Santa Cruz in broad daylight without starting a train of gossip that Palermo and Aliston would have been the last to desire. He didn't know about Joris, but he would have bet that Hoppy Uniatz would never have gone out on his own feet. Graner's explanation had cleared up another minor mystery.
The Saint kept his satisfaction to himself. He took the telephone out of Graner's hand and hung it up again.
'As I was saying,' he remarked, 'you still need a lot more of my brains.'
Graner's stony eyes settled on his face.
'Why?'
'What d'you think would happen if you took her back to the house?'
'She would be persuaded to tell us what she knew.'
'That's what you think.'
'I can assure you there would be no question about that,' Graner said significantly.
Simon's gaze dissected him contemptuously.
'If I'm right about what you're thinking,' he said, 'you can forget it again. That's something I don't stand for. But in any case you're talking like a fool as well as a louse. Did you ever invent any way of proving whether anyone was telling the truth when they were being what you call persuaded?'
'It would be proved eventually.'
'Now you're talking like a spick, on top of everything else. Why wait for 'eventually'-whenever that is? Hasn't it occurred to you that Joris wouldn't have ditched his daughter here? If there's anything in this party that looks certain to me, it's that Joris will get in touch with her again, sooner or later. Maybe he'd have done it already if he hadn't seen your car outside.'
Graner's face hardened with concentration. The thoughts that were going on under the mask were unreadable, but the Saint didn't need to read them. He could make a pretty good guess about Graner's next reaction; and he was perfectly right.
'There is something in what you say. Perhaps it would be better to leave her here for the present. I will tell Palermo to come down and watch her, and we can go back to the house.'
He reached out again for the telephone; but the Saint laughed amicably and put his arm aside.
'Not so quickly, Reuben,' he murmured. 'You seem to have forgotten that you and I still have a few things to settle.'
Graner's stare fastened rigidly on him again. The Saint felt it without looking up to meet it. He was engaged in tapping a cigarette on his thumbnail.
'I thought they had been settled,' Graner said at length.
'By your admitting that you've been double-crossing me?'
'That will be put right as soon as we get back to the house.'
'With somebody else's gun, or have you got another one of your own?'
'Obviously we must have some confidence in each other.'
'And a hell of a lot of confidence you've given me for a start!'
The Saint's blue eyes switched suddenly back to Graner's face, very clear and cool and disparaging. This was the crucial moment of the plan of compaign which the urgent necessity of the moment had whipped out of his brain, the reason why he had induced Christine to take that expertly doctored drink, the only reason which had deprived him of the more elementally attractive solution of hitting Reuben Graner smartly on the nose and taking Christine away with an open declaration of war.
Half-a-dozen other solutions had whirled through his brain in the few seconds that he had been able to allow himself to think, and he had discarded all of them. Christine remained the one snag that had to be overcome. If he had proposed to take her up to the house when she was conscious, her reaction against him would probably have given him away. If she were taken up to the house at all, and she had to answer any questions there, her answers would probably give him away in any case. And finally, to clinch the matter, the Saint had no intention of throwing her on the mercy of Graner's gang on any account; if Graner once had them both shut up together in that fortress of a house, the situation would take quite a different angle-Simon had a cold-blooded conviction about that. And yet he had to find a way of assuring Christine's safety and his own, without putting his own cards on the table. For if he did that, he was cut off irrevocably from any direct contact with Aliston and Palermo, who knew where Joris and Hoppy were, and Lauber, who knew what had become of the ticket. It was like walking a mental tightrope with a fatal drop waiting on either side; but the Saint had to find his way across.
He put the cigarette in his mouth and struck his lighter without shifting his gaze.
'This girl is my insurance policy,' he said. 'So long as I've got her, you've got to shoot square with me. And if you are shooting square, you don't have to be in such a damn hurry to get me locked up again in your house.'
'But if she is going to be questioned --'
'I've told you-she isn't. But she'll talk of her own accord, which is worth twice as much.'
Graner went on watching him.
'Why should she?'
'Take a look at me. And then look in the mirror.' The Saint smoothed his dark hair. 'There's no comparison, Reuben, though I says it myself. Maybe a blind man would open his heart to you, but nobody else would. And much the same thing goes for those other beauties you've got at home. Besides which, she knows you all too well. But don't you see what I've done?'
Graner made no answer, which Simon wasn't expecting of him anyway. The Saint went on, in the same calm, confident tone:
