The Saint Steps In s-24

by Leslie Charteris

  Quennel trimmed his cigar on the ashtray in front of him.

  "Yes," he said. "Andrea told me you were taking an interest in Calvin Gray's synthetic rubber, so I thought you'd like to know. Gray showed me a sample of it not long ago, as I think Walter told you. I had a report on it from my chief chemist today." He settled even more safely and positively in his chair. "I'm afraid Calvin Gray is a complete fraud."

  2

  Simon's right hand rested on the table in front of him like a bronze casting set on stone, and he watched the smoke rising from his cigarette like a pastel stroke against the dark wood.

  "You had a specimen analysed?"

  "Yes. I don't know whether you know it, but that kind of analysis is one of the most difficult things in the world to do. In fact, a lot of people would say it was almost impossible. But I've got some rather unusual men on my staff."

  "Did you ever see it made?" Simon asked slowly.

  "No."

  "I have."

  "Can you describe the process?"

  Simon gave a rough description of what he had seen. He knew that it was technically meaningless, and admitted it.

  "That doesn't matter," said Quennel. "I'm sure you can see now where the trick was worked."

  "You mean in the enclosed electrical gadget, I suppose."

  "Naturally," Quennel chuckled. "I'm surprised that a fellow like you wouldn't have caught on to it at once. It's just a dressed-up topical version of all those old swindles where a man has a machine that prints dollar bills or a formula for making diamonds."

  "But why should a man like Calvin Gray go in for anything like that?"

  "Do you know Calvin Gray?"

  "Not personally. But I've checked on him, and his reputa­tion is quite special."

  "But as I understand it, you haven't even seen him. All you've met is a pretty girl with a story."

  "I've been to his house."

  "How do you know it was his house? Because the girl took you there and told you it was?"

  "Who's Who gives his residence as Stamford, Connecticut."

  "I suppose that would be the onlv residence there."

  The Saint's blue gaze was meditative and unimpassioned. He drew at his cigarette and set his wrist back on the table.

  "Mind you," said Quennel, "I'm not necessarily suggesting that that's the answer. It could have been Gray's house. It could have been his daughter. It isn't impossible. It takes a big man to put over a big fraud."

  "But why should Gray bother? I understood he was well enough off already."

  "Who did you get that from? From the same source—from his daughter, or from the girl who said she was his daughter?"

  "Yes," said the Saint thoughtfully.

  Quennel trimmed his cigar again.

  "Suppose it's what you were told from a good source. In business, that isn't always enough. A lot of men have had big reputations, and have been generally believed to be pretty well off, and have been well off—and still they've ended up in jail. I'm sure you can remember plenty of them yourself. Famous stockbrokers, attorneys, promoters . . . Not that I'm com­mitting myself about this case. I don't know enough about it. Maybe Calvin Gray would be the most surprised man in the world if he knew about it. He might be away somewhere— lecturing, for instance—and his house might have been broken into and used by some gang of crooks. Even that's been done before. I don't have to tell you about these things. The only thing I think you ought to know is that this synthetic rubber story is a fraud."

  Simon Templar took one more measured breath at his ciga­rette, and said: "I don't know how much you claim to know, but you may have heard that in Washington night before last there was an attempt to kidnap Madeline Gray, or the girl who calls herself Madeline Gray. Mr. Devan was there."

  Devan nodded.

  "That's right. Only I didn't know it was a kidnaping attempt, until Andrea gave us the idea after she'd talked to you."

  "If it ever was a kidnaping attempt," said Quennel. "Or couldn't it have been part of the same build-up, staged for your benefit, to help make the case look important to you?"

  The Saint had an odd ludicrous feeling of being a feed man, of offering properly baited hooks to fish who had personally chosen the bait. But he had to hear all the answers; he had to see the whole scene played through.

  "You wouldn't have heard it," he said, "but it seems as if Calvin Gray really was kidnaped."

  "Really?"

  "At any rate, either he or the man who is being talked about is missing." Simon paused casually. "I've already called in the FBI about it." .

  There was silence for a moment. It had a curious negative quality, as if it were more than a mere incidental absence of sound and movement, as if it would have absorbed and neu­tralised any sound or movement there had been. "What about the girl?" Devan asked; and Simon met his crinkly deep-set eyes.

  "Since this afternoon," he said expressionlessly, "she seems to be missing too."

  There was only a barely perceptible flicker of stillness this time, as if a movie projector had stuck on the same frame for two or three extra spins of the shutter. And then Hobart Quen­nel moved a little and drank some brandy, and raised one shoulder to settle his forearm more comfortably on the arm of his chair.

  "Probably it was your calling in the FBI that did that," he said. "That would have been a complication they weren't ex­pecting."

  "Why?"

  "You always had a reputation—forgive me, I'm not being personal, but after all we all read newspapers—for being a sort of lone wolf. So the last thing they'd have expected was that you'd take your troubles to any of the authorities. In fact, I'm a little surprised about it myself."

  "These aren't quite the same times," said the Saint quietly. "And perhaps a few things have changed for me as they have for everyone else."

  Quennel laughed a little, his sound sure confident laugh.

  "Anyway," he said, "probably you scared them, and now they're organising a nice neat getaway. You can take it that the whole deal was crooked from the beginning anyhow, whatever the minor details were . . . Very possibly the real Calvin Gray will turn up in a day or two, and be as puzzled as anyone . . . It doesn't really make a lot of difference, does it?"

  "It makes a difference," said the Saint; and his voice was as even as a calm arctic bay, and the same invisible chill nestled over it. He said: "I go after crooks."

  Hobart Quennel's slight deep engaging chuckle came again, like a breath from the South, and now it was warmer and surer than ever, and there was no uncertainty at all left behind in it, and it could soothe you and blot the search and the question-ing and the fight out of you like the breeze rustling through southern palms; and it was right, it had to be right, because nothing could be wrong that was so friendly and permanent and sure.

  "I know," he said. "But you just said it yourself. These aren't the same times, and everybody changes. This Gray business will take care of itself now. If you've already called in the FBI, it's sure to. It's in good hands. It's none of my business, but I can't really see you wasting any more time on it. It wouldn't do you justice."

  "What would?" Simon asked. Quennel turned his cigar again.

  "Well, frankly, I've read a lot about you and I've often thought that you weren't doing yourself justice, even before the war. Not that I haven't enjoyed your exploits. But it's al­ways seemed to me that a man with your mind and your abili­ties could have achieved so much more . . . You know, sometimes I've wondered whether a man like you mayn't have been suffering from some mistaken ideas about business. I don't mean selling things over the counter in a hardware store. I mean the kind of business that I do."

  "Perhaps I don't know enough about it."

  "I assure you it can be just as great an adventure, in its own way, as anything you've ever done. A great corporation is like a little empire. Its relations with other corporations and indus­tries are like the relations between empires. You have diplo­macy, alliances, feuds, espionage, and wars. Quite
often you have to step right through ordinary laws and restrictions. That's one of the things I meant by the necessity for a strong execu­tive class. I think if you go into it you'll find that they are really only paralleling your own attitude. There have to be a great many petty general regulations for the conduct of the majority of people, just as there have to be for children. It's just as necessary for there to be parents, and people who can step above the ordinary regulations. I think you'd find yourself quite at home in that class. I think that Business could employ all your brilliance, all your charm, all your audacity, all your generalship, all your—shall I say—ruthlessness."

  "You could be right," said the Saint, with a smile that barely touched the edges of his mouth. "But who would give me a job?"

  "I would," said Quennel.

  The Saint gazed at him.

  "You would?"

  "Yes," Quennel said deliberately. "To be quite truthful, when I told Andrea to ask you over, I was thinking about that much more than about the Gray business. Let's say it was one of my crazy ideas, or one of my hunches. You don't get very far in business without having those ideas. I believe right now a man like you could be worth a hundred thousand dollars a year to me."

  Simon drew his glass closer to him and cupped it in his hand, the stem between his second and third fingers, making gentle movements that swirled the golden spirit softly around and warmed it in the curve of the bowl.

  This, then, was all of it, and all the answers and explanations were there. And he knew quite certainly now, as his intuition had always told him, that there was no ordinary way to fight it. As Quennel had said, there were times when you had to step right through ordinary laws and restrictions. There was a world outside the orderly lawful world of average people, and to fight anyone there you had to move completely into his world, or else he was as untouchable and invulnerable as if he were in another dimension.

  The Saint smiled a little, very sardonically and deep inside himself, at the passing thought of how far he would have been likely to get if he had tried to fight Hobart Quennel from any footing on the commonplace world. Even without his own peculiar reputation by commonplace legal standards, he knew how ridiculous the accusations he would have had to make would have seemed when thrown against such a man as Quen­nel. It wouldn't be merely because of Quennel's wealth. It would be because his standing, his respect, his utterly genuine confidence and authority and rightness and integrity would throw off anything the Saint could say like armor would throw off spitballs.

  It was a good thing, Simon thought, that he also could move in dimensions where such considerations were only words.

  He finished his brandy, enjoying the full savor of the last sip, and put the glass down, and said pleasantly: "That's very flattering. But I have another idea."

  "What is that?"

  Unhurriedly, almost idly, the Saint put his right hand under his coat, under his left arm, and brought out the automatic that rode there. He leveled it diagonally across the table, letting the aim of its dark blunt sleek muzzle touch Quennel and Devan in turn.

  "This is what I was talking about before," he said. "About the war being close to home. The war is here with you now, Quennel. I came here for Calvin Gray and his daughter, and unless I get them I promise you some of us are going to die most unexpectedly."

  The only trouble was, as the Saint reckoned it afterwards, that even then he still hadn't realized deeply enough how closely Quennel's—or at least Devan's—fourth-dimensional mentality might coincide with his own.

  He looked at their rigid immobility, at Quennel's face still bland and bony and Walter Devan's face heavy and grim, both of them staring at him soberly and calculatingly but without any abrupt panic; and then he saw Devan's eyes flick fraction­ally upwards to a point in space just above his head.

  Instantly, and before Simon could move at all, a new voice spoke behind him. It was a voice with a rich bass croak that Simon seemed to have heard before, very recently.

  "Okay," said the voice. "Hold it. Don't move anything if you want to go out of here breathing."

  The Saint held it. He knew quite well where he had heard that deep grating voice before.

  It spoke again, sounding a little nearer.

  "I been saving this for you, bud," it said.

  After that there was only a fierce jarring agony that crashed through the Saint's skull like a bolt of lightning, with a scorch­ing white light that broke into a million rainbow stars that danced away into a deep engulfing darkness.

  3

  Coming back to consciousness was a distant brilliance that hurt his eyes even through his closed eyelids, a sharp cold wet monotonous nagging slapping on his cheeks that turned out to be a sodden towel unsympathetically wielded by Karl Morgen.

  "That's enough, Karl," said Walter Devan's voice.

  Simon rubbed his face with his hands and cleared his eyes. The tall raw-boned man stood over him, looking as if he would enjoy repeating both the assault and the remedy.

  "Beat it, Karl," Devan said.

  Morgen went out reluctantly.

  Simon tried to get his bearings in a rather unusual room. It was small and somewhat bare. The walls and ceiling were plain white cement, and they looked new and clean. There was a plain new-looking carpet on the floor. There was the plain heavy unpainted door through which Karl had gone out, and another identical door in another wall. Near the ceiling in one wall was a sort of open embrasure, but it was too high up to see out of from where the Saint sat. There was no other win­dow.

  The Saint sat on a simple divan with blankets over it, and on the opposite side of the room was another similar divan. There were some low shelves against another wall on which he saw a small radiophone, some records, half a dozen books, a couple of packs of cards, a bottle of brandy, a bottle of Scotch, a box of chocolates, half a dozen cans of assorted food, and a package of paper plates. The air had a slightly damp chill in it.

  "People in stories always ask 'Where am I?' " said the Saint, "so I will."

  "This is Mr. Quennel's private air-raid shelter," replied Devan. "He had it built about a year ago."

  He sat in a comfortable chair behind a card table, smoking a freshly lighted cigar. He wielded the cigar with his left hand, because his right hand held an automatic which the Saint rec­ognized as his own. He didn't point the gun. His hand was re­laxed with it on the table. But he was twelve feet from the Saint, and pointing was not necessary.

  "Very nice it looks," Simon murmured. "And handy," he added.

  "Cigarette?" Devan tossed a pack into the Saint's lap, and followed it with a book of matches. "Keep 'em," he said. "I'm afraid Karl took everything you had away from you."

  "Naturally."

  Simon didn't have to check over his pockets and other hid­ing places. He had no doubt that the search would have been thorough. An intellectual organization like that wouldn't have risked leaving anything that could conceivably have concealed some ingenious means of making unexpected trouble.

  He lighted a cigarette and said reminiscently: "Karl really owes you something, after Washington. You did a nice job of looking after him and his pal."

  Devan nodded.

  "It was the only thing to do."

  "You took quite a risk."

  "I couldn't expect people to take risks for me if they didn't know I'd do the same for them. I took a bit of a beating, too, if you haven't forgotten. That's why I'm keeping this gun handy, and I want you to stay sitting down where you are."

  Simon grinned wryly.

  "Have you been saving something for me too?"

  Devan shook his head.

  "Let's forget that. That's kid stuff. I'm here because Bart asked me to see if I couldn't talk you into reconsidering his proposition, and that's all I want to do."

  "You've been studying all the best Nazi heavies in the mov­ies," said the Saint admiringly. "I see all the delicate touches. And when 1 go on saying No, you most regretfully call back the storm troopers and they beat t
he bejesus out of me."

  "I'm not a Nazi, Templar. Neither is Mr. Quennel."

  "You have some unusual thugs on your staff. I'll bet you Karl heils Hitler every time he goes to the bathroom."

  "I'm not concerned about that. When Gray fired him and he came to us, I thought he could be useful. He has been. So long as he does what I tell him I don't have to ask about his politics. He isn't going to find out any Quenco secrets. And I know one thing—being what he is, no matter what happens, he can't squawk."

  "Now I really know what Quennel meant about the diplo­macy of Big Business," said the Saint. "Getting a German spy to do your dirty work for you ought to be worth some kind of Oscar."

  "We've been lucky to have the use of him. But that's the only connection there is. I'm an American, and I don't want to be anything else."

  "I know all about you, Walter. I could tell you your own life story. I've read a very complete secret dossier on you. Oh, I know there's nothing in it that could put you in jail, or you'd have been there before this. But the indication is quite definite. You are Quennel's chief private thug, which means his own personal Gestapo."

  Devan sat still, with only a slight dull red glow under his skin.

  "There's nothing Nazi about it. If you know all about us, you know that we're working one hundred per cent for Amer­ica. I work for Quennel because he has to have a man who can be tough and handle tough situations. He told you himself— an industry like Quenco is like a little empire. You have to have your own police and your own laws and your own en­forcement. This is nothing but business."

  "Business, because Calvin Gray's invention would shift a great big slice of Government backing away from you, and you'd be in the hole to the extent of your own investment."

  "As Mr. Quennel said, it's not going to be any use winning the war if we win it by ruining our own economic structure."

  "How catching his phrases are," drawled the Saint. "I sup­pose it wouldn't have occurred to you that Mr. Quennel might have been thinking first of Mr. Quennel's own economic struc­ture?"