The Saint Steps In (The Saint Series) Page 6

  “Now get the hell out of here,” Imberline said defiantly.

  There was nothing else to do.

  Simon stood up, crushed his cigarette in an ashtray, and hoped that his nonchalant impassivity had enough suggestion of postponed menace and loaded sleeves to conceal the completely impotent confusion of his mind. For perhaps the first time in his life he felt that he hadn’t a single answer in him.

  “Thank you,” he said, and left the room like that.

  He let himself out of the front door, and crossed the lawn diagonally towards the street, moving through the dark patches cast by the thick spruce trees with the silence that was as natural to him as breathing.

  He was just emerging from the deepest gloom when he stumbled over somebody who had been taken unawares by his cat-like approach. The man he had bumped into straightened, squeaked, and vanished like a startled rabbit. But although he disappeared in the time it might take eyelash to meet eyelash in a slow blink, the Saint knew who he was. It was the funny little man, Sylvester Angert.

  2

  Simon Templar walked back to the Shoreham, conscious always of the movement of shadows about him. He knew he was wide open for a pot shot, but he had the idea that nobody wanted to kill him—yet. They might kill Madeline Gray, and her father, but not before they got the formula from one of the two. He himself was a recent nuisance, not yet thoroughly estimated, and the forces that were working against the Grays would hardly want to complicate their problem with a police investigation until they were convinced that there was no alternative.

  He was a trifle optimistic in this prognosis, as it was soon to be demonstrated.

  Madeline Gray opened her door when he gave the password he had written down, and he almost laughed at the solemn roundness of her eyes.

  “I’m not a returning ghost,” he said. “Come back downstairs, and I’ll buy you another drink.”

  They walked down to his floor, and he waited until she was curled up on the sofa with her feet tucked under her and a Peter Dawson in her hand.

  Then he said, without preface, “I’ve just been to see Imberline.”

  Her mouth opened and stayed open in an unfinished gasp of amazement and incredulity, and he had time to light a cigarette before she got it working again.

  “H…h…how?”

  “I burgled his house and walked in on him. Rather illegal, I suppose, but it suddenly seemed like such an easy way to cut out a lot of red tape and heel-cooling.” The Saint grinned a little now in reminiscent enjoyment of his own simplifying impudence, and then without a change of that expression he added bluntly, “He says your father is a crackpot phony.”

  His eyes fastened on hers, and he saw resentment and anger harden the bewilderment out of her face.

  “I told you Mr Imberline has never seen a demonstration of father’s process. He doesn’t dare, because of what our invention might do to the natural rubber business after the war.”

  “He says he told his staff to investigate it.”

  “His staff!” she snorted. “His stooges! Or maybe just some other men with their own axes to grind. Father met them, and wouldn’t talk to them after they demanded to see the formula before they’d see a demonstration. I told you he isn’t the most tactful person in the world. He suspected Imberline’s men from the first, and he made no bones about throwing them out of the laboratory when they came up to Stamford.”

  “On the other hand, Imberline promised to give you a hearing if I brought you to see him.”

  She couldn’t be stunned with the same incredulity again, but it was as if she had been jarred again behind the eyes.

  “He told you that?”

  “Yes. In a couple of days. As soon as he gets back from a trip that he has to rush off on tomorrow.”

  She breathed quickly a couple of times, so that he could hear it, in a sort of jerky and frantic way.

  “Do you think he meant it?”

  “He may have. He didn’t have to say that. He could have screamed bloody murder, thundered about the police, or told me to go to hell. But he didn’t even try.”

  She put her glass down on the low table in front of her and rubbed her hands shakily together as if they felt clammy. Her lips trembled, and the voice that came through them had a tremor in it to match.

  “I…I don’t know what to say. You’ve been so wonderful—you’ve done so much—made everything seem so easy. I feel so stupid. I…I don’t know whether I ought to kiss you, or burst into tears, or what. I don’t know how to believe it.”

  He nodded.

  “That,” he said flatly, “is my problem.”

  “What did you do to persuade him?”

  “Very little. It was too easy.”

  “Well, why do you think he did it?”

  “I wish I knew.” The Saint scowled at his cigarette. “He may have been scared of the trouble I might stir up—but he didn’t look scared of anything. He may have been afraid that I really had something on him. He may be a very clever and a very cunning guy, and he may have been just getting himself elbow room to hit back with a real brick in his glove. He may be on somebody’s pay-roll, and he may have to go back to his boss for orders when he’s in a jam. He may just have a sort of caliph complex, and get a shot in his ego from making what he thinks is a grand eccentric gesture—something to make an anecdote out of and show what a big-minded down-to-earth democrat he is. All of that’s possible. And none of it seems enough, somehow…So I muddle and brood around, and I still come back to one other thing.”

  “What’s that?”

  He said, “How much of this persecution of you and your father is real? How much of that is crackpot, how much is imagination—and how much is fake?”

  The new disbelief in her eyes was sharp with hurt.

  “After all this—are you still thinking that?”

  He gazed at her detachedly, trying to persuade himself that he could make the same decision that he would have made if she had been fat and fifty with buck teeth and a wart on her nose.

  Then he stopped looking at her. He was not so hot at being detached. He strolled over to the window and gazed out at the panorama of distant lights beyond the grounds and the Park…

  Ping!

  The glass in front of him grew an instantaneous spider-web around a neat round hole, and the plunk of the bullet lodging itself in the wall plaster somewhere above and behind him came at about the same moment.

  He was probably already in motion when he heard it, for his impressions seemed to catch up with it quite a little while later. And by that time he was spun around with his back to the wall between the two windows, temporarily safe from any more careless exposure, and looking at Madeline Gray’s white face with a quite incorrigible silent laughter in his eyes.

  “By God,” he said, “even the Washington mosquitoes have war fever. They must be training to be dive-bombers.”

  She looked up at the opposite wall, near the ceiling, where his glance had also gone to search for the scar of the shot. After a second or two she found her voice somewhere.

  “Somebody shot at you,” she said, and sounded as if she knew it was the only possible foolish thing to say.

  “That would be another theory,” he admitted.

  “But where from?”

  “From the grounds, or the Park. They had the window spotted, of course. I’m afraid I’m getting careless in my old age.”

  He reached sideways cautiously for the edge of the shade, and pulled it all the way down. Then he did the same thing for the other window. After that he felt free to move again.

  “Won’t you catch them, or…or something?”

  He laughed.

  “I’m not a Superman, darling. By the time I got downstairs they could be blocks away. I should have known better—I was warned once, at least.” Then his face was sober again. “But I guess the Ungodly are still answering for you. If all this is fooling, it’s certainly an awful complicated game.”

  She met his eyes with a visi
ble tumult of thoughts that couldn’t form into words. Then, in the silence, the telephone rang.

  Simon crossed to it and picked it up.

  “This is Miss Brown of the Associated Press,” it said. “I heard that you were in town, and I wondered if you’d be terribly angry if I asked you for a short interview.”

  It was a light and engaging and unusually arresting voice, but Simon Templar had met specialised voices before.

  “I don’t know what you could interview me about,” he said. “I’m thirty-five years old, I think Edgar J. Hoover is wonderful. I believe that drinking is here to stay. I want everyone to buy War Bonds, and I am allergic to vitamins. Beyond that, I haven’t anything to say to the world.”

  “I’d only take a few minutes, really, and you wouldn’t have to answer any questions you didn’t like.”

  “Suppose you call me tomorrow and I’ll see what I’m doing,” he suggested, giving himself a mental memorandum to see that his telephone was cut off.

  “Why, are you in bed already?”

  The Saint’s brows climbed fractionally and drew down again.

  “When I was a girl that would have been called a rather personal question,” he said.

  “I’m downstairs in the lobby now,” she said. “Why couldn’t we get it over tonight? I promise you can throw me out as soon as you’ve had enough.”

  And that was when the last of the Saint’s hesitations winked out like a row of punctured bubbles, so that he wondered how he could ever have wasted time on them.

  For girl reporters in real life do not come as far as the lobby of their victim’s hotel before they ask for an interview. Nor do they press for ordinary interviews in the middle of the night.

  Nor do they use a sexy voice and a faintly suggestive turn of phrase to wheedle their way into the presence of a reluctant subject.

  The sublime certainty of his intuition crescendoed around him with the symphonic grandeur of a happy orchestra. The decision had been taken out of his hands. He could resist temptation just so long, but there was a limit to how much he could be pushed. The note he had found in his pocket had been bad enough. The encounter with the aspiring kidnappers had been worse. The episodes of Mr Angert and Mr Imberline had been a bonus of aggravation. To be potted at in his own window by a sniper was almost gross provocation, even if he was broad-minded enough to admit that it was his own fault for providing the target. But this—this was positively and finally going too far.

  “Okay,” he said in a resigned tone. “Come on up.”

  He put the telephone back in its cradle as gently as a mother laying down her first-born, and turned back to the girl with a smile.

  “Go to your room again, Madeline,” he said, and for the first time that evening the full gay carelessness of a Saintly life was alive and laughing in his voice. “Get your things packed. We’re going to Connecticut tonight.”

  Her eyes were bewildered.

  “But I have to see Mr Imberline.”

  “I’ll get you back here as soon as we’ve arranged a genuine appointment. But that won’t be tomorrow. Meanwhile, I can’t be in two places at once. And maybe your father needs looking after, too.” He grinned. “Don’t bother about those private detectives. I’m sold—if you’ll still buy me.”

  She laughed a little through uncertain lips.

  “Are you very expensive?”

  “Not if you buy your Peter Dawson wholesale. Now run along. And the same password applies. I’ll be after you as soon as I’m through with this.”

  He had her arm and was taking her to the door.

  “What was that telephone call?” she asked. “And how do you know you’re going to be all right?”

  “That’s what I’m going to find out,” he said. “I won’t be any help to you hiding in a cellar. But I’m firmly convinced that I was not destined to die in Washington. Not this week, anyhow…I’ll see you soon, darling.”

  She stood in the doorway for a moment looking at him, and then, suddenly and very quickly, she kissed him.

  Then she was gone.

  Simon went into the bedroom, opened a suit-case, and took out an automatic already nested in a spring holster. He slipped his arms through the harness, shrugged it into comfort, and went back into the living-room and put his coat on again. It seemed like a slightly melodramatic routine, but the only reason why Simon Templar had lived long enough to become a legend before he was also a name on a tombstone, was that he had never been coy about taking slightly melodramatic precautions. And in the complex and sinful world where he had spent most of his life, there were no guarantees that when an alluring feminine voice invited itself in on the telephone there would be an alluring feminine person on the doorstep when the doorbell next rang.

  He had just time to light another cigarette and freshen his drink before that potential crisis was with him.

  He opened the door with his left hand and swung it wide, standing well aside as he did so. But it was only a girl who matched the telephone voice who came in.

  He risked one arm to reach across the opening and draw the door shut behind her, and he quietly set the safety lock as he did so.

  After that, without the slightest relaxing of his vigilance, and still with that steady pressure of ghostly bullets creeping over his flesh, he followed her into the living-room and surveyed her again in a little more detail. She was tall, and built with the kind of curvaceous ripeness in which there is hardly a margin of a pound between perfection and excess. So far, she was still within the precarious safety of that narrow margin, so that her figure was a startling excitement to observe. Her face was classically beautiful in a flawless peach-skinned way. She had natural blonde hair and rather light blue eyes that gave her expression a kind of passionate vagueness.

  “All right, darling,” said the Saint. “I’m in a hurry, too, so we’ll make it easy. Who sent you and what am I supposed to fall for?”

  3

  Her face was blank and innocent.

  “I don’t quite understand. I was just told to get an interview—”

  “Let’s save a lot of time,” said the Saint patiently. “I know that you aren’t from the AP, and probably your name isn’t Brown either—but that’s a minor detail. You can put on any act you like and talk from here to breakfast, but you’ll never get anywhere. So let’s start from here.”

  She regarded him quite calmly.

  “You have very direct methods, haven’t you?”

  “Don’t you think they cut the hell out of the overhead?”

  She glanced placidly around the room, and observed the potable supplies on the side table. He was aware that she didn’t miss the half-empty glass that Madeline Gray had left, either.

  “I suppose you wouldn’t like to offer me a drink.”

  Without answering, he poured a highball and handed it to her.

  “And a cigarette?”

  He gave her one and lighted it.

  “Now,” he remarked, “you’ve had plenty of time to work on your story, so it ought to be good.”

  She laughed.

  “Since you are so clever—you ought to be able to tell me.”

  “Very likely I can.” He lighted another cigarette for himself. “You are either an Axis agent, a private crook, or a mildly enterprising nitwit. You may have fancier names for it, but it comes to the same thing. Once upon a time I’d have laid odds on the third possibility, but just recently I’ve gotten a bit sceptical.”

  “You make it sound awfully interesting. So what am I here for—as an Axis agent or a private crook?”

  “That’s a little more difficult. But I can think of the possibilities. You either came here to eliminate me—with or without outside co-operation—or to get information of one kind or another. Of course, there are gentle angles on both those bright ideas, as well as the rough and noisy ones. We could stay up all night playing permutations and combinations. I was just curious to know what your script was.”

  “And if I don’t tell you?�
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  “We’ll just have to play it out,” he said tiredly. “Go on. Shoot. Give me the opening line.”

  She tilted her head back, showing teeth as regular as a necklace of pearls.

  “I think you’re beautiful,” she said.

  “Thank you.”

  “You talk just like I imagined you would.”

  “That must be a great relief.”

  “You sound wildly exciting.”

  “Good.”

  “But I’m afraid I’m going to be a great disappointment.”

  “Are you?”

  “I’m afraid I’m only a mildly enterprising nitwit.”

  He went on looking at her dispassionately.

  “I adore you,” she said.

  “I adore me, too,” he said. “Tell me about you.”

  She tasted her drink.

  “My name’s Andrea Quennel.”

  It went through him like a chemical reaction, a sudden congealing and enveloping stillness. In an almost unreal detachment he observed her left hand. It wore no rings. He crossed over to her, and calmly took the purse from her lap and opened it. He found a compact with her initials on it, and didn’t search any further.

  “Satisfied?” she asked.

  “You must be Hobart Quennel’s daughter,” he said.

  “That’s right. We came in just as Mr Devan was driving off after he’d dropped you. He told us about your little excitement this evening. He hadn’t thought anything about your name, but being a romantic soul, of course I had to wonder at once if it was you. So I inquired at the desk, and it was.”

  She looked very pleased with herself, and very comfortable.

  “That still doesn’t tell me why you had to see me this way,” he said.

  “I wanted to meet you. Because I’ve been crazy about you for years.”