Then he pulled a thick roll of green paper out of his pocket. He fumbled through it, and selected a piece, and pushed it into the Saint's hand. The Saint's blue eyes rested on it with a premonition of doom. Included in its decorative art work was a figure '1' followed by three zeros. Simon counted them.
'That's for today,' said Freddie. 'You're hired. Let's have a drink.'
The Saint sighed.
'I think I will,' he said.
2
ONE REASON why there were no gray hairs on the Saint's dark head was that he never wasted any energy on vain regrets. He even had a humorous fatalism about his errors. He had stuck his neck out, and the consequences were strictly at his invitation. He felt that way about his new employment. He had been very sweetly nailed with his own smartness, and the only thing to do was to take it with a grin and see if it might be fun. And it might. After all, murder and mayhem had been mentioned; and to Simon Templar any adventure was always worth at least a glance. It might not be so dull. . . .
'You'll have to move into the house, of course,' Pellman said, and they drove to the Mirador Hotel to redeem the Saint's modest luggage, which had already run up a bill of some twenty dollars for the few hours it had occupied a room.
Pellman's house was a new edifice perched on the sheer hills that form the western wall of the town. Palm Springs itself lies on the flat floor of the valley that eases impercepнtibly down to the sub-sea level of the Salton Sea; but on the western side it nestles tightly against the sharp surges of broken granite that soar up with precipitous swiftness to the eternal snows of San Jacinto. The private road to it curled precariously up the rugged edges of brown leaping cliffs, and from the jealously stolen lawn in front of the building you could look down and see Palm Springs spread out beneath you like a map, and beyond it the floor of the desert mottled gray-green with greasewood and weeds and cactus and smoke tree, spreading through infinite clear distances across to the last spurs of the San Bernardino mountains and widening southwards towards the broad baking spreads that had once been the bed of a forgotten sea whose tide levels were still graven on the parched rocks that bordered the plain.
The house itself looked more like an artist's conception of an oasis hideaway than any artist would have believed. It was a sprawling bungalow in the California Spanish style that meнandered lazily among pools and patios as a man might have dreamed it in an idle hour-a thing of white stucco walls and bright red tile roofs, of deep cool verandahs and inconsequential arches, of sheltering palm trees and crazy flagstones, of gay beds of petunias and ramparts of oleanders and white columns dripping with the richness of bougainvillea. It was a place where an illusion had been so skilfully created that with hardly any imagination at all you could feel the gracious tempo of a century that would never come again; where you might see courtly hacendados bowing over slim white hands with the suppleness of velvet and steel, and hear the tinkle of fountains and the shuffle of soft-footed servants, and smell the flowers in the raven hair of laughing seёoritas; where at the turn of any corner you might even find a nymph-- Yes, you might always find a nymph, Simon agreed, as they turned a corner by the swimming pool and there was a sudden squeal and he had a lightning glimpse of long golden limbs uncurling and leaping up, and rounded breasts vanishing alнmost instantaneously through the door of the bath house, so swiftly and fleetingly that he could easily have been convinced that he had dreamed it.
'That's Esther,' Freddie explained casually. 'She likes taking her clothes off.'
Simon remembered the much-publicised peculiarities of the Pellman mщnage, and took an even more philosophical attiнtude towards his new job.
'One of your secretaries?' he murmured.
'That's right,' Freddie said blandly. 'Come in and meet the others.'
The others were in the living-room, if such a baronial chamber could be correctly designated by such an ordinary name. From the inside, it looked like a Hollywood studio deнsigner's idea of something between a Cordoban mosque and the main hall of a medieval castle. It had a tiled floor and a domed gold mosaic ceiling, with leopard and tiger skin rugs, Monterey furniture, and fake suits of armor in between.
'This is Miss Starr,' Freddie introduced. 'Call her Ginny. Mr. Templar.'
Ginny had red hair like hot dark gold, and a creamy skin with freckles. You could study all of it except about two square feet which were accidentally concealed by a green lastex swim-suit that clung to her soft ripe figure- where it wasn't artistically cut away for better exposures-like emerald paint. She sat at a table by herself, playing solitaire. She looked up and gave the Saint a long disturbing smile, and said: 'Hi.'
'And this is Lissa O'Neill,' Freddie said.
Lissa was the blonde. Her hair was the color of young Inнdiana corn, and her eyes were as blue as the sky, and there were dew-dipped roses in her cheeks that might easily have grown beside the Shannon. She lay stretched out on a couch with a book propped up on her flat stomach, and she wore an expensively simple white play suit against which her slim legs looked warmly gilded.
Simon glanced at the book. It had the lurid jacket of a Crime Club mystery. 'How is it?' he asked.
'Not bad,' she said. 'I thought I had it solved in the third chapter, but now I think I'm wrong. What did he say your name was?'
'She's always reading mysteries,' Ginny put in. 'She's our tame crime expert-Madam Hawkshaw. Every time anyone gets murdered in the papers she knows all about it.'
'And why not?' Lissa insisted. 'They're usually so stupid, anyone but a detective could see it.'
'You must have been reading the right books,' said the Saint.
'Did he say 'Templar'?' Lissa asked.
The door opened then, and Esther came in. Simon recogнnised her by her face, a perfect oval set with warm brown eyes and broken by a red mouth that always seemed to be whispering 'If we were alone. ...' A softly waved mane the color of smoked chestnuts framed the face in a dark dreamy cloud. The rest of her was not quite so easily identiнfiable, for she had wrapped it in a loose blue robe that left a little scope for speculation. Not too much, for the lapels only managed to meet at her waist, and just a little below that the folds shrank away from the impudent obtrusion of a shapely thigh.
'A fine thing,' she said. 'Walking in on me when I didn't have a stitch on.'
'I bet you loved it,' Ginny said, cheating a black ten out of the bottom of the pack and slipping it on to a red jack.
'Do we get introduced?' said Esther.
'Meet Miss Swinburne,' said Freddie. 'Mr. Templar. Now you know everybody. I want you to feel at home. My name's Freddie. We're going to call you Simon. All right?'
'All right,' said the Saint.
'Then we're all at home,' said Freddie, making his point. 'We don't have to have any formality. If any of the girls go for you, that's all right too. We're all pals together.'
'Me first,' said Ginny.
'Why you?' objected Esther. 'After all, if you'd been there to give him the first preview--'
The Saint took out his cigarette-case with as much poise as any man could have called on in the circumstances.
'The line forms on the right,' he remarked. 'Or you can see my agent. But don't let's be confused about this. I only work here. You ought to tell them, Freddie.'
The Filipino boy wheeled in the portable bar, and Pellman threaded his way over to it and began to work.
'The girls know all about that threatening letter. I showed it to them this morning. Didn't I, Lissa? You remember that note I showed you?' Reassured by confirmation, Freddie picked up the cocktail shaker again and said: 'Well, Simon Templar is going to take care of us. You know who he is, don't you? The Saint. That's who he is,' said Freddie, leaving no room for misunderstanding.
'I thought so,' said Lissa, with her cornflower eyes clinging to the Saint's face. 'I've seen pictures of you.' She put her book down and moved her long legs invitingly to make some room on the couch. 'What do you think about that note?'
Simon accepted the invitation. He didn't think she was any less potentially dangerous than the other two, but she was a little more quiet and subtle about it. Besides, she at least had something else to talk about.
'Tell me what you think,' he said. 'You might have a good point of view.'
