Thanks to the Saint

The careful terrorist

The explosion that killed Lester Boyd blew out a couple of windows in his West Side apartment and narrowly missed some passers on the sidewalk below with a shower of falling glass, but otherwise its force was so accurately calculated that it endangered nobody but its intended victim. The apartments across the landing and directly overhead felt only a dull concussion, and a little plaster fell from a ceiling underneath; that was all. But all that was left of Lester Boyd was a gory pulp and the memory of a crusading journalist who had taken one dare too many.

Two days after it happened Chief Inspector Fernack came striding out of The New York Herald Tribune by the back way on Fortieth Street, swung to his left, and collided with Simon Templar with a force that would have sent most men spinning. But the momentum of Fernack’s rugged beef and bone was absorbed almost casually by a deceptively lean frame of spring steel and leather, and the Saint smiled and said, “Why, John Henry, haven’t you heard that it isn’t supposed to be good for men of your age to gallop around like Boy Scouts on a treasure hunt?”

Fernack recognized him with delayed surprise, bit off the churlish execration which like any healthy New Yorker he was instinctively prepared to launch at any stranger who obstructed his own fevered shuttlings, and said almost lamely, “Oh, it’s you.” Then, with renewed irascibility, “When did you get back in town? And what are you up to now?”

The Saint suppressed a sigh — just enough for it to be still irritatingly perceptible.

“Yesterday,” he replied methodically. “And nothing. But I don’t need to ask you silly questions, John Henry. I’m just an amateur detective — not a pampered civil servant. I observe that you’re slightly overwrought. I see where you’ve come from.” He glanced up at the grimy building beside them. “I read newspapers. I know that Lester Boyd worked here. I deduce that you’re working on his murder and that you’re still trying to tag a Clue.”

“Have you got one?” Fernack growled.

“I’ve got the price of a drink,” Simon said. “You look as if you could use one — and why should we stand being jostled on a hot pavement outside Bleeck’s when it’s cooler and quieter inside?”

The detective offered only token resistance to being steered through the unpretentious door of the famous tavern. Simon found a sufficiently secluded space for them at one end of the age-mellowed bar, for they were still more than half an hour ahead of the vanguard of artists and writers and big and little wheels of the newspaper world who had given the place its name as their informal club and who by lunch time would have jam-packed it to the first of its two daily peaks of convivial frenzy. He ordered Dry Sack for himself and Peter Dawson on the rocks for Fernack, and under the soothing influence of the smooth Scotch nectar Fernack almost apologized, in a grudging and indirect way.

“This isn’t just a routine case to me,” he said. “I knew the guy. Some of the stuff he printed was what I told him. He was doing a good job.”

Originally assigned to do a short series on the rackets that still flourished in a United States that had become progressively less conscious of them as they became more deeply embedded in the political and economic system, Lester Boyd had pursued his researches with such zeal and proficiency, and had written about them with such trenchant clarity and wit, that the initial articles had stretched out into a syndicated column which had been running for more than six months with no diminution of reader interest when an expertly measured quantity of dynamite brought it to an abrupt conclusion.

The subjects of Boyd’s investigations were not the illicit distillers and unlicensed gamblers and peddlers of forbidden pleasures, the violators of fairly simple laws which could be enforced by any moderately efficient police force with the ambition to do it. He pointed out that the victims of that group of malefactors were mostly eager customers by their own choice, or at best had been susceptible to relatively little coaxing to step off the straight and narrow path. The targets that he had made his specialty were the crooked union bosses and masterminds of devious extortion who defrauded and disfranchised the “working man” at the same time as they professed to be championing his cause, and who simultaneously used the threat of strikes and riots to saddle legitimate business with a hidden tax which, he argued, was eventually paid by almost every citizen in the form of the extra pennies which as a result had to be added to the majority of things that people buy.

This is such an ingeniously subtle and diffused form of blackmail, embezzlement, and larceny that most public prosecutors — to say nothing of the rank-and-file union members and the realistic business men on the other side of the table — had long since given up hope of any practical solution except to continue the payment of tribute and charge it off to modern overhead. But Lester Boyd’s pertinacious studies had contrived to detail and document so many case histories and specific shakedowns that they had started a rumble of rising indignation across the land which the sensitive ears of its politicians could not ignore. And as a corollary, the parasites who saw their immunity and fat living menaced stopped sneering and began to snarl.

“He was warned to lay off,” Fernack said. “He got messages stuffed in his mailbox, phone calls in the middle of the night. Then a coupla goons were waiting outside his apartment building once when he came home, but the cop on the beat happened to come around the corner just as they started slugging him. After that I tried to make him call Headquarters whenever he was going any place where there wasn’t bright lights and plenty of people, and we’d have a radio car cruise by and watch for him. Sometimes he’d do it and sometimes he wouldn’t bother, but I made him have it put in the paper anyway and I figured it’d make those bastards think twice about trying to beat him up again. But he wouldn’t lay off, of course. So they laid him off.”

“You know the characters he was attacking,” Simon said. “Have you had any of them in and asked them questions?”

“Oh, sure, I’ve had ’em in. And asked ’em stupid questions. And got the stupid answers I deserved.” The detective’s voice was harsh with corrosive acid. “If you mean did I give ’em a good old-fashioned going over, you know damn well I didn’t. You remember how in Prohibition nobody could lay a hand on a top gangster for all the shyster attorneys around him and the crooked politicians spreading their pocket handkerchiefs for him to walk on so’s his shoes wouldn’t get dusty? Well, these mugs make those old-time mobsters look like punks. They got twice as many lawyers and half the time they don’t even bother with the politicians. These guys are legitimate — at least until somebody proves otherwise. They got fancy offices an’ secretaries an’ all the trimmings, just like the president of General Motors. They go to conventions an’ banquets and make speeches. Suppose we caught some goon who beat somebody up, and maybe twisted his arm a bit till he named one of the bosses who hired him to do it? The boss would laugh at us. Just some overenthusiastic union member trying to talk himself out of an assault rap, he’d say — and what other proof do we have?”

“Who would you use your rubber hose on if you could get away with it?” Simon asked sympathetically, but with just enough hint of an underlying taunt to be sure of stinging Fernack out of any imminent reversion to the discreet habits of the clam. “Boyd was shooting at so many guys. Did he have anyone in his sights sharply enough to make himself an obvious murder risk?”

“Yeah. Just one guy that I put him on the tail of. But what he dug up, after the lead I gave him, was all his own. He said it was hot enough that if it wouldn’t get this guy at least five years in a Federal pen it could only be because the Attorney General was fixed. Anyway, he had somebody worried enough to want him bumped off.”

“Where did he keep this information?”

“That’s what I was up to the Syndicate office trying to find out. But they don’t have it. Nobody seems to know where it is — unless, probably, it was all in his head. But it don’t mean the same any more. Suppose anybody found it now and this louse did draw a five-year stretch. That only pays for some of his past racketeering. The murder is still on the house.” Fernack’s big knuckles whitened around his glass in a contraction of coldly suppressed fury that threatened to crush it like an eggshell. “There’s only one way he’s ever likely to be tied into that bombing, and that’d be if someone backed him up to a wall and beat a confession out of him. Which the judge would throw out anyhow. But I can remember a time when I’d of done it just the same, just for the satisfaction of seeing he didn’t beat the rap without even getting his hair mussed.”

“What’s his name?” Simon persisted.

“Nat Grendel,” Fernack said, almost defiantly. “You’ve heard of him.”

The Saint nodded.

“I read Boyd’s articles. But I didn’t think Grendel would go all the way to murder.”

“Some guys will go a long way to stay out of Leavenworth.”

Simon lighted a cigarette.

“I never get enough exercise in this effete city. How would you feel if I did some of the old-fashioned brutal things to Brother Grendel that they won’t let you do, now that Centre Street has become so correct and maidenly?”

The detective glared at him in what anyone who had not followed their long acquaintance through all its vicissitudes would certainly have considered a disproportionately apoplectic reaction to such a friendly offer.

“You stay out of this! If somebody takes Nat Grendel for a ride, in the name of some kind o’ justice above the Law, like you did to some other guys in this town once, I’ll know it was you and I’ll send you to the electric chair and I’ll pull the switch myself, so help me. I got enough trouble already — and you can’t get away with that stuff any more.” He drained his glass violently and added, with what seemed like a somewhat naive superfluity, “Anyhow, Grendel’s only the guy who wanted Boyd wiped out. The guy whose trademarks were all over that bomb job is the Engineer.”

In the underworld’s roster of peculiar specialists the man who was usually referred to as the Engineer was perhaps the most sinister and shadowy. The latter adjective is applicable to his reputation and modus operandi rather than to his physical aspect, which was anything but wraithlike.

His real name was Herman Uberlasch, and he had the bullet head, stolid features, and bovine build with which any cartoonist would have automatically endowed a character intended to represent a typical Teuton. A straggly mustache masked the ruthless line of a bear-trap mouth, and gold-rimmed glasses of unfashionable shape maintained a deceptive screen of gentle helplessness before his very pale blue eyes. Ostensibly he operated a watch, clock, and small-appliance repair shop on a shabby corner of Third Avenue, but his unsuspecting neighbors would have been amazed to see the figures on the income-tax returns which he meticulously filed each year. To the inspectors, who were also amazed and slightly incredulous, he explained unblinkingly that he was sometimes paid quite fantastic fees for overhauling priceless antiques and heirlooms, and beyond that, since there was no evidence that he had been unwise enough to conceal any income, they had no authority to go.

But in more sophisticated circles, Herman Uberlasch was widely believed to have been the first practical joker to wire a bundle of dynamite and a detonator to the ignition system of a car in such a way that the next person attempting to start it would simultaneously eliminate both himself and his vehicle from the automobile market. That story may belong strictly to folklore. But even if there is any truth in it, he progressed rapidly to more complex and ingenious conceptions. He was more plausibly credited with inventing a cigarette lighter which could actually be lighted for demonstration purposes, but which exploded like a grenade when operated by anyone who did not know its secret, and there is no longer much doubt that he originated the prank of mounting a .45 cartridge inside a telephone receiver with such a cleverly sprung firing mechanism that as far as the victim was concerned its message literally went in one ear and out of the other. He had a solution for almost any problem that could be handled mechanically, and he was always alert for ways to adapt the latest advances of science and technology to his work: when television came in, he was the first to think of fitting a picture tube with a special cathode that in one or two sessions would give its audience a dose of X-rays which would soon place them beyond the reach of the most insistent commercial.

It was for achievements thus unsung, or at least vocalized only in very limited choral society, that Uberlasch won his reputation as the Engineer, but as the time-honored and straightforward custom of taking troublesome individuals for a ride became somewhat outmoded or less practical, his unusual talents were increasingly in demand, and to his great disgust his name was bandied about among the cognoscenti, and a man who heard that the Engineer had been assigned to him would scarcely dare to strike a match for fear that it might kindle his own funeral pyre. But still it was all only accepted rumor and furtive whisperings, for the Engineer himself never boasted, nor did his gadgets leave any evidence that could embarrass him.

If the police raided his humble premises (as one rash officer did once) he had the ideal legitimate justification for any springs, cogs, timing devices, electrical parts, tools or instruments that might be found there; the explosives never entered his shop but were always added on the job at the last moment.

“It might be five or ten years before a combo like that makes a slip that would stick in court, Bill — if they ever make it,” Simon argued. “I just want to speed up the odds.”

This was after Fernack had refused another drink and departed for his office downtown, muttering further threats of what would happen if the Saint presumed to take the law into his own hands, and Simon had waited for the editor of the syndicate which Boyd had been working for, with whom he already had a date for lunch.

“I couldn’t get away with setting you up to be shot at,” was the answer. “Even if you talked me into it, my boss wouldn’t let me go through with it.”

“You could hire me to continue Boyd’s column,” Simon wheedled. “Any self-respecting newspaper should refuse to let itself be bullied into dropping this subject just because the goons have hit back once, and my reputation as an expert on skulduggery and dirty pool is certainly good enough to account for picking me to carry on. Then when you start publishing me, and I say in my first article that by an odd coincidence I was the little bird who told Boyd where to dig up the dirt that he was going to publish on Grendel, and that I’m just as qualified to go on raking it out — well, you could hardly refuse to print that, because for all you know it might be the truth. And then if anything unfortunate did happen to me as a result, nobody could blame you, because obviously I’d asked for it myself.”

“But what you’re thinking is that they’ll have to try to give you something like the same treatment they gave Lester, but you’re going to be fast enough to duck.”

“And maybe catch them off base, too — if you don’t mind how a metaphor gets mangled. You’d go a long way to see that somebody pays for Boyd’s murder, wouldn’t you?”

The editor rubbed his chin.

“I don’t think Fernack is going to like this,” he said.

“What we have to hope is that Nat and Herman like it even less,” said the Saint.

Nat Grendel would have objected venomously to hearing it reported that he blew his top when the first article under Simon Templar’s by-line was shown to him, for he prided himself on having risen above such vulgar displays, but he came frighteningly close to it.

In the course of a career professedly devoted to improving the status of the working man, Nat Grendel had improved nobody more than himself. Rising from origins as lowly as those of any of the toilers he claimed to represent, he had managed to transform himself into a fair facsimile of their own traditional bogey-man. Always impeccably barbered, groomed, and tailored, he looked as if he had never soiled his manicured fingers on any cruder tool than a fountain pen. Not for him was the rugged, raucous, homespun, back-slapping pose of certain other labor leaders who were always trying to prove that inflated salaries and unlimited expense accounts had not made them feel any less spiritually akin to the common man whose cause they championed. Grendel always spoke softly and moreover had taught himself to do it in the language and even a good imitation of the accents of education and breeding, and he comported himself with a reserved and worldly suavity which often exceeded that of the corporation executives with whom he had to negotiate. Yet by some paradox which a Freudian psychologist would not find totally baffling, he commanded the genuine loyalty of a full fourth of the members of the key union local which he dominated, and the steel talons inside his kid gloves were sharp enough to control the rest. Even some of the more conservative and constitutional modern hierarchy of union bosses secretly envied Grendel’s unchallenged rule over his self-chosen province, and although the supreme councils of organized labor disclaimed and deplored his tactics, he was still far too powerful a figure to be disowned or even seriously disciplined.

At fifty, he had plenty of wavy hair of a distinguished gray, though his brows and the pencil-line of mustache which he cultivated were still jet-black, and he was quite vain of his somewhat actorish good looks and well-preserved figure. Along with the appearance, he had developed the tastes of a sybarite: he liked to dine in expensive restaurants, accompanied by showy if not scintillating young women, and his terrace apartment overlooking Central Park housed a collection of antiques which few of the tycoons he professionally sneered at would have been ashamed of.

The concluding paragraph of the Saint’s first essay said:

Those who still want to know the facts which the late Lester Boyd meant to publish will not be disappointed if they continue to watch this space. But I don’t want to put Nat Grendel out of his misery too quickly. I want him to sweat for a few days and lie awake for a few nights first. And meanwhile I am thinking of a few extra ways to make him unhappy which even Boyd couldn’t have handled.

Grendel found this partly puzzling, but the text which preceded it was essentially ominous enough to make him acutely uneasy for about twenty hours.

The second article, however, did nothing but elaborate an assortment of generalities, and he began to feel his confidence rebuilding as he allowed himself to consider the possibility that the whole thing might be a hoax, or at best a very crude and hollow bluff.

Although when it seemed expedient Nat Grendel had employed enough gunmen, thugs, plug-uglies, pipe-wielders, rock-slingers, and brass-knuckle masseurs to make up a sizeable task force, he had contrived to hold himself so personally aloof from violence that he would have scorned the mere suggestion of maintaining a private bodyguard. And it is an interesting fact that he had never had any occasion to doubt the wisdom of that arrogant economy until the third morning after Simon Templar had finagled himself a short-term mortgage on the Fourth Estate.

When his Puerto Rican houseboy announced the visitor, Grendel was examining a china lion-dog figurine of the Yin dynasty which had reached him through the mail only that morning. “This is one of a pair my grandfather brought back from Shanghai,” said the letter enclosed in the parcel, from an address in Buffalo. “A dealer has offered $100 for them, and we could use the money, but I don’t know if it is a fair price. I have read where you are a collector yourself and I know you would always help one of your union men not to get gypped whatever the papers say, so please tell me if I should take it.” Grendel was still far from being an expert himself, but he knew that if the figures were fakes no dealer would pay ten dollars for them, but if he would pay one hundred they must be worth many times that amount. Grendel was trying to distract himself from his major anxiety by deliberating whether in the circumstances one hundred twenty-five or one hundred fifty dollars would be the ideal offer for him to make on his own account — the object being to seem magnanimous without encouraging his follower to try for more competitive bids — and his first reaction when he heard the name “Templar” was to be so incensed by the effrontery that he forgot to be afraid.

“Send him in,” he snapped, and as soon as the Saint entered he went on in the same tone: “You’ve got a nerve thinking you could just drop in and get an interview from me, after the lies you’ve already printed!”

Simon shook his head gently.

“I’m not a bit interested in anything you’re likely to tell me. And I’m not here to ask if you’d care to buy me off, as you may have been thinking. I just came to keep the promise I published and bring a little personal woe into your life, in case you hadn’t decided yet whether to take me seriously.”

By that time the houseboy had withdrawn, closing the door after him, and Grendel’s first physical qualm came a little late.

The Saint was surveying the decorations and ornaments with elaborate and unblushing curiosity.

“You’ve come a long way, Nat,” he remarked. “If only you’d picked up some honesty along with the other cultural trimmings, you’d be quite a success story.”

“Listen to who’s talking,” Grendel jeered.

For an instant the Saint’s eyes were like sword-points of sapphire.

“Don’t ever get one thing wrong,” he said. “I never robbed anyone who wasn’t a thief or a blackguard, although they might have been clever enough to stay within the law. I’ve killed people too, but never anyone that the world wasn’t a better place without. Sometimes people seem to forget it, since I got to be too well known and had to give up some of the simple methods I used to get away with when I was more anonymous, but my name used to stand for a kind of justice, and I haven’t changed.”

“If that’s how you feel, you shouldn’t be picking on me,” Grendel said automatically, and was even angrier to hear how hollow it sounded.

“You are a parasite and an extortioner, among other things, and you’ve had dozens of men beaten and maimed for obstructing your chosen escalator to a penthouse,” said the Saint dispassionately. “But an ordinary judge and jury might have cut you back to size eventually. Only the man who seemed most likely to help that happen was conveniently blown away, and a friend of mine who knows his onions thinks that, whatever happens now on the other counts, you’re a cinch to literally get away with murder. So for old time’s sake, I decided I should do something about it.”

He smiled again, with renewed geniality, and sauntered across to a glass cabinet which obviously enshrined some of Grendel’s most fragile treasures. He opened the door calmly, and with unerring instinct lifted out a delicate vase from the central position on an upper shelf.

“This is a nice piece, isn’t it?” he murmured. “I bet it cost you plenty of skimmings off the union dues.”

“That’s none of your business. Be careful—”

“It would be a crime to destroy it, wouldn’t it? But is it quite such a crime as destroying a man, wantonly, for no better reason than that he might have told the truth about you?”

“Put that down,” Grendel said savagely, starting across the room, “and get out of here—”

Simon Templar put down the vase, sadly and very seriously, but none the less firmly, as an executioner might have swung down a switch that sent a lethal voltage into an electric chair, crisply and positively, on the edge of the nearest table, with an unflinching force that shattered it into a shower of fragments.

In a white paroxysm into which no other goad could have stung him, Grendel sprang forward into a collision course with an orbiting set of knuckles which he intercepted with his right eye.

He reeled and swung wildly, contacting nothing but thin air, and another wickedly accurate fist jarred his teeth sickeningly and sent him staggering back to collapse ignominiously in an armchair which caught him behind the knees.

The Saint sat on the edge of a table and lighted a cigarette.

“You’d better relax, Nat, before something permanent happens to your beauty.”

Dabbing a silk handkerchief on his bloody lips, Grendel spat out some crude words that he had not used for fifteen years. But pain and shock had already quenched his momentary flare of violence. Outside of that instant of uncontrollable madness he would never have exposed himself to physical conflict at all, for he had neither the muscles nor the spirit for personal combat. Now the awareness of his abject impotence at the hands of the Saint was linked with the bitter memory of other half-buried humiliations suffered in his youth, before he learned more devious ways of fighting, and the mocking eyes of the contemptuous buccaneer gazing speculatively at him seemed to know it.

“I wonder what you’ll do now, Nat? You could call the police and charge me with assault, or call your lawyer and sue me. But if I said I was only trying to interview you, and you went berserk and knocked that vase out of my hand when you took a poke at me, and I had to smack you a couple of times to cool you down in self-defense — it’d only be your word against mine, and you might have a tough time selling it.”

“I’ll get you for this, don’t worry!”

“With one of your goon squads? But you’ll never get the same satisfaction out of hearing what they did to me as I’ve had out of slapping you with my own hands. I suppose if they were good enough to kidnap me they might be able to hold me while you beat me up. But that wouldn’t be so good for you, because you’d be proving in front of your own men that you were a white-livered punk who couldn’t lick anyone that didn’t have his hands tied behind him, and they mightn’t forget it. Besides, beating me up isn’t enough. I’ve got to be killed, or else I give you my word I’m going to send you to jail as surely as Lester Boyd would have. And you wouldn’t have the nerve to kill anyone yourself even if he was trussed up like a mummy.”

“You’ll find out,” Grendel said.

Simon contemplated him skeptically.

“You’ll probably end up just farming the job out as usual,” he said. “The whole trouble is, you’re yellow. Even if the Engineer could set me up with some radio-controlled bomb that you could fire from here without the slightest risk that it could ever be proved you did it, I don’t think you’d have the guts to press the button. You’ve made yourself into a little two-bit czar, but you’ll never find out what it feels like to play God.”

He stubbed out his cigarette, most deliberately, on the beautifully polished table top, and slid himself lazily off it to straighten up on his feet.

“I’ll leave you to brood about it,” he said lightly. “But don’t brood too long, because in a day or two I may drop by again and do something else horrible. And I’ve got plenty more printable things to write about you.” He paused at the door. “Any time you’ve got a few husky friends with you and feel brave, you don’t have to waste a lot of time looking for me. I’m staying at the Algonquin.”

Herman Uberlasch felt phlegmatically confident that he had nothing to apologize for in the bomb that had silenced Lester Boyd — although it was one of his less intricate contraptions, it had been entirely adequate for the job, and the conscientious craftsmanship that went into it was evidenced by the fact that it had admittedly hurt no extraneous characters whose injury might have beclouded the issue and unnecessarily increased the volume of public indignation.

Therefore he was somewhat puzzled by the curt and rancorous tone of voice in which Grendel phoned him a few days afterward and summoned him to another conference. But he went, because Grendel was an old established client and never haggled over a fee, and when he got there he could see very plainly why his customer was emotionally distraught.

“Dot iss a beautiful shiner you got, Nat,” he commented tactlessly, in the accent which he had guarded as an artistic flourish rather than from any linguistic disability. “Und der schvelling of der mouth also. I didn’t know it vos so true vot I read in der paper.”

The Saint’s latest article had begun:

The reason why Nat Grendel, the tapeworm of organized labor, will be not sampling the caviar in his favorite haunts for a few days is that he is ashamed to show his face in public. Not, I regret to say, on account of the things I’ve been saying about him here, but simply because of some inglorious contusions inflicted on it by the rude hands of an unidentified person who may have felt he was paying an interim dividend on the late Lester Boyd’s account.

“Never mind about that,” Grendel said coldly. “I want you to do something about Templar.”

“Chust like Boyd perhaps? A liddle machine dot goes off ven he schvitches on der lights? Dot iss a good, simple, reliable system mit no bugs in it. Or do you vant dis vun to be different?”

“I’ve got a crazy idea — I’d like to pull the trigger on this myself. Would it be possible to rig something that could be fired by radio, for instance? So I could wait till I got him on the phone and tell him what I was doing, and then press a button and even hear it go off.”

The Engineer’s torpid face lighted up.

“You should’ve been a clairvoyant, Nat. You ask for der very latest idea I been working on. Only a few days ago a feller comes in my shop mit a model airplane for me to repair, und it has radio controls so he can fly it he says two miles avay. Now you know how I’m alvays looking for new ideas to improve my service, so of course I see at vunce how dis could be exactly vot I’d need some day to schtart a fire or set off a special bomb, und naturally I find out vhere he gets it und I put it in schtock. Dis vill be so interesting I vould almost do it for nodding — only dot vould be unprofessional,” he added hastily.

“How long will it take you to get it working?” Grendel asked. “This can’t wait for weeks while you’re experimenting.”

“Der experimenting iss already done. I vould not be talking about it if I hadn’t proved I could make it vork. Der bomb I can haf ready tomorrow. Vhere iss Templar living?”

“At the Algonquin.”

Uberlasch frowned.

“To plant der bomb may not be easy. It iss a schmall hotel vhere everybody iss known und everybody iss noticed. Und I suppose Templar iss no fool, und he vill be looking out for somebody trying to take care of him like Boyd.”

“Up to a point, yes. But he’s so damned sure of himself that he doesn’t seriously believe it could happen to him. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’m convinced that he thinks he can bluff me out of making anything happen to him because it’s too soon after what happened to Boyd. So I’m betting it’ll be easier than you expect.”

“I alvays giff you top marks for psychology, Nat. Maybe you got der answer right dere.” The Engineer scratched thoughtfully at his benevolent walrus whiskers. “Now perhaps ve cash in on his blind schpot like dis...”

In a room only a few floors less lofty in an adjacent hotel, where he had registered under a new and utterly implausible name, Simon Templar presently took off the earphones and switched off the sensitive radio receiver which had brought him every word of the conversation.

Nat Grendel also had his blind spot. Like any other man involved in sometimes highly questionable stratagems, he was acutely sensitive to the risk that someone might try to install an eavesdropping device in his apartment, and his loyal and conscientious servant had standing orders which would have made it virtually impossible for anyone to gain admission and be left alone on any pretext even for a moment. But it had not occurred to Grendel, who did not have the Engineer’s turn of mind, that a Chinese ornament credibly sent to him by a trustful member of his union could have sealed into it a microphone and miniature radio transmitter capable of broadcasting for a more than sufficient two hundred yards.

Grendel placed the lion-dog temporarily on top of the cabinet which the Saint had vandalized and wrote a letter to Buffalo which he thought neatly solved his dilemma.

“I’m not an expert valuer,” he wrote, “but I do know that antique dealers expect to make a profit. Let me see if I can help you to share in it. I’m sending you herewith $100 — all that the dealer would have given you — to tide you over your immediate emergency. Send me the other figure, and let me get an offer for the pair. Perhaps I can get a slightly better bid than you could, from some dealer who owes me a favor, and if so I’ll send you the difference.”

In this way he would have both pieces in his possession, there would be no danger of the owner getting an embarrassingly different valuation, and in a short while an additional check for perhaps fifteen dollars would secure him an even more grateful and devoted disciple.

For the protective function performed by Grendel’s house-boy, Simon Templar was able to rely to a large extent on the voluntary devotion of a large part of the Algonquin staff, some of whom had known him for so many years that they took an almost proprietary interest in his welfare. When he returned to the hotel the following afternoon from typing and handing in his column at the newspaper syndicate office, a bellboy stepped into the elevator with him, exchanged a polite greeting and some innocuous comments on the weather, got out at the same floor, and trailed him unobtrusively to his suite.

“There was a man here while you were out, sir, supposed to be from the telephone company,” he said when they were alone. “I got the job of letting him in with the passkey and staying here while he worked, you know, like the hotel always has somebody do. It was some complaint about the phone not always ringing, he said. He fiddled about a bit and fastened something on the wire, under the bed, but he said that was only temporary and he’d take it away when he brought a new bell unit. I thought you’d like to know, sir.”

The bellhop showed him the attachment on the wire, and Simon removed it and examined it captiously. It was a small but very efficient wire recorder, as he pointed out.

“You might as well take it home and have some fun with it,” he said. “Or any shop that deals in second-hand recorders should pay a fairly good price for it. If that bogus telephone man comes back and finds it’s gone, I promise you he won’t even let out a peep.”

The bellboy grinned.

“Thank you, Mr Templar. And I hope nobody ever gets the drop on you.”

“Keep your fingers crossed for me,” said the Saint piously, “and your eyes open.”

As soon as his self-appointed sentinel had gone he made a further search and did not take long to find the second memento left by his visitor. This was a plastic box about the size of a couple of cigarette packages, and it was fastened to the underside of the telephone table with a gooey adhesive. Obviously it had been prepared so that all the operator had to do was distract the bellhop’s attention for an instant, strip off a protective covering, and press the sticky side of the box up against the wood, where it would cling without any other fastening.

It was not hard to detach, but he handled it very gingerly, knowing what it contained.

He could look back on many minutes of agonizing suspense in the course of his life, but none that were more icily nerve-racking than those that he spent before he was sure that he had rendered the Engineer’s newest masterpiece harmless.

Even after that he felt tense as he went back downstairs with a small valise which he had already packed, and told the desk clerk that he would be away overnight, and made an especial point of asking for the switchboard to be notified to give that message to any telephone callers. Not until his taxi had pulled away from the door, cutting him off from any chance of being prematurely contacted by Grendel, did he draw a completely relaxed breath.

He did not, however, go out of town, but before they had reached Fifth Avenue he changed the directions which the doorman had relayed to the driver, from the Air Terminal to the other hotel where he had set up his listening post, and it was from there that he called Fernack the next day and invited the detective to meet him for a drink at the Algonquin at five-thirty that evening.

“What’s the idea now?” Fernack asked suspiciously. “Are you thinking you can con me into giving you the same leads I gave Boyd, so you can keep up your newspaper career?”

“Don’t be late,” said the Saint. “And have a police car waiting for you outside — you may need it.”

“This had better be good,” Fernack grumbled. “I read all your articles, because I gotta, but I’m gettin’ a hunch that you’re full of spit. If I was Grendel, you’d worry me a bit less every day.”

Inspector Fernack’s misjudgement could be excused, for he lacked the inside information which gave Grendel’s appreciation of the Saint’s literary output a peculiar piquancy, right up to and including the opening lines of the column which had appeared that morning:

Nat Grendel was still chewing a thumbnail over that sentence when Uberlasch arrived late in the afternoon. The matching china figure to the one the Saint had referred to had arrived earlier, by express, with a letter of effusive thankfulness enclosed, and Grendel had been unable to resist unpacking it and setting it on his desk beside its mate, the better to admire their symmetry.

Now he might end up having to pay something like a reasonable market price for the pair, if he wanted to keep them, unless he could think of some foolproof way of double-talking around those gratuitous observations which his faithful fan might just have been cussed enough to read. The probability inflamed all over again a complex of wounds of which his facial inflammations were now only dwindling shadows.

“How many do you vant of dose china nightmares, Nat?” wondered Uberlasch, whose faded eyes missed very little. “Now for half der price I could make you a dog dot vags his tail und barks und eats only flashlight batteries. Dot iss, if it’s schtill true vot I read in der papers.”

“The only thing I want to read in the papers tomorrow,” Grendel said edgily, “is how this precious radio gadget of yours worked.”

The other put down the untidy brown-paper parcel he carried on the desk and opened it. When exposed, its contents were contrastingly compact and tidy.

“Here iss der transchmitter, Nat. It iss already tuned mit der bomb. Here iss der button. Ven it iss time for you, you pusch mit der finger. Dot iss all. You could’ve had it last night, und by now it vould be all over.”

“Templar went somewhere out of town yesterday, I found out from his hotel. That’s why I told you not to hurry. But he’s due back any time now. All I want is to be sure everything’s jake with the thing you planted.”

The Engineer sat down comfortably and lighted a rank cigar.

“If it ain’t, I should be blown up mit it myself,” he said. “I’m not der great psychologist like you, but dot bomb vos put in mit a psychology of genius.”

Simon Templar himself was ready to concede that, with the generosity of one true artist towards another. He admitted as much to Chief Inspector Fernack, in his living room at the Algonquin, while he poured Old Curio over the ice cubes in two glasses.

“I honestly don’t know how many times I might have been a sucker for a switch like that,” he said. “They knew, of course, that the odds were about twenty to one I’d hear about any trick they used to get into my room, so they deliberately used one of the corniest routines in the book to make the bet even safer. Perhaps they overdid it a bit in actually showing the bellhop the gizmo on the telephone wire. But I was supposed to feel so smug about finding it that I wouldn’t think I needed to search any farther. And I just possibly might have, if I hadn’t had electronic insurance.”

“But the bomb, man,” fumed the detective, too agitated about fundamentals to notice the last cryptic phrase. “Why didn’t you keep it, or bring it to me? That’d be the kind of evidence—”

“Of what?”

“Any part that’s used in a bomb can be traced, especially before it’s blown up.”

“Did you ever tie anything to the Engineer that way?”

Fernack gulped.

“Somebody was in your room, impersonating a telephone service man. The bellhop could identify him—”

“If he lived to do it. The guy did me a favor. But after what they did to Boyd, and what they had planned for me, can you see me asking him to stick his neck out like that?”

“If he identified the Engineer, I’d have that Dutchman locked up so tight that even Grendel couldn’t spring him.”

“You might, but I doubt it. But even if you did, do you think you’d ever make Uberlasch say who hired him? Just on a point of pig-headed Prussian pride, you couldn’t open his mouth with red-hot crowbars, and if you think you know better you’re only kidding yourself.”

“If we don’t keep trying,” Fernack said stubbornly, “what’s ever going to stop Grendel?”

“I had a suggestion once, but you didn’t like it.”

The detective looked up grimly.

“I still don’t.”

“Let’s put it this way,” said the Saint. “Grendel and the Engineer are guilty as hell: you know it, and I know it. But under the ordinary processes of law they don’t seem any nearer to getting their comeuppance. However, it’s an ancient legal doctrine that if anyone injures himself in an attempt to commit a crime, it’s strictly his own fault. For instance, if we were standing on the edge of a cliff, and you suddenly tried to shove me over, and I dodged, so that you lost your balance and fell over yourself, it couldn’t be blamed on me for not standing still and letting you push me.”

“So what?”

Simon sipped his drink placidly.

“In the same way, if Grendel was fooling around with some nasty little toy that was intended to blow me to blazes, and instead it went off and disintegrated him — it’d be practically suicide, wouldn’t it?”

“What are you driving at?” rasped Fernack distrustfully. “You didn’t get me up here just for an argument.”

“No,” Simon admitted. “I also thought you might ask me for an alibi, and I couldn’t think of a better one I could give you than yourself. For the rest, I’m betting everything on psychology. I know that Grendel fancies himself as the sharpshooter in that department, but I think I’ve got him out-psychologized — or maybe buffaloed would be a better word,” he said enigmatically.

And then, as if on cue, the telephone rang.

“That should be Grendel now,” said the Saint, putting down his glass. “Come and listen.”

He led the way into the bedroom, and Fernack followed him in glowering uncertainty. Simon lifted the handset and said, “Hullo.”

“Templar?”

“Speaking.” Simon turned the receiver away from his ear and beckoned Fernack closer so that the other could also hear.

“This is Nat Grendel.”

“Well. How are your bruises? They should be sporting some beautiful color effects by now.”

“Do you remember saying that if I had you sitting on a bomb you didn’t believe I’d have the guts to set it off myself?”

“Yes.”

“I’m going to show you how wrong you were.”

“Don’t try it, Nat,” said the Saint soberly. “I can’t give you a fairer warning than that.”

“This isn’t a warning,” Grendel said. “I’m going to kill you, you bastard. But right now, I just wanted to tell you about it, so that the last thing you know’ll be that I’m doing it myself. Now.”

Simon prudently moved the receiver a little further from his ear, but the detective, who was caught unprepared, jumped at the loudness of the clack that came from the diaphragm.

“What was that?”

Simon Templar listened a moment longer, to nothing, and then quietly put down the phone.

“That was the accident I was talking about. I got the idea from Shakespeare. You remember that line about ‘the Engineer hoist with his own petard?’ You didn’t ask me how I got rid of the petard that they fixed for me. I suppose it was rather naughty, but the only thing I could think of was to put it inside a piece of china that he was interested in and send it back to him. It wouldn’t’ve hurt him if he hadn’t pressed the button.” The Saint went back into the living room and finished his drink. “Well, I guess we’d better get in that car I told you to have waiting and go see how much mess it made.”