The Saint Steps In

1

Mr. Hobart Quennel looked no more like a millionaire than any other millionaire; and probably he was just as secretly proud of the fact as any other up-to-date millionaire. He was one of hundreds of modern refutations of the old crude Communist caricatures of a captialist, so that Simon Templar wondered whether there might be some congenital instinct of camouflage in the cosmogony of millionaires which caused them as a race to keep one jump ahead of their unpopular prototypes. It was, as if in these days of ruthless social consciousness a millionaire required some kind of protective coloration to enable him to succeed in his déclassé profession.

Mr. Quennel was physically a fairly big and well-built man, with his daughter's fair hair sprinkled with gray and balding back from his forehead, and the same pale blue inexpressive eyes. But he gave no impression of being either frightening or furtive, for in these days of higher education it is no longer so easy as it may once have been to bludgeon the crisp cabbage out of the public purse, and a man who looks either frightening or furtive has too many strikes against him when he bids for the big bullion. His face was smooth and bony without being cadaverous, so that its fundamental hardness was calm and without strain. His clothes were good when you noticed them, but it was just as easy not to notice them at all. He had no softening around the middle, for that mode is also out of fashion among millionaires, who are conspicuous among sedentary workers for being able to afford all the trainers and masseurs and golf clubs and other exercising appliances that can be prescribed to restrain the middle-aged equator. He was that new and fascinating evolution of the primitive tycoon who simply worked at the job of being a millionaire, as un-excitedly as other men worked at the job of being bricklayers, and probably with no more grandiose ideas of his place in the engine of civilisation. It was just a job in which you weighed different factors and did different things in different ways, and you had a different wage scale and standard of living; but then bricklayers were different again from cowboys, but they didn't confuse their personal reactions by thinking about cowboys.

He shook hands with the Saint, and said "I'm very glad to meet you," and personally poured Martinis from the shaker he had been stirring.

He had a pleasant voice and manner, dignified but cordial, neither ingratiating nor domineering. He had the soothing confidence of a man who didn't need to ask favors, or to go out of his way to offer them. He was a guy you could like. Simon Templar liked him in his own way, and felt just as comfortable. He sat down on the sofa beside Andrea Quennel, and crossed his long legs, and said: "This is quite a place you have here."

"Like it?" She sounded as if she wanted it to be liked, as if it were a new dress. "But I think you'd like Pinehurst much more. I do. It's more sort of outdoorsy."

She looked as sort of outdoorsy as an orchid. She wore one of those house-coat-dinner-dress effects that would get by anywhere between a ballroom and a boudoir and still always have a faint air of belonging somewhere else. It had a high strapped Grecian bodice line that did sensational things for her sensational torso. She had opened the door when he arrived, and it had seemed to him that her classic face and melting receptive mouth were like candy in a confectioner's window, lovely and desirable but without volition. He knew now that this was a fault of his own perception, but he was still inching his way through the third dimension that had to bring the whole picture into sudden life and clarity.

It felt a little unearthly to be meeting her like that, in this atmosphere of ordinary and pleasant formality, after the way they had last seen each other. He wondered what she was thinking. But he had been able to read nothing in her face, not even embarrassment; and they hadn't been alone together for a moment. He didn't know whether to be glad of that or not. They watched each other inscrutably, like a pair of cats at opposite ends of a wall.

There was one other person who had to be there to complete the pattern, and a few minutes later he came in, looking very much freshly scrubbed and brushed, in a plain blue suit that was a little tight around the chest and biceps, so that he had some of the air of a stevedore dressed up in his Sunday best. Mr. Quennel patted him on the shoulder and said: "Hullo, Walter… You've met Mr. Templar, haven't you?"

"I certainly have." Walter Devan shook hands with a cordial grin. "I didn't know who I was picking a fight with at that time, though, or I'd have been a bit more careful about butting in."

"I'm glad you weren't," Simon said just as cordially, "or you might have done much too good a job."

"What do you think about the news from Russia?" Quennel asked.

So it was to be played like that. And the Saint was quite ready to go along with it that way. Perhaps he even preferred it. He had quite a little background to fill in, and in it he knew that there were things which were important to his philosophy, even if anyone else would have found them incidental. He could wait now for the explosive action which was ultimately the only way in which the difference of basic potential could be resolved, like the difference between two thunderclouds. But before that he was glad to explore and weigh the charge that was going to match itself against his own.

He lighted a cigarette, and relaxed, and for the first time since the beginning of the episode he knew that it had a significance beyond any simple violence that might come out of it.

They had another drink. And dinner. It was not a lavish-dinner, but just quietly excellent, served by a butler whose presence didn't keep reminding you of the dignity of having a butler. There was not a dazzling display of silver and crystal on the table. They drank, without discussion or fanfares, an excellent Fountaingrove Sonoma Cabernet. Everything had the cachet of a man to whom luxury was as natural and essential as a daily bath, without making a De Mille sequence out of it.

"I think you'll like Pinehurst, if Andrea takes you down there," Quennel said. "I just got a couple of new strings of polo ponies from Buenos Aires — I haven't even seen them yet. You might be able to try them out for me. Do you play polo?"

"A bit," said the Saint, who had once had a six-goal rating.

"I can't wait to get down there myself," said Quennel. "But Washington never stops conspiring against me."

"I imagine the war has something to do with it, too."

Quennel nodded.

"It has made us pretty important," he said deprecatingly. "We were doing quite all right before, but war-time requirements are making us expand very considerably. Of course, we're working about ninety-five per cent on Government orders now. But after the war we'll really have the advantage of a tremendous amount of building and plant expansion, as well as some great strides in technical experience."

"All of which the Government, meaning the people, will have given you and paid for," Simon observed sympathetically.

"Yes." Quennel accepted it quite directly and disarmingly. "We don't expect to do any profiteering at this time, and in any case the tax system wouldn't let us, but in the end we shall get our return — fundamentally in improved methods and increased capital values, which good management will turn back into income."

Simon made idle mosaics with a fork in the things on his plate; and presently he said: "How have you been making out with labor problems in your field?"

"We really don't have any labor trouble. All our plants are in the South, of course, where you get less of that sort of thing than anywhere else. Labor is always a bit of a problem in these days, but I honestly think it only boils down to knowing how to handle your employees? How about it, Walter? — that's your headache."

"Quenco pays as good wages as any other industry in our areas," Devan said ruggedly. "And I think we do as much to look after them as any other firm you can mention. You'd be surprised at what we do. We have our own health insurance, and our own group clinics — we organise all kinds of social and athletic clubs for them — we even build their homes and finance them."

"That," said the Saint, "is the sort of thing that makes some of the things one hears so puzzling."

"What things?"

"I mean some of the rumors — you must have heard them yourself — about your private Gestapo, and that kind of talk."

Devan smiled with his strong confident mouth.

"Of course we have our private plant investigators. You couldn't possibly handle thousands of employees like we have without them. But when they aren't looking for cases of petty larceny and organised laziness, which you have to contend with in any outfit as big as ours, they're mostly just keeping in touch with the morale of the staff. That's the only way we can really insure against trouble, by anticipating it before it comes."

"That's one of the crosses we have to bear," Quennel said. "I'd like to know any other company that hasn't been smeared with the same gossip."

"I suppose so," Simon agreed flexibly. "But it must be specially tough when there's an accident they can hang it on. Like those union organisers who got killed in the riot at Mobile last year, for instance."

Devan made a blunt admissive movement of his head.

"Things like that are bound to happen sometimes. It was too bad it had to be us. But some of our people have been with us a long time, and you'd be surprised what a strong feeling they've got about the company. When some cheap racketeering rabble-rousers come around trying to stir up trouble, they can't help getting sore, and then somebody may get hurt."

"After all," Quennel said, "we aren't fighting a war against Fascism to make the country safe for the Communists. We're fighting for liberty and democracy, and that automatically means that we're also fighting to preserve the kind of social stability that liberty and democracy have built up in this country."

"What particular kind of social stability were you thinking of?" Simon asked.

"I mean a proper and progressive relationship between Capital and Labor. I don't believe in Labor run wild. No sensible man does. Without any revolutions, we've been slowly improving the conditions and standards of Labor, but we haven't disrupted our economic framework to do it. We believe that all men were created free and equal, but we admit that they don't all develop equal abilities. Therefore, for a long time to come, there are bound to be great masses of people who need to be restrained and controlled and brought along gradually. We don't need storm troopers and concentration camps to do it, because we have a sound economic system which obtains the same results in a much more civilised way. But we do have to recognise, and we do tacitly recognise, that we can't do without a strong and capable executive class who know how to nurse these masses along and feed them their rights in reasonable doses."

There was a weird fascination, a hypnotic rationality about the discussion, in those terms and at that moment, with everything that was tied up with it and looming over it, which had a certain dreamlike quality that was weirder and worse because it was not a dream. But the Saint would not have let it break up uncompleted even if he could.

He said, in exactly the same way as he had listened: "I wonder if it's only what you might call the lower classes who need nursing along."

"Who else are you thinking of?"

"I'm thinking of what the same terminology would call the upper classes. I suppose — the people that you and I both spend a lot of our time with. I wonder, for instance, if they've got just as clear an idea that there's a war on and what it's all about."

"I should say they've got just as clear an idea."

"I wish I were so sure," said the Saint, out of that same detachment. "I've looked at them. I've tried to get a feeling about them. They buy War Bonds. They submit to having their sugar rationed. They wonder how the hell they're going to keep up with their taxes. They grumble and connive a bit about tires and gasoline. They read the newspapers and become barroom strategists. Some of them have been put out of business — just as some of them have found new bonanzas. Some of them have been closer to the draft than others. But it still isn't real."

"I think it's very real."

"It isn't real. Thousands of men dying in some bloody Russian swamp are just newspaper figures. Prisoners being tortured and mutilated and bayoneted in the Far East are just good horror reading like a good thriller from the library. They haven't been hurt themselves. It's going to be all right. The war is expensive and inconvenient, but it's going to be all right. It's all going to be taken care of eventually. That's what we pay taxes for."

"Everybody can't do the fighting," said Devan. "In these days it takes — I forget the exact statistics, but I read them somewhere — something like ten people working at home to keep one soldier at the front."

"But the people behind the lines have to feel just as sure as the soldier that they're in a war. They've got to feel that the whole course and purpose of their lives has been changed, just as his has — and you don't feel that just from getting by on one pound of sugar a week. They've got to have something that the people of England have got, because their war was never thousands of miles away. It's something that you only get from going hungry, and walking in the dark at night, and seeing things you've grown up with destroyed, and watching your friends die. That's when you know you're really in a war, whatever job you happen to be doing, and literally fighting for your life, and everything has to go into it. There isn't that feeling here yet. I think there are still too many people who sincerely think that all they have to do is root for the home team. I think there are still too many people who think you can fight total war on a basis of golf as usual every Saturday and nothing must be allowed to interfere with our dear old social stability. Particularly the people who ought to be leading in the opposite direction. Particularly," said the Saint carefully, "the wrong people."

Quennel made a slight impatient gesture.

"I can't think where you'd get that impression. Where have you been lately?"

"I was in Florida for a while. And then I was in New York for a couple of weeks."

"And in New York I suppose you go to El Morocco and 21 and places like that."

"I don't live there, but I've been to them. They seem to be doing all right."

Quennel raised his shoulders triumphantly.

"Then of course you'd get a wrong impression. The class of people you find in those places — in Miami Beach and Palm Beach and New York night clubs — they're a class that this war is going to wipe out completely. They're dead now, but they don't know it."

He settled back confidently, efficiently, and took a cigar from the box which the unobtrusive butler was passing. He lighted it and tasted it approvingly, and said: "I'm glad I remembered to keep some of these locked up."

"Mice, or pixies?" Simon inquired with a smile.

"Just Andrea's friends," Quennel said tolerantly, "She throws parties for them up here all the time, and they go through the place like locusts. She had one only a week ago, and they drank up thirty cases of champagne, and that wasn't enough. They got into the cellar and finished half a dozen bottles of Benedictine that I was saving."

It came upon the Saint like the deep tolling of a bell in the far distance, like the resonance of an alarum that he had known about and been waiting for, and yet which had to be actually heard before it could compress the diaphragm and be felt throbbing out along the veins. But he knew now that this was it, and that it was the last of everything that had been missing, and that now he had seen all of his dragon, and he knew all the ugliness and the evil of it, and it was a bigger and sleeker dragon than he had ever seen before.

He bent his head for a moment so that it should not show in his face before he was quite ready, while it went through him like light would have gone through his eyes, and while he tapped and lighted a cigarette because he didn't feel like a cigar; and Hobart Quennel must have felt that there was an implied submission in his withdrawal, because Simon could feel it in the way Quennel settled himself back in his chair and told the butler to bring in some brandy, the solid good humor of a man who has made a rightful point. But when Simon looked up he looked at Andrea, who had been silent for a long while, only following the argument with her eyes from face to face. She was the one person who until then had been physically in the picture more than either of the two men, and yet she had never been a fixed part of the composition. He wondered whether she ever would have any such place, or whether it was only an insatiable artistic sense of his own that made him imagine that she should have found one.

He said lightly: "You must know a lot of gay people."

"I like parties," she said. She added, almost defiantly: "I like El Morocco, too, when I'm in the mood. I don't see how it's going to help us win the war if everybody sits around being miserable."

But she went on looking at the Saint, and her eyes were still like windows opening on to an empty sky. You could look through them and out and out and there was still nothing but the clear pale blue and nothing.

Quennel smiled indulgently, and said: "It's pretty cool tonight. Why don't you go and get a fire started in the library, and we'll join you in a few minutes."

She got up.

"Don't forget you had something you wanted to tell Simon," she said.

"No — I was just thinking of that."

She had to look at the Saint again before she went out.

"Daddy always wants to have his own way," she said rather vaguely. "Don't let him keep you here for ever."

"I won't," said the Saint, with a last upward glance. Then the door closed behind her, and he was alone with one last sudden disturbing question in his mind, but quite alone, like a fighter when the gong sounds and the seconds disappear through the ropes. He knew that this was the gong, and the preliminary routines were over; and he knew just what he was fighting, and all his senses were keyed and calm and ice-cold. He turned to Quennel just as easily as he had played every waiting line of the scene, and murmured: "Andrea did say you had something to tell me."

Quennel trimmed his cigar on the ashtray in front of him.

"Yes," he said. "Andrea told me you were taking an interest in Calvin Gray's synthetic rubber, so I thought you'd like to know. Gray showed me a sample of it not long ago, as I think Walter told you. I had a report on it from my chief chemist today." He settled even more safely and positively in his chair. "I'm afraid Calvin Gray is a complete fraud."

2

Simon's right hand rested on the table in front of him like a bronze casting set on stone, and he watched the smoke rising from his cigarette like a pastel stroke against the dark wood.

"You had a specimen analysed?"

"Yes. I don't know whether you know it, but that kind of analysis is one of the most difficult things in the world to do. In fact, a lot of people would say it was almost impossible. But I've got some rather unusual men on my staff."

"Did you ever see it made?" Simon asked slowly.

"No."

"I have."

"Can you describe the process?"

Simon gave a rough description of what he had seen. He knew that it was technically meaningless, and admitted it.

"That doesn't matter," said Quennel. "I'm sure you can see now where the trick was worked."

"You mean in the enclosed electrical gadget, I suppose."

"Naturally," Quennel chuckled. "I'm surprised that a fellow like you wouldn't have caught on to it at once. It's just a dressed-up topical version of all those old swindles where a man has a machine that prints dollar bills or a formula for making diamonds."

"But why should a man like Calvin Gray go in for anything like that?"

"Do you know Calvin Gray?"

"Not personally. But I've checked on him, and his reputation is quite special."

"But as I understand it, you haven't even seen him. All you've met is a pretty girl with a story."

"I've been to his house."

"How do you know it was his house? Because the girl took you there and told you it was?"

"Who's Who gives his residence as Stamford, Connecticut."

"I suppose that would be the only residence there."

The Saint's blue gaze was meditative and unimpassioned. He drew at his cigarette and set his wrist back on the table.

"Mind you," said Quennel, "I'm not necessarily suggesting that that's the answer. It could have been Gray's house. It could have been his daughter. It isn't impossible. It takes a big man to put over a big fraud."

"But why should Gray bother? I understood he was well enough off already."

"Who did you get that from? From the same source — from his daughter, or from the girl who said she was his daughter?"

"Yes," said the Saint thoughtfully.

Quennel trimmed his cigar again.

"Suppose it's what you were told from a good source. In business, that isn't always enough. A lot of men have had big reputations, and have been generally believed to be pretty well off, and have been well off — and still they've ended up in jail. I'm sure you can remember plenty of them yourself. Famous stockbrokers, attorneys, promoters… Not that I'm committing myself about this case. I don't know enough about it. Maybe Calvin Gray would be the most surprised man in the world if he knew about it. He might be away somewhere — lecturing, for instance — and his house might have been broken into and used by some gang of crooks. Even that's been done before. I don't have to tell you about these things. The only thing I think you ought to know is that this synthetic rubber story is a fraud."

Simon Templar took one more measured breath at his cigarette, and said: "I don't know how much you claim to know, but you may have heard that in Washington night before last there was an attempt to kidnap Madeline Gray, or the girl who calls herself Madeline Gray. Mr. Devan was there."

Devan nodded.

"That's right. Only I didn't know it was a kidnaping attempt, until Andrea gave us the idea after she'd talked to you."

"If it ever was a kidnaping attempt," said Quennel. "Or couldn't it have been part of the same build-up, staged for your benefit, to help make the case look important to you?"

The Saint had an odd ludicrous feeling of being a feed man, of offering properly baited hooks to fish who had personally chosen the bait. But he had to hear all the answers; he had to see the whole scene played through.

"You wouldn't have heard it," he said, "but it seems as if Calvin Gray really was kidnaped."

"Really?"

"At any rate, either he or the man who is being talked about is missing." Simon paused casually. "I've already called in the FBI about it.".

There was silence for a moment. It had a curious negative quality, as if it were more than a mere incidental absence of sound and movement, as if it would have absorbed and neutralised any sound or movement there had been. "What about the girl?" Devan asked; and Simon met his crinkly deep-set eyes.

"Since this afternoon," he said expressionlessly, "she seems to be missing too."

There was only a barely perceptible flicker of stillness this time, as if a movie projector had stuck on the same frame for two or three extra spins of the shutter. And then Hobart Quennel moved a little and drank some brandy, and raised one shoulder to settle his forearm more comfortably on the arm of his chair.

"Probably it was your calling in the FBI that did that," he said. "That would have been a complication they weren't expecting."

"Why?"

"You always had a reputation — forgive me, I'm not being personal, but after all we all read newspapers — for being a sort of lone wolf. So the last thing they'd have expected was that you'd take your troubles to any of the authorities. In fact, I'm a little surprised about it myself."

"These aren't quite the same times," said the Saint quietly. "And perhaps a few things have changed for me as they have for everyone else."

Quennel laughed a little, his sound sure confident laugh.

"Anyway," he said, "probably you scared them, and now they're organising a nice neat getaway. You can take it that the whole deal was crooked from the beginning anyhow, whatever the minor details were… Very possibly the real Calvin Gray will turn up in a day or two, and be as puzzled as anyone… It doesn't really make a lot of difference, does it?"

"It makes a difference," said the Saint; and his voice was as even as a calm arctic bay, and the same invisible chill nestled over it. He said: "I go after crooks."

Hobart Quennel's slight deep engaging chuckle came again, like a breath from the South, and now it was warmer and surer than ever, and there was no uncertainty at all left behind in it, and it could soothe you and blot the search and the questioning and the fight out of you like the breeze rustling through southern palms; and it was right, it had to be right, because nothing could be wrong that was so friendly and permanent and sure.

"I know," he said. "But you just said it yourself. These aren't the same times, and everybody changes. This Gray business will take care of itself now. If you've already called in the FBI, it's sure to. It's in good hands. It's none of my business, but I can't really see you wasting any more time on it. It wouldn't do you justice."

"What would?" Simon asked. Quennel turned his cigar again.

"Well, frankly, I've read a lot about you and I've often thought that you weren't doing yourself justice, even before the war. Not that I haven't enjoyed your exploits. But it's always seemed to me that a man with your mind and your abilities could have achieved so much more… You know, sometimes I've wondered whether a man like you mayn't have been suffering from some mistaken ideas about business. I don't mean selling things over the counter in a hardware store. I mean the kind of business that I do."

"Perhaps I don't know enough about it."

"I assure you it can be just as great an adventure, in its own way, as anything you've ever done. A great corporation is like a little empire. Its relations with other corporations and industries are like the relations between empires. You have diplomacy, alliances, feuds, espionage, and wars. Quite often you have to step right through ordinary laws and restrictions. That's one of the things I meant by the necessity for a strong executive class. I think if you go into it you'll find that they are really only paralleling your own attitude. There have to be a great many petty general regulations for the conduct of the majority of people, just as there have to be for children. It's just as necessary for there to be parents, and people who can step above the ordinary regulations. I think you'd find yourself quite at home in that class. I think that Business could employ all your brilliance, all your charm, all your audacity, all your generalship, all your — shall I say — ruthlessness."

"You could be right," said the Saint, with a smile that barely touched the edges of his mouth. "But who would give me a job?"

"I would," said Quennel.

The Saint gazed at him.

"You would?"

"Yes," Quennel said deliberately. "To be quite truthful, when I told Andrea to ask you over, I was thinking about that much more than about the Gray business. Let's say it was one of my crazy ideas, or one of my hunches. You don't get very far in business without having those ideas. I believe right now a man like you could be worth a hundred thousand dollars a year to me."

Simon drew his glass closer to him and cupped it in his hand, the stem between his second and third fingers, making gentle movements that swirled the golden spirit softly around and warmed it in the curve of the bowl.

This, then, was all of it, and all the answers and explanations were there. And he knew quite certainly now, as his intuition had always told him, that there was no ordinary way to fight it. As Quennel had said, there were times when you had to step right through ordinary laws and restrictions. There was a world outside the orderly lawful world of average people, and to fight anyone there you had to move completely into his world, or else he was as untouchable and invulnerable as if he were in another dimension.

The Saint smiled a little, very sardonically and deep inside himself, at the passing thought of how far he would have been likely to get if he had tried to fight Hobart Quennel from any footing on the commonplace world. Even without his own peculiar reputation by commonplace legal standards, he knew how ridiculous the accusations he would have had to make would have seemed when thrown against such a man as Quennel. It wouldn't be merely because of Quennel's wealth. It would be because his standing, his respect, his utterly genuine confidence and authority and rightness and integrity would throw off anything the Saint could say like armor would throw off spitballs.

It was a good thing, Simon thought, that he also could move in dimensions where such considerations were only words.

He finished his brandy, enjoying the full savor of the last sip, and put the glass down, and said pleasantly: "That's very flattering. But I have another idea."

"What is that?"

Unhurriedly, almost idly, the Saint put his right hand under his coat, under his left arm, and brought out the automatic that rode there. He leveled it diagonally across the table, letting the aim of its dark blunt sleek muzzle touch Quennel and Devan in turn.

"This is what I was talking about before," he said. "About the war being close to home. The war is here with you now, Quennel. I came here for Calvin Gray and his daughter, and unless I get them I promise you some of us are going to die most unexpectedly."

The only trouble was, as the Saint reckoned it afterwards, that even then he still hadn't realized deeply enough how closely Quennel's — or at least Devan's — fourth-dimensional mentality might coincide with his own.

He looked at their rigid immobility, at Quennel's face still bland and bony and Walter Devan's face heavy and grim, both of them staring at him soberly and calculatingly but without any abrupt panic; and then he saw Devan's eyes flick fractionally upwards to a point in space just above his head.

Instantly, and before Simon could move at all, a new voice spoke behind him. It was a voice with a rich bass croak that Simon seemed to have heard before, very recently.

"Okay," said the voice. "Hold it. Don't move anything if you want to go out of here breathing."

The Saint held it. He knew quite well where he had heard that deep grating voice before.

It spoke again, sounding a little nearer.

"I been saving this for you, bud," it said.

After that there was only a fierce jarring agony that crashed through the Saint's skull like a bolt of lightning, with a scorching white light that broke into a million rainbow stars that danced away into a deep engulfing darkness.

3

Coming back to consciousness was a distant brilliance that hurt his eyes even through his closed eyelids, a sharp cold wet monotonous nagging slapping on his cheeks that turned out to be a sodden towel unsympathetically wielded by Karl Morgen.

"That's enough, Karl," said Walter Devan's voice.

Simon rubbed his face with his hands and cleared his eyes. The tall raw-boned man stood over him, looking as if he would enjoy repeating both the assault and the remedy.

"Beat it, Karl," Devan said.

Morgen went out reluctantly.

Simon tried to get his bearings in a rather unusual room. It was small and somewhat bare. The walls and ceiling were plain white cement, and they looked new and clean. There was a plain new-looking carpet on the floor. There was the plain heavy unpainted door through which Karl had gone out, and another identical door in another wall. Near the ceiling in one wall was a sort of open embrasure, but it was too high up to see out of from where the Saint sat. There was no other window.

The Saint sat on a simple divan with blankets over it, and on the opposite side of the room was another similar divan. There were some low shelves against another wall on which he saw a small radiophone, some records, half a dozen books, a couple of packs of cards, a bottle of brandy, a bottle of Scotch, a box of chocolates, half a dozen cans of assorted food, and a package of paper plates. The air had a slightly damp chill in it.

"People in stories always ask 'Where am I?' " said the Saint, "so I will."

"This is Mr. Quennel's private air-raid shelter," replied Devan. "He had it built about a year ago."

He sat in a comfortable chair behind a card table, smoking a freshly lighted cigar. He wielded the cigar with his left hand, because his right hand held an automatic which the Saint recognized as his own. He didn't point the gun. His hand was relaxed with it on the table. But he was twelve feet from the Saint, and pointing was not necessary.

"Very nice it looks," Simon murmured. "And handy," he added.

"Cigarette?" Devan tossed a pack into the Saint's lap, and followed it with a book of matches. "Keep 'em," he said. "I'm afraid Karl took everything you had away from you."

"Naturally."

Simon didn't have to check over his pockets and other hiding places. He had no doubt that the search would have been thorough. An intellectual organization like that wouldn't have risked leaving anything that could conceivably have concealed some ingenious means of making unexpected trouble.

He lighted a cigarette and said reminiscently: "Karl really owes you something, after Washington. You did a nice job of looking after him and his pal."

Devan nodded.

"It was the only thing to do."

"You took quite a risk."

"I couldn't expect people to take risks for me if they didn't know I'd do the same for them. I took a bit of a beating, too, if you haven't forgotten. That's why I'm keeping this gun handy, and I want you to stay sitting down where you are."

Simon grinned wryly.

"Have you been saving something for me too?"

Devan shook his head.

"Let's forget that. That's kid stuff. I'm here because Bart asked me to see if I couldn't talk you into reconsidering his proposition, and that's all I want to do."

"You've been studying all the best Nazi heavies in the movies," said the Saint admiringly. "I see all the delicate touches. And when I go on saying No, you most regretfully call back the storm troopers and they beat the bejesus out of me."

"I'm not a Nazi, Templar. Neither is Mr. Quennel."

"You have some unusual thugs on your staff. I'll bet you Karl heils Hitler every time he goes to the bathroom."

"I'm not concerned about that. When Gray fired him and he came to us, I thought he could be useful. He has been. So long as he does what I tell him I don't have to ask about his politics. He isn't going to find out any Quenco secrets. And I know one thing — being what he is, no matter what happens, he can't squawk."

"Now I really know what Quennel meant about the diplomacy of Big Business," said the Saint. "Getting a German spy to do your dirty work for you ought to be worth some kind of Oscar."

"We've been lucky to have the use of him. But that's the only connection there is. I'm an American, and I don't want to be anything else."

"I know all about you, Walter. I could tell you your own life story. I've read a very complete secret dossier on you. Oh, I know there's nothing in it that could put you in jail, or you'd have been there before this. But the indication is quite definite. You are Quennel's chief private thug, which means his own personal Gestapo."

Devan sat still, with only a slight dull red glow under his skin.

"There's nothing Nazi about it. If you know all about us, you know that we're working one hundred per cent for America. I work for Quennel because he has to have a man who can be tough and handle tough situations. He told you himself — an industry like Quenco is like a little empire. You have to have your own police and your own laws and your own enforcement. This is nothing but business."

"Business, because Calvin Gray's invention would shift a great big slice of Government backing away from you, and you'd be in the hole to the extent of your own investment."

"As Mr. Quennel said, it's not going to be any use winning the war if we win it by ruining our own economic structure."

"How catching his phrases are," drawled the Saint. "I suppose it wouldn't have occurred to you that Mr. Quennel might have been thinking first of Mr. Quennel's own economic structure?"

"We aren't Nazis," Devan reiterated stubbornly.

Simon drew a fresh drift of smoke into his lungs.

"No," he said. "You aren't Nazis. Or even conscious fifth columnists. That's one of the things that bothered me for a while. I couldn't understand the half-hearted villainy. The Nazis would have been much more positive and drastic, and Calvin Gray and his invention would probably have been mopped up long ago."

"We don't like violence," Devan said. "It makes trouble and a stink and it's dangerous, and we bend over backwards to avoid it. Only sometimes it's forced on us, and then we have to be able to handle it. We tried to handle Gray without going too far."

"And the hell with what difference it made to the net cost and efficiency of our war production?"

"Superficial savings and efficiences aren't always the best thing when you take a broad long view. You learn that in a big industry. Mr. Quennel knows all about that, because that's his job."

"The Führer principle," Simon observed, almost to himself. He looked at Devan again, and said: "And now that I've really butted in, and you know you're stuck with it?"

"The sky's the limit."

Simon smoked again, and looked at the end of his cigarette. "You think you can get away with it?"

"I'm sure we can."

"There's a little matter of murder involved, and the police take such an oldfashioned view of that."

"You're talking about Angert? That was stupid of Morgen, but he didn't mean to kill him. He didn't know who he was. But that'll be Morgen's bad luck, if he gets caught. I'll try to see that he doesn't get caught. But if he did, we wouldn't know anything about him."

"You ought to worry about being caught yourself. If you read the papers, you may have seen something about a certain Inspector Fernack, who has just gotten ambitious about collecting the scalp of the guy who removed a very dull bureaucrat named Imberline last night — and nearly managed to hang the job on me."

Devan looked him straight in the eye.

"I read the papers. But I wasn't anywhere near the Savoy Plaza last night. And I thought Imberline was still in Washington."

That was his story. And probably he could prove it. Quennel could probably prove the same. It would be very careless of them if they couldn't, and the Saint didn't think they were careless. If they had been addicted to making egregious mistakes, someone else would have taken care of them before he ever came along.

It was a rather depressing thought. But he had to finish covering the ground. He took another breath through his cigarette.

"A man like Calvin Gray, and his daughter, can't just disappear without any questions being asked."

"Calvin Gray won't disappear. He'll be back tomorrow from a visit to some friends in Tennessee, and he'll be very surprised at the commotion. His daughter will have gone to New York with some friends — who have an apartment there, by the way — and he will have reached her on the telephone there. When she hears that it's all a false alarm and he's quite all right, she will tell him that she's going on a trip to Cuba with some other friends. From there she'll probably fly down to Rio. She may even get married down there and not come back for a very long time."

The Saint's eyes were cold and realistic.

"And of course Gray will go along with that."

"I think so, after I've had another talk with him. I think he'll even discover that there was a flaw in his formula after all, and forget about it."

"You aren't even interested in it yourselves?"

"Oh, yes, of course he'll have to tell us the formula. It may be valuable one day, if we have one of our own chemists discover it. But for the present Mr. Quennel is quite satisfied with our own setup."

"And Gray will never open his mouth so long as you have his daughter for a hostage."

Devan shrugged.

"I don't have to be melodramatic with you. You know what these things are all about. You know what he'll do."

The Saint knew. There was heroism of a kind for the lone individual, although even that could almost always be broken down eventually under pitiless scientific treatment. He doubted how much ultimate heroism there would ever be against the peril of a man's own daughter.

He didn't doubt that Walter Devan was the man to see the job through competently and remorselessly. Devan was no common thug, or he would not have had the position he held. He could easily have passed as having had a college education, even if most of it had been spent on the football field. He had a definite intelligence. He really belonged in Quennel's entourage. He had enough intelligence to assimilate Quennel's intellectual arguments. He also believed in what he was doing, and he was just as sure that it was right. And he wouldn't make any stupid mistakes. Simon didn't need to press him for elaborate details. Walter Devan would know just how to finish what he had started.

There was only one question left in the Saint's mind.

"How does Andrea feel about all this?" he asked.

"Andrea doesn't think," Devan said casually. "She does a sort of roping job for Bart now and again. He probably told her you might be connected with someone who was trying to put over a dirty deal on him in business. He wouldn't tell her anything else. But she seems to be carrying quite a torch for you." Devan met the Saint's gaze with brash man-to-man candor. "You're on your own, as far as that goes. She could be a lot of fun."

"If I played ball," said the Saint.

Devan made an affirmative movement with his head and his cigar at the same time.

"Why be a dope? You can't win. But there aren't any hard feelings. Bart and I both appreciate what you've done, and what you're after. And the proposition he made you still goes. One hundred per cent."

"But if I turn you down—"

"Why bring that up? I don't have to tell you we can't leave you around now. But you belong with us."

Simon glanced at the stump of his cigarette. Having been warned once, he didn't try to get up and move towards the ashtray that Devan was using. He trod the cigarette out on the carpet, and lighted another.

He had heard the threat of death many times in his life, but never with such utter certainty and conviction. Even though not a word had been said about it at all. It gave him a sense of frozen inevitability that no noise and savagery could have done. And he knew that Walter Devan was just as aware of it as he was. They spoke the same language so closely that it would have been merely a waste of energy to shout…

Devan stood up, still holding the gun.

"Why don't you take a few minutes to think it over?" he said.

He went to the door through which the long big-boned man had gone out; and as he opened it he jerked his head towards the second door.

"Calvin Gray and his daughter are in the next room," he said. "Say hullo to them if you want to."

Simon Templar was alone.

He got to his feet after a moment, surveyed the room once more in a detached way, and turned to the other door.

It opened when he tried the handle, and he went in.

It was a room very much like the one he had left. Madeline Gray and her father sat side by side on a divan close to the door. It had to be Calvin Gray, of course, before she jumped up and introduced them.

"How do you do," said the Saint.

They shook hands. A strange formality, and a stranger tribute to the perdurance of common customs.

Madeline Gray left her hand resting on the Saint's arm, and he smiled down at her and said: "How soundproof are the doors?"

"We heard all of it, in the other room," she said.

It was all very quiet; and when you came down to it there didn't seem to be any other way it could be.

"Then we can save a lot of repetition," said the Saint. "I don't even care very much about the details of how you two were snatched. It's relatively unimportant now."

"What were you saying in there," she asked, "about Imberline?"

"They killed him."

He told them all about that, from the dossiers he had studied through to his session with Fernack in the morning. He skipped as lightly as he could through the interval he had spent with Andrea. He gave her credit for having tried to keep him out of that trap without telling him about it, but he didn't elaborate on the counter-attractions she had offered. But he saw Madeline watching him rather thoughtfully.

"In one way," he said grimly, "you could say that I killed him. Just like I got the two of you into this. By being, too clever… You were quite wrong about him. On the evidence, he had to be honest. So I went to him as an honest man — to see if I couldn't convert him to our side. I wasn't able to do that in five minutes — it took him too long to understand anything that wasn't a proverb — but at least I figured that I'd laid up some more trouble for the Ungodly. Unfortunately, I had. But I didn't know he'd be seeing Quennel and Devan that same night. And even after I saw Devan downstairs, I didn't think of it in the right way. I suppose they were having this conference in New York because too many people are watching too many other people's maneuvers in Washington; they knew by then that the ice was awful thin and getting thinner by the minute with me breathing on it, and they had to make sure they could keep Imberline where they wanted him. Instead of that, they got just the reverse. Suspicion had started to penetrate into that mess of porridge he used for a brain, and there was no talking him out of it. When he checked with Jetterick, they knew they were up against it. They may have tried threats or bribery at that point, but he was just too stubborn or stupid to be scared or bought — it doesn't make any difference now. There was only one way to stop him then; and they stopped him."

"But we still want to know how you got here," said the girl huskily.

Simon's glance reflexed to the doors again. But it didn't really matter. He had nothing to say just then that couldn't be overheard.

"I'll tell you," he said.

He lay on the other divan and told them, stretched out in an amazing restful relaxation that was not actually any testimonial to the steel in his nerves at all, but only to the supreme conversation of energy that a trapped tiger would have had.

He told them everything he had thought from the beginning; and in as much detail as he could remember he gave them an account of the dinner conversation in which so many things had been so elementarily explained.

He tried to do a good job of it; but he still didn't know how well he had made his point when he had finished reporting and Calvin Gray said: "How can a man like Quennel be like that?"

He was a fairly tall wiry man, lean almost to the verge of emaciation, with a tousled mop of perfectly white hair and eyes that blinked with nervous frequency behind square rimless glasses; and he said it with an air of academic perplexity, as if he were fretting over a chemical paradox.

The Saint put one hand behind his head and gazed at the ceiling.

"Simply because he is a man like that. Because he's more dangerous than any fifth columnist or any outright crook, because he sincerely believes that he's a just and important and progressive citizen. Because he can talk contemptuously about Café Society and the playboy class, and really believe it and feel austerely superior to them, and sandwich it in between mentioning his new strings of polo ponies and the parties he throws for his daughter where they drink thirty cases of champagne. 'They're dead but they don't know it' — but he's one of them and he doesn't know it… Because he can disclaim profiteering while he feels very contented about 'increased capital values'… Because he's very proud of his share in the War Effort, but he thinks nothing of faking the registration of the family cars so as to get more than his share of gas to play with. Because he doesn't mind using a German agent like Morgen if Morgen can be useful, instead of turning him over to the FBI; but he'd be full of righteous indignation if you called him a fifth columnist… Because he hates Fascism and he's a patriotic one-hundred-per-cent American; but he believes in what he calls 'social stability' and 'a strong and capable executive class' whose divine mission it is to dish out liberty and democracy in reasonable doses to the dumb unruly proletariat… Because he's thoroughly satisfied that Big Business is wide awake and wading into the war effort with both hands, but he's also ready to sabotage a rival process that would speed up and cheapen a very vital production, because it would lose him a hell of a lot of dough… Because he builds model homes and organizes baseball teams and sewing bees for his employees to keep them happy, but he believes that nabobs like himself should have a law of their own which transcends the rights of ordinary mortals… Because he's exactly the same type as Thyssen and the other Big Business men who backed Hitler to preserve their own kind of Social Stability; because he'd back his own kind of dictatorship in this country, under another name, and still think what a fine level-headed liberal he was… Because he's a goddam bloody Nazi himself, and you can never hang it on him because even he hasn't begun to realise it."

His voice seemed to linger in the air, so quiet and sensible, and yet with a feeling so much deeper than any dramatics, so that it seemed as if it should have gone on for ever, and there should have been something permanent about it, and it should have spread out wherever the minds of those who listened would take it on.

Calvin Gray rubbed his rough white hair and said hazily: "But when he goes into actual crime—"

"Quennel," said the Saint, "never went into a crime in his life. If he tells Devan that you and your invention are a Bad Thing, and ought to be stopped, he's only giving his opinion. If things happen to you and stop you, he's naturally very pleased about it. If he tells Devan to try and talk me into forgetting you and taking a job with Quenco, that's entirely legitimate. If Devan succeeds, fine. If he doesn't, but an unfortunate accident eliminates me, that's providential… It would have been the same with Imberline. I don't doubt that Quennel finally went off and left Devan to go on arguing. If Devan could talk Imberline around, that would be swell. If Imberline dropped dead in the bathroom before the argument was settled, that was too bad, but it saved a whole lot of trouble."

"But he tried to tell you I was a fraud."

"A diplomatic fiction. And very well done. If it hadn't been me, he might easily have put it over. And even if it didn't completely go over, it might still have served — with the offer of a wonderful job to wash it down. I could have helped myself to believe it, if I'd wanted to: it would have been a fair enough excuse to stop worrying about you and put my conscience to sleep. But it was no crime."

Calvin Gray shook his head helplessly.

"The man must be insane. It's such incredible hypocrisy."

"It's not hypocrisy. And he's perfectly sane. He just doesn't ask what methods Devan uses, and therefore he doesn't know. He could probably justify them out of his philosophy if he had to, but his great mind is occupied with so many more important things that it's much simpler not to know. I don't suppose Hitler ever does any positive thinking about what happens to prisoners in Dachau, either."

There was silence for a little while, an odd calm silence that made it almost fantastic to think that this was a profoundly philosophical conversation in a bright and comfortable death cell.

It was the girl who brought it back to that.

"You don't think Devan is bluffing at all?" she said.

"Not for an instant," said the Saint gently. "Don't let's waste any effort kidding ourselves about that. Devan will arrange whatever he has to arrange, and he'll do as neat a job as I could do myself."

Her brown eyes that smiled so easily were big and deep and unflinching.

"I feel so guilty," she said, "for dragging you into it."

"Don't worry about it," he answered carelessly. "If it hadn't been this, it would have been something else."

She looked around the room.

"Isn't there any way you could get out?"

He laughed a little, and got back on his feet.

"If there were, I wouldn't be here. I tell you, our Walter isn't an amateur."

But he strolled over to the high embrasure like the one he had noticed in the other room. Standing on a chair, he saw that it sloped downwards towards the outside, and at the outside was a heavy steel Venetian shutter. He guessed that the shelter was built in the side of the hill running down to the Sound, and the embrasure peeped out through the hillside, providing natural ventilation but still safe from the blast of anything but a direct hit on the opening. The steel shutter was set solidly in the concrete, and he took one look at it and stepped down with a shrug.

"Why can't you tell Quennel that you'll accept his offer?" asked Gray. "Then, later on, you'd have a chance—"

"Do you imagine they haven't thought of that?" Simon retorted patiently. "I think Quennel meant every word of his offer, and I think he still means it in spite of everything, and I'm sure he'd live up to it to the letter; but I'm also sure that he'd want to be damn certain that I was the same. I don't know what proof or security he'd want — I can think of half a dozen devices — but it doesn't matter. You can take it that it would be good."

He stood over Calvin Gray, poised and quiet and kindly implacable.

"This is your problem, not mine," he said.

The girl sat beside her father again and held his hand.

"You mustn't think about me," she said. "You mustn't."

"How can I help it?"

"If you were both tortured to death," said the Saint inexorably, "what good would it do?"

Calvin Gray covered his eyes.

"Devan talked to me all afternoon," he said hoarsely. "He told me… If it was only myself, I could try… But Madeline. I'm not big enough… And what good would it do? What difference would it make? They'll kill the invention anyway. So why should…" His voice broke, and then rose suddenly. "I couldn't see it. Don't you understand? I couldn't!"

"Daddy," said the girl.

The Saint watched for an instant, and then turned away.

On one of the side shelves, beside the playing cards, there was a score pad and a pencil. He picked them up. At the top of the first sheet he printed in bold capitals: WE MAY BE OVERHEARD. Then under that he wrote a few quick lines. He tore off the sheet and put the pad and pencil back.

Then he returned to Calvin Gray and put a hand on his shoulder, and the old man looked up at him hollow-eyed.

"Crying won't get you anywhere. This is still a war," said the Saint, and handed him the paper he had written on.

The girl tried to lean over and see; but Simon took her arm and brought her up to her feet and led her a few steps away. He held her by both elbows, facing him, and gazed at her with all the strength that was in him.

"Some of this is my fault too," he said. "If I hadn't butted in, it might not have been so bad."

Then the door opened, and Walter Devan came in.

He looked like a sales manager who had left a conference room at a crucial moment to answer a phone call.

"Well?" he inquired briskly.

The Saint detached himself leisuredly, and lighted another cigarette.

"So far as I'm concerned," he said, without a flicker of emotion, "the answer is still: Nuts."

"So is mine," said the girl clearly.

"I'm sorry," said Devan; and it sounded like genuine regret.

But he looked at Calvin Gray.

Gray got up off the divan. He was unsteady and haggard, and his eyes burned.

"Mine isn't," he said. "Can you swear to me that if I do everything you want, nothing will ever happen to Madeline?"

"Daddy!" said the girl.

"I can," said Devan.

The old man's hands twisted together.

"Then — I will."

Devan studied him, not with cheap triumph, but with sturdy businesslike satisfaction.

"I'll get you some paper to write out your process," he said, in quite a friendly way. "Is there anything else you'd like?"

Gray shook his head.

"I couldn't write it. It would sound so complicated, and — I don't even know if I could concentrate enough… Please… Can't you make it easy? Mr. Quennel used to be a chemist himself, didn't he? Take me back to my laboratory, I'll show him—"

"Daddy," said the girl in torment.

"I'll show him," Gray said in a kind of hysterical breathlessness. "He'll understand. And he'll have it all to himself. Nothing in writing. Him and me… and nobody'll ever know… and Madeline… You promise?"

"Come back to the house and talk to Mr. Quennel yourself," Devan said reasonably.

He took Calvin Gray's arm and steered him towards the door. But he never turned his back on the Saint; and, almost paralytically, his right hand stayed with the bulge in his coat pocket where it had been from the time when he came in.

Madeline Gray tensed in a spasmic impulse to go after him; and the Saint caught her by the shoulders and held her.

The door closed again.

Simon Templar's face was like stone.

"You can't do anything," he said.

It was a moment of interminable stillness.

Then with a fierce irresistible movement, she tore herself away from him and flung herself down on the nearest divan, face downwards, her face clutched and buried between her hands. He could see her right hand, the small fingers clenched to whiteness as the knuckles gripped at her temples.

After a while he lighted another cigarette and took to strolling slowly and silently up and down the room.

It must have been about ten minutes before she turned over on her back and lay with one fist at her mouth, staring blankly up at the ceiling. And only then he thought it might be safe to speak. And even then, he stood over her and kept his voice so low that it was only just enough to brush her ears.

He said softly: "Madeline."

"He didn't have to do it," she said tonelessly. "He didn't."

He said: "Madeline, this is very probably curtains for all of us, but we don't have to go alone. I gave him a note."

"It didn't make any difference."

"I hope it did. I believe it did. I told him what to do."

She sat up with a sudden start.

"You told him — what?"

"I told him we could still do something on our way. I told him to get Quennel over to the laboratory. And then I said I was sure that while he was pretending to demonstrate his process he could put some things together that would go off all at once with a loud noise. And it wouldn't do any of us any good, but it would take Quennel along too, and probably Devan with him. And in the end that may be just as important." The Saint's voice was very light, no more than a breath between iron lips that scarcely moved. "I sent him to die, Madeline, but in the best way that any of us could do it."

She was on her feet somehow. She was holding his arms by the sleeves, making little aimless tugging movements, rocking a little in a kind of anguish of inarticulacy. Her eyes were flooding and yet her lips were parted in an unearthly sort of smile.

"You did that?" she repeated again and again; and it was as if something sang through the break in her voice. "You did that?"

He nodded.

Then the door opened, and he turned sharply.

Andrea Quennel came in.

4

She said: "Hullo."

He looked into her pale empty, eyes that still gave him nothing back, and put one hand negligently in his pocket, and said affably: "Hullo to you."

"What are you doing?"

"Rehearsing a play," he said.

"Why are you locked in here?"

He still didn't know how to take her.

"We heard that Selznick was looking for us," he said, "so we were going to be very inaccessible and make him double his offer."

"I thought there was something wrong," she said. "I've seen silly things happen to people who crossed Daddy before. I don't usually worry, because I'm not superstitious, but I was worried about you. So I watched. I saw them carry you out here. And that was even after I tried to warn you to be careful when I left the dining room."

"So you did," said the Saint slowly.

"And then later on Mr. Devan came out of here with a man I'd never seen before. Then I thought I'd have to find out what was going on; but there was still the other man at the door—"

"What other man?"

"A sort of short thick-set man. He's been here before, with another tall man. Mr. Devan said they were salesmen. But he didn't want me to come in."

"So what did you do?" The Saint found himself curiously tense.

"Well, I didn't see why I shouldn't go into our own air-raid shelter if I wanted to. So I pretended I'd lost an earring." She had been holding her right hand a little behind her, but now she let it slip into sight. It held an ordinary household hammer. "I didn't know what I might be running into, so I brought this with me. So when he was bending down hunting around, I hit him on the head with it and came in."

The Saint couldn't laugh. That would come later… perhaps.

If there were any laughing afterwards.

He couldn't think of that at the instant. The simple fact and its connections backwards and forwards, and the thin incredible wisp of hope that came with them, struck into his mind with the complete breadth of a single chord. He found that he was gripping Andrea almost brutally by the shoulders.

"Where is your father now?"

"He went out with Mr. Devan and that other man. That's why I was worried, because they'd said you'd had a phone call and had to go out, but you were hoping to get back so you hadn't stopped to say goodbye to me; but I thought if you'd just passed out why should they bring you out here, and then why should they go away and leave you—"

"How long ago was this?"

She winced under the steel of his fingers, and he hardly noticed it.

"About fifteen minutes ago "

"Show me where to find a car."

He thrust her towards the door, and flung it open, and was outside before her. He found himself in a narrow concrete corridor. At one end of it there was a flight of steps running upwards. He raced up them, and came out through an open iron door at the top, and almost tripped over the figure that lay outside.

Simon turned him over as he saved himself with one hand on the ground; and enough light came through the opening for him to recognise the chunky individual who had been Karl Morgen's companion in Washington.

He showed no signs of activity, and it seemed very possible that he had a fractured skull; but just to be on the safe side Simon gave his head another vigorous thump on the ground as he straightened himself up.

Then he was feeling his way along the paved walk that led away from the shelter, accustoming his eyes to the light of the stars and half a moon, while he heard the two girls stumbling up behind him.

Suddenly ahead of him there was a quickened heavy movement, and he had a fleeting glimpse of a tall angular silhouette against the infinitesimally lighter tint of the sky, only a scrap of a second before the beam of a flashlight stabbed at him like a spear and barely missed him as he reeled off into the shrubbery that bordered the path. The tall man came running down the wedge of his own light, not making much sound, and switched it off a moment before he came level with the Saint; and at that point Simon moved in on him without any sound at all, his left arm sliding around the man's neck from behind and locking his larynx in the crook of his elbow, cutting off voice and breath together while he spoke in the man's ear.

"You can save this for me too, bud," he said; and then he turned the man deftly around and hit him with the blade of his hand just at the base of the septum, and threw him aside into the bushes as the girls reached him.

They threaded through winding walks, down into a sunken garden and across it and out again, and then they came around a clump of trees and the house was there, looming large and sedate in the dark and seeming aloof and asleep with the heavy blackout curtains drawn. They ran around it; and on the drive in front, gleaming faintly in the dim moonlight, Simon saw Madeline Gray's car where he had parked it when he arrived.

He opened the door and she almost fell in; and then Andrea Quennel was beside him.

Her face was a pale blur in the darkness close to him.

"You must tell me," she said with a kind of blank desperation. "What is this all about?"

He was glad that she couldn't see the involuntary mask that hardened over his face. There were so many things that perhaps ought to have been said, so many things that it was impossible to say.

"I'm going to try like hell to let your father tell you himself," he said.

Then he slid in behind the wheel and slammed the door before she could ask any more, and touched the starter and whipped the car away like a racehorse from the gate, leaving her where she stood.

It was a help that he had driven himself there, and that he had a memory for landmarks and a sense of direction that a homing pigeon could have envied. In a matter of seconds he was on to the coastal road, past Compo Beach and winding along the edge of the marshes at the estuary of the Saugatuck. Then inland a little way, and then wrenching the car around to the left to speed over the bridge across the wider part of the inlet; then to the right again, northwards, to slow down a little, reluctantly, as they skimmed the edge of the town of Westport, and catch a green light and speed up again on the road that follows the west bank of the river and comes in a mile and a half to the Merritt Parkway.

They were nearly at the Parkway when Madeline said: "Wouldn't it have been better to have phoned?"

"They'd have been standing right over him when he answered the phone — if they let him answer at all. And they may be only just arriving now."

"But the police—"

He shook his head.

"With all the things I'd have to explain and convince them of, and then to get them moving fast enough? No. It's the same as our trip from Washington. Only worse. But this time perhaps we won't be too late."

She sat tense and still, leaning forward a little, as if by that she could help the car to make more speed.

"Have we any chance?"

"We're trying."

And they were on the Parkway, the speedometer needle climbing to eighty and eight-five and creeping on, yet with the Saint's fingers effortless and almost caressing on the wheel, driving with one hand only while the other pressed the electric lighter and shook a cigarette out of Devan's pack and set it between his lips.

Presently she said, as if because any kind of conversation was better than listening to the same ceaseless clock-tick of terror: "How much does Andrea know?"

"I think she's fairly dumb," he said in the same way. "Devan said she was dumb. They just used her. And so did I. As I told you, in Washington I eventually tried to let her think she'd taken me in, because she might be a useful contact. And she was."

"But now you know why she asked you over there tonight."

"I know why she asked me in the first place. They had a story for her, and they must have known from past experience that she shouldn't be hard to sell. Maybe she never has been quite so monumentally dumb, but she knew how to leave her brain alone. It was the easiest defence of her own kind of Social Stability… Only, as it worked out this evening, I invited myself."

"And she let you walk into it."

"She knew that I knew what I was walking into. She tried to stop me last night, when I didn't know. She may have figured that I had all the right cards up my sleeve, or else I wouldn't want to walk in. She may have changed sides again, and been glad to see me sticking my neck out. It might have been vengeance, or it might have been her kind of help; or she might have just put her brain to sleep again. I wouldn't know. She must have done a lot of odd things in her life that you couldn't explain in ten-year-old language."

"Only she fell in love with you," Madeline said. "I've heard all your story, and I've seen her."

The Saint let cigarette smoke trail away from his lips, and kept his eyes on the unfolding road.

"I didn't make her do that." He was cold and apart in a way that she had never felt from him before. "She saved our lives tonight, whether she knew it or not, and whatever she meant to do. Don't ever forget that." There were some things that it was almost impossible to put together in words. "I'm afraid nothing is going to be easy for her now."

And they were past Talmadge Hill, swooping down and up long easy switchbacks, the engine humming to the perfection of its power, the tires hissing on the roadbed and the wind ruffling at the windows, almost as if they were flying, the sense of speed lulled by the smoothness of his driving and the isolation of the darkness around them, with only the road to see ahead and the tail lights of other cars being overtaken like crawling glowworms and fluttering angrily for an instant as they were passed and then being lost in silence behind.

He thought, this was one time when he didn't give a damn if the whole Highway Patrol was out after him, and just because of that there wouldn't be a single one of them in the country. And there wasn't.

And then they were near the turning he had to take, and suddenly he recognised it, and crammed on the brakes and spun the wheel and spurred the engine, and they were screaming around and bucking through a break in the highway division, right under the lights of some inoffensive voyager in the other lane who probably lost two pounds of weight and a year's growth on the spot, while the Saint balanced the car against its own rolling momentum like a tightrope walker and dived it into the twisting lane that led towards Calvin Gray's home.

It was only then that she said: "Have you got a gun or anything?"

"I borrowed one from Karl. He owed me something," he said, and didn't bother to explain about Karl.

And then they were nearing the entrance of Gray's estate, and he killed the engine and cut the lights and coasted the car to a stop a few yards short of the stone gateway.

He got out and said "This way," and drew her out through the same door, and closed it again without a sound, and they went quickly in up the drive and past the house, as softly as he could lead her. There was a great silence all around them now, with even the undertones of their own traveling wiped out; and he realised that for miles his ears had been keyed for the sound that he dreaded and that he must have heard, the concussion of unnatural thunder and the blaze of unnatural lightning that would have said finally that they were too late. And it still might come at any instant, but so far it hadn't, and the only light was the faint untroubled silver of the moon.

He only took her so far because he wanted to be sure that he found the right path; and then they found it, and he knew exactly where he was, and he stopped for a second to halt her. "You wait here. Lie down, and be quiet."

"I want to go with you."

"You couldn't do anything. And you'd make more noise than I will. And if anything happens, somebody has to tell the story."

His lips touched her face, and he was gone, and he had scarcely paused at all.

And so perhaps this was the end of all stories; and if it was, there could have been worse ones.

He came like a shadow to the door of the laboratory building, and turned the handle without a sound with his left hand while his right slid the borrowed revolver out of his pocket. His nerves were spidery threads of ice, and time stood still around him like a universe that had run down.

He thought then, in a crazy disassociation, that it would be strange to die that way, because you would never even know you died. You wouldn't even have time to hear or feel anything. There would be some sort of silent and insensate shock that would take the inside of your mind and blot it out, like the putting out of a light and a great hand that picked you up and wiped you away. One instant you would be there, and the next instant you wouldn't be there, but it wouldn't mean anything, because you wouldn't be there to know.

Through the tiny hall, as he went in, he could see all of them by the long bench where the rubber apparatus was set up. He could see Hobart Quennel, balanced and absorbed in watching, and Walter Devan standing a little back with one hand in the side pocket of his coat, and Calvin Gray's thin hands adjusting themselves around a large glass flask of straw-colored liquid to pick it up.

The Saint stood in the doorway with his gun leveled, and tried to launch his voice on the air like a feather, mostly so that it would steal into the ears of Calvin Gray without any shock that might precipitate disaster.

"I'm sorry, boys," he said, "but this is the end of the line. Please keep still and put your hands up very slowly."

He saw Quennel and Devan start to turn towards him. and then begin to obey when they saw what he held in his hand. But he was really hardly noticing them at all. His eyes were on Calvin Gray; and he felt as though he had stopped breathing a long time ago.

It was a slightly cosmic thing that he had reckoned without the scientific temperament and the contempt of familiarity.

Calvin Gray settled the flask back on the table as if it had been a soft-shelled egg, and dusted off his hands.

"I'm glad you didn't startle me," he said. "That thing is full of nitroglycerin, and I was just going to drop it"