Authors: Leslie Charteris
There
was only one question left in the Saint’s mind.
“How does Andrea feel about all this?” he asked.
“Andrea
doesn’t think,” Devan said casually. “She does a
sort of roping job for Bart now and
again. He probably told
her
you might be connected with someone who was trying to
put over a dirty deal on him in business. He wouldn’t
tell her
anything else. But she
seems to be carrying quite a torch for you.” Devan met the Saint’s gaze
with brash man-to-man can
dor. “You’re on your own, as far as that goes. She could be a
lot of fun.”
“If I played
ball,” said the Saint.
Devan made an
affirmative movement with his head and his
cigar
at the same time.
“Why be a dope? You can’t win. But there aren’t any hard
feelings. Bart and I both appreciate
what you’ve done, and
what you’re
after. And the proposition he made you still goes.
One hundred per cent.”
“But if I
turn you down——”
“Why
bring that up? I don’t have to tell you we can’t leave
you around now. But you belong with us.”
Simon
glanced at the stump of his cigarette. Having been
warned once, he didn’t try to get up and move towards
the
ashtray that Devan was using. He trod the
cigarette out on the
carpet, and lighted
another.
He had heard the
threat of death many times in his life, but
never
with such utter certainty and conviction. Even though
not a word had been said about it at all. It gave
him a sense
of frozen inevitability
that no noise and savagery could have
done.
And he knew that Walter Devan was just as aware of it
as he was. They spoke the same language so closely
that
it would have been merely a
waste of energy to shout …
Devan stood up,
still holding the gun.
“Why don’t you take a few minutes to think it over?” he
said.
He went to the door through which the long big-boned man
had gone out; and as he opened it he
jerked his head towards
the second door.
“Calvin Gray and his daughter are in the next room,” he s
aid. “Say hullo to them if you want to.”
Simon Templar was
alone.
He got to his feet after a moment, surveyed the room once more in a
detached way, and turned to the other door.
It opened when he tried the handle, and he went in.
It was a room
very much like the one he had left. Madeline
Gray
and her father sat side by side on a divan close to the
door. It had to be Calvin Gray, of course, before
she jumped
up and introduced them.
“How do you do,” said the Saint.
They shook hands. A strange formality, and a stranger trib
ute to the perdurance of common
customs.
Madeline
Gray left her hand resting on the Saint’s arm, and
he smiled down at her and said: “How soundproof
are the
doors?”
“We heard
all of it, in the other room,” she said.
It was all very quiet; and when you came down to it there
didn’t seem to be any other way it could be.
“Then
we can save a lot of repetition,” said the Saint. “I
don’t even care very much about the
details of how you two
were snatched. It’s relatively unimportant now.”
“What
were you saying in there,” she asked, “about Imberline
?”
“They
killed him.”
He
told them all about that, from the dossiers he had studied
through to his session with Fernack in
the morning. He
skipped
as lightly as he could through the interval he had spent
with Andrea. He gave her credit for
having tried to keep him
out
of that trap without telling him about it, but he didn’t elaborate on the
counter-attractions she had offered. But he
saw Madeline watching him rather thoughtfully.
“In one way,” he said grimly, “you could say that I
killed
him. Just like I got the
two of you into this. By being, too
clever … You were quite wrong about him. On the
evidence,
he had to be honest. So I
went to him as an honest man—to see if I couldn’t convert him to our side. I
wasn’t able to do
that in
five minutes—it took him too long to understand any
thing that wasn’t a proverb—but at least I figured
that I’d laid
up some more trouble for
the Ungodly. Unfortunately, I had.
But I didn’t know he’d be seeing Quennel and Devan that
same night. And even after I saw Devan
downstairs, I didn’t
think of it in the right way. I suppose they were having this
conference in New York because too
many people are watch
ing
too many other people’s maneuvers in Washington; they
knew by then that the ice was awful thin and getting
thinner
by the minute with me
breathing on it, and they had to make
sure they could keep Imberline where they wanted him. In
stead of that, they got just the
reverse. Suspicion had started to
penetrate into that mess of porridge he used for a brain,
and
there was no talking him
out of it. When he checked with Jetterick
, they knew they were up against it. They may have
tried
threats or bribery at that
point, but he was just too stubborn
or stupid to be scared or bought—it doesn’t make any differ
ence now. There was only one way to
stop him then; and they
stopped him.”
“But we still want to know how you got here,” said the girl
huskily.
Simon’s
glance reflexed to the doors again. But it didn’t
really matter. He had nothing to say just then that
couldn’t be
overheard.
“I’ll
tell you,” he said.
He lay on the other divan and told them, stretched out in
an amazing restful relaxation that was
not actually any testimonial to the steel in his nerves at all, but only to
the supreme
conversation of energy
that a trapped tiger would have had.
He told them everything he had thought from the beginning; and in as
much detail as he could remember he gave
them an account of the dinner conversation in which so
many things had been so elementarily explained.
He
tried to do a good job of it; but he still didn’t know
how well he had made his point when he had finished
report
ing and Calvin Gray said:
“How can a man like Quennel be
like that?”
He was a fairly tall wiry man, lean almost to the verge of
emaciation, with a tousled mop of
perfectly white hair and
eyes that blinked with nervous frequency behind square rim
less glasses; and he said it with an
air of academic perplexity,
as if he were fretting over a chemical paradox.
The Saint put one hand behind his head and gazed at the
ceiling.
“Simply because he is a man like that. Because he’s more
dangerous than any fifth columnist or
any outright crook, be
cause
he sincerely believes that he’s a just and important and
progressive citizen. Because he can
talk contemptuously about
Caf
é
Society and the playboy
class, and really believe it and feel austerely superior to them, and sandwich
it in between mentioning his new strings of polo ponies and the parties he
throws for his daughter where they
drink thirty cases of cham
pagne. ‘They’re dead but they don’t know it’—but he’s one
of them and he doesn’t know it
…
Because he can disclaim
profiteering while he feels very contented about
‘increased
capital values’ …
Because he’s very proud of his share in the
War Effort, but he thinks nothing of faking the
registration of
the
family cars so as to get more than his share of gas to play
with. Because he doesn’t mind using a
German agent like Morgen
if Morgen can be useful, instead of turning him over to
the FBI; but he’d be full of righteous
indignation if you
called
him a fifth columnist … Because he hates Fascism and
he’s a patriotic one-hundred-per-cent
American; but he be
lieves in
what he calls ‘social stability’ and ‘a strong and capable executive class’
whose divine mission it is to dish out
liberty and democracy in reasonable doses to the dumb
unruly
proletariat … Because
he’s thoroughly satisfied that Big
Business is wide awake and wading into the war effort with
both hands, but he’s also ready to
sabotage a rival process that
would speed up and cheapen a very vital production, be
cause it would lose him a hell of a lot
of dough … Because
he
builds model homes and organizes baseball teams and
sewing bees for his employees to keep them happy, but
he be
lieves that nabobs like
himself should have a law of their own
which transcends the rights of ordinary mortals …
Because
he’s exactly the same type
as Thyssen and the other Big Busi
ness men who backed Hitler to preserve their own kind of So
cial Stability; because he’d back his
own kind of dictatorship
in
this country, under another name, and still think what a
fine level-headed liberal he was …
Because he’s a goddam
bloody
Nazi himself, and you can never hang it on him be
cause even he hasn’t begun to realise it.”
His voice seemed to linger in the air, so quiet and sensible, and yet
with a feeling so much deeper than any dramatics, so
that it seemed as if it should have gone on for ever, and there
should have been something permanent about it, and
it should
have spread out wherever the
minds of those who listened
would take it on.
Calvin Gray rubbed his rough white hair and said hazily:
“But when he goes into actual
crime——
”
“Quennel,” said the Saint, “never went into a crime in
his
life. If he tells Devan
that you and your invention are a Bad
Thing, and ought to be stopped, he’s only giving his
opinion.
If things happen to you
and stop you, he’s naturally very
pleased
about it. If he tells Devan to try and talk me into forgetting you and taking
a job with Quenco, that’s entirely legit
imate.
If Devan succeeds, fine. If he doesn’t, but an unfor
tunate accident eliminates me, that’s providential
… It
would have been the same with
Imberline. I don’t doubt that
Quennel
finally went off and left Devan to go on arguing. If Devan could talk Imberline
around, that would be swell. If
Imberline
dropped dead in the bathroom before the argument
was settled, that was too bad, but it saved a whole lot of trou
ble.”
“But he tried to tell you I was a fraud.”
“A diplomatic fiction. And very well done. If it hadn’t been
me, he might easily have put it over. And even if it didn’t
com
pletely go over, it might still have
served—with the offer of a
wonderful
job to wash it down. I could have helped myself
to believe it, if I’d
wanted to: it would have been a fair enough
excuse
to stop worrying about you and put my conscience to
sleep. But it was no crime.”
Calvin Gray shook his head helplessly.
“The man must be insane. It’s such incredible hypocrisy.”
“It’s
not hypocrisy. And he’s perfectly sane. He just doesn’t
ask what methods Devan uses, and
therefore he doesn’t know. He could probably justify them out of his philosophy
if he had
to, but his great mind is
occupied with so many more impor
tant things that it’s much simpler not to know. I don’t sup
pose Hitler ever does any positive
thinking about what hap
pens to prisoners
in Dachau, either.”
There was silence
for a little while, an odd calm silence that
made
it almost fantastic to think that this was a profoundly
philosophical conversation in a bright and
comfortable death
cell.
It was the girl who brought it back to that.
“You don’t think Devan is bluffing at all?” she said.
“Not for an
instant,” said the Saint gently. “Don’t let’s waste
any effort kidding ourselves about that. Devan
will arrange
whatever he has to
arrange, and he’ll do as neat a job as I
could do myself.”