one door before which a scrawny-necked individual lounged negligently, blinking at them, as they went by, with heavy-lidded eyes like an alligator's; they passed another door and stopped before the third and last. One of his escorts hammered on it, and it was yanked open. There was a sudden burst of brighter light from within; and the Saint went on into the lion's den with an easy, unhurried stride.
Simon had seen better dens. Except for the brighter illumination, the room in which he found himself was no better than the social quarters on the ground floor. The boards underfoot were uncarpeted, the once dazzlingly patterned wallpaper was yellowed and moulting. There was a couch under the window where two shirt-sleeved hoodlums sat side-saddle over a game of pinochle; they glanced up when the Saint came in, and returned to their play without comment. In the centre of the room was a table on which stood the remains of a meal; and at the table, facing the door, sat Ualino.
Simon identified him easily from Fernack's description. But he saw the man only for one fleeting second; and after that his gaze was held by the girl who also sat at the table.
There was no logical reason why he should have guessed that she was the girl Fay who had spoken to Nather on the telephone—the Fay Edwards of whom Fernack had begun to speak. In a house like that there were likely to be numbers of girls, coming and going; and there was no evidence that Morrie Ualino was an ascetic. But there was something to this girl that might quite naturally have spoken with a voice like the one which Simon had heard. In that stark shabby room her presence was even more incongruous than the immaculate Ualino's. She was slender and fair, with eyes like amber, and her mouth was a soft curve of amazingly innocent temptation. Perhaps she was twenty-three or twenty-four, old enough to have the quiet confidence which adolescence never has; but still she was young in an ageless, enduring way that the years do not change. And once again that queer intuitive throb of expectation went through the Saint, as it had, done when he first heard the voice on Nather's telephone; the stirring of a chord in his mind whose note rang too deep for reason. . . .
It was to her, rather than to Ualino, that he spoke.
'Good-evening,' said the Saint.
No one in the room answered. Ualino dipped a brush into a tiny bottle and stroked an even film of liquid polish on the nail of his little finger. A diamond the size of a bean flashed from his ring as he inspected his handiwork under the light. He corked the bottle and fluttered his graceful hand back and forth to dry off the polish, and his tawny eyes returned at leisure to the Saint.
'I wanted to have a look at you.' Simon smiled at him.
'That makes us both happy. I wanted to have a look at you. I heard you were the Belle of New York, and I wanted to see how you did it.' The ingenuousness of the Saintly smile was blinding. 'You must give me the address of the man who waves your hair one day, Morrie—but are you sure they got all the mud pack off last time your face had a treatment?'
There was a hideous clammy stillness in the room, a stillness that sprawled out of sheer open-mouthed incredulity. Not within the memory of anyone present had such a thing as that happened. In that airlessly expanding quiet, the slightest touch of fever in the imagination would have made audible the thin whisper of eardrums waving soggily to and fro, like wet palm fronds in a breeze, as they tried dazedly to recapture the unbelievable vibrations that had numbed them. The faces of the two pinochle players revolved slowly, wearing the blank expressions of two men who had been unexpectedly slugged with blunt instruments and who were still wondering what had hit them.
'What did you say?' asked Ualino pallidly.
'I was just looking for some beauty hints,' said the Saint amiably. 'You know, you remind me of Papulos quite a lot, only he hasn't got the trick of those Dietrich eyebrows like you have.'
Ualino stroked down a thread of hair at one side of his head.
'Come over here,' he said.
There was no actual question of whether the Saint would obey. As if answering an implied command, each of the two gorillas on either side of the Saint seized hold of his wrists. His arms were twisted up behind his back, and he was dragged round the table; and Ualino turned his chair round and looked up at him.
'Did you ever hear of the hot box?' Ualino asked gently.
In spite of himself, the Saint felt an instant's uncanny chill. For he had heard of the hot box, that last and most horrible product of gangland's warped ingenuity. Al Capone himself is
