'Quite,' said Renway and went on humming.
The butler came in with a tray, put it down, and departed. Renway crossed over to it and poured whisky into two glasses.
'Soda?'
'Thanks.'
Renway worked the siphon and handed over the drink. Then he took up his own glass; and abruptly, as if he were blurting out something which he had been mustering his determination to say for several minutes, he snapped: 'I suppose you don't think I believe that story of yours about being a patent-medicine salesman?'
'Don't you?' said the Saint evasively.
'Of course not. I know cocaine when I see it.'
Simon, who had carefully rilled all his tins with boracic, wanted to smile. But he glanced apprehensively at the valise, which he had put down beside his chair, and then hardened his face into an ineffective mask.
'But don't worry,' said Renway. 'I'm not going to tell the police. It's none of my business. I'm only wondering why a fellow like you--clever, daring, a good pilot--why you should waste your time over small stuff like that.'
Simon licked his lips.
'It isn't so very small. And what else is there for me to do? There aren't so many jobs going these days for an out-of-work ace. You know yourself that war heroes are two a penny nowadays. I'm desperate enough to take the risk; and I want the money.'
'You'll never make a million out of it.'
'If you know anything that I can make a million out of, I'll do it.' .
Renway swallowed another gulp of whisky and put down his glass. In the last few moments the jangling of his nerves seemed to have risen to a pitch at which anything might crack. And yet it was without the tense wearing raggedness that he had felt before--he had a crazy breathless presentiment of success, waiting for him to grasp if he risked the movement. It had come miraculously, incredibly, literally out of the blue; and it was all personified in the broad-shouldered blue-eyed shape of the dangerous young man whose leather coat filled his armchair. Renway wiped his mouth on a silk handkerchief and tucked it away.
'Tomorrow morning,' he said, 'an aeroplane will leave Croydon for Paris with about ten tons of gold on board-- as a matter of fact, the value will be exactly three million pounds. It is going to be shot down over the Channel, and the gold is going to be stolen. If you were desperate enough, you would be the man to do it.'
VII
Simon Templar did not need to act. The peculiar stillness that settled over him called for no simulation. It was as starkly genuine as any expression his face had ever worn.
And far back in the dim detached recesses of consciousness he was bowing down before the ever-lasting generosity of fortune. He had taken that wide sweep out over the sea and choked his engine over the cliffs at the southern boundary of March House, staged his whole subsequent demonstration of guilt and truculence, rolled the dice down the board from beginning to end with nothing more substantial behind the play than a vast open-minded optimism; but the little he knew and the little he had guessed, the entire nebulous theory which had given him the idea of establishing himself as a disreputable airman, was revealed to be so grotesquely inadequate that he was temporarily speechless. His puerile stratagem ought to have gained him nothing more than a glimpse of March House from the inside and a quick passage to the nearest police station; instead of which, it had flung doors wide open into something which even now he could scarcely believe in cold blood.
'It couldn't be done,' he said at length.
'It can be done by a few men with the courage to take big chances for a share in three million pounds,' said Renway. 'I have all the necessary information. I have everything organized. The only thing I need to make it certain is the perfect pilot.'
Simon tapped his cigarette.
'I should have thought that was the first thing.'
'It was the first thing.' Renway drank again. He was speaking with more steadiness now, with a conviction that was strengthening through every sentence; his faded stare weaved endlessly over the Saint's face, changing from one eye to the other. 'I had the ideal man; but he--met with an accident. There wasn't time to find anyone else. I was going to try it myself, but I'm not an expert pilot. I have no fighting experience. I might have bungled it. You wouldn't.'
Meeting the gaze of those unequally staring eyes, Simon had an eerie intuition that Renway was mad. He had to make a deliberate effort to separate a part of his mind from that precogni-tion while he pieced his scanty facts together again in the light of what Renway had said.
There had been a pilot. That would have been( Manuel Enrique, who died on the Brighton road. A new pilot swooped down out of the sky, and within twenty minutes was being offered the vacant post. With all due deference to the gods of luck, it seemed as if that new aviator were having a remarkable red carpet laid out for him.
'You don't only need a pilot,' said the Saint mechanically. 'You need a proper fighting ship, with geared machine guns and all the rest of it.'
'There is one,' said Renway. 'I took it from Hawker's factory last night. It's one of a new flight they're building for the Moravian government. The one I took had been out on range tests, and the guns were still fitted. I also took three spare drums of ammunition. I flew it over here myself--it was the first night landing I've ever made.'
It had not been a particularly clean one, Simon remembered; and then he saw the continual tensing and twitching of Renway's hands and suddenly understood much more.
There had been a pilot; but he had--met with an accident. And yet the plot in which he had a vital role could not be given up. Therefore it had grown in Renway's mind to the dimensions of an obsession, until the point had been reached where it loomed up as the needle's eye of an insanely conceived salvation. Although Enrique was dead, the aeroplane had still been stolen: Renway had flown it himself, and the ordeal of that untutored night flight had cut into the marrow of his nerves. Still the goal could not be given up. The new pilot arrived at the crisis of an
