The Saint Steps In (The Saint Series) Page 18

  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 favours, 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 too much 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 labour problems in your field?”

  “We really don’t have any labour trouble. All our plants are in the South, of course, where you get less of that sort of thing than anywhere else. Labour 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 rumours—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 Labour. I don’t believe in Labour run wild. No sensible man does. Without any revolutions, we�
��ve been slowly improving the conditions and standards of Labour, 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 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 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 tyres and gasoline. They read the newspapers and become bar-room 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 alarm 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 humour 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 forever.”

  “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?”