Nothing much more than could have been found in
He turned next to Walter Devan. He had recalled a few associations of that name since their meeting, and he found them verified and extended.
Born in a small town in Indiana, father a carpenter. Ran away to Chicago at sixteen. Newsboy, Postal Telegraph messenger, dishwasher, car washer. A few preliminary bouts as fall guy for rising middleweights. professional football. A broken leg. Garage mechanic; night school. Machinist in an automobile factory in Detroit. Repair man in the Quenco plant at Cincinnati. Repair foreman. Then, in a series of rapid promotions, engineering manager, assistant plant superintendent at Mobile, personnel manager for the entire organization of the Quennel Chemical Corporation.
And that was where the biography became quite interesting, for Walter Devan's conception of personal management, which apparently had the approval of Quenco to the extent of raising his salary to an eventual high of $26,000 a year, was something new even in that comparatively youthful industry. He was credited with having become the field commander of Quennel's long and bitter fight against unionism, a miniature civil war which had only been ended by congressional legislation. He had been accused in a Senate investigation of institut ing an elaborate system of spies and stoolpigeons, of coercing employees with threats and blackmail, of saying that any union organizers caught on Quenco property would be qualified for a free funeral at the corporation's expense. Certainly he had more than once imported regiments of strike-breakers, and been the generalissimo of pitched battles in which several lives had been lost. But he had easily cleared himself of one indictment for manslaughter, and the blackest mark on his legal record was an order to cease and desist. Entrenched behind his own taciturnity and protected by all the power of Quenco, he had become a semi-mythical bogey man, an intermittent subject for attacks by such writers as Westbrook Pegler, a name that the average public remembered without being quite sure why; but even if the papers in Simon's hands only collated facts and rumors which had already been found inadequate by the Law, they still solidified into a portrait which was realistic and three-dimensional to him.
It was, he meditated, a portrait that was well worth setting beside Walter Devan's very timely arrival on the scene of the attempted kidnaping, and the misunderstanding through which Morgen and his chunky companion had been enabled to make their getaway. Not to mention the Saint's impression that Devan could have been the man who squeezed by him in the cocktail lounge of the Shoreham, who could have slipped a note in his pocket if Morgen hadn't—but he wasn't sure about that.
The only thing missing was any special connection between Devan and Morgen. Devan, from his dossier, was no more concerned with politics than Calvin Gray. The only club he belonged to was the Elks. His only quoted utterances were on the subject of unions, and obvious sturdy platitudes about Capital and Labor, and, under examination, hardly less obvious defenses of the Quenco policy and methods. A pre-war attempt to link him with the German-American Bund had collapsed quite ridiculously. He was a man who worked at his job and kept his mouth shut, and didn't seem to divide his loyalty with anything else.
'And yet,' Simon thought, 'if he doesn't know more about at least some of this charade than I do, I will devote the rest of my life to curling the hair on eels.'
He built himself another highball, and turned logically to the file summary on Hobart Quennel.
This was another of those superficially straightforward histories which any sound citizen is supposed to have. Quennel was the son of a respectable middle-class family in Mobile, Alabama. His father owned a prosperous drug store, in which Quennel worked after he left high school. Out of this ordinary origin, perhaps, in some deep-rooted way, might have stemmed both Quennel's ultimate aggrandisement of the chemical industry and his choice of Mobile for the establishment of one of Quenco's newest and largest plants.
Orphaned at twenty-one, Quennel had sold the drug store and gone north. He went to law school, graduated, joined a New York firm of corporation attorneys, worked hard and brilliantly, became a partner at twenty-eight. Married, and sired Andrea. Six years later, the deaths or retirements of the senior partners had made him the head of the firm. Two years later, he became the receiver in bankruptcy of an obscure manufacturing drug company in Cincinnati. One year from that, after a series of highly complicated transactions which had never been legally disputed, he was a majority stockholder and the firm was getting on its feet again. That was the beginning of the great Quennel Chemical Corporation.
The further developments were even more complicated in detail—in fact, Treasury experts had spent large sums of public money in efforts to unravel them—but fairly simple in outline. The obscure manufacturing drug company had prospered and grown until it was one of the most important in the country. It had absorbed small competitors and enlarged its interests. Somewhere quite early in the tale, Mrs. Quennel, who had been an earnest art student of Greenwich Village, found that her married life was unbearably deficient in romance, and left for Reno with a Russian poet of excitingly Bolshevist philosophy. Encouraged rather than discouraged, Hobart Quennel left his law business entirely to the junior partners he had taken, and devoted his legal genius exclusively to his own commerical interests. Over the following years, and out of a maze of loans, liquidations, mergers, stock exchange manipulations, mortgages, flotations, and holding companies, Quenco finally emerged—an octopus with factories in four different states, no longer concerned only with such simple products as aspirin and lovable laxatives, but branching out into all the fields of fertilisers, vitamins, synthetics, and plastics, and presenting impeccable balance sheets full of astronomical figures in which Mr. Quennel's personal participation ran to millions of dollars a year.
His present life was busy but well upholstered. He kept the reins of Quenco firmly in his hands, but found time to belong to a long list of golf, chess, bridge, polo, and country clubs. For several years before the war he had regularly taken a summer vacation in Europe, accompanied by Andrea as soon as she was old enough. He was one of those Americans who once sang the praises of Mussolini because he made the trains run on time. He had rescued Andrea from three or four escapades which had made news—one concerned with a Prussian baron, one with the breaking of bottles over the heads of gendarmes in the casino at Deauville, and one with an accountant in Chicago whose wife had old-fashioned ideas about the sanctity of the home. There was a note that several of Andrea's other liaisons which had not become public scandals seemed to have been impartially divided between her father's business associates and business rivals. Hobart Quennel himself was a model of genial good behavior. He was a Shriner, staunch Republican, and a dabbler in state and national politics. He also had been the subject of a Senate investigation, a defendant under the Sherman Act, and an implacable feudist of the Labor rela tions Board; but with seasoned forensic skill he had managed to emerge as nothing worse than a rugged individualist who had built up a great industry without ever being accused of robbing hungry widows, who was a diehard opponent of government interference, and who had to be respected even if disagreed with. Curiously, he had made public denunciations of the America First Committee, and had voluntarily pioneered in the compulsory fingerprinting of employees and in laying off all Axis nationals even before there had been any official moves in that direction.
'A deep guy,' thought the Saint. 'A very deep guy indeed.' He had his own interpretation of some of the items in Quennel's biography. He could see the connection between the middle-class beginning and the gigantic plant at Mobile, the local boy making good. He could see the link between the Bolshevik poet and the Mussolini railroad schedules. He could even tie up the bourgeois Southern background with the advancement of Walter Devan as the Imperial Wizard of a strictly private Ku Klux Klan. But all of that still didn't tarnish Hobart Quennel's unimpeachable Americanism, misguided as you might think it, or the fact that even the most scurrilous attacks on him had never been able to attach him adhesively to any subversive faction or foreign-controlled activity.
Hobart Quennel was indisputably a very clever man; but could he have been as clever as that, for so many years, exposed all the time to any sniper who wanted to load a gun for him?
The Saint lowered his drink an inch, and made himself acknowledge that something he had been looking for was still missing. And for the first time he began to wonder whether he had been wrong from the start. An easily preconceived idea, even a series of very ready deductions, were desperately tempting to coast on and glutinously hard to shake off once the ride had started. But facts were facts; and the dossiers in his hands hadn't
