The Saint Steps In s-24

by Leslie Charteris

  "A nice dish, eh?"

  "A very nice dish. But to get back to Gray's invention—you haven't seen it demonstrated yourself, I take it?"

  Imberline shook his head.

  "No. I'm a busy man. I can't be running all over the country to view the brainstorm of every crackpot. I looked at his sam­ple and I told my staff to investigate it. That's all I could do. Even you might understand that."

  Simon stared at him thoughtfully through a couple of clouds of smoke. He was beginning to get an odd feeling about this interview which fitted with nothing that he had expected. Frank Imberline was as pompous and phony as a bullfrog with a megaphone; his thinking appeared to be done in resonant clichés, and he uttered them all the time as if he were address­ing a large rally in a public square. And yet from the beginning his reaction to Simon's presence had been one of righteous indignation and not fear. It was true that the Saint hadn't waved a knife under his nose or made any threatening noises. But the Saint had also calmly admitted a technical act of burglary, which there was no denying anyhow; and any normal citizen would have regarded such an intruder as at least a po­tentially dangerous screwball. Well, possibly Imberline was one of those men who are too obtuse to be subject to ordinary fear. But in that case, why hadn't he simply rung or called for help and had the Saint arrested?

  Because he was more profoundly afraid that the Saint had something else up his sleeve? Or for some other reason?

  Imberline was returning his scrutiny just as shrewdly. He took the cigar out of his mouth and bit off the end. "You tell me that Miss—er—Gray is a very attractive young woman," he said.

  "She is."

  "Young man, I'm going to ask you a question."

  "Shoot."

  "Is there any romantic reason for this interest of yours?"

  The Saint shook his head.

  "None at all."

  "Have you invested any money in this so-called invention?"

  "No."

  Imberline struck a match and put it to the cigar.

  "Well, then," he said in a gust of smoke, "what the hell are you here for?"

  "That's a fair question," said the Saint. "I have some quaint reasons of my own for believing that this invention may have more in it than you think. If that's true, I'm as interested as any citizen in wanting to see something done about it. If there's any fake about it, I'm still interested—from another angle. And from that angle, I'd be even more interested if the invention was really good and there was a powerful and well-organized campaign of skullduggery going on to prevent any­thing being done about it."

  "Why?"

  "I've told you my name. But perhaps you'd know me better if I said—the Saint."

  Imberline's cigar jerked in his mouth as his teeth clamped on it, and his eyes squeezed up again. But there was no change of color in the florid face. No—Frank Imberline, with or with­out a guilty conscience, wasn't panicked by shadows. He stared back at the Saint, without blinking, puffing smoke out of the side of his mouth in intermittent clouds.

  "You're a crook," he said.

  "If you'd care to put that in writing," said the Saint calmly, "I shall be very glad to sue you for libel. There isn't a single legal charge that can be brought against me—other than this little matter of breaking and entering tonight."

  The other made a short impatient gesture.

  "Oh, I'm sure you've been clever. And I've read some of that stuff about your Robin Hood motives. But your methods, sir, are not those which have been set up by our democratic constitution. The end does not justify the means. No individual has the right to take the law into his own hands. The main­tenance of our institutions and our way of life, sir, rests upon the subordination of private prejudice to the authorised process of our courts."

  He gave the pronouncement a fine oratorical rotundity, paused as if to allow the acclamation of an unseen audience to subside, and said abruptly: "However. Your suggestion that, my Department could be influenced by anything but the best interests of the country is insulting and intolerable. I'm going to prove to you that you're talking a lot of crap."

  "Good."

  "You bring this Miss Gray to see me, and I'll prove to you that she has a chance to present her case if she's got one."

  Simon could hardly believe his ears,

  "Do you mean that?"

  "What the hell are you talking about, do I mean it? Of course I mean it! I'm not condoning your behavior, but I do know how to put a stop to the sort of rumor you're starting."

  "When? Tomorrow?"

  "No. I'm leaving first thing in the morning for New York and Akron on Government business. But as soon as I get back. In a couple of days. Keep in touch with my office."

  The Saint went on looking at him with a sense of deepening bafflement that had the question marks pounding through his head like triphammers. His blue eyes were cool and inscrutable, but behind the mask of his face that strange perplexity went on. If this was a stall to get him out of there and keep him quiet for a couple of days, perhaps while further shenanigans were concocted, it was still a perfect stall. There was still no way of exposing it except by waiting. Imberline had taken the wind out of his sails. But if it wasn't a stall . . . Simon found his head aching with the new incongruities that he would have to untangle if it wasn't a stall.

  "Now get the hell out of here," Imberline said defiantly.

  There was nothing else to do.

  Simon stood up, crushed his cigarette in an ashtray, and hoped that his nonchalant impassivity had enough suggestion of postponed menace and loaded sleeves to conceal the com­pletely impotent confusion of his mind. For perhaps the first time in his life he felt that he hadn't a single answer in him.

  "Thank you," he said, and left the room like that.

  He let himself out of the front door, and crossed the lawn diagonally towards the street, moving through the dark patches cast by the thick spruce trees with the silence that was as nat­ural to him as breathing.

  He was just emerging from the deepest gloom when he stum­bled over somebody who had been taken unawares by his cat­like approach. The man he had bumped into straightened, squeaked, and vanished like a startled rabbit. But although he disappeared in the time it might take eyelash to meet eyelash in a slow blink, the Saint knew who he was. It was the funny little man, Sylvester Angert. .

  2

  Simon Templar walked back to the Shoreham, conscious al­ways of the movement of shadows about him. He knew he was wide open for a pot shot, but he had the idea that nobody wanted to kill him—yet. They might kill Madeline Gray, and her father, but not before they got the formula from one of the two. He himself was a recent nuisance, not yet thoroughly estimated; and the forces that were working against the Grays would hardly want to complicate their problem with a police investigation until they were convinced that there was no al­ternative.

  He was a trifle optimistic in this prognosis, as it was soon to be demonstrated.

  Madeline Gray opened her door when he gave the password he had written down, and he almost laughed at the solemn roundness of her eyes.

  "I'm not a returning ghost," he said. "Come back down­stairs and I'll buy you another drink."

  They walked down to his floor, and he waited until she was curled up on the sofa with her feet tucked under her and a Peter Dawson in her hand.

  Then he said, without preface: "I've just been to see Imber­line."

  Her mouth opened and stayed open in an unfinished gasp of amazement and incredulity, and he had time to light a cigarette before she got it working again.

  "H-h-how?"

  "I burgled his house and walked in on him. Rather illegal, I suppose, but it suddenly seemed like such an easy way to cut out a lot of red tape and heel-cooling." The Saint grinned a little now in reminiscent enjoyment of his own simplifying im­pudence; and then without a change of that expression he added bluntly: "He says your father is a crackpot phony."

  His eyes fastened on hers, and he saw resentment and anger h
arden the bewilderment out of her face.

  "I told you Mr. Imberline has never seen a demonstration of Father's process. He doesn't dare, because of what our inven­tion might do to the natural rubber business after the war."

  "He says he told his staff to investigate it."

  "His staff!" she snorted. "His stooges! Or maybe just some other men with their own axes to grind. Father met them, and wouldn't talk to them after they demanded to see the formula before they'd see a demonstration. I told you he isn't the most tactful person in the world. He suspected Imberline's men from the first, and he made no bones about throwing them out of the laboratory when they came up to Stamford."

  "On the other hand, Imberline promised to give you a hear­ing himself if I brought you to see him."

  She couldn't be stunned with the same incredulity again, but it was as if she had been jarred again behind the eyes.

  "He told you that?"

  "Yes. In a couple of days. As soon as he gets back from a trip that he has to rush off on tomorrow."

  She breathed quickly a couple of times, so that he could hear it, in a sort of jerky and frantic way.

  "Do you think he meant it?"

  "He may have. He didn't have to say that. He could have screamed bloody murder, thundered about the police, or told me to go to hell. But he didn't even try."

  She put her glass down on the low table in front of her and rubbed her hands shakily together as if they felt clammy. Her lips trembled, and the voice that came through them had a tremor in it to match.

  "I—I don't know what to say. You've been so wonderful— you've done so much—made everything seem so easy. I feel so stupid. I—I don't know whether I ought to kiss you, or burst into tears, or what. I don't know how to believe it."

  He nodded.

  "That," he said flatly, "is my problem."

  "What did you do to persuade him?"

  "Very little. It was too easy."

  "Well, why do you think he did it?"

  "I wish I knew." The Saint scowled at his cigarette. "He may have been scared of the trouble I might stir up—but he didn't look scared of anything. He may have been afraid that I really had something on him. He may be a very clever and a very cunning guy, and he may have been just getting himself elbow room to hit back with a real brick in his glove. He may be on somebody's payroll, and he may have to go back to his boss for orders when he's in a jam. He may just have a sort of caliph complex, and get a shot in his ego from making what he thinks is a grand eccentric gesture—something to make an anecdote out of and show what a big-minded down-to-earth democrat he is. All of that's possible. And none of it seems enough, some­how. ... So I muddle and brood around, and I still come back to one other thing."

  "What's that?"

  He said: "How much of this persecution of you and your father is real? How much of that is crackpot, how much is im­agination—and how much is fake?"

  The new disbelief in her eyes was sharp with hurt.

  "After all this—are you still thinking that?"

  He gazed at her detachedly, trying to persuade himself that he could make the same decision that he would have made if she had been fat and fifty with buck teeth and a wart on her nose.

  Then he stopped looking at her. He was not so hot at being detached. He strolled over to the window and gazed out at the panorama of distant lights beyond the grounds and the Park. . . .

  Ping!

  The glass in front of him grew an instantaneous spider-web around a neat round hole, and the plunk of the bullet lodging itself in the wall paster somewhere above and behind him came at about the same moment.

  He was probably already in motion when he heard it, for his impressions seemed to catch up with it quite a little while later. And by that time he was spun around with his back to the wall between the two windows, temporarily safe from any more care­less exposure, and looking at Madeline Gray's white face with a quite incorrigible silent laughter in his eyes.

  "By God," he said, "even the Washington mosquitoes have war fever. They must be training to be dive bombers."

  She looked up at the opposite wall, near the ceiling, where his glance had also gone to search for the scar of the shot. Af­ter a second or two she found her voice somewhere.

  "Somebody shot at you," she said, and sounded as if she knew it was the only possible foolish thing to say.

  "That would be another theory," he admitted.

  "But where from?"

  "From the grounds, or the Park. They had the window spotted, of course. I'm afraid I'm getting careless in my old age."

  He reached sideways cautiously for the edge of the shade, and pulled it all the way down. Then he did the same thing for the other window. After that he felt free to move again.

  "Won't you catch them, or—or something?"

  He laughed.

  "I'm not Superman, darling. By the time I got downstairs they could be blocks away. I should have known better—I was warned once, at least." Then his face was sober again. "But I guess the ungodly are still answering for you. If all this is fool­ing, it's certainly an awful complicated game."

  She met his eyes with a visible tumult of thoughts that couldn't form into words.

  Then, in the silence, the telephone rang.

  Simon crossed to it and picked it up.

  "This is Miss Brown of the Associated Press," it said. "I heard that you were in town, and I wondered if you'd be terribly angry if I asked you for a short interview."

  It was a light and engaging and unusually arresting voice, but Simon Templar had met specialised voices before.

  "I don't know what you could interview me about," he said. "I'm thirty-five years old, I think J. Edgar Hoover is wonder­ful, I believe that drinking is here to stay, I want everyone to buy War Bonds, and I am allergic to vitamins. Beyond that, I haven't anything to say to the world."

  "I'd only take a few minutes, really, and you wouldn't have to answer any questions you didn't like."

  "Suppose you call me tomorrow and I'll see what I'm doing," he suggested, giving himself a mental memorandum to see that his telephone was cut off.

  "Why, are you in bed already?"

  The Saint's brows climbed fractionally and drew down again.

  "When I was a girl that would have been called a rather personal question," he said.

  "I'm downstairs in the lobby now," she said. "Why couldn't we get it over tonight? I promise you can throw me out as soon as you've had enough."

  And that was when the last of the Saint's hesitations winked out like a row of punctured bubbles, so that he wondered how he could ever have wasted time on them.

  For girl reporters in real life do not come as far as the lobby of their victim's hotel before they ask for an interview. Nor do they press for ordinary interviews in the middle of the night. Nor do they use a sexy voice and a faintly suggestive turn of phrase to wheedle their way into the presence of a reluctant subject.

  The sublime certainty of his intuition crescendoed around him with the symphonic grandeur of a happy orchestra. The decision had been taken out of his hands. He could resist temptation just so long, but there was a limit to how much he could be pushed. The note he had found in his pocket had been bad enough. The encounter with the aspiring kidnapers had been worse. The episodes of Mr. Angert and Mr. Imberline had been a bonus of aggravation. To be potted at in his own win­dow by a sniper was almost gross provocation, even if he was broad-minded enough to admit that it was his own fault for providing the target. But this—this was positively and finally going too far.

  "Okay," he said in a resigned tone. "Come on up."

  He put the telephone back in its cradle as gently as a mother laying down her first-born, and turned back to the girl with a smile.

  "Go to your room again, Madeline," he said; and for the first time that evening the full gay carelessness of a Saintly lilt was alive and laughing in his voice. "Get your things packed. We're going to Connecticut tonight."

  Her eyes were b
ewildered.

  "But I have to see Mr. Imberline."

  "I'll get you back here as soon as we've arranged a genuine appointment. But that won't be tomorrow. Meanwhile, I can't be in two places at once. And maybe your father needs looking after too." He grinned. "Don't bother about those private de­tectives. I'm sold—if you'll still buy me."

  She laughed a little through uncertain lips.

  "Are you very expensive?

  "Not if you buy your Peter Dawson wholesale. Now run along. And the same password applies. I'll be after you as soon as I'm through with this."

  He had her arm and he was taking her to the door.

  "What was that telephone call?" she asked. "And how do you know you're going to be all right?"

  "That's what I'm going to find out," he said. "I won't be any help to you hiding in a cellar. But I'm firmly convinced that I was not destined to die In Washington. Not this week, anyhow . . . I'll see you soon, darling."

  She stood in the doorway for a moment, looking at him; and then, suddenly and very quickly, she kissed him.

  Then she was gone.

  Simon went into the bedroom, opened a suitcase, and took out an automatic already nested in a spring holster. He slipped his arms through the harness, shrugged it into comfort, and went back into the living room and put his coat on again. It seemed like a slightly melodramatic routine; but the only reason why Simon Templar had lived long enough to become a legend before he was also a name on a tombstone was that he had never been coy about taking slightly melodramatic pre­cautions. And in the complex and sinful world where he had spent most of his life, there were no guarantees that when an alluring feminine voice invited itself in on the telephone there would be an alluring feminine person on the doorstep when the doorbell next rang.

  He just had time to light another cigarette and freshen his drink before that potential crisis was with him.

  He opened the door with his left hand and swung it wide, standing well aside as he did so. But it was only a girl who matched the telephone voice who came in.

  He risked one arm to reach across the opening and draw the door shut behind her, and he quietly set the safety lock as he did so.