The Saint Steps In

He probably told her you might be connected with someone who was trying to put over a dirty deal on him in business. He wouldn't tell her anything else. But she seems to be carrying quite a torch for you.' Devan met the Saint's gaze with brash man-to-man candor. 'You're on your own, as far as that goes. She could be a lot of fun.'

'If I played ball,' said the Saint.

Devan made an affirmative movement with his head and his cigar at the same time.

'Why be a dope? You can't win. But there aren't any hard feelings. Bart and I both appreciate what you've done, and what you're after. And the proposition he made you still goes. One hundred per cent.'

'But if I turn you down——'

'Why bring that up? I don't have to tell you we can't leave you around now. But you belong with us.'

Simon glanced at the stump of his cigarette. Having been warned once, he didn't try to get up and move towards the ashtray that Devan was using. He trod the cigarette out on the carpet, and lighted another.

He had heard the threat of death many times in his life, but never with such utter certainty and conviction. Even though not a word had been said about it at all. It gave him a sense of frozen inevitability that no noise and savagery could have done. And he knew that Walter Devan was just as aware of it as he was. They spoke the same language so closely that it would have been merely a waste of energy to shout . . .

Devan stood up, still holding the gun.

'Why don't you take a few minutes to think it over?' he said.

He went to the door through which the long big-boned man had gone out; and as he opened it he jerked his head towards the second door.

'Calvin Gray and his daughter are in the next room,' he said. 'Say hullo to them if you want to.'

Simon Templar was alone.

He got to his feet after a moment, surveyed the room once more in a detached way, and turned to the other door.

It opened when he tried the handle, and he went in.

It was a room very much like the one he had left. Madeline Gray and her father sat side by side on a divan close to the door. It had to be Calvin Gray, of course, before she jumped up and introduced them.

'How do you do,' said the Saint.

They shook hands. A strange formality, and a stranger trib­ute to the perdurance of common customs.

Madeline Gray left her hand resting on the Saint's arm, and he smiled down at her and said: 'How soundproof are the doors?'

'We heard all of it, in the other room,' she said.

It was all very quiet; and when you came down to it there didn't seem to be any other way it could be.

'Then we can save a lot of repetition,' said the Saint. 'I don't even care very much about the details of how you two were snatched. It's relatively unimportant now.'

'What were you saying in there,' she asked, 'about Imber­line?'

'They killed him.'

He told them all about that, from the dossiers he had studied through to his session with Fernack in the morning. He skipped as lightly as he could through the interval he had spent with Andrea. He gave her credit for having tried to keep him out of that trap without telling him about it, but he didn't elaborate on the counter- attractions she had offered. But he saw Madeline watching him rather thoughtfully.

'In one way,' he said grimly, 'you could say that I killed him. Just like I got the two of you into this. By being, too clever . . . You were quite wrong about him. On the evidence, he had to be honest. So I went to him as an honest man—to see if I couldn't convert him to our side. I wasn't able to do that in five minutes—it took him too long to understand any­thing that wasn't a proverb—but at least I figured that I'd laid up some more trouble for the Ungodly. Unfortunately, I had. But I didn't know he'd be seeing Quennel and Devan that same night. And even after I saw Devan downstairs, I didn't think of it in the right way. I suppose they were having this conference in New York because too many people are watch­ing too many other people's maneuvers in Washington; they knew by then that the ice was awful thin and getting thinner by the minute with me breathing on it, and they had to make sure they could keep Imberline where they wanted him. In­stead of that, they got just the reverse. Suspicion had started to penetrate into that mess of porridge he used for a brain, and there was no talking him out of it. When he checked with Jet­terick, they knew they were up against it. They may have tried threats or bribery at that point, but he was just too stubborn or stupid to be scared or bought—it doesn't make any differ­ence now. There was only one way to stop him then; and they stopped him.'

'But we still want to know how you got here,' said the girl huskily.

Simon's glance reflexed to the doors again. But it didn't really matter. He had nothing to say just then that couldn't be overheard.

'I'll tell you,' he said.

He lay on the other divan and told them, stretched out in an amazing restful relaxation that was not actually any testi­monial to the steel in his nerves at all, but only to the supreme conversation of energy that a trapped tiger would have had.

He told them everything he had thought from the begin­ning; and in as much detail as he could remember he gave them an account of the dinner conversation in which so many things had been so elementarily explained.

He tried to do a good job of it; but he still didn't know how well he had made his point when he had finished report­ing and Calvin Gray said: 'How can a man like Quennel be like that?'

He was a fairly tall wiry man, lean almost to the verge of emaciation, with a tousled mop of perfectly white hair and eyes that blinked with nervous frequency behind square rim­less glasses; and he said it with an air of academic perplexity, as if he were fretting over a chemical paradox.

The Saint put one hand behind his head and gazed at the ceiling.

'Simply because he is a man like that. Because he's more dangerous than any fifth columnist or any outright crook, be­cause he sincerely believes that he's a just and important and progressive citizen. Because he can talk contemptuously about Cafe Society and the playboy class, and really believe it and feel austerely superior to them, and sandwich it in between mentioning his new strings of polo ponies and the parties he throws for his daughter where they drink thirty cases of cham­pagne. 'They're dead but they don't know it'—but he's one of them and he doesn't know it ... Because he can disclaim profiteering while he feels very contented about 'increased capital values' . . . Because he's very proud of his share in the War Effort, but he thinks nothing of faking the registration of the family cars so as to get more than his share of gas to play with. Because he doesn't mind using a German agent like Mor­gen if Morgen can be useful, instead of turning him over to the FBI; but he'd be full of righteous indignation if you called him a fifth columnist . . . Because he hates Fascism and he's a patriotic one- hundred-per-cent American; but he be­lieves in what he calls 'social stability' and 'a strong and ca­pable executive class' whose divine mission it is to dish out liberty and democracy in reasonable doses to the dumb unruly proletariat . . . Because he's thoroughly satisfied that Big Business is wide awake and wading into the war effort with both hands, but he's also ready to sabotage a rival process that would speed up and cheapen a very vital production, be­cause it would lose him a hell of a lot of dough . . . Because he builds model homes and organizes baseball teams and sewing bees for his employees to keep them happy, but he be­lieves that nabobs like himself should have a law of their own which transcends the rights of ordinary mortals . . . Because he's exactly the same type as Thyssen and the other Big Business men who backed Hitler to preserve their own kind of So­cial Stability; because he'd back his own kind of dictatorship in this country, under another name, and still think what a fine level-headed liberal he was . . . Because he's a goddam bloody Nazi himself, and you can never hang it on him be­ cause even he hasn't begun to realise it.'

His voice seemed to linger in the air, so quiet and sensible, and yet with a feeling so much deeper