The Saint Steps In (The Saint Series) Page 4

  “It’s all right,” she said in a low voice. “It was a logical question, after all.”

  She raised her eyes to his and met them squarely.

  “Yes,” she said stoutly. “He does have the good of the people at heart. He offered his invention to the Government, free and clear, but his offer never got to the men he wanted to give it to. Instead, he was interviewed by strangers whom he didn’t like or trust. When he refused to give them his formula, when he insisted on being taken to the top man, the mysterious accidents began to happen.”

  “Does Imberline know of all this?”

  She shrugged.

  “Who knows? I’ve told you that he’s not exactly the heavy intellectual. It might be that he’s of the popular conviction that all inventors are pathological specimens who just want to waste his time. Heaven knows he must meet plenty of that type, too. Or it might be that somebody in his office does work for some other interests, as Father insists, and never lets him see anything or anybody they don’t want him to see.”

  She leaned forward eagerly.

  “But I’m sure that if I could get to him, I could make him listen, get him interested.” She coloured slightly. “Frank Imberline, you see, is one of those I’m-old-enough-to-be-your-father persons. I…I think he’ll at least give me a hearing.”

  Simon eyed the girl sombrely. Her face blazed suddenly.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “But I can put up with that if it would help Father and—yes—help the war effort. It sounds corny, I know, but I really mean it.”

  Her eyes were beseeching.

  “Couldn’t you help me to see Imberline?” she pleaded.

  He gazed at her soberly. She was not stupid in the way he had thought, but it appeared that there were certain facts of life that had not yet completely entered her awareness.

  “Of course I will,” he said kindly. “But it might take some time to get an audience with the pontiff. I’m not so well up in the routines of getting into the inner sanctum of a Washington panjandrum…”

  The Saint had a faculty of hearing things without listening for them, and of correlating them with the instantaneous efficiency of a sorting machine, so that they were sharply classified in his mind almost before the mechanical part of his sense of hearing had finished processing them.

  This particular sound was no more than the shyest ghost of a tap. But it told him, quite simply and clearly, that something had touched the door behind him.

  He moved towards it on soundless feet, while his voice went on without the slightest change of pace or inflection.

  “…I believe if you take a folding cot and a camp stove and park in his outer office for a few days you can sometimes get in a word with his secretary’s secretary’s secretary…”

  Simon’s hands touched the doorknob and whipped the door open in one movement of lightning suddenness. And with another movement that followed the first with the precision of a reciprocating engine, he shot out another hand to grasp the collar of the man who crouched outside with an article like a small old-fashioned ear-trumpet at his ear.

  “Come in, chum,” he said cordially. “Come in and introduce yourself. Are you the house detective, or were you just feeling lonely?”

  4

  The eavesdropper found himself whirled into the room, clutching wildly at the air in a vain effort to regain his balance. Before he could recover himself, one of his arms was hauled up painfully behind his back, and he found himself helpless.

  “Don’t scream, darling,” Simon said to the girl. “It’s just a surprise visit from somebody who wanted to make certain he wasn’t intruding before he knocked.”

  His free hand moved swiftly over his captive’s clothes, but discovered no gun. Simon twisted the eavesdropper around and stared into his face. Then he relaxed his hold on the stranger’s arm. The man cautiously stretched the twisted member and began rubbing it, half whimpering as he did.

  “Know him?” asked the Saint of the girl.

  Wordlessly, Madeline Gray shook her head.

  “Not exactly the type,” Simon remarked, cocking his head on one side. “He looks more like the typical bookkeeper who’s due to get pensioned off with a nice gold watch for fifty years of uninterrupted service, and never a vacation or a day off for sickness.”

  The little man continued rubbing his arm, squeaking. He looked something like a careworn mouse in ill-fitting clothes, with shoe-button eyes and two rodent teeth that protruded over his lower lip. As the pain in his arm subsided, he worked hard to present a picture of outraged innocence.

  “Sir!” he began.

  “Even talks like a mouse,” observed the Saint coolly.

  “I’ll have satisfaction for this,” said the eavesdropper. “This is…this is scandalous! When a man is attacked in the hallway of a prominent hotel by a hoodlum who practically breaks his arm, it’s time—”

  “All right, Junior,” the Saint said pleasantly. “We can do without all that. Just who are you and who do you work for?”

  The little man drew himself up to his full height of about five feet three.

  “I might ask you the same question,” he retorted. “Who are you that you think you can attack—”

  “Look,” said the Saint. “I haven’t much time, and although I’m usually an exceedingly patient sort of bloke, I’m slightly allergic to people who listen at my door with patent listening gadgets. Who sent you here and what did you expect to find out?”

  “My name,” squeaked the little man, “is Sylvester Angert. And I was not listening at your door. I was trying to find my own room. I thought this was it. I was about to try my key in the lock when you assaulted me.”

  “I see,” said the Saint thoughtfully. “Of course, you didn’t check the number of my room with the number on your key before you…er…prepared to try the lock. And you always have a good listen to what might be going on inside your room before you enter. Is that it?”

  The little man’s eyes held Simon’s firmly for a second and then slid away.

  “If you must know,” he said, with a spark of defiance, “that’s exactly what I do. Listen, I mean. I’ve done that ever since I had an unpleasant experience in Milwaukee. I walked into my room, and I was held up by two thugs who were waiting for me there. I procured this little instrument to safeguard myself against just that sort of thing.”

  “Oh, lord,” said the Saint faintly. “Now I’ve heard everything.”

  “Believe it or not,” said Sylvester Angert, “that’s the truth.”

  “Suppose you show me your key,” Simon suggested.

  Mr Angert probed his pockets and came up with the tabbed key and offered it to the Saint. Simon checked the number and frowned thoughtfully. Its last two digits corresponded with the number of Simon’s room. Mr Angert, it appeared, occupied the suite immediately above the Saint’s.

  Simon returned the key and smiled easily.

  “Everything checks beautifully, doesn’t it?” he asked. “Suppose you have a seat, Sylvester, and toy with a drink while we talk this over.”

  Reluctantly the little man took a chair across the room from the door. Simon splashed liquor into a glass and fizzed the soda syphon. He nodded in the direction of the girl.

  “I suppose introductions are in order,” he said. “Mr Angert, this is Miss Millie Van Ess. Miss Van Ess—Mr Angert.”

  His eyes were bland but they would not have missed the minutest change in Angert’s expression, if there had been any reaction to the alias he had inflicted on Madeline Gray. But he saw no reaction at all.

  The little man nodded stiffly to the girl and murmured something that might have been “How do you do.” He took the glass from Simon and sipped the highball daintily.

  Simon’s long brown fingers reached for a cigarette.

  “Now, Mr Angert,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll agree that explanations are in order—on both sides, possibly. Just what is your business, Comrade?”

  The liquor seemed to
give the little man courage, or perhaps it was the realisation that he was not going to be stretched on a rack—at least not immediately. Over the rim of his glass, he said, “I don’t know your name, sir.”

  “So sorry. It’s Templar, Simon Templar.”

  Angert’s voice was quite calm as he said, “I believe I’ve heard of you? Aren’t you the one they call the Saint, or some such name?”

  Simon bowed modestly.

  “My wife, that’s Mrs Angert, takes a great interest in the crime news in the papers, and I’ve heard her mention your name. I, personally, don’t pay much attention to that sort of thing.”

  He looked up apologetically.

  “Not,” he added, “that I have anything against crime news, but—”

  Simon held up a hand.

  “No apologies, please,” he said. “I much prefer the funnies and the produce market reports, myself. But what do you do, brother, besides not read crime news?”

  The little man delved into a vest pocket and brought out a card. Simon read that Sylvester was sales manager of the Choctaw Pipe and Tube Company of Cleveland.

  “I’m in Washington, trying to get to see somebody about a sub-contract, but, oh dear, I just haven’t been able to do anything! They all keep sending me from one office to the other and then back to the place I contacted first.”

  Simon casually slipped the card into his pocket and dragged at his cigarette.

  “I take it you make pipes and tubes,” he said.

  “We did, up until the war,” explained Sylvester. “Then we converted to more direct war products. Naturally, I can’t explain just what we’re turning out now, but it’s important. Yes sirree, very important, if I may say so.”

  “I’m sure you may,” Simon murmured.

  Then he shot his next question in a rapier-like tone that cut away the smug complacency Sylvester seemed to be building up as thoroughly as a sharp knife would rip away cheese cloth.

  “Does your plant have anything to do with rubber?” he demanded.

  This time Mr Angert’s eyes bounced a bit. He had been prepared for the other questions, but this one had come out of nowhere and there was a split second’s interval before he recovered.

  “Rubber? Oh, no. We’re a metal production outfit. No, we have nothing to do with rubber at all.”

  Simon half turned away to freshen his drink.

  “Naturally not,” he said. “That was rather a silly question.”

  Sylvester Angert finished his drink and got out of his chair. He laughed rather uncertainly.

  “I’m sorry I was so…so harsh when I first…er…arrived here, but the surprise…I guess I do owe you an apology for that. Perhaps we could get together for a drink tomorrow.”

  “Perhaps,” said the Saint non-committally.

  “And now I’d better be getting up to my room. It’s getting late and I’ve had a hard day. Good night, Miss Van Ess, Mr Templar.”

  He ducked his head and scuttled out of the room. Madeline giggled.

  “A funny little man,” she said.

  “Very. Will you excuse me for a second? I’ve got a couple of calls to make.”

  He went into the bedroom, closing the door behind him. He called a local number which was not in any directory, and talked briefly with a man named Hamilton, whom very few people knew. Then he called the desk and exchanged a few words with Information. He returned to the living-room, smiling in his satisfaction.

  “A funny little man indeed,” he said. “There is no such animal as the Choctaw Pipe and Tube Company of Cleveland. And the suite above this is occupied by a senator who’s been living there ever since his misguided constituents banded together in a conspiracy to get him out of his home state.”

  “Then—”

  “Oh, he’s harmless,” the Saint assured her. “I don’t think he’ll bother us again. It will be somebody very different from little Sylvester who’ll probably get the next assignment.”

  “But who’s he working for?”

  “The same people, my dear, who seem to be determined that your father’s invention is going to blush unseen. I only hope for your sake that hereafter they limit their activities to such things as visits by Sylvester Angerts. But I’m afraid they won’t.”

  “What difference does it make?” she protested. “If you’ll really help me—and if you’re really like any of the things I’ve read about you—you should be able to wangle an appointment with Imberline in a few days at the outside.”

  The Saint’s fingers combed through his hair. The piratical chiselling of his face looked suddenly quite old in a sardonic and careless way.

  “I know, darling,” he said. “That isn’t the problem. The job that’s going to keep me busy is trying to make sure that you and your father are allowed to live that long.”

  CHAPTER TWO:

  HOW SIMON TEMPLAR INTERVIEWED MR IMBERLINE, AND WAS INTERVIEWED IN HIS TURN

  1

  A change of expression flickered over her face, that started with half a smile and ended with half a frown, but under the half-frown her brown eyes were level and steady.

  “Now are you giving me what you thought I was asking for, or do you mean that?”

  “Think it out for yourself,” he said patiently, “Somebody was interested enough to make your father a present of two explosions and a fire—according to what you told me. Somebody followed you long enough to know you’d been trying to see Imberline. Somebody thought it was worthwhile calling you and making a phony appointment, and then sending you a threatening note to see how easily you’d scare off. Somebody even thought it was worthwhile trying another note on me, after they’d seen us talking.”

  “You don’t know how it got into your pocket?”

  “No more than you know how yours fell into your lap. But I was bumped into rather heavily on two occasions, so it was on one of those occasions that the note was planted.”

  The face of Walter Devan and the tall man who had been in Imberline’s entourage passed through the Saint’s memory.

  “Anyway, since you didn’t scare, there was an ambush waiting for you on the way. If you’d taken a cab doubtless it would have been run off the road.”

  She was neither frightened nor foolish now. She simply watched his face estimatingly.

  “What do you think they meant to do?”

  “Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe they were just told to rough you up a bit to discourage you. Maybe it was to be a straight kidnapping. Maybe they thought you could be used to keep your father quiet. Or maybe they thought you might be able to tell them his process if they persuaded you enough. By the way, could you?”

  She nodded.

  “It’s very simple once you know it, and I’ve been helping father in his laboratory ever since he started working on it again.”

  “Then you don’t need to ask me questions about what they might have had in mind.”

  She glanced at her drink.

  “It’s silly, isn’t it? I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

  “You’d better start thinking now. In times like these, anybody who can pour a lot of sawdust, old shoe laces, tomato ketchup, and hair tonic into a bathtub and make rubber is hotter than Tabasco. The only thing I can’t understand is why the FBI didn’t have you both in a fireproof vault long ago.”

  “I can answer that,” she said wearily. “Have you any idea how many new synthetic rubber inventors are pestering people in Washington every day? Only about a dozen.”

  “But if your father’s reputation is as good as you say it is—”

  “All sorts of crackpots have some kind of reputation, too. And to the average dollar-a-year man, any scientist is liable to be a bit of a crackpot.”

  “Well, they can test this stuff of yours, can’t they?”

  “Yes. But it takes a lot of time and red tape. And it wouldn’t necessarily prove anything.”

  “Why not?”

  “The specimen might be any other kind of worked-over or reclaimed rubber
.”

  “Surely it could be detected.”

  “How?”

  “Analyse it.”

  She laughed a little.

  “You’re not a chemist. Any organic or semi-organic concoction—like this is—is almost impossible to analyse. How can I explain that? Look, for instance, you could grind up the ashes of a human arm, and analyse them, and find a lot of ingredients, but that wouldn’t prove whether you’d started with a man or not. That’s putting it very clumsily, I know, but—”

  “I get the idea.”

  He lighted a cigarette and tightened his lips on it. These were ramifications that he hadn’t had time to think out. But they made sense within the limits of his knowledge.

  He went back to the concrete approach that he understood better.

  “Has your father patented his formula?”

  “No. That would have meant discussing it with attorneys and petty officials and all kinds of people. And I tell you, it’s so simple that if one wrong person knew it, all the wrong people could know it. And after all—we are in the middle of a war.”

  “He didn’t want any commercial protection?”

  “I told you that once, and I meant it. He doesn’t need money, doesn’t want it. Really, we’re horribly comfortable. My grandfather bought a gold mine in California for two old mules and a can of corned beef. All father is trying to do is to give his process to the right people. But he’s been soured by his experiences here in Washington, and of course he can’t just write a letter or fill out a form, and tell all about it, because then it would be sure to leak out to the wrong people.”

  “Something seems to have leaked out already,” Simon observed.

  “Maybe some people have more imagination than others.”

  “You haven’t anyone special in mind?”

  She moved her hands helplessly.

  “The Nazis,” she suggested. “But I don’t know how they’d have heard of it…Or the Japs. Or anyone…”

  “Anyone,” said the Saint, “is a fair guess. They don’t necessarily have to be clanking around with swastikas embroidered on their underwear and sealed orders from the Gestapo up their sleeves. Anyone who isn’t as big-hearted as your father, but who believes in him, might be glad to get hold of this recipe—just for the money. Which would make the field a good bet on any mutuel.”