'There y' are, doc,' said the cabby. 'An' take it easy.'
Simon paid his fare and added a generous tip, and went in.
It was apparent as soon as he was inside that at least the adjective in the name was justified. The decorator who had dreamed up the trimmings must have been hipped on Gershwin. Everything was done in a bluish motif-- walls and tablecloths and glass and chairs. There was the inevitable from hunger orchestra, with too much brass and a blue tempo, and the inevitable tray-sized dance floor where the inevitable mixture of sailors, soldiers, salesmen, and stews were putting their work in with the inevitable assortment of wild kids who had drunk too much and wise women who hadn't drunk enough. Even the lighting scheme was dim and blue.
The only thing that wasn't clear from the entrance was whether the customer got goosed, or was merely a goose to be there.
Simon crossed to the bar and ordered a Scotch and water, saving himself the trouble of ordering Peter Dawson, which would have been no different anyway in spite of the label on the bottle. He got It with plenty of water in a shimmed glass, and saved his breath on that subject also.
He said to the bartender: 'Throgmorton----'
'Call me Joe,' said the bartender automatically.
He was a big blond man with big shoulders and a slight paunch, with a square face that smiled quickly and never looked as if the smile went very far inside.
'Joe,' said the Saint, 'do you know a gal here by the name of Olga Ivanovitch?'
The man paused only infmitesimally in his mopping.
At the Saint's side, a voice with strange intonations in it said: My name is Olga Ivanovitch.'
Simon turned and looked at her.
She sat alone, as certain other women did there, with a pile drink in front of her. He hadn't paid any attention to her when he chose his stool, but he did now. Because she had a real beauty that was the last thing he had expected there--in spite of the tradi-tional requirements of a well-cast mystery.
Beauty of a stately kind that had no connection with the common charms of the other temptations there. A face as pale and aristocratic as that of a grand duchess, but with the more earthy touches of broad forehead and wide cheekbones that betrayed the Slav. Blonde hair as lustrous as frozen honey, braided severely around her head in a coiffure that would have been murder to any less classic bone structure. Green eyes that matched her deep-cut green gown. By her birth certificate she might have been any age; but by the calendars of a different chronology she had been old long ago--or ageless.
'Why were you looking for me?' she asked in that voice of unfamiliar harmonies.
The bartender had moved down the counter and was busy with other ministrations.
'I wanted to know,' said the Saint steadily, 'what you can tell me about a character called Henry Stephen Matson--possibly known to you as Henry Stephens.'
3 He had to admire the way she handled the mask of her face, even with the underlying configuration to help her.
'But why should you ask me?' she protested, with seductive bewilderment.
The Saint put one elbow on the bar and pillowed his chin on the hand attached to it.
'Darling,' he said, with every kind of friendliness and good humor and amiable sophistication, 'you are an exceedingly beauti-ful creature. You've probably been told that at least once before if not ten times an evening. You are now hearing it again--but this time from a connoisseur. Nevertheless, ready as I am to swoon before you, the few fragments of sense that I have left will not let me go along with the gag of treating you as an ingenue.'
She laughed; and it was something that he registered in her favor, if only because she was probably the only woman in the place who could have unraveled his phraseology enough to know whether to laugh or not.
She said: 'Then I won't do?'
'You'll do perfectly,' he assured her, 'if you'll just take my word for it that I'm strictly in favor of women who are old enough to have had a little experience--and young enough to be interested in a little more. But they also have to be old enough to look at an old tired monument like me and know when I don't want to sit up all night arguing about storks.'
It was a delight to watch the play of her shoulders and neck line.
'You're priceless. . . . Would you buy me a drink?'
'I'd love to. I expect to buy the whole joint, a small hunk at a time. If I have a drink too, it should be worth two tables and a dozen chairs.'
He signaled the square-faced bartender.
'And a cigarette?' she said.
He shook one out of his pack.
'You've got quite a sense of humor, Mr----'
'Simon Templar,' he said quietly, while the bartender was turning away to select a bottle.
Her perfectly penciled eyebrows rose in perfectly controlled surprise.
'Simon Templar?' she repeated accurately. 'Then you must be----Here, let me show you.'
She reached away to remove a newspaper from under the nose of a recuperating Rotarian on the other side of her. After a moment's search, she re-folded it at an inside page and spread it in front of the Saint.
Simon saw at a glance that it was the early morning edition of the Times-Tribune, and read the item with professional appraisal.
It was not by any means the kind of publicity that he was ac-customed to, having been condensed into four paragraphs of a middle column that was overshadowed on one side by the latest pronunciamento of the latest union megaphone, and on the other by a woman in Des Moines who had given birth to triplets in a freight elevator. But it did state quite barrenly that an unidentified burned body had been found on the shore road east of Virginia Point by 'Simon Temple, a traveling salesman from Chicago'. The police, as usual, had several clues, and were expected to solve the mystery shortly.
That was all; and the Saint wondered why there was no mention of the name that the dying man had given him, or his gasped reference to the Blue Goose, and why Lieutenant Kinglake had been so loth to give out with any leads on the night life of Galveston. Perhaps Kinglake hadn't taken the Saint's question seriously at all. . . .
Simon turned his blue steel eyes back to Olga Ivanovitch again, and gave her a light for her cigarette. Once more he was aware of her statuesque perfection--and perfect untrustworthiness.
He lifted his newly delivered dilution of anonymous alcohol.
'Yes,' he acknowledged modestly, 'I am the traveling salesman. But you aren't the farmer's daughter.'
'No,' she answered without smiling. 'My name is Ivanovitch.'
'Which means, in Russian, exactly what 'Johnson' would mean here.'
'But it's my name.'
'And so is 'Templar' mine. But it says 'Temple' in the paper, and yet you placed me at once.'
'For that matter,' she said, 'why did you ask me about-- Henry?'
'Because, my sweet, if you'd like the item for your memoirs, your name was on dear Henry's lips just before he passed away.'
She shuddered, and closed her eyes for a moment.
'It must have been a gruesome experience for you.'
'How did you guess?' he inquired ironically, but she either didn't feel the irony or chose to ignore it.
'If he was still alive when you found him . . . Did he say anything else?'
The Saint smiled with a soft edge of mockery.
'Yes, he said other things. But why should you be so interested?'
'But naturally, because I knew him. He was to have come to my house for cocktails this afternoon.'
'Was he really?' said the Saint gently. 'You know, I can think of one man in this town who'd be quite excited to hear that.'
Her dark gaze was full of innocence.
'You mean Lieutenant Kinglake?' she said calmly. 'But he has heard it. He's already talked to me tonight.'
Simon took a gulp of his drink.
'And that's how you got my name right?'
'Of course. He asked me about you. But I couldn't tell him anything except what I've read in the
