“Anything,” said the Saint with conviction, “could happen to anyone in Washington. And most of the time it does. That’s why so many people here have ulcers.”
“Could anyone be killed here?”
He shrugged.
“There was a man named Stavisky,” he offered, “but of course that was officially labelled a suicide. But I could imagine somebody being killed here. Is that the proposition, and whom do you want bumped off?”
She turned the stem of her glass between her fingers, her head bent, not looking at him.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t think you’d be like that.”
“I’m sorry, too,” he said coolly. “But, after all, you make the most unusual openings. I only read about these things in magazines. You seem to know something about me. I don’t know anything about you, except that I’d rather look at you than a fat senator. Let’s begin with the introduction. I don’t even know your name.”
“Madeline Gray.”
“It’s a nice name. Should it ring bells?”
“No.”
“You aren’t working for a newspaper, by any chance?”
“No.”
“And you’re not a particularly unsophisticated Mata Hari?”
“I—no, of course not.”
“You just have an academic interest in whether I think it would be practical to ease a guy off in this village.”
“It isn’t exactly academic,” she said.
He took a cigarette from the pack in front of him on the table.
“I’m sorry, again,” he said. “But you sounded so very cheerful and chatty about it—”
“Cheerful and chatty,” she interrupted as the tautness returned to her face, “because I don’t want anyone who’s watching me to know everything I’m talking to you about. I thought you’d be quick enough to get that. And I didn’t have in mind any guy who might be eased off, as you put it.”
The Saint put a match to his cigarette. Everything inside him was suddenly very quiet and still, like the stillness after the stopping of a clock which had never been noticed until after it left an abrupt intensity of silence.
“Meaning yourself?” he asked easily.
She was spilling things out of her handbag, searching for a lipstick. She found it. The same movement of her hand that picked it up slid a piece of paper out of the junk pile in his direction. Shoulder to shoulder with her as he was, it lay right under his eyes.
In crudely-blocked capitals, it said: “DON’T TRY TO SEE IMBERLINE.”
“I never wanted to see him,” said the Saint.
“You don’t have to. But I’ve got an appointment with him at eight o’clock.”
“Just who is Imberline?”
“He’s in the WPB.”
The name began to sound faintly familiar, although Simon Templar had very little more general knowledge of the multitudinous personnel of the various Washington bureaus than any average citizen.
He said, “Hasn’t he heard about making the world safe for the forty-hour week?”
“Maybe not.”
“And somebody doesn’t want you to put him wise.”
“I don’t know, exactly. All I know is that the note you’re looking at was tossed into my lap about twenty minutes ago.”
Simon glanced at the paper again. It was wrinkled and crumpled as it should have been, if it had been made into a ball as the girl implied.
He said, “You didn’t see where it came from?”
“Of course not.”
He admitted that. It could easily have been done. And just as readily he admitted the cold spectral fingers that slid caressingly up his spine. It was right and inevitable, it always had been, that adventure should overtake him like that, just as naturally and just as automatically, as soon as he was “at liberty” again. But when it was too easy and too automatic, also, it could have other angles. He was precisely as relaxed and receptive as a seasoned guerrilla entering a peaceful valley.
“As a matter of interest,” he murmured, “is this the first you’ve heard about this conspiracy to keep Imberline away from your dazzling beauty?”
“Oh, no,” she said. She had regained her composure now and her voice was almost bland. “I had a phone call this morning that was much more explicit. In fact, the man said that if I wanted to live to be a grandmother I’d better start working at it now—and he meant by going home and staying there.”
“It sounds like rather a dull method,” said the Saint.
“That’s why I spoke to you,” she said.
The turn of his lips was frankly humorous.
“As a potential grandfather?”
“Because I thought you might be able to get me to see Imberline in one piece.”
Simon turned in his chair and looked around the room.
He saw an average section of Official Washington at cocktail time—senators, representatives, bureaucrats, brass hats, men with strings to pull, and men with things to sell. Out of the babble of conversation, official secrets reverberated through the air in deafening sotto voces that would have gladdened the hearts of a whole army of fifth columnists and spies, and probably did. But all of them shared the sleek solid look of men in authority and security, bravely bearing up under the worry of wondering where their next hundred grand was coming from. None of them had the traditional appearance of men who could spend their spare time carving pretty girls into small sections.
The dialogue would have sounded perfect in a vacuum, but, somehow, from where the Saint sat, none of it sounded right. He turned back to Madeline Gray.
“This may sound a bit out of line,” he remarked, “but I like to know things in advance. You don’t happen to have a heart interest in this Imberline that his spouse or current girlfriend might object to?”
She shook her head decisively.
“Heavens, no!”
“Then what do you have to see him about?” he asked, and tried not to seem perfunctory.
“I don’t know whether I should tell you that.”
The Saint was still very patient. And then he began to laugh inside. It was still fun, and she was really interesting to look at, and after all you couldn’t have everything.
A round stocky man who must once have been a door-to-door salesman crowded heavily past the table to a vacant seat nearby and began shouting obstreperously to the nearest waiter. Simon eyed him, decided that he was unusually objectionable, and consulted his watch.
“You’ve still got more than an hour to spare,” he said. “Let’s have some food and talk it over.”
They had food. He ordered lobster Cardinal and a bottle of Château Olivier. And they talked about everything else under the sun. It passed the time surprisingly quickly. She was fun to talk to, although nothing was said that either of them would ever remember. He enjoyed it much more than the solitary meal he had expected. And he was almost sorry when they were at their coffee, and for the sake of the record he had to call a showdown.
He said, “Darling, I’ve enjoyed every minute of this, and I’ll forgive you anything, but if you really wanted me to help you it must have occurred to you that I’d want to have some idea what I was helping. So let’s finish the story about Imberline and the mysterious tosser of notes. Since you’ve told me that Romance hasn’t reared its lovely head, that you’re not a newspaper gal nor a spy, I’m a bit at a loss.”
Her dark eyes studied him quietly for several seconds. Then she searched through her purse again.
“A filing system,” Simon murmured, “would be indicated.”
The girl’s hand came up with something about six inches long, like a thick piece of tape, and a sort of shiny pale translucent orange in colour. She passed it across the table.
Simon took it and fingered it experimentally. It was soft but resistant, tough against the pressure of a thumbnail, flexible, and elastic. He stretched it and snapped it back a couple of times, and then his gaze was cool and estimating on her.
“Rubber?�
� he asked.
“Synthetic.”
His eyebrows hardly moved.
“What kind?”
“Something quite new. It’s made mostly of sawdust, vinegar, milk—plus, of course, two or three other important things. But it isn’t derived from butadiene.”
“That must be a load off its mind,” he remarked. “What in the world is butadiene?”
Her unaffected solemnity could have been comic if it had not seemed so completely natural.
“I thought everybody knew that,” she said. “Butadiene is something you make out of petroleum or grain alcohol. It’s the base of the buna synthetic rubbers. Of course, that might be a bit technical for you.”
“It might,” he admitted. He wondered whether she had been taken in by his wide-eyed wonderment or not. He rather thought not.
“The thing that matters,” she said, “is that the production of buna is still pretty experimental, and in any case it involves a fairly elaborate and expensive plant. This stuff can be mixed in a bathtub, practically. My father invented it. His name is Calvin Gray. You’ve probably never heard of him, but he’s rated one of the top research chemists in the country.”
“And you’re here to get Imberline interested in this—to get his WPB sanction?”
She nodded.
“You make it sound frightfully easy. But it hasn’t been so far. My father started working on this idea years ago, but then natural rubber was so cheap that it didn’t seem worth going on with. When the war started and the Japs began moving in on Thailand, he saw what was coming and started working again.”
“He must have hundreds of people rooting for him.”
“Is that what you think? After he published his first results, his laboratory was burned out once, and blown up twice. Accidents, of course. But he knows, and I know, that they were accidents that had been—arranged. And then, when he had his process perfected, and he came here to try and give it to the Government—you should have seen the run-around they gave him.”
“I can imagine it.”
“Of course, part of the brush-off he got here might have been his fault. He’s quite an individualist, and he hasn’t read those books about winning friends and influencing people. At the same time, paradoxically, he’s rather easily discouraged. He ended up by damning everybody and going home.”
“And so?”
“I came back here for him.”
Simon handed the sample back to her with a tinge of regret. It was a lovely performance, and he didn’t believe a word of it. He wished that someday some impressionable and personable young piece of loveliness would have the outrageous honesty to come up to him and simply say, “I think you’re marvellous and I’d give anything to see you in action,” without trying to feed him an inferior plot to work on. He felt really sorry about it, because she seemed like nice people and he could have liked her.
“If you think you’re on the spot, you ought to talk to the FBI,” he said. “Or if you’re just getting the old run-around, squawk to one of the papers. If you pick the right one, they’ll pour their hearts into a story like that.”
She stood up so suddenly that some of his coffee spilled in the saucer. She looked rather fine doing that, and the waste of it hurt him.
“I’m sorry,” she said huskily. “It was a silly idea, wasn’t it? But it was nice to have dinner with you, just the same.”
He sat there quite sympathetically while she walked away.
The dining-room seemed unusually dull after she had disappeared. Perhaps, he thought, he had been rather uncouthly hasty. After all, he had been enjoying himself. He could have gone along with the gag.
But then, life was so short, and there were so many important things.
He was sitting there, pondering over the more important things, when a group of men bore down on him, crowding their way through the too-narrow aisles between the tables. In the van of the group was a large person with a domineering air, and Simon knew that he was almost certain to be jostled, as he had been jostled in the cocktail lounge.
He was getting tired of being bumped and shoved by individuals who seemed to get the idea that the “DC” after Washington meant “disregard courtesy.” He prepared himself for the inevitable encounter.
The big man did not disappoint him. Simon felt the pressure on the back of his chair and a coat sleeve ruffled the hair on the back of his head. He shoved back his chair quickly and beamed inwardly as he heard the involuntary “oof” that the big man gave as the chair-back dug into his stomach. Templar stretched his lean length upright and turned to the man he had effectively body-checked with his chair.
“Terribly sorry,” he said very politely.
The big man looked at him. He had the crimson-mottled face of a person who enjoyed good food, good liquor, and good cigars, and had had too many of each. His little eyes regarded Simon speculatively for a moment, and there might have been a flare behind them, or there might not have been, before he wreathed his face in a beaming smile.
“It’s all right,” he said. “Accidents will happen, you know.”
“Yes, indeed,” Simon murmured.
The others in the party were waiting respectfully, almost reverently, for the big man to proceed. The man whom Simon had prodded with the chair gave the Saint another enigmatic glance and then turned away. His disciples followed.
“But, Mr Imberline,” one of them cried in a voice that approached a wail. “Think of the inconvenience that this programme will mean to certain parties.”
“As the fellow says,” announced the prow of the group majestically. “This is war, and it’s up to every one of us to put our shoulders to the wheel. Waste not, want not, is my motto, and this is a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth.”
“Incredible,” the Saint told himself, gazing after the group as it barged its way to the long table that had been reserved at the further end of the room. “That must be the great Imberline himself.”
He put a cigarette between his lips, and felt in his coat pocket for a match.
He didn’t find the match, but his fingers encountered something else that he knew at once didn’t belong there. It was a folded piece of paper which he knew quite certainly he had never put in that pocket. He took it out and opened it.
It was the same clumsy style of block capitals that he had seen very recently, and it said: “MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS.”
He had a curious feeling in looking at it, like walking out of a rowdy stifling honky-tonk into a silent snow night. Because all the time they had been in the cocktail lounge, Madeline Gray had been on his left, and he had been half-turned towards her, so that his right-hand pocket was almost against the table, and it was impossible that she could have put that paper into his pocket while they were there. And, aside from the fact that he had been surrounded by Imberline satellites a few seconds earlier, there had definitely been no chance since.
2
The doorman said, “Yes, she went that way. She was walking.”
He put away the dollar bill that Simon handed him, and added, “She asked me the way to Scott Circle.”
Simon turned back into the lobby and found a telephone booth. The directory gave him the address of Frank Imberline. It was one of the low numbers on Scott Circle.
Simon Templar frowned thoughtfully.
From the address, it was evident that Mr Imberline might indeed be a gentleman of some importance, for Scott Circle is the centre of one of the best residential sections of Washington, and the list of householders there reads like a snob hostess’s dream.
Madeline Gray had told him that she had an appointment with Imberline at eight. He checked his strap watch and saw that it was close to eight now. Still, Imberline—or at least an Imberline—had just entered the hotel dining-room, obviously bent on food. For a faintly prominent bureaucrat to ignore an appointment was not unheard of in Washington, and that might be the answer. Or Frank Imberline might have a brother or a cousin or a namesake who possessed some Govern
ment job and its accompanying entourage.
Still, Simon wished that he had questioned Madeline about the appointment, and how she had arranged it. For a Government official to arrange an appointment at his home, in the evening, sounded a little strange.
He left the hotel again and acquired a taxi by the subtle expedient of paying an extortionate bribe to a driver who maintained that he was waiting for a customer who had just stepped into the hotel for a moment. With the taxi in motion, Simon sat forward and watched the road all the time with an accelerating impatience that turned into an odd feeling of emptiness as he began to realise that the time was approaching and passing when they should have overtaken the girl. Unless she had taken a different route, or picked up a taxi on the way, or…
Or.
Then they were entering Scott Circle, and stopping at the number he had given the driver. He didn’t see another taxi at the door, or anywhere in the vicinity.
He got out and paid his fare. The front of the house seemed very dark, except for a light shining through the transom above the door. That was explainable, he told himself, if this really was a romantic tryst, if there was another Imberline besides the one in the hotel dining-room, but it seemed to the Saint to be an odd set of circumstances under which a bureaucrat would carry on a conference concerning synthetic rubber.
To the Saint, direct action was always better than dim speculation. He rang the bell.
The butler said, “No, suh. Mr Imberline ain’t at home.”
“He is to me,” said the Saint cheerfully. “I’ve got an appointment with him. The name is Gray.”
“Ah’m sorry, suh, but Mr Imberline ain’t here. He ain’t been back since he left this mawnin’, an’ he told the cook he was eatin’ out.”
Simon pursed his lips wryly.
“I guess he forgot his appointment,” he said. “I guess, being such a busy man, he forgets a lot of them.”
“No, suh!”said the butler loyally. “Not Mr Imberline, suh! He makes a date to be somewheres an’ he gits there. Mebbe you got the wrong evenin’, suh. Mebbe it’s tomorrer you’s supposed to have your ’pointment.”
“Perhaps,” the Saint said easily. “I may have mixed up my times. Tell me, did a young lady named Gray call here this evening? I rather expected to meet her here.”
The Saint Steps In (The Saint Series) Page 2
