“How would they set out to buy it?”
The Saint stretched his long legs patiently, and regarded Fernack with kindly tolerance.
“Henry,” he said, “this frightful finesse and subtlety of yours is producing the corniest dialogue. You make us remind me of the opening characters in a bad play, carefully telling each other what it’s all about so that the audience can get the idea too.”
“I didn’t—”
“You did. You know just about as much about iridium and the black market and how and why it works as anybody else, but you’re feeding me all the wide-eyed questions to see if I’ll let something slip that you don’t happen to know. Well, you’re wasting a lot of time. I hate to tell you, comrade, but you are.”
The detective’s rugged forthright face reddened a little deep under the skin.
“I want to know who told you to stick your oar into this.”
“Nobody. It was something I thought up in my bath.”
“If there is anything in this black market story, it’s being taken care of—”
“I know. By the proper authorities. How often have I heard that sweet old phrase before?”
“There are proper authorities to take care of anything like that,” Fernack said religiously.
Simon nodded with speculative respect.
“Who?”
It was a little pathetic to see Fernack suffer. He ran a finger around under his collar and floundered in the awful pain of a frustrated mastodon.
“Well, the…the different agencies involved. We’re all working with them—”
“That’s fine,” said the Saint approvingly. “So while we’re all clumping around on our great flat feet, I thought I’d stick my little oar in and see what I could do to help.”
“How do you think you’re helping by trying to make a monkey out of everyone else?”
“Henry, I assure you I never presumed to improve on—”
The detective swallowed.
“In this interview,” he blared, “you said that since the authorities apparently hadn’t been able to do anything about it yet, you were going to take it in hand yourself.”
Simon inclined his head.
“That,” he admitted, “is the same thought in judicial language.”
“Well, you can’t do it!”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s…it’s—”
“Tell me,” said the Saint innocently. “What is the particular law that forbids any public-spirited citizen to do his little bit towards purifying a sinful world?”
“In this interview,” Fernack repeated like an overstrained litany, “you said you had a personal inside line that was going to get results very quickly.”
“I did.”
Fernack tied the newspaper up in his slow powerful fists.
“You realise,” he said deliberately, “that if you have any special information, it’s your duty to co-operate with the proper agencies?”
“Yes, Henry.”
“Well?”
Fernack didn’t really mean to blast the challenge at him like a bullet. It was just something that the Saint’s impregnable sang-froid did to his blood pressure that lent a catapult quality to his vocal cords.
Simon Templar understood that, broadmindedly, and smiled with complete friendliness.
“If I had any special information,” he said, “you might easily persuade me to do my duty.”
The detective took a slight pause to answer.
It was as if he lost a little of his chest expansion, and had to find a new foothold for his voice.
When he found it, there was a trace of insecurity in his belligerence.
“Are you trying to tell me that that was just a bluff?”
“I’m trying to tell you.”
“You really don’t know anything yet?”
The Saint extinguished his cigarette, and shook another one out of the pack beside his hand.
“But,” he said gently, “anyone who didn’t know that might easily think it was time to get tough with me.”
Fernack looked at him for a while from under intent but reluctant brows.
At last he said, “You’re just using yourself for bait?”
“I love you, Henry. You’re so clever.”
“And if you get any nibbles?”
“That will be something else again,” said the Saint dreamily, and Fernack began to come back to the boil.
“Why? It isn’t any of your business—”
Simon stood up.
“It’s my business. It’s everybody’s business. There are aeroplanes and tanks and jeeps and everything else being manufactured for this war. They need magnetos and distributors. Magnetos and distributors need iridium. There are millions of wretched people paying taxes and buying bonds and doing everything to pay for them. If they cost twice as much as they should on account of some lousy racket has a corner in the stuff, every penny of that is coming out of the sacrifice of somebody who believes he’s giving it to his country. If the war production plan is being screwed up because materials are being shunted off where they aren’t most urgently needed—if the aeroplanes and the tanks aren’t getting there because some of the parts aren’t finished—then there are a lot of poor damn helpless lads having their guts blown out and dying in the muck so that some crook can buy himself a bigger cigar and keep another bird in a gilded cage. I say that’s my business and it’s going to be my business.”
He was suddenly very tall and strong and sure, and not lazy at all, and there was something in his reckless fighting face of a mocking conquistador that held Fernack silent for a moment, with nothing that seemed to have any point at all to say.
It was just for a moment, and then all the detective’s suspicion and resentment welled up again in a defensive reaction that was doubly charged for having so nearly been beguiled.
“Now I’ll tell you something! I’ve been getting along all right in this town without any Robin Hoods. You’ve done things for me before this, but everything you’ve done has been some kind of grief to me. I don’t want any more of it. I’m not going to have any more!”
“And exactly how,” Simon inquired interestedly, “are you going to stop me?”
“I’m going to have you watched for twenty-four hours a day. I’m going to have this place watched. And if anybody comes near this bait at all, I’m going to know all about them before they’ve even told you their name.”
“What a busy life you are going to lead,” said the Saint.
During the next twenty-four hours, exactly thirty-eight persons called at the Algonquin, and asked for Mr Templar, were briefly interviewed, and went back to their diverse affairs, closely followed by a series of muscular and well-meaning gentlemen who replaced each other in the lobby of the hotel with the regularity of a row of balls trickling up to the plunger of a pin-cable.
After that, the Police Commissioner personally called a halt.
“It may be a very promising lead, Fernack,” he said in his bleached, acidulated way, “but I cannot place all the reserves of the Police Department at your disposal to follow everyone who happens to get in touch with Mr Templar.”
The Saint, who had hired every one of his visitors for that express purpose, enjoyed his own entertainment in his own way.
It was still going on when he had a much more succinct call from Washington.
“Hamilton,” said the dry voice on the telephone, for enough introduction. “I saw the papers. I suppose you know what you’re doing.”
“I can only try,” said the Saint. “I think something will happen.”
He had visualised many possibilities, but it is doubtful whether he had ever foreseen anything exactly like Titania Ourley.
2
Mrs Milton Ourley was a great deal of woman. She was constructed according to a plan which is discreetly called statuesque. She wore brilliantly hennaed hair, a phenomenal amount of bright blue eye-shadow, and fingernails that would have done credit to a
freshly blooded cheetah. Her given name, naturally, was not her fault, but it might have been prophetically inspired. If she was not actually the queen of the fairies, she certainly impressed one as being in the line of direct succession.
She plumped herself down on the smallest available chair, which she eclipsed so completely that she seemed to be miraculously suspended some eighteen inches from the floor, and speared the Saint on an eye like an ice-pick.
“If you want to know all about iridium,” she said, “I came to tell you about my husband.”
Simon Templar had taken more obscure sequiturs than that in his stride. He offered her a cigarette, which she declined with fearful cordiality, and sank one hip on the edge of a table.
“Tell me about him.”
“He’s been buying iridium in the black market. I heard him talking about it to Mr Linnet.”
Her voice became a little vague towards the end of the sentence, as if her mind had already begun to wander. Her eye had already been wandering, but only in a very limited way. Nevertheless, it had not taken long to lose a large part of its impaling vigour. It was, in fact, becoming almost wistful.
“Do you like dancing?” she asked.
“I can take it or leave it alone,” said the Saint cautiously. “Who is Mr Linnet?”
“He’s in the same kind of business as my husband. He makes electrical things. My husband, of course, is president of the Ourley Magneto Company.” Her rapidly melting eye travelled speculatively over the Saint’s tall symmetrical frame. “You look as if you could do a wonderful rumba,” she said.
Only the Saint’s incomparable valour, which is already so well known to the entire reading public of the English-speaking world, enabled him to face the revolting tenderness of her smile without quailing.
“I hope I never disappoint you,” he said ambiguously. “Now, about your husband—”
“Oh, yes. Of course.” Her pronunciation of the last word was a caress. “Well, he used a lot of iridium. I don’t know much about his business—I think business is so dull, don’t you?—but I know he uses it. So does Mr Linnet. Well, last night we had dinner with Mr Linnet, and—well, I had to powder my nose.”
“Not really? Even you?”
“Yes,” said Mrs Ourley vaguely. “Well, when I came back, I just couldn’t help hearing what Milton—that’s my husband, Milton—and Mr Linnet were talking about.”
“Of course not.”
“Well, Mr Linnet was saying, ‘I don’t know what to do. I’ve got to have iridium to fulfil my contracts, and the market’s cornered. I don’t like any part of it, but they’ve got me over a barrel.’ Then Milton said, ‘I’ll say they have. But you’ll buy it and pay through the nose, just like me. You can’t afford to do anything else.’ And Mr Linnet said, ‘I still don’t like it.’ Then I had to go into the room because the butler came out into the hall, so I couldn’t just stand there, and of course they stopped talking about it. But I can tell you it was a terrible shock to me.”
“Naturally,” Simon agreed sympathetically.
“I mean, if Milton and Mr Linnet are buying illegal iridium, that makes them almost criminals themselves, doesn’t it?”
Simon studied her seriously for a moment.
“Do you really want your husband to go to gaol?” he asked bluntly.
“Good Heavens, no!” She was righteously pained. “That’s why I came to you instead of telling the police or the FBI. If Milton went to gaol I just wouldn’t know how to look my friends in the face. But as a patriotic citizen I have my duty to do. And it wouldn’t do any harm if you frightened him a bit. I think he deserves it. He’s been so mean to me lately. If you could only have heard what he said to the nicest boy that I met in Miami Beach—”
It seemed to the Saint, quite abstractly, that he might have enjoyed hearing that, but he was just tactful enough not to say so.
He said, “What you’ve told me isn’t exactly enough to convict him. And for that matter, it doesn’t lay the black market in my lap either. But I’d like to have a talk with your husband.”
“Oh, if you only would, Mr Templar; you’re sooo clever, I’m sure you could persuade him to tell you.”
“I could try,” he said non-committally. “Where do you live?”
“We’ve got a little place out at Oyster Bay. Milton will be home by half-past six. If you could manage to get out there—you could say you just happened to be passing and you dropped in for a drink—”
“Tell him we met in Havana,” said the Saint, “and put him in the right frame of mind.”
He got her out of the door with some remarkably firm and adroit manoeuvring and came back to pour himself a healthy dose of Peter Dawson and restore his nerves.
The fortunes of buccaneering had brought many women out of the wide world and thrown them into Simon Templar’s life, and it is a happy fact that most of them had been what any man would agree that a woman out of the wide world ought to be, which was young and decorative and quite undomesticated. But he had to realise that sooner or later such good luck had to end, and he had no idea of ignoring Titania Ourley, in spite of her unprepossessing appearance and even more dreadful charm.
It was like that in the strange country of adventure where he had worn so many trails. When you had no idea where your quarry was, there was nothing to bring it within range like the right bait. When you had no idea what your quarry was like, you had to find the right bait, and sometimes that wasn’t at all easy, but when you had the right bait, you were bound to get a nibble. And when you had a nibble, the rest depended on how good you were. Mrs Milton Ourley was definitely a nibble.
He reached Oyster Bay soon after six-thirty, and after the inevitable series of encounters with village idiots, characters with cleft palates, and strangers to the district, he was able to get himself directed to Mr Ourley’s little place.
This little place was no larger than a fairly flourishing hotel, occupying the centre of a small park. Simon watched the enormous iron-studded portal open as he approached it with the reasonable expectation of seeing the hallway flanked with a double line of periwigged footmen, but instead of that it was Mrs Ourley herself who stood fabulously revealed on the threshold, gowned and corseted in a strapless evening dress that made her upper section look slightly like an overfilled ice-cream cone.
“Simon! You darling boy! How wonderful of you to remember!”
She insisted on taking both his hands as she drew him in, and still holding on to them when he was inside—doubtless under the impression that this gave her some of the winsome appeal of Mary Martin in her last picture.
He found himself in an immense pseudo-baronial hall cluttered with ponderous drapes and gilt furniture, and atmospherically clogged with a concentration of perfume on which it might have been possible to float paper boats. As Mrs Ourley dragged him closer to her bosom, it became stiflingly plain that she herself was the well-spring of this olfactory soup.
“I was just driving by,” Simon began as arranged, “and—”
“And of course you had to stop! I just knew you couldn’t forget—”
“What the dabbity dab is going on here?” boomed a sudden wrathful voice from the background.
Mrs Ourley jumped away with a guilty squeal, and Simon turned to inspect Mr Ourley with as much composure as Mrs Ourley’s over-zealous interpretation of her part could leave him.
“Good evening,” he said politely.
He saw a very short man with enormous shoulders and an even more enormous stomach swelling below a stiff white shirt front. He carried a raggedly chewed cigar in thick hirsute fingers, and his black beetling brows arched up and down in apoplectic exasperation.
“Tiny!” he roared at his wife, thereby causing even the Saint to blink. “I’ve told you before that I’ll make no effort to control your comings and goings outside of this house, but I will not have you bringing your gigolos into my house!”
Mrs Ourley bridled automatically.
“But he’s no
t a…I asked him to drop in.”
“So,” said Milton Ourley thunderously, “you admit it. Well, this is just about the last—”
“But, Milton,” she protested coldly, “this is Mr Templar. Simon Templar. You know—the Saint.”
“Jumping Jehosaphat!” roared Mr Ourley. “The what?”
Simon turned back from the Beauvais tapestry which he had been surveying while he allowed the first ecstatic symptoms of marital bliss to level off.
“The Saint,” he said pleasantly. “How do you do?”
“Dabbity dab dab dab,” said Mr Ourley. A new flood of adrenalin in his blood-stream caused him to inflate inwardly until he looked more than ever like a bellicose bullfrog. “Tiny, have you gone out of your mind? Asking this crook, this—this busybody—”
“Milton,” said Mrs Ourley glacially, “I heard you and Mr Linnet talking about iridium last night. And since Simon is trying to break up that racket, I thought it would be a good idea to bring you two together.”
Milton Ourley stared at the Saint, and his broad chest seemed to shrink one or two sizes. That might have been only an impression, for he stood as solid as a sawed-off colossus on his short stocky legs. Certainly he did not stagger and collapse. His glare lost none of its fundamental bellicosity. It was only quieter, and perhaps more calculating.
“Oh, did you?” he said.
The Saint finger-tipped a cigarette out of the pack in his breast pocket. For his part, the approach was all ploughed up anyhow. He had given Titania Ourley little enough script to work with, and now that she had gone defensively back into simple facts it was no use worrying about what other lines might have been developed. Simon resigned himself to some hopeful adlibbing, and smiled at Mr Ourley without the slightest indication of uncertainty in his genial nonchalance.
“You see?” he murmured. “Tiny has brains as well as beauty.”
Ourley’s red face deepened into purple again.
“You leave my wife out of this!” he bellowed. “And as for you, you can get out of here this minute, Mister Templar. When you’ve got any authority to come barging into other people’s affairs—”
The Saint on Guard (The Saint Series) Page 2
