Templar had suggested was swept away, and he was standing solidly on a decision of his own.
'If you want to know what we were talking about,' he clipped out, 'Templar was giving me a stall, and I pretended to fall for it. Now I'm going to see where he takes me. Yard, you can take charge here. I'm going to follow the Saint myself, and I'm going to bust this whole case if it takes me till Christmas.'
'But Lieutenant,' protested the dumbfounded Yard, 'what about the Chief? What about . . .'
'The Chief,' Kinglake said shortly, 'and the Commissioner, and the Sheriff, and everybody behind them, can----'
He did not say that they could jump in the lake, or go climb a tree, or perform any of the more conventional immolations. It is indeed highly doubtful whether they could have done what the Lieutenant said they could do. But Kinglake was not very concerned just then with literal accuracy. He had an objective of his own which mattered a lot more to him, and he left his extraordinary statement fluttering forgotten in the air behind him as he stalked out.
Simon Templar was also dominated by o.ne single idea. The murder of Matson had been unfortunate, but he could exonerate himself from it. The murder of Vaschetti had been still more unfortunate, but the excuses he could make for himself for that were flimsy gauze before his own ruthless self-criticism. But his reaction to that had already reversed itself into a positive driving force that would go on until the skies fell apart--or he did. For the ungodly to have murdered two men almost under his nose and within split seconds of giving him the precious information that he had to get was an insolence and an effrontery that he was going to make them wish they had never achieved. The Saint was angry now in a reckless cold savage way, not as he had been when he first went from Police Headquarters to the offices of the Times-Tribune, but in a way that could only be soothed out in blood.
And now he thought he knew where he was going to find the blood that night.
A taxi took him to the Blue Goose; but this time he didn't need the driver to vouch for him. The doorkeeper remembered him, and let him in at once. He walked through the blue melodious dimness towards the bar, loose- limbed and altogether at his ease; yet there were filaments stirring through all the length of him that kept no touch at all with that lazily debonair demeanor. He caught sight of Olga Ivanovitch sitting at a table with another girl and two obvious wholesale bottle-cap salesmen, but he only gave her a casual wave and went on to find a stool at the bar. He knew she would join him, and he waited good-humoredly while the brawny blond bartender worked over complicated mixtures for a complicated quartet at the other end of the counter.
Then she was beside him; and he knew it by the perfume she used and the cool satin of he'r hand before he looked at her.
'I'm glad you got here,' she said. 'Did you get your job done?'
She was exactly the same, lovely and docile, as if she was only glad of him and wanting to be glad for him; as if death had never struck near her or walked with the men she knew.
Simon made a movement of his head that seemed to answer the question unless one stopped to wonder whether it meant yes or no. He went on before that could happen: 'I nearly didn't come here. What I'd really hoped to do was curl up at home with a good book from the circulating library.'
'What was the book?'
'Just a piece of some guy's autobiography. However, when I went to pick it up, it was gone. A man named Nick Vaschetti had it earlier in the evening. He hadn't finished with it--but he has now. I suppose you wouldn't know where it is?'
Her eyes were still pools of emerald in the mask of her face.
'Why do you say that?' She seemed to have difficulty in articulating.
'Lots of people read. It occurred to me----'
'I mean that this--this Vaschetti--hadn't finished with the book--but he has now?'
'He's given up reading,' explained the Saint carelessly. 'He was so upset about having the book taken away from him that he stepped out of an eighth-floor window--with the help of a couple of your pals.'
He watched the warm ivory of her face fade and freeze into alabaster.
'He's--dead?'
'Well,' said the Saint, 'it was a long drop to the sidewalk, and on account of the rubber shortage he didn't bounce so well.'
The bartender was standing over them expectantly. Simon said: 'Dawson for me; and I guess you know what the lady's drinking.' He became absorbed in the way the man worked with his big deft hands.
And then suddenly he knew all about everything, and it was like waking up under an ice-cold shower.
He took his breath back gradually, and said without a change in.his voice except that the smile was no longer there: 'You don't know Brother Blatt and his playmates very well, do you, Olga? Especially Maris. But if I'd only been a little brighter I'd have just stayed here and found Maris.'
She was staring at him rigidly, with wide tragical eyes. It was a good act, he thought cynically.
The bartender stirred their drinks and set them up, fastidiously wiping spots of moisture from the bar around them. Simon appealed to him.
'I should have asked you in the first place, shouldn't I, Joe? You could have shown me Maris.'
The man's big square face began to crinkle in its ready accommodating smile.
And the Saint knew he was right--even though the conclusion had come to him in one lightning-flash of revelation, and the steps towards it still had to be retraced.
Maris, the man nobody knew. Maris, the man nobody had ever heard of. The truly invisible man. The man whom the assistant manager of the Ascot might have been referring to, and have forgotten, even, when he said that he had been chatting with a friend when Nick Vaschetti came home to die. The man nobody ever saw, or ever would see; because they never looked.
Simon lifted his glass and took a sip from it.
'You could have told me, couldn't you?' he said, with his eyes like splinters of blue steel magnetised to the man's face. 'Because everybody calls you Joe, but they don't give a damn about your last name. And I don't suppose you'd tell them it's Maris, anyway.'
It was strange that everything could be so clear up to that instant, and then be blotted out in an explosion of blackness that sprang from somewhere behind his right ear and dissolved the universe into a timeless midnight.
11 There were bells tolling in the distance.
Enormous sluggish bells that paused in interminable suspense between each titanic bong! of their clappers.
Simon Templar was floating through stygian space towards them, so that the clanging became louder and sharper and the tempo became more rapid as he sped towards it.
He was hauling on the bell cords himself. It seemed vaguely ridiculous to be ringing peals for your own funeral, but that was what he was doing.
His arms ached from the toil. They felt as though they, were being pulled out of their sockets. And the knell was blending into pain and sinking under it. A pain that swelled and receded like a leaden tide . . . like a pulse beat . . .
His mind came back gradually out of the dark, awakening to the realisation that the carillon was being played inside his own cranium, and the pain was synchronised with the beating of his own heart.
He became aware that he was in a windowless chamber with some sort of plastered rock walls. A naked light bulb shone in the middle of the low ceiling. It was a cellar. There were collections and scatterings of the kind of junk that accumulates in cellars. There was an ugly iron furnace; and lines and criss-crosses of pipe hung high under the ceiling, wandering from point to point on undivinable errands, like metal worms in exposed transit from one hole to another.
He was close to one of the walls, sagging downward and outward, his whole weight hanging from his outstretched arms. He had been tied by the wrists to two of the overhead pipes, about six feet from the floor and the same distance apart. That accounted for the ache in his arms. Otherwise, he was unconfined.
He found the floor with his feet and straightened his knees. That eased the racking strain on his joints and ligaments, and reduced the pain of the ropes biting into his wrists, and might eventually give the throbbing of his strangled circulation a chance to die down. But it was the only constructive movement he could make.
Then he saw Olga Ivanovitch.
