Call for the Saint

They had parted on a tentative agreement to lunch again, and it was not likely that anyone so punctual as she was would be careless about an engagement. Probably, he told himself, she had gone shopping.

He called again every half hour until one-thirty, and stayed in his own room for fear of missing her if she called him.

It was not an afternoon to remember with any pleasure or any pride. He must have walked several miles, pacing the room steadily like a caged lion and taking months of normal wear out of the carpet. He tried to tell himself that his imagination was running away with him, that he was giving himself jitters over nothing. He told himself that he should have kept Monica entirely out of it, that he should never have let her learn anything, that he would only have himself to blame if she tried to steal the play from him. He saw her all the time in his mind's eye, a composite of all her tantalizing facets-sultry, impish, arrogant, venturesome, languorous, defiant, tender. He felt angry and foolish and frightened in turn.

Mr. Uniatz worked on his BB marksmanship with un­troubled single-mindedness. He could learn nothing from the Saint's face, and to him the operations of the Saint's mind would always be a mystery. It was enough for him that there was a mind there, and that it worked. All he had to do was carry out its orders when they were issued. It was a panacea for all the problems of life which over the years had never failed to pay off, and which had saved untold wear and tear on the rudimentary convolutions of his brain.

At five o'clock Simon remembered that Monica might have a matinee, and verified it from the newspaper. He walked to the Martin Beck Theatre and went in the stage door.

'Miss Varing ain't on this afternoon,' said the doorman. 'She's sick.'

With lead settling in his heart, Simon sought out the stage manager.

'That's right,' said the man, who remembered him. 'She called me this morning and said she wouldn't be able to go on. She said if I hadn't heard from her by this time she wouldn't be doing the evening performance either.'

'She isn't sick,' said the Saint. 'She hasn't been in her hotel all day.'

The stage manager looked only slightly perturbed. He said nothing about artistic temperament; but his discretion itself implied that he could think of plausibly mundane explanations.

Simon took a taxi to the Ambassador and finally corralled an assistant manager whom he could charm into co-operation. A check through various departments established that room service had delivered breakfast to Monica Varing's apartment at nine, that she had been gone when the maid came in at eleven. But her key had not been left at the desk, and no one had seen her go out.

'No one knows they saw her,' Simon corrected, and asked his last questions of the doorman.

Already he knew what the answer would be, and wondered what forlorn hope kept him trying to prove himself wrong.

'An old ragged woman, looked like she might be a beggar?

. . . Yes, sir, I did see her come out. Matter of fact, I wondered how she got in. Must have been while I was calling someone a cab.'

'On the contrary,' said the Saint, with surprising gentleness, 'you opened the door for her yourself.'

He left the man gaping, and went back into the hotel to call Lieutenant Kearney.

CHAPTER TWELVE

The boiler room in the basement of the Elliott Hotel was not quite as bleak as the description implies. This was only because the description does not mention several rows of hard wooden benches, the bodies of several dozen apathetic occupants of them, a few paper decorations left over from some previous Christmas, and the platform at one end where Stephen Elliott was filling in with some merry ad-libs as the Saint found his way in.

'And-ah-as the stove said to the kettle, I hope you're having a hot time.' Nobody laughed, and Elliott went on: 'We want you to enjoy yourselves, friends, and the next item on tonight's program is a song by Mrs. Laura Wingate.'

He handed Mrs. Wingate up to the platform, and the con­nection between his two statements became somewhat obscure as the piano began to tinkle out an uncertain accompaniment and Mrs. Wingate cut loose with an incredibly piercing and off-key soprano.

'My heart is like a singing bird Whose nest is in a watershoot, My heart is like an apple tree Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit--'

Stephen Elliott was taking Mrs. Wingate's place beside a tall thin man to whom she had been talking when she was called. As Simon edged up behind them, he recognized the tall thin shape as Lieutenant Alvin Kearney.

'I'm sure I don't know what it's about,' the detective was saying, in a voice that had no need to drop its level to avoid interfering with the earsplitting stridencies that were welling from Mrs. Wingate's throat. 'For all I know, it may be just another of his funny gags. But I'd look plenty silly if anything happened and I wasn't here.'

Elliott took out a handkerchief and patted his temples, while Mrs. Wingate continued to liken her heart to various other improbable objects.

'I don't know anything about it,' he said mildly. 'But if he's working on a case--'

'Oh, is he?' Kearney snapped that up with the avidity of a starving shark. 'What case?'

Elliott hesitated.

'I really can't say,' he replied at last. 'Why don't you ask him?'

'Yes, why not?' Simon, agreed, and they both turned.

Kearney's lips thinned over his teeth as he met the Saint's affable smile. There was no thoroughly defensible reason for his reaction, yet it was a basic reflex which in its time had produced fundamentally identical effects upon such widely separated personalities as Chief Inspector Teal of Scotland Yard, Inspector Fernack of New York City, Lieutenant Ed Condor of Los Angeles, Sheriff Newt Haskins of Miami, and many others who will be remembered by the unremitting fol­lowers of this saga. It was perhaps something that sprang from the primal schism of law and disorder, an aboriginal cleavage between policeman and outlaw whose roots were lost in the dank dawns of sociology.

Lieutenant Alvin Kearney of Chicago liked the Saint, ad­mired him, respected him, envied him, and hated him with an inordinate bitterness that loaded stygian tints into his scowl as he rasped: 'All right, wise guy, you tell me. What was the idea phoning me to meet you here tonight because there might be a riot?'

'I guess it was a form of stage fright,' said the Saint, with an aplomb which made Kearney feel as if he had two days' growth of beard and a dirty neck. 'I'm not very used to these personal appearances, and I felt nervous. You can't tell what an audience like this might do, so I thought I should have some protection.'

What the detective thought would have been inaudible even in the volume of voice which his congested face portended, for at that moment Mrs. Wingate's vocal analysis of her heart attained a screeching fortissimo that almost scraped the paint off the walls.

'My heart is gladder than all these, Because-my lo-o-ove-has come to me!'

As silence finally settled upon tortured eardrums, there was some perfunctory applause. It was rather nicely adjusted to show grateful appreciation without encouraging an encore. Since apparently the coffee and doughnuts would not be served until after the entertainment, the audience could not walk out, but it did not have to be hysterical.

Mrs. Wingate panted and bowed twitteringly to the very last handclap, which naturally came from Stephen Elliott.

'Thank you, thank you, my dear friends. . . . And now I see that our special guest of the evening has arrived, and I'm going to ask him to come up here and say a few words to you. It is a great privilege to be able to introduce-Mr. Simon Templar.'

Simon stepped up on the platform to the resigned acclama­tion of the coffee-and-doughnuts claque. He raised Mrs. Wingate's pudgy hand to his lips, and ushered her off in giggling confusion. Then he made a sign of dismissal to the piano player.

'I'm not going to sing,' he said.

While the accompanist withdrew, he waved cheerfully to the gaping Lieutenant Kearney, and ran friendly blue eyes over the faces of the rest of the audience. A few of them looked like the respectable struggling poor, some were ordinary shiftless down-and-outs; these would be bona fide beggars, helpless vic­tims of the King's racket; and undoubtedly there were others who worked directly for the King. Big Hazel Green was no­where in evidence,