His face had neither pity nor passion, but only a relentless and inescapable sincerity that was out of a different universe from the lazy flippancy which he usually wore with the same ease as he wore his clothes.
'Barbara, there are little guys from farms and filling stations who wouldn't even know how it all worked who're fighting more odds than just the enemy because of what he's doing. They're wading through steamy slime in South Pacific jungles, and chewing sand in Africa, and freezing to death in their tracks in the Ukraine. But that doesn't bother your private Santa Claus, so long as there are still a few good chefs in Manhattan and he ha? plenty of green paper to pay for all the little luxuries that help to alleviate the hardships of the home front. And if you take his side, all that is true about you too.'
'I'm not taking his side,' she said desperately. 'He's been good to me, and I'm just giving him a chance.'
'Of course he's been good to you. You wouldn't have done anything for him if he hadn't. No crook or traitor or any other kind of louse can afford to be any other way with anyone he needs for an enthusiastic accomplice.'
She rocked back and forth in the chair, with a kind of unconscious automatism, as though she was somehow trying to lull back all the tormenting consciences that his steady remorselesi voice awakened.
'I've told you,' she repeated dully. 'I've told you I'll talk to you later. It's only a little while. And then you and all your policemen and secret service and FBI men can go after him like a pack of wolves.'
'There's just a little more to it than that,' said the Saint quietly. 'Us wolves, as you call us, would like to go after him very respectably, and give him a fair trial with proper publicity just to encourage anyone else who might have similar ideas.
'How nice of you,' she said.
He didn't know why he went on trying.
'The evidence you could give,' he said rather tiredly, 'could be quite important. That's just half the reason why I'm talking to you now, and using up all this good breath. The other halt is because I'm trying to give you a break. This is your chance to get out from under. I'm not trying to sell you now. Its too late for that. But I've still got to try and make you see that the jig is up, no matter what you do; but you can come out in quite a different light if you just make it possible for me to swear quite truthfully that you'd cooperated to the fullest extent with those fine creatures whom John Henry Fernack loves to refer to as the proper authorities'.'
She gazed steadily at him with dark empty eyes.
He inhaled through his cigarette again, and said with a glacial evenness that was beginning to grow a little bitter like a winter Minset: 'I'm telling you very quickly that this is the best chance you'll ever have. Maybe the last chance.'
She hesitated, with her lips working in tiny unconscious patterns. He might have interpreted any of them into an effort to frame the name that he was expecting; but that would only have been his own imagination, and it was not enough.
He still waited, even when it seemed too long. He was that' sort of dope.
And then her lips were still, and tight and sullen and lost again. It was exactly as if a mould had set.
'You'll have to wait,' she said stubbornly; and he stood up slowly. 'I told you,' she said.
Simon Templar drew his cigarette bright once more without tasting it, standing quite still and looking at her.
Everything went through his memory and understanding like a newsreel pouring through some far-off chamber of his brain.
She was so very beautiful, so physically desirable; and in a light way that might eventually have had more to it she had once briefly been fun. When he had first seen her swinging her long legs on the porch of the late Mr Linnet's home, he had thought that she was everything that a girl out of a story should have been. It was a pity that in real life story-book introductions didn't always end up the way story-books ended. But this was not anything that could be changed by wishing.
She was in love with, or hopeful for, or in fear of, or hypnotised by, or standing strongly and stupidly beside a man who would have looked like an ideal practice target to savage staggering men in any of the localised hells of the war. And still, whatever the reason might be, there was a pattern set, and it was more solid than any momentary work of his could break.
She only had to speak two words, two words that made one name, one name that was already tramping and tramping through his mind; but she would not do that.
And he could understand that, just as he could understand the craters on the moon, without being able to do anything about it. He could understand it just as he understood Milton Ourley's lust for money and a different life from the one he was forced to live at Oyster Bay, and just as he understood Titania Ourley's eroding hunger for young men and rumbas, and just as he understood Fernack and Varetti and even Cokey Walsh and Allen Uttershaw who played with quotations like a tired juggler toying with a cigar.
If it wasn't for the impenetrable blockages like that, they cot all have been such nice normal people.
Like Inspector Fernack, who had lived all his life by the manual which had been given to him when he joined the Department as a rookie cop, was really a nice person. He was straight and square and he knew the Law and he believed in it. When his human nature and his critical sense of realities came out, as it did sometimes, it hurt him. He tried to fight against it but it wasn't often much good. The mould was set and casehardened; the reflexes were conditioned for keeps.
Barbara Sinclair could have married the son of the druggist at the corner of Main and Teenth, in her home town, and she could have alternately bulged and slimmed as she produced future druggists or presidents. She could have gone to Saturday night dances and flirted mildly with her next-door neighbor's husband while she worried about whether Junior or Freddie or Ike had thrown off the covers and whether the hired girl had fallen asleep or was out keeping a rendezvous on the corner with the top sergeant who had just come into her life.
Milton Ourley could have been the boss foreman of a crew of dock wallopers, harmlessly loosing off his choleric tongue on the job of lashing bigger and better men into setting new records in hip loading. Little bull- shaped men like that usually made good bosses because they inevitably went around with their shoulders hunched and a chip on both. If only Milton Ourley had never gotten into the money and the money had never gotten into him, he might have been quite a worthy and worthwhile individual who would never have become involved with anything more crim-inal than a pair of black-market nylons.
Titania Ourley could have had a husband who knew how to dominate her as she really needed to be dominated, instead of one who had convinced himself and ended by convincing her that the only way to hold her was by pouring more and more wealth and power into her hands. Then she would never have had the fundamental frustration that had reversed itself into her own exaggerated desire to dominate--to dominate the mate whom she despised for being dominated, to conquer and dominate everyone else with whom she came in contact by any kind of gushing effort, to buy or bully the sequacious young men who could flatter her that the charms she had wasted on her ineffectual spouse were still intact and devastating.
Varetti and Walsh could have climbed a little way up any humdrum but honest ladder, but at the time when their choice was made the Noble Experiment was in full swill, and it was becoming a simple axiom on the tough street corners where they dawdled that a pint of ersatz gin worth twenty cents could be marketed for a dollar. But to get that market some other mer- chant or salesman might have to be eradicated, and so the shooting came next and it came with enough impunity so that before long there were no more qualms about murder than there were about swallowing one of the illicit drinks that the murder was done for, not any more for them than for the righteous law-breaking public who didn't see the blood on the bottles and didn't give a damn anyway. Cokey Walsh had gone to the snow for the plain practical nerve and speed that he needed, but on any moral issues his soul was as shark- skinned as Varetti's. The only difference now was that the days of their splendor were gone and they would do their killing for much less money, because they were stragglers from an army that had passed into limbo and like any other stragglers they had to live off the land as best they could.
Allen Uttershaw was easy to understand. He was a business man who should have been a dilettante. He was a good business man but his only interest in business was the ultimate goal of being able to get out of it and live the vague and graceful life that his peculiar dramatisation of himself required. If he had inherited a million dollars twenty years ago he would have been a timeless and contented flaneur in a world of sleek penthouses, velvet smoking jackets, first editions, vintage wines, silk dressing gowns, and the conversation of connoisseurs. He would have sauntered with faultless charm and savoir faire through his elegantly lepi-dopteral existence, quoting his snatches of poetry with that dis-arming half-smile up his sleeve that always made you wonder if it was worth
