Renway's lids drooped. 'Yes,' he said.
VIII
ACCORDING to his watch, Simon Templar stayed in hat secret cellar for about eighteen hours: with-out that evidence, he could have been fairly easily persuaded that it was about eighteen days.
It was so completely removed from the sense of reality, as well as from the ordinary change of lights and movements of the outer world, that time had very little meaning. At intervals, one of the men would go to a cupboard in the corner and dig out a loaf of bread and a slab of cheese, a tin of beans, or a bottle of beer: those who felt in-clined would join him in a sketchy meal or a drink. One of the card players got up from the table, lay down on one of the beds, and went to sleep, snoring. Another man shuffled the cards and looked flat-eyed at the Saint.
'Want a game?'
Simon took the vacant chair and a stack of chips. Purely as an antidote to boredom, he played blackjack for two hours and finished five chips down.
'That's five hundred pounds,' said Pargo, writing figures with a half-inch stub of pencil on a soiled scrap of paper.
'I haven't got five hundred pounds on me,' said the Saint.
The man grinned like a rat.
'Nor have any of us,' he said. 'But you will have after tomorrow.'
Simon was impressed without being pleased. He had watched Jeddy rake up a stack of chips that must have represented about three thousand pounds at that rate of exchange, without any sign of emotion; and Mr. Jeddy was a man whose spiritual niche in the Buddy-can-you-spare-a-dime class was as obvious as the fact that he had not shaved for three days.
The others were not vastly different. Their physical aspects ranged from the bearded and faintly odorous burliness of Mr. Petrowitz to the rat-faced and yellow-toothed scrawniness of Mr. Pargo; but all of them had the same dominant characteristic in common. It was a characteristic with which the Saint had become most familiar on the west side of the Atlantic, although it was confined to no single race or nationality; a characteristic which Hoppy Uniatz, who couldn't have spelt the word to save his life, would have been the first to recognize: the peculiar cold lifelessness of the eye which brands the natural killer. But there are grades in killers, just as there are in singers; and the men in that cellar were not in the grand-opera class, the class that collects diamonds and expensive limousines. They were men who did their stuff at street corners and in dingy alleys, for a chance coin or two; the crude hacks of their profession. And they were the men whom Renway had inspired with so much confidence in the certainty of his scheme that they were calmly gambling their hypothetical profits in hundred-pound units.
God alone knew how Renway had gathered them together--neither the Saint nor Teal ever found out. But they constituted six more amazing eye-openers for the Saint to add to his phenomenally growing collection--six stony- faced witnesses to the fact that Sir Hugo Renway, whom Simon Templar would never have credited with the ability to lead anything more piratical than a pompous secession from the Conservative Party, had found the trick of organizing what might have been one of the most astounding robberies in the history of crime.
The men took him for granted. Their conversation, when they spoke at all, was grumbling, low-voiced, monosyllabic. They asked Simon no questions, and he had a sure intuition that they would have been surprised and hostile if he had asked them any. The business for which they were collected there was never mentioned--either it had already been discussed so much that there was nothing left to say on the subject, or they were too fettered by habitual suspicion for any discussion to have a chance of getting under way. Simon decided that in addition to being the ugliest, they were also the dullest assortment of thugs he had ever come across.
The man who had been reading the newspaper put it down and added himself to the increasing company of sleepers, and Simon reached out for the opportunity of getting acquainted with the latest lurid accounts of his own entirely mythical activities. They were more or less what he would have expected; but there was a subheading with the words 'Scotland Yard Active' which made him smile. Scotland Yard was certainly active-- by that hour, it must have been hopping about like a young and healthy flea---but he would have given much to see their faces if they could have been miraculously enabled to find him at that moment.
As it turned out, that pleasure, or a representative part of it, was not to cost him anything.
'Put those damn lights out,' a voice from one of the beds growled at last; and Simon stretched himself out on a hard mattress and continued his meditations in the dark, while the choral symphony of snores gained new and individual artistes around him. After a while he fell asleep himself.
When he woke up the lights were on again, and men were pulling on their coats and gulping cups of hot tea. One by one they began to slouch off into the tunnel; and Simon splashed cold water on his face from a basin and joined in the general move with a reawakening of vitality. A glance at his watch showed him that it was half-past four, but it might have been morning or afternoon for all the sense of time he had left. When he came up the creaking stairladder into the billiard room, however, he saw that it was still dark. Renway, in a light overcoat, was standing close to the panel watching the men as they emerged: he beckoned the Saint with a slight backward tilt of his head.
'How are you getting on?' he asked.
Simon glanced at the last two men as they stum-bled through the panel and followed their com-panions across the room and out by the more conventional door.
'I have been in more hilarious company,' he murmured.
Renway did not appear to hear his answer--the impression was that his interest in Mr. Tombs's social progress was merely formal. He did something to the woodwork at the level of his shoulder, and the secret panel closed with a slight click.
'You'd better know some more about our arrangements,' he said.
They went out of the house by the same route as they had finally come in the previous morning. The file of men who had preceded them was al-ready trudging southwards over the rough grass as if on a journey that had become familiar by routine--the Saint saw the little dabs of light thrown by their electric torches bobbing over the turf. A pale strip of silver in the east promised an early dawn, and the cool sweetness of the air as indescribably delicious after the acrid frowstiness of the cellar. Renway produced a flashlight of his own and walked in flat-footed taciturnity. They reached the edge of the cliffs and started down a narrow zigzag path. Halfway down it, the Saint suddenly missed the dancing patches of torchlight ahead: he was wondering whether to make any comment when Renway touched his arm and halted.
