'This is the Berkeley Hotel, London.'
The Italian nodded. He swallowed painfully, and Simon refilled his glass and passed it back. Another silence fell, which grew so long that the Saint wondered if his patient had fallen asleep again. He rose stealthily to his feet, and the Italian roused and caught his sleeve.
'Wait.' The words came quite quietly and sanely. 'I must talk to you.'
'Sure.' Simon smiled down at the man. 'But do you want to do it now? Hadn't you better rest for a bit—maybe have something to eat——'
The Italian shook his head. 'Afterwards. Will you sit down again?' And Simon Templar sat down.
And he listened, almost without movement, while the minute hand of his watch voyaged unobserved once round the dial. He listened in a perfect trance of concentration, while the short precise sentences of the Italian's story slid into the atmosphere and built themselves up into a shape that he had never even dreamed of.
It was past one o'clock when he walked slowly down the stairs with the inside story of one of the most stupendous crimes in history whirling round in his brain like the armature of a high-powered dynamo.
Wrapped up in the rumination of what he had heard, he passed out like a sleep-walker into Berkeley Street. And it so happened that in his abstraction he almost cannoned into a man who was at that moment walking down towards Piccadilly. He stepped aside with a muttered apology, absent-mindedly registering a kind of panoramic impression of a brilliantly purple suit, lemon-coloured gloves, a gold-mounted cane, a lavender shirt, spotted tie, and ——
Just for an instant the Saint's gaze rested on the man's face. And then they were past each other, without a flicker of recognition, without the batting of an eyelid. But the Saint knew . . .
He knew that that savagely arrogant face, like a mask of black marble, was like no other black face that he had ever seen in his life before that morning. And he knew, with the same certainty, that the eyes in the black face had recognised him in the same moment as he had recognised them—and with no more betrayal of their knowledge. And as he wandered up into Berkeley Square, and the portals of the Bruton Club received him, he knew, though he had not looked back, that the black eyes were still behind him, and had seen where he went.
Chapter IV
But the smile with which the Saint greeted Patricia was as gay and carefree a smile as she had ever seen.
'I should like,' said the Saint, sinking into an armchair, 'three large double Martinis in a big glass. Just to line my stomach. After which, I shall be able to deal respectfully with a thirst which can only be satisfactorily slaked by two gallons of bitter beer.'
'You will have one Martini, and then we'll have some lunch,' said Patricia; and the Saint sighed.
'You have no soul,' he complained.
Patricia put her magazine under the table.
'What's new, boy?' she asked.
'About Beppo? . . . Well, a whole heap of things are new about Beppo. I can tell you this, for instance: Beppo is no smaller a guy than the Duke of Fortezza, and he is the acting President of the Bank of Italy.'
'He's—what?'
'He's the acting President of the Bank of Italy—and that's not the half of it. Pat, old girl, I told you at the start that there was some gay game being played, and, by the Lord, it's as gay a game as we may ever find!' Simon signed the chit on the waiter's tray with a flourish and settled back again, surveying his drink dreamily. 'Remember reading in some paper recently that the Bank of Italy were preparing to put out an entirely new and original line of paper currency?' he asked.
'I saw something about it.'
'It was so. The contract was placed with Crosby Dorman, one of our biggest printing firms—they do the thin cash and postal issues of half a dozen odd little countries. Beppo put the deal through. A while ago he brought over the plates and gave the order, and one week back he came on his second trip to take delivery of three million pounds' worth of coloured paper in a tin-lined box.'
'And then?'
'I'll tell you what then. One whole extra million pounds' worth of
