'Naturally I want you, if it can be arranged. That is why you were sent for.'
'And why was that so urgent?'
The glimpse of an outlet did just what the Saint meant it to do. It made Graner grab for it like a fish going for a baited hook.
'That is easier to answer. As you know, Felson and another of my men, Holby, are in Madrid on business. The wife of the American ambassador there has some jewels which we have been interested in for some time. If everything goes according to plan, my men will be arriving here with them on Sunday, when, of course, we shall need you.'
The Saint drew a deep silent breath. So a few more things were being explained. It was like scratching bits of gold out of a rock seam with a toothpick, but all the time he was getting somewhere. He thought about that for a moment, and stopped thinking again. The thoughts he had made him feel a trifle lightheaded. First a fifteen- million-peseta lottery ticket. Then Graner's amazing collection of stolen jewels. Then the jewels of the wife of the American ambassador in Madrid, just for good measure-although the last he had seen of Messrs Felson and Holby made their arrival as per schedule seem rather less probable than Graner fondly believed. But the sum total of what he was adding up began to make it seem as if he had butted into a thieves' picnic that made Ali Baba and his forty stooges look like so many scroungers in abandoned ash cans.
He lighted another cigarette and sat down again.
'That's a start, anyway,' he murmured. 'Let's keep the ball rolling. Give me the rest of the dope about this guy Joris and the lottery ticket-and give it me straight this time.'
Graner laid his cane down on the dressing table and took out his cigar case. He fitted a fresh cigar into his amber holder. Simon knew that he was playing for a breathing spell, weighing one thing against another; and this time he let Graner work it out his own way. He knew that it could have only one result.
'If it will help to rectify your unfortunate impression of our methods,' Graner said, 'it may be best to be candid with you. I do not know where Joris is. He escaped from the house last night, taking his daughter and the lottery ticket. We discovered their absence soon afterwards, and Lauber and Palermo and Aliston went after them to bring them back. They would probably have been able to do this if some confederates of Joris, whom we knew nothing about, had not arrived in the nick of time and interfered. Joris and his accomplices escaped, but Palermo took a note of the car in which they went off, which was quite conspicuous. As soon as they reported to me, I sent my chauffeur, Manoel, to search Santa Cruz for the car. He found it outside this hotel, but he had a breakdown on his way back and did not arrive until after you had gone to bed. It was then too late to do anything; but first thing this morning I sent Palermo and Aliston down here to do what they could. They telephoned me that they had discovered that Joris and some other man, probably this confederate of his, had stayed at the hotel the night before, but they had left very early in the morning without leaving any address. That is as much as any of us know.'
Simon leaned back and trickled puffs of smoke towards the ceiling, sorting the story out in his mind. Certainly it explained the car which had arrived at the house when he was undressing. Also it explained the absence of Aliston and Palermo at breakfast time. And in a way it explained what he had heard of Graner's telephone conversation at breakfast, as well as the interruption that had intervened in time to save the Saint from having to demonstrate his skill as a diamond cutter, and Graner's agitation when he returned to the workroom. All of those things fitted in very nicely and neatly.
But at the same time it let loose a cataract of new questions. It didn't explain why Graner's gang hadn't found Hoppy and Joris, once they had got that far. It didn't explain why Hoppy Uniatz hadn't answered the telephone a little more than half an hour ago. It reaped one crop of enigmas, and left whole rows of freshly germinating riddles sprouting up behind it that made the Saint feel as if his universe had been turned upside down.
His eyes raked Graner like rapiers from under lazily drooping lids, skinned him alive and turned his soul inside out. But for the first time he was convinced that Graner was telling the truth as far as he knew it. He couldn't have invented a new fairy tale like that, on the spur of the moment, that matched so flawlessly with all the circumstances-or if he could, he was an immortal genius to whom the Saint was prepared to erect an altar. Graner couldn't have been bluffing. It wasn't humanly plausible. After the treading out he had just undergone, he couldn't have revived with such supernatural speed. The fight had been licked out of him as effectively as if the Saint had been using his solar plexus for a punching bag ever since they started talking. Later on, yes, given even half an hour in which to pull himself together and iron the knots out of his crafty and vindictive brain-yes, then, by all means, he could be reckoned as crooked and slippery as ever, if not more so. The Saint had no illusions about that. The settling of accounts between them hadn't even started. But Graner wasn't in any condition to start faking the audit there and then. Simon was ready to gamble his life on it.
Therefore there must have been some other auxiliary explanation. And there was only one such explanation that came into the Saint's head. It came flying out of the great voids of space like a comet, crashing resistless through all the narrow mathematical orbits of logic, dazzling him with a sudden blaze of light that exploded like a bomb in the darkness through which he had been trying to grope his way. And yet it was so paralysingly simple that he could have gaped at himself for not having seen it before.
If Graner wasn't lying, there was only one possible inference. Somebody else was.
3 Simon Templar sat and gasped inaudibly at his own genius. It must have deserved the name, for the intuitive deduction had cut straight through his conscious reasoning. Afterwards his brain had to catch up with it, plodding laboriously over the steps that inspiration had taken in its winged stride. But every step was there, and no deliberate testing he could think of would shake them. The whole solution was one solid and articulated structure, fitting all the foundations of known fact and spanning all the gaps that had puzzled him so irritatingly before.
The cigarette smouldered down between his fingers while his mind raced on from there.
He knew that Aliston and Palermo had taken Hoppy and Joris. It was the one link that made everything else fit together. How it had been done remained to be discovered, though he could make a few guesses. But he knew that that was what had happened. He knew it as surely as he knew that Lauber had got the ticket.
That was how it had all started. The idea must have come into Lauber's head first, when he awakened in the car on the way back to the house with his brain hazy from the aftereffects of Mr Uniatz' treatment. Lauber would have made the natural efforts of a man recovering consciousness to reconstruct the events which had led up to the black-out. There had been a fight, he would remember, and somebody had hit him over the head. What had happened to the others? Of course, they had already been incapacitated. They had been fighting the intruders while he was still dealing with Joris. . . . He had been searching Joris' pockets, looking for a ticket. . . . He'd found the ticket, hadn't he? ... Well, what else had happened? The others would tell him what had happened, and Lauber would have pieced the fragmentary accounts together. But he'd got the ticket, hadn't he? He would have felt in his pocket. Yes, it was there. . . . And at that moment the brilliant idea had probably dawned on him. He'd got the ticket, but none of the others knew he'd got it. They'd been too busy fighting. And the fight had ended with the intruders getting away with Joris and Christine. Why shouldn't they have got away with the ticket as well? The argument must have carried Lauber away on the instant with its surpassing simplicity. All he had to do was to let
