The Saint nodded sympathetically and sauntered over to a chair. The first breath-taking shock was gone now, and once again his mind was running as cool and clear as an alpine stream. Only the high-strung tension of his awakened nerves, a pulse of vivid expectation too deeply pitched and infinitesimal in its vibration to be perceptible to any senses but his own, remained to testify to the thunderbolt of realisation that had flamed through his brain.
He slipped a cigarette from his case, tapped it, set it between his lips without a tremor in his hands, and lighted it without haste. Then he opened his wallet and took out a folded piece of blue paper.
It was a Spanish telegram form; and he read it through again for the twentieth time since it had come into his possession, though he already knew every word of it by heart. It had been sent from Santa Cruz on the twenty- second of December, and it was addressed to a certain Mr Rodney Felson at the Palace Hotel, Madrid. The message ran: MUST REPLACE JORIS IMMEDIATELY CAN YOU SECURE SUBSTITUTE VERY URGENT GRANER Simon folded the sheet and put it carefully away again, but the words still danced before his eyes. He drew the smoke of his cigarette deep into his lungs and let it trickle out towards the ceiling, 'What's the rest of the name?' he enquired, as if he was merely making idle conversation.
A moment passed before she answered.
'Vanlinden,' she said, in the same half-defiant way; and then the Saint knew that he had been right in the wild hunch that had come to him five nights ago in Madrid and sent him driving recklessly through the night to Cadiz to catch the boat that left for Tenerife the next day.
Simon looked up and realised that the scarecrow physiognomy of Mr Uniatz was becoming convulsed with the same sort of expression that might have been found on the face of a volcano preparing to erupt-if a volcano had a face. His eyes were bulging out of his head like a crab's, and his whole face was turning purple with such an awful congestion, that anyone who did not know him well might have thought that he was being strangled. The Saint, who was not in that innocent category, knew in a flash that these horrible symptoms were only the outward and visible signs of the dawning of a Thought somewhere in the dark un-fathomed caves of Mr Uniatz' mind. His eyes blazed a warning that would have paralysed a more sensitive man; but all the sensitiveness in Mr Uniatz would have made a rhinoceros look like a wilting gazelle. Besides, Hoppy's cerebrations had gone too far to be suppressed: he had to get them out of his system or asphyxiate.
'Boss,' he exploded, 'dijja hear dat? Joris Vanlinden! Ain't dat de guy - 'Yes, Hoppy, of course that's the guy,' said the Saint soothingly.
He went quickly over to the bed and sat down facing the girl. It was a moment when he had to act faster than he could think, before Hoppy's blundering feet blotted out every trace of the fragile bridge that he had been trying to build. He held out his hand and smiled disarmingly into her eyes.
'Lady,' he said solemnly, 'this is a great moment. Will you shake?'
Her fingers met his almost immediately.
'But why?' she said.
'Just to keep me going till I can shake hands with Joris himself. I've always wanted to meet one of the boys who pulled off that job at Troschman's-it was one of the classics of the century.'
'I don't think I know what you're talking about.'
He was still smiling.
'I think you do. I said your father had an uncommon name, but I knew I'd heard it before. Now it's all come back to me. I knew I should never forget it.'
And he was speaking nothing but the most candid truth, though she might not understand it.
When some persons unknown got into Troschman's diamond fabriek down on Maiden Lane one rainy night in April, and cleaned out a safe that had held two hundred thousand dollars' worth of cut and uncut stones, the police were particularly interested in the fact that the raid could hardly have been better timed had the raiders been partners in the business. This was impossible, for Troschman had no partners; Troschman's was a small concern which employed only one permanent cutter, taking on other workers when they were needed. As a matter of fact, this cutter was the nearest approach to a partner that Troschman had, for he was acknowledged to be one of the finest craftsmen in the trade, and had been with Troschman ever since the business was started. So that it was natural for him to be given more confidence than an ordinary employee would have received; and when the stones were collected to fill the biggest order that Troschman had ever secured in his career, this cutter was the only other man who knew when the collection was complete. His name was Joris Vanlinden.
The only reason he was not arrested at once was because the police hoped that, by keeping watch on him, they might net the whole gang at one swoop. And then, three days later, he vanished as if the earth had swallowed him up; and the hue and cry which followed had sought him for four years in vain. Only in various police headquarters did his name and description remain on record, with appropriate instructions. In various police headquarters-and in the almost equally relentless memory of the Saint. . . .
Simon Templar could have sat down and listed the authors of every important crime committed in the last fifteen years; and that list would have included a number of names that no police headquarters had on record, and a number of crimes that no police headquarters had even recognised as crimes. He could have told you when and where and how they were committed, the exact value of the boodle, and very often what had happened to it. He could have told you the personal descriptions of the participants, their habits, haunts, specialties, weaknesses, aliases, previous record and modus operandi. He had a memory for those details that would have been worth thirty years' seniority to any police officer; but to the Saint it was worth more than that. It was half the essentials of his profession, the broad foundations on which his career had been built up, the knowledge and research on which the plans for his amazing forays against the underworld were based; and again and again ingenious felons had thought themselves safe with their booty, only to wake up too late when that unparalleled twentieth-century privateer was already sailing into their stronghold to plunder them of all that they had, until there were countless men who feared him more than the police, and unnumbered places where his justice was known to be swifter and more deadly than the Law.
The Saint said nothing about that, though there was no native modesty in his make-up. He looked the girl in the eyes and kept that frank and friendly smile on his lips.
'Don't look so scared,' he said. 'You've nothing to worry about. I'm in the business myself.'
'You aren't anything to do with the police?'
'Oh, I have lots to do with them. They're always trying to arrest me for something or other, but so far it hasn't
