The Saint Steps In

1

The FBI man from New Haven, whose name was Jetterick, said: "This Mrs. Cook says she served Mr. Gray's dinner at seven-thirty, and then she washed up and went home about nine. At that time he was reading a book in the living-room."

"He didn't say anything about going out," Madeline put in.

"No."

"Was there any reason why he should?" asked the Saint.

There wasn't any answer to that.

Simon had told his story two or three times over — the last time, for it to be laboriously taken down as a statement. Both of them had answered innumerable questions.

Madeline Gray had said: "I don't know anyone called Diana Barry, and I don't know anyone who fits that description. And I'm not being blackmailed."

Jetterick had phoned the description and address through to New York for investigation. A police doctor had seen Angert, confirmed the Saint's diagnosis subject to a postmortem, and gone away again. The remains of Sylvester Angert had gone away too, riding in a closed van which arrived later. Photographs had been taken, and fingerprints. The laboratory had been gone over with powders and magnifying glasses. Even then, men were working meticulously through the rest of the house.

"You're quite sure about Mrs. Cook?" Wayvern asked.

"Absolutely," Madeline said. "We've known her for years and years, and I don't think she's ever been out of Stamford. It won't take you a minute to find out all about her."

Jetterick rubbed his clean hard chin and said: "There haven't been any threats before, Miss Gray?"

"No. Only the notes in Washington, that we told you about."

"You said that your father was pretty well off, didn't you?"

"Yes."

"But so far there hasn't been any demand for ransom."

"Kidnaping for ransom," Simon mentioned, "doesn't tie in with two or three attempts to sabotage a laboratory."

"Was the sabotage proved? Were the local police told about it?"

"Of course," said the girl. "But they didn't find anything."

"We did what we could," Wayvern said.

"Accidents do happen in chemical laboratories, don't they?"

"Sometimes. But—"

"Didn't your father ever stay out at night, Miss Gray? You understand, I have to be very practical about this. According to you, he was under fifty. That isn't so old, in these days. I don't want to suggest anything that might offend you, but he hasn't been gone very long. Why shouldn't he have gone to New York — met some friends — decided to stay over in town—"

"You know as much as we do," said the Saint. "I've told you the whole story as I have it. You still have to account for the attempt to kidnap Miss Gray in Washington, the shot that was fired at me in the Shoreham, Karl Morgen prancing in and out of the picture, and the very dead Mr. Angert. But you take it your own way from here."

Jetterick looked at him with philosophical detachment. "If it were anyone else but you," he said, "I'd have given you more trouble than I have. I admit you make it sound like a case. But I have to think of everything. I'm understaffed and overworked anyway. However, we are covering everything we can. We've got Morgen's description, and we'll get some of his fingerprints from the laboratory. We've got the gun you took from him to check on. We'll keep working on every clue there is."

"Isn't there anything I can do?" Madeline asked.

"Get me a photograph and give me a description of your father. We'll notify him as missing. If you do receive any communication about him, that'll give us something more to work on. Until then, I- can't make any promises. There's a lot of space on this continent, and if a man is deliberately being hidden he can take a lot of finding."

The FBI man didn't mean to be unkind. He was just sticking to his job, and his textbooks hadn't encouraged the emotional approach to criminology. But Simon could see the girl stiffen herself to take it, and liked the way she did it. She hadn't just been making talk; she was all right now.

"I'll get you a picture," she said very evenly, and went out of the room.

Jetterick leafed over the notes he had taken. Wayvern made another examination of Angert's wallet, which Simon had turned over. He picked out the snapshot of the young man in uniform, and shifted the long-dead stump of his cigar to the corner of his mouth. "Know anything about this, Ray?"

"Yes," Schindler said. "That's his son. Or was, rather. He was killed in the Solomons."

"No chance of Angert having had any queer sympathies, then?" Jetterick suggested.

"Not in a million years," Schindler said with conviction. "He was crazy about that boy. Besides that, Angert worked for me on and off over a period of ten years, and I'd vouch for him anywhere. He was just caught in the middle, the same as I was."

"That's what it seems like," admitted Jetterick. "But I still don't get it. If Morgen was working for the same outfit as this woman who hired you, what would he kill Angert for?"

The same riddle had been distracting the Saint's attention for a long time; but he still kept silent about his ace in the hole. No doubt it was most reprehensible of him, but he had always been rather weak on the ethics of such matters. He had called in the FBI for their obvious usefulness, and the local police out of necessity; but he had no idea at all of retiring into the background of the case. On the contrary, he felt that his own activity was only just beginning. And Andrea Quennel was an angle to which he felt he had a special kind of proprietary claim.

Madeline Gray came back and said to the other three: "You'd better have some lunch with us while your men are finishing up."

They were drinking coffee when there was a phone call for Jetterick from New York. When he returned to the table his pleasantly commonplace face was stoical.

"They're checked on that address," he said. "It's just one of those accommodation places. The girl's description fits.But she didn't leave any forwarding address. She said she'd call in for messages."

"I could have guessed that," Schindler said, "as soon as I heard the rest of the story."

"We're watching the place, of course. If she goes there, we'll pick her up."

Simon drew on his cigarette.

"If she hears that Sylvester was cooled off," he remarked, "she isn't likely to go there."

"That's true. But we can try."

"Does she have to hear about it?" Schindler asked.

Jetterick shrugged.

"I don't have to say anything. How about you, Chief?"

"I'll do what I can to keep it quiet," Wayvern answered. "But I don't promise more than twenty-four hours. These things always leak out somehow. Then the reporters are on my neck, and I have to talk."

"Twenty-four hours are better than nothing," said Jetterick.

"While we're keeping things quiet," said the Saint, "I wish we could pretend that Madeline hasn't been here. The Ungodly are still looking for her. But Morgen didn't see her, so far as I know; and I told him she was in New York. Madeline can ask Mrs. Cook to stay overnight, and make up some story for her husband, so that there's no gossip around the town. The more we can keep Madeline hidden, the less likely we are to lose her."

"I can tell my men they didn't see her," said Wayvern.

"Besides that," Simon went on, "she ought to have a guard. Just in case. I've got to go to New York this afternoon, and I can't promise to be back tonight."

Jetterick grimaced.

"If I had a man to spare," he said, "I could divide him into six pieces and need all of them."

"I can take care of that," said Wayvern.

They all looked at each other. They seemed to have reached the end of what they could do.

"I'm driving in to New York," Schindler offered. "I can give you a lift, Simon."

It was still a while before they got away.

They talked the case to pieces all the way to the city, but the Saint was guilty of keeping most of his conclusions to himself and only contributing enough to sound natural and stay with the conversation. He had had enough analysing and theorising to last him for a long time. And now he was even more restless to get his hands on the dossiers that should be on their way to meet him. Somewhere in them, he hoped, there would be a key to at least one of the puzzles that was twisting through his brain. In spite of his friendship for Ray Schindler, he was glad when the ride was over and he could feel alone and unhampered again for whatever came next.

He was at the Roosevelt at four-thirty, and he was down to the last drop of a studiously nursed Martini when a thin gray man say down at his table and laid a bulky envelope between them. Typed on the envelope was "Mr. Sebastian Tombs."

"From Hamilton," said the thin gray man dolefully.

"God bless him," said the Saint.

"I hope I didn't keep you waiting?"

"No, I was early." Simon signaled a waiter. "Have a drink."

"Thank you, no. I have ulcers."

"One dry Martini," said the Saint, and turned back to the thin gray man. "Did Hamilton give you a message too?"

"The party you asked about is staying at the Savoy Plaza tonight."

"Good."

"If you'll excuse me," said the thin gray man sadly, "I must go and keep some other appointments."

He got up and went grayly and wispily away, a perfect nonentity, perfectly enveloped in protective coloring, whom nobody would ever notice or remember — and perfect for his place in a machine of infinite complexity.

Simon weighed the package in his hand and teased the flap with his thumb while he tasted his second cocktail, but he decided against opening it there. At that hour, the place was getting too busy and noisy, filling tip with business men intent on restoring themselves from the day's cares of commerce, and he wanted to concentrate single-mindedly on his reading.

He finished his drink more quickly than the last, but still with self-tantalising restraint, and put the envelope in his pocket and went out. His thoughts were working towards a quiet hotel room, a bottle of Peter Dawson, a bowl of ice, a pack of cigarettes, and a period of uninterrupted research. That may have been why he suddenly realised that he had been staring quite blankly at an open green convertible that swerved in to the curb towards him with a blonde blue-eyed goddess waving to him from behind the wheel.

He walked over to the car quite slowly, almost as though he were uncertain of the recognition; but he was absolutely certain, and it was as if the pit of his stomach dropped down below his belt and climbed up again.

"Hullo, Andrea," he said.

2

After the first chaotic instant he knew that this was only a coincidental encounter. No one except Hamilton and the thin gray courier could have told that he would be there at that moment — he had even let Schindler decant him at the Ritz-Carlton and walked over. But out of such coincidence grew the gambler's excitement of adventure. And there was no doubt any more that Andrea Quennel was adventure, no matter how dangerous.

Even if the only way she looked dangerous was the kind of way that had never given the Saint pause before.

She wore a soft creamy sweater that clung like suds to every curve of her upper sculpture, and her lips were full and inviting.

"Hullo," she said. "Surprised?"

"A little," he admitted mildly.

"We flew up this morning. Daddy had some business to attend to in New York, so I was going to Westport."

"What are you running on — bathtub gasoline?"

She laughed without a conscience, and pointed to the "T" sticker on the windshield.

"All our cars belong to Quenco now, and that's a defense industry… I was going to see if I could track you down in Stamford."

"That was nice."

She made a little face.

"Now you're stuck with me anyway. Get in, and you can buy me a drink somewhere."

He got in, and she let in the clutch and crept up to the light on Madison.

"Where would you like to take me?" she asked.

He had gone that far. He had picked up the dice, and now he might as well ride his own roll to the limit.

He said: "The Savoy Plaza."

He was watching her, but she didn't react with even a flicker of withdrawal. She made the right turn on Madison, and sent the convertible breezing north, weaving adroitly and complacently through the traffic, and keeping up a spillway of trivial chatter about some congressman who had been trying to date the hostess on the plane. The Saint was in practice by that time for interjecting the right agreeable noises. By the time they reached the Savoy Plaza he was cool and relaxed again, completely relaxed now, with a curious kind of patience that hadn't any immediate logical connection.

She berthed the car skillfully, and they went down into the cocktail lounge. He ordered drinks. She pulled off her gloves, giving the room the elaborately casual once-over of a woman who is quite well aware that every man in it has already taken a second look at her.

She said: "How are your protégés?"

"Fine."

"Did you leave Madeline in Stamford?"

As if he had only just said it, the recollection of what he had told her in Washington scorched across his mind; and he cursed himself without moving a muscle of his face. That was the one loophole which he had overlooked. Yet when he had created it, there had been no reason for not telling Andrea Quennel that he was taking Madeline back. It had seemed like ingenious tactics, even. A good deal had happened since then…

He said, as unhesitatingly as he had told the same lie before, but with less comfort in it: "I parked her with a friend in New York. I decided afterwards that too many accidents could happen on a lonely country estate."

"What about the Professor?"

"He's also been moved and hidden," said the Saint, most truthfully.

She looked at him steadily, simply listening to him, and her face was as unresponsive as a magazine cover. It was impossible to tell who was learning what or who was fooling who.

Their drinks came, and they toasted each other pleasantly. But the Saint had a queer fascinated feeling of lifting a sword instead of a glass, in the salute before a duel.

"You haven't found out any more yet?" she asked.

"Not much."

"When am I going to do something for you?"

"I don't know."

"You're terribly talkative."

He was conscious of his own curtness, and he said: "How long are you going to be at Westport?"

"Maybe not very long. We've got a place at Pinehurst, North Carolina, and Daddy wants to spend some time there as soon as he can get away. He wants me to go down and see that it's all opened up ready." She turned the stem of her glass. "It's a lovely place — I wish you could see it."

"I wish I could."

"The gardens are gorgeous, and there's an enormous swimming pool that's more like a lake, and stables and horses. The riding's wonderful. Do you like to ride?"

"Very much."

"We could have a lot of fun if you came down with me. Just the two of us."

"Probably."

Her eyes were big and docile, asking you to write your own meaning in them.

"Why couldn't you?"

"I've got a job to do," he said.

"Is it that important?"

"Yes."

"I know it must be… But is it going on for ever?"

"I hope not."

"Mightn't it be over quite soon?"

"Yes," he said. "It might be over quite soon."

"Very soon?"

He nodded with an infinitesimal smile that was more inscrutable than complete expressionlessness.

"Yes," he said, "it might be very soon indeed."

"Then you must have been finding out things! Do you really know who all your villains are — what it's all about, and who's doing everything, and so on? I mean did you find your Axis agents or whoever they are?"

He lighted a cigarette and looked at her quite lazily. "I've been rather slow up to now — I don't know what's been the matter with me," he confessed. "But I think I'm just coming out of the fog. You have these dull spells in detecting. It isn't all done by inspiration and rushing about, firing guns and leaping through windows. Sometimes a very plodding investigation of people's pasts, and present brings out much more interesting things. I think mine are going to be very interesting."

Her gaze went over his face for a little while; and her mouth looked soft in an absentminded way, or perhaps it was always like that.

She lighted a cigarette herself, and there was a silence that might have held nothing at all.

"Daddy's coming up to Westport tonight," she said.

"Oh, is he?" Every one of the Saint's inflections and expressions was urbane and easy; only the soaring away of his mind had left nothing but a shell of the forms and phrases.

"Why don't you drive up with me and have dinner, and you can meet him when he gets there? We can find you a bed, too."

"I'd love to. But I've got my job."

"Can't she take care of herself at all?"

"Not at the moment."

"Are you — more than professionally interested?"

He caught the flash in her words, but he didn't let it bring a spark back from him.

"I'm sorry," he smiled. "I just couldn't go to Westport tonight."

She said: "Daddy's very interested in you. I broke down and told him about our talk last night. He thinks you're a pretty sensational person, and he's very anxious to meet you. He said he wanted to tell you something that he thinks you ought to know."

The Saint was aware of a fleeting touch of impalpable fingers on his spine.

"What was it about?"

"He didn't say. But he wanted me to be very sure and tell you. And he doesn't make much fuss about anything unless it's important."

"Then we'll certainly have to get together on it."

"What about tomorrow?"

"I don't know. Maybe."

"If you find you can get away," she said, "you've only got to call us. We don't dine till eight, and any time up till then… Will you do that?"

"Sure," he said, with just the right amount of politely meaningless promise.

"Let me give you our number in Westport."

He wrote it down.

"Your father isn't going home till late?" he said idly.

"No. He's got one of those awful business conferences. I'd have waited for him if I had anything to do." She pouted at her empty glass. "Why don't you get me another drink, sweetie?"

"I'm sorry."

He gave the order; and she sat back and reflected his gaze with blue eyes as pale and vacant as a clear spring sky.

"Are you staying in town tonight?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Where?"

"Here."

He had only just decided that, but it struck him as a convenient step with a multitude of enticing possibilities.

She brightened her cigarette with a deep fretful inhalation.

"Why do you have to play so hard to get?" she demanded abruptly.

"I suppose I must be anti-social."

"I think you're wonderful."

"So do I. But maybe I have eccentric tastes."

"You.don't like me."

"I don't really know you."

"You could do something about that."

It was quite plain to him that he could. It had been just as plain at their first meeting; but he hadn't given it any serious thought. Now he knew exactly why he had kept Andrea Quennel for his own special assignment, and what he had to do about it, because this was the part he had been cast for without even asking for it. Perhaps in a way he had known for several hours that it would come to this, without thinking about it, so that there was no shock when he had to realise that the time was there.

Two more dry Martinis arrived, and he raised his glass to the level of his mouth again; but this time he knew that it was a sword.

"Here's to crime," he said, and she smiled back.

"That sounds more like you."

Deliberately he let his eyes survey her again, and they did not stop at the neck. There wasn't a blush in her. She gave him back glance for glance, her red lips moist and parted. He let about half the calculated reserve soften out of his face.

"I told you I'd been a bit slow," he murmured. "Maybe I've been missing something."

"Want to reform?"

"It seems as if it might be more fun to degenerate."

"I could have fun watching you degenerate."

Then she pouted again.

"But," she said, "you're so frightfully busy…"

He knew just where he was going now, and he had no scruples about it. He was even going to enjoy it if he could.

"I've got some things that I must do," he said. "I can't get out of that. But I could get through a lot of them by eight o'clock. If you'd like to meet me then, we could nibble a hamburger and spend a few hours making up some lost time. Would that tempt you?"

"My resistance has been low ever since I met you," she said, and touched his hand with her fingers.

His mind was totally dispassionate, but there were human responses over which the mind held very nominal control. He was very much aware of the way her breathing lifted the roundness under her clinging sweater, and the eagerness that went out to him from her face. And he had a disturbing intuition, against all cynical argument, that her part in the game was no harder for her to play than his was for him.

Which was a good idea to forget quickly.

He said: "I'll have to get started if I'm not going to keep you waiting at eight o'clock. Let's meet at Louis-and-Armand's. We can fight out the rest of it over dinner."

"We won't fight," she said. "I'll chase around and see if I can find Daddy and tell him I'm not going straight home: And I'll see you at eight."

"I always seem to be giving you a sort of bum's rush," he remarked, "and here it is again."

She shook her head. She was suddenly very gay.

"Tonight is different, darling. Do you think it was Fate that made me see you outside the Roosevelt?"

"It could have been."

They drained their glasses while he waited for the check, and presently he took her outside and opened the door of her car for her. She got in and adjusted her skirt without any particular haste.

"I'll wait for you," she said. "You wouldn't stand me up, would you?"

"Not tonight, for a dictator's ransom," he answered lightly, and watched her drive away with the lines around his mouth smoothed in sober introspection.

He went back into the lobby, found a writing table, and enclosed a postcard announcing the forthcoming appearance of Larry Adler in an envelope which he addressed to Mr. Frank Imberline. He took the envelope over to the desk and put it down there, moving away at once and unnoticed behind the ample cover of the woman to whom the room clerk was talking. From the other side of the lobby he watched until the woman billowed off, and the clerk found the envelope, glanced at the name, time-stamped it, and put it in one of the pigeonholes behind him.

The Saint strolled back to the desk without taking his eyes off the pigeonhole until he could read the number on it. The number was 1013.

"Can you find me a room for tonight?" he asked. "Something about the tenth floor — I like to be fairly high up, but not too high."

He was about to register in the name of Sebastian Tombs, from nothing but automatic caution, when he remembered that Andrea Quennel might call him. He wrote his own name instead, and never guessed how he was to remember that decision.

After some discussion he settled for 1017, which seemed almost like divine intervention.

Having no luggage, he made a cash deposit, and went upstairs at once. He sent for ice and a bottle of Peter Dawson. By the time it came he already had his coat and tie off, and he was stretched out comfortably with his feet up, poring over the contents of Hamilton's envelope.

3

He took the report on Calvin Gray first, since it was the shortest. And it only amplified with dates and places the kind of picture which he had sketched by then for himself.

Old New England family. Graduated from Harvard, magna cum laude. Member of the faculty of Middleburg College, five years. Married; one daughter, Madeline, later B. Sc. at Columbia. Wife died in childbirth. Member of the faculty of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, nine years. Then a professorship at Harvard for six years. Inherited California gold mine at death of father. Check, check, and check. Retired, and devoted himself to private research. Author of one book, Molecular Principles of Chemical Synthesis, and sundry contributions to scientific journals. No political affiliation. A quiet modest man, well liked by the few people who got to know him.

Nothing much more than could have been found in Who's Who, if Calvin Gray had ever bothered to seek an entry there. But enough to confirm the Saint's information and his own final estimate.

He turned next to Walter Devan. He had recalled a few associations of that name since their meeting, and he found them verified and extended.

Born in a small town in Indiana, father a carpenter. Ran away to Chicago at sixteen. Newsboy, Postal Telegraph messenger, dishwasher, car washer. A few preliminary bouts as fall guy for rising middleweights. professional football. A broken leg. Garage mechanic; night school. Machinist in an automobile factory in Detroit. Repair man in the Quenco plant at Cincinnati. Repair foreman. Then, in a series of rapid promotions, engineering manager, assistant plant superintendent at Mobile, personnel manager for the entire organization of the Quennel Chemical Corporation.

And that was where the biography became quite interesting, for Walter Devan's conception of personal management, which apparently had the approval of Quenco to the extent of raising his salary to an eventual high of $26,000 a year, was something new even in that comparatively youthful industry. He was credited with having become the field commander of Quennel's long and bitter fight against unionism, a miniature civil war which had only been ended by congressional legislation. He had been accused in a Senate investigation of instituting an elaborate system of spies and stoolpigeons, of coercing employees with threats and blackmail, of saying that any union organizers caught on Quenco property would be qualified for a free funeral at the corporation's expense. Certainly he had more than once imported regiments of strike-breakers, and been the generalissimo of pitched battles in which several lives had been lost. But he had easily cleared himself of one indictment for manslaughter, and the blackest mark on his legal record was an order to cease and desist. Entrenched behind his own taciturnity and protected by all the power of Quenco, he had become a semi-mythical bogey man, an intermittent subject for attacks by such writers as Westbrook Pegler, a name that the average public remembered without being quite sure why; but even if the papers in Simon's hands only collated facts and rumors which had already been found inadequate by the Law, they still solidified into a portrait which was realistic and three-dimensional to him.

It was, he meditated, a portrait that was well worth setting beside Walter Devan's very timely arrival on the scene of the attempted kidnaping, and the misunderstanding through which Morgen and his chunky companion had been enabled to make their getaway. Not to mention the Saint's impression that Devan could have been the man who squeezed by him in the cocktail lounge of the Shoreham, who could have slipped a note in his pocket if Morgen hadn't — but he wasn't sure about that.

The only thing missing was any special connection between Devan and Morgen. Devan, from his dossier, was no more concerned with politics than Calvin Gray. The only club he belonged to was the Elks. His only quoted utterances were on the subject of unions, and obvious sturdy platitudes about Capital and Labor, and, under examination, hardly less obvious defenses of the Quenco policy and methods. A pre-war attempt to link him with the German-American Bund had collapsed quite ridiculously. He was a man who worked at his job and kept his mouth shut, and didn't seem to divide his loyalty with anything else.

"And yet," Simon thought, "if he doesn't know more about at least some of this charade than I do, I will devote the rest of my life to curling the hair on eels."

He built himself another highball, and turned logically to the file summary on Hobart Quennel.

This was another of those superficially straightforward histories which any sound citizen is supposed to have. Quennel was the son of a respectable middle-class family in Mobile, Alabama. His father owned a prosperous drug store, in which Quennel worked after he left high school. Out of this ordinary origin, perhaps, in some deep-rooted way, might have stemmed both Quennel's ultimate aggrandisement of the chemical industry and his choice of Mobile for the establishment of one of Quenco's newest and largest plants.

Orphaned at twenty-one, Quennel had sold the drug store and gone north. He went to law school, graduated, joined a New York firm of corporation attorneys, worked hard and brilliantly, became a partner at twenty-eight. Married, and sired Andrea. Six years later, the deaths or retirements of the senior partners had made him the head of the firm. Two years later, he became the receiver in bankruptcy of an obscure manufacturing drug company in Cincinnati. One year from that, after a series of highly complicated transactions which had never been legally disputed, he was a majority stockholder and the firm was getting on its feet again. That was the beginning of the great Quennel Chemical Corporation.

The further developments were even more complicated in detail — in fact, Treasury experts had spent large sums of public money in efforts to unravel them — but fairly simple in outline. The obscure manufacturing drug company had prospered and grown until it was one of the most important in the country. It had absorbed small competitors and enlarged its interests. Somewhere quite early in the tale, Mrs. Quennel, who had been an earnest art student of Greenwich Village, found that her married life was unbearably deficient in romance, and left for Reno with a Russian poet of excitingly Bolshevist philosophy. Encouraged rather than discouraged, Hobart Quennel left his law business entirely to the junior partners he had taken, and devoted his legal genius exclusively to his own commerical interests. Over the following years, and out of a maze of loans, liquidations, mergers, stock exchange manipulations, mortgages, flotations, and holding companies, Quenco finally emerged — an octopus with factories in four different states, no longer concerned only with such simple products as aspirin and lovable laxatives, but branching out into all the fields of fertilisers, vitamins, synthetics, and plastics, and presenting impeccable balance sheets full of astronomical figures in which Mr. Quennel's personal participation ran to millions of dollars a year.

His present life was busy but well upholstered. He kept the reins of Quenco firmly in his hands, but found time to belong to a long list of golf, chess, bridge, polo, and country clubs. For several years before the war he had regularly taken a summer vacation in Europe, accompanied by Andrea as soon as she was old enough. He was one of those Americans who once sang the praises of Mussolini because he made the trains run on time. He had rescued Andrea from three or four escapades which had made news — one concerned with a Prussian baron, one with the breaking of bottles over the heads of gendarmes in the casino at Deauville, and one with an accountant in Chicago whose wife had old-fashioned ideas about the sanctity of the home. There was a note that several of Andrea's other liaisons which had not become public scandals seemed to have been impartially divided between her father's business associates and business rivals. Hobart Quennel himself was a model of genial good behavior. He was a Shriner, staunch Republican, and a dabbler in state and national politics. He also had been the subject of a Senate investigation, a defendant under the Sherman Act, and an implacable feudist of the Labor relations Board; but with seasoned forensic skill he had managed to emerge as nothing worse than a rugged individualist who had built up a great industry without ever being accused of robbing hungry widows, who was a diehard opponent of government interference, and who had to be respected even if disagreed with. Curiously, he had made public denunciations of the America First Committee, and had voluntarily pioneered in the compulsory fingerprinting of employees and in laying off all Axis nationals even before there had been any official moves in that direction.

"A deep guy," thought the Saint. "A very deep guy indeed." He had his own interpretation of some of the items in Quennel's biography. He could see the connection between the middle-class beginning and the gigantic plant at Mobile, the local boy making good. He could see the link between the Bolshevik poet and the Mussolini railroad schedules. He could even tie up the bourgeois Southern background with the advancement of Walter Devan as the Imperial Wizard of a strictly private Ku Klux Klan. But all of that still didn't tarnish Hobart Quennel's unimpeachable Americanism, misguided as you might think it, or the fact that even the most scurrilous attacks on him had never been able to attach him adhesively to any subversive faction or foreign-controlled activity.

Hobart Quennel was indisputably a very clever man; but could he have been as clever as that, for so many years, exposed all the time to any sniper who wanted to load a gun for him?

The Saint lowered his drink an inch, and made himself acknowledge that something he had been looking for was still missing. And for the first time he began to wonder whether he had been wrong from the start. An easily preconceived idea, even a series of very ready deductions, were desperately tempting to coast on and glutinously hard to shake off once the ride had started. But facts were facts; and the dossiers in his hands hadn't been compiled by dewy-eyed romanticists. If Hobart Quennel had even been more than essentially polite to any Nazi or known fifth columnist, the slip would almost certainly have been recorded.

And yet…

Simon thought about Andrea Quennel again. She had the build and beauty and coloring that Wagner was probably dreaming of before the divas took over. She might easily have been flattered by the ideals of the Herrenvolk… There had been the Prussian baron… And definitely she was the Diana Barry who had commissioned Schindler… If you disregarded the rules of legal evidence, her own father had transparently taken advantage of her glandular propensities before. In the same way that she had been using them ever since the Saint met her.

That was so much. like the words she had used herself that he could almost hear her saying them again. He saw her lifelike in front of him, her warm rich lips and the too-perfect contours of her body; and the remembrance was not helpful to dwell on.

He lighted a cigarette and picked up the last docket of the sheaf — the story of the man who was still the most nebulous personality of all.

Frank Imberline.

Born in New York's most expensive maternity home. A silver spoon case. Private school. Princeton. Colonial Club. Graduated minima cum laude, being much too busy for affairs of the higher intellect. Was then drafted by his father into the service of Consolidated Rubber. Served a six-year apprenticeship, being driven sluggishly through all the different departments of the business, Steadied down, acquired a stodgy and even pompous sense of responsibility, became an executive, a Rotarian a member of the Akron Chamber of Commerce; eventually became Consolidated Rubber's head or figurehead. The latter seemed more probable, for there was a board of directors with plenty of shrewd experience behind them. The character estimate of Imberline said: "Generally considered honest and well-meaning, but dull." He played golf in the nineties, subscribed to all the good causes, and could always be depended on for a salvo of impressive and well-rounded clichés at any public dinner. His farthest traveling had been to Miami Beach. He had no labor battles, no quarrels with any Government bureaus. He did everything according to what it said in the book. His only political activity had been when some group persuaded him to run for Mayor on what was vaguely called a "reform ticket": he lost the election by a comfortable minority, and stated afterwards that politics were too confusing for him. Certainly the things that Simon had heard him say made that sound plausible. All the rest of his career — if such a swift-sounding word could be applied to anything so rutted and ponderous — had been devoted to Consolidated Rubber, from that early enforced apprenticeship until the time when he had resonantly donated his services to the National Emergency. And that was that. Nothing else.

Not the barest hint of sharp practice, corruption, chicanery, rebellion, conniving, strongarming, conspiracy, political ambition, or adventuring in social philosophies. "Generally considered honest and well-meaning, but dull…"

Of all the suspect records, his was the most open and humdrum and unassailable.

Which turned everything inside out and upside down. The Saint lay back with his glass held between his knees and blew chains of spaced smoke-rings towards the ceiling. Once again he put all the pieces together, fitting and matching them against all the facts that he had learned and memorised, estimating and analyzing with the utter impersonality of a mathematician. And only getting back again and again to the same irreconcilable equations.

He got up and freshened the melted ice in the remains of his drink, and lighted another cigarette. For several minutes he paced the room with monotonous precision, up and down on one seam of the carpet like a slow shuttle in a machine.

He could cogitate his brain into a pretzel, but it wouldn't advance him a single millimeter. He would be in the same foredoomed position as an Aristotelian philosopher trying to discover the nature of the universe with no other instrument than pure and transcendent logic. But one renegade factor might be within a few yards of him at that moment, and if he left it untouched it would only be his own fault that the solution didn't come out.

There had been moments like that in many of his adventures — there nearly always seemed to be. Moments when the fragile swinging balance of thought became a maddening pendulum that only physical action would stop. And this was one of them.

From there on he was through with theories. He knew what he knew, he had dissected all the arguments, he had pinned down and anatomised all the ifs and buts. He would never have to go back to them. The solution and the answers were all there, if he could beat them out of the raw material. The loose ends, the contradictions, the gaps, would all merge and blend and fill out and explain themselves as the shape forged. But from there on, win or lose, right or wrong, the rest was action.

He still had time before he had to meet Andrea.

He put on his tie, his holster, and his coat, and left his room. He went a few yards down the corridor and knocked on the door of 1013.

4

Imberline was in his shirtsleeves, his waistcoat unbuttoned. He recognised the Saint in a surprised and startled way that was too slow in maturing to influence the course of events. Simon was inside the door and closing it for him before he had decided on his response.

"You'll begin to think this is a habit of mine, Frank," said the Saint apologetically. "But honestly, I do make appointments when I have time."

"This is going too far," Imberline spluttered belatedly. "I told you I'd see you and your — er — Miss Gray when I got back to Washington. I don't expect you to follow me all over the country. Even if it's a hotel, a man's house is his castle—"

"But needs must," said the Saint firmly, "when the devil drives."

He allowed Imberline to follow him into the room, and helped himself to the most inviting chair.

Imberline stood in front of him, bulging like a pouter pigeon.

"Young man, if you don't get out of here at once I'll pick up the telephone and have you thrown out."

"You can do that, of course. But I'll still have time to say what I want to say before the bouncers arrive. So why not just let me say it, and save a lot of commotion?"

The rubber rajah made the mistake of trying to find an answer to that one, and visibly wrestled himself to a standstill. He inflated himself another notch to try and distract attention from that.

"Well, what is it?" he barked.

"A few things have happened since last night," said the Saint. "I don't know what all of them add up to, but they do make it seem very probable that Calvin Gray's invention isn't a crackpot dream."

"The proof of the pudding is in the eating," Imberline pronounced sententiously. "We've already discussed that—"

"But that was before Calvin Gray was kidnaped."

Imberline had his mouth open for a retort before he fully realised what he was replying to.

He swallowed the unborn epigram, and groped for something else. It came out explosively enough, but the roar in his voice lacked its normal fullness.

"What's that?"

"Kidnaped."

"I didn't see anything about it in the papers."

"It's being kept as quiet as possible. So is the fact that a man was murdered during the return engagement this morning."

Imberline's jowls swelled.

"Mr. Templar, if this is some cock-and-bull story that you've concocted to try and stampede me, let me tell you—"

"You don't have to," said the Saint quietly. "If you want to confirm it, call the FBI in New Haven. They'll probably admit it to you if you identify yourself. Tell them you're interested on behalf of the WPB."

"Who was murdered?"

"A man named Angert, employed by Schindler, who was employed by some party unknown to trail Calvin Gray's daughter."

"I never heard of him."

"I'm afraid that doesn't make him any less dead."

Imberline glared at him with unreasonable indignation.

"This is a civilised country," he proclaimed. "We don't expect our system to be disrupted by violence and gangsterism. If there has been any official negligence—"

"Something ought to be done about it," Simon assented tiredly. "I know. Personally, I'm going to write to the President. What are you going to do?"

"What am I going to do?"

"Yes. You."

"What do you expect me to do? If your story is true, the proper authorities—"

"Of course, I'd forgotten the dear old Proper Authorities. But you were a Proper Authority who was supposed to find out what Calvin Gray had on the ball. And apparently some Improper Authority thinks a lot more of him than you did — so much that they're prepared to go to most violent and gangster lengths to put him on ice."

Imberline fumbled a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and mopped his heavy face. He went over to another chair and made it groan with his weight.

"This is terrible," he said. "It's — it's shocking."

"It's all of that," said the Saint. "And it stinks for you."

"What do you mean?'

Simon slung one leg over the arm of his chair and settled deeper into it. He was no longer worried about being thrown out.

"Madeline Gray had an appointment with you last night," he said. "You'll remember I asked you about it. You said you didn't make it. But she thought she had it. And she was on her way to your house when there was an attempt to kidnap her — which I happened to louse up. But it was rather obvious that the appointment, phony or not, was planned to put her on the spot for kidnaping. If anyone wanted to jump to conclusions, they could make your position look slightly odd."

The other stiffened as if he had been goosed, and a tint of maroon crept into his complexion.

"Are you daring to insinuate—"

"I'm not insinuating anything, Frankie. I'm just telling you what any dumb cop would think of. Especially after you'd been so bull-headed about dodging Gray and his daughter. Almost as if you didn't want them to get a hearing."

"I told you, there is an established procedure — a well-planned system—"

"And there is Consolidated Rubber, which I hear was rather late in climbing on the synthetic bandwagon."

Imberline drew himself up.

"Young man," he said, with indomitable dignity, "I have never made any secret of my views on the subject of synthetic rubber. If Nature had intended us to have synthetic rubber, she would have created it in the first place. But only God can make a tree. However," he conceded magnanimously, "in the present Emergency I have not been influenced by my personal opinions. My life has always been an open book. I am prepared to match my principles with any man's. If anyone wishes to impugn my honesty, I cannot prevent him, but I can assure you that he will live to eat his words."

Simon put a match to a cigarette and regarded him with unconcealable awe.

"Incredible" was the adjective which he had spontaneously tacked on Imberline in the Shoreham, without knowing anything about him or having heard more than two sentences of his dialogue. He couldn't improve on it now.

"You ought to be in a glass case," he said.

The pattern snapped into place. And once there, it was immovable. His ruthless eyes had held Imberline under a microscope for every instant of the interview, and they wouldn't have missed even the cobwebby shred of a frayed edge. Even less than in their first conversation, when he had been completely baffled. But there had been no such thing. The précis he had studied hadn't lied — as he should have known it couldn't. He had jabbed Imberline calculatingly with facts, information, insinuations, names and knowledge, without rattling him for a split second on any score except his own sonorous self-esteem. No cornered conspirator could ever have been that brilliant. Not even the dean of all professional hypocrites could have been so unpuncturable. Histrionic masterpieces like that were performed daily in detective stories; never in real life. And this was very much a time for realism, no matter what pet postulates went down in the crash.

"Frankie," said the Saint carefully, "I'm afraid I'm going to have to shake your foundations a bit. I'm beginning to wonder if you haven't been too much an open book for your own good."

"Honesty is the best policy — the only policy," insisted Imberline, putting a fine ring into his new coinage. Then suddenly he was a rather helpless and flabby man staring wistfully at a bottle and a syphon on the bureau. "I was going to have a drink when you came in," he said, as if he had been cheated.

"Fix me one while you're up," said the Saint congenially.

He let Imberline muddle through the mechanics of bartending, without moving until a glass was put into his hand.

Then he said, trying to walk the tight wire between candor and offense, between toughness and tact: "Let's face it. You are an honest man. But everyone you meet in this evil world may not be such an idealist as you are. You may have been a sucker for some people who needed a front man whose life was an open book."

"My associates," stated Imberline, "are business men of the highest standing—"

"And Sing Sing," drawled the Saint, "has several alumni and post-graduate students who got used to hearing the same things said about them."

"You're letting your imagination run away with you. This dreadful coincidence — suppose I accept your statement that there has been foul play—"

"Let me ask you a couple of questions."

"What about?"

Simon absorbed from his drink and then from his cigarette.

"You said last night that Calvin Gray was a nut. Why?"

"That was on the basis of my information."

"You said that his invention had been investigated."

"It has been."

"Who by?"

"I told you — there is an established procedure. You probably haven't had much to do with modern business methods, but I can assure you that the best brains in the country have evolved a system of—"

"I just asked you: Who? What is the guy's name, where did you dig him up, and which side does he dress on?"

Imberline blinked, and then rubbed his rectangular wattled chin.

"If it's of any importance," he said, "I don't think Gray's case went through the regular channels. I'm trying to remember. No, perhaps it didn't. I think I was quite impressed with him at first, and the very same day I was in a position to mention Gray's claims to someone else who is one of the biggest men in that field. This expert told me that Professor Gray had already tried to sell him the same formula, and he had made exhaustive tests and established beyond any doubt that the whole thing was a fraud. So naturally, in order not to place any unnecessary burdens on our system of investigation—"

"You killed it then and there."

"In a manner of speaking."

"And then talked yourself into believing that it had been thoroughly investigated by your tame experts—"

"Mr. Templar," said Imberline crushingly, "my information in this case came from an expert whom my Department would be proud to employ if we could afford him. A self-made man, of course, but the most important figure in his field today."

"And what is his name?" inquired the Saint, with a little pulse beating behind his temples — "Joe Palooka?"

"Mr. Hobart Quennel, the President of Quenco."

Imberline said it somewhat as if he had been the toastmaster at a diplomatic banquet, and Quenco was a South American republic which recently decided to become a Good Neighbor.

The Saint's glass traveled very leisurely to his mouth again, and his cigarette visited there after it, while his amiably sardonic blue eyes surveyed the dollar-a-year deacon with unsubdued delight.

Another piece had clicked into its niche, and the threads were sorting out. Calvin Gray had been a shrewder diagnostician than Simon had given him credit for. In fact, Simon had to face the realisation that a great deal of the tangle had been woven out of his own refusal to accept the obvious. Too determinedly on the alert for tortuous scheming, he had only succeeded in snarling his own skein. Now he was finally cured, he hoped, and this — this lovely and luminous simplicity — could chart a straight course between way stations to the end.

"So Hobart Quennel was your authority," said the Saint dreamily. "And Quenco has two million dollars invested already in a plant that's laid out to use the old butadiene process."

Imberline snorted at him.

"Mr. Quennel is one of the most prominent industrialists in the country. I may not approve of his perpetual squabbles with some other Government departments, but in my own dealings with him he has always been most pleasant and co-operative. The mere suggestion that a man in his position would be prejudiced—"

"And yet," said the Saint, "I happened to meet his stooge, Walter Devan, in Washington; and Devan told me that Calvin Gray's formula looked very promising, but just didn't happen to be in their line. Not that it was fraud."

"Devan isn't a chemist."

"Neither is Quennel, except that he once worked in his father's drug store."

"He has the best advice that money can buy. Devan must have been misinformed."

"Why would Quennel misinform Devan?"

Imberline waved a large hand.

"I am not impertinent enough to pry into Mr. Quennel's private affairs. Doubtless he had his reasons. It could have been no concern of Devan's anyway. The cobbler should stick to his last."

"Devan said that in front of Madeline Gray. And it's much easier to believe that he was trying to cover up Quenco's interest in suppressing Gray's discovery."

"Nonsense. Of course he was trying to spare Miss Gray's feelings."

"Pollyanna," said the Saint bluntly, "why the hell won't you see that Quennel is playing you for a sucker?"

He had said the wrong thing, and he knew it immediately. Imberline bridled and bulged again, his heavy face darkening. He stood up and boomed.

"Young man, that is not only an impudent suggestion — it's scandalous. Mr. Quennel is the head of a great corporation. A man of his standing has a duty to the public almost like that of a trustee. A great deal of harm has been done by cheap and irresponsible attempts to discredit some of our outstanding industrial leaders. But there is still a thing as business ethics; and thank God, sir, while there are still men of the caliber that has made America what it is today—"

"Spare me the speech," said the Saint mildly. "I seem to have read it before somewhere."

"If you expect to impress me with these wild and scurrilous innuendoes—"

"All I'd like to know," Simon said patiently, "is what you propose to do about it."

"Do?" brayed Imberline.

He seemed to have a defensive repugnance to the suggestion that it was up to him to do something.

"Yes." Simon left one swallow in his glass, and stood up also. He kept the stout satrap spitted on a gaze of coldly challenging sapphire. "Don't forget that you could be made to look rather funny yourself on the basis I mentioned a little while ago."

Imberline's eyes narrowed down into beady stubbornness.

"I shall verify your statements, naturally. As a Public Servant, I am obliged to do that. If they have any truth in them — and I still haven't discarded the idea that the whole thing may be a fabrication of your own — there will of course be a thorough investigation. But I'm quite sure that there is some perfectly simple explanation."

"I'm quite sure there is," said the Saint. "Only you haven't seen it yet."

"Now will you get the hell out of here again? I have an engagement in a few minutes."

Simon nodded, and glanced at his watch. He emptied his glass and set it down.

"So have I, brother. So just remember what I'm going to do."

"Next time, you can make a proper appointment for it."

"I'm going to make an appointment," said the Saint. "With the FBI. Tomorrow. In the course of which I shall mention your name in connection with that Madeline Gray business, and your dropping of Calvin Gray on Hobart Quennel's say-so. So if you haven't taken some steps by that time, the Proper Authorities will want to know why." He dragged the last value out of his cigarette and crushed it out in the nearest ashtray. "I hope you will all have a bouncing reunion."

He closed the door very silently behind him; and as the elevator took him down he was cheered by the thought that he had been able to insert at least one lively bluebottle in the balm of the Ungodly. Frank Imberline might be the nearest thing to a well-schooled moron; he might fume and boom and cling dogmatically to all his platitudes; but a seed had been planted in his approximation of a mind, and if it ever got a root in there it would be as immovable as all his bigotries. The fatuous honesty, or honest fatuousness, which had made him such a perfect tool might boomerang in a most diverting way.

Simon Templar rolled the rare bouquet of the idea through his mind. He had certainly hoped to have something sensational out of Hamilton's reports to confront Imberline with; but this might be even better.

It was nearly eight o'clock, and he was hurried and preoccupied enough to stride past a couple of men who were entering the lobby without recognising one of them until his step was taking him past them. He almost stopped, and then went straight on out of the street, without looking round or being quite sure whether he had been recognised himself. But the monkey-wrench he had flipped into the machinery clattered more musically in his ears as he hailed a taxi. He knew that it would produce some disorder even sooner than he had hoped, and he thought he knew a little more about Hobart Quennel's business conference that night; for the man he had belatedly identified was Walter Devan.