner couldn't have been bluffing. It wasn't humanly plausible. After the treading out he had just undergone, he couldn't have revived with such supernatural speed. The fight had been licked out of him as effectively as if the Saint had been using his solar plexus for a punching bag ever since they started talking. Later on, yes, given even half an hour in which to pull himself together and iron the knots out of his crafty and vindictive brain-yes, then, by all means, he could be reckoned as crooked and slip­pery as ever, if not more so. The Saint had no illu­sions about that. The settling of accounts between them hadn't even started. But Graner wasn't in any condition to start faking the audit there and then. Simon was ready to gamble his life on it.

Therefore there must have been some other auxiliary explanation. And there was only one such expla­nation that came into the Saint's head. It came flying out of the great voids of space like a comet, crashing resistless through all the narrow mathematical orbits of logic, dazzling him with a sudden blaze of light that exploded like a bomb in the darkness through which he had been trying to grope his way. And yet it was so paralysingly simple that he could have gaped at himself for not having seen it before.

If Graner wasn't lying, there was only one possible inference. Somebody else was.

3 Simon Templar sat and gasped inaudibly at his own genius. It must have deserved the name, for the intuitive deduction had cut straight through his conscious reasoning. Afterwards his brain had to catch up with it, plodding laboriously over the steps that inspiration had taken in its winged stride. But every step was there, and no deliberate testing he could think of would shake them. The whole solution was one solid and articulated structure, fitting all the foundations of known fact and spanning all the gaps that had puz­zled him so irritatingly before.

The cigarette smouldered down between his fingers while his mind raced on from there.

He knew that Aliston and Palermo had taken Hoppy and Joris. It was the one link that made everything else fit together. How it had been done remained to be discovered, though he could make a few guesses. But he knew that that was what had happened. He knew it as surely as he knew that Lauber had got the ticket.

That was how it had all started. The idea must have come into Lauber's head first, when he awakened in the car on the way back to the house with his brain hazy from the aftereffects of Mr Uniatz' treatment. Lauber would have made the natural efforts of a man recovering consciousness to reconstruct the events which had led up to the black-out. There had been a fight, he would remember, and somebody had hit him over the head. What had happened to the others? Of course, they had already been incapacitated. They had been fighting the intruders while he was still dealing with Joris. . . . He had been searching Joris' pock­ets, looking for a ticket. . . . He'd found the ticket, hadn't he? ... Well, what else had happened? The others would tell him what had happened, and Lauber would have pieced the fragmentary accounts together. But he'd got the ticket, hadn't he? He would have felt in his pocket. Yes, it was there. . . . And at that moment the brilliant idea had probably dawned on him. He'd got the ticket, but none of the others knew he'd got it. They'd been too busy fighting. And the fight had ended with the intruders getting away with Joris and Christine. Why shouldn't they have got away with the ticket as well? The argument must have carried Lauber away on the instant with its surpassing sim­plicity. All he had to do was to let the others go on believing that Joris still had the ticket-and when his head had stopped aching enough for him to pick a suitable opportunity, he, Lauber, could slide off into the wide world with two million dollars that he didn't have to share with anybody.

It was all so transparent that the Saint could analyse Lauber's mental processes as accurately as if they had been printed on the wall in front of his eyes. And it was proved-proved up to the hilt by the announce­ment he had heard Lauber making which had almost knocked him off his feet as he entered Graner's house the night before.

Only that the others hadn't been quite so credulous as Lauber had expected. Lauber's statement had clearly come in the middle of an argument in which he was being accused of double-crossing, and it was probably the same argument that had gone on far into the night. In the end, Lauber must somehow have managed to get himself acquitted for the time being; otherwise it was doubtful whether he would have been taking breakfast. Almost certainly he would have been searched, but certainly he would have contrived to hide the ticket by that time, which would have gone some way towards blocking a definite verdict against him. So for a while he had at least managed to get himself left alone, although his conscience might be making him feel less confident about choosing a mo­ment for his getaway than he had anticipated.

But the idea he had started hadn't finished there. The seed must have taken root in either Palermo's or Aliston's imagination; and on the way down to the town that morning one of them would have made a proposition. If there was going to be any double-crossing, they might as well look after themselves. Joris was still a key man in the situation, wherever the lottery ticket was. If they found him, why should they be in a hurry to share him out before they knew how the rest of the deal was going? There was still time to locate the ticket, whether or not they had been wrong about Lauber-and in any case a fifty-fifty divi­sion was twice as good as a four-way split. . . .

The Saint's glow of delight deepened as the colours and details developed in the picture. When he had inwardly labelled the party a thieves' picnic a few moments ago he hadn't realised what a perfect summary of the situation it was.

"In that case, I suppose Joris and his pal have gone off to cash the ticket," he said, principally because he felt that he had to say something after all that time.

"If they have done that, they will have been intercepted," answered Graner. "I have had one of my servants posted outside the shop where the ticket was bought ever since it opened this morning. The ticket cannot be cashed anywhere else."

And the gorgeous complications of the tangle went on tracing their fantastic convolutions in the Saint's mind.

Lauber knew where the ticket was; but he didn't know what had happened to Joris and Christine, and he knew that for the present it certainly wasn't safe for him to try and cash it. Palermo and Aliston knew where Joris was; but they didn't know what had hap­pened to the ticket or to Christine. Graner knew where Christine was, and he might hope to find something out from her; but he didn't know yet what had hap­pened to Joris and the ticket. Every one of them held some of the cards, and every one of them was com­pletely in the dark about the others. And presumably every one of them was prepared to cut anybody else's throat to fill his own hand or keep what he already held. The intrusion of that two-million-dollar scrap of paper had blown the esprit de corps of the gang to smithereens and opened up the way for what must have been one of the wildest and most unscrupulous free-for-all, dog-eat-dog dissensions that the history of crime could ever have known. ...

"Your servant doesn't know what this pal of Joris' looks like," Simon pointed out. "Or does he?"

Graner's slit of a mouth almost smiled.

"He would scarcely need to. If anyone presented that ticket for payment, the whole street would know about it."

Not, Simon was reflecting, that he had too much to crow about himself. He held tantalising portions of all the cards, and didn't have a single complete one to himself. He knew that Lauber had got the ticket, but he didn't know where; he knew that Palermo and Aliston had got Joris and Hoppy, but he didn't know what they had done with them; he knew that Christine was there beside him, but he knew that Graner was just as much there. And within something like the next ten seconds he had got to plan out a definite campaign sequence that would take in all those points."

"Joris won't be there, and you know it," said Christine. "Because he hasn't got the ticket."

"You mean you have it?" Graner said slowly.

"Neither of us has got it, I told you. It was st --"

"Wait a minute," interrupted the Saint. "Let's take this in order. What did happen last night?"

She looked at him sullenly.

"You ought to know."

"Not me, darling," said the Saint easily. "I'm a new recruit. I wasn't in that party."

"Who were these other two men who interfered?" said Graner.

She didn't answer at once, and Graner turned to the Saint.

"We're wasting time here," he snapped. "The car's outside-we had better take her back to the house at once. When we get there we shall be able to make her answer questions."

"Try and take me there," she said.

She had had time to recover from her first terror, and the hard jaunty pose of which Simon had seen a glimpse the night before was beginning to cover her again. It was as if a brittle shell formed over her that shut out all the other side of her nature which he had seen when she wept over Joris. She seemed to gather herself together with an effort to shake off the spell of Graner's pitiless beady eyes. Suddenly she took a step away from the wall, and Graner's hand shot out and caught her wrist.

"If you try to stop me," she said steadily, "I'll make enough noise to bring everyone in the hotel up here."

Graner glanced at the Saint. Simon knew exactly what the glance was intended to convey. He had demonstrated his resourcefulness in a similar situation before, and it was his cue to repeat the performance. But just as he had known what he was doing then, he knew what he was doing now.

He got up off the bed; but it was Graner's wrist that he took hold of, closing his fingers on it in a ring of steel that numbed the nerves and sinews. He laid the flat of his hand on Graner's face and pushed him back against the door.

"You mind your own business, Reuben," he said paternally.

He had turned round with the movement so that his back was towards Christine, and as he spoke his left eyelid drooped in a broad wink.

"And I'll have your gun-in case you're still feeling nasty," he added.

He took the weapon out of Graner's pocket and transferred it to his own, and as he did so he glared at him warningly and winked again. Graner stared back at him without a change in the venomous glitter of his eyes, but the Saint took no notice. He locked the door and took out the key and gave it to Christine.

"Listen," he said. "You've got nothing to worry about. This punk won't lay a hand on you again while I'm around. We'll peel him off the door and let you out any time you want to go. But I wish you'd stop and talk for a few minutes more. I'm just working round to a proposition that might interest you." She hesitated. The Saint's back was towards Graner now, and he gave Christine the same encouraging wink and pushed her gently towards the bed.

"Sit down and have a drink," he said. "You look as if you needed one. And just let me talk for three minutes. You can still scream your head off if anyone tries to stop you going out after that."

"You can't say anything that I want to listen to."

"Don't be too sure, darling. I have beautiful ideas sometimes."

He left her and went across the room to rummage in one of his suitcases. It yielded a bottle of whiskey -and something which no one else saw him pick up.

"It's like this," said the Saint, as he poured out three glasses. "You say you've lost your lottery ticket. Well, things like that do happen. People lose jewelry, and so forth. They don't often lose two million bucks' worth at one go, but that doesn't alter the general principle. When they lose something and they want it back, they mostly offer a reward."

"They don't offer a reward to the thieves who stole it.'

"Even that has been known to happen."

The Saint squirted soda into the glasses and picked up two of them. He carried one of them over to Graner, and as he gave it to him he winked again. He handed the other to Christine. Then he went back to the table and picked up his own.

"In any case," he resumed, "the question doesn't arise. I didn't steal your ticket-if I'd got it, I shouldn't be messing around here. Surely you're not going to say that if I got it back for you I shouldn't be entitled to a commission?"

She took another drink from her glass, watching him rather perplexedly.

"Now if you've been listening to my recent chat with Reuben," Simon went on, "you'll have gathered that he hasn't been playing ball with me. So if he's ready to double-cross me, I'm quite ready to do some double-crossing on my own. From what I've made out, there are Reuben and three other guys up at the house wait­ing for a split in this ticket. Then there are a couple more in Madrid who'll probably expect to be cut in. And at least a couple of minor thugs who may be worth one share between them. So the best I can hope for is to come in for an eighth, even if they don't try to gyp me out of that. And you don't get anything."

He moved a little towards her. She drank again, and leaned her head back against the end of the bed. Once or twice her eyes closed, and she seemed to make an effort to open them.

"You're a nice kid, Christine, and I wouldn't mind doing something for you-if it doesn't cost me anything. From what I hear, there are only three other people in your outfit: Joris and his two pals. Well, if you cut me in there, including yourself, I'd be due for a fifth, which looks a whole lot better to me. If that looks like a proposition to you, you just say the word and I'll wring this bum Graner's neck. . . ."

The girl's head slid suddenly sideways, and Simon Caught the glass from her hand before it fell.

He put it on the table and eased her gently down until she was lying on the bed. She lay there limp and relaxed, breathing evenly and peacefully, with her eyes closed, as if she were in a natural sleep. Simon studied her for a few moments; and then he turned round to Graner with a flash of triumph in his eyes.

"What you've been needing in your outfit all along, Reuben," he said kindly, "is a little less melodrama and a lot more of my brains."

V How Reuben Graner Took Back His Gun, and a Taxi Driver Was Unconvinced REUBEN GRANER stepped delicately up to the bed and gazed down at the girl for a while without expression, tapping his mouth with the chased gold knob of his cane.

Presently he looked at the Saint.

"Yes, that was good," he said complacently. "Otherwise we might have had some trouble."

He reached over for the telephone.

"What d'you think you're doing now?" asked the Saint.

"Sending for the others to come down and fetch her."

Simon stretched out a long arm and put his finger on the hook.

"Ixnay," he said succinctly. "D'you still want to turn the hotel upside down, or are you just daft?"

"There will be no excitement," said Graner, "When I sent Palermo and Aliston down this morning, they had two large trunks to carry the luggage they expected to bring back. They can bring one of the trunks down again. You have told the hotel you are leaving, and one extra trunk will not disturb them unduly."

So that was how it had been done, Simon reflected. He had been wondering about that point-it was hardly conceivable that two unconscious men could have been dragged out of the Hotel Orotava into the main square of Santa Cruz in broad daylight without starting a train of gossip that Palermo and Aliston would have been the last to desire. He didn't know about Joris, but he would have bet that Hoppy Uniatz would never have gone out on his own feet. Graner's explanation had cleared up another minor mystery.

The Saint kept his satisfaction to himself. He took the telephone out of Graner's hand and hung it up again.

"As I was saying," he remarked, "you still need a lot more of my brains."

Graner's stony eyes settled on his face.

"Why?"

"What d'you think would happen if you took her back to the house?"

"She would be persuaded to tell us what she knew."

"That's what you think."

"I can assure you there would be no question about that," Graner said significantly.

Simon's gaze dissected him contemptuously.

"If I'm right about what you're thinking," he said, "you can forget it again. That's something I don't stand for. But in any case you're talking like a fool as well as a louse. Did you ever invent any way of proving whether anyone was telling the truth when they were being what you call persuaded?"

"It would be proved eventually."

"Now you're talking like a spick, on top of everything else. Why wait for 'eventually'-whenever that is? Hasn't it occurred to you that Joris wouldn't have ditched his daughter here? If there's anything in this party that looks certain to me, it's that Joris will get in touch with her again, sooner or later. Maybe he'd have done it already if he hadn't seen your car outside."

Graner's face hardened with concentration. The thoughts that were going on under the mask were unreadable, but the Saint didn't need to read them. He could make a pretty good guess about Graner's next reaction; and he was perfectly right.

"There is something in what you say. Perhaps it would be better to leave her here for the present. I will tell Palermo to come down and watch her, and we can go back to the house."

He reached out again for the telephone; but the Saint laughed amicably and put his arm aside.

"Not so quickly, Reuben," he murmured. "You seem to have forgotten that you and I still have a few things to settle."

Graner's stare fastened rigidly on him again. The Saint felt it without looking up to meet it. He was engaged in tapping a cigarette on his thumbnail.

"I thought they had been settled," Graner said at length.

"By your admitting that you've been double-crossing me?"

"That will be put right as soon as we get back to the house."

"With somebody else's gun, or have you got another one of your own?"

"Obviously we must have some confidence in each other."

"And a hell of a lot of confidence you've given me for a start!"

The Saint's blue eyes switched suddenly back to Graner's face, very clear and cool and disparaging. This was the crucial moment of the plan of compaign which the urgent necessity of the moment had whipped out of his brain, the reason why he had induced Christine to take that expertly doctored drink, the only reason which had deprived him of the more elementally attractive solution of hitting Reuben Graner smartly on the nose and taking Christine away with an open declaration of war.

Half-a-dozen other solutions had whirled through his brain in the few seconds that he had been able to allow himself to think, and he had discarded all of them. Christine remained the one snag that had to be overcome. If he had proposed to take her up to the house when she was conscious, her reaction against him would probably have given him away. If she were taken up to the house at all, and she had to answer any questions there, her answers would probably give him away in any case. And finally, to clinch the matter, the Saint had no intention of throwing her on the mercy of Graner's gang on any account; if Graner once had them both shut up together in that fortress of a house, the situation would take quite a different angle-Simon had a cold-blooded conviction about that. And yet he had to find a way of assuring Christine's safety and his own, without putting his own cards on the table. For if he did that, he was cut off irrevocably from any direct contact with Aliston and Palermo, who knew where Joris and Hoppy were, and Lauber, who knew what had become of the ticket. It was like walking a mental tightrope with a fatal drop waiting on either side; but the Saint had to find his way across.

He put the cigarette in his mouth and struck his lighter without shifting his gaze.

"This girl is my insurance policy," he said. "So long as I've got her, you've got to shoot square with me. And if you are shooting square, you don't have to be in such a damn hurry to get me locked up again in your house."

"But if she is going to be questioned --"

"I've told you-she isn't. But she'll talk of her own accord, which is worth twice as much."

Graner went on watching him.

"Why should she?"

"Take a look at me. And then look in the mirror." The Saint smoothed his dark hair. "There's no comparison, Reuben, though I says it myself. Maybe a blind man would open his heart to you, but nobody else would. And much the same thing goes for those other beauties you've got at home. Besides which, she knows you all too well. But don't you see what I've done?"

Graner made no answer, which Simon wasn't ex­pecting of him anyway. The Saint went on, in the same calm, confident tone: "When I put her to sleep I was talking about double-crossing you and joining up with her party. When she wakes up I can go on with the same line. I can tell her I put her to sleep just to get a chance to talk to you. In fact, I can tell her everything we've said-with the explanation that all my side of it was just a fairy tale to keep you happy and get you out of here."

The words came from the Saint's lips without the waver of an inflection, without a falter, without a flicker of doubt in the level candour of his gaze. And all the time he was holding on to himself with both hands and feeling his heart leaping up and down just behind his tonsils. He had bluffed as much as any living man in his time; but he was inclined to doubt whether he had ever in his career of hairbreadth adventure gambled on such a magnificent impudence as that. Even the bluff with which he had used Christine's presence in his room to turn the tables on Graner in the first place paled beside it.

And yet he knew that it must work again, simply because Graner or anybody else couldn't have helped being convinced that a man who was afraid of that suspicion could never have found the nerve to bring it out before anyone else had evolved it. Things like that simply didn't happen-they were outside the limit of human psychology and human insolence. What the Saint's opponents could never realise was that the Saint himself was just as far outside those rules and limitations. He was the one adventurer of his age to whom no audacity was too fantastic; and nine times out of ten his audacities went unchallenged because no one with a less daring imagination could credit them.

Graner said, quite mildly: "All the same, we don't know that you might not be tempted if she did agree to the proposition you were making."

"You know it for any amount of reasons. What's the difference between a fifth of two million dollars and an eighth? A hundred and fifty thousand. Well, you showed me the inside of your safe. If that's the scale you do business on, would I be mug enough to throw in my share of your prospects for a hundred and fifty thousand? How far should I get on my own, without anyone to help me? I don't know the town and I don't know the people and I don't speak the language. And how should I get away with it if I did double-cross you? There's only one way out of Tenerife as far as I know-that harbour down there. And am I sap enough to think that I'd ever get on board a boat if I'd double-crossed you and your outfit was looking for me?"

Graner inspected the end of his cigar-it was burn­ing a trifle unevenly, and he moistened the tip of one finger to damp the part that was burning too fast.

"I'm on the level with you," said the Saint, "and I'm ready to stay that way, because I know you've got more to offer than a share in a lottery ticket.

But after the way you've started, I want to be sure that you're on the level with me before I take any more chances. If this turns out all right, we'll call it quits and keep going. All of which is aside from the fact that I can get a hell of a lot more out of this girl by making love to her and kidding her that I'm on her side than you ever will with your ideas of per­suading. . . . Anyway, that's the deal I'm offering; and if you don't like it you can have the key and walk out just as soon as it suits you."

Outside the window, the locomotive announced its return journey with a fresh outburst of hideous brain-searing shrieks. An unsilenced motorcycle crackled and spluttered like an inexhaustible machine gun while its rider howled his greetings to some friends two blocks away, who howled back with no less enthusiasm at him. A couple of ancient buses groaned through the square with a noise like a thousand tin cans being rattled together in a riveting yard. About forty taxis sustained an intermittent blasting on their peculiarly obnoxious horns. A tram ground and thundered up the slope, ringing a bell continuously. A knife grinder blew his mournful whistle. A donkey threw up its head and let out its sobbing asthmatic song. Apart from those echoes of the Elysian tranquillity of Santa Cruz, there was absolute silence in the room for some time.

Simon didn't try to hurry the decision. Actually, there was only one way it could possibly be made. But what really mattered was the atmosphere.

Graner looked at him again.

"If you still want to be satisfied about me, I take it that you would have no objection to satisfying me about yourself."

"How?"

"By letting me look after your passport."

Without a second's hesitation, the Saint took it out of his pocket. It was a perfectly good passport, and it was made out in the name of Sebastian Tombs.

Graner glanced at it and placed it carefuly in his wallet. The possession of it made a subtle difference to his manner; and the Saint knew that for that mo­ment at any rate Graner was convinced. The immortal gorgeousness of the reversal made his ribs ache. It must have been years since anyone had stood up to Graner like that, since anyone had taken him apart and flattened him out with such sublime completeness; and when Simon thought about how he had done it he wanted to roll on the bed in a rapture of cosmic mirth that was too deep and soul-shaking for ordinary laughter. But he didn't. Instead, he crowned the peak of his inspiration with the last and most superb auda­city of all.

He produced Graner's automatic and held it care­lessly out to him, butt foremost.

"You'd better have this too," he said gravely.

It was the climax. The man who could have re­mained unimpressed by a gesture like that would have been superhuman. It left Graner stripped of every other argument.

Graner put the gun away and picked up his cane. He looked down at Christine again for another moment.

"How long will that keep her quiet?"

"I gave her enough for about half an hour." Simon took the key and unlocked the door. "You'd better be on your way."

He accompanied Graner down the stairs. There was still the hall to be passed, and the wavy-haired boy who might smash everything again with two or three words; and the Saint sent up a silent prayer as they descended the last flight.

As his foot came off the last step he said: "Directly anything breaks, I'll call you. Is your phone number in the directory?"

"Yes."

"And if you or any of the boys think of anything brilliant, you'll find me here." The Saint's lazy stride was deceptive: it covered the distance between the stairway and the door without the waste of a second, although to him it seemed much too slow. "In any case, we'll keep in touch."

"Yes." Graner checked at the door. "By the way, what about your room?"

"I'll tell them I'm staying-there is somebody here who speaks English." Simon took his arm and pressed him on. "The point is that you've got to get your car out of the way before it puts the wind up Joris and his pals-if it hasn't done that already."

From the front entrance there was a flight of steps down to the street. The Saint stood at the top of the flight and watched Graner all the way down before his breathing really became normal again.

2 He turned and went back into the hotel with the humour dancing again in his eyes. And yet he wasn't letting himself be led astray by a single overoptimistic delusion. He had only taken the first round, and there were a hell of a lot still to go. But the joy was to be in the fight, to be playing a lone hand in the most dangerous game in the world, the game which meant more to him than his own life.

He went up to the desk and buttonholed the wavy-haired boy.

"I am not leaving today," he said in fluent Spanish. "So you need not worry about making out that bill. . . . There is something else. It is possible that some­body may be making enquiries about me here. If they aren't enquiring about me, they may be enquiring about the lady for whom I took the room next to me last night."

"Si, seńor. I will tell them."

"That's just what you won't do. If anybody starts asking any questions, you'll remember that I have nothing to do with the lady next door. I don't know, her. I have never heard of her. I didn't bring her here. żComprende?"

"Si, seńor."

"Apart from that, you will not talk about me at all. Except that if anybody mentions it, you can say that I don't speak Spanish."

"Pero usted --"

"I know. I speak it better than you do, but I don't want anyone to know. żEstamos ?"

"Si, seńor."

Simon spread a hundred-peseta note on the counter.

"Perhaps that will help you to remember," he said, and went upstairs.

In his room, Christine was still sleeping, but he only glanced at her. He went across to the window and looked down through the shutters into the square. Graner's car was just driving off, and Simon realised that Graner himself must have taken the wheel, for the chauffeur stood on the pavement and watched the car move away. Then he strolled across to the opposite side of the plaza, propped himself up against the corner of the Casino building among the other idlers who were standing around, unfolded a newspaper from his pocket, and began to read.

Simon poured the remainder of Christine's drink into the washbasin, and picked up Graner's glass, which had been left untouched.

Then he remembered that he had been so confident in his deduction of what had happened to Hoppy and Joris that he hadn't even troubled to check up on it. He put the glass down and went out again.

The door of Hoppy's room was not locked. Simon went in and found the key on the inside. The room was empty, as he had expected. Mr Uniatz' pajamas formed a palpitating splodge of colour on the bed that Joris had slept in, and the old man's clothes were gone. Simon surveyed the rest of the room without finding any other clues. There were no traces even of a mild scrimmage; but the one mysterious fact was a tray laid with two breakfasts which stood on the table. Nothing on it had been touched. Simon frowned at it for some moments before the explanation dawned on him. He leaned over the bed and rang for the chambermaid.

She arrived promptly after he had rung three times.

"Did you see my friend when you brought the breakfast?" he asked.

"No, seńor."

"żComo que no?"

"Because another gentleman took it. He had on a white coat like a camarero, and he said that he wanted to take it in for a joke. I gave him the tray, and I went away when he was knocking."

"Was he a little man with a small moustache and a black eye?"

"No, he was tall and fair, like an Englishman. He had a graze on his face."

The Saint nodded slowly. It was simple enough, really-after it had been done.

"I may take the tray?" asked the woman.

"Go ahead. And you can do the room at the same time."

At least there was nothing to be gained by giving her any more to gossip about.

He went back to his own room, and when he opened the door Christine was sitting up. Her mind was still clouded from the aftereffects of the drug he had given her, and he saw the understanding creep gradually into her eyes as she stared at him. He closed the door be­hind him and smiled at her.

"I owe you an apology," he said. "It's the first time I ever gave a girl a drink like that."

She shook her head, as if to try and clear away some of the mists from her brain.

"What did you do it for?" she asked huskily.

"It was either that or clipping you under the jaw, and I thought the drink would be kinder," He crossed over to the bed and sat down beside her. "Does it feel very bad?"

She rubbed her eyes stupidly.

"My head's splitting. . . ."

"We can fix that in no time."

He went to his suitcase and found another bottle, from which he tipped a spoonful of powder into a glass of water.

"I keep this for when Hoppy starts complaining about what a good time he had the night before," he explained. "But it's just as good for what you've got."

She looked at the glass without moving.

"There's nothing wrong with it," he said. "If I'd wanted to keep you under I'd have given you some­thing stronger in the first place."

The girl shrugged.

"It doesn't seem to matter," she said. "I'd rather be asleep again than have this head."

He took the glass away from her after she had finished the draught, and put it down. She lay back and closed her eyes again with a grimace, and the Saint lighted a cigarette and left her alone. With the drink he had just given her, the muzziness and the headache would pass off quickly enough.

"I was a fool to drink that whiskey," she muttered. "But you wait till I feel a bit stronger. I'll make a noise then-if you haven't put me to sleep again."

"But you're feeling better already."

"Maybe I'm not going to die, if that's what you mean."

"Then just wait till you're quite sure about it, and we'll go on talking. You can still scream the roof off if you get tired of listening."

"That's what you said before."

"But Reuben was here then."

Her eyes opened, and she looked quickly round the room. Her breath came a little faster.

"Yes-he was here. . . . Where is he?"

"I sent him home."

"Did he have the same sort of drink that I had?"

The Saint shook his head.

"I wouldn't give you the sort of drink I should mix for Reuben if I had a free hand," he said. "No-I just told him to push off and he pushed off. Like a lamb. He's really quite docile when you know how to handle him. Weren't you watching me all the time before you went to sleep?"