a cigar in his mouth. The rest of him fitted those features in with the picture that Simon had constructed from Dick Halliday's comments. He had thick shoulders and thick black hair, and his face had a quality of actual physical toughness that was totally different from the thin-lipped affectation of a tough guy behind a mahogany desk.
'Have a drink,' said Mr. Ufferlitz, who had already been passing the time with a highball.
'Cleopatra,' said the Saint.
'What's that?' asked Ufferlitz, as the waiter repeated it and moved away.
'One of the best dry sherries.'
It was as if Ufferlitz opened a filing cabinet in his mind, punched a card, and put it away. But he did it without the flicker of a muscle in his face, and sat back to make a coldнblooded inventory of the Saint's features.
'You're all right,' he announced. 'You're swell. I recogнnised you as soon as you came in. From your pictures, of course. But I couldn't tell from them whether they'd just-caught you at a good angle.'
'This is a great relief to me,' Simon remarked mildly.
A flash bulb popped at close quarters. Simon looked up, blinking, and saw the photographer retreating with an inнgratiating grin.
'That's just a beginning,' explained Mr. Ufferlitz complaнcently. 'We'll get plenty more pictures later, of course. But there's no harm grabbing anything that comes along.'
'Would you mind,' asked the Saint, 'telling me just what this is all about?'
'Your build-up. Of course I know you're a celebrity alнready, but a little extra publicity never hurt anyone. I've got the best press-agent in town working on you already. Want you to meet him this afternoon . . . We got you all fixed up for tonight, by the way.'
'You have?' Simon said respectfully.
'Yep. It was in Louella Parsons this morning. I shot it in last night, soon as I knew you'd arrived. Didn't you see it?'
'I'm afraid I was too busy reading the subsidiary part of the paper. You know-the part where there's a war going on.'
Mr. Ufferlitz thumbed through a bulging wallet and exнtracted a clipping. It had a sentence ringed in red pencil.
...Simon Templar ('The Saint', of course) will be in town today, and the glamor girls have a new feud on. But his first date is April Quest, whom he will squire to Ciro's tonight. They met in Yellowstone last summer ...
'It's wonderful,' said the Saint admiringly. 'A whole new past opens behind me.'
'You'll be crazy about her,' said Mr. Ufferlitz. 'Face like a dream. Chassis like those girls in Esquire. And intelligent! She's been all through college and she reads books.'
'Does she remember Yellowstone too?'
For the first time, a slight cloud passed over Mr. Ufferlitz's open features.
'She'll cooperate. She's a real trouper. You gotta cooperнate too. Hell, I'm paying you six G a week, ain't I?'
'Are you?' said the Saint interestedly. 'I don't remember that we fixed it definitely. It might help if you told me what you wanted me to do.'
'All I want you to do,' said Ufferlitz expansively, 'is be yourself.'
'There's a catch in it,' said the Saint. 'I do that most of the time for free.'
'Well, there's a difference .. .'
The revelation of the difference had to wait while they gave their lunch order. Then Mr. Ufferlitz put his elbows on the table and leaned forward.
'This is the greatest idea there's ever been in pictures,' he stated modestly. 'They've done plenty of movies about modнern heroes-Edison-Rockne-Sergeant York-all the rest of 'em. But there's always something phony about it to me. I can't look at Spencer Tracy and think he's Edison, because I know he's Spencer Tracy. I can't see Tyrone Power building the Panama Canal or the Pyramids or whatever it was. Now when the Duke of Windsor walked out of Buckingham Palace I had a great idea. Let him play himself in his own story. It was a natural. I wrote to Sam Goldwyn about it-I was in business in Chicago then-but he was too dumb to see it. Would ya believe that?'
'Amazing,' said the Saint.
'But this is even better,' said Mr. Ufferlitz, cheering up. 'You're plenty hot yourself, right now, and some ways you got more on the ball. Everything you've done was on your own. And you can still do it. Sergeant York couldn't play himself because he's an old man now, but you're just right. And are you photogenious? Hell, the fans'll go nuts about you!'
Simon Templar took a long mouthful of Cleopatra.
'Wait a minute,' he said. 'Do I get the idea that this earth-shaking idea of yours is a scheme to make a movie star out of me?'
'Make a star?' echoed Mr. Ufferlitz indignantly. 'You are a star! All I want you to do is help me out with one picнture. We'll make it a sort of composite of your life, ending up with that Pellman business in Palm Springs. I got a coupla writers working on it already-they'll have a first draft for me tomorrow. You'll play yourself in your own biography. I had the idea all worked out for a fiction character-Orlando Flane was going to do it for me-but this is ten times hotter. We can easily fix up the story.'
His face was bright with the autogenous energy of its own enthusiasm. And then, as if a switch had been flipped over, the theatrical lighting was gone. The professional illuнmination which he had picked up somewhere in his career went away from him, and there was only the heavy-boned face that had kicked an independent union together and made it stick.
'Of course,' he said, 'there are plenty of people who'd hate to see me make a hit with this idea. One or two of 'em would go a long ways to wreck it. That's why I couldn't try it with anyone but you. I guess you can take care of yourself. But if you're scared, we can call it off and you won't get hurt.'
2
SHE WAS EVERYTHING that her voice had promised. Beнyond that, she had golden-brown hair and gray eyes with a sense of humor. She looked as if she could take care of herself without hurting anyone else. She had a slim figure in a navy blue sweater that brought her out in the right places. She was taller than he had expected, incidentally. Long legs and neat ankles.
Simon said: 'By the way, what's your name?'
'Peggy Warden,' she told him. 'What now?'
'While the attorneys haggle over my epoch-making conнtract, you're supposed to introduce me to the writing talent.'
'The third door on the left down the passage,' she said. 'Don't let them get your goat.'
'My goat is in cold storage for the duration,' said the Saint. 'See you later.'
He went to the third door down the passage and knocked on it. A voice like that of a hungry wolf bawled 'Yeow?' The Saint accepted that as an invitation, and went in.
Two men sat around the single battered desk. Both of them had their feet on it. The desk looked as if it had learned to think nothing of that sort of treatment. The men had an air of proposing that the desk should like it, or else.
One of them was broad and stubby, with a down-turned mouth and hair turning gray. The other was taller and thinнner, with gold-rimmed glasses and a face that looked freshly scrubbed, like the greeting of a Fuller Brush Man. They inнspected the Saint critically while he closed the door behind him, and looked at each other as if their heads pivoted off the same master gear.
'I thought he'd have a machine-gun stuck down his pants leg,' said the gray-haired one.
'They didn't put the chandelier back in time,' countered the Fuller Brush Man, 'or he could swing on it. Or am I thinking of somebody else?'
'Excuse me,' said the Saint gravely. 'I'm supposed to be taking an inventory of this circus. Are you the performing seals?'
They looked at each other again, grinned, and stood up to shake hands.
'I'm Vic Lazaroff,' said the gray-haired man. 'This is Bob Kendricks. Consider yourself one of us. Sit down and make yourself unhappy.'
'How are you getting on with the epic?' Simon inquired.
'Your life story? Fine. Of course, we've had a lot of pracнtice with it. It started off to be a costume piece
