The Saint Steps In s-24

by Leslie Charteris

  "We aren't Nazis," Devan reiterated stubbornly.

  Simon drew a fresh drift of smoke into his lungs.

  "No," he said. "You aren't Nazis. Or even conscious fifth columnists. That's one of the things that bothered me for a while. I couldn't understand the half-hearted villainy. The Nazis would have been much more positive and drastic, and Calvin Gray and his invention would probably have been mopped up long ago."

  "We don't like violence," Devan said. "It makes trouble and a stink and it's dangerous, and we bend over backwards to avoid it. Only sometimes it's forced on us, and then we have to be able to handle it. We tried to handle Gray without going too far."

  "And the hell with what difference it made to the net cost and efficiency of our war production?"

  "Superficial savings and efficiences aren't always the best thing when you take a broad long view. You learn that in a big industry. Mr. Quennel knows all about that, because that's his job."

  "The Führer principle," Simon observed, almost to himself. He looked at Devan again, and said: "And now that I've really butted in, and you know you're stuck with it?"

  "The sky's the limit."

  Simon smoked again, and looked at the end of his cigarette. "You think you can get away with it?"

  "I'm sure we can."

  "There's a little matter of murder involved, and the police take such an oldfashioned view of that."

  "You're talking about Angert? That was stupid of Morgen, but he didn't mean to kill him. He didn't know who he was. But that'll be Morgen's bad luck, if he gets caught. I'll try to see that he doesn't get caught. But if he did, we wouldn't know anything about him."

  "You ought to worry about being caught yourself. If you read the papers, you may have seen something about a certain Inspector Fernack, who has just gotten ambitious about col­lecting the scalp of the guy who removed a very dull bureau­crat named Imberline last night—and nearly managed to hang the job on me."

  Devan looked him straight in the eye.

  "I read the papers. But I wasn't anywhere near the Savoy Plaza last night. And I thought Imberline was still in Wash­ington."

  That was his story. And probably he could prove it. Quen­nel could probably prove the same. It would be very careless of them if they couldn't, and the Saint didn't think they were careless. If they had been addicted to making egregious mis­takes, someone else would have taken care of them before he ever came along.

  It was a rather depressing thought. But he had to finish covering the ground. He took another breath through his ciga­rette.

  "A man like Calvin Gray, and his daughter, can't just dis­appear without any questions being asked."

  "Calvin Gray won't disappear. He'll be back tomorrow from a visit to some friends in Tennessee, and he'll be very surprised at the commotion. His daughter will have gone to New York with some friends—who have an apartment there, by the wav— and he will have reached her on the telephone there. When she hears that it's all a false alarm and he's quite all right, she will tell him that she's going on a trip to Cuba with some other friends. From there she'll probably fly down to Rio. She may even get married down there and not come back for a very long time."

  The Saint's eyes were cold and realistic.

  "And of course Gray will go along with that."

  "I think so, after I've had another talk with him. I think he'll even discover that there was a flaw in his formula after all, and forget about it."

  "You aren't even interested in it yourselves?"

  "Oh, yes, of course he'll have to tell us the formula. It may be valuable one day, if we have one of our own chemists dis­cover it. But for the present Mr. Quennel is quite satisfied with our own setup."

  "And Gray will never open his mouth so long as you have his daughter for a hostage."

  Devan shrugged.

  "I don't have to be melodramatic with you. You know what these things are all about. You know what he'll do."

  The Saint knew. There was heroism of a kind for the lone individual, although even that could almost always be broken down eventually under pitiless scientific treatment. He doubted how much ultimate heroism there would ever be against the peril of a man's own daughter.

  He didn't doubt that Walter Devan was the man to see the job through competently and remorselessly. Devan was no common thug, or he would not have had the position he held. He could easily have passed as having had a college education, even if most of it had been spent on the football field. He had a definite intelligence. He really belonged in Quennel's en­tourage. He had enough intelligence to assimilate Quennel's intellectual arguments. He also believed in what he was doing, and he was just as sure that it was right. And he wouldn't make any stupid mistakes. Simon didn't need to press him for elabo­rate details. Walter Devan would know just how to finish what he had started.

  There was only one question left in the Saint's mind.

  "How does Andrea feel about all this?" he asked.

  "Andrea doesn't think," Devan said casually. "She does a sort of roping job for Bart now and again. He probably told her you might be connected with someone who was trying to put over a dirty deal on him in business. He wouldn't tell her anything else. But she seems to be carrying quite a torch for you." Devan met the Saint's gaze with brash man-to-man candor. "You're on your own, as far as that goes. She could be a lot of fun."

  "If I played ball," said the Saint.

  Devan made an affirmative movement with his head and his cigar at the same time.

  "Why be a dope? You can't win. But there aren't any hard feelings. Bart and I both appreciate what you've done, and what you're after. And the proposition he made you still goes. One hundred per cent."

  "But if I turn you down——"

  "Why bring that up? I don't have to tell you we can't leave you around now. But you belong with us."

  Simon glanced at the stump of his cigarette. Having been warned once, he didn't try to get up and move towards the ashtray that Devan was using. He trod the cigarette out on the carpet, and lighted another.

  He had heard the threat of death many times in his life, but never with such utter certainty and conviction. Even though not a word had been said about it at all. It gave him a sense of frozen inevitability that no noise and savagery could have done. And he knew that Walter Devan was just as aware of it as he was. They spoke the same language so closely that it would have been merely a waste of energy to shout . . .

  Devan stood up, still holding the gun.

  "Why don't you take a few minutes to think it over?" he said.

  He went to the door through which the long big-boned man had gone out; and as he opened it he jerked his head towards the second door.

  "Calvin Gray and his daughter are in the next room," he said. "Say hullo to them if you want to."

  Simon Templar was alone.

  He got to his feet after a moment, surveyed the room once more in a detached way, and turned to the other door.

  It opened when he tried the handle, and he went in.

  It was a room very much like the one he had left. Madeline Gray and her father sat side by side on a divan close to the door. It had to be Calvin Gray, of course, before she jumped up and introduced them.

  "How do you do," said the Saint.

  They shook hands. A strange formality, and a stranger trib­ute to the perdurance of common customs.

  Madeline Gray left her hand resting on the Saint's arm, and he smiled down at her and said: "How soundproof are the doors?"

  "We heard all of it, in the other room," she said.

  It was all very quiet; and when you came down to it there didn't seem to be any other way it could be.

  "Then we can save a lot of repetition," said the Saint. "I don't even care very much about the details of how you two were snatched. It's relatively unimportant now."

  "What were you saying in there," she asked, "about Imber­line?"

  "They killed him."

  He told them all about that, from the dossiers h
e had studied through to his session with Fernack in the morning. He skipped as lightly as he could through the interval he had spent with Andrea. He gave her credit for having tried to keep him out of that trap without telling him about it, but he didn't elaborate on the counter-attractions she had offered. But he saw Madeline watching him rather thoughtfully.

  "In one way," he said grimly, "you could say that I killed him. Just like I got the two of you into this. By being, too clever . . . You were quite wrong about him. On the evidence, he had to be honest. So I went to him as an honest man—to see if I couldn't convert him to our side. I wasn't able to do that in five minutes—it took him too long to understand any­thing that wasn't a proverb—but at least I figured that I'd laid up some more trouble for the Ungodly. Unfortunately, I had. But I didn't know he'd be seeing Quennel and Devan that same night. And even after I saw Devan downstairs, I didn't think of it in the right way. I suppose they were having this conference in New York because too many people are watch­ing too many other people's maneuvers in Washington; they knew by then that the ice was awful thin and getting thinner by the minute with me breathing on it, and they had to make sure they could keep Imberline where they wanted him. In­stead of that, they got just the reverse. Suspicion had started to penetrate into that mess of porridge he used for a brain, and there was no talking him out of it. When he checked with Jet­terick, they knew they were up against it. They may have tried threats or bribery at that point, but he was just too stubborn or stupid to be scared or bought—it doesn't make any differ­ence now. There was only one way to stop him then; and they stopped him."

  "But we still want to know how you got here," said the girl huskily.

  Simon's glance reflexed to the doors again. But it didn't really matter. He had nothing to say just then that couldn't be overheard.

  "I'll tell you," he said.

  He lay on the other divan and told them, stretched out in an amazing restful relaxation that was not actually any testi­monial to the steel in his nerves at all, but only to the supreme conversation of energy that a trapped tiger would have had.

  He told them everything he had thought from the begin­ning; and in as much detail as he could remember he gave them an account of the dinner conversation in which so many things had been so elementarily explained.

  He tried to do a good job of it; but he still didn't know how well he had made his point when he had finished report­ing and Calvin Gray said: "How can a man like Quennel be like that?"

  He was a fairly tall wiry man, lean almost to the verge of emaciation, with a tousled mop of perfectly white hair and eyes that blinked with nervous frequency behind square rim­less glasses; and he said it with an air of academic perplexity, as if he were fretting over a chemical paradox.

  The Saint put one hand behind his head and gazed at the ceiling.

  "Simply because he is a man like that. Because he's more dangerous than any fifth columnist or any outright crook, be­cause he sincerely believes that he's a just and important and progressive citizen. Because he can talk contemptuously about Café Society and the playboy class, and really believe it and feel austerely superior to them, and sandwich it in between mentioning his new strings of polo ponies and the parties he throws for his daughter where they drink thirty cases of cham­pagne. 'They're dead but they don't know it'—but he's one of them and he doesn't know it ... Because he can disclaim profiteering while he feels very contented about 'increased capital values' . . . Because he's very proud of his share in the War Effort, but he thinks nothing of faking the registration of the family cars so as to get more than his share of gas to play with. Because he doesn't mind using a German agent like Mor­gen if Morgen can be useful, instead of turning him over to the FBI; but he'd be full of righteous indignation if you called him a fifth columnist . . . Because he hates Fascism and he's a patriotic one-hundred-per-cent American; but he be­lieves in what he calls 'social stability' and 'a strong and ca­pable executive class' whose divine mission it is to dish out liberty and democracy in reasonable doses to the dumb unruly proletariat . . . Because he's thoroughly satisfied that Big Business is wide awake and wading into the war effort with both hands, but he's also ready to sabotage a rival process that would speed up and cheapen a very vital production, be­cause it would lose him a hell of a lot of dough . . . Because he builds model homes and organizes baseball teams and sewing bees for his employees to keep them happy, but he be­lieves that nabobs like himself should have a law of their own which transcends the rights of ordinary mortals . . . Because he's exactly the same type as Thyssen and the other Big Business men who backed Hitler to preserve their own kind of So­cial Stability; because he'd back his own kind of dictatorship in this country, under another name, and still think what a fine level-headed liberal he was . . . Because he's a goddam bloody Nazi himself, and you can never hang it on him be­cause even he hasn't begun to realise it."

  His voice seemed to linger in the air, so quiet and sensible, and yet with a feeling so much deeper than any dramatics, so that it seemed as if it should have gone on for ever, and there should have been something permanent about it, and it should have spread out wherever the minds of those who listened would take it on.

  Calvin Gray rubbed his rough white hair and said hazily: "But when he goes into actual crime——"

  "Quennel," said the Saint, "never went into a crime in his life. If he tells Devan that you and your invention are a Bad Thing, and ought to be stopped, he's only giving his opinion. If things happen to you and stop you, he's naturally very pleased about it. If he tells Devan to try and talk me into for­getting you and taking a job with Quenco, that's entirely legit­imate. If Devan succeeds, fine. If he doesn't, but an unfor­tunate accident eliminates me, that's providential . . . It would have been the same with Imberline. I don't doubt that Quennel finally went off and left Devan to go on arguing. If Devan could talk Imberline around, that would be swell. If Imberline dropped dead in the bathroom before the argument was settled, that was too bad, but it saved a whole lot of trou­ble."

  "But he tried to tell you I was a fraud."

  "A diplomatic fiction. And very well done. If it hadn't been me, he might easily have put it over. And even if it didn't com­pletely go over, it might still have served—with the offer of a wonderful job to wash it down. I could have helped myself to believe it, if I'd wanted to: it would have been a fair enough excuse to stop worrying about you and put my conscience to sleep. But it was no crime."

  Calvin Gray shook his head helplessly.

  "The man must be insane. It's such incredible hypocrisy."

  "It's not hypocrisy. And he's perfectly sane. He just doesn't ask what methods Devan uses, and therefore he doesn't know. He could probably justify them out of his philosophy if he had to, but his great mind is occupied with so many more impor­tant things that it's much simpler not to know. I don't sup­pose Hitler ever does any positive thinking about what hap­pens to prisoners in Dachau, either."

  There was silence for a little while, an odd calm silence that made it almost fantastic to think that this was a profoundly philosophical conversation in a bright and comfortable death cell.

  It was the girl who brought it back to that.

  "You don't think Devan is bluffing at all?" she said.

  "Not for an instant," said the Saint gently. "Don't let's waste any effort kidding ourselves about that. Devan will arrange whatever he has to arrange, and he'll do as neat a job as I could do myself."

  Her brown eyes that smiled so easily were big and deep and unflinching.

  "I feel so guilty," she said, "for dragging you into it."

  "Don't worry about it," he answered carelessly. "If it hadn't been this, it would have been something else."

  She looked around the room.

  "Isn't there any way you could get out?"

  He laughed a little, and got back on his feet.

  "If there were, I wouldn't be here. I tell you, our Walter isn't an amateur."

  But he st
rolled over to the high embrasure like the one he had noticed in the other room. Standing on a chair, he saw that it sloped downwards towards the outside, and at the outside was a heavy steel Venetian shutter. He guessed that the shelter was built in the side of the hill running down to the Sound, and the embrasure peeped out through the hillside, providing natural ventilation but still safe from the blast of anything but a direct hit on the opening. The steel shutter was set solidly in the concrete, and he took one look at it and stepped down with a shrug.

  "Why can't you tell Quennel that you'll accept his offer?" asked Gray. "Then, later on, you'd have a chance——"

  "Do you imagine they haven't thought of that?" Simon retorted patiently. "I think Quennel meant every word of his offer, and I think he still means it in spite of everything, and I'm sure he'd live up to it to the letter; but I'm also sure that he'd want to be damn certain that I was the same. I don't know what proof or security he'd want—I can think of half a dozen devices—but it doesn't matter. You can take it that it would be good."

  He stood over Calvin Gray, poised and quiet and kindly implacable.

  "This is your problem, not mine," he said.

  The girl sat beside her father again and held his hand.

  "You mustn't think about me," she said. "You mustn't."

  "How can I help it?"

  "If you were both tortured to death," said the Saint inexora­bly, "what good would it do?"

  Calvin Gray covered his eyes.

  "Devan talked to me all afternoon," he said hoarsely. "He told me ... If it was only myself, I could try ... But Madeline. I'm not big enough . . . And what good would it do? What difference would it make? They'll kill the invention anyway. So why should . . ." His voice broke, and then rose suddenly. "I couldn't see it. Don't you understand? I couldn't!"

  "Daddy," said the girl.

  The Saint watched for an instant, and then turned away.

  On one of the side shelves, beside the playing cards, there was a score pad and a pencil. He picked them up. At the top of the first sheet he printed in bold capitals: WE MAY BE OVERHEARD. Then under that he wrote a few quick lines. He tore off the sheet and put the pad and pencil back.