The Saint Steps In (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  He smiled and added, “Even including that human also-ran, Mr Sylvester Angert—the funny little man.”

  He put down his glass and strolled around the room, his hands in his pockets and his eyes crinkled against the smoke of the cigarette slanted between his lips.

  It began to look like a nice little situation. The FBI wouldn’t have any jurisdiction unless somebody Higher Up—such as Frank Imberline, perhaps—brought it to Mr Hoover’s attention that the protection of Calvin Gray and his daughter was a matter of national importance. Imberline might do just that, doubtless adding something like, “A stitch in time saves nine.” But would he? Would the dollar-a-year man who had been the head of Consolidated Rubber go to any great lengths to protect the life of an inventor of a process which could make synthetic rubber out of odd bits of nothing much? Might not Imberline, like too many others in Washington, be looking beyond the end of the war? Walter Devan had said something pat about life preservers, but wasn’t it a fact, still, that when the war was over, the old battle might start again, the battle between the old and the war-born new?

  Imberline was an unknown quantity, then, which left only the local gendarmerie to appeal to. Simon knew nothing at all about them, but even if they were extremely efficient, he surmised that they were also liable to be very busy. He didn’t know for how long they would be likely to detach three able-bodied officers for the sole job of providing a full-time personal bodyguard for Madeline Gray. And in any case they couldn’t stay with her if she left the city.

  “Where is your father now?” he asked.

  “At home—in Connecticut.”

  “Where?”

  “Near Stamford.”

  The DC police couldn’t do anything about that. And the Stamford cops would be even less likely to have men to spare for an indefinite vigil.

  “Maybe you ought to hire some guards from a detective agency,” he said. “I gather you could afford it.”

  She looked him in the eyes.

  “Yes. We could afford it.”

  He had made a reasonable suggestion and she had considered it in the same reasonable way. Even that steady glance of hers didn’t accuse him of trying to evade anything. It would have had no right to, anyway, he told himself. It was his own conscience. He didn’t owe her anything. He had plenty of other things to think about. There certainly must be some proper legal authority for her to take her troubles to—he just hadn’t been able to think what it was. And, anyhow, what real basis did he have for deciding that Calvin Gray’s invention was practical and important? There were highly-trained experts in Government offices who were much more competent to judge such matters than he was.

  And just the same he knew that he was still evading, and he felt exasperated with himself.

  He asked, “What was your idea when you did see Imberline?”

  “Get him to come to the laboratory himself, or send someone who was absolutely reliable. They could watch us make as much rubber as they’d need for their tests, and then they could be sure it was a genuine synthetic.”

  “But eventually other people would have to be in on it—if it were going to be manufactured in any quantity.”

  “Father has that all worked out. You could have a dozen different ingredients shipped to the plant and stored in tanks. Three of them would be the vital part of the formula. The other nine would mean nothing. But they’d all be piped down through a mixing-room that only one man need go into. The unnecessary ingredients would be destroyed by acids and run down to the drain, so that no check-up would be possible. The real formula would be piped from the mixing-room direct to the vats. One man could control a whole plant by just working two or three hours a day. I could control one myself. But even if anyone on the outside knew every chemical that was brought in and used, it would take them years to try out every combination and proportion and treatment until they might hit on the right one.”

  It was a sound answer. But it had the tinge of being a pat answer, too. As if it had been rehearsed carefully to reply to embarrassing questions.

  Or maybe he still had a hangover of his own first scepticism.

  He made a decision with characteristic abruptness.

  “Suppose,” he suggested, “you go to your room. Lock and night-lock the door and don’t open it to anyone, except me.”

  He went to the desk, scrawled a word on a slip of paper, folded it, and handed it to her. She looked at it and nodded. He took the paper back and touched a match to it. As the ashes crumbled, they took into nothingness the word he had written, the word he was to say when he called her.

  He was taking no chances that Mr Sylvester Angert’s cousin might be looking for his room in the hall outside, complete with a little tube that heard through doors.

  “Will you be long?” she asked.

  “I hope not. I’ll take you to your room, if you don’t mind.”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  He escorted her to the elevators, rode up five floors, and saw her safely to her door. He waited until the night latch clicked and then returned to the elevators. He rode to the main lobby and spent a few minutes looking into the dining-room. It was virtually deserted—for Washington—and the man he was looking for wasn’t there.

  Simon left the hotel and bought a taxi driver for the second time that night. He leaned back on the cracked-leather upholstery and reached for a cigarette.

  “Take me to a street that enters into Scott Circle,” he directed. “One that hits the circle near the low numbers.”

  “You got any special number in mind, Chief?”

  “Yeah, bud. I’ve got me a number in mind, but just do like I told you, see?”

  “Okay, okay. I just wanted to know.”

  He lighted his cigarette, wondering if his tough-guy talk would convince a radio-casting director, in a pinch. He decided that it wouldn’t. He hadn’t used it for quite a while, and he was out of practice. He made a mental note to polish up on it.

  The cab drifted to a street corner on the rim of the circle, and the hackman turned.

  “How’s this, Cap?” he asked.

  “This is swell.”

  He paid off the driver, waited until the cab drove away, and waited a few minutes more to make certain that the cabbie was not too curious. He surveyed the dimmed-out houses on the circle and picked out the mansion which he had already visited once this evening.

  There was a light in the downstairs hallway, and lights in a second-floor room that must be a bedroom. As he watched, Simon saw a bulky shadow pass the drawn shade. The shadow was of proportions that hardly could have belonged to anyone else but Frank Imberline.

  The downstairs light went out. The Saint moved along the sidewalk enough to see a tiny window in the back of the house go on. That meant that the coloured butler must be going to bed.

  Walking in the deep shadows, Simon Templar made his way to the front door of the house that surely must have been built as an ambassadorial dwelling. He worked on the lock for about a minute with an instrument from his pocket, and it ceased to be an obstruction.

  “Now,” he told himself, “if there’s no burglar alarm, and if there’s no bolt, we might get to see Comrade Imberline in person.”

  There was neither alarm nor bolt. Simon let himself noiselessly into the front hall and closed the door gently behind him. A circular staircase wound its way up towards the second floor, and there was no creak of a loose joist as the Saint made his way aloft. A crack of light under a door told him that Frank Imberline was still awake.

  Simon pushed open the door and calmly walked into the great man’s bedroom.

  Imberline was seated at a desk, scanning a sheaf of papers. He was clad in maroon and gold pyjamas that made the Saint blink for a moment. As Simon stepped into the room, the rubber tycoon swung his heavy head in his direction and popped his eyes, the unhealthy ruddiness slowly ebbing from his face.

  “Who are you?” he croaked.

  “Don’t be alarmed, Mr Imberline,” said th
e Saint soothingly. “I’m not a hold-up man, and I’m not an indignant taxpayer proposing to beat you up.”

  “Then who the devil are you, and what do you want?”

  “My name is Simon Templar, and I just wanted to talk to you.”

  “How did you get in here?”

  “I walked in,” said the Saint, “through the front door.”

  “You broke in!”

  Simon shook his head.

  “I didn’t break anything,” he said innocently. “I just used one of my little tricks on the lock. Really, I did no damage at all.”

  Imberline made gargling noises in his throat. “This is…this is…”

  “I know,” said the Saint wearily. “I know. I should have applied for an audience through the usual channels, and filled out half a dozen forms in quintuplicate. But after all there is a war going on—to coin a phrase—and it just occurred to me that this might save us waiting a few months to meet each other.”

  The red came back into Frank Imberline’s square face, and he seemed to swell within his gorgeous pyjamas.

  “I’ll have you know,” he said, in a half-bellow, “that such high-handed tactics as this—these—must be dealt with by the proper authorities! I will not be intimidated, sir, by any high-handed—”

  “You said that before,” Simon reminded him politely.

  “Well—what in hell do you want?’

  “I want to talk to you about a man who has invented a synthetic rubber process. One Calvin Gray.”

  Imberline drew his heavy brows down over his little eyes.

  “What about Calvin Gray?” he demanded.

  “I’m interested in Mr Gray’s process,” said the Saint, “and I’m wondering why the man can’t get a hearing with you.”

  Imberline waved a pudgy hand in a disdainful gesture.

  “A nut, Mr…er…Templar,” he said. “A nut, pure and simple. From what I’ve heard, he claims he can make rubber out of rhubarb, or something. Impossible, of course. I hope you haven’t invested any money in his invention, sir.”

  “A fool and his money are soon parted,” Simon said wisely.

  “Yes,” Imberline grunted. “Quite so. But this outrageous breaking into a man’s house—a man’s house is his castle, you know—you really have no excuse for that.”

  The big man got out of the chair by the desk and stalked over to the bureau. He took a fat cigar from the box on the bureau top and rammed it into his mouth. Simon’s eyes were watchful. But Imberline’s hand did not move towards the handle of any drawer that might have contained a gun. He marched back across the room and slumped down into a deep easy chair.

  “Okay,” he said over his cigar. “So you broke in here to talk to me about Gray’s invention. I could throw you out or have you arrested, but instead I’ll listen to what you have to say.”

  “Very kind of you,” Simon murmured. “A soft answer turneth away stuff.”

  “What is it you want to know?” Imberline asked bluntly. “I’m a busy man, and every minute counts.”

  “While time and tide wait for no man.”

  “Get to the point. Why are you here?’

  Simon placed a cigarette between his lips and snapped his lighter. He was aware of Imberline’s gimlet eyes watching his every movement. He exhaled a long plume of smoke and sat on the end of the bed.

  “Have you ever seen Gray’s product?” he asked.

  “Once—or maybe twice.”

  “And what was your opinion?”

  If it were possible for the hulking shoulders of Frank Imberline to shrug, they would have.

  “It’s something that could be synthetic—and it’s something that could be made-over rubber, cleverly disguised.”

  “You investigated it thoroughly, I suppose?”

  “I had my staff investigate it. Their report was bad. That man Gray pestered me for weeks, trying to get to see me, and finally gave up. I hear his daughter is in town now, still trying to waste my time.”

  “You haven’t made an appointment with her?”

  “Certainly not. There are only so many hours in the day—”

  “And so many days in the week—”

  “Young man,” said Mr Imberline magisterially, “I am a public servant. I have the most humble respect for the trust which has been placed in me, and my daily responsibility is to make sure that not one hour—not one minute—of my time shall be frittered away on things from which the community cannot benefit.”

  “You couldn’t by any chance have made an appointment with her for tonight and forgotten it?” Simon asked, unawed by that resounding statement.

  Imberline drew his chins together.

  “Certainly not! I never forget an appointment. Punctuality is the politeness of princes—”

  “You really ought to have seen her. She’s quite something to look at.”

  There seemed to be a flicker of interest in the close-set eyes. The big man grinned nauseatingly.

  “Easy on the eye, eh?”

  “Very easy. But to get back to Gray’s invention—you haven’t seen it demonstrated yourself, I take it?”

  Imberline shook his head.

  “No. I’m a busy man. I can’t be running all over the country to view the brainstorm of every crackpot. I looked at his sample and I told my staff to investigate it. That’s all I could do. Even you might understand that.”

  Simon stared at him thoughtfully through a couple of clouds of smoke. He was beginning to get an odd feeling about this interview which fitted with nothing that he had expected. Frank Imberline was as pompous and phony as a bullfrog with a megaphone; his thinking appeared to be done in resonant clichés, and he uttered them all the time as if he were addressing a large rally in a public square. And yet from the beginning his reaction to Simon’s presence had been one of righteous indignation and not fear. It was true that the Saint hadn’t waved a knife under his nose or made any threatening noises. But the Saint had also calmly admitted a technical act of burglary, which there was no denying anyhow, and any normal citizen would have regarded such an intruder as at least a potentially dangerous screwball. Well, possibly Imberline was one of those men who are too obtuse to be subject to ordinary fear. But in that case, why hadn’t he simply rung or called for help and had the Saint arrested?

  Because he was more profoundly afraid that the Saint had something up his sleeve? Or for some other reason?

  Imberline was returning his scrutiny just as shrewdly. He took the cigar out of his mouth and bit off the end.

  “You tell me that Miss…er…Gray is a very attractive young woman,” he said.

  “She is.”

  “Young man, I’m going to ask you a question.”

  “Shoot.”

  “Is there any romantic reason for this interest of yours?”

  The Saint shook his head.

  “None at all.”

  “Have you invested any money in this so-called invention?”

  “No.”

  Imberline struck a match and put it to the cigar.

  “Well, then,” he said in a gust of smoke, “what the hell are you here for?”

  “That’s a fair question,” said the Saint. “I have some quaint reasons of my own for believing that this invention may have more in it than you think. If that’s true, I’m as interested as any citizen in wanting to see something done about it. If there’s any fake about it, I’m still interested—from another angle. And from that angle, I’d be even more interested if the invention was really good and there was a powerful and well-organised campaign of skullduggery going on to prevent anything being done about it.”

  “Why?”

  “I’ve told you my name. But perhaps you’d know me better if I said—the Saint.”

  Imberline’s cigar jerked in his mouth as his teeth clamped on it, and his eyes squeezed up again. But there was no change of colour in the florid face. No—Frank Imberline, with or without a guilty conscience, wasn’t panicked by shadows. He stared back at the Sa
int, without blinking, puffing smoke out of the side of his mouth in intermittent clouds.

  “You’re a crook,” he said.

  “If you’d care to put that in writing,” said the Saint calmly, “I shall be very glad to sue you for libel. There isn’t a single legal charge that can be brought against me—other than this little matter of breaking and entering tonight.”

  The other made a short impatient gesture.

  “Oh, I’m sure you’ve been clever. And I’ve read some of that stuff about your Robin Hood motives. But your methods, sir, are not those which have been set up by our democratic constitution. The end does not justify the means. No individual has the right to take the law into his own hands. The maintenance of our institutions and our way of life, sir, rests upon the subordination of private prejudice to the authorised processes of our courts.”

  He gave the pronouncement a fine oratorical rotundity, paused as if to allow the acclamation of an unseen audience to subside, and said abruptly, “However, your suggestion that my Department could be influenced by anything but the best interests of the country is insulting and intolerable. I’m going to prove to you that you’re talking a lot of crap.”

  “Good.”

  “You bring this Miss Gray to see me, and I’ll prove to you that, she has a chance to present her case if she’s got one.”

  Simon could hardly believe his ears.

  “Do you mean that?”

  “What the hell are you talking about, do I mean it? Of course I mean it. I’m not condoning your behaviour, but I do know how to put a stop to the sort of rumour you’re starting.”

  “When? Tomorrow?”

  “No. I’m leaving first thing in the morning for New York and Akron on Government business. But as soon as I get back. In a couple of days. Keep in touch with my office.”

  The Saint went on looking at him with a sense of deepening bafflement that had the question marks pounding through his head like trip-hammers. His blue eyes were cool and inscrutable, but behind the mask of his face that strange perplexity went on. If this was a stall to get him out of there and keep him quiet for a couple of days, perhaps while further shenanigans were concocted, it was a perfect stall. There was still no way of exposing it except by waiting. Imberline had taken the wind out of his sails. But if it wasn’t a stall…Simon found his head aching with the new incongruities that he would have to untangle if it wasn’t a stall.