'Private Aviator Extraordinary to Mr. Francis Lemuel,' answered the Saint, with dancing eyes. 'And you can't laugh that off!'
'Is that what you've been so mysterious about lately?'
'It is. I tell you, it wasn't dead easy. Mr. Lemuel has an eccentric taste in aviators. I got a lot of fun out of convincing him that I was a really shabby character. Try to imagine the late lamented Solomon applying, incog., for the job of 'Ask Auntie Abishag' on the staff of the Lebanon Daily Leader. . . .' The Saint grinned reminiscently. 'But as an ex-R.A.F. orficer, cashiered for pinching three ailerons, four longerons, and a brace of gliding angles, I had what you might call a flying start.'
'And what are you supposed to do?'
'Propel him about the bright blue sky.'
'Where?'The Saint bisected a sardine with precision and dexterity.
'That,' he answered, 'is the point. According to rumours, Francis is proposing to extend his cabaristic activities into the other capitals of Europe. But why by air? The latest and most rapid means of transport,' says you, intelligent-like. Oh, every-time. But the whole of civilized Europe is served by very comfortable public airways-very comfortable-and my researchers into Mr. Lemuel's character never made me think he was the sort of cove who'd sacrifice his armchair in a pukka flying Pullman and go batting through the blue in an open two-seater air-louse just to save an hour here and there. Mystery Number One. That's why I was so interested to read that Brother Francis had been trying to aviate solo-you remember?'
Patricia nodded.
'I wondered--'
'Never give tongue before you've got the bluebottle by the blunt end,' said the Saint. 'That's my motto. But I always believe in taking two looks at anything that seems to have slipped the least bit off the main line, and that was a case in point. Particularly with a man like Francis Lemuel. I've al ways thought he was far too respectable to be above suspicion. Now we may start to learn things.'
She tried to find out how he had contrived to discover that Mr. Lemuel had been searching for a disreputable aviator; she was equally curious to know how the Saint had contrived to present himself for the job; but Simon Templar still had his own little secrets. About some of the preliminary details of his adventures he was often absurdly reticent.
'I heard about it,' he said, 'and a bloke I met in a pub out at Aldgate landed me on the front door, so to speak. . . . Mystery Number Two, of course, is why the aviator should have been disreputable. . . .'
He talked energetically about this problem, and left her first questions otherwise unanswered. And with that she had to be content-until, abruptly, he switched off the subject altogether, and for the rest of that day refused to talk any more about what he was pleased to call 'affairs of state.'
Other things happened afterwards-very shortly afterwards. A few other people entered the story, a few other threads came into it, a few diverting decorations blossomed upon it; but the foundations of the story were already laid, and it is doubtful whether any of the subsequent events herein described would have eventuated at all if Simon Templar had not chanced to catch sight of that innocent paragraph in the Evening Record. For of such material were the Saint's adventures made.
And nothing can be more certain than that if the Saint had not been a man of such peculiar genius and eccentric interests he would not to this day carry an eight-inch scar on his right forearm as a memento of the adventure, and Mr. Francis Lemuel would not have experienced such a sudden and cataclysmic elevation, and one Jacob Einsmann might still have been with us, and M. Boileau, the French Minister of Finance, would not have been put to considerable inconvenience -and (which is perhaps even more important) a girl whose name used to be Stella Dornford would not now be married to a bank clerk with very ordinary prospects, and living in a very ordinary apartment in Battersea, and perfectly happy in spite of that.
2
The Calumet Club is situate (as the estate agents so beautifully put it) in a spacious basement in Deacon Street, Soho. This statement should be taken at its face value. There are, in fact, no premises whatsoever in any way ostensibly appertaining to the said club on the street level, or on any of the floors above. Entrance to the club is by means of a narrow flight of stone steps leading down into a microscopic area; and through a door opening upon this area one may (if one is known to the management) obtain access to the club itself, via a room which only an estate agent would have the nerve to describe as a vestibule, and past a porter who has been other things in his time.
The Calumet Club has an extensive if curiously exclusive membership. Things are discussed there-fascinating things. Money and other objects of virtue change hands there. And sometimes strange things are said to have happened there- very strange things. The Saint was distinctly interested in the Calumet Club. It was one of the irregular interests of his young life.
Nevertheless, the visit he paid to it on a certain evening began as a mere matter of routine, and was embarked upon without immediate malice premeditated.
For thus is the way paved for adventure, as far as human ingenuity can contrive it, with good sound non-skid tarmac. Upon learning, almost beyond dispute, that Mr. Phineas Poppingcove is a saccharine smuggler, you do not, whatever your principles and prowess, immediately invade his abode, beat him vimfully about the head with some blunt instrument, and so depart with the work of discouragement satisfactorily accomplished. If you discover, after patient investigation, that the rooms in which Miss Desiree Sausage professes to teach the latest ballroom dances (h. & c.) are in reality the dens where foolish young men are fleeced of their fathers' money at wangled games of halma, you do not, even if you are the Saint, instantly force your way into those rooms, shoot the croupier, denounce Miss Sausage, and take the stake money home with you as a souvenir. Or, if you do, your promising career is liable to terminate abruptly and in a manner definitely glutinous. The Saint, it should be remembered, had been in that sort of game for some time; and he knew, better than anyone else, the value of painstaking preparation. When everything that could possibly be known about the lie of the land and the personal habits of its denizens was known, and the line of subsequent retreat had been thoroughly surveyed, mapped, dressed, ventilated, and upholstered-then, oh, yes, then the blunt instrument, wielded with decisive celerity and no uncertain hand. But not before.
This visit to the Calumet Club was definitely 'before'; and the Saint was therefore prepared and even expecting to behave himself with all the decorum that the occasion demanded.
He passed to a comer table, ordered a drink, lighted a cigarette, and settled himself comfortably.
It was then barely eleven, and the club would not begin to do real business for about another half-hour. The nucleus of an orchestra was rhythmically, if a trifle unenthusiastically, insisting that it didn't care how much some lady unspecified made it blue. To the accompaniment of this declaration of an unselfish devotion of which the casual eye, judging the orchestra solely by appearances, would never have believed them capable, four self-appointed ladies, in two pairs, and two other self-appointed ladies paired with an equal number of temporary gentlemen, were travelling in small circles round a minute section of inferior parquet. At other tables round the floor a scattering of other clients, apparently male and female, were absorbing divers brands of alcohol in the lugubrious fashion in which alcohol is ordinarily absorbed in England during the hours in which the absorption is legal. In fact, the Calumet Club was just yawning and stretching itself preparatory to waking up for the night's festivities.
The Saint sighed, inhaled cigarette smoke luxuriously, tasted the modest glass of beer which the waiter brought him, paid twice the usual retail price for it, added a fifty-percent bonus, and continued to inspect his fellow members with a somewhat jaundiced eye.
One by one he dismissed them. Two men whom he had met there several times before saluted him, and he smiled back as if he loved them like brothers. An unattached damsel at an adjacent table smiled sweetly at him, and the Saint smiled back just as sweetly, for he had a reputation to keep up. And then, in another corner, his gaze came to rest upon a man he had seen before, and a girl he had never seen before, sitting together at a table beside the orchestra.
Simon's gaze rested upon them thoughtfully, as it had rested upon other people in that room; and it only rested upon them longer than it had rested upon anyone else that night, because at that moment, when his glance
