Fortunately, no one was paying any attention to Pietri. Dumaire, his job done, was leaning against the wall and watching Lady Valerie with reptilian eyes in which the only discernible expression had a brazen lewdness that quite plainly revealed his chief preoccupation; Bravache had simply ignored the Saint's last remarks as if he had not heard them. He was busily turning over the things on the table before him. He gave his most detailed attention to the wallet, and he had hardly started on it when a gleam of triumph flowed into his cold eyes. He held up a scrap of buff paper with a large number printed on it.
'Ah!' he said, with a deep satisfaction that was exaggerated by his slightly foreign handling of words. 'The ticket. That is excellent!'
As a matter of fact, it was a ticket in an impromptu sweepstake organized over the week end in Peter Quentin's favourite pub on the outskirts of Anford; but the Saint had known that it was there, and had left it there with the deliberate object of leading the comedy on as far as it would go in the hope of finding out exactly what was meant to be the end of it before he was forced to show his hand.
He waited to see how far his hope would be fulfilled. Valerie Woodchester's eyes were like saucers: they looked at first as if they couldn't believe what they were seeing; and then a veiled half-comprehending, half-perplexed expression passed over them which Simon hoped nobody would see. Bravache folded the ticket carefully and put it in his own wallet. Then he looked at Lady Valerie, and again the limp cigarette dangled between his fingers.
'We are very grateful, my dear lady,' he said. 'You have done a great service to the Sons of France. The Sons of France do not forget services. In future you will be under our protection.' He paused, smiling, and there was something wolfish about his smile. 'Should anything happen to you—should you, for instance, be murdered by one of our enemies—you will be immediately avenged.'
An arpeggio of spooky fingers stroked up the Saint's back into the roots of his hair. In spite of Bravache's stilted phrasing, the almost farcical old-fashioned melodrama in which his tongue rolled itself gloatingly around every word, there was something in his harsh voice that was by no means farcical, something which in combination with that wolfish smile was made more deeply horrible by the unreality of its enunciation. Simon realized for the first time in his life, in spite of everything he had believed, that it was actually possible for a villain to speak like that, in grotesquely serious conformity with the standard caricature of himself, and still keep the quality of terror: it was, after all the jokes were over, the natural self-expression of a certain type of man—a man who was cruel and unscrupulous and egotistical in too coarse a vein to play cat-and-mouse with the dignity that subtleness might give it, and yet whose vanity demanded that travesty of subtleness, and whose total lack even of the saving grace of humour made it possible for him to play the travesty with a perfectly straight face and made the farce more gruesome in the process. In that revealing instant the Saint had an insight into the mentalities of all the glorified Jew-baiters and overblown petty tyrants whose psychology had baffled him before.
He said lightly: 'That'll be fun for you, won't it, Valerie?'
Bravache looked back at him, and again his eyes were cold and fishy.
'You have been attempting to discover the secrets of the Sons of France in order to betray them to our enemies,' he said. 'The penalty for that, as you know, is death.'
'You must have been reading a book,' said the Saint admiringly. 'Or was that Luker's idea ?'
The vulpine twist that was meant to be a smile remained on the other man's thin lips.
'I am acquainted with Mr Luker only as a sympathizer and supporter of our ideals to whom I have the honour to be attached as personal aide,' he replied. 'Your crime has been committed against an organization of patriots known as the Sons of France, of which I am an officer. You are now the prisoner of the Sons of France. We have been informed that you are an unprincipled mercenary employed by the bandits of Moscow to spy upon and betray our organization. Of that I have sufficient proof.' He tapped the pocket where he had replaced his wallet with the sweepstake ticket in it. 'It also appears that you have threatened Lady Valerie Woodchester, who is our friend. Therefore if you were to murder her, it would naturally be our duty to avenge her.'
Simon's arms were beginning to ache and stiffen from being held
