The Saint Steps In s-24

by Leslie Charteris

  After that, without the slightest relaxing of his vigilance, and still with that steady pressure of ghostly bullets creeping over his flesh, he followed her into the living-room and sur­veyed her again in a little more detail. She was tall, and built with the kind of curvacious ripeness in which there is hardly a margin of a pound between perfection and excess. So far she was still within the precarious safety of that narrow margin, so that her figure was a startling excitement to observe. Her face was classically beautiful in a flawless peach-skinned way. She had natural blonde hair and rather light blue eyes that gave her expression a kind of passionate vagueness.

  "All right, darling," said the Saint. "I'm in a hurry too, so we'll make it easy. Who sent you and what am I supposed to fall for?"

  3

  Her face was blank and innocent.

  "I don't quite understand. I was just told to get an interview——"

  "Let's save a lot of time," said the Saint patiently. "I know that you aren't from the AP, and probably your name isn't Brown either—but that's a minor detail. You can put on any act you like and talk from here to breakfast, but you'll never get anywhere. So let's start from here."

  She regarded him quite calmly.

  "You have very direct methods, haven't you?"

  "Don't you think they cut the hell out of the overhead?"

  She glanced placidly around the room, and observed the potable supplies on the side table. He was aware that she didn't miss the half-empty glass that Madeline Gray had left, either.

  "I suppose you wouldn't like to offer me a drink."

  Without answering, he poured a highball and handed it to her.

  "And a cigarette?"

  He gave her one and lighted it.

  "Now," he remarked, "you've had plenty of time to work on your story, so it ought to be good."

  She laughed.

  "Since you're so clever—you ought to be able to tell me."

  "Very likely I can." He lighted another cigarette for him­self. "You are either an Axis agent, a private crook, or a mildly enterprising nitwit. You may have fancier names for it, but it comes to the same thing. Once upon a time I'd have laid odds on the third possibility, but just recently I've gotten a bit skeptical."

  "You make it sound awfully interesting. So what am I here for—as an Axis agent or a private crook?"

  "That's a little more difficult. But I can think of the pos­sibilities. You either came here to eliminate me—with or with­out outside cooperation—or to get information of one kind or another. Of course, there are gentle angles on both of those bright ideas, as well as the rough and noisy ones. We could stay up all night playing permutations and combinations. I was just curious to know what your script was."

  "And if I don't tell you?"

  "We'll just have to play it out," he said tiredly. "Go on. Shoot. Give me the opening line."

  She tilted her head back, showing teeth as regular as a neck­lace of pearls.

  "I think you're beautiful," she said.

  "Thank you."

  "You talk just like I imagined you would."

  "That must be a great relief."

  "You sound wildly exciting."

  "Good."

  "But I'm afraid I'm going to be a great disappointment."

  "Are you?"

  "I'm afraid I'm only a mildly enterprising nitwit."

  He went on looking at her dispassionately.

  "I adore you," she said.

  "I adore me too," he said. "Tell me about you."

  She tasted her drink.

  "My name's Andrea Quennel."

  It went through him like a chemical reaction, a sudden con­gealing and enveloping stillness. In an almost unreal detach­ment he observed her left hand. It wore no rings. He crossed over to her, and calmly took the purse from her lap and opened it. He found a compact with her initials on it, and didn't search any further.

  "Satisfied?" she asked.

  "You must be Hobart Quennel's daughter," he said.

  "That's right. We came in just as Mr. Devan was driving off after he'd dropped you. He told us about your little excitement this evening. He hadn't thought anything about your name, but being a romantic soul of course I had to wonder at once if it was you. So I inquired at the desk, and it was."

  She looked very pleased with herself, and very comfortable.

  "That still doesn't tell me why you had to see me this way," he said.

  "I wanted to meet you. Because I've been crazy about you for years."

  "Why did you try to pretend to be a reporter?"

  She shrugged.

  "You said it yourself, didn't you? I'm a mildly enterprising nitwit. So I don't want everyone to know what a nitwit I am. I suppose I could have made Mr. Devan call you up on some excuse and met you that way, but I try to let him think I'm halfway sane, because after all he does work for my father. And if I'd call you up and said I was dying to meet you I was sure you'd just send the house detective after me. So I thought I was being rather clever." Her face became quite empty and listless. "I guess I wasn't. I'm sorry."

  Her vague light eyes studied him for a moment longer; and then she stood up.

  "Anyway, I did get to meet you, just the same, so I think it was worth it ... I'll get out of your way now."

  He watched her. The curious inward immobility that had seized him when she told him her name had dissolved com­pletely, but imperceptibly, so that he hadn't even noticed the change. But his brain was fluid and alive again now, as if all the cells in it were working like coordinated individuals, like bees in a hive.

  He said: "Sit down, Andrea, and finish your drink."

  She sat down, with a surprised expression, as if someone had pushed her. The Saint smiled.

  "After all, you were enterprising," he murmured, "so I'll forgive you. Besides, it's just occurred to me that you might be able to do something for me one of these days."

  Her eyes opened.

  "Could I? I'd do anything . . . But you're just kidding me. Nothing so marvelous as that could ever happen!"

  "Don't be too sure."

  "Do you often do that?—I mean, get perfect strangers to help you do things?"

  "Not often. But sometimes. And anyway, perhaps by that time we won't be such strangers."

  "I hope not," she said softly; and then she blinked. "This isn't happening to me," she said.

  He laughed.

  "What do you do—work for Quenco too?"

  "Oh, no. I'm much too stupid. I just do nothing. I'm a very useless person, really. What would you want me to do for you?"

  "I'll tell you when the time comes."

  "I hope it'll be something exciting."

  "It might be."

  She leaned forward a little, watching him eagerly.

  "Tell me—why did you think I might be an Axis agent? Were you expecting one?"

  "It wasn't impossible," he said carefully.

  "Are you working on some Secret Service job? And those men you had the fight with tonight . . . No, wait." She frowned, thinking. Somehow, although she said she was stupid, she managed to look quite intelligent, thinking. "Mr. Devan only thought of a hold-up. But he knew this girl you rescued— Madeline Gray. You see, I've got a memory like a parrot. Her father has an invention. Synthetic rubber. So the Gestapo or whatever it is want to get hold of it. So they think if they can kidnap his daughter they can make him tell. But you're looking after her, so they don't get away with it. So you think they'll be sending somebody to get rid of you. How's that?"

  He blew a meticulously rounded smoke-ring.

  "It's not bad."

  "Is it right?"

  "I can't answer for all of it. Madeline Gray, yes. Father makes synthetic rubber, yes. Try to kidnap daughter, yes. But who and why—that's something to make up our minds about slowly."

  "Is that why you asked if I was an Axis agent or a private crook?" she said shrewdly.

  The shift of his lips and eyebrows was cheerfully noncom­mittal.

&nbs
p; "Wonderful weather we've been having," he said.

  "But you were looking after her."

  "I am looking after her," he said, without a trace of em­phasis on the change of tense.

  She pouted humorously.

  "All right. I mustn't ask questions." She finished her drink, and gazed into the empty glass. "Couldn't we go somewhere and dance?" she said abruptly.

  "No." He came up off the chairback that he had been prop­ping himself on. "I'm sorry, but I've got to pack a couple of things. And then I'll be traveling."

  She stood up.

  "You mean you're leaving Washington?"

  "Yes."

  "Then how are we going to get to know each other better?"

  "How does anyone find you?"

  "You can call Daddy's office in New York. His secretary al­ways knows where we are—he talks to her every day. I'll talk to her myself and ask her to tell you."

  "Then it ought to be easy."

  She hesitated.

  "But where are you going?"

  He thought it over before he answered. "I'm going to see Calvin Gray, and I'm taking Madeline with me. I told you I was looking after them. I'd love to go dancing with you, Andrea, but this is business."

  "Where does he live?"

  "Near Stamford, Connecticut."

  "We've got a place at Westport," she said lingeringly.

  "Then we might run into each other some time," he smiled.

  He took her to the door, and after she had gone he came back and poured himself another drink before he went to the tele­phone. He had to call three or four numbers before he located the man he wanted.

  "Hullo, Ham," he said. "Simon. Sorry to interrupt you, but I'm going solo for a few days. I want a private plane to go to the nearest field to Stamford. Organize it for me, will you? I'll be at the airport in an hour."

  "You don't want much, do you?"

  "Only one of those little things that you handle so beauti­fully, comrade . . . Oh, and one other thing."

  "I suppose you'd like Eleanor to come down and see you off."

  "Get me some dossiers. Anything and everything you can dig up—including dirt. Airmail them to me at General Delivery, Stamford. Get the names. Calvin Gray, research chemist. A guy named Walter Devan, who works for Quenco." Simon lighted a cigarette. "Also Hobart Quennel himself, and his daughter Andrea."

  He hung up, and sat for several moments, drawing steadily at his cigarette and watching the smoke drift away from his lips.

  Then he went into the bedroom and started packing his bag, humming gently to himself as he moved about. He was travel­ing very light, and there wasn't much to do. He had practically finished when the telephone rang again, and he picked it up.

  "Washington Ping-Pong and Priority Club," he said.

  "This is Madeline Gray," she said. "Are you still tied up?"

  "No."

  "Can you come up to see me, or shall I come down?"

  He didn't need to be as sensitive as he was to feel the un­natural restraint in her voice.

  "Is something going on," he asked quietly, "or can't you talk now? Just say Yes or No."

  "Oh, yes, I can talk. There's nobody here. I suppose I'm just silly. But . . ." The pause was quite long. Then she went on, and her voice was still cold and level and sensible. "I've been trying to phone my father and let him know we're coming. But they say there's no answer."

  Simon relaxed on the bed and flipped cigarette ash on the carpet.

  "Maybe he's gone to a movie, or he's out with the boys analys­ing alcohol in one of the local saloons."

  "He never goes out in the evening. He hates it. Besides, he knew I was going to phone tonight. I was going to talk to him as soon as I'd seen Imberline. Nothing on earth would have dragged him out until he knew about that. Or do you think you've scared me too much?"

  The Saint lay back and stared at the ceiling, feeling cold needles tiptoeing up his spine and gathering In spectral con­clave on the nape of his neck.

  4

  Simon Templar checked his watch mechanically as the Beechcraft sat down on the runway at Armonk airport. One hour and fifteen minutes from Washington was good traveling, even with a useful tail wind, and he hoped that his haste hadn't ground too much life out of the machinery.

  The pilot who was to take the ship back, who hadn't asked a single question all the way because he had been taught not to, said: "Good luck." Simon grinned and shook hands, and led Madeline Gray to the taxi that he had phoned to meet them.

  As they turned east towards Stamford he was still consider­ing the timetable. They could be at Calvin Gray's house in twenty minutes. Making about an hour and thirty-five minutes altogether. Only a few minutes longer than one of the regular airlines would have taken to make New York, even if there had been a plane leaving at the same time. Furthermore, he had left no loophole for the Ungodly to sabotage the trip, or to interfere with him in any way before he got to his destination. They couldn't have intercepted him at any point, because they couldn't have discovered his route before it was too late.

  As for any other connections that the Ungodly could have used, It would have taken an hour to drive from New York to Stamford, or fifty minutes on a fast train—ignoring such delays as phone calls to start the movement, or the business of getting a vehicle to drive in, or the traveling to and from railroad sta­tions and the inconsiderate tendency of railroads not to have trains waiting on a siding at all hours ready to pull out like taxis off a rank.

  He had tried to explain some of this to the girl while they were flying.

  "If anything has happened to Daddy," she said now, "there were people there already."

  "Then whatever happened has happened already," he said, "and nobody on earth could have caught up with it. I thought of phoning somebody to go out from New York, but they mightn't have gotten here any sooner than we have. I could have phoned the Stamford Town Police, but what could we have told them? So the telephone doesn't answer. They'd have said the same as I said. By the time we'd gotten through all the arguing and rigmarole, it could have been almost as late as this by the time they got started. If they ever got started."

  "Maybe I'm just imagining too much," she said.

  He didn't know. He could just as easily have been imagining too much himself. He had spent a lot of time trying to get his own mind straight.

  He said, because it helped to crystallise his ideas to talk aloud: "The trouble it that we don't even know who the Un­godly are, or what they're working towards . . . Suppose they were private crooks. An invention like this could be worth a fortune. They'd want to get the formula—just for dough. All right. They might kidnap you, so that they could threaten your father with all kinds of frightful things that might happen to you if he didn't give them the secret. They might kidnap him, and try to torture it out of him."

  He felt her flesh tighten beside him.

  "But there have also been these accidents you told me about. Wrecking his laboratory. Sabotage. It's a nice exciting word. But where would it get them—in the end?"

  She said: "If they were spies——"

  "If they were spies," he said, "they wouldn't be blowing up a laboratory. They might break into it to see what they could see. But they wouldn't destroy it, because they want the work to go on. They just want the results. And if they wanted to kidnap you or your father to squeeze a formula out of you with horsewhips and hot Irons—they'd have tried it long before this. You wouldn't have been hard to snatch."

  "Well," she said, "they could just be saboteurs. They warned me not to try and see Mr. Imberline. They might just want to stop us getting anywhere."

  "Then both of you would have been crated and under grass by this time," he said coldbloodedly. "Killing is a lot easier than kidnaping, and when you get into the class of political and philosophical killers you are talking about a bunch of babies who never went to Sunday School. That's the whole thing that stops me. What goes with this pulling of punches— this bush league milquetoast sku
llduggery?"

  He went on nagging his mind with that proposition while the taxi turned up the Merritt Parkway and presently branched off again to the right up a meandering lane that brought them to a stone gateway and through that up a short trim drive to the front of a comfortably spacious New England frame house. He had a glimpse of white shingled walls and green shingled roofs and gables as the taxi's headlights swept over them, and he saw that there were lights behind some of the curtains. For a moment her hand was on his arm, and he put his own hand over it, but neither of them said anything.

  She opened the front door while he was paying off the driver, and he carried their bags up the path of light to the hall and joined her there.

  She called: "Daddy!"

  They could hear the taxi's wheels crunching out off the gravel, and the hum of its engine fading down the lane, leaving them alone together in the stillness.

  "Daddy," she called.

  She went through an open door into the living-room, and he put the bags down and followed her. The room was empty, with one standard lamp burning beside the piano.

  She went out again quickly.

  He stayed there, lighting a cigarette and taking in the scene. It was a livable kind of room, with built-in bookshelves and plenty of ashtrays and not too fancy chintz covers on the chairs, a pleasant compromise between interior decorating and mas­culine comfort. There were no signs of violence or disorder, but there were rumples in various cushions where they had been sat on since the room was last done over. There was a pipe in one of the ashtrays by the fireplace: he went over and felt the bowl, and it was quite cold. He wondered how long a pipe bowl would stay warm after it was put down.

  A telephone stood on the same table. He picked it up, and heard the familiar tone of a clear line. Just to make sure, he dialed a number at random, and heard the ringing at the other end, and then the click of the connection, and a gruffly sleepy male voice that said "Yes?"

  "This is Joe," said the Saint momentously. "You'd better start thinking fast. Your wife has discovered everything."

  He hung up, and turned to Madeline Gray as she came back into the room.

  "The phone is working," he said casually. "There's noth­ing wrong with the line."