clocking might have catastrophic results. And even then he was trying to timetable something so nebulous that his own intuition was practically the only guarantee that it would work out that way at all.
He slid the key into his door with millimetric stealth, and went into his suite with weightless feet and one hand on the gun which he had borrowed from Mr Varetti before lunch. He had beer caught once that day, and he was not going to make the same mistake again.
But apparently he was still within his margin of time--if it had any real existence at all. There was no one in his living room, or behind the portieres that shut off the bedroom, or in the bathroom or the closet or under the bed. He took each hazard separately and methodically, making no sound to betray his presence until he had covered all of them.
Even then he was very quiet, and denied himself a cigarette that he would have enjoyed because he didn't want to leave fresh smoke in the air.
The suitcase which he had sent up stood beside the sofa in the living room. He didn't touch it.
The iron structure of the fire escape ran outside the bedroom window. Simon had chosen his suite for that reason; but it could work two ways. The front door of the suite could be penetrated in one way or another, but it would present difficulties. Simon thought it would be the fire escape.
The hallway from the front door met the living room at an angle so that there was a corner from which he could cover any entrance from equal concealment. He flattened himself into it and waited, as patient and motionless as a statue in a niche.
Somebody in the adjoining suite turned on a radio at full volume, and it blared away for two or three minutes before it was turned down. Even then, it was too loud.
Of course, it might be the front door. Either Varctti or Walsh might be good with locks, or might be clever enough to con a master key out of somewhere. Or they might even be tough enough to try it with a frontal assault, on a simple smash-grab-and-run basis.
It was curious how he had always assumed that it would be Varetti and Walsh. Even when he spoke to Fernack on the telephone. He had left them locked up in Barbara Sinclair's closet intending to have been back there by that time and busy with the job of advancing their acquaintance on his own terms; but all that had been changed for quite a while. He wasn't quite sure how long ago he had been sure that they were no longer waiting where he had left them, but it seemed now that he had always been sure that they wouldn't be there. It was one of those fourth-dimensional elisions that saw an end before it could pin down all the steps and stages through which the end would come about.
He knew that Varetti and Walsh were out again, because only since they were out again could certain other things have happened. Or, conversely, because other things had happened, they must be out again.
And the rawhide suitcase was standing beside the sofa and someone would come to get it.
It wouldn't take much shopping around to settle on one of the suites directly above the one he was in. And from any such starting point a fire escape that ran down through a gloomy inside courtyard that nobody would ever want to look out at anyway would present virtually no problems at all. . . .
He could really have enjoyed that cigarette.
But how long could he afford to wait, backing his hunch, while he might always be wrong, and the fox might be away in another spinney?
The radio next door was blatting forth some emetic commercial about the perils of fungoid feet or some such attractive ailmen He could hear every word as if he were in the room with it. wondered if it would be loud enough to drown one of the sounds he was listening for.
But it wasn't.
He heard it.
It was the slow cautious rasp of a window-sash being eased quietly upwards. And, after that, the subdued rattle of the slats of the Venetian blind being lifted from below.
So it was the fire escape and the bedroom window; and he had not waited in vain.
There had been an instant of tingling stillness when he heard the sound, but now he was as smooth and cool as a hand-trued machine, and his pulses were as light as the ripples on a landlocked bay at sunset. Now he backed noiselessly out of his neutral corner and flattened himself easily along the wall, towards the front door and away from the rooms, so that the visitor would have to step clear into the living-room before he could see the Saint at all.
The Saint's ears followed the movements in the bedroom step by step. He heard the occasional scuff of exploring feet, and a hoarse 'For Christ's sake, hurry up!' There was the clicking of the blind again, and more movement. It was surprising how you could hear sounds, after all, in spite of the radio: when it came to the point, these sounds had a totally different texture, so that there was no confusion, just as you could have heard a hiccup in the next seat in a movie in spite of the sound effects of a newsreel bombardment. He could even hear the thin strained sound of consciously controlled breathing.
In addition, he became ethereally aware of a new richness in the atmosphere which he could still identify in spite of his recent bludgeoning by the assorted smells of Mrs Ourley, and he knew that he was perceiving the particularly obnoxious pomade of Mr Varetti even before the sleek head that wore it slid into his sidelong field of vision.
Varetti stood looking down at the rawhide bag as Cokey Walsh followed him out of the bedroom.
'Here it is,' he said, with superfluous but deep satisfaction.
'If only that sonofabitch Templar was here too,' said Mr Walsh, 'I'd like to . . .'
He enumerated a few things he would have liked to do which it would be useless to repeat here, since the elevated minds of the readers of this reportage would never believe that any person could have such depraved ambitions.
Varetti, a more practical man, cut him off in the middle of a fine phrase with the kind of question which from time immemorial has nipped the poet's prettier fancies in the bud.
''Why don't you shut your trap?'
He picked up the heavy bag with an effort.
'We'll walk down the stairs and walk straight out the front,' he said.
'Suppose he's in the lobby,' Cokey suggested.
'You go ahead and make sure he isn't.'
'I wanna see that sonofabitch again.'
'You'll have plenty of time.'
Varetti turned towards the door. And there the Saint faced him, elegant and graceful and smiling, with his gun level and tremor less at his waist and blue lights of devilish mockery dancing in his eyes.
It seemed quite unfortunate at that moment that the Algonquin Hotel had omitted to provide two vats of soft plaster of paris among the otherwise well-planned furnishings of the joint. If it had not been for that almost incredible lack of foresight, the cataleptic rigidity of the two men might easily have allowed the Saint to immerse them and withdraw them again without the slightest disturbance of their articulation, thereby creating a pair! of moulds for which any wax museum would have been glad to bid. But such sad wastes are an inevitable symptom of our un-planned economy, and Simon Templar had learned to exercise his philosophy on them.
He said, without undue gloom: 'The hands up and clasped behind the back of the head, gentlemen--if you don't mind my borrowing your own fancy formula, Ricco. Although to be quite' candid it just struck me that your vocabulary had slipped a bit. Or is it because you save your party dialogue for the cash customers?'
Varetti put the bag down gradually and deliberately, and raised his hands in the same way, so that his movements were rather like those of a trained snake; and his eyes were a snake's eyes, bright and beady and unblinking.
'How the hell did you get here?' demanded Mr 'Walsh, almost indignantly.
'I heard you wanted me,' said the Saint, 'so I came a-running. A little faster with the hands, if you don't mind, Cokey. . . . Thank you. . . . Now if you'll both turn your backs I'll see whether you've picked up any new weapons since we last met, and if you are very polite I may refrain from goosing you.'
Apparently they had been rushed out of either the time or the opportunity to replenish their armory, or else they had anticipated no such disconcerting need for one, for the only trophy which rewarded his excavations was a six-inch jackknife from the pocket of Comrade Varetti with a trick spring that whipped the blade open when you pressed a button.
