The Saint Steps In (The Saint Series)

by Leslie Charteris

  “And yet,” Simon thought, “if he doesn’t know more about at least some of this charade than I do, I will devote the rest of my life to curling the hair on eels.”

  He built himself another highball, and turned logically to the file summary of Hobart Quennel.

  This was another of those superficially straightforward histories which any sound citizen is supposed to have. Quennel was the son of a respectable middle-class family in Mobile, Alabama. His father owned a prosperous drug store, in which Quennel worked after he left high school. Out of this ordinary origin, perhaps, in some deep-rooted way, might have stemmed both Quennel’s ultimate aggrandisement of the chemical industry and his choice of Mobile for the establishment of one of Quenco’s newest and largest plants.

  Orphaned at twenty-one, Quennel had sold the drug store and gone north. He went to law school, graduated, joined a New York firm of corporation attorneys, worked hard and brilliantly, became a partner at twenty-eight. Married, and sired Andrea. Six years later, the deaths or retirements of the senior partners had made him the head of the firm. Two years later, he became the receiver in bankruptcy of an obscure manufacturing drug company in Cincinnati. One year from that, after a series of highly complicated transactions which had never been legally disputed, he was a majority stockholder and the firm was getting on its feet again. That was the beginning of the great Quennel Chemical Corporation.

  The further developments were even more complicated in detail—in fact, Treasury experts had spent large sums of public money in efforts to unravel them—but fairly simple in outline. The obscure manufacturing drug company had prospered and grown until it was one of the most important in the country. It had absorbed small competitors and enlarged its interests. Somewhere quite early in the tale, Mrs Quennel, who had been an earnest art student of Greenwich Village, found that her married life was unbearably deficient in romance, and left for Reno with a Russian poet of excitingly Bolshevist philosophy. Encouraged rather than discouraged, Hobart Quennel left his law business entirely to the junior partners he had taken, and devoted his legal genius exclusively to his own commercial interests. Over the following years, and out of a maze of loans, liquidations, mergers, stock exchange manipulations, mortgages, flotations, and holding companies, Quenco finally emerged—an octopus with factories in four different states, no longer concerned only with such simple products as aspirin and lovable laxatives, but branching out into all the fields of fertilisers, vitamins, synthetics, and plastics, and presenting impeccable balance sheets full of astronomical figures in which Mr Quennel’s personal participation ran to millions of dollars a year.

  His present life was busy but well upholstered. He kept the reins of Quenco firmly in his hands, but found time to belong to a long list of golf, chess, bridge, polo, and country clubs. For several years before the war he had regularly taken a summer vacation in Europe, accompanied by Andrea as soon as she was old enough. He was one of those Americans who once sang the praises of Mussolini because he made the trains run on time. He had rescued Andrea from three or four escapades which had made news—one concerned with a Prussian baron, one with the breaking of bottles over the heads of gendarmes in the casino at Deauville, and one with an accountant in Chicago whose wife had old-fashioned ideas about the sanctity of the home. There was a note that several of Andrea’s other liaisons which had not become public scandals seemed to have been impartially divided between her father’s business associates and business rivals. Hobart Quennel himself was a model of genial good behaviour. He was a Shriner, a staunch Republican, and a dabbler in state and national politics. He also had been the subject of a Senate investigation, a defendant under the Sherman Act, and an implacable feudist of the Labour Relations Board, but with seasoned forensic skill he had managed to emerge as nothing worse than a rugged individualist who had built up a great industry without ever being accused of robbing hungry widows, who was a diehard opponent of government interference, and who had to be respected even if disagreed with. Curiously, he had made public denunciations of the America First Committee, and had voluntarily pioneered in the compulsory fingerprinting of employees and in laying off all Axis nationals even before there had been any official moves in that direction.

  “A deep guy,” thought the Saint. “A very deep guy indeed.”

  He had his own interpretation of some of the items in Quennel’s biography. He could see the connection between the middle-class beginning and the gigantic plant at Mobile, the local boy making good. He could see the link between the Bolshevik poet and the Mussolini railroad schedules. He could even tie up the bourgeois Southern background with the advancement of Walter Devan as the Imperial Wizard of a strictly private Ku Klux Klan. But all of that still didn’t tarnish Hobart Quennel’s unimpeachable Americanism, misguided as you might think it, or the fact that even the most scurrilous attacks on him had never been able to attach him adhesively to any subversive faction or foreign-controlled activity.

  Hobart Quennel was indisputably a very clever man, but could he have been as clever as that, for so many years, exposed all the time to any sniper who wanted to load a gun for him?

  The Saint lowered his drink an inch, and made himself acknowledge that something he had been looking for was still missing. And for the first time he began to wonder whether he had been wrong from the start. An easily preconceived idea, even a series of very ready deductions, were desperately tempting to coast on, and glutinously hard to shake off once the ride had started. But facts were facts, and the dossiers in his hands hadn’t been compiled by dewy-eyed romanticists. If Hobart Quennel had even been more than essentially polite to any Nazi or known fifth columnist, the slip would almost certainly have been recorded.

  And yet…

  Simon thought about Andrea Quennel again. She had the build and beauty and colouring that Wagner was probably dreaming of before the divas took over. She might easily have been flattered by the ideals of the Herrenvolk…There had been the Prussian baron…And definitely she was the Diana Barry who had commissioned Schindler…If you disregarded the rules of legal evidence, her own father had transparently taken advantage of her glandular propensities before. In the same way that she had been using them ever since the Saint met her.

  That was so much like the words she had used herself that he could almost hear her saying them again. He saw her lifelike in front of him, her warm rich lips and the too-perfect contours of her body, and the remembrance was not helpful to dwell on.

  He lighted a cigarette and picked up the last docket of the sheaf—the story of the man who was still the most nebulous personality of all.

  Frank Imberline.

  Born in New York’s most expensive maternity home. A silver-spoon case. Private school. Princeton. Colonial Club. Graduated minima cum laude, being much too busy for affairs of the higher intellect. Was then drafted by his father into the service of Consolidated Rubber. Served a six-year apprenticeship, being driven sluggishly through all the different departments of the business. Steadied down, acquired a stodgy and even pompous sense of responsibility, became an executive, a Rotarian, a member of the Akron Chamber of Commerce, eventually became Consolidated Rubber’s head or figurehead. The latter seemed more probable, for there was a board of directors with plenty of shrewd experience behind them. The character estimate of Imberline said, “Generally considered honest and well-meaning, but dull.” He played golf in the nineties, subscribed to all the good causes, and could always be depended on for a salvo of impressive and well-rounded clichés at any public dinner. His farthest travelling had been to Miami Beach. He had no labour battles, no quarrels with any Government bureaus. He did everything according to what it said in the book. His only political activity had been when some group persuaded him to run for Mayor on what was vaguely called a “reform ticket:” he lost the election by a comfortable minority, and stated afterwards that politics were too confusing for him. Certainly the things that Simon had heard him say made that sound plausible. All the rest of h
is career—if such a swift-sounding word could be applied to anything so rutted and ponderous—had been devoted to Consolidated Rubber, from that early enforced apprenticeship until the time when he had resonantly donated his services to the National Emergency.

  And that was that. Nothing else.

  Not the barest hint of sharp practice, corruption, chicanery, rebellion, conniving, strong-arming, conspiracy, political ambition, or adventuring in social philosophies. “Generally considered honest and well-meaning, but dull…”

  Of all the suspect records, his was the most open and humdrum and unassailable. Which turned everything inside out and upside down.

  The Saint lay back with his glass held between his knees and blew chains of spaced smoke-rings towards the ceiling. Once again he put all the pieces together, fitting and matching them against all the facts that he had learned and memorised, estimating and analysing them with the utter impersonality of a mathematician. And only getting back again and again to the same irreconcilable equations.

  He got up and freshened the melted ice in the remains of his drink, and lighted another cigarette. For several minutes he paced the room with monotonous precision, up and down on one seam of the carpet like a slow shuttle in a machine.

  He could cogitate his brain into a pretzel, but it wouldn’t advance him a single millimetre. He would be in the same foredoomed position as an Aristotelian philosopher trying to discover the nature of the universe with no other instrument than pure and transcendent logic. But one renegade factor might be within a few yards of him at that moment, and if he left it untouched it would only be his own fault that the solution didn’t come out.

  There had been moments like that in many of his adventures—there nearly always seemed to be. Moments when the fragile swinging balance of thought became a maddening pendulum that only physical action would stop. And this was one of them. From there on he was through with theories. He knew what he knew, he had dissected all the arguments, he had pinned down and anatomised all the ifs and buts. He would never have to go back to them. The solution and the answers were all there, if he could beat them out of the raw material. The loose ends, the contradictions, the gaps, would all merge and blend and fill out and explain themselves as the shape forged. But from there on, win or lose, right or wrong, the rest was action.

  He still had time before he had to meet Andrea.

  He put on his tie, his holster, and his coat, and left his room. He went a few yards down the corridor and knocked on the door of 1013.

  4

  Imberline was in his shirt sleeves, his waistcoat unbuttoned. He recognised the Saint in a surprised and startled way that was too slow in maturing to influence the course of events. Simon was inside the door and closing it for him before he had decided on his response.

  “You’ll begin to think this is a habit of mine, Frank,” said the Saint apologetically. “But honestly, I do make appointments when I have time.”

  “This is going too far,” Imberline spluttered belatedly. “I told you I’d see you and your…er…Miss Gray when I got back to Washington. I don’t expect you to follow me all over the country. Even if it’s a hotel, a man’s house is his castle—”

  “But needs must,” said the Saint firmly, “when the devil drives.”

  He allowed Imberline to follow him into the room, and helped himself to the most inviting chair.

  Imberline stood in front of him, bulging like a pouter pigeon.

  “Young man, if you don’t get out of here at once I’ll pick up the telephone and have you thrown out.”

  “You can do that, of course. But I’ll still have time to say what I want to say before the bouncers arrive. So why not just let me say it and save a lot of commotion?”

  The rubber rajah made the mistake of trying to find an answer to that one, and visibly wrestled himself to a standstill. He inflated himself another notch to try and distract attention from that.

  “Well, what is it?” he barked.

  “A few things have happened since last night,” said the Saint. “I don’t know what all of them add up to, but they do make it seem very probable that Calvin Gray’s invention isn’t a crackpot dream.”

  “The proof of the pudding is in the eating,” Imberline pronounced sententiously. “We’ve already discussed that—”

  “But that was before Calvin Gray was kidnapped.”

  Imberline had his mouth open for a retort before he fully realised what he was replying to.

  He swallowed the unborn epigram, and groped for something else. It came out explosively enough, but the roar in his voice lacked its normal fullness.

  “What’s that?”

  “Kidnapped.”

  “I didn’t see anything about it in the papers.”

  “It’s being kept as quiet as possible. So is the fact that a man was murdered during the return engagement this morning.”

  Imberline’s jowls swelled.

  “Mr Templar, if this is some cock-and-bull story that you’ve concocted to try and stampede me, let me tell you—”

  “You don’t have to,” said the Saint quietly. “If you want to confirm it, call the FBI in New Haven. They’ll probably admit it to you if you identify yourself. Tell them you’re interested on behalf of the WPB.”

  “Who was murdered?”

  “A man named Angert, employed by Schindler, who was employed by some party unknown to trail Calvin Gray’s daughter.”

  “I never heard of him.”

  “I’m afraid that doesn’t make him any less dead.”

  Imberline glared at him with unreasonable indignation.

  “This is a civilised country,” he proclaimed. “We don’t expect our system to be disrupted by violence and gangsterism. If there has been any official negligence—”

  “Something ought to be done about it,” Simon assented tiredly. “I know. Personally, I’m going to write to the President. What are you going to do?”

  “What am I going to do?”

  “Yes. You.”

  “What do you expect me to do? If your story is true, the proper authorities—”

  “Of course. I’d forgotten the dear old Proper Authorities. But you were a Proper Authority who was supposed to find out what Calvin Gray had on the ball. And apparently some Improper Authority thinks a lot more of him than you did—so much that they’re prepared to go to most violent and gangster lengths to put him on ice.”

  Imberline fumbled a handkerchief out of his trouser pocket and mopped his heavy face.

  He went over to another chair and made it groan with his weight.

  “This is terrible,” he said. “It’s…it’s shocking.”

  “It’s all of that,” said the Saint. “And it stinks for you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Simon slung one leg over the arm of his chair and settled deeper into it. He was no longer worried about being thrown out.

  “Madeline Gray had an appointment with you last night,” he said. “You’ll remember I asked you about it. You said you didn’t make it. But she thought she had it. And she was on her way to your house when there was an attempt to kidnap her—which I happened to louse up. But it was rather obvious that the appointment, phony or not, was planned to put her on the spot for kidnapping. If anyone wanted to jump to conclusions, they could make your position look slightly odd.”

  The other stiffened as if he had been goosed, and a tint of maroon crept into his complexion.

  “Are you daring to insinuate—”

  “I’m not insinuating anything, Frankie. I’m just telling you what any dumb cop would think of. Especially after you’d been so bull-headed about dodging Gray and his daughter. Almost as if you didn’t want them to get a hearing.”

  “I told you, there is an established procedure—a well-planned system—”

  “And there is Consolidated Rubber, which I hear was rather late in climbing on the synthetic bandwagon.”

  Imberline drew himself up.

  “Young
man,” he said, with indomitable dignity, “I have never made any secret of my views on the subject of synthetic rubber. If Nature had intended us to have synthetic rubber, she would have created it in the first place. But only God can make a tree. However,” he conceded magnanimously, “in the present Emergency I have not been influenced by my personal opinions. My life has always been an open book. I am prepared to match my principles with any man’s. If anyone wishes to impugn my honesty, I cannot prevent him, but I can assure you that he will live to eat his words.”

  Simon put a match to a cigarette and regarded him with unconcealable awe.

  “Incredible” was the adjective which he had spontaneously tacked on Imberline in the Shoreham, without knowing anything about him or having heard more than two sentences of his dialogue. He could improve on it now.

  “You ought to be in a glass case,” he said.

  The pattern snapped into place. And once there, it was immovable. His ruthless eyes had held Imberline under a microscope for every instant of the interview, and they wouldn’t have missed even the cobwebby shred of a frayed edge. Even less than in their first conversation, when he had been completely baffled. But there had been no such thing. The précis he had studied hadn’t lied—as he should have known it couldn’t. He had jabbed Imberline calculatingly with facts, information, insinuations, names and knowledge, without rattling him for a split second on any score except his own sonorous self-esteem. No cornered conspirator could ever have been that brilliant. Not even the dean of all professional hypocrites could have been so unpuncturable. Histrionic masterpieces like that were performed daily in detective stories, never in real life. And this was very much a time for realism, no matter what pet went down in the crash.