The Saint On Guard

1

The headline in the New York World Telegram said:

The story itself was relatively slight for so much black type, but it was adequately padded with a fairly accurate resume of the Saint's career and exploits, or as much of them as had ever become a matter of record; for while the Saint himself was not naturally a modest man, there are certain feats which the dull legislatures of this century do not allow a person to publicise without fear of landing behind iron bars, and Simon Templar preferred bars with bottles to the less convivial kind.

However, the mere fact that the Saint was involved made the item meaty enough from a journalistic standpoint to justify the expenditure of ink, and it is probable that hardly any of the readers felt that the space could have been more stimulatingly and entertainingly employed.

Inspector John Henry Fernack was one very solid exception. He may have been stimulated, in an adrenal way, but he was certainly not entertained. He was, in fact, a rather solemnly angry man. But he had been conditioned by too many previous encounters with Simon Templar's unique brand of modern buccaneering to view the threat of a fresh outbreak without feeling a premonitory ache somewhere in his sadly wise gray head.

He came all the way uptown from Centre Street to the Saint's suite at the Algonquin, and thrust the paper under Simon's nose, and said grimly: "Would you mind telling me just what this means?"

The Saint glanced over it with lazy and bantering blue eyes.

"You mean I should read it to you, or are you just stuck on the longer words?"

"What do you know about iridium?"

"Iridium," said the Saint encyclopedically, "is an element with an atomic weight of 193.1. It is found in platinum ore, and also in lesser quantities in some types of iron and copper ores. In metallurgical practice it is usually combined with platinum, producing an alloy of great hardness and durability, suitable for the manufacture of electrical contacts or for boring holes in policemen's heads."

Fernack breathed deeply and carefully.

"What do you know about this black market?"

Simon ran a hand through his dark hair.

"I know that there is one. There has to be. That isn't any great secret. Iridium is one of the essential metals for war production, and it's awful scarce — so scarce that after Pearl Harbor the price shot up to about four hundred dollars a Troy ounce. The present official price is about a hundred and seventy dollars, or about two thousand bucks a pound, which is still very expensive groceries. If you can get it. But you can't get it."

"You're supposed to get it if you have the proper priority."

"So the Government gives you a pretty license to buy it. They could probably give you a license to buy a web-footed unicorn, too. And then all you have to do is find it."

"What's wrong with the regular markets?"

"They just haven't got it. There never has been much to spare, and the armament boom has just been going through it like a steak through a shipwrecked sailor. And that consignment that was hijacked in Tennessee about a month ago did as much damage as putting an airplane factory oat of production for six months. It wasn't written up that way, but that's what it amounted to."

The incident he referred to had made enough headlines on its own merits, nevertheless. The sheer callous audacity of the job was obvious front-page material, and the value of the loot ranked it with the great robberies of all time.

Three glass-lined quart containers of iridium powder — the usual method of shipping the metal — were being flown from Brazil to the Fort Wayne laboratories of the Uttershaw Mining Company. They were transhipped from Pan American Airways at Miami; and there was another transfer to be made at Nashville, Tennessee. Since the consignment was insured for three hundred thousand dollars, its actual value, there were two armed guards provided by the insurance company to supervise the transhipment at Nashville; but it is certain that no trouble was expected. Perhaps it was because the value of the cargo was only dimly appreciated, in spite of the figures on the policy: iridium was just a word to most people, it wasn't like jewels or bullion or any of the well publicised forms of boodle that automatically bring exciting thoughts to mind. Perhaps the guards were negligent, or merely bored; perhaps the precautions were simply routine, and nobody took the idea of such an attack seriously. Anyway, the result was already history.

A car drove on to the airfield while the case containing the heavy flasks was being unloaded. The two armed guards were shot down before they even realised what was happening, the case was thrown into the car, and the raiders were gone again before any of the spectators had recovered enough to make a move. It had been as simple as that.

Fernack said: "What do you know about that job?"

"Only what I read in the papers."

"You think some of that stolen iridium is finding its way into the black market?"

"I wouldn't drop dead with shock if it was."

"Then it would really be a thieves' market."

"I wouldn't quibble. I imagine you ought to have a priority number even to buy stolen iridium. The point is that it's an illegal market."

"But how could a respectable manufacturer buy in a market like that?"

"Respectable manufacturers have contracts with the Government. They want to fill those contracts, patriotically or for profit or both. If the only way they can get vital materials is that way, any of them are still liable to buy. It's just about as safe as any form of criminal connivance. Only one or two men in the firm would need to know, and iridium is compact and easy to handle in the quantities they use, and it would be the hell of a thing to track down and hang on them individually. So they have some iridium, and none of the workers who are using it is going to ask questions or give a damn where it came from, and maybe they had it in stock all the time."

"How would they set out to buy it?"

The Saint stretched his long legs patiently, and regarded Fernack with kindly tolerance.

"Henry," he said, "this frightful finesse and subtlety of yours is producing the corniest dialogue. You make us remind me of the opening characters in a bad play, carefully telling each other what it's all about so that the audience can get the idea too."

"I didn't—"

"You did. You know just about as much about iridium and the black market and how and why it works as anybody else, but you're feeding me all the wide-eyed questions to see if I'll let something slip that you don't happen to know. Well, you're wasting a lot of time. I hate to tell you, comrade, but you are."

The detective's rugged forthright face reddened a little deep under the skin.

"I want to know who told you to stick your oar into this."

"Nobody. It was something I thought up in my bath."

"If there is anything in this black market story, it's being taken care of—"

"I know. By the proper authorities. How often have I heard that sweet old phrase before?"

"There are proper authorities to take care of anything like that," Fernack said religiously.

Simon nodded with speculative respect.

"Who?"

It was a little pathetic to see Fernack suffer. He ran a finger around under his collar and floundered in the awful pain of a frustrated mastodon.

"Well, the — the different agencies involved. "We're all working with them—"

"That's fine," said the Saint approvingly. "So while we're all clumping around on our great flat feet, I thought I'd stick my little oar in and see what I could do to help."

"How do you think you're helping by trying to make a monkey out of everyone else?"

"Henry, I assure you I never presumed to improve on—"

The detective swallowed.

"In this interview," he blared, "you said that since the authorities apparently hadn't been able to do anything about it yet, you were going to take it in hand yourself."

Simon inclined his head.

"That," he admitted, "is the same thought in judicial language."

"Well, you can't do it!"

"Why not?"

"Because it's — it's—"

"Tell me," said the Saint innocently. "What is the particular law that forbids any public-spirited citizen to do his little bit towards purifying a sinful world?"

"In this interview," Fernack repeated like an overstrained litany, "you said you had a personal inside line that was going to get results very quickly."

"I did."

Fernack tied the newspaper up in his slow powerful fists.

"You realise," he said deliberately, "that if you have any special information, it's your duty to cooperate with the proper agencies?"

"Yes, Henry."

"Well?"

Fernack didn't really mean to blast the challenge at him like a bullet. It was just something that the Saint's impregnable sangfroid did to his blood pressure that lent a catapult quality to his vocal cords.

Simon Templar understood that, broadmindedly, and smiled with complete friendliness.

"If I had any special information," he said, "you might easily persuade me to do my duty."

The detective took a slight pause to answer.

It was as if he lost a little of his chest expansion, and had to find a new foothold for his voice.

When he found it, there was a trace of insecurity in his belligerence.

"Are you trying to tell me that that was just a bluff?"

"I'm trying to tell you."

"You really don't know anything yet?"

The Saint extinguished his cigarette, and shook another or out of the pack beside his hand.

"But," he said gently, "anyone who didn't know that might easily think it was time to get tough with me."

Fernack looked at him for a while from under intent but reluctant brows.

At last he said: "You're just using yourself for bait?"

"I love you, Henry. You're so clever."

"And if you get any nibbles?"

"That will be something else again," said the Saint dreamily; and Fernack began to come back to the boil.

"Why? It isn't any of your business—"

Simon stood up.

"It's my business. It's everybody's business. There are airplanes and tanks and jeeps and everything else being manufactured for this war. They need magnetos and distributors. Magnetos and distributors need iridium. There are millions of wretched people paying taxes and buying bonds and doing everything to pay for them. If they cost twice as much as they should on account of some lousy racket has a corner in the stuff, every penny of that is coming out of the sacrifice of some bloody little jerk who believes he's giving it to his country. If the war production plan is being screwed up because materials are being shunted off where they aren't most urgently needed — if the airplanes and the tanks aren't getting there because some of the parts aren't finished — then there are a lot of poor damn helpless bastards having their guts blown out and dying in the muck so that some crook can buy himself a bigger cigar and keep another bird in a gilded cage. I say that's my business and it's going to be my business."

He was suddenly very tall and strong and — not lazy at all, and there was something in his reckless face of a mocking conquistador that held Fernack silent for a moment, with nothing that seemed to have any point at all to say.

It was just for a moment; and then all the detective's suspicion and resentment welled up again in a defensive reaction that was doubly charged for having so nearly been beguiled. Now I'll tell you something! I've been getting along all right in this town without any Robin Hoods. You've done things for me before this, but everything you've done has been some kind of grief to me. I don't want any more of it. I'm not going to have any more!"

"And exactly how," Simon inquired interestedly, "are you going to stop me?"

"I'm going to have you watched for twenty-four hours a day. I'm going to have this place watched. And if anybody comes near this bait at all, I'm going to know all about them before they've even told you their name."

"What a busy life you are going to lead," said the Saint.

During the next twenty-four hours, exactly thirty-eight persons called at the Algonquin, asked for Mr Templar, were briefly interviewed, and went back to their diverse affairs, closely followed by a series of muscular and well-meaning gentlemen who

placed each other in the lobby of the hotel with the regularity of a row of balls trickling up to the plunger of a pin-table.

After that, the Police Commissioner personally called a halt.

"It may be a very promising lead, Fernack," he said in his bleached acidulated way, "but I Cannot place all the reserves of the Police Department at your disposal to follow everyone who happens to get in touch with Mr Templar."

The Saint, who had hired every one of his visitors for that express purpose, enjoyed his own entertainment in his own way.

It was still going on when he had a much more succinct call from Washington.

"Hamilton," said the dry voice on the telephone, for enough introduction. "I saw the papers. I suppose you know what you're doing."

"I can only try," said the Saint. "I think something will happen."

He had visualised many possibilities, but it is doubtful whether he had ever foreseen anything exactly like Titania Ourley.

2

Mrs Milton Ourley was a great deal of woman. She was constructed according to a plan which is discreetly called statuesque. She wore brilliantly hennaed hair, a phenomenal amount of bright blue eye-shadow, and fingernails that would have done credit to a freshly blooded cheetah. Her given name, naturally, was not her fault; but it might have been prophetically inspired. If she was not actually the queen of the fairies, she certainly; impressed one as being in the line of direct succession.

She plumped herself down on the smallest available chair, which she eclipsed so completely that she seemed to be miraculously suspended some eighteen inches from the floor, and speared the Saint on an eye like an ice-pick.

"If you want to know all about iridium," she said, "I came to tell you about my husband."

Simon Templar had taken more obscure sequiturs than that in his stride. He offered her a cigarette, which she declined with fearful cordiality, and sank one hip on the edge of a table.

"Tell me about him."

"He's,been buying iridium in the black market. I heard him talking about it to Mr Linnet."

Her voice became a little vague towards the end of the sentence, as if her mind had already begun to wander. Her eye had already been wandering, but only in a very limited way. Nevertheless, it had not taken long to lose a large part of its impaling vigor. It was, in fact, becoming almost wistful.

"Do you like dancing?" she asked.

"I can take it or leave it alone," said the Saint cautiously. "Who is Mr Linnet?"

"He's in the same kind of business as my husband. He makes electrical things. My husband, of course, is president of the Ourley Magneto Company." Her rapidly melting eye traveled speculatively over the Saint's tall symmetrical frame. "You look as if you could do a wonderful rumba," she said.

Only the Saint's incomparable valor, which is already so well known to the entire reading public of the English-speaking world, enabled him to face the revolting tenderness of her smile without quailing.

"I hope I never disappoint you," he said ambiguously. "Now, about your husband—"

"Oh, yes. Of course." Her pronunciation of the last word was a caress. "Well, he uses a lot of iridium. I don't know much about his business — I think business is so dull, don't you? — but I know he uses it. So does Mr Linnet. Well, last night we had dinner with Mr Linnet, and — well, I had to powder my nose."

"Not really? Even you?"

"Yes," said Mrs Ourley vaguely. "Well, when I came back, I just couldn't help hearing what Milton — that's my husband, Milton — and Mr Linnet were talking about."

"Of course not."

"Well, Mr Linnet was saying: 1 don't know what to do. I've got to have iridium to fulfil my contracts, and the market's cornered. I don't like any part of it, but they've got me over a barrel.' Then Milton said: I'll say they have. But you'll buy it and pay through the nose, just like me. You can't afford to do anything else.' And Mr Linnet said: 'I still don't like it.' Then I had to go into the room because the butler came out into the hall, so I couldn't just stand there, and of course they stopped talking about it. But I can tell you it was a terrible shock to me."

"Naturally," Simon agreed sympathetically.

"I mean, if Milton and Mr Linnet are buying illegal iridium, that makes them almost criminals themselves, doesn't it?"

Simon studied her seriously for a moment.

"Do you really want your husband to go to jail?" he asked bluntly.

"Good Heavens, no!" She was righteously pained. "That's why I came to you instead of telling the police or the FBI. If Milton went to jail I just wouldn't know how to look my friends in the face. But as a patriotic citizen I have my duty to do. And it wouldn't do any harm if you frightened him a bit. I think he deserves it. He's been so mean to me lately. If you could only have heard what he said to the nicest boy that I met in Miami Beach—"

It seemed to the Saint, quite abstractly, that he might have enjoyed hearing that; but he was just tactful enough not to say so.

He said: "What you've told me isn't exactly enough to convict him. And for that matter, it doesn't lay the black market in my lap either. But I'd like to have a talk with your husband."

"Oh, if you only would, Mr Templar! You're sooo clever, I'm sure you could persuade him to tell you."

"I could try," he said noncommittally. "Where do you live?"

"We've got a little place out at Oyster Bay. Milton will be home by half past six. If you could manage to get out there — you could say you just happened to be passing and you dropped in for a drink—"

"Tell him we met in Havana," said the Saint, "and put him in the right frame of mind."

He got her out of the door with some remarkably firm and adroit maneuvering, and came back to pour himself a healthy dose of Peter Dawson and restore his nerves.

The fortunes of buccaneering had brought many women out of the wide world and thrown them into Simon Templar's life, and it is a happy fact that most of them had been what any man would agree that a woman out of the wide world ought to be, which was young and decorative and quite undomesticated. But he had to realise that sooner or later such good luck had to end; and he had no idea of ignoring Titania Ourley, in spite of her unprepossessing appearance and even more dreadful charm.

It was like that in the strange country of adventure where he had worn so many trails. When yo.u had no idea where your quarry was, there was nothing to bring it within range like the right bait. When you had no idea what your quarry was like, you had to find the right bait, and sometimes that wasn't at all easy, but when you had the right bait you were bound to get a nibble. And when you had a nibble, the rest depended on how good you were. Mrs Milton Ourley was definitely a nibble.

He reached Oyster Bay soon after six-thirty, and after the inevitable series of encounters with village idiots, characters with cleft palates, and strangers to the district, he was able to get himself directed to Mr Ourley's little place.

This little place was no larger than a fairly flourishing hotel, occupying the center of a small park. Simon watched the enormous iron-studded portal open as he approached it with the reasonable expectation of seeing the hallway flanked with a double line of periwigged footmen; but instead of that it was Mrs Ourley herself who stood fabulously revealed on the threshold, gowned and corseted in a strapless evening dress that made her-upper section look slightly like an overfilled ice cream cone.

"Simon! You darling boy! How wonderful of you to remember!"

She insisted on taking both his hands as she drew him in, and still holding on to them when he was inside — doubtless under the impression that this gave her some of the winsome appeal of Mary Martin in her last picture.

He found himself in an immense pseudo-baronial hall cluttered with ponderous drapes and gilt furniture, and atmospherically clogged with a concentration of perfume on which it might have' been possible to float paper boats. As Mrs Ourley dragged him closer to her bosom, it became stiflingly plain that she herself was the wellspring of this olfactory soup.

"I was just driving by," Simon began as arranged, "and—”

"And of course you had to stop! I just knew you couldn't forget—”

"What the dabbity dab is going on here?" boomed a sudden wrathful voice from the background.

Mrs Ourley jumped away with a guilty squeal; and Simon turned to inspect Mr Ourley with as much composure as Mrs Ourley's over-zealous interpretation of her part could leave him.

"Good evening," he said politely.

He saw a very short man with enormous shoulders and an even more enormous stomach swelling below a stiff white shirtfront. He carried a raggedly chewed cigar in thick hirsute fingers, and his black beetling brows arched up and down in apoplectic exasperation.

"Tiny!" he roared at his wife, thereby causing even the Saint to blink. "I've told you before that I'll make no effort to control your comings and goings outside of this house, but I will not have you bringing your gigolos into my home!"

Mrs Ourley bridled automatically.

"But he's not a… I asked him to drop in."

"So," said Milton Ourley thunderously. "You admit it. Well, | this is just about the last—"

"But Milton," she protested coldly, "this is Mr Templar. Simon Templar. You know — the Saint."

"Jumping Jehosaphat!" roared Mr Ourley. "The what?"

Simon turned back from the Beauvais tapestry which he had been surveying while he allowed the first ecstatic symptoms of marital bliss to level off.

"The Saint," he said pleasantly. "How do you do?"

"Dabbity dab dab dab," said Mr Ourley. A new flood of adrenalin in his blood stream caused him to inflate inwardly until he looked more than ever like a bellicose bullfrog. "Tiny, have you gone out of your mind? Asking this crook, this — this busybody—"

"Milton," said Mrs Ourley glacially, "I heard you and Mr Linnet talking about iridium last night. And since Simon is trying to break up that racket, I thought it would be a good idea to bring you two together."

Milton Ourley stared at the Saint, and his broad chest seemed to shrink one or two sizes. That might have been only an impression, for he stood as solid as a sawed-off colossus on his short stocky legs. Certainly he did not stagger and collapse. His glare lost none of its fundamental bellicosity. It was only quieter, and perhaps more calculating.

"Oh, did you?" he said.

The Saint fingertipped a cigarette out of the pack in his breast pocket. For his part, the approach was all ploughed up anyhow. He had given Titania Ourley little enough script to work with, and now that she had gone defensively back into simple facts it was no use worrying about what other lines might have been developed. Simon resigned himself to some hopeful adlibbing, and smiled at Mr Ourley without the slightest indication of uncertainty in his genial nonchalance.

"You see?" he murmured. "Tiny has brains as well as beauty."

Ourley's red face deepened into purple again.

"You leave my wife out of this!" he bellowed. "And as for you, you can get out of here this minute, Mister Templar. When you've got any authority to come barging into other people's affairs—"

"You heard the name," Simon replied softly. "Did you ever hear of the Saint asking for any authority?"

"And seem a saint when most I play the devil," said another voice, a deep cultured voice from somewhere else in the hall.

Simon looked around for it.

He saw, in one of the doorways, a tall spare man whose dinner clothes seemed to have been poured over his figure, smiling and twirling a Martini glass in one manicured hand. Gray at the temples, his face was hard and almost unlined, cut in the aquiline fleshless pattern of a traditional Indian chief.

"I don't want to break anything up," he said, "but all the excitement seemed to be out here." Ignoring Ourley, he sauntered towards the Saint with his free hand outstretched. "I've heard a lot about you, Mr Templar. My name's Allen Uttershaw. I'm supposed to run that Uttershaw Mining Company. I heard somebody talking about iridium. Are you going to get that stolen shipment back for us?"

"I don't know," said the Saint. "I'm afraid I only heard about you a few days ago."

"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen," Uttershaw said tolerantly, his smile widening.

Ourley made a gesture of frightful frustration with his cigar.

"What is all this?" he barked. "Who said that?"

"John Kieran," said Uttershaw gravely; and Simon looked at him with new interest. It began to seem as if Mr Allen Uttershaw might be quite a fellow.

Mr Ourley didn't have the same pure intellectual detachment. He repeated his outraged gesture with italics in smoke.

"Dabbity dab dab dab!" he roared. "Has everybody gone nuts? First I find my wife has brought this meddler into my home to spy on me, and then you keep on quoting poetry. Or maybe it's me that's crazy."

"Milton!" said Mrs Ourley sternly.

Uttershaw took Simon by the arm and started to lead him easily into the living room from which he had emerged.

"Milton, I'm ashamed of you," he said. "What will Mr Templar think of your hospitality?"

"I don't give a dab dab what he thinks," fumed Ourley, pattering helplessly after them. "My hospitality doesn't include welcoming crooks and spies with open arms."

"Now, after all — surely Mr Templar is at least entitled to the chance of saying something for himself." Uttershaw turned to a tray on which a shaker and a row of glasses were set out. "How about a drink, Mr Templar?"

"Thanks," said the Saint, with equal urbanity.

He took the glass that Uttershaw handed him, gazed into it for a moment, and then swept his cool blue eyes again over the faces of the other two men.

"I didn't exactly come here to spy," he said frankly. "I didn't actually come here with any plans at all. But after what Mrs Ourley told me, I was certainly anxious to talk to" — he inclined his head — "Mr Ourley. I thought I might possibly get you to talk to me. You know that I'm interested in the iridium situation, and it seems that you've had some dealings with the black market. You might like to tell me about it."

"My wife is an irresponsible imbecile," Ourley said balefully. "I'm just a business man with a contract to fill, and I'm filling it."

"Anyone who buys in a black market, of course, is technically compounding some sort of misdemeanor," Simon went on imperturbably. "But in this case it goes a little further. Iridium isn't so common that a black market can just scratch it up out of a junk pile. And Mr Uttershaw will certainly remember a recent robbery in which two men were killed. It seems rather obvious to me that at least some of this black market iridium is coming from that stolen shipment which started the shortage in the first place. In that case, anyone who buys it is not only receiving stolen goods, but in a sort of way he's an accessory to murder."

"Fiddlesticks!" exploded Ourley. "What do you propose to do when you get some information — turn it over to the Junior G-Men or cash in on it yourself?"

"Milton!" repeated Mrs Ourley, aghast from her quivering bust to the crimson-tipped toes that protruded through the front of her evening sandals.

"Considering my reputation, the question is not out of order," Simon said equably. "And the answer is that I shall deal with any facts I can get hold of in whatever way I think they would do the most good."

"Well," rasped Ourley, "in that case I'd be seventy-seven kinds of a dab dabbed idiot if I told you anything — if I knew anything, that is," he added hastily.

Simon's gaze was dispassionately unwavering.

"Would you say the same thing to the police or the FBI?"

"You're dabbity dab well right I would. My business is still my own business until these dabbity dab New Dealers take what's left of it away from me."

Uttershaw stepped up with a gold lighter for the cigarette which the Saint was still holding unlighted between his fingers.

"Do you know anything about this iridium black market, Milton?" he inquired curiously.

Ourley's mouth opened, and then closed again like a trap before it parted a second time to let out words.

"I have no information to give anyone," he said; "especially to interfering dab dabs like this. And that's final."

"I only wondered," Uttershaw said suavely, "because naturally I'm interested myself. Of course that iridium shipment of mine was insured, but I couldn't insure my legitimate profit, which would have been quite reasonable. And after all, we all have to make some kind of living. Besides, I can't help hating to think that some crooks are making a fantastic profit where I'm really entitled to a fair one. Personally, I wish Mr Templar a lot of luck. And I'm sure the Government would be behind him."

"Don't talk to me about the Government!" Ourley blared, his face ripening again. "What I still want to know is what right a meddling son of a dab blab like this Templar has to go around sticking his nose into my business and making passes at my wife and crashing into my house to cross-examine me. And I want him the hell out of here!"

"The eagle suffers little birds to sing," Uttershaw remembered soothingly; and Ourley's eyes bulged with his blood pressure.

"I wish everybody would stop throwing quotations at me," he howled. "Who said that?"

"Clifton Fadiman — or was it F P A?" said Uttershaw good-humoredly.

Simon Templar emptied his shallow glass and set it down. It seemed rather sadly clear that he was not going to make any substantial progress there and then, and his nibble still left him a secondary line that might be more profitable to play on. He had that in his mind as he bent over Mrs Ourley's diamond-sprinkled hand with somewhat exaggerated formality.

"It's been nice to see you again — Tiny," he said, and added with a malice that saved him from shuddering: "Perhaps we shall dance that immortal rumba one of these days." He bowed to the spluttering Mr Ourley. "I still hope you'll think this over, Milton. I do really. Prison life is so slimming," he said; and shook hands with Uttershaw. "If you hear anything in professional circles, I'm at the Algonquin. We might have lunch one day."

"I'd love to," Uttershaw said cordially. "I'd still like to know why you should take so much trouble."

Simon turned at the door. There were certain little touches and lovely curtains that he could never resist.

"I sing because I must," he said softly, and was gone.

They heard his car starting up and crunching away down the drive, and there was a longish silence in the room.

Then Milton Ourley found his voice again.

"Now what the dabbity dab goes on?" he yelped. "He sounded as if he was quoting poetry too. You've got everybody doing it. What did he mean?"

Allen Uttershaw held up his glass and turned it meditatively.

"I sing because I must," he repeated. For a moment his handsome bony brow was furrowed with thought. Then, just for another moment, it cleared. He went on: "And pipe but as the linnet sings…"

His voice died away, and left only his clear gray eyes drifting over Ourley's congested face.

3

Mr Gabriel Linnet, according to the Manhattan directory, had a residential address just off Madison Avenue in the Sixties. It proved to be a three-storey whitestone house with an air of solid prosperity which was quite different in style from that of the Ourley palazzo, but which obviously indicated a similar familiarity with spending coupons.

No lights showed from the windows as Simon stopped his car outside, but it was impossible to tell at a glance whether that might only be the effect of blackout curtains. There was another kind of light, though, that the Saint saw as he stepped out — a spark like a durable firefly hovering over a vague grayish shape in the darkness of the entrance porch. As he came to the steps, the shape developed into an ermine wrap encasing a girl who was perched on the stone balustrade beside the front door, and the firefly was a cigarette in her hand. The faintest subtlest fragrance, a thing not to be mentioned in the same breath as the stupefying reek of Mrs Ourley, crept into his nostrils as he came closer and touched his mind with a quite fanciful excitement.

He took a pencil flashlight from his pocket with a pretense of searching for the doorbell, but he was careful to turn it clumsily enough so that the beam passed over her face.

At least, it was meant to pass over; but when he saw her clearly his hand stopped, and he could no more have kept it moving for a moment than a conscientious bee could have kept flying past a freshly opened flower.

She had long-bobbed blue-black hair that shone like burnished metal, and long-lashed eyes that looked the same color. Her face was a perfect oval of softly-modeled olive, ripening into moist lips that were in themselves a justification for at least half the poems that have been written on such subjects. She was the kind of thing that a castaway on a desert island would dream about just before the seagulls started talking back to him.

The Saint should have had his mind on nothing but the job in hand; but he was still a long way from such dizzy depths of asceticism. She was so much more what a woman out of the wide world should have been, so completely everything that Titania Ourley was not, that he didn't even realize how long he looked at her before she gave him a hint of it.

"Are you quite through?" she said icily; and yet even then her voice matched the picture of her so much better than the mood that the rebuke was warmer than most other women's welcomes.

The Saint turned his light downwards so that it wasn't directly in her eyes, and she could see him equally by the reflected glow; but he didn't turn away himself.

He said, in a low reckless breath:

She sat utterly still for a few seconds.

Then she said: "How did you know my name was Barbara?"

"I didn't," he said. "I just came from a Quiz Kids reunion, and I've got a bad attack of the quotes. I'm sorry. Is your name Barbara?"

"Barbara Sinclair."

"It's a nice name."

"Now that that's settled," she said, "why don't you run along? Can't you see I'm busy?"

"So am I," said the Saint. "Don't go away now. I shan't be long."

He turned his light back on the front door, searching for the bell again.

"You're wasting your time," she said. "There's nobody in."

He took his fingers from the bell without touching it, and sat on the stone railing beside her.

"For some reason," he murmured, "that begins to seem strikingly unimportant."

"I've been here for half an hour," she said.

"I suppose life is like that. I wouldn't keep you waiting on my doorstep for half an hour."

"You don't really have to keep me waiting on anyone's doorstep for half an hour."

After an instant, he brought out a cigarette of his own and lighted it and took his time over the job.

"I suppose," he said carelessly, "you wouldn't be hinting that we might go and get a drink and maybe gnaw a bone somewhere."

"No," she said. "But a man with a car is an awful temptation these days. How's your gas ration?"

"Very healthy," he said. "How is your conscience?"

She stood up, and sent her firefly spinning on one last incandescent trajectory out into the street.

"Starving."

He turned the car south on Madison, considering places where this shining hour might be best improved, and she sat just close enough beside him so that he was always aware of her with his shoulder, and the faint insidious sweetness of her was always in the air he breathed.

Then they were in a rooftop restaurant, in a corner booth with the lights of Manhattan spread out below them, and there were shaded candles on the tables and soft music, and there were oysters and green turtle soup and much fascinatingly inconsequential chatter, and the ermine wrap was over the back of her chair and she was wearing a dress that left no questions about whether her figure would match her face; and then there was coq au vin and a bottle of burgundy, and more talk that went very quickly and meant nothing at all; and then the Saint lighted a cigarette and stretched his legs contentedly and said: "Of all the possible things that I might have run into this evening, you are the last thing I was expecting — and incidentally I'm afraid you're much more fun. Why were you waiting on Comrade Linnet's doorstep?"

"That," she said, "is my affair."

He sighed.

"I might have known it. You were obviously too beautiful to be lying around loose."

"Are you going to disappoint me now?" she said mockingly. "I thought the Saint was a buccaneer — a man who took what he wanted, and damn the torpedoes."

Simon had the last glass of wine in his hand, moving it under the candlelight to enjoy the rich purity of its color. He put it down with the liquid in it as smooth and unrippled as if it had been frozen.

"How did you know my name?"

"After that picture of you in the paper yesterday," she said casually, "who wouldn't?"

"You've known all the time?"

"Of course." She gave him a quick smile with the slightest troublement in it. "Please — did I say anything wrong? I'm not a celebrity hunter. That isn't why I came with you. I just wanted to."

"I was just a little surprised," he said.

She looked out of the window at the sparsely scattered stars that the dimout had left below; and then she said, without her eyes meeting his directly: "Couldn't we get out of here? Haven't you got an apartment somewhere? Or I have. And a radio. I'll buy you a drink and we can get sweet music on WQXR and talk about Life."

He drew slowly at his cigarette.

"That could be swell," he said; and her eyes turned to his face again.

"I'll have to make a phone call and break another date," she said with a smile. "But it doesn't seem to matter a bit."

He stood up while she left the table, and then he sat down again and propped his cigarette arm on one elbow for about as long as it took to absorb three more long and contemplative drags.

Then he got up and strolled unhurriedly out of the restaurant.

He strolled past the bar, past the men's room, past the hat-check girl. There was an elevator engorging a flock of satisfied diners. Almost accidentally, it might have seemed, the Saint drifted in on the heels of the last passenger, and was dropped with ear-numbing swiftness to the street.

Ten minutes later he was on the steps of Gabriel Linnet's house again.

This time he rang the bell.

He rang it two or three times, but there was no response.

He felt so still inside that he could hear his own pulses drumming. There might be some perfectly ordinary explanation for the fact that the house seemed empty. Yet Linnet had dined with the Ourleys the night before; and if he had been planning to close up his house and go away somewhere, Mrs Ourley would almost certainly have mentioned it. And unless Mr Linnet was an eccentric who preferred to sweep his own floors and wash his own dishes, there should have been some servant on duty at that hour in a place that size.

And of course Barbara Sinclair had always been too good to be true…

The Saint wondered if he deserved to be shot. But he was going to find out.

He took a pin from his coat lapel and used it to jam the doorbell on a steady ring, and stepped back. It could have been a major operation to force that entrance, and a street front was not the ideal place for such operations at any time, but he had already noted a narrow alley that ran between the Chateau Linnet and its next-door neighbor, and if such an alley didn't lead to a side entrance he couldn't think of any other reason for it to be there.

There was a side entrance, and like most side entrances it looked much less of a problem than the front door.

The Saint cupped his pencil flashlight vinder his hands for a preliminary diagnosis of the lock.

And as he looked at it, it receded slowly before him.

The movement was so gradual and stealthy that it didn't register instantaneously. At first it could have been only an insignificant hallucination, an effect of the movement of the light in his hands. He had to become at first unthinkingly aware that the continuous pealing of the doorbell which could be heard somewhere inside the building was growing clearer and louder; and at the same time his brain had to consent to recognise the improbable report of his eyes; and then he had to put the two things together; and then the door had unquestionably opened more than an inch, and a gossamer commando of intangible cockroaches raced up from between his snoulder-blades into the roots of his hair.

Somebody was opening the door from within.

It was too late then to switch out the torch and duck — even if there had been anywhere to duck to. The glow of light must have already been distinctively perceptible from inside the opening door. And for final proof of that, the door started to close again.

Simon's shoulder hit it with all his weight in about the same split second as it reversed itself.

The door traveled some six inches back, and thudded in a rather sharp crisp way against some obstacle which let out a sort of thin yipping cough. Then it went on with much less impetus, while a straggly tumbling effect peeled off behind it.

Simon went in and shut the door behind him, flashing his light around even while he did that.

He saw a short flight of steps with the temporary obstacle sprawled at the foot of them. The obstacle was a thin hollow-cheeked man who looked as if he had probably shaved two days before. If he hadn't, he should have. The point, however, was not suitable for immediate discussion, since the only potential source of first-hand evidence was not a good prospect for interrogation at that time. He had a vertical cut in his forehead where the edge of the door had hit him, and he looked very uninterested indeed.

Simon made sure of his continued neutrality by using his necktie to bind his ankles together, and then using the man's shoelaces to tie his wrists behind his back and link them with the Charvet hobble.

Then he went on quickly into the house.

He moved through a huge kitchen, a series of pantries, and up a flight of stairs to the main floor. He found himself in a bare but richly carpeted hall, with the front door facing him and a single onyx bowl of light burning overhead, and turned off his torch.

He didn't need any extra light to see the crudely drawn skeleton figure crowned with a symbolic halo which was chalked on one of the doors on his right.

"What a quaint touch," said the Saint to himself; but he was not smiling to himself at the same time.

The door was ajar. He pushed it open with his foot, and took the one necessary step into the room. It was a slightly conventional library with built-in bookshelves and warm wood panels and deep comfortable chairs, but all of it unmistakably tinged with the vision of an interior decorator. It seemed regrettable that this was yet another subject that could not be discussed with the person who would normally have been the most likely source of information; but it was a little obvious that there was at least one linnet who would never pipe or sing any more.

Aside from the simple probabilities, there were the initials "G L" embroidered on the breast pocket of the dark brocade dressing gown which the man wore over his tuxedo shirt and trousers. He lay on the floor in the middle of the room in an attitude of curious relaxation. But the piece of blind cord which was knotted around his throat so tightly that it had almost sunk into the skin could never have done his voice any good.

Simon Templar lighted a cigarette very carefully, and stood looking down at the body for a space that must have run into minutes, while he grimly tried to think of himself as a secondhand murderer. And all the time the doorbell was buzzing on one ceaseless monotonous note.

And then, abruptly, it was silent. After which it gave three or four distinct irregular peremptory rasps which could only have been produced by individual action.

The Saint came back into movement as if he had never paused, as if all those moments of intense and ugly thought had been nothing but the gap between the stopping of a cinema projector and the starting up again. In an instant he had flipped off they light switch, and he was crossing to the window. He only had to move the drapes a hair's breadth to peep out on to the doorway porch, and what he saw there enabled him to intellectually discard the effort of doubling back to the side door. He was a great believer in the economy of effort, and he could always tell at a glance when it would be completely wasted.

He switched the library lights on again as he went out into the hall, and opened the front door with his most disarming bonhomie.

"Hullo, there, John Henry," he said. "Come on in and play. Somebody seems to have been trying to frame me for a murder."

4

There was no answering geniality in Inspector Fernack's entrance. He stalked in rather heavily with two plain-clothes men following behind him like a pair of trained dogs, and his tough square-jawed face was as uncompromising as a cliff. His straight stolid eyes drove at the Saint like fists. Then, in a quick glance around, they fell on the childish chalked sketch on the library door, and his mouth set like a ridge of granite.

"Hold him here," he said, and went into the room.

He was gone only a couple of minutes, and when he came back he looked several years older. He spoke to one of his satellites.

"Have you searched him?"

"Yes sir. No weapons."

"Go out and phone for a homicide detail — better not use any of the phones in here. Al, you go upstairs and look over the other rooms, but don't touch anything."

The two men left, and Simon straightened his clothes to restore his natural elegance from the disorder which the rough search of his person had produced. He could never have looked more at case and debonair, as if it had never occurred to him that the most diaphanous cloud of suspicion could ever cast a shadow on his unspotted probity.

"Quite a neat little job, isn't it?" he remarked affably.

Fernack stared up at him, and his gaze was curiously sad.

"If I hadn't seen it myself, I wouldn't have believed it," he said. "Simon, what in God's name did you do it for?"

The Saint's brows rose in balanced arcs of shocked incredulity.

"Henry — you couldn't possibly have some doddering notion in your dear gray head that I really did blow Gabriel's horn?"

"Off the record," Fernack said, relentless, "I was hoping against hope that the tip was a phony. But 1 might have known it would be like this one of these days."

"You've known people to try to frame me before."

"I've never seen such a cold case as this against you before."

Simon flipped ashes from the shortening end of his cigarette.

"There was a tip-off, of course," he said languidly. "How did you get it?"

"On the telephone."

"Man or woman?"

"A man."

"Name and address?"

Fernack took a breath.

"I don't know."

"Did you talk to him yourself?"

"Yes. He asked for me."

"Why?"

"People do sometimes. Besides, it's been published quite a bit that I'm the man who's supposed to do something about you."

"Fame is a wonderful thing," said the Saint admiringly. "And what did this anonymous fan of yours have to report?"

"He said: 'I was passing Mr Linnet's house on East Sixty-third Street, and I saw a man who looked as if he was breaking in. He looked just like the pictures of that fellow the Saint. I didn't get it at first, and then when I did I walked back and there were noises | in the house as if there was a fight going on.' "

Simon nodded a number of times with the gravest respect.

"I can see that I shouldn't have underestimated your public," he drawled. "They come from a very talented class. They know' just whose house they're passing on any street in town. With their catlike eyes, they can recognise characters like me in dark corners in a dimout. They can tell at a glance whether I'm trying to break in, or whether I'm just looking for the bell or the right key. And of course they know that you're the only officer in New York to call out on a case like that. They wouldn't dream of losing face by just mentioning it to the first cop they met on his beat."

The detective eased his collar with one powerfully controlled forefinger.

"That's all very clever," he said stubbornly. "But I came here. And Linnet has been murdered. And you're still here."

"Naturally I'm here," said the Saint blandly. "I wanted to see him."

"What for?"

"Because he manufactures electrical gadgets, and he needs iridium, and I heard he'd been buying from the black market. I thought I might persuade him to tell me a thing or two."

"And he wouldn't talk, so you strangled him."

"Yes," said the Saint tiredly. "I tied a string around his larynx to ease his vocal cords."

"And you left your mark on his door."

Simon glanced critically across the hall at the ungainly pattern of chalk lines that Fernack referred to.

"Henry," he said reasonably, "I'm not a hell of an artist, but you've seen some of my early original work. Would you honestly say that that was a typical job of mine? It looks kind of shaky and spavined to me."

The detective glowered at the drawing, and almost wavered. You could see the doubt beginning to curdle and grow heavier inside him, like a complicated meal in a fragile stomach.

"Besides which," Simon mentioned diffidently, "wouldn't it be just a little bit silly of me to leave that trademark around at all in these days, so that you wouldn't even waste a minute before you had the dragnet out for me?"

"I've heard you say something like that before, too," Fernack retorted. "But it isn't my job to throw out evidence just because it looks silly. You give me your story, and we'll start from there."

"Figure it for yourself," Simon persisted inexorably. "Somebody wanted to keep me from talking to Linnet in the worst way. They wanted it badly enough to make quite sure he wouldn't sing. And they thought they could tie it off with the corny slickness of putting me out of action at the same fell swoop. So they must be just a little bit worried about me. And it also suggests that our iridium merchants may have something quite ingenious to put over while I'm presumably languishing in the jug. Now would you like to play their game for them, or shall we try to make sense?"

Fernack studied his face with intractable doggedness. He might have been about to make any comeback, or none at all. It was one of those teetering moments that might have toppled on either side.

And it inevitably had to be that moment when the plain-clothes man called Al appeared at the top of the stairs with another individual who was a stranger to all of them, to whom he was probably trying to give sympathetic assistance, but who looked more as if he were being frogmarched into a back room for a friendly rubber of third degree. This specimen wore the black coat and striped trousers of a conventional butler, and his fleshy face was as distressed as the face of any conventional butler would have been at the humiliation of his production.

"I found 'im," Al announced cheerfully, helping his patient down the stairs with much the same tenderness as he would have helped any old trunk. "The guy slugged 'im when he opened the door, an' tied 'im up an' locked him in a closet."

There was a different and hardening detachment about the way that Fernack waited until the man had been shepherded down to his level, and then said: "Would you know the man who slugged, you if you saw him again?"

"I don't really know, sir. He had his coat collar turned up, and there wasn't much light on the porch, but he seemed to be fairly tall and slim. He had an air-raid warden's armlet on, and I was looking at that mostly, because he was saying we had some lights showing that shouldn't have been; and then he pointed to sortie-thing behind me, and I turned to look, and that's when he must have hit me, because I don't remember anything more."

"Could it have been this man here?" Fernack asked flatly, stabbing his thumb back at the Saint.

The butler's puffy eyes hesitated over actuality and recollection.

"It could have been, sir. I wouldn't like to be too definite, but this man was built a bit similar."

You could feel the weakness ebbing out of Fernack like the fluidity of setting concrete. He turned on his heels to face the Saint again, and his jaw was tightening up again like a trap.

"Well," he said, "you were going to tell your story. Go on with it."

Simon found a rim of floor that was clear of the late Mr Linnet's beautiful carpet, and studiously trod the stub of his cigarette out on it. In the same leisured tempo, he lighted another to replace it. He had a sense of incipient anticlimax, just the same.

It was, admittedly, a little bit on the hammy side to have tried to talk himself through his contract without showing any trumps; but as a challenge to professional vanity the temptation had been irresistible. He only resigned himself to quit because he realised that time was marching on, and fun might be fun but it had to take second place to the ultimate exigencies of the clock. He could certainly have played a lot longer, but there were more urgent things to do.

"I'm sorry to disappoint you," he said, "but it's really dreadfully simple. Somebody else knew I was coming here tonight. Somebody didn't want Comrade Linnet to sing to me, and the same person wanted to stop me doing any arias of my own. It all went together into the pretty picture you sec before you. As a matter of fact, I wasn't even supposed to be caught here at all. That was just a little too tight for practical timing. But I actually was waylaid on the doorstep by a very ornamental piece of grommet, and I took her to dinner, and then the stall was to lure me to her apartment for some soft music and hard practice; and then I was supposed to have no alibi at all for these vital moments."

"That's interesting," Fernack said unyieldingly. "Go on."

"Unfortunately for the ungodly," said the Saint, "I was much cleverer than they expected me to be, and I ditched my waylayer and came back here in a hurry. I got here in what the most original writers call the nick of time. As a matter of fact, the bright boy who actually garroted Comrade Linnet was on his way out at the moment. Then he sort of collided with a door, and got tired and went to sleep, so I tied him up and kept him for you. You'll probably even find some fresh remains of chalk on his fingertips to clinch it for you."

Fernack's face underwent a series of gradual and well-rounded reconstructions that were fascinating to watch. Each phase was a complete and satisfying production in its own right, so rich and full-bodied that only the most niggling critic would have complained that their climax was something very like a simple incredulous gape.

"Then why the hell couldn't you say so before?" he squawked. "Where is he?"

"You were having such a lovely time sending me to the chair, it seemed a shame to break it up," said the Saint. "But he ought to be where I left him, in the basement. Would you like to say hullo?"

He turned and led the way back as he had come in; and Fer-nack followed him without a word.

They went down the stairs, past the series of pantries, and through the huge kitchen to the place where Simon had left his captive. And that was when the incipient anticlimax suddenly ceased to be incipient at all, and in fact turned a complete somersault and made the Saint's stomach turn one with it.

For the cadaverous gent with the cracked forehead wasn't there any more.

There was just nothing to argue about in it. He wasn't there. The entire area of stone flooring at the foot of the back steps was burdened with nothing more substantial than a probable film of New York grime.

Simon Templar stood and gazed down at it with the utmost restraint for several seconds; until Fernack said impatiently: "Well, where is this man?"

"This is going to make you very unhappy, Henry," said the Saint, raising his eyes, "but he doesn't seem to be here any more. I'm afraid he must have had a boy friend who came back for him. The way I had him tied, he couldn't possibly have gotten loose by himself. But he's certainly gone away."

The gastric ulcers of innumerable haggard authors bear witness to the awful responsibility of attempting an adequate description of such scenes as this. The present chronicler, however, having much more respect and affection for his mucosa, intends to court no such disaster. He proposes to leave most of the detailed etching to the imagination of the reader, for whose lambent perspicacity he has the very highest regard.

He will nevertheless go so far as to give a slight lead by mentioning that the calorific swelling of a moderately understandable indignation caused Inspector Fernack's face to give a startling imitation of an overripe plum which is receiving an unexpected hypodermic from a jet of high-pressure steam.

"All right," Fernack said, and his voice had the slow burn of molten lava. "I can't blame you for trying, but this is the last time you're going to treat me like a moron."

"But Henry, I give you my word—"

"You can give your word to a judge, and see what he thinks of it," snarled the detective. "I'm through. I'm going to take you down to Headquarters and lock you up right now, and you can save the rest of it for your lawyer!"

"And I thought you were a real professional, Henry. If you'd only stationed a man at the back door, as I was sure you would have, instead of getting so excited—"

"Are you coming along?" Fernack asked glowingly. "Or am I going to have to use this?"

Simon glanced down regretfully at the revolver which had appeared in the other's fist.

He might conceivably have been able to take it away. And apparently there was no one to stop him outside the back door. But he was reluctant to hurt Fernack seriously; and he knew that even if he succeeded the call would be out for him within a space of minutes, and that would be a handicap which might easily be crippling.

And just the same, nothing could have been much more manifest than that the last chance of talking the situation away had departed for the night. There is such a thing as an immutably petrified audience, and Simon Templar was realistic enough to recognise one when he saw it.

He shrugged.

"Okay," he said resignedly. "If you can't help being a moron, I'll pretend I don't notice. But if you'll take any advice from me at all, please don't be in too much of a hurry to call in the reporters and boast about your performance. I don't want you to make a public spectacle of yourself. Because I'll bet you fifty dollars to a nickel you won't even hold me until midnight."

He lost his bet by a comfortable margin, for Hamilton was away from Washington that night; and the far-reaching results of that delay were interesting to contemplate long afterwards.

A little after ten the next morning, a rather rotund and unobtrusive gentleman with the equally unobtrusive name of Harry Eldon presented Fernack with his credentials from the Department of Justice and said: "I'm sorry, but we've got to exercise our priority and take Templar out of your hands. "We want him rather badly ourselves."

Somewhat to his own mystification, the detective found that he didn't know whether to feel frustrated or relieved or worried.

He took refuge in an air of gruff unconcern.

"If you can keep him where he belongs, it'll be a load off my mind," he said.

"You haven't made any statement about his arrest yet?"

"Not yet."

Fernack could never have admitted that he had been sufficiently impressed by the Saint's warning, combined with the saddening recollection of previous tragic disappointments, to have forced himself to take a cautious breathing spell before issuing the defiant proclamation that was simmering in his insides.

"That's a good thing. You'd better just forget this as well," Eldon said enigmatically. "Those are my orders."

He took Simon Templar out with him, holding him firmly by the arm; and they rode uptown in a taxi.

The Saint filled his cigarette-case from a fresh pack, and lighted the last one left over, and said: "Thanks."

"I had a message to give you," Eldon said laconically. "It says that this had better be good. Or somebody else's neck will be under the axe."

"It will be good," said the Saint.

"Where do you want to be let off?"

"Any drug store will do. I want to look in a phone book."

It was just a chance that Barbara Sinclair's apartment would be listed under her name; but it was. It lay just off Fifth Avenue, across from the park.

When Simon arrived there, he found that it was one of those highly convenient buildings with a self-service elevator and no complications in the way of inquisitive doormen, which are such a helpful accessory to the vie boheme.

He rode up to the floor where he had found her name listed in the hall, and rang the bell. After a reasonable pause, he rang it again. There was still no answer; and he proceeded to inspect the lock with professional penetration. It was the usual Yale type, but the way it was set in the door promised very little opposition to a man whom the master cracksmen of two continents had been heard to mention with respect. He took a thin strip of flexible metal from a special compartment in the back of his wallet, and went to work with unhurried confidence.

It took him less than a minute, and he went into a living-room which could have served as a model of relaxing and fussless cosiness to any lady who wanted her gentleman friends to feel much better than at home.

He took three steps into the room, and a syrupy voice said: "The hands up and clasped behind the back of the neck, please, Mr Templar."

5

Simon did as he was told, while he turned to locate the welcoming committee. He realised that he had been quite conspicuously careless: because there had been no answer to the bell, he had assumed that there was nobody home. Which seemed to have been an egregiously rash assumption.

He found himself considering two separately unreliable trigger fingers.

One of them, which had appeared from behind the door, belonged to the thin blue-chinned specimen who had had such an unfortunate collision with a slab of functional timber the night before. He wore a broad patch of adhesive tape across his brow as a souvenir of the occasion, and if there was any spirit of Christian forgiveness and loving-kindness in his secret soul it had. not yet had time to dig its way out into his sunken eyes.

The other man, who must have been the owner of the grenadine voice, stood in the doorway of the bedroom. A glimpse of the room behind him formed a sudden sensuous woodcut of black painted floor and white snow leopard rugs, black marble fireplace and white leather paneled walls, ebony and white corduroy furniture — the sort of room from which a man like that would most naturally seem to emerge. For aside from the plated automatic in his hand, he was outwardly a very boudoir type. In contrast with the hapless butter of doors, whose clothes hung on his skinny frame like washing on a line, this exhibit was tailored to the point of being almost zoot-suited. He had glossy black hair with three beautiful regular waves in it, and the adenoidal type of Latin countenance which belongs with the male half of a ballroom dance team. He smiled steadily, showing teeth that were very white and slightly buck.

"So you walked into the parlor, Mr Templar," he said.

"You have the advantage of me," Simon said genially. "Would you like to introduce yourself, or are you the man of mystery?"

The wavy head bowed.

"Ricco Varetti — at your service. And on your left is Cokey Walsh, who will now proceed to search you."

Simon nodded.

"We nearly met last night, only something came between us. I suppose you were the guy who rescued him?"

"I had that pleasure. By the way, it's a little surprising to see you. We really expected that the police would detain you much longer than this. How were you able to get away so soon?"

"I told them I had an appointment with the hairdresser for a new permanent, so of course they had to let me go. You'd understand."

The scrawny warrior stepped back from his search with malevolence in the thin gash of his mouth.

"So this is the guy, is it?" he said.

"This is the guy, Cokey," Varetti agreed.

"The guy who gave me this crack on the head."

"Yes, Cokey."

"Lemme have him, Ricco. All to myself."

"Not yet, Cokey."

"The sonofabitch bust my head open," Cokey argued. "Lemme get a piece of rope and put him out of my misery."

"Not yet, Cokey."

The Saint's expression was interested and sympathetic.

"After all, we do have to make up our minds about me," he murmured helpfully. "Cokey is just trying to be practical. Now, what are the possibilities? We could all just stand around here for ever, but one day we might get bored with our own conversation. Of course, you could always shoot me; but then one of the other apartments might hear it and get curious about the noise. You might take me for an old-fashioned ride; but that's kind of a luxury these days, what with the tire situation and gasoline rationing and everything."

"Or," said Varetti, in the same vein, "we might call the police again and give you back to them for breaking in here."

"That's quite an idea," Simon admitted. "But I was under the impression that this apartment belonged to a Miss Barbara Sinclair. Are you sure that you mightn't have to do a little awkward explaining about why you're here yourselves and how you got in?"

As bait, it was worth the casual try; but Varetti's greasy smile was toothily unchanged.

"I think you forget your position, Mr Templar. Yes, I am sure you do. I ask the questions. You answer them… I hope. If not, I shall have to ask Cokey to help you. And that wouldn't be nice. I'm afraid Cokey doesn't like you."

"I like him," Cokey said glitteringly. "I'll show you, Ricco. Just lemme tie a piece of rope around his neck and show you. He bust my head open, didn't he?"

"You see?" said Varetti. "He does like you. And there are plenty of things you ought to be telling us. Yes. Perhaps he has the right idea."

"He must have one sometimes," Simon conceded. "Anyone with his looks has to have some compensation."

"You shut your trap," said Cokey with cold savagery; and the Saint raised one mildly mocking brow at him.

"Well, well, well! What coarse idioms you do use, Cokey, old chum. I didn't think you'd really be sore about our little game of hide-and-seek last night. I thought that would all be under the heading of business as usual."

Varetti flashed him another dental broadside.

"Cokey has his feelings," he said. "You hurt his pride last night. So he's entitled to a little revenge… Go and find your piece of rope, Cokey. We'll try to make Mr Templar take us into his confidence."

Everything had been diverting enough up to that point; but there is always a stage in such situations where the fun can go too far, and Simon Templar was very sensitive to those subtle barometric changes. He could feel this one all the way from his fingertips to his toes.

He said coolly: "While we're all getting so friendly, would you mind very much if I took my hands down from this uncomfortable position and had a cigarette?"

"Go ahead," said Varetti. "But don't try anything clever, because I'd hate to have to deprive Cokey of his entertainment."

The Saint let his hands down and eased his shoulders as he took out his cigarette-case, watching Varetti with thoughtful blue eyes like flakes of sapphire.

He was not, he told himself, a slave to snap judgments. He tried to be broadminded and forbearing; he tried to find in even the most repulsive creatures some redeeming spark that would allow his heart to warm towards them. But even with the most noble effort, it was becoming cumulatively plain to him that he and Mr Varetti could never be as brothers. He did not like any part of Mr Varetti, from his marcelled hair to his pointed shoes. And he particularly disliked Mr Varetti's idea of suave dialogue — no doubt partly because it was too much like a hammy imitation of his own. He was going to enjoy doing something about Comrade Varetti.

He selected his cigarette with care from one end of the case — it was the single cigarette that had been left there when he refilled it, as it was always still left there when he refilled, for the Saint was never totally unprepared for any emergency. He lighted it, and strolled across the room to deposit the match in an ashtray as Cokey came back from the kitchen.

He was figuring and maneuvering for position with the oblique innocence of a cat encircling a pair of sparrows.

"Before this gets too unpleasant," he said, "couldn't we talk it over?"

"You talk," said Varetti, with his teeth gleaming. "I'll listen."

Simon hesitated a moment; and then with the most natural gesture of decision he put his cigarette down in the ashtray and moved around towards Varetti, while Cokey came around to follow him.

Varetti said: "Not too close, Mr Templar. You can talk from there."

Simon stopped a step further on. Varetti's gun, trained steadily on his midsection, was about four feet away. Cokey was to his right and a little further off, but he had put his gun away to have both hands free for the length of cord he had found.

"Look," said the Saint. "All this business—"

It was at that point that the cigarette he had left in the ashtray went bam! like a small firecracker, which in fact it was.

Varetti would probably have been too smart to fall for any ordinary stall, but he would have been less than animate if he could have heard that noise with no reaction. His head and eyes switched away together; and that was all Simon really needed. The fact that this involuntary movement also happened to angle one side of Varetti's jaw into an ideal position for receiving a left hook was actually only a bonus.

The Saint took one long step forward, and the impetus of his stride added itself to the impact of a fist that must have made Mr Varetti think for one split second that he had received a direct hit from a block-buster bomb. After that immeasurable instant he did no more thinking at all: he slid down the door frame like sloppy plaster down a wall, and Simon picked the shiny automatic out of his unresisting fingers as he dropped.

Cokey Walsh backed away with a wild attempt to get his own automatic out again, but he was too tangled up with the gar-roting cord which he had been twisting around his hands for a good purchase. Without even bothering to reverse the gun that he had taken from Varetti, Simon bonged him firmly on his already tender brow, and once again Mr Walsh passed into slumber-land…

The Saint lighted himself another and less stimulating cigarette, and paused for a bare moment's thought. His mind was still gyrating with questions that he had still had no chance to ask, and which now seemed condemned to further postponement on account of the magnificent lethargy of the potential respondents. On the other hand, after such a promising introduction, Miss Sinclair's interesting and unusual apartment should be at least worth a little more detailed survey. But there was no telling how soon some other interruption might crop up in such an unconventional menage; and whatever form it might take, it seemed fair to assume that the presence of a pair of unconscious bodies on the living-room floor would do nothing to facilitate coping with it.

In order to dispose of that difficulty first, he took the two bodies by the collar, one in each hand, and dragged them into the bedroom; in which process he nearly tripped headlong over a rawhide suitcase which someone had thoughtfully left out in the middle of the floor. He was still rubbing an anguished shin when he heard the rattle of a key in the front door lock and went back hopefully into the living-room.

"Hullo, Barbara," he said blandly. "I was afraid I'd missed you."

6

In her street clothes, she looked just as exotic and exciting as she had the night before. Her tailored suit had obviously been conceived by a Scottish sheep, born on a hand loom north of the Tweed, and lovingly reared by a couturier with a proper admiration for the seductive curves of her figure. The inevitable hatbox which is the badge and banner of the New York model dangled from one gloved hand; but you would still have een her as a model without it, if only because such a sheer physical-perfection as hers simply demanded to be pictured. Simon observed, with dispassionate expertness, that even broad daylight could find no flaw in the clear olive smoothness of her skin.

Another and less simple observation was that she seemed at first too surprised and angry to be afraid.

"Well I'm damned," she said. "How did you get in here?"

"I burgled the joint," said the Saint candidly.

"You've got a nerve," she said. "On top of what you did to me last night."

The act looked quite terrific. But the lift of the Saint's right eyebrow was only mildly impudent.

"Did they make you wash a lot of dishes?" he inquired interestedly.

The flare in her eyes was like lightning reflected in pools of jet. She was Certainly wonderful. And it was no help to her at all that anger only cleared her beauty of the magazine-cover sugariness and gave it a more vivid reality.

"So you're damned smart," she said in a frozen voice that came like icicles out of a blast furnace. "You make a fool out of me in front of half the waiters in New York. You stick me with a dinner check for about thirty dollars—"

"But you must admit it was a good dinner."

"And then you have the gall to break into my apartment and try to be funny about it." Her voice thawed out on the phrase, as if she was coming out of a momentary trance into the full spoken realisation of what he had actually done; and then it sizzled like oil on hot coals. "Well, we can soon settle that—"

"Not so fast, darling."

His arm shot out almost lazily, and he hardly seemed to have moved towards her at all, but her wrist was caught in fingers of steel before she had taken more than one full step towards the telephone.

He stopped her without any apparent effort at all, and calmly disengaged the hatbox and tossed it into the nearest armchair.

"Before you add half the cops in New York to half the waiters, in this audience of yours," he said, "I think we should talk some more."

"Let me go!" she blazed.

"After all," he continued imperturbably, "it is a pretty nice apartment. And you did invite me here originally, if you remember. There must be some handy dough in this modeling racket for you to be able to keep up a pied-d-terre like this. Or, if it isn't rude question, who else is contributing at the moment?"

Her ineffectual struggle almost ceased for a moment; and then, when it sprang up again, for the first time it had the wild flurry of something close to the delayed panic that should have been there long before.

"You must be crazy! You're hurting me—"

"And that," said the Saint, nodding towards a veneered cabinet against the wall, without any change either in the steel of his grip| or the engaging velvet of his voice, "is presumably the radio whose| dulcet tones were to beguile me last night — while I was being cosily framed into the neatest murder rap that I've had to answer for a long time."

"You crazy lunatic…"

Her voice faded out just like that. And the fight faded out of her in exactly the same way, abruptly and completely, so that she was like a puppet with the strings suddenly cut.

"What do you mean," she whispered, "murder?"

Simon let go her wrist and put his cigarette to his mouth again, gazing down at her with eyes of inexorable blue ice. His mind was clear and passionless like the mind of a surgeon in an operating room. In the back of his mind he could hear the whirr of wheels in a production line, and again he could remember candlelight and soft music and rich food and wine in a penthouse hideaway, and still behind that in his mind was the rumble of tanks and the drone of airplanes and the numbing thunder of shells and bombs, and men sweating and cursing in the smoke of hell; and the war was there in that room, he could feel it as fierce and vital as the hush in a front-line trench before an attack at dawn, and he knew that even in those incongruous and improbable settings he was fighting not one battle but many battles.

He repeated passionlessly: "I said murder."

"Who?"

"It's in the papers. But you wouldn't need to read about it."

Her eyes were pleading.

"I don't understand. Honestly. Who are you talking about?"

"The linnet will sing no more," Simon said. "And if I hadn't been a calloused skeptic and walked out on you last night, I'd be doing my own singing in a very minor key and a most undecorative cage."

She stared at him in utter stupefaction.

"Mr Linnet? You mean he's been murdered?"

"Very thoroughly."

"I can't believe it."

"Nobody seems to believe anything these days," Simon re-marked sadly. "But it's still no thanks to you that a lot of large and unfriendly policemen aren't showing me their incredulity right now with a piece of rubber hose."

Half of her mind still seemed to be unreached by his meaning.

"Who did it?"

"I think one of the gentlemen in your bedroom might be able to tell you."

"The what?"

"One of the men in your bedroom. I ran into him at the scene of the crime last night; but he got away. However, it's all right now. It was quite a jolly reunion."

"Are you still raving?"

"Come and see for yourself."

He took her arm and pushed her into the bedroom, kicking the door open with his foot. She stopped with a faint gasp on the threshold, her mouth open and one hand going to her throat.

"Who are they?" she begged.

"Friends of yours, I take it. Anyway, they were here when I arrived, and they seemed to feel very much at home."

"You're joking!"

"I am not joking, darling. Neither were they. In fact, they were proposing to do some very serious and unpleasant things to me. It's rather lucky I was able to discourage them. But I must say I take a poor view of your choice of playmates."

She fought his cynical remoteness with wild and desperate black eyes.

"I've never seen them before in my life. I swear I haven't You must believe me!"

"Then how did they get in here?"

"I don't know."

"I suppose they just broke in," Simon suggested, ignoring the fact that that was exactly what he had done himself.

"They might have."

"Or did they have a key?"

"I tell you, I don't know them."

"Who else has your key?"

It was as if he had hit her under the ribs. All the blood drained out of her face and turned the warm golden glow to a sick yellow. The strength seemed to go out of her with it, so that he felt her weight grow on the arm he was holding. He released her again, and she sank on to the bed as if her knees had turned to water.

"Well?" he said ruthlessly.

"I can't tell you."

"Meaning you won't."

She shook her head so that her long hair swirled like a dancer's skirt.

"No…" Her gaze was imploring, frantic, yet trying ineffectually to draw back and harden. "What are you trying to do anyhow, and what right have you got—"

"You know about me. I'm trying to break the iridium black market. And there was robbery and murder tied up with it even before I started. You may have heard that there's a small war in progress. Iridium happens to be a ridiculously vital material. Gabriel Linnet had had dealings with the black market, and I was going to talk to him last night. You were planted there to keep me away while he was having his voice amputated — and incidentally to make sure I wouldn't have an alibi so I could be hung for it."

"No," she said.

"If you aren't anything worse, you're just another butterfly trying to throw curves God didn't give her to toss around. Maybe you thought it was all good clean fun — great sport for a pretty girl to play Mata Hari and dip her little fingers into international intrigue—"

"No," she said. "It wasn't like that."

"Then how was it?"

She twisted her hands together between her knees.

"I was planted there last night. That's true." Her voice was light and strained. "But that isn't what I was told. I was told it was just business. That Mr Linnet had hired you to try and spoil a business deal that — that this person I was doing it for was interested in. He said I just had to keep you away from Mr Linnet for a certain time and everything would be all right. I never dreamed it meant any more than that. I still can't believe it."

"Who is this person?" he asked again.

"How can I tell you? I'd be betraying a trust."

"I suppose betraying your country and helping to hide a murderer seems much more noble."

Her clenched hands beat at her temples.

"Please don't — please! I've got to think…"

"That might be a great beginning."

He was as pitiless and implacable as he could be. There was nothing in this that he could afford to be sentimental about. He was deliberately using his voice and personality like a whip.

She turned her face up to him with the mascara making dark smudges under her eyes, and the same pleading held in her voice.

"I'm so mixed up. This is somebody who's been very good to me… But everything I've told you is the truth. I swear it is. You must believe me. You must."

He knew that at that time he was as unemotional as a lie detector; and yet unsureness tightened the muscles of his jaw. He took a long inhalation from his cigarette while he assessed the feeling.

He had his own extra sense of truth that was like the ear of a musician with perfect pitch. He knew also that even that intuition could be deceived, because he himself had more than once deceived some of the most uncooperative critics. But if Barbara Sinclair was doing that, she had to be the most sensational actress that ever walked, on or off a stage. It simply became easier and more rational to believe that he had met at least some of the truth than that he had met the supreme acting of all time.

His main objectives were unchanged. He had to convict a murderer, track down the stolen iridium that had been diverted into the black market, and uncover, erase, liquidate, or otherwise dispose of the upper case brain that controlled the whole traitorous racket. He had to do that no matter who got hurt, including himself.

But there was the slightest change in his tone of voice as he said: "All right. What about these two creeps?"

"I don't know who they are. Honestly. I can't even think how they got in here."

"Let's find out."

He made a rapid search of the two sleepers, and found no burglarious implements. But separate from the bunch of keys on Varetti's gold trouser chain, he found a single key in one waistcoat pocket. He took it to the front door and tried it. It worked.

He came back, showed it to the girl, and put it in his own pocket.

"They had a key," he said. "So by your own count, they must be pals of your boy friend. Does that help?"

She didn't answer.

"I might ask them some questions," he said. "How would you like that?"

"I'd like that," she said almost intensely.

He looked at Varetti and Walsh again; but they showed no signs of life whatever, and he regretted a little that he had dealt with them quite so vigorously. But the real motive of his question had been to get her reaction. The two men themselves were obviously dyed-in-the-wool mobsters of an older school, who would endure great persuasion before they opened up their souls and became confidential. And that would take time — quite probably, too much time.

Simon located a closet full of feminine fripperies, and gave it a quick inspection. A suit of masculine pajamas hanging just inside interested him quite a little — even if Barbara Sinclair had a weakness for masculine modes, they would obviously have been too big for her. But he made no remarks about them. He heaved the two mobsters in, one after the other, and locked the door.

"They'll keep for a bit," he said; and then his eye fell again on the rawhide bag which had damaged his shin.

He pointed to it.

"Were you thinking of going somewhere, or were they moving in?"

She hesitated, fighting another battle with herself before she replied.

"It isn't mine."

"Who does it belong to — your new boarders?"

"No. It belongs to — the same person. He left it with me some time ago. He said it was a lot of old books that he'd brought in from the country to give to the USO, but he kept forgetting to do anything about it." Her eyes went back to him with a weak spark of hope. "Perhaps he just sent those men to fetch it."

"Perhaps he did," Simon agreed courteously. "Do you mind if I have a look at these old books?"

She shook her head.

"I suppose I can't stop you. But the bag's locked."

He looked at her humorously.

"I should have known that a bookworm like you would have tried to take a peek before this."

Her face flamed but she made no retort.

Simon started to pick up the suitcase, and was momentarily taken aback by his own lack of strength. It was a little distressing to discover that old age had caught up with him so quickly — in the space of a mere few minutes, to be exact. For he had handled the two limp gangsters without much difficulty.

He took a fresh grip, and heaved the bag on to the bed. Even for a load of books, it was astonishingly heavy for its size.

It was closed with a three-letter combination lock that surrendered its feeble little secret to the Saint's sensitive fingers in a few seconds; and he raised the lid and gazed down at two glass jars, about the size of quart milk bottles, solidly embedded in a nest of crumpled newspapers. Each of them was filled to the toj with a greenish powder.

The girl was leaning over to look with him.

"I don't know whether you know it, darling," said the Saint; gently, "but you have been taking care of about two hundred' thousand dollars' worth of iridium."

7

If she had had any reactions left he might have suspected her again. It would have been too much like an effort to show the right response — however right it was. But now she seemed to have been stunned into a purely mechanical acceptance.

"This is what you were looking for," she said.

It was a simple statement, almost naive in its tonelessness.

"I imagine it is," he said. "The shipment that was hijacked in Nashville. Or about two-thirds of it. That would be about right — a third of the shipment must be in black market circulation by this time."

He squinted down at the suitcase again as he reached for a cigarette, and his eyes settled on the combination of letters at which the lock had opened.

"Do the initials O S M mean anything to you?" he asked.

"No. Why?"

Her face was completely empty. He was watching her. And so much depended on whether he was right, and whether he could see through the beauty of her face and not let it color what he was looking for. "Skip it," he said. "It was just an idea."

He lighted his cigarette, while she sat down heavily on the bed and stared at him in that numb kind of bewilderment. Her hands trembled slightly in her lap.

He said: "Your boy friend parked this stuff here with you — safely enough, because this is one of the last places where anybody would look for it. Probably even his best friends don't know anything about his connection with this place. And even if anybody who knew too much already did know, they'd never expect him to be so dumb as to leave a couple of hundred grand's worth of boodle lying around in a love-nest. Which is what we call the technique of deception by the obvious… Yes, it was a good place to cache the swag. But now, apparently, your mysterious meal ticket is getting nervous. Maybe he's a little afraid of you and what you know. So he sent Humpty and Dumpty here to fetch it away." The Saint had slipped out of cold cruelty again as impersonally as he had slid into it. He said quietly: "Now what?"

She nodded like a mechanical doll.

"Just give me a chance," she begged. "If I can only make it right with myself… Can't you give me just a little time?"

He was sure now, and his decision was made. It was no part of him to look back.

"Not here," he said decisively. "We don't know who the next caller may be, and in any case we don't want Humpty and Dumpty waking up and hearing you. If any of the ungodly got the idea that you were talking to me at all, they might find a whole new interest in your health. And I'd rather not have to hold my next interview with you in a morgue."

Her eyes widened as she looked at him.

"You mean you think somebody might try to harm me?"

"There have been instances," said the Saint, with considerable patience, "where persons who knew too much, in this life of sin, have been harmed — some of them quite permanently."

"But he — I mean, this man wouldn't hurt me. You see, he's in love with me."

"I don't altogether blame him," said the Saint agreeably. "And I'm sure he would weep bitterly while he cut your throat."

He closed the valise quickly, hefted it again, and took her arm with his other hand.

"Let's go," he said.

She raised herself slowly from the bed.

"Where?"

"Some place with room service, where you don't have to be seen and where it would take weeks to locate you."

He herded her briskly out of the apartment, and stabbed at the button of the self-service elevator. The car was still on that floor, and he followed her in as the door rolled back.

"And there, my love," he continued, as the antique apparatus began its glubbering descent, "you will sit in your ivory tower with the night chain on the door, refusing all phone calls and| unbarring the portals only to admit slaves bearing food which you are damn sure you ordered, or when you hear my rich and resonant voice announcing that I have a COD package for you from Saks Fifth Avenue. All characters who demand entrance with telegrams, special deliveries, flowers, plumbing tools, or dancing hears will be ignored. In that way I hope I shall save the expense of having to pay for cleaning a lot of your red corpuscles off the carpet,"

Then he kissed her, because she was still very beautiful looking at him, and other things that were rooted in neither of them as people had forced him into a part that he would never have chosen, and he knew it even while it would never shake the lucid distances of his mind.

It was like kissing an orchid; and the seismic grounding of the elevator was only just in time to save him from the disturbance of discovering what it might mean to kiss an orchid that became alive.

He glanced up and down the street as he followed her to the cab which was fortunately waiting at the stand outside. There was nobody he recognised among the few people within range, but nowhere in Simon Templar's professional habits was there an acceptance of even temporary immunity without precautions.

"Penn Station," he told the driver. The girl looked at him questioningly, but before she could speak he said quickly: "We'll just catch the twelve-thirty, and that'll get us to Washington in plenty of time."

He chattered blithely on about non-existent matters, giving her no chance to make any mistakes, and glancing back from time to time through the rear window. But the traffic was thick enough all the way to make it almost impossible to be certain of identifying any following vehicle. He could only be secure by taking no chances.

He had the fare and tip ready in his hand as the taxi swooped down the ramp and wedged itself into the jam at the unloading platform. Without waiting for the cab to creep any closer, he hauled out the heavy bag, shook his head at a hopeful redcap, grasped Barbara Sinclair by the elbow, and propelled her dextrously and without a pause through the crowded rotunda of the station to the escalators with a nimbleness of dodging and threading that would have brought tears to the eyes of a football coach. In a mere matter of seconds they were out on Seventh Avenue opposite the Pennsylvania Hotel.

"Not that one," said the Saint. "It's too obvious. I've got another place in mind. Let's joy-ride some more."

"But why—"

"Darling, that is a one-hack stand in front of your building. Anyone who was trailing us wouldn't have much trouble finding our last driver."

"Do you think he'd remember? He must have so many passengers—"

The Saint sighed.

"Didn't you ever wonder why taxi drivers always haul out a pad at the first red light and start scribbling in it? Did you think they were putting in a quick paragraph on the Great American Novel? Well, they weren't. That's a record that the Law makes them keep. Where from and to. So our driver doesn't need such a memory. With that note to goose him, he'll probably even remember that we were talking about going to Washington. Now if your glamor boy has any respect for my genius, which he may or may not have, he probably won't believe we went to Washington. But he won't be sure. If he's very bright, he will immediately begin to think of what I was talking about just now — the technique of deception by the obvious. And he will begin to feel quite ill. Uncertainty will breed in his mind. And uncertainty breeds fear; and fear often leads clever men to do quite unclever things. Anyway, this will all help to make him miserable, and since he never set me up in a fancy apartment I don't owe him anything. Taxi!"

He signed her into a small residential hotel off Lexington Avenue as the wife of an entirely fictitious Mr Tombs whose sarcophagal personality had given him much private entertainment for many years, and left her there after he had made sure that she remembered his password seriously.

"You can do your thinking here, in pleasant surroundings," he said. "Search your soul to the core and make your decision. I'm sorry I can't stay to help you, but I have things to do while you wrestle with your private confusions."

Her eyes wandered around the apartment, and then back to him, in a lost sort of way.

"Do you really have to go now?"

She didn't have to ask that, and he wished that he didn't have to make an answer.

"I'm sorry," he repeated with a smile. "But this little war is still going on, and maybe the enemy isn't waiting."

The same bellboy who had just carried the rawhide suitcase in and out of the elevator met him in the small lobby with a somewhat unresolved blend of eagerness and suspicion. The contents of the bag alone weighed a full hundred pounds, and the Saint swung it in one hand as if it had been empty.

"The lining in this damn thing is all coming unstuck," he said casually. "Is there any place near here where I could get it fixed?"

The boy's dilemma resolved itself visibly in his slightly bovine eyes.

"There's a luggage store a couple of blocks down on Lexington," he said; and the Saint gave him another quarter and sauntered out, still airily swinging the bag.

Not being Superman, he was wielding it a little less jauntily when he turned into the store; but apart from a mild feeling of dislocation in his left shoulder he was able to amuse himself a little with the business of making the purchases which he had in mind — one of which was somewhat eccentric, to say the least, and fairly baffling to the proprietor of the adjoining sporting goods emporium.

His next stop was at the Fifty-first Street police station, where he had a weighty message to leave for Inspector Fernack. Then he took another cab to the Algonquin, and walked into the lobby just as the gray handsome figure of Allen Uttershaw turned away from the desk and caught sight of him.

"The ass will carry his load," Uttershaw observed cheerily, raising his eyebrows at the Saint's burden. "I was just asking for you."

Simon surrendered his bag to a bellboy to be taken to his room, and shook hands.

"With all the doormen in the Army, the ass has to," he said. "Do you carry a pocket edition of Familiar Quotations?"

"A weakness of mine, I'm afraid," Uttershaw admitted. "But at least it's a little more distinctive than the usual conversational cliches." He sighed deprecatingly. "I was thinking of taking you up on that invitation to lunch."

Simon realised that he was hungry himself, for the prisoner's breakfast with which he had been regaled at some unholy hour had not been planned to induce the vigorous vibrations to which his constitution was accustomed.

"Why don't you?" he said.

They went into the bright paneled dining room and ordered Little Necks and sole veronique, with sherry for a preface. Simon sipped his glass of pale gold Cedro and remarked: "This is a little more restful than the love-nest we met in."

"Domestic happiness, thou only bliss of Paradise that has survived the Fall," said Uttershaw ironically. "I very seldom let my business connections lure me into their private lives, but sometimes one just can't avoid it. I was sorry for you. If you'll forgive my saying it, your method of getting to see him was clever enough in theory, but if you'd known more about Milton Ourley you'd never have tried it that way."

The Saint passed over the assumption that he had engineered his introduction from the start, and appreciated Uttershaw's tacit and friendly elimination of a number of unnecessary pretenses.

"Do you think he could have talked if he'd wanted to?"

"If he'd wanted to. Yes. I don't doubt it. He seems to be getting the iridium he needs, and he certainly isn't getting it from me. And I'm not trying to sound like a great king of commerce, but the fact remains that there just isn't any other legitimate way of getting it that I wouldn't know about."

Simon considered the statement for a few moments while he watched a waiter threading his way through the tables towards them, brandishing platters of clams with the legerdemain of some phenomenal cymbalist. He gazed down at them appreciatively as they settled in front of him — seven beautiful bivalves, glistening with their own juicy freshness. The Saint felt very pleased about clams, in a generous and cosmic way. He was glad he had invented them.

He did careful things with horseradish, tabasco, and lemon.

"By the way," he inquired casually, "has your insurance company offered any reward for the recovery of your iridium?"

"Ten per cent of the value of the amount recovered, I believe." Uttershaw's glance was mildly interrogative in turn. "Is that the motive of your interest?"

"Partly," said the Saint with a slight smile. "But only partly."

He speared a fat young clam from its shell, dunked it in cocktail sauce, and savored its delicate succulence with unmitigated relish.

Uttershaw went through the same motions, but he went on looking at the Saint with a directness that contrived to be quite undisconcerting.

"I didn't miss your exit line last night," he said. "How much did the Linnet sing?"

"A little less than enough," Simon said warily. "You heard about him?"

"I read a morning paper."

"What did you think?"

Uttershaw hunched his shoulders faintly as he went for another clam.

"As a mere amateur at this sort of thing, I wondered whether he was punished for singing too much, or whether he was choked off before he really hit a tune. What's your opinion?"

Simon let the question go unanswered while he tasted his sherry again, and when he put his glass down he seemed to have a convenient impression that he had already answered and could start again on another tack.

"He made quite a lot of headlines," he observed idly.

"fie was quite a figure in his business, you know," Uttershaw J said.

"You must have known him, of course."

"Fairly well. He bought his iridium from my firm — in the good old days when we had some."

"And then?"

Uttershaw spread his hands.

"Then, I suppose, the poor devil dipped into the black market, with the results already noted. You probably know much more about that than I do. How deeply was he mixed up in it?"

Simon waited until the sole was in front of them and he had enjoyed his first taste; and then he said directly, but with the same amiable presupposition of a common intelligence: "How would it be if you told me why I should tell you anything, before you ask too many questions?"

"That's fair enough," Uttershaw agreed easily. "As I explained last night, I've got a financial interest. 'The loss of wealth is loss of dirt', if you believe John Heywood — or should I have said Christopher Morley? — but it happens to be my dirt, and I think that's a responsibility as well as a privilege. The other interest is — well, I've got to be trite and call it patriotic. Then, I like you as a person; and I'd like you to bring this off. I'd like to help you, if I could; but I don't want to sound foolish by making great revelations which might be all old and stale to you."

"For instance," said the Saint, just as pleasantly, "what was the great revelation you had in mind?"

"I was wondering if you'd formed any definite conclusions about Ourley."

Simon enjoyed more mouthfuls. He was hungry. But he didn't miss any of the lines of sober anxiety in the other's thinly sculptured face.

"He appears to be a little man with a large wife," he said trivially.

"And though his favorite seat be feeble woman's breast," quoted Uttershaw mournfully. "Milton really does prefer them feeble, and with all that — shall we say? — giddiness of hers, Tiny Titania is as tough as her own stays. And while she likes her own dancing partners, she watches him like a hawk. He isn't even allowed to have a typist under forty in his office."

The Saint had a sudden strange creeping feeling in his spine.

"Does Milton take it and like it," he asked, "or does he still manage to get his fun?"

Uttershaw shook his head deprecatingly.

"I wouldn't know about that," he said. "I told you we were never very close."

"Didn't he ever talk?"

Uttershaw pursed his lips as he brought a hand up to his lean jaw and stroked his face meditatively.

"There was one time…" he said slowly, and stopped.

"Yes?"

"Oh, hell, it doesn't amount to anything. There was a stag affair at some escapist club for downtrodden business men that he belongs to, and he insisted on dragging me along. For some reason or other I couldn't get out of it, or perhaps I didn't think of an excuse quickly enough. Ourley… but it was all so alcoholic that it really doesn't mean a thing."

To the Saint, it felt as if the air about the table was charged with the static electricity of an approaching storm, but he knew that it was only a mystic prescience within himself which was generating that sense of overloaded tension.

"Suppose you give me a chance to decide that for myself," he suggested genially.

"Well, Ourley was pretty tight — most of them were — and he cornered me and babbled a lot of damn foolishness. I guess getting out from under Tiny's iron fist for even that one night had unsettled him, and given him delusions of grandeur. 'In vino veritas', I suppose. Anyway, he was in quite a Casanova mood. Told me he had a key that Tiny didn't know about, and how he was really much too smart for her, and all that sort of thing. I didn't pay much attention, and I got away as soon as I could. Next morning he called me up and explained that he'd had too much to drink, which was obvious, and said he'd been talking a lot of nonsense and would I forget it. I never gave it another thought, and of course I wouldn't…" Uttershaw broke off, and smiled rather sheepishly. "But that's just what I am doing, isn't it?"

8

The Saint ate a little more, and scarcely noticed what he was doing. The creepy sensation in his backbone had spread out over his whole body, so that every bone in him felt faintly tingling and detached, and his brain was sitting up in a corner of the ceiling moving them with strings.

It was at that moment, for the first time, that a whole chain of the crazy pieces in his jigsaw fell together and began to make a section of a recognisable picture which did curious things to his breathing.

But all that was within himself again, and his face was a study in untroubled bronze.

"I wouldn't worry about its going any further," he said carelessly; and the other nodded, but went on looking at him with a lightly interrogative frown.

"Naturally. But I can't help wondering what made you ask."

"It just came into my head," said the Saint. "On the other hand, I'm wondering why you were thinking about Ourley."

"This isn't easy to say," Uttershaw replied hesitantly. "But I do know from my business dealings with him — and you may have gathered the same impression yourself — that Milton is a bit 'too grasping to care for mere delight'. And it seems to me that any man would need some very good reason for taking Titania to his bosom and keeping her there… I know that some of Milton's financial manipulations have been — well, what you might call complicated. At least, complicated enough for him to keep most of his holdings in his wife's name."

"You're sure of that?"

"Quite sure. As a matter of fact, there are those who would believe that Tiny herself has had a lot to do with the planning and staging of some of those manipulations. There are skeptics who maintain that Tiny's giddiness is more or less of a pose. Although if that's true, the stakes must be very high for a woman to make such an awful caricature of herself."

"If Tiny is Milton's partner behind the scenes, and the duenna of the do-re-mi," Simon remarked thoughtfully, "it must make his home life even more interesting."

"Dire was the noise of conflict." Uttershaw laughed shortly. "You know, I'm still embarrassed about going on with this."

Simon moved his plate a little away from him with an unconscious gesture of finality, and reached for his Pall Malls. He extended the pack towards his guest, and said: "Let me try to help you. How far do you think Milton would go to create a new business life of his own?"

Uttershaw blinked before he bent to accept the Saint's proffered light. He straightened up and exhaled his first puff of smoke a little gustily.

"I hadn't even thought that far," he said, and suddenly he looked shocked and strained. "Do you really mean what I think you're getting at?"

"I was just asking."

"But that's unbelievable. No man could build up anything like this black market alone. He'd have to have at least some associates. And I mean plain criminal associates. A man like Ourley just wouldn't have any connections like that."

"Men like Ourley have had them before. It isn't such a hell of a long time ago that speakeasy proprietors and bootleggers were quite social characters. You get to know a lot of queer people. Big business sometimes deals with queer people, when there are labor troubles or the competition gets rough. The impresarios who put on stag shows at escapist clubs for downtrodden business men move in and out of a world of queer people. Any man can make any connections he wants, if he wants them seriously enough."

Uttershaw made a helpless sort of movement with his hands.

"It seems so fantastic — to think of Milton Ourley as a criminal master mind. Why, he's — he's—"

"He's what?" Simon prompted quietly.

"He's such a dull, irascible, unimaginative, uninventive sort of windbag!" Uttershaw protested. "All he thinks about is how much money he's got, or how much he might make if it wasn't for Roosevelt; and what Tiny is doing with her latest gigolo or how he could be kept late at the office and go out on the town with the boys."

"A master mind," said the Saint didactically, "doesn't always go around with an illuminated forehead. That's the first thing to remember in this detective racket — if you read any stories. Besides which, he can really be just as stupid and boring as anyone else outside of his own field of brilliance. Why shouldn't he be? The greatest bacteriologist in the world could look like a half-wit in a gathering of structural engineers. And he could even be a pain in the neck at a soiree of other bacteriologists. He could be addicted to thunderous belching, or insisting on describing every stroke of his last golf game, without—"

He broke off abruptly, and put a quick hand on the other's arm. The warning shift of his eyes was quite a pamphlet of explanation.

Uttershaw looked where the Saint's glance led him. And then his groan was so polite that it was almost inaudible.

He said, without moving his lips: "Talk of the devil."

Simon nodded, keeping a smile of recognition on his face. He had seen her come in while he was talking, and with the grim certainty of impending doom he had watched her methodically sifting the room with her eyes like a veterinarian working over a shaggy dog with a steel comb.

Now, like a pirate galleon under full sail sweeping down upon a freshly sighted victim, Titania Ourley came cleaving through the tables, her plump and expensively painted face set in the overpowering smile of a woman who remains steadfastly convinced in spite of all discouragements that her charm and beauty will carry her serenely past all the reefs and snags in the sea of life.

"Milton, thou shouldst be with us at this hour," Simon paraphrased under his breath, with a certain resignation.

"Templar hath need of thee," Uttershaw continued for him sympathetically.

"She is a wen'," said the Saint, concluding the slaughter, and stood up to bow over the nearer of the two hands which she extended towards them with a prodigality that would have done credit to Mrs Siddons at her Westphalian best.

Perched on the forward top of her head she wore a confection of fur, feathers, and what appeared to be a bunch of slightly mildewed prunes. It nearly fell into the Saint's coffee as she sat down, but she caught it in time and restored it to its point of balance with what looked like the insouciance of much practice.

"I felt I just had to see you and explain, Simon dear," she said. "Milton's behavior was so downright disgraceful last night — wasn't it, Allen?"

Uttershaw tried to achieve some sort of pleasant and neutral vagueness; but the effort was hardly necessary, for Mrs Ourley had only paused for a swift breath.

"I'd thought that perhaps later we might get in a rumba or two with the Capehart — I've got simply stacks and stacks of records — but as it was you couldn't even stay for dinner. And after I'd told Frankfurter — he's our butler, and a perfect jewel of a butler if I ever saw one, and of course I've seen so many. But the way Milton acted. Well, really, it was a complete surprise to me. And after you'd taken the time and trouble to come all the way out to Oyster Bay and use up your gas and tires and everything to try and help him out of that terrible iridium mess. We had a dreadful spat about it last night, and I told him he was either too rude to live or as good as a traitor; and he said — well, you heard how he talks when he's angry, and I can't bring myself to repeat it. But I was so hoping I'd find you here so that I could tell you it wasn't my fault."

"I never thought it was," said the Saint reassuringly, and was fortunately rescued from further contortions by the intrusion of a bellboy in search of Uttershaw for a telephone call.

"Excuse me," Uttershaw said, with a tinge of humorous malice, and went gracefully away.

Mrs Ourley watched him go with a kind of middle-aged lasciviousness, dislocated her hat again as she turned back to the table, balanced it once more with the same nonchalant agility, and said: "Isn't he the most charming man?"

"A nice character," said the Saint.

"And he's a divine dancer. And always so wonderfully tactful. I don't know what I'd have done if he hadn't been there last night. Milton is simply impossible when he gets into one of his moods. It's a good thing they never last more than a few weeks. But really, Simon — I hope you don't mind me calling you Simon, but I'm beginning to feel as if I'd known you for years — really, you must come out to dinner with us one night. I've got a simply wonderful cook — she makes pics that literally melt in your mouth, I mean literally melt."

"Simple Simon met a pieman, going to the fair," murmured the Saint, and immediately decided that this quotation mechanism was something that had to be taken firmly in hand.

"What?… Oh, you silly boy! Of course I didn't mean anything like that. But my cook really is a treasure."

"You look like a living tribute to her genius," said the Saint with a straight face; and Mrs Ourley beamed.

"You say the sweetest things. But I was telling you about Milton. I know I shouldn't talk about my own husband, but he's ridiculously jealous. He…"

Simon listened with the utmost interest to her description of some of the unreasonableness of Mr Milton Ourley, and while he listened he was studying the face of the woman across the table.

He had to admit that the ideas which Uttershaw had planted were astonishingly fertile. There was a rapacious ruthlessness below the surface of gabbling imbecility which Titania Ourley displayed to the public which could make a lot of surprising pictures of her plausible. Without knowing anything else about her, he knew that she would make a dangerous enemy; and he knew that the effusive gush which enveloped her like her appalling perfume could provide a lot of study for a post-graduate student of camouflage.

The tale of Milton Ourley's derelictions went on and on while the Saint thought about it. He nodded regularly, and made encouraging noises in the right places, and managed to look quite disappointed when the recital was interrupted by the return of Allen Uttershaw.

"Do sit down," said Mrs Ourley hospitably. "I was just telling Simon — I mean Mr Templar — I mean Simon—"

"I'm sorry," Uttershaw said suavely. "I'm still a working man, you know. That call was from my office, and I'm afraid some other working men are getting impatient."

"You're a meanie!"

Mrs Ourley made a moue. This was undoubtedly something she had read about in a magazine. In her interpretation, it looked a little as if she had just detected the presence of a dead rat in the room.

"Forgive me," Uttershaw said. "It isn't because I want to 'scorn delights and live laborious days'." He turned to Simon, and held out his hand with a smile that contained a hint of wicked amusement which had nothing to do with the ordinary urbanities. "I'm glad to leave you in such good company." He glanced at Mrs Ourley again. "By the way, where is Milton?"

"He's down the street at the Harvard Club, having lunch with some dreary man from Washington — at least, that's what he said he was doing," she added darkly. "Lately, I've had my suspicions as to what Milton is doing when he tells me he's doing something else, if you know what I mean. Why?"

"I might want to get in touch with him this afternoon," Uttershaw said casually, but his eyes returned rather conspiratorially to the Saint as he was finishing the sentence. "Well — I enjoyed our talk. Let's meet again soon."

"Very soon," Simon promised.

He sat down again as Uttershaw sauntered out, and saw that Mrs Ourley was following this departure with a tinge of speculation that had not been in her oestrous gaze before.

"Now, why do you suppose he might want to find Milton?" she asked.

She was talking more to herself than to him, but the eyes that she swung back towards him were no longer vacant.

"And he was having lunch with you… Is it something about the iridium?" she asked sharply.

Anyone could have noticed the change in her tone, the steel showing through the whipped cream, the spikes under the feathers.

Simon reached for his coffee and took a sip.

"That's rather obvious, isn't it?" he said calmly. "You know that I'm gunning for the black market. You know that Alien Uttershaw was about the biggest dealer in iridium before the shortage. So I guess the subject may have been just accidentally mentioned."

Her pale and slightly protruding eyes became almost metallic. The thickly rouged lips thinned out, and the puffy features had congealed under the lacquered skin.

"What did he tell you?" she demanded.

The Saint didn't answer. He merely slanted his eyebrows into line of bland and blunt inquiry that was exactly as eloquent as speech. Without articulating a syllable, it wanted to know just what the hell business of Titania Ourley's it was what Allen Uttershaw had told him; and she caught the precise meaning of it like a fighter walking into a straight left. You could almost see the impact of it connecting with one of the receding tiers of chins that sagged from beneath that suddenly hard mouth.

She recovered with a celerity that earned his reluctant admiration. When he gave her that cynical challenge of the eyebrows she had been within a hair's breadth of menace and domineering; now, in a moment, she was leaning back again and delving into an enormous handbag to excavate a cigarette holder that looked like a jeweled pipe from a cathedral organ, and she was just as vapid as she had ever been.

"I'm afraid I'm much too inquisitive," she prattled. "I keep forgetting that you're the Saint, and anything people tell you is sacred. After all, I did make you my own father confessor, didn't I?… But I admit I am curious." She bent forward again so that a comber of hothouse odors practically splashed into the Saint's nostrils. "Not that I ever gossip about anybody — Heaven knows that my worst enemies can't say that about me! But to tell you the truth, I've often wondered about Mr Uttershaw."

9

Simon Templar replenished his cup with the last dribble from his rationed coffee-pot, and reflected that life could certainly open up a wondrous variety of perspectives when sundry citizens began to look sideways at one another. It was a sizable item in the mental overhead which he would have preferred to leave out of his budget; but he compromised by showing no visible reaction at all and letting his mind remain passive and receptive.

Titania Ourley, who was apparently waiting for shocked amazement to spread over his features, seemed moderately disappointed when his face remained unmoved but expectant. Nevertheless, she surged closer over the table, buffeting him with another tidal wave of exotic stenches which he decided must have been concocted in a cocktail shaker.

"I wouldn't be at all surprised," she said portentously, "if somebody investigated Allen Uttershaw one of these days and found out a lot of funny things. Oh, I know he's a marvelous dancer, and he's always so perfectly perfect, if you know what I mean, but haven't you noticed that there's something secret about him? I hate to say it when he isn't here to defend himself, but do you know, sometimes I think he isn't quite normal!"

"Really?" drawled the Saint. "You mean he—"

"Oh, no — nothing like that!"

Simon was prepared to give something to know what "that" was that Allen Uttershaw was nothing like. He suspected the worst, in Mrs Ourley's peculiar mind.

He applied an expression of fascinated suspense to his mask, and waited.

"When I say that," she elucidated, "I mean that he's — he's — well, I can only say that he must be anti-social." Her voice became positively vibrant. "Do you know, out of all the times we've invited him to dinner, last night was the first time he's been to see us in months!"

She relaxed triumphantly, with the air of having furnished incontrovertible evidence that the subject under discussion was a dangerous case who should be lured into a padded cell at the earliest opportunity.

Simon clicked his tongue gloomily, shaking his head at the dreadful realisation that his recent companion was indisputably an incurable schizophrene. His manifest distress spurred Mrs Ourley to further expansions.

"Not only that," she said, in confidential accents that could not possibly have been heard more than three tables away, "but I think he has a grudge against Milton. Of course, he's just as friendly and charming as he can be when he's with us, but he does things behind Milton's back."

"How horrible," muttered the Saint solemnly, with no qualms at all that either innuendo or sarcasm would register on that target.

He was absolutely right, for whatever satisfaction the experiment was worth.

"Yes, indeed," she trilled. "For instance, when Milton was put up for one of Allen's clubs, only a little while ago, he was voted down. And I have it on very good authority that it was Allen who blackballed him. And after he'd been a guest in our home, too!"

Simon searched for words to express his revulsion at such perfidy, but before he had formulated the fitting phrase he was saved by the bell again. The same heaven-sent bellboy stood by the table again.

"Telephone, Mr Templar."

"Thank you," said the Saint, and really meant it.

He went out to the booth in the lobby and said: "Hullo."

"What the hell," roared the voice of Inspector Fernack, like a bursting dam, "are you doing there?"

The Saint smiled, and picked a cigarette out of the pack in his pocket.

"Hullo, John Henry," he said cordially. "I'm just finishing lunch and making love to a retired Ziegfeld girl. What are you doing?"

"How did you get loose?"

"I didn't. The FBI turned me loose. I promised to be a good boy, and they took one look at my cherubic countenance and knew they could trust me."

"If you think—"

"I do, Henry. And don't you send half a dozen squad cars screaming up here to grab me again, because if you do the FBI will hear about it at once, and then they'll think I've violated my parole by getting into bad company and associating with policemen again, and of course they'd have to come right over and ask to have me back."

"I don't believe—"

"But you must, Comrade. If you don't, you're liable to look awful foolish. And that would never do. Think of your dignity. Think of the prestige of the Force. And if that's too much work for you, call Brother Eldon's office and verify it."

There was an interval of silence, during which Simon could almost see the detective's aorta laboring like a stimulated blow-fish.

Finally Fernack said, in a painful parody of his ordinary voice: "Templar, what are you doing in this setup?"

"You heard from Fifty-first Street?"

"Yes." It was a grudging admission. "But—"

"Then at least you've got something."

"But where did you find it?"

"I can't tell you yet. But at least I'm giving you a break. Don't. you think I'm being good to you? I don't think you appreciate it. Think of the glory I'm helping you to grab for yourself. And now I'm going to give you some more. By tomorrow, you'll have half the morning paper headlines all to yourself."

Fernack said suspiciously: "What's this?"

"In just a few minutes, any bright bull who walks into my suite here will be able to pinch a couple of old-timers. Their names are Ricco Varetti and Cokey Walsh. They will be trying to steal a very handsome piece of luggage from me, and they might even be attempting some private unpleasantness on my person. You've got their records, no doubt."

"I know 'em both. But what've they got to do with—"

"You'll find out. Come on over and play some flagrante de-licto."

"I can't," Fernack said tormentedly. "I've got to go into court on another case in just a few minutes."

"Then send someone else."

"Is this on the level?"

"Word of honor."

After a second or two Fernack said: "I'll send Kestry and Bonacci. I think you've met them."

The Saint had met them. The acquaintance dated back to the first episode in which he had met Inspector Fernack, and it had been enlightening. The recollection drew his mouth down in a tight line that still did not embitter his eyes.

"I guess they can take care of the situation," he admitted. "As a matter of fact, there must be very few situations in which those two goons couldn't take care of themselves."

"I expect they can keep out of trouble," Fernack agreed with ponderous deference. "But what are they supposed to hold Varetti and Walsh for?"

"I don't know what technical charge would be the worst they'd settle for," said the Saint, "but if they can't work out a good one on the spot, they must have slipped a lot since I met them. And anyhow, I'm sure they'll be able to do some great detecting in a back room with a rubber hose. Or has this priority business got-ten so tough that you can't even buy your laboratory equipment any more?"

The receiver seemed to grow hot against his ear.

"You can be funny about that some other time," Fernack grunted. "But I'm telling you, Templar, if this turns out to be mother of your—"

"Henry," said the Saint patiently, "I haven't got much more time to waste. And if you're just trying to keep me here until your flying squad arrives, don't say I didn't warn you."

"I haven't got any flying squad out after you."

"Then why did you call me?"

"I just wanted to find out if you'd been back; and when they put you on the wire—"

"Your little heart had kittens. Now cancel the prowl car and carry on. I've got a job to do."

"But where did you—"

"I'll call you back in a little while," said the Saint. "Keep in touch with your office, give my love to the judge, and I hope you win your case without perjuring yourself."

He hung up on a last imploring squawk from the other end of the wire, and went back to the dining room to close out an interrupted chapter.

He still wanted to hear a little more from Mrs Ourley, and yet he was conscious of time ticking away, and of the vital connections that he had to make. But there was nothing he could ignore, and no prejudice that he could permit to blind him to the reversals of new knowledge.

He sat down again as if no counterplot at all had intervened, and picked up the conversation as smoothly as if he had never been away at all.

"I don't think Milton needs to worry about a little thing like a club membership," he offered. "He must be doing pretty well these days."

"I can't complain," Mrs Ourley said smugly. "Although of course the taxes are frightful and I don't know what we shall do next year if That Man keeps on trying to ruin everybody. But I make Milton save every penny he can; and then I take care of it for him. One of these days, when I've got enough put by, I'm going to buy some War Bonds. I think War Bonds are a wonderful investment… But I know you don't want to be bored with things like that. I don't think any young man, I mean any attractive young man, should ever be bothered about money matters."

"Neither do I," Simon agreed. "But quaintly enough, there isn't any organisation giving away free meals and clothing and alcohol to attractive young men."

The old gleam was in Mrs Ourley's eyes, but her voice burbled on with the same analgesic inanity.

"You just haven't met the right people," she insisted, and eyed the place next to him archly. "Or else you're just too shy with them, making them sit out in the middle of the gangway when there's plenty of room—"

Simon moved the table and made room for her on the banquette beside him. Her circumambient nimbus of perfume moved in with her and pushed away the lunchers on the other side.

"I wish you weren't so terribly busy," she said, and went on to develop her theme without waiting for him to confirm or deny. "You ought to find time to cultivate some people who might help you. I mean really help you. Of course, dashing about after criminals must be very exciting, but is it an altogether complete life?"

"I don't really know," said the Saint mildly. "You seemed to think it was fairly complete when you came to see me and asked me to dash after Milton."

She giggled in a thin falsetto.

"I was thoroughly mad with him," she confessed. "But then I didn't know you personally like I do now. Now I'm just thinking of you as a friend, and I do so want you to do well for yourself. So I was just wondering why you'd want to work so hard and run such frightening risks, when I imagine there'd be plenty of people who'd pay you, oh, enormous amounts of money just for being yourself."

Simon looked up at her, and his blue eyes were icily clear.

"You mean there might be somebody who'd bribe me quite lavishly to leave this iridium racket alone?" he asked, and his voice was completely lazy.

Mrs Ourley laughed again, making a noise which probably sounded to her like the tinkling of fairy bells. It sounded exactly like broken glass going down a garbage chute.

"You do say the funniest things! I was only thinking how nice it would be if I could take you to see the new show at the Copacabana. And the music is just heavenly. It does the most exciting things to me. Milton told me he'd have to work late tonight, and I was hoping…"

She babbled on, and Simon made vaguely helpful responses. But behind it his mind was far away and running like a machine. The electrification that he had felt a few minutes before, that had spread out and become pervading, was something as firmly with him now as the meal he had just eaten.

He knew that he had almost everything in his hands now. At least, he had as much as he was likely to get. The rest of it lay with his own judgment and perception and choice. He had to read character and motive and physical possibility right. He had to take apart the things people had said, and distinguish the sinister from the stupid, and be a razor edge of separation between the stupid things that looked sinister and the sinister things that looked stupid. He had to eschew all red herrings and perceive only the one true fish.

And he couldn't sit there for ever while he made up his mind, lie had to move. He had to move swiftly and rightly, before there was another murder to be solved, and another sacrifice to be accounted to the dull golden gods who had declared themselves for the enemy.

And at that perfect point he raised his eyes and saw Milton Ourley standing at the entrance of the dining room.

10

It is a simple fact that the Saint was not even surprised. The appearance of Mr Ourley was merely the natural and inevitable slipping of a link in a chain that had been forming for some time, a chain that must ultimately be so solid and inescapable that the failure of one link to make its appearance would have dissolved every other materialising loop. And this link was so ineluctable that it was uncannily like seeing a revival of some half-remembered play, rather than meeting a new and sudden complication.

He said: "Don't look now, but I think your husband is joining us."

Mrs Ourley did look, of course; but she did not come out with the squeak of coy consternation which one might reasonably have expected from her past performance in her own hallway at Oyster Bay. Instead, her carmined nails dug into the tablecloth so hard that they left furrows in the linen, and her complexion paled under its crust of powder until she looked like a fat frostbitten ghost. The sheer coagulation of her face was a distillate of all that unearthly majestic austerity that wins battles in the committee meetings of women's clubs.

"Let me take care of this," she said ominously, and stood up.

She moved with surprising swiftness for her bulk, and she met Milton Ourley halfway down the room. Once again she was like a stately galleon ploughing through a cluttered harbor. Milton might have been compared with a squat broad fussy tug, except that it was the galleon which took him in tow. Simon could hear something like a hoarse spluttering "dabbity dab dab", like a rumble of distant thunder, but it made just as little difference to the general flow of motion. Mr Ourley might actually have made a great physical effort to struggle towards the Saint's table, but the achievements of his kampf were not readily discernible. Borne like a cockleshell upon his spouse's regal bow wave, he was washed back into the lobby, still booming like a frustrated foghorn, and disappeared from the scene.

Simon kept his head down while he examined and signed the check that was already on the table, and then he caught the eye of the maitre d'hotel and brought him over with a mere wisp of a gesture.

"Raul," he said, "how could anyone get out of here without going through the lobby?"

If the maitre d'hotel had his own and incidentally erroneous theories about the Saint's motives, he was far too polished a diplomat to give them any expression. In addition to which, and for no professional reasons, he had long since taken the Saint under his generous wing.

"There is a back way out," he said. "Would you like to see it?"

"I might even fall in love with it," said the Saint.

They went down to the other end of the dining room, through well-organised pantries and one end of the clean busy kitchen, and past a row of food lockers to a wire-mesh door where the timekeeper rose from his little table and a plate of roast beef to let them out. Beyond that there was a short narrow passage and another door that opened inconspicuously on to Forty-fourth Street.

Simon stopped and looked back the way they had come. He pointed.

"Is that the service elevator?"

"Yes, sir. Do you want to use it?"

"That would get me upstairs and back again without going through the lobby too, wouldn't it?"

"Yes, sir."

The Saint rubbed his chin.

"I'd like to do that first. But will George here let me out when I come down again?"

"Of course." Raul turned to the timekeeper. "Please let Mr Templar out whenever he's ready." He turned back to the Saint with a flourish. "Is there anything else I can do?"

Simon grinned as he strolled back towards the service lift.

"You've done plenty already, Raul," he said. "As it is, I expect you've broken all the regulations in the joint, and Mr Case will probably fire you."

The maitre d'hotel shrugged cheerfully.

"Regulations are for everybody else, but not for the Saint." He said to the elevator operator: "Take Mr Templar upstairs and bring him down again any time he wants to come." He smiled at the Saint with the happy magnificence of a mayor who has just bestowed the keys of his city, and said with charming impersonality: "Do you wish to leave any message?"

Simon shook his head.

"Just stay out of trouble and pretend you didn't see me go."

"But I won't have seen you go, Mr Templar," said Raul. "I won't look."

He turned his back, and Simon stepped into the car and was wafted upwards at a suitable pace for a sedate hotel.

He glanced at his wrist watch automatically as he stepped out on the third floor, but it was almost a reflex movement and the position of the hands scarcely impressed itself on him at all. The real timing was all in his head — it was a matter of how long it would have taken to discuss this and decide that and then to do something about it. He was working to almost psychically close tolerances, and an error of even a few minutes in his mental clocking might have catastrophic results. And even then he was trying to timetable something so nebulous that his own intuition was practically the only guarantee that it would work out that way at all.

He slid the key into his door with millimetric stealth, and went into his suite with weightless feet and one hand on the gun which he had borrowed from Mr Varetti before lunch. He had beer caught once that day, and he was not going to make the same mistake again.

But apparently he was still within his margin of time — if it had any real existence at all. There was no one in his living room, or behind the portieres that shut off the bedroom, or in the bathroom or the closet or under the bed. He took each hazard separately and methodically, making no sound to betray his presence until he had covered all of them.

Even then he was very quiet, and denied himself a cigarette that he would have enjoyed because he didn't want to leave fresh smoke in the air.

The suitcase which he had sent up stood beside the sofa in the living room. He didn't touch it.

The iron structure of the fire escape ran outside the bedroom window. Simon had chosen his suite for that reason; but it could work two ways. The front door of the suite could be penetrated in one way or another, but it would present difficulties. Simon thought it would be the fire escape.

The hallway from the front door met the living room at an angle so that there was a corner from which he could cover any entrance from equal concealment. He flattened himself into it and waited, as patient and motionless as a statue in a niche.

Somebody in the adjoining suite turned on a radio at full volume, and it blared away for two or three minutes before it was turned down. Even then, it was too loud.

Of course, it might be the front door. Either Varetti or Walsh might be good with locks, or might be clever enough to con a master key out of somewhere. Or they might even be tough enough to try it with a frontal assault, on a simple smash-grab-and-run basis.

It was curious how he had always assumed that it would be Varetti and Walsh. Even when he spoke to Fernack on the telephone. He had left them locked up in Barbara Sinclair's closet intending to have been back there by that time and busy with the job of advancing their acquaintance on his own terms; but all that had been changed for quite a while. He wasn't quite sure how long ago he had been sure that they were no longer waiting where he had left them, but it seemed now that he had always been sure that they wouldn't be there. It was one of those fourth-dimensional elisions that saw an end before it could pin down all the steps and stages through which the end would come about.

He knew that Varetti and Walsh were out again, because only since they were out again could certain other things have happened. Or, conversely, because other things had happened, they must be out again.

And the rawhide suitcase was standing beside the sofa and someone would come to get it.

It wouldn't take much shopping around to settle on one of the suites directly above the one he was in. And from any such starting point a fire escape that ran down through a gloomy inside courtyard that nobody would ever want to look out at anyway would present virtually no problems at all…

He could really have enjoyed that cigarette.

But how long could he afford to wait, backing his hunch, while he might always be wrong, and the fox might be away in another spinney?

The radio next door was blatting forth some emetic commercial about the perils of fungoid feet or some such attractive ailmen He could hear every word as if he were in the room with it. wondered if it would be loud enough to drown one of the sounds he was listening for.

But it wasn't.

He heard it.

It was the slow cautious rasp of a window-sash being eased quietly upwards. And, after that, the subdued rattle of the slats of the Venetian blind being lifted from below.

So it was the fire escape and the bedroom window; and he had not waited in vain.

There had been an instant of tingling stillness when he heard the sound, but now he was as smooth and cool as a hand-trued machine, and his pulses were as light as the ripples on a landlocked bay at sunset. Now he backed noiselessly out of his neutral corner and flattened himself easily along the wall, towards the front door and away from the rooms, so that the visitor would have to step clear into the living-room before he could see the Saint at all.

The Saint's ears followed the movements in the bedroom step by step. He heard the occasional scuff of exploring feet, and a hoarse "For Christ's sake, hurry up!" There was the clicking of the blind again, and more movement. It was surprising how you could hear sounds, after all, in spite of the radio: when it came to the point, these sounds had a totally different texture, so that there was no confusion, just as you could have heard a hiccup in the next seat in a movie in spite of the sound effects of a newsreel bombardment. He could even hear the thin strained sound of consciously controlled breathing.

In addition, he became ethereally aware of a new richness in the atmosphere which he could still identify in spite of his recent bludgeoning by the assorted smells of Mrs Ourley, and he knew that he was perceiving the particularly obnoxious pomade of Mr Varetti even before the sleek head that wore it slid into his sidelong field of vision.

Varetti stood looking down at the rawhide bag as Cokey Walsh followed him out of the bedroom.

"Here it is," he said, with superfluous but deep satisfaction.

"If only that sonofagun Templar was here too," said Mr Walsh, "I'd like to…"

He enumerated a few things he would have liked to do which it would be useless to repeat here, since the elevated minds of the readers of this reportage would never believe that any person could have such depraved ambitions.

Varetti, a more practical man, cut him off in the middle of a fine phrase with the kind of question which from time immemorial has nipped the poet's prettier fancies in the bud.

""Why don't you shut your trap?"

He picked up the heavy bag with an effort.

"We'll walk down the stairs and walk straight out the front," he said.

"Suppose he's in the lobby," Cokey suggested.

"You go ahead and make sure he isn't."

"I wanna see that sonofabitch again."

"You'll have plenty of time."

Varetti turned towards the door. And there the Saint faced him, elegant and graceful and smiling, with his gun level and tremor less at his waist and blue lights of devilish mockery dancing in his eyes.

It seemed quite unfortunate at that moment that the Algonquin Hotel had omitted to provide two vats of soft plaster of paris among the otherwise well-planned furnishings of the joint. If it had not been for that almost incredible lack of foresight, the cataleptic rigidity of the two men might easily have allowed the Saint to immerse them and withdraw them again without the slightest disturbance of their articulation, thereby creating a pair! of moulds for which any wax museum would have been glad to bid. But such sad wastes are an inevitable symptom of our unplanned economy, and Simon Templar had learned to exercise his philosophy on them.

He said, without undue gloom: "The hands up and clasped behind the back of the head, gentlemen — if you don't mind my borrowing your own fancy formula, Ricco. Although to be quite candid it just struck me that your vocabulary had slipped a bit. Or is it because you save your party dialogue for the cash customers?"

Varetti put the bag down gradually and deliberately, and raised his hands in the same way, so that his movements were rather like those of a trained snake; and his eyes were a snake's eyes, bright and beady and unblinking.

"How the hell did you get here?" demanded Mr "Walsh, almost indignantly.

"I heard you wanted me," said the Saint, "so I came a-running. A little faster with the hands, if you don't mind, Cokey… Thank you… Now if you'll both turn your backs I'll see whether you've picked up any new weapons since we last met, and if you are very polite I may refrain from goosing you."

Apparently they had been rushed out of either the time or the opportunity to replenish their armory, or else they had anticipated no such disconcerting need for one, for the only trophy which rewarded his excavations was a six-inch jackknife from the pocket of Comrade Varetti with a trick spring that whipped the blade open when you pressed a button.

The Saint was not too disappointed. He had discovered before then that it is only in the less conscientious crime stories that the ungodly are endowed with inexhaustible reserves of artillery from which they can rebound on a few minutes' notice from any setback, armed to the teeth again and spitting javelins; and moreover he realised that the armament program must have placed additional handicaps even on the hoodlums who were accustomed to buy their gats by the carton. But he did not complain. He was not the complaining type. He was prepared to make his small contribution to the exigencies of global war.

He put the knife through its paces with the most detached and fascinated interest while he allowed the two men to turn around again.

"Very ingenious, Ricco, and quite a credit to the Mafia, or whatever your dear old alma mater was," he observed appreciatively. "I'm afraid you must have been a very bad little boy when you were young."

Varetti showed his white rabbit teeth in a smile that was half a snarl.

"You'll find out what kind of a bad boy I am before we're through," he said. "Your luck will run out one of these days, and I'm going to be there when it does. You and your exploding cigarettes! I certainly was a chump to be taken in by an old gag like that."

"You certainly were, brother," Simon agreed consolingly. "But you can cheer yourself with the thought that smarter men than you have fallen for it before. And now, if we have to keep up these old-world courtesies, may I trouble you two creeps to back off and park your bottoms on that beautiful period sofa behind you? Keeping the hands in the same position, if you don't mind… That's the idea… I want you to be comfortable, because I still think of you as my guests, and we are now going to have a brief chat about one thing and another."

With just a little more thoughtful reluctance than Walsh, Varetti sank obediently on to the couch; but there was no shift in the bland display of his incisors.

"Don't you know you're wasting your time?" he asked. "We aren't going to tell you anything. Why don't you just call the cops?"

"And then?" Simon inquired, smiling and silky.

"Then you'll have to prove that you didn't invite us in here. And you'll have to explain why you were so mad when we found that you had a bag full of stolen indium in your apartment."

The Saint's eyes danced with boreal lights.

"Mr Walsh," he said, "would you be good enough to open the bag that Ricco is talking about?… Go on… I won't shoot you."

In a state of partial hypnosis buffeted between the menace of the Saint's gun and the impudent spear-tips in the Saint's eyes, Mr Walsh slid dubiously off the sofa to obey. He laid the suitcase on its side, and clicked the catch. He raised the lid. He looked.

So did Ricco Varetti.

They beheld what must have been one of the finest collections of assorted spheres that had ever been hastily improvised. It ranged from the ripe solidity of bowls that should have been booming smoothly down polished alleys, down to ball bearings designed to speed the wheels of roller skates, and down from there to buckshot and BB pills for airguns. It included baseballs, cricket balls, billiard balls, and one large sand-packed medicine ball. It was a truly amazing crop of balls.

"All right," said the Saint amiably. "Let's have the showdown on that basis. The cops are on their way already, whether you believe it or not, and they are a couple of tough babies. They'll be crashing in here in a matter of minutes — if they take that long. I'm giving you this one chance to scream everything you can remember about your boss man; and if you don't want to play with me I'm sure that Kestry and Bonacci will just love showing you the town."

11

To any individual who, like the present chronicler, is acutely conscious of the need to conserve paper in order that there may never be any lack of raw materials on which the latest governmental artist can design new forms to be filled out in sesquicentuplicate, the mere thought of wasting one milligram of precious pulp which might be better devoted to the production of monogrammed kleenex is instinctively repugnant. Your correspondent therefore proposes to expend no words on describing the reactions of Messieurs Varetti and Walsh, beyond mentioning that they looked as if they had been kicked three inches above the navel by an exacerbated elephant.

Where after, as an equally simple matter of record, it was Cokey Walsh who digested the ultimate total into the single sizzling sentence without which all detective-story dialogue would have dried up long ago.

"I ain't talking."

"That remains to be seen," said the Saint, with proper patience, having been in stories before. "But you'll have to start with some sort of alibi when the cops arrive, and I thought you might like a rehearsal."

Varetti moistened his lips.

"That's still easy," he said. "You brought us in here and started all this. You say we were trying to steal something. Well, what was it and where did you get it?"

"You're doing fine," said the Saint encouragingly. "Go on."

Varetti shrugged.

"I don't have to go on for you. But I can tell you that if there's going to be any squealing at all, Cokey and I will squeal on you first. And if we have to take any rap, we'll share it out with you.

We could even say that you were in with us all the time, until you started to double-cross us just now."

"That's right," Cokey chimed in brightly. "When we found out what you was up to, we didn't want any part of it. So we was just tryin' to do our duty and turn you in."

The Saint sighed.

"I can't stop you dreaming," he said, "but do you honestly believe that even the dumbest cop you ever hoped for is going to buy a yarn like that from a couple of characters like you?"

"What's wrong with our characters?" Cokey demanded aggrievedly. "Our word is as good as yours—"

"But is it?" Simon asked gently. "I imagine that your record must be rather involved. And I don't suppose you got your name because of your passion for drinking colas. I can see other stuff in your eyes now. Are you quite sure that a junkie's word is as good as mine? What do you think, Ricco? — and incidentally, how is your police record? Will the YMCA vouch for you? Are you in line for an honorary commission in the Salvation Army?"

Varetti said nothing. He stared back at the Saint with adequate outward composure, and Simon gathered that he had all the misdirected courage of his profession. The Saint didn't underestimate Mr Varetti, in spite of his revolting clothes and coiffure.

There was, meanwhile, the matter of a cigarette which was becoming increasingly overdue… Simon dipped into his breast pocket and secured one with his left hand, without the most microscopic shift of the automatic in his right. He fished out a match booklet in the same way, and began shaping a match over without tearing it out, in order to strike it one-handed.

He said: "I don't have to make speeches to you, either. I just hope you don't think I'm kidding about Kestry and Bonacci. Because if you do, we're wasting a lot of time, and we haven't got much to spare."

Varetti's mouth curled derisively.

"Don't give us that stuff. You didn't know we were coming here until we walked into the room."

"That's true. I was only guessing that you were coming. But I knew that somebody was. I knew that somebody would be checking on me here, and I couldn't bring that bag in in my pocket. Therefore somebody would know that something had gone wrong. And somebody would want to do something fast about getting the bag back. That's what I told Inspector Fernack; and that's why Kestry and Bonacci are on their way. I do hope you know Kestry and Bonacci. They don't have any of those Lord Peter Wimsey whimsies, but they get a lot more confessions in their own way. Are you looking forward to a romp with them in the massage parlor?"

The hoodlum glared at him with hot hateful eyes.

"I don't believe you," he said flatly. "It's a stall, that's what it is."

"Is that all you're betting on?"

Varetti's mouth was a tight line.

"If you mean I should spill, there isn't a chance."

Simon wiped his bent match over the striking strip on the booklet and put the flame to his cigarette.

He said: "How about you, Cokey? How are you looking forward to going without your inhaler for a while? Have you ever been through that experience before? I expect you have. On top of being slapped around a bit, it's quite a lot of fun — isn't it?"

Cokey Walsh's face was pallid and lined. "With his hands clasped behind his head as he had been ordered, only his elbows could tremble. But they did. His eyes were jittering buttons in a yellow mask.

"Remember it, Cokey?" Simon asked gently. "Remember how all your nerves jump and twitch, and you're all empty inside except for your stomach being a tight knot in the middle, and there are hammers inside your head beating it apart from the middle, and you know that if it doesn't stop you're going to scream and go crazy?"

Cokey swallowed twice as if he were trying to get a tough dry mouthful down his throat.

"I—"

"You're not talking, either," Varetti cut in savagely. "Take hold of yourself, Cokey! This punk hasn't got a thing on us, except maybe a breaking and entering charge that won't stick. You make one peep, and you'll wind up in the hot squat — unless I croak you first. Which I will, so help me!"

Cokey struggled again with the bolus of dry hay in his gullet.

"I ain't talking," he rasped again. "You can't make me talk."

Simon Templar took a deep rib-lift of smoke down into his system and let it circulate leisurely around. But the pulse in the back of his brain that was ticking away seconds had nothing leisurely about it. Time marched on, inexorably and alarmingly, and he was getting nothing out of it. There was no doubt that Cokey would sing eventually, if he had any music to give out, but there was also no doubt that he would take quite a little loosening up. Any fears he had of the police or even of the Saint himself were still plainly dominated by his fear of Varetti. And Varetti was still dominated, for one reason or another, by someone else. And it was still an impasse, and time was slipping away like water out of a bath…

And the Saint's idle smile still didn't change as he let the smoke out through it and held the two gonsels with easy and impossible blue eyes.

"Now let's face a few facts, kiddies," he said quietly. "You were sent here to collect a lot of very valuable green dust. You don't find any. You pick up a collection of spherical souvenirs which cost me quite a lot of dough, but which don't have such a terrific market value. Therefore you are not going home and collect a great big commission on the trip. In fact, your boss may not even be pleased with you at all… I'm trying to be honest with you, boys. I bought another bag and put the boodle you're looking for in it, and it's safe now where you'll never get your hands on it again. So you can't win. And Kestry and Bonacci will beat it out of you eventually, anyway. Why not tell me now and let me save you a lot of pain?"

"You're scaring me to death," sneered Varetti.

He should have been scared. For the Saint was most dangerous when his smile was gentle and detached like that. And it wasn't always a physical danger. Varetti was tough enough to brace himself against that, at least for a time. He was concentrating on that.

And so it was unfortunate for him, and for certain other people, that he was psychologically satisfied with that threat alone. It was clear enough to him so that it was twisting up his nerves and drawing on all his resistance, while his constructive imagination was fully occupied with a desperate groping for some trick of escape. And that left him nothing to spare with which to encompass the really frightening idea that all of that build-up might only be a feint in force for a much more complicated attack in depth. He watched the falling bludgeon and never saw the stealthy approach of the stiletto.

The Saint stepped closer, and he looked taller and harder, and the edges were sharpening in his voice.

"Sure, Ricco, you're tough," he said. "You can take plenty. But how much can your girl friend take? How long will she keep her mouth buttoned when we start working on her? And where are you and Cokey going to find the answers when she sings about you?"

"She can't sing about us," Varetti retorted. "She doesn't know anything."

There were tiny little beads of moisture on his face. Simon could see them as he drew closer still.

"Oh, no?" he said in a voice of silken needles. "What makes you think the boss never talked to anyone except you? What makes you so sure he never told her anything? Are you quite ready to take your chance on what she'll spill when I talk to her?"

Varetti laughed, in a sort of nervous triumph.

"You won't ever talk to her! The boss is taking care of—"

He was exactly that far when Kestry and Bonacci arrived, turning a key in the door and entering with a rush, rather like a pair of stampeding hippopotami, which in other respects they slightly resembled.

They came in with their guns drawn, and Simon stepped back to give them room to take over, without even glancing at them or shifting his gun until they had the scene under control. There was the snick-snack of handcuffs, and the Saint still didn't move at once.

"Thank you," he said; and his eyes were still on Varetti.

"That's okay, pal." The big bulk of Kestry shouldered across his view, heavy-jawed and unfriendly-eyed. "How did you get here?"

For the first time Simon looked at him, and put the gun away in his pocket.

"It's my room," he mentioned calmly. "I was here when they arrived. Now you can take them away. They bother me."

"They won't bother you any more. They're both three-timers, an' they'll get the book thrown at them."

"That's fine," said the Saint cynically. "Unless they get the right lawyer. They've probably done it before."

"They won't do it this time. Not after they've sung. And they'll sing." Kestry was certain and unemotional like a rock, and no more changed or changeable. He said, without any alteration of stance or stare: "I still want to know more about you."

"Why don't you read a newspaper?"

"You just put a gun in your pocket. That makes it a concealed weapon. Where did you get it, an' where's your permit?"

The Saint put his cigarette to his lips and drew at it with a light easy breath.

"Fernack told you what to do," he said. "If you want to write in a new scene for yourself, you're on your own. Otherwise, I wish you'd just drag the bodies out. I'm in a hurry."

Kestry's eyes were bitter and glistening, the Saint's cool and bright like chips of sapphire with indefinable gleams of insolence shifting over them. It was a clash from which tinder might have been ignited at close range. But the measure of Kestry's defeat, and the value of its future repercussions, were plain in the heavy viciousness with which he turned back to his captives.

"Let's get 'em out of here, Dan," he said.

He grasped Varetti's arm in a ham-like fist and yanked him off the couch, while his partner performed a similar service for Walsh. Cokey let out a yelp as the steel bracelets cut into his wrists.

"Shut up, you," growled Bonacci. "That ain't nothing to what you're gonna get."

He shoved the two men roughly towards the door.

Kestry took a last pointless look around, and followed. How-evcr, he turned to favor the Saint with one lingering farewell glower.

"It still don't seem right to be goin' out of here without you," he said; and the Saint smiled at him sweetly.

"You must drop in again," he murmured, "and get used to it."

He waited until the door had slammed after the departing populace, and then he picked up the telephone and called Centre Street.

Inspector Fernack must have gabbled his evidence and rushed back to his office like a broker returning from lunch during a boom, for he was on the wire as soon as Simon asked for him.

"This is the Voice of Experience, Henry," he said. "Your beef trust has just oozed out, taking Cokey and Ricco with them. I think they'll make noises eventually, so you can take your boots off and get ready to hear them vocalise. Now while you and the boys are getting cosy with them, I've got one final little job to do. So if you'll excuse me…"

"Hey, wait a minute!" The anguish in Fernack's voice was almost frantic. "If you've got any further information, you ought to—"

"My dear Henry, if I waited around to do all the things I ought to, I'd be wasting as much energy as you spend on your setting-up exercises."

"I don't do any setting-up exercises!"

"Then you certainly ought to. That fine manly figure of yours must be preserved. Now I really must get busy, because you've got plenty on your hands as it is, and I don't want you to have another murder to worry about."

"You let me worry about my own worrying," Fernack said grimly. "All I want to know is what else you know now."

"You didn't get the significance of the lock?"

"What lock?"

"Never mind," said the Saint. "It will dawn on you one of these days. Now I really must be going."

"But where?" wailed the detective.

The Saint smiled, and blew a slender smoke-ring through a teasing pause.

"I'll leave a note for you at the desk here. You climb on to your little bicycle and come and pick it up."

"Why not give it to me now?"

"Because I want to be there first. Because I want a little time to set the stage. And because cops rush in where Saints are smart enough to wait. Be patient, Henry. Everything will be under control… I hope. I'm just trying to make it easy for you. And please, when you get there, do me the favor of listening for a minute before you thunder in. I don't want to be interrupted in the middle of a tender passage… Goodbye now."

He hung up in time to disconnect a jolt of verbal heat and explosion that might have threatened the New York Telephone Company with a general fusing of wires between the Murray Hill and Spring exchanges, scribbled rapidly on a sheet of paper, and sealed it into an envelope and wrote Fernack's name on it while he waited for the service elevator.

"Get this to the desk, will you?" he said to the operator as they rode down. "To be called for."

The timekeeper let him out, and he emerged from the side door on to Forty-fourth Street, walking east. In a few strides he turned into the Seymour Hotel, and walked quickly up the corridor towards the lobby. There he stopped for a minute, waiting to see if anyone entered after him. It was always possible that Kestry might have brooded enough to wait for him, or even that the ungodly themselves might have another representative lurking around. But no one followed him in within a reasonable time; and that part of the chase was won. For the Seymour ran cleat through the block, and he went out on to Forty-fifth Street and stepped into a passing taxi with reasonable assurance that he was alone.

The clock in his head ran with sidereal detachment and precision, and on that spidery tightrope of timing his brain balanced as lightly as a shadow.

He had had to put everything together very quickly and coldly; and yet it seemed to him now that he had always known just where each person who mattered would be, from instant to instant, as though they had been linked to him by threads of extrasensory perception. But he had to be right. He had to be right now, or else he had thrown away all the completeness of what he had tried to do.

And with that sharp sting of awareness in his mind he walked into the lobby of the hotel where he had left Barbara Sinclair.

He nodded to the desk clerk who had signed them in, and rode up in the elevator to her floor. He knocked on the door, and waited a little while. He said: "Saks Fifth Avenue, ma'am. A C.O.D. package for Mrs Tombs."

12

He waited a little longer, and then the door opened two or three inches, and he saw a narrow panel of her face — hair like a raven's wing, a dark eye, and carmine lips.

He went in.

"I wondered what had happened to you," she said.

"I had lunch. I met some friends."

His eyes strayed over the room with the most natural unconcern, but they missed nothing. Actually it was in an ashtray that he saw the proof that at least half of his timing had been right, but his glance picked up the detail without pausing.

Barbara Sinclair moved to a deep low chair by the window and sat down, curling one shapely leg under her. Her other foot swung in a short off-beat rhythm, so that every interrupted movement of it gave him a measure of the effort of will-power that was maintaining her outward composure.

"Has anything else happened?" she asked.

"Just a few things."

"Have you found out anything?"

"A little… You know, this isn't such a bad place, is it? I must remember it next time some visiting fireman is asking me where to stay with his concubine."

He was strolling about the room as if he were estimating the general comfort of it and incidentally taking his time over choosing a place to sit down.

"It's not one of the tourist taverns, so he'd be pretty safe from the risk of an awkward meeting with one of the home-town gossips. And it's very discreet and respectable, which ought to put the lady in the right mood. There must be nothing like a dingy bedroom and a leering bellhop to damp the fires of precarious passion."

He arrived in front of a bookcase on which stood a tall vase of chrysanthemums filled out with a mass of autumn oak leaves. He stood with his back to the room, approving them.

"Chrysanthemums," he murmured. "Football. Raccoon coats. The long crawl to New Haven. The cheers. The groans. The drinks." He shook his head sadly. "Those dear dead days," he said. "The chrysanthemums are here, but the gridiron scholars are boning up on the signals for squads right. And as for driving to New Haven without any bootleg gas coupons… But they are pretty."

"The management sent them up," she said. "I'm afraid I didn't think I was spotted as a concubine. I wondered if they thought we were honeymooners."

He laughed sympathetically, and took the automatic out of his breast pocket and nested it in amongst the leaves, still covering the vase with his back, while he was pretending to make improvements in the arrangement of the bouquet.

Then he turned again to look at her, and said: "It's too bad, isn't it? We never had that honeymoon."

"We would have had it, you know, if you hadn't been quite so clever about getting rid of me."

"I have a feeling of irreparable loss."

Her lovely face seemed to grow dark and warm from within as her long lashes dipped for a moment. Then she raised them again in a slow stare that could have had many sources.

"You really hate me, don't you?"

He shook his head judicially, his brow wrinkled by a frown that was very vague and distant.

"Not so much."

"You don't like me."

He smiled easily, and started to open a fresh pack of cigarettes.

"Like you? Darling, I always thought you were terrific. I would have loved our honeymoon. But unfortunately I haven't any of the instincts of the male scorpion. I never could see consummation and immolation as interchangeable words. And I wasn't nearly so anxious to get rid of you as you were to get rid of me — permanently."

"I didn't—"

"Know?" Simon suggested. "Perhaps not. Perhaps. But your boy friend did. And you must admit that he's clever. Within his own class, anyway. Clever enough, for instance, to set you up in that fancy tenement because it might always be useful to have a pretty girl on call to entertain the tired business man — or decoy the simple sucker. That is, when he didn't want her himself. A very happy way of combining business with pleasure, if you ask me… Or is it rude of me to insist on this masculine viewpoint? Should I have thought of a girl friend instead — some nice motherly creature who…"

He raised a hand as she started out of the chair with dark eyes blazing.

"Take it easy," he drawled. "Maybe I was just kidding. It's obvious that the bag I found in your apartment was a man's. But so were the pajamas that were hanging in the closet where I heaved Humpty and Dumpty."

Her hand went to her mouth, and her exquisite features suddenly sagged into a kind of blank smear. It was absurd and pitiful, he thought, how a few words could transform a lovely and vital creature into a haggard woman with neck cords that streaked her throat and eyes that were hollow and lusterless with fear.

"I don't know what you mean," she said.

"I've heard more original remarks than that," he said. "But if it's any help to you, I don't know what you mean either. I didn't say the pajamas had any name embroidered on them — or did I?"

She sank back on to the edge of the chair, her hands clasped in her lap, not comfortably or relaxed, but as if she had only paused there in the expectation of having to move again.

He slid a cigarette forward in his pack and offered it to her. In the same solicitous way, he lighted it for her and then lighted one for himself. He drew slowly at it, not savoring the smoke, and looking at her, and wondering why in a world so sadly in need of beauty he should have to be talking to her in this way and know that this was the only way to talk, and that was how it was and there was nothing else to do.

He said, with a slight but sincere shrug: "This isn't a fight. It might have been a beautiful honeymoon. But maybe it just wasn't in the cards. Anyway, it'll have to wait now."

She said: "I suppose so."

He said: "It's no use stalling much more. You were supposed to have made up your mind about telling me something. Have you made up your mind?"

She winced and looked down at the tangling and untangling fingers in her lap. She looked up at him, and then down again at her hands. Her mouth barely moved.

She said: "Yes."

"Well?"

"I'll tell you."

He waited.

"I'll tell you," she said, "sometime this afternoon."

"Why not now?"

"Because…"

The Saint took a great interest in the tip of his cigarette.

"Barbara," he said, "it may not occur to you that I'm giving you a lot more breaks than the rules provide. I never was a nut on technicalities, but the fact remains that you're a technical accessory. You know the man I want to talk to, the man who holds the key to most of this dirty business. You know that everything you keep back is helping him to get away with — literally — murder. And you spend the hours you've been here alone struggling with your conscience to arrive at the tremendous decision that you'll tell me all about it — at your own convenience."

"No," she said.

"I don't want you to think I'm getting tough with you, but I've known police matrons who developed bulging muscles just from persuading wayward girls that they ought to unburden their hearts in the interests of right and justice. And I'm sure that wouldn't appeal to you at all."

She made a thin line of her mouth and gazed back at him defiantly.

"You sound as if you'd said all this before."

"Maybe I have," he admitted equably. "But it doesn't make it any less true. Believe it or not, I've only got to pick up that phone and call a certain gent by the name of Inspector John Henry Fernack to have you taken into what is so charmingly referred to as 'custody'. Custody is a place out of the earshot of any unofficial person who might be too inquisitive; and it isn't a very pleasant place. In Custody, almost anything can happen, and often does." He blew a thoughtful streak of smoke at the ceiling. "You can still make your own choice, but I wish you'd make the right one."

The moment's flare had died out of her as if it had never happened.

She said, as if she were repeating a lesson that she had worked out for herself until it became an obsession: "I've got to tell — this person — first. I've got to tell him that I'm going to tell you. I've got to give him a chance. He — he's been the kindest person I ever met. I was nothing — I was practically starving — I'd have done anything — when I met him. He… he's been very good to me. Always. I want to do what's right, but I couldn't just give him to you — like that. I couldn't be a Judas. At least they give foxes a start, don't they?"

Simon considered the question gravely, as though he had all the time in the world. He felt as if he had. He felt as if she was important, in a way that was important only to him; and there-was always a little time for important things.

"They do," he said. "But that's only because they want the fox to run longer and give the valiant sportsmen a better chase. If they were just being noble and humane, they'd simply shoot him as quickly and accurately as possible, thereby saving him all the agonies of fear, flight, hope, and final despair. Of course that wouldn't be quite so sporting as letting him run his heart out against a pack of hounds, but the eventual result would be the same."

"Sometimes the fox gets away," she said.

"The fox never gets away in the end," he said kindly. "He ma get away a dozen times, but there'll always be a thirteenth time when he makes one little mistake, and then he's just a trophy for somebody to take home. It's almost dull, but that's how it is."

"They've never caught you."

"Yet."

He went to the window and peered out. The sky was already darkening with the limpid clarity of sunset, the hour when it seems to grow thinner and deeper so that you almost begin to see through it into the darkness of outer space.

Without turning, he said: "I gather that you've already told the fox."

He heard her stir in the chair behind him.

"Yes."

He said, without anger, without disappointment, without anything: "I rather thought you would. I expected that when I left you. Because you really have too much heart for too little sense. I don't blame you for the heart, but now I want you to try and develop some sense."

"I'm sorry," she said, and she could have been. "But I can't do anything about it."

He turned.

"For Christ's sake," he said, "don't you get anything into your head? I told you I was expecting you to tip off the fox. Do you think I'd have expected that, and left you alone to do it, if I hadn't figured that you'd be doing something for me? I wanted you to make the fox break cover. I wanted him rushed into doing something that would give us a view of him. I wanted to force him into making the mistakes that are going to qualify him for his seat on the griddle. He's already made one of them, and any minute now he's going to make another. You've done that much to help him, and now you're doing your damn best to help yourself right into the soup with him. If that isn't devotion, I don't know what is."

13

He saw the stunned shock petrifying her face, but he didn't wait for it to complete or resolve itself. He didn't have time. And now before she collected herself might be the best chance he would ever have.

He moved quickly across towards her and sat on the next chair, and his voice was as swift and urgent as the movement.

"Listen," he said. "This man is a crook. He is a thief — and stealing iridium is no different from stealing jewels or coffee or anything else. And in just the same language, he's a murderer."

"He never killed anyone—"

"Of course not. Not personally. He didn't have to. A crumb in his class doesn't need to pull triggers himself, or knot ropes around an old fool's neck. He has other men to do that — or other women. But that doesn't make him any less a killer. There was murder done in the first stealing, at Nashville. Two guards by the name of Smith or Jones or Gobbovitch were shot down. Just a couple of names in a newspaper. Probably they had families and relatives and friends here and there, but you don't think about that when you're reading. You click your tongue and say isn't it awful and turn on to your favorite columnist or the funnies. But Mrs Jones has lost a husband who was a hell of a lot more real to her than your boy friend is to you, and the Gobbovitch brats are going to have to quit school after their primary grades and do the best they can on their own — just because your big-hearted glamor boy hired a couple of cannons to go out and do his shooting for him."

"Please don't," she said.

"I want to be sure you know just what kind of a man you're shielding. A cold-blooded murderer. And a traitor on top of that. Maybe he hasn't even thought of it that way himself. Maybe he's been too busy thinking about the money that was helping to keep you in that splendid apartment. But it's still just as true as if you both had your eyes open."

"It isn't true."

His face had neither pity nor passion, but only a relentless and inescapable sincerity that was out of a different universe from the lazy flippancy which he usually wore with the same ease as he wore his clothes.

"Barbara, there are little guys from farms and filling stations who wouldn't even know how it all worked who're fighting more odds than just the enemy because of what he's doing. They're wading through steamy slime in South Pacific jungles, and chewing sand in Africa, and freezing to death in their tracks in the Ukraine. But that doesn't bother your private Santa Claus, so long as there are still a few good chefs in Manhattan and he ha» plenty of green paper to pay for all the little luxuries that help to alleviate the hardships of the home front. And if you take his side, all that is true about you too."

"I'm not taking his side," she said desperately. "He's been good to me, and I'm just giving him a chance."

"Of course he's been good to you. You wouldn't have done anything for him if he hadn't. No crook or traitor or any other kind of louse can afford to be any other way with anyone he needs for an enthusiastic accomplice."

She rocked back and forth in the chair, with a kind of unconscious automatism, as though she was somehow trying to lull back all the tormenting consciences that his steady remorseless voice awakened.

"I've told you," she repeated dully. "I've told you I'll talk to you later. It's only a little while. And then you and all your policemen and secret service and FBI men can go after him like a pack of wolves."

"There's just a little more to it than that," said the Saint quietly. "Us wolves, as you call us, would like to go after him very respectably, and give him a fair trial with proper publicity just to encourage anyone else who might have similar ideas.

"How nice of you," she said.

He didn't know why he went on trying.

"The evidence you could give," he said rather tiredly, "could be quite important. That's just half the reason why I'm talking to you now, and using up all this good breath. The other halt is because I'm trying to give you a break. This is your chance to get out from under. I'm not trying to sell you now. Its too late for ^that. But I've still got to try and make you see that the jig is up, no matter what you do; but you can come out in quite a different light if you just make it possible for me to swear quite truthfully that you'd cooperated to the fullest extent with those fine creatures whom John Henry Fernack loves to refer to as the proper authorities'."

She gazed steadily at him with dark empty eyes.

He inhaled through his cigarette again, and said with a glacial evenness that was beginning to grow a little bitter like a winter Minset: "I'm telling you very quickly that this is the best chance you'll ever have. Maybe the last chance."

She hesitated, with her lips working in tiny unconscious patterns. He might have interpreted any of them into an effort to frame the name that he was expecting; but that would only have been his own imagination, and it was not enough.

He still waited, even when it seemed too long. He was that" sort of dope.

And then her lips were still, and tight and sullen and lost again. It was exactly as if a mould had set.

"You'll have to wait," she said stubbornly; and he stood up slowly. "I told you," she said.

Simon Templar drew his cigarette bright once more without tasting it, standing quite still and looking at her.

Everything went through his memory and understanding like a newsreel pouring through some far-off chamber of his brain.

She was so very beautiful, so physically desirable; and in a light way that might eventually have had more to it she had once briefly been fun. When he had first seen her swinging her long legs on the porch of the late Mr Linnet's home, he had thought that she was everything that a girl out of a story should have been. It was a pity that in real life story-book introductions didn't always end up the way story-books ended. But this was not anything that could be changed by wishing.

She was in love with, or hopeful for, or in fear of, or hypnotised by, or standing strongly and stupidly beside a man who would have looked like an ideal practice target to savage staggering men in any of the localised hells of the war. And still, whatever the reason might be, there was a pattern set, and it was more solid than any momentary work of his could break.

She only had to speak two words, two words that made one name, one name that was already tramping and tramping through his mind; but she would not do that.

And he could understand that, just as he could understand the craters on the moon, without being able to do anything about it. He could understand it just as he understood Milton Ourley's lust for money and a different life from the one he was forced to live at Oyster Bay, and just as he understood Titania Ourley's eroding hunger for young men and rumbas, and just as he understood Fernack and Varetti and even Cokey Walsh and Allen Uttershaw who played with quotations like a tired juggler toying with a cigar.

If it wasn't for the impenetrable blockages like that, they cot all have been such nice normal people.

Like Inspector Fernack, who had lived all his life by the manual which had been given to him when he joined the Department as a rookie cop, was really a nice person. He was straight and square and he knew the Law and he believed in it. When his human nature and his critical sense of realities came out, as it did sometimes, it hurt him. He tried to fight against it but it wasn't often much good. The mould was set and casehardened; the reflexes were conditioned for keeps.

Barbara Sinclair could have married the son of the druggist at the corner of Main and Teenth, in her home town, and she could have alternately bulged and slimmed as she produced future druggists or presidents. She could have gone to Saturday night dances and flirted mildly with her next-door neighbor's husband while she worried about whether Junior or Freddie or Ike had thrown off the covers and whether the hired girl had fallen asleep or was out keeping a rendezvous on the corner with the top sergeant who had just come into her life.

Milton Ourley could have been the boss foreman of a crew of dock wallopers, harmlessly loosing off his choleric tongue on the job of lashing bigger and better men into setting new records in hip loading. Little bull-shaped men like that usually made good bosses because they inevitably went around with their shoulders hunched and a chip on both. If only Milton Ourley had never gotten into the money and the money had never gotten into him, he might have been quite a worthy and worthwhile individual who would never have become involved with anything more criminal than a pair of black-market nylons.

Titania Ourley could have had a husband who knew how to dominate her as she really needed to be dominated, instead of one who had convinced himself and ended by convincing her that the only way to hold her was by pouring more and more wealth and power into her hands. Then she would never have had the fundamental frustration that had reversed itself into her own exaggerated desire to dominate — to dominate the mate whom she despised for being dominated, to conquer and dominate everyone else with whom she came in contact by any kind of gushing effort, to buy or bully the sequacious young men who could flatter her that the charms she had wasted on her ineffectual spouse were still intact and devastating.

Varetti and Walsh could have climbed a little way up any humdrum but honest ladder, but at the time when their choice was made the Noble Experiment was in full swill, and it was becoming a simple axiom on the tough street corners where they dawdled that a pint of ersatz gin worth twenty cents could be marketed for a dollar. But to get that market some other mer- chant or salesman might have to be eradicated, and so the shooting came next and it came with enough impunity so that before long there were no more qualms about murder than there were about swallowing one of the illicit drinks that the murder was done for, not any more for them than for the righteous law-breaking public who didn't see the blood on the bottles and didn't give a damn anyway. Cokey Walsh had gone to the snow for the plain practical nerve and speed that he needed, but on any moral issues his soul was as shark-skinned as Varetti's. The only difference now was that the days of their splendor were gone and they would do their killing for much less money, because they were stragglers from an army that had passed into limbo and like any other stragglers they had to live off the land as best they could.

Allen Uttershaw was easy to understand. He was a business man who should have been a dilettante. He was a good business man but his only interest in business was the ultimate goal of being able to get out of it and live the vague and graceful life that his peculiar dramatisation of himself required. If he had inherited a million dollars twenty years ago he would have been a timeless and contented flâneurin a world of sleek penthouses, velvet smoking jackets, first editions, vintage wines, silk dressing gowns, and the conversation of connoisseurs. He would have sauntered with faultless charm and savoir faire through his elegantly lepidopteral existence, quoting his snatches of poetry with that dis-arming half-smile up his sleeve that always made you wonder if it was worth laughing at him because he had probably just finished laughing at himself; and such contrastingly clamorous subjects as Ourleys and Saints would never have clattered through his peaceful and platonic ken…

So the newsreel ran through the Saint's mind and finished, and the projection room was dark and silent again.

And he was still looking at Barbara Sinclair, lifting the cigarette to his mouth again, with his eyes very blue and quiet and unchanging.

He was very sorry, more sorry than it was easily endurable to he, and it was all so stupid and wasteful; but that was how things really happened, and sometimes you had to know it.

The clock in his head went on all the time.

And it was no damn good giving her a second thought, because you couldn't change anything.

Because life was like that, and sometimes you were stuck with it.

And stories just didn't end that way, because there was always a miracle at the last moment; but this wasn't a story.

And that was that.

He said: "It doesn't make very much difference, because I know already."

"What do you know?" she asked, looking at him with empty eyes.

He strolled across the room and sat down again in an armchair beside the bookcase that was crowned with the bouquet of chrysanthemums. He felt curiously tired; but it was a tiredness of the spirit and nothing to do with his mind or body.

"I know practically everything," he said. "Including the name of the master mind you're trying to protect. Suppose I tell you all about it."

14

"We begin," said the Saint, after a little pause, "with the stealing of a three hundred thousand dollar shipment of iridium at Nashville, Tennessee, not so long ago, and our first two murders — Comrades Smith and Gobbovitch, or whatever their names were, who got a load of lead in their lunch baskets."

"I know all that," she said, with a gesture of her slender hands that might have been an effort to brush away the vision that came behind his words.

"I expect you do," said the Saint. "But we ought to begin at the beginning. Because this robbery really opened the way for the black market. It actually created a sudden and very serious shortage. And then the manufacturers who use the stuff, who were suddenly caught short like that, were informed that they could still get supplies — at a price. Some of them were in a spot where they were glad enough to get it at almost any price."

He glanced again into the jet-black eyes that were fastened on him; and he was still sorry, but he was only more sure.

"The black market salesman, no doubt, had inside information about who was most badly in need of his merchandise. Two of these guys were the late Mr Linnet, and Mr Milton Ourley There may have been others, but I don't happen to know about them. I know that Linnet had some misgivings about selling out his country for the benefit of your private angel, but the Ourley Magneto Company was not so fussy."

He looked at his watch and checked it by the other clock in his mind.

"Meanwhile, I had decided to stick my delicate nose in. I made a statement to the newspapers that I was going to clean up this black market, and I said I already knew plenty that would make it unhappy for the operators." It was a lie. I didn't know a thing. But I figured that it might scare the operators into trying to cool me off, which might give me a chance to get a line on them; or it might encourage somebody to come and sing to me a little for any one of various reasons. It isn't the newest trick in the world, but it often works. This worked. It brought me a little bird named Titania Ourley. Maybe you know her."

Barbara Sinclair licked her lips.

"I've met her."

"Titania sang me a little song about her husband, whom she said she had overheard talking to Gabriel Linnet about their dealings with the black market. She seemed to think I ought to investigate him. A most unwifely idea, but that wasn't my business. At her suggestion, I went out to Oyster Bay to meet and talk to Milton. Unfortunately, it became rather rapidly clear that Milion and I were not destined to form a great and beautiful friendship. And he didn't want to talk to me at all. In fact, he practically threw me out on my ear."

Simon leaned his head back and looked at the ceiling, as if he could see pictures there.

"I made one rather tragic mistake first, though. I dropped an unfinished quotation that somebody must have finished after I left. Because anyone who heard it finished would have known that I expected Linnet to sing — if he hadn't started singing already. And they would have had a good idea that I was on my way to see Linnet then. Which was very tragic indeed for Gabriel." He blew a carefully constructed smoke-ring. "I did go to innet's, of course; and there I met you. And in due course you gave me a very attractive invitation."

She bowed her head over her hands clenched together between her knees.

"Soon after this," he added, "Fernack was called by some mysterrious amateur sleuth who reported that I'd been seen breaking into Linnet's place. There was also some mention of noises like a fight going on inside."

"I didn't phone anybody except the boy I had a date with. I told you I had to break a date."

"You couldn't have called anybody else by mistake, could you? You couldn't have called your treacherous friend to report that I was duly hooked and under control, so the rest of the plot could go into production as scheduled."

She made no reply except to look up at him again. Tears glistened under her long lashes.

"Anyway," he said, "I came to my senses almost in time, left you with the check for a souvenir, and beat it back to Linnet's dearly fast enough to be in at the death. Quite an unpleasant death, too. They tied a rope around his neck, and his eyeballs were popping and his tongue sticking out. You should have seen him. It would have made you proud of your team."

He stood up and stretched himself a little.

"Well, I was duly arrested by the doughty Inspector Fernack, and it took me until this morning to get out of his clutches. I went to your apartment, and there I met Humpty and Dumpty and a certain piece of luggage. And, of course, we had our reunion. I suppose I should have been able to solve the whole story then, but I guess you still had me slightly dazzled. Because there were two lovely clues, and they were completely contradictory. First, the pajamas in your closet—"

"You told me—"

"I know. They didn't have initials on them. But I could tell things by just looking at them… And then there was that precious portmanteau of iridium."

"I told you how that got there."

"But you didn't tell me about the initials. You saw how the combination lock worked out when I opened it, didn't you?"

"No."

"Three very important letters, and you didn't notice them," he said reprovingly.

"I wasn't looking."

"You were hanging over my shoulder and watching everything I did. You couldn't have missed seeing them."

"I wasn't looking at that."

"Besides which, I asked you if the initials O S M meant anything to you."

"They don't."

The Saint took out another cigarette and lighted it from the butt of the last.

"M S O," he said, "in reverse. A subtle touch. But nothing to make a reasonably bright guy rupture a brain cell. In other words, our dear mutual friend."

There was a silence.

The Saint wandered towards the window. It was getting darker, and the skyscraper silhouettes around them were losing their sharpness against the velvet off-blue of the sky. He stood there for a moment or two, looking out.

"M S O," he repeated. "Milton S Ourley. So nice and simple… And I still had to put it together. You ought to have saved me all that trouble."

"I told you—"

'I know. You'd tell me when you felt like it. But it's too late for that now. Maybe it was always too late… But there was a time when the suspects were very vague. I even wasted a few minutes suspecting you. Oh, not as an active killer — I couldn't really visualise you garrotting Gabriel with your own strong hands, and besides a police surgeon decided soon afterwards that Gabriel was getting the tourniquet on his tonsils at about the time when you would have been trying to persuade an unfriendly head waiter that it wasn't your fault if your host sneaked out without paying for dinner. And also I'd collided with Cokey in the rneantime. But somebody sent Cokey; and somebody sent Varetti — at least, I'm guessing that it was that fugitive from a tango tournament who rescued Cokey after I'd tied him up. It could conceivably have been you who was the master mind; but after some profound meditation I decided that you just didn't have that much brain."

Her eyes smouldered like tar pits as she glared at him, and he realised that things happened to her beauty under stress.

He had a fleeting instant of wondering whether it was right for him to destroy so much loveliness piece by piece as he was doing, even to achieve what he had to achieve.

Then he thought about nameless men dying in foxholes or plunging out of the sky in naming fortresses, and knew that it was still all right.

He said: "Believe it or not, I thought about Titania too. She makes sillier noises than you do, but she's a lot shrewder and tougher. I could see Milton with a mistress as ornamental as you, and I could see him going to all these lengths to get back a little of his own life. But I could just as well see Titania taking the last colossal step to get rid of Milton, whom she hates and despises, and at the same time make herself even richer and stronger than before. But what was wrong with that was that if she'd had the real master-mind cunning she wouldn't have stuck her neck out so far. She wouldn't have been so specific, and she wouldn't have dragged Linnet in. She wouldn't have made it so easy for the suspicion to be transferred to herself. So that was something else that didn't connect. I could see her as a phenomenally vicious and nasty woman with a great hate and jealousy in her complicated brain; but she wasn't subtle enough… All that's just a lot of wordage now, of course, because I know all the answers."

"You're just talking," she said.

His lean face was untouched and impassive.

"I know the answers, and I can practically prove them. The police will put the rest of it together. There's only one person who could have done all these things. Who stole Uttershaw's iridium, and created the shortage at the same time as he set up his own black market with inside information. Who had Gabriel Linnet killed, because I was too damn smart and couldn't keep my stupid mouth shut. Who fixed you up for me, to make sure I wouldn't have an alibi for that murder. Who left that suitcase at your apartment, and who sent Varetti and Walsh with a key to pick it up, and who let them out of your closet a little while ago and sent them off to the Algonquin to pick it up again."

He smiled pleasantly at her, sipping his cigarette again while he measured her for his penultimate thrust.

"And," he said, "I know who's been planning to kill you at any convenient moment now, besides killing me."

He would never have believed that a face like hers could have looked so bleached and frozen.

"Now I know you must be insane," she breathed.

He shook his head sadly.

"No, dear. Not any more insane than your beloved, who is very sane indeed. Sane enough to know that this is too hot now to take any more chances on you, because you know too much anyhow and you might still change your mind." The Saint's voice was utterly passionless and level, and his mind felt as if it were standing alone in the middle of a great empty hall. "Your life is running out while you're stalling, darling. And it doesn't make a bit of difference, because I did see those pajamas."

"I wore those pajamas," she said, "and I think your insinuations—"

"Why not save it? I can see where you might need all those histrionics. You'll need plenty of them for the most dead-pan audience you ever saw — the jury who'll decide whether to give you the electric cure or burden the taxpayers with the cost of your gray uniforms and oatmeal for twenty years. Which will be quite a change from Saks Fifth Avenue and coq au vin."

"You—"

"I am no gentleman," said the Saint regretfully. "Because I know that even if you did wear those pajamas, you didn't buy them — at least not for yourself. They would have been too big for you. They might have fitted Titania, but she would never go for any tomboy styles — she would be strictly for lace and chiffon, ind lots of it. But they were also very obviously too long for Milton. Which confused me more than somewhat for quite a little while; but eventually it made sense. So the showdown is right now, and this is the very last time I can ask you which side you're on."

Her lips were wooden.

"Presently." He nodded.

"Yes. That's what you said before."

"Then why don't you go away now?"

"Because I want to be finished with this. And I think this is a perfect time to finish."

He moved towards the center table, to the ashtray which had been his first landmark of all with its litter of crumpled butts. He stirred the mess with his fingers, and picked out one stub to hold up.

His eyes picked her up again like blued points of steel.

"When I came in here," he said, "I happened to notice that there was one cigarette in this ashtray that didn't have any lipstick on it. So I was quite sure that your boy friend was here already, and I've been talking to him as much as to you. Now that you've made your choice, and he's listened so patiently to what I've got on him, we can stop playing hide-and-seek. I'm quite certain that he's just inside the bedroom door, and I think it would be much more sociable if he came out and joined us."

"Journeys end in lovers meeting," said Allen Uttershaw, in his mild and ingratiating way. "Or would you prefer the other one — Journeys end in death?"

15

He stepped into the room with a gun held almost diffidently in his hand; but his eyes were much too calm for carelessness, and it was noticeable that his aim appeared to be steady and accurate enough.

"For the moment, the choice seems to be yours," said the Saint placidly.

He stood with his hands raised, and made no movement while Uttershaw circled cautiously around him, came up behind him, and felt over his pockets with unflurried thoroughness.

"You might put down your cigarette," Uttershaw said as he stepped back and circled into view again. "And if it explodes, I assure you I shall not look round."

The Saint smiled as he dabbed at the ashtray.

"So Ricco told you about that one, did he? I imagine he must have been quite pained about being taken in by an old gag like that."

"He did seem to have a grudge against you."

"I'm sure he has a much worse one by now."

"I was wondering about that. How did it happen?"

"I was expecting him. And I'm afraid he loused up the job again. Really, Allen, he did let you down. I bullied and badgered him until he was too bothered to keep two worries bouncing in his head at the same time, and then he dropped a couple of words which were just enough to tell me for sure that you'd be here and what you were planning to do."

Uttershaw smiled and nodded. It was just as though somebody were telling him about a friend of his whose record trout had gotten away because the leader broke.

"I knew I'd been disappointed when you arrived here," he acknowledged. "And I suppose the iridium is still safe in your room."

"Oh, no."

"What did you do with it?"

"It never was in my room. So I hope you won't disturb the atmosphere of my elegant estaminet by sending any more of your messengers after it. You see, after I left Barbara here I went to mother luggage store and bought another bag and put the iridium in it, and I filled your bag with an assortment of sporting goods of suitable weight and, I think, of rather an appropriate shape. Then I left the really valuable bag at a police station on the way home, to be called for later."

"Which police station?" asked Uttershaw; and suddenly his casual mien had vanished.

Now he looked rather like a polished gray vulture, and the transformation was so slight that it was startling.

The Saint shrugged.

"I'm afraid it wouldn't do you much good to know," he said. "I told the local mandarin that they were to be delivered to our pal Inspector Fernack. I mean those two pretty green bottles in the bag. And I'm quite sure they've been moved by now. You might be good enough to take a precinct, but I don't think even you could raise the troops to storm the bastilles you'd have to break into to get that dust back now."

He paused, and asked: "Incidentally, do you think one would have to pay income tax on a reward like your insurance company was offering? Not that taxpaying isn't a pleasure these days, but 1 have to think of my budget."

"I imagine you would," Uttershaw said judicially, his composure flowing back into him like a returning tide. "Did you make any other arrangements for Varetti and Walsh?"

"Only a welcoming deputation of two of the ugliest cops I've seen in a long life of looking at ugly cops."

Uttershaw's finely modeled face was as soberly thoughtful as if he had been concentrating on an ordinary business problem.

"The first time I met you, I was afraid something like this might happen," he said. "You really have been very clever… Of course, when you walked into the Algonquin, with that suitcase I knew you were getting on too well."

"I hoped somebody would think that."

"But I did think I was doing a pretty good job myself."

Simon nodded.

"You were terrific," he said sincerely. "With all the things that must have been skittering about in your mind, it was the coolest job I ever saw. It was quite a bit later when you spoilt it."

"When was that?" asked the other interestedly.

"When you improvised such a wonderful build-up for the Ourleys. It was just a little too pat. It fitted in just a little too neatly. You might have gotten away with just setting the combination, on the bag to open at Ourley's initials — did you pick those for final insurance, or just out of your own sense of humor, by the way?… It doesn't matter. But you were just a little too coy about telling me that Ourley might have had a cosy corner of his own with somebody like Barbara waiting for him. And you were just a little too circumstantial and detailed about giving me the inside dope on the intricacies of the Ourley menage. You bore down too hard on being the impeccable I-don't-want-to-say-this-but guy. But it couldn't possibly have been quite as good as that unless you'd known just a little too much… All those little things, but what a big difference they make."

Uttershaw grimaced ruefully, the gleaming barrel of his gun still drawing a solid and level line at Simon's middle.

"This is an invaluable education," he remarked. "Please don't stop."

"Even then," said the Saint agreeably, "I had one or two tiny little doubts. But they went away when you were so careful to find out where Milton was, and when he arrived so aptly a few minutes later. I know it was brilliant of you to stop off at the Harvard Club to tell him his wife was having lunch with me, so that you could be sure he'd come bellowing back to make a commotion that would tie me up for long enough for you to get a start on a whole lot of new adjustments. But what you hadn't thought of was that even brilliance can be overdone. You were awfully good, Allen; and if it's any consolation to you, the only mistake you ever made was that you were just too good."

They might have been discussing a routine matter of merchandising policy.

"O what a tangled web we weave," Uttershaw said philosophically. "I suppose I really shouldn't have gone to the Algonquin at all today, but there was nothing about you in the papers in connection with last night's affair, and I had to find out if you were still at large. I happened to be in the neighborhood, so I stopped in instead of telephoning. It seemed safe enough at the time. But if I'd been in another part of town, I'd have spent a nickel, and I wouldn't have run into you, and I mightn't have had half this trouble. As you say, the little things make such a big difference."

"Exactly." In his own strange and equally fantastic way, the Saint was just as interested. He would always be interested, even with death waiting on an unpredictable trigger finger. "You had a beautiful racket, even though it could have looked slightly soiled if you'd considered the people who got hurt in the end. You stole your own property, collected the insurance, and still Lad the same goods to sell at even more than the legitimate market price. Of course, a few insignificant soldiers might have been blown apart as a derivative result of your business acumen, but soldiers are only hired to get blown apart, aren't they?"

Uttershaw rubbed his chin with a familiar gesture.

"I never really thought about that," he said, rather sublimely.

The Saint's eyes were not even regretful any more.

"But you threw it all away, Allen. And now you're going to have to die just like any other soldier, because you couldn't be satisfied with the dollars you already had in your bank account."

The lean gray man shook his head.

"I don't know about dying," he said. "Perhaps you've made a few miscalculations yourself. I think you're banking rather a lot on the testimony of Varetti and Walsh."

"I think they'll talk."

"I think you're forgetting what a good attorney could do to them on the stand. But I don't even think they will talk. All those things have been tried on them before. And they can't talk, if they want to get off with anything less than life. But they can plead guilty to just trying to rob your room, and get away with that, and wait for me to buy them a parole. Milton doesn't know much, and he wouldn't even dare to say that."

"But you're admitting everything to me."

"Why not? The only people who could make it hard for me are Barbara and yourself. And as you so rightly prophesied, I don't intend to allow either of you to go that far. I hate to do it, but you put me in this position."

"Allen!"

Barbara Sinclair moved towards Uttershaw in a wild kind of rush. She held out her arms as though she expected other arms to receive her; and the Saint's eyes narrowed as he snapshot his distances. But even before he could have stirred, Uttershaw's left hand reached flatly to meet her oncoming face, and sent her spinning back. She landed on the floor, with one hand clinging to an overturned chair.

"Allen," she said again, with a sort of incredulous tonelessness.

"Shut up," Uttershaw said coldly, and the snout of his gun was back on the Saint in the same instant, if it had ever wavered. "Keep still, please," he said; but the Saint had not moved. Uttershaw glanced at the girl again. "Mr Templar told you all about it," he said. "You should have believed him. But as he seems to have discovered, you don't have enough brains."

The Saint memorized her blanched face with an expression that was too late for sympathy.

"I did tell you," he said.

"Allen — no!"

"Yes, my dear," Uttershaw said. "I'm afraid he was perfectly right."

Simon Templar took a deep breath.

"Speaking of being put in positions," he said clearly, "how will you like your position on the broiler at Sing Sing if you do this?"

"I'm not very worried about that," Uttershaw said with the same unreal removal from emotion. "You see, I was careful enough to take the elevator to two floors above this, and I walked down here. I also found a fine little back stairway, with an openable window that leads out on to a fire escape. Apparently the management of this hotel trusts its guests. So I'll have plenty of time for any other arrangements I may think of to account for what I've been doing during this time. And I shall certainly take your lecture to heart, and try not to be too brilliant… I'm sorry, but it wouldn't be fair to leave you any false hopes."

The Saint looked at him with a face of stone.

Out of the corner of his eye he could see Barbara Sinclair also, still crouched on the floor, speechless and rigid and chalky in a trance of the real horror that she had so immutably refused to see.

But those choices were over now, for her as they were for Uttershaw.

And as they might be over for him too, if he had been so preoccupied with other excessive cleverness that he had overdone his own, after all.

He said: "This makes quite a curtain."

He turned abruptly on his heel, and walked in an aimless way towards the bookcase.

And thought what an immortal laugh it would be if after so much staging the clock in his mind had never been really right.

And what a picturesque finale it all was…

"Our death is but a sleep and a forgetting," Uttershaw said gently; and the Saint stood still.

"I hope that will make you very happy," he said.

He thought that Inspector Fernack had delayed his entrance to the last possible filament of suspense, doubtless with all conceivable malice aforethought, and then chosen a peculiarly dangerous moment for it. But he admitted to himself that he had helped to ask for that.

And the temptation to repay the performance was almost more than he could resist, but he knew at the same time that that filament was too fragile to risk even with a breath.

He seemed to have no emotional feeling at all; but he had his own. quality of mercy that was apart from all the other things.

As the door burst open, and Fernack lumbered in, and Utter-shaw whirled at the sound, Simon Templar took his gun out of the vase of chrysanthemums and fired as carefully as if he had been on a target range.

16

The Saint said: "No."

"Why?" wheedled Titania Ourley.

"Because you don't have to try and pump me for information like you did at the Algonquin, because I'm not investigating your personal nastiness or your husband's subrosa activities. That's been taken over by the — oh, Lord — proper authorities. Because you can read the newspapers for anything it's good for you to know. Because I hate to rumba. And," said the Saint, with dispassionate deliberation, "because you not only look like a cow, but you smell like tuberoses on a fresh grave."

He put the telephone back on its rest and lighted a cigarette but he had barely brought it alive when the bell rang again.

The operator said: "I have a call from Washington."

"Hamilton," said the telephone, with pleasant precision. "Nice work, Simon."

"Thank you," said the Saint.

"I just wish that one of these days you'd bring 'em back alive. There is such a thing as good propaganda, if you don't know it."

The Saint hitched himself more comfortably on to his bed, and adjusted his bathrobe over his long legs. His mind was clouded with many memories, and yet the core of it was clear and sure and without remorse.

"Uttershaw wasn't such a bad fellow, in his own way," he said. "I guess my hand must have slipped. But if he had any time to think, I think he would have liked that."

The telephone played with its own static.

"What happens with Ourley?" it asked after a while.

"I just did a little more for him," said the Saint. "You could never hang anything on him in a court of law so far as this case is concerned; but he still has Titania, and I've come to the conclusion that as a life sentence she's even worse than Alcatraz. And with the encouragement I gave her a few minutes ago, she should be even better company than she was before."

"That Sinclair girl ought to get about ten years, with Fernack's testimony of what he heard from outside the door before he broke in," said the telephone callously. "She's a good-looking number, though, isn't she? What happened to you? Are you slipping?"

"Maybe I am."

"Well… Whenever you're ready, there is something else I'd like to talk to you about."

The Saint laughed a little, and it was silent and all the way inside himself, and deep and unimportant and nothing that could be talked about ever.

"I'll catch a plane this afternoon and meet you at the Carlton for dinner. I was just wondering what I could find to do."

He lay on the bed for a little while longer after he had hung up, smoking his cigarette and thinking about several things or perhaps not anything much. But he kept remembering a girl with hair that had been stroked by midnight, and eyes that were all darkness, and lips that were like orchid petals. And that was no damn good at all.

He got up and began to pack.