IT WAS NOT to be expected that Simon Templar could have stayed in Hollywood in an ordinary way. Nothing that ever happened to him was really ordinary-it was as if from the beginning he had had some kind of fourth- dimensional magnetism that attracted adventure and strange happenings, or else it may have been because nothing to him was entirely commonplace or unworthy of expectant curiosity that he had a gift of uncovering adventure where duller people would have passed it by without ever knowing that it had been within reach. But as the saga of perilous light-hearted buccaneerнing lengthened behind him past inevitable milestones of newspaper headlines, it became even more inescapable that adventure would never let him alone, for unordinary people went out of their way to drag him into their unordinary affairs. In the most platitudinous and yet exciting and fateful way, one thing simply led to another, and he was riding a tide that only slackened enough to let him catch his breath before it was off on another irresistible lunge.
It was like that in Hollywood, where he was eating his first breakfast of that visit when the telephone rang in his apartнment at the Chтteau Marmont, which he had chosen preнcisely because he thought that he might attract less attention there than he would have at one of the large fashionable hoнtels with a publicity agent hungrily scrutinising every guest for possible copy.
'Mr. Simon Templar?' said a girl's voice.
It was a businesslike and efficient voice, but it had a nice quality of sound, a freshness and a natural feeling of friendliнness that made him feel interested in talking to it some more. So he admitted hopefully that he was Simon Templar.
'Just a moment,' she said. 'Mr. Ufferlitz is calling.'
Simon was not quite sure whether he caught the name right, but it didn't sound like any name among his acquaintнances. In any case, he had arrived late the night before, and hadn't yet told anyone he knew that he was in town. Of course, it was possible that some shining light of the local Police Department was already leaping on to his trail, afire with notions of importance and glory-that was an almost monotonous habit of shining lights of local Police Departнments, even in much more out-of-the-way places, whenever Simon Templar paused in his travels, although none of them had ever achieved the importance and glory to which their zeal would have entitled them in a world less hidebound by the oldfashioned rules of evidence. But Simon also felt sure that no Police Department employed telephone girls with such friendly voices. It would have disrupted the whole system...
'Hullo, Mr. Templar,' said the telephone. 'This is Byron Ufferlitz.'
'Baron who?' Simon queried.
'Byron,' said the new voice. 'Byron Ufferlitz.'
This voice was not fresh and provocative, although it was apparently trying to be friendly. It sounded as if it was rather overweight and wore a diamond ring and had a cigar in its mouth. It also appeared to think that its name should be recognised immediately and inspire awe in the hearer.
'Have we ever met?' Simon asked.
'Not yet,' said the voice jovially. 'But I want to put that right. Will you have lunch with me?'
There were times when Simon's directness left the Emily Post School of Social Niceties out of the cosmos.
'What for?' he inquired, with the utmost detachment.
'I'm going to give you a job.'
'Thank you. What is it?'
'I'll tell you all about it at lunch.'
'Did anyone tell you I was looking for a job?'
'Oh, I know all about you,' said Mr. Ufferlitz confidently. 'Been watching you for a long time. That was a great thing you did in Arizona. And that funny business in Palm Springs -I read all about it. So I know what you cost. You asked Pellman for a thousand dollars a day, didn't you? Well, I'll pay you the same. Only I don't want a bodyguard.'
'How do you know I can do what you want?'
'Look,' said Mr. Ufferlitz, 'you're Simon Templar, aren't you?'
'Yes.'
'You're the fellow they call the Saint.'
Something like the faintest whisper of distant music seemed to touch the Saint's eardrums with no more substance than the slipstream of a passing butterfly.
'Well,' he admitted cautiously, 'I've heard the name.'
'You're what they call the Robin Hood of modern crime. You're the greatest crook that ever lived, and you've put more crooks away than all the detectives who keep trying to hang something on you. You're always on the side of the guy who's up against it, and you're always busting up some graft or dirty work, and all the gals are nuts about you, and you can jump through windows like Doug Fairbanks used to and knock guys cold like Joe Louis and shoot like Annie Oakley and figure things out like Sherlock Holmes and-and--'
'Catch airplanes in my teeth like Superman?' Simon sugнgested.
'No kidding,' said Mr. Ufferlitz. 'You're the greatest propнosition that ever hit this town. I've got all the angles worked out. Tell you all about it at lunch. Let's say the Vine Street Derby at one o'clock. Okay?'
'Okay,' said the Saint tolerantly.
Which was exactly why and because he was Simon Tempнlar, the Saint, and things always happened to him. The last few sentences of Mr. Ufferlitz had given him a sudden and fairly clear idea of what sort of proposition Mr. Ufferlitz would consider 'great', and what kind of angles Mr. Ufferlitz would have worked out-even before he turned to the teleнphone directory and found an entry under UFFERLITZ PRODUCTIONS, Inc. Anyway, he had nothing else to do and no other plans for lunch, and Mr. Ufferlitz could alнways provide comic relief.
He was right about that; but he also had no inkling whatнever of a number of quite unfunny things that were destined to cross his path as a direct result of his amused acceptance of that invitation.
During the morning he called a friend of his, an agent; and after they had exchanged a suitable amount of nonнsense he inquired further about Mr. Ufferlitz.
'Byron Ufferlitz?' repeated Dick Halliday. 'He's quite an up-and-coming producer these days. A sort of cross between Sammy Glick and Al Capone. I don't suppose you'd know about it, but he bobbed up only a little over a year ago with some wildcat Studio Employees Union that he'd invented, and somehow he got so many studio employees to join it and made such a nuisance of himself with a few well-timed strikes that finally they had to buy him off.'
'By suddenly discovering that he was a production genius?'
'Something like that. The Government tried to get him for extortion, but the witnesses called it off, and he was supposed to be wanted in New Orleans on some old charge of sticking up a bank, but nothing came of that either. Now he's quite the white-haired boy. He brought in a picture for about fifty thousand dollars, and surprisingly enough it wasn't bad. What does he want you to do-sell him your life story or bump somebody off?'
'I'm going to find out,' said the Saint, and went to his apнpointment with even a shade more optimism.
The Brown Derby on Vine Street-smarter offspring of the once famous hat-shaped edifice on Wilshire Boulevard-was unchanged since he had last been there. Even the customers looked exactly the same-the same identifiable people, even with different names and faces, labeled as plainly as if they .had worn badges. The actors and actresses, important and unimportant. The bunch of executives. The writers and diнrectors. The agent with the two sides of a possible deal. The radio clan. The film colony surgeon and the film colony attorney. The humdrum business men and the visiting firemen. The unmistakable tourists, working off this item of their itinнerary, trying hard to look like unimpressionable natives but betraying themselves by the greedy wandering of their eyes.
In this clear-cut patchwork of types the Saint acquired a puzzling neutrality. He stood scanning the room with interest, but he was quite positively not a tourist. Yet the tourists and the non-tourists stared at him alike, as if he were someone they should have known and were trying to place. With the casual elegance of his clothes and his dark handsome face he could have been some kind of romantic actor, only that his good looks didn't seem to have any of the weaknesses of a romantic actor-they had a sinewy recklessness of fundaнmental structure that belonged more to the character that a romantic actor would try to play than to the character of the impersonator. But he was quite unactorishly unaware of attracting that sort of interest at all, and was satisfied when he caught the eye of a man who was waving frantically at him from a booth halfway down the room, who could only have been Mr. Byron Ufferlitz.
For Mr. Ufferlitz looked just like his voice. He was rather overweight, and he wore a diamond ring, and he had
