silence.'
He went back to the library, and Erik Nordsten looked up as he came in.
'Was I all right?' he asked.
'You were magnificent,' said the Saint. He stretched himself and grinned. 'You must be just about all in by this time, my lad. Let's call it a day. A hot bath and a night's sleep in clean sheets'll make a new man of you. And you will be a new man. But there's just one other thing I'm going to ask you to do tomorrow.'
'What is it?'
'There's a rather pretty kid named Vickery round at my house who put me into the whole thing, if you haven't forgotten what I told you. I can smuggle her out of the country easily enough, but she's still got to live. One of your offices in Sweden might find room for her, if you said the word. I seem to remember you telling Claud Eustace that you were interested in reforming criminals, and she'd be an excellent subject.'
The other nodded.
'I expect it could be arranged.' He stood up, shrugging himself unconsciously in the unfamiliar feeling of the smart lounge suit which Simon had found for him in Nordsten's wardrobe; and what must have been the first smile of two incredible years flickered momentarily on his tired mouth. 'I suppose there's no hope of reforming you?'
'Teal has promised to try,' said the Saint piously.
Ill
THE ART OF ALIBI
I
Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal unfolded the paper wrapping from a leaf of chewing gum with slow-moving pudgy fingers, and the sleepy china-blue eyes in his pink chubby face blinked across the table with the bland expressionlessness of a doll.
'Of course I know your point of view,' he said flatly. 'I'm not a fool. I know that you've never done anything which I could complain about if I were just a spectator. I know that all the men you've robbed and'--the somnolent eyes steadied themselves deliberately for a moment--'and killed,' he said--'they've all deserved it--in a way. But I also know that, technically, you're the most dangerous and persistent criminal outside of prison. I'm a police officer, and my job is technicalities.'
'Such as pulling in some wretched innkeeper for selling a glass of beer at the wrong time, while the man who floats a million-pound swindle gets away on a point of law,' Simon Templar suggested gently; and the detective nodded.
'That's my job,' he said, 'and you know it.'
The Saint smiled.
'I know it, Claud,' he murmured. 'But it's also the reason for my own career of crime.'
'That, and the money you make out of it,' said the detective, with a tinge of gloomy cynicism in his voice.
'And, as you say, the boodle,' Simon agreed shamelessly.
Mr. Teal sighed.
In that stolid, methodical, honest, plodding, unimaginative and uninspired mechanism which was his mind, there lingered the memory of many defeats--of the countless times when he had gone up against that blithe and bantering buccaneer, and his long-suffering tail had been mercilessly pulled, stretched, twisted, strung with a pendant of tin cans and fireworks, and finally nailed firmly down between his legs; and it was not a pleasant recollection. Also in his consciousness was the fact that the price of his dinner had undoubtedly been paid out of the boodle of some other buccaneering foray, and the additional disturbing fact that he had enjoyed his dinner immensely from the first moment to the last. It was very hard for him to reconcile those three conflicting emanations from his brain; and his heavy-lidded eyes masked themselves even deeper under their perpetual affectation of weariness as he rolled the underwear of his spearmint ration into a small pink ball and flicked it across the restaurant tablecloth. He might even have been phrasing some suitable reply which should have comprehended all the opalescent facets of his paradox in one masterly sentence; but at that moment a waiter came to the table.
The chronicler, a conscientious and respectable citizen whose income-tax payments are never more than two years in arrears, hesitates over those last ten words. He bounces, like an inexpert matador on the antlers of an Andalusian bull, upon the horns of a dilemma. All his artistic soul, all that luminescent literary genius which has won him the applause and reverence of the reading world, rises in shuddering protest against that scant dismissal. He feels that this waiter, who rejoiced in the name of Bassanio Quinquapotti, should have more space. He is tempted to elaborate at much greater length the origin and obscure beginnings of this harbinger of fate, this dickey-bird of destiny; to expatiate in pages of elegant verbiage upon the psychological motivations which put him into permanent evening dress, upon his feverish sex life, and upon the atrophied talent which made him such a popular performer on the sackbut at informal Soho soirees. For this waiter who came to the table was the herald of five million golden pounds, the augur of one of the Saint's most satisfactory adventures, and the outrider of yet another of the melancholy journeys of Mr. Teal. With all these things in mind, the sensitive psyche of the historian revolts from that terse unceremonious description --'a waiter came to the table.' And only the bloodthirsty impatience of editors and publishers forces him to press on.
'Excuse me, sir,' said this waiter (whose name, we insist on recording, was Bassanio Quinqua-potti), 'but are you Mr. Teal?'
'That's right,' said the detective.
'You're wanted on the telephone, sir,' said the waiter (Bassanio Quinquapotti).
Mr. Teal got up and left the table. Ulysses, at some time or another, must have got up and left a table with the same limpid innocence, undreaming of the odyssey which lay before him. . . . And the Saint lighted a cigarette and watched him go.
It was one of those rare occasions when Simon Templar's conscience carried no load; when his restless brain was inevitably plotting some fresh audacious mischief, as it always Was, but there was no definite incident in the daily chronicles of London crime which could give Scotland Yard cause to inquire interestedly into his movements; and Chief Inspector Teal was enjoying a brief precarious interlude of peace. At those times the Saint could beguile
