He wanted it to be that way, to go into swift movement and the exalting leap of danger that left no time for profitless introspection and static gentleness; he was tired of thinking. There was no bravado in it. He wanted whatever they had waiting-wanted it with an insolent and desperate desire.
'Lead on, Adolphus,' he said, and the waiter's eyes barely flickered.
'Yes, sir. This way.'
They went around the perimeter of the room, past the front of the orchestra, and through the curtained doorway that served the floor show artistes for an entrance. A passage turned to the left, parallelling the wall for a couple of yards, and then turned straight back at right angles.
Simon stopped at the corner of the L and adjusted a shoelace that was perfectly well tied. March and Friede had both been dancing when he crossed the floor, but if it was part of their plan to follow him closely into the back of the building he could do no harm by confusing the timetable. He spent rather a long time over the shoelace, long enough for them to have blundered into him, but no one followed.
He straightened up at last and went on.
The passage was about eighty feet long, ending in a door which from the iron bars over its pebble glass panel he guessed to be an exit from the building. The wall on the left gave out warmth for a few yards as he passed it, and a muted rattle and dink of metal and china that came through it suggested a kitchen. Aside from that blank space, there were plain doors on both sides. A pretty blackhaired girl in a gaudy print brassiere and sarong came out of one door, passed them with hardly a glance, and went on to wait for her announcement. Further down, on the other side, a twittering of high-pitched male voices came through another door. It opened, and something in a strapless sequin gown and a silver wig came out, leered at them, said 'Wooo!', and vanished through the door opposite like a leprechaun.
The waiter stopped just beyond that point, and Simon came up alongside him.
'The last door, sir, on the left'
'Thank you.'
The Saint passed him and strolled on. The steadiness of his movement was a triumph of cold nerve over instinct, but he felt as if there was a bullseye stencilled between his shoulder-blades. His ears strained for the click of a cocked gun or the premonitory swish of a blackjack, or even a breath too close behind . . , Then he was at the last door, and as he turned towards it he was able to glance sideways down the length of corridor through which he had come. The waiter had turned his back and was walking slowly away. There was no one else visible.
Simon laughed, silently and without humour. Perhaps he really was getting old and jumpy, letting his imagination blind his judgment.
And yet there was nothing fanciful about the bullet that had been sent him by the man he was going to see.
He paused for a moment at the door. Without intention, but simply from force of habit, he knew that his feet had made no sound through the approach. But during that pause he could hear nothing within the room-not the least rustle of human speech or movement. There were only the distant undertones which had become unnoticeable through acceptance-the waiter's retreating steps, the chitter from other dressing-rooms, the dissonances of the kitchen, and the distant drift of music. But in spite of that, or because of it, he lowered the hand which he had raised to knock.
Instead, his fingers closed on the door knob. He took one long breath; and then in one feline ripple of co- ordination he threw the door open and slid diagonally into the room.
Two men with round stolid faces like Tweedledum and Tweedledee stood in one comer with their hands held high. Jesse Rogers reclined on a shabby divan with his hands behind his head, a lighted cigarette drooping from one corner of his mouth. There was no weapon anywhere near him to account for the attitudes of Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The single reason for that was a cumbersome .45 Colt which swung around in the hand of a fourth member of the congregation whose lanky legs stretched forward from a chair tilted back against the dressing table.
Sheriff Newt Haskins spat accurately at the feet of one of his captives, squinted his keen grey eyes at the Saint, and said: 'Well, ain't this nice? Come right in, son. We were sort of expectin' you.'
Simon Templar carefully closed the door.
There was rather a lot to assimilate all at once, and he wanted time. The entire tableau gave him the impression of some sort of a mad tea-party from Alice in Wonderland. Of course, he had already seen the March Hare, he reflected hysterically. And now there was Tweedledum and Tweedledee. Doubtless Sheriff Haskins would turn out to be the Mad Hatter. Jesse Rogers, from his position, looked like a promising candidate for the Dormouse. Presently they would all start singing and dancing, with Toots and Vivian doing a hot rumba in the middle.
That was the way it felt at first. The Saint could have taken a whole army of hoodlums in his stride, and turned up his nose at a forest of machine-guns, by comparison with the cataclysmic shock of what he actually saw. It left him wondering, for perhaps the first time in his life, whether he had any right to be patronising about the pedestrian intellectual reflexes of Hoppy Uniatz . . .
'Hullo, Sheriff,' he drawled. 'You do get around, don't you?'
The sheer electronic energy that it cost him to maintain that air-conditioned nonchalance would have twisted the needle of any recording instrument known to science off its bearings; but he achieved it. And with a simultaneous equal effort he was forcing himself to try and wring a coherent interpretation out of the scene.
The only entirely unplumbed factors were Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
Aside from their generic facial resemblance, they shared the hollow-stomached muscular emphasis of professional bullies-and something more. It was something strange and out of place even in that plethora of improbabilities, something that was bound up by devious psychological links with the strangeness that had struck him about some of the revellers outside.
In another split second he realised what it was. Even in surrender, their carriage had the ingrained rigidity of soldiers on a parade-ground. They only needed the addition of field boots and Sam Browne belts to complete the picture.
Two guns lay on the dressing table beside Haskins' left shoulder. The Sheriff caught Simon's glance at them, and moved his chair a little to offer a better view. He puckered his lips, weasening his face with furrows, and underlined the weapons with a backward jerk of his left thumb.
'Now that you're heah, son, mebbe you can help us. A feller like you should have a right smart knowledge of firearms. What do you make of these shootin' irons?'
The Saint made no attempt to get closer-he knew better than to make an incautious move against a man who seemed to have the situation so comfortably lined up. Newt Haskins might look like a piece of antique furniture if he were set down in the streamlined atmosphere of New York's Centre Street, but Simon was not deceived. Haskins wasn't even nervous. He was utterly relaxed-a natural deadly machine buttressed with the simple knowledge that if he shot six times, six men would die.
'One of them is a Smith & Wesson .357 Magnum,' said the Saint.
'An' the other?'
Simon screwed up his eyes.
'It looks like a Webley Mark VI .455 Service revolver.'
'Service, hey?' The Sheriffs free hand caressed his neck. 'What service would that mean?'
'It was the official British Army revolver in the last war,' Simon replied slowly. 'I don't know whether they're still using it'
Haskins peered sidelong at Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
'Do either o' these lads look to you like they mighta been in the British Army?'
Simon shook his head.
'They look more as if they'd belong on the other side.'
'That's how it seemed to me. But I took those irons away from Hans and Fritz less 'n fifteen minutes ago.' Another stream of tobacco juice hit the floor. 'Now, why would you figure one o' these Krauts would be totin' a gun that looks more like it ought to belong to you?'
'I don't suppose I can prove it,' said the Saint, 'but I never owned one of those guns in my life.'
Haskins pushed back his black hat and scratched his head.
'I can't prove you ever did, either, if it comes to that,' he said. 'But it seems to me you still got plenty of explainin' to do. There's a whole lot o' things goin on that don't make sense, an' you're in the middle of all of 'em.'
