Authors: Leslie Charteris
Her vague light eyes studied him for a moment longer; and
then she stood up.
“Anyway,
I did get to meet you, just the same, so I think it
was worth it
…
I’ll get out of your way now.”
He watched her. The curious inward immobility that had
seized him when she told him her name
had dissolved com
pletely,
but imperceptibly, so that he hadn’t even noticed the
change. But his brain was fluid and alive again now,
as if all
the cells in it were
working like coordinated individuals, like
bees in a hive.
He
said: “Sit down, Andrea, and finish your drink.”
She sat down, with a surprised expression, as if someone had
pushed her. The Saint smiled.
“After all, you were enterprising,” he murmured, “so
I’ll forgive you. Besides, it’s just occurred to me that you might
be able to do something for me one of
these days.”
Her
eyes opened.
“Could
I? I’d do anything … But you’re just kidding me. Nothing so marvelous as
that could ever happen!”
“Don’t
be too sure.”
“Do
you often do that?—I mean, get perfect strangers to
help you do things?”
“Not often. But sometimes. And anyway, perhaps by that
time we won’t be such strangers.”
“I
hope not,” she said softly; and then she blinked. “This
isn’t happening to me,” she said.
He
laughed.
“What do you do—work for Quenco too?”
“Oh, no. I’m much too stupid. I just do nothing. I’m a very
useless person, really. What would you
want me to do for you?”
“I’ll
tell you when the time comes.”
“I
hope it’ll be something exciting.”
“It might be.”
She leaned forward a little, watching him eagerly.
“Tell
me—why did you think I might be an Axis agent? Were you expecting one?”
“It wasn’t impossible,” he said carefully.
“Are
you working on some Secret Service job? And those
men you had the fight with tonight … No,
wait.” She
frowned,
thinking. Somehow, although she said she was stupid, s
he managed to look quite intelligent, thinking.
“Mr. Devan
only
thought of a hold-up. But he knew this girl you rescued—
Madeline Gray. You see, I’ve got a
memory like a parrot. Her
father has an invention. Synthetic rubber. So the Gestapo or
whatever it is want to get hold of
it. So they think if they can kidnap his daughter they can make him tell. But
you’re looking
after her,
so they don’t get away with it. So you think they’ll
be sending somebody to get rid of you. How’s
that?”
He blew a meticulously rounded smoke-ring.
“It’s
not bad.”
“Is it
right?”
“I can’t answer for all of it. Madeline Gray, yes. Father
makes synthetic rubber, yes. Try to
kidnap daughter, yes. But who and why—that’s something to make up our minds
about
slowly.”
“Is that why
you asked if I was an Axis agent or a private
crook?”
she said shrewdly.
The shift of his
lips and eyebrows was cheerfully noncom
mittal.
“Wonderful
weather we’ve been having,” he said.
“But you
were looking after her.”
“I
am looking after her,” he said, without a trace of em
phasis on the change of tense.
She pouted humorously.
“All right. I mustn’t ask questions.” She finished her drink,
and gazed into the empty
glass. “Couldn’t we go somewhere
and dance?” she said abruptly.
“No.” He came up off the chairback that he had been prop
ping himself on. “I’m sorry, but
I’ve got to pack a couple of
things. And then I’ll be traveling.”
She stood up.
“You mean you’re leaving Washington?”
“Yes.”
“Then
how are we going to get to know each other better?”
“How does anyone find you?”
“You can call Daddy’s office in New York. His secretary al
ways knows where we are—he talks to her
every day. I’ll talk
to her myself and ask her to tell you.”
“Then it ought to be easy.”
She hesitated.
“But where are you going?”
He thought it
over before he answered.
“I’m going to
see Calvin Gray, and I’m taking Madeline with me. I told you I was looking
after them. I’d love to go dancing
with
you, Andrea, but this is business.”
“Where does he live?”
“Near
Stamford, Connecticut.”
“We’ve got a place at Westport,” she said lingeringly.
“Then
we might run into each other some time,” he smiled.
He took her to the door, and after she had gone he came back
and poured himself another drink before he went to the tele
phone. He had to call three or four numbers before
he located
the man he wanted.
“Hullo,
Ham,” he said. “Simon. Sorry to interrupt you, but I’m going solo for
a few days. I want a private plane to go to
the nearest field to Stamford. Organize it for me,
will you?
I’ll be at the airport in
an hour.”
“You don’t want much, do you?”
“Only
one of those little things that you handle so beauti
fully, comrade … Oh, and one other thing.”
“I suppose you’d like Eleanor to come down and see you off.”
“Get me some dossiers. Anything and everything you can dig
up—including dirt. Airmail them to me at General Delivery,
Stamford. Get the names. Calvin Gray, research
chemist. A guy
named Walter Devan, who
works for Quenco.” Simon lighted
a cigarette. “Also Hobart
Quennel himself, and his daughter Andrea.”
He
hung up, and sat for several moments, drawing steadily
at his cigarette and watching the smoke drift away
from his
lips.
Then he went into
the bedroom and started packing his bag, humming gently to himself as he moved
about. He was traveling very light, and there wasn’t much to do. He had
practically
finished when the telephone rang
again, and he picked it up.
“Washington
Ping-Pong and Priority Club,” he said.
“This
is Madeline Gray,” she said. “Are you still tied up?”
“No.”
“Can you come up to see me, or shall I come down?”
He didn’t need to be as sensitive as he was to feel the unnatural
restraint in her voice.
“Is
something going on,” he asked quietly, “or can’t you talk
now? Just say Yes or No.”
“Oh, yes, I can talk. There’s nobody here. I suppose I’m just
silly. But …” The pause was
quite long. Then she went on,
and her voice was still cold and level and sensible. “I’ve been
trying to phone my father and let him
know we’re coming. But
they say there’s no answer.”
Simon relaxed on
the bed and flipped cigarette ash on the carpet.
“Maybe he’s gone to a movie, or he’s out with the boys analys
ing alcohol in one of the local
saloons.”
“He never
goes out in the evening. He hates it. Besides, he
knew I was going to phone tonight. I was going to talk to him as soon as
I’d seen Imberline. Nothing on earth would have
dragged him out until he knew about that. Or do you think
you’ve scared me too much?”
The Saint lay back and stared at the ceiling, feeling cold
needles tiptoeing up his spine and
gathering In spectral con
clave on the nape of his neck.
4
Simon
Templar checked his watch mechanically as the
Beechcraft sat down on the runway at Armonk airport.
One
hour and fifteen minutes
from Washington was good traveling,
even with
a useful tail wind, and he hoped that his haste hadn’t ground too much life out
of the machinery.
The pilot who was
to take the ship back, who hadn’t asked a single question all the way because
he had been taught not to, said: “Good luck.” Simon grinned and shook
hands, and led
Madeline Gray to the taxi
that he had phoned to meet them.
As they turned east towards Stamford he was still consider
ing the timetable. They could be at
Calvin Gray’s house in
twenty minutes.
Making about an hour and thirty-five minutes altogether. Only a few minutes
longer than one of the regular
airlines would
have taken to make New York, even if there had been a plane leaving at the same
time. Furthermore, he
had left no loophole for the Ungodly to sabotage
the trip, or to interfere with him in any way before he got to his destination.
They couldn’t have intercepted him at any
point, because they
couldn’t have discovered his route before it was too
late.
As
for any other connections that the Ungodly could have
used, It would have taken an hour to drive from New York to
Stamford, or fifty minutes on a fast
train—ignoring such delays
as phone
calls to start the movement, or the business of getting a vehicle to drive in,
or the traveling to and from railroad stations and the inconsiderate tendency
of railroads not to have
trains
waiting on a siding at all hours ready to pull out like
taxis off a rank.
He
had tried to explain some of this to the girl while they
were flying.
“If anything
has
happened to Daddy,” she said now,
“there
were people there already.”
“Then
whatever happened has happened already,” he said,
“and nobody on earth could have caught up with
it. I thought of phoning somebody to go out from New York, but they mightn’t
have gotten here any sooner than we have. I could have phoned the Stamford Town
Police, but what could we
have told them?
So the telephone doesn’t answer. They’d have
said
the same as I said. By the time we’d gotten through all the
arguing and
rigmarole, it could have been almost as late as this by the time they got
started. If they ever got started.”
“Maybe I’m just imagining too much,” she said.
He didn’t know.
He could just as easily have been imagining
too
much himself. He had spent a lot of time trying to get his
own mind
straight.
He
said, because it helped to crystallise his ideas to talk
aloud: “The trouble it that we
don’t even know who the Un
godly are, or what they’re working towards … Suppose they
were private crooks. An invention like this could be worth
a
fortune. They’d want to get the
formula—just for dough. All
right. They might kidnap you, so that they
could threaten your
father with all kinds of
frightful things that might happen to
you
if he didn’t give them the secret. They might kidnap him,
and try to torture it out of him.”
He felt her flesh tighten beside him.
“But there have also been these accidents you told me about.
Wrecking his laboratory. Sabotage. It’s a nice exciting word.
But where would it get them—in the end?”
She said: “If they were spies
——”
“If they were spies,” he said, “they wouldn’t be blowing
up
a laboratory. They might
break into it to see what they could see. But they wouldn’t destroy it, because
they want the work to go on. They just want the results. And if they wanted to
kidnap you or your father to squeeze a
formula out of you
with
horsewhips and hot Irons—they’d have tried it long before
this. You wouldn’t have been hard to snatch.”
“Well,” she said, “they could just be saboteurs. They
warned
me not to try and see Mr.
Imberline. They might just want to
stop us getting anywhere.”
“Then
both of you would have been crated and under grass
by this time,” he said coldbloodedly.
“Killing is a lot easier than kidnaping, and when you get into the class
of political
and philosophical killers
you are talking about a bunch of
babies who never went to Sunday School. That’s the whole
thing that stops me. What goes with this pulling of
punches—
this bush league milquetoast
skullduggery?”
He
went on nagging his mind with that proposition while
the taxi turned up the Merritt Parkway and presently branched
off again to the right up a meandering lane that
brought them
to a stone gateway and
through that up a short trim drive to
the
front of a comfortably spacious New England frame house.
He had a glimpse of white shingled walls and green
shingled roofs and gables as the taxi’s headlights swept over them, and
he saw that there were lights behind some of the
curtains. For
a moment her hand was
on his arm, and he put his own hand
over
it, but neither of them said anything.