Saint Steps In (6 page)

“Naturally not,” he said. “That was rather a silly
question.”

Sylvester Angert finished his drink and got out of his chair. He
laughed rather uncertainly.

“I’m sorry I was so—so harsh when I first—er—arrived here,
but the surprise
…
I guess I do owe you an apology at that. Perhaps we could get together for a
drink tomorrow.”

“Perhaps,”
said the Saint noncommittally.

“And now I’d better be getting up to my room. It’s getting
late and I’ve had a hard day. Goodnight Miss Van Ess, Mr.
Templar.”

He ducked his head and scuttled out of the room.

Madeline giggled.

“A funny
little man,” she said.

“Very. Will you excuse me for a second? I’ve got a couple of calls
to make.”

He went into the bedroom, closing the door behind him. He
called a local number which was not in
any directory, and
talked
briefly with a man named Hamilton, whom very few
people knew. Then he called the desk and exchanged a
few
words with Information. He
returned to the living room, smil
ing in his satisfaction.

“A funny little man indeed,” he said. “There is no such
ani
mal as the Choctaw Pipe and
Tube Company of Cleveland.
And the suite above this is occupied by a senator who’s been living
there ever since his misguided constituents banded to
gether in a conspiracy to get him out of his home state.”

“Then——
”

“Oh, he’s
harmless,” the Saint assured her. “I don’t think he’ll bother us
again. It will be somebody very different from little Sylvester who’ll probably
get the next assignment.

“But who’s he working for?”

“The same
people, my dear, who seem to be determined that
your father’s invention is going to blush unseen. I only hope
for your sake that hereafter they limit their
activities to such
things as visits
by Sylvester Angert. But I’m afraid they
won’t.”

“What
difference does it make?” she protested. “If you’ll
really help me—and if you’re really
like any of the things I’ve
read about
you—you should be able to wangle an appointment
with Imberline in a few days at the outside.”

The Saint’s fingers combed through his hair. The piratical
chiseling of his face looked suddenly
quite old in a sardonic
and careless way.

“I
know, darling,” he said. “That isn’t the problem. The job
that’s going to keep me busy is trying
to make sure that you
and your father are allowed to live that long.”

2. How Simon
Templar interviewed Mr. Imberline
,

and was Interviewed in his Turn.

A change of
expression flickered over her face, that started with
a half smile and ended with half a frown; but under the half-
frown her brown eyes were level and steady.

“Now are you giving me what you thought I was asking for,
or do you mean that?”

“Think
it out for yourself,” he said patiently. “Somebody
was interested enough to make your father a present of two
explosions and a fire—according to what you told me. Some
body followed you long enough to know you’d been
trying to
see Imberline. Somebody
thought it was worth while calling
you
and making a phony appointment, and then sending you
a threatening note to see how easily you’d scare
off. Somebody
even thought it was
worth while trying another note on me,
after they’d seen us
talking.”

“You don’t
know how it got into your pocket?”

“No
more than you know how yours fell into your lap. But
I was bumped into rather heavily on two occasions, so
it was
on one of those occasions
that the note was planted. The face of Walter Devan and the tall man who had
been in Imberline’s
entourage passed through the
Saint’s memory. “Anyway, since
you
didn’t scare, there was an ambush waiting for you on the
way. If you’d taken a cab it doubtless would have
been run
off the road.”

She was neither frightened nor foolish now. She simply
watched his face estimatingly.

“What
do you think they meant to do?”

“Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe they were just told
to rough you up a bit to discourage
you. Maybe it was to be a
straight kidnaping. Maybe they thought you could be used to
keep your father quiet. Or maybe they
thought you might be
able to tell them
his process if they persuaded you enough. By
the
way, could you?”

She nodded.

“It’s very simple, once you know it; and I’ve been helping
Father in his laboratory ever since he
started working on it
again.”

“Then you don’t need to ask me questions about what they
might have had in mind.”

She glanced at
her drink.

“It’s
silly, isn’t it? I hadn’t thought of it that way.”

“You’d better start thinking now. In times like these, any
body who can pour a lot of sawdust, old
shoelaces, tomato
ketchup,
and hair tonic into a bathtub and make rubber is
hotter than tobasco. The only thing I can’t understand
is why
the FBI didn’t have you
both in a fireproof vault long ago.”

“I can answer that,” she said wearily. “Have you any
idea how many new synthetic rubber inventors are pestering peo
ple in Washington every day? Only about a dozen.”

“But if your father’s reputation is as good as you
 
say it is ——”

“All
sorts of crackpots have some kind of reputation too.
And to the average dollar-a-year man, any scientist
is liable to
be a bit of a crackpot.”

“Well, they can test this stuff of yours, can’t they?”

“Yes.
But that takes a lot of time and red tape. And it
wouldn’t necessarily prove anything.”

“Why not?”

“The
specimen might be any other kind of worked-over or
reclaimed rubber.”

“Surely it
could be detected.”

“How?”

“Analyse it.”

She laughed a
little.

“You’re not a chemist. Any organic or semi-organic concoc
tion—like this is—is almost impossible
to analyse. How can I
explain
that? Look, for instance, you could grind up the ashes
of a human arm, and analyse them, and find a lot of
ingre
dients, but that wouldn’t
prove whether you’d started with a
man or not. That’s putting it very clumsily, I know, but——
”

“I get the idea.”

He lighted a cigarette and tightened his lips on it. These
were ramifications that he hadn’t had
time to think out. But
they made sense within the limits of his knowledge.

He went back to the concrete approach that he understood better.

“Has your father patented his formula?”

“No. That would have meant discussing it with attorneys and
petty officials and all kinds of
people. And I tell you, it’s so
simple that if one wrong person knew it, all the wrong people
could know it. And after all—we are in
the middle of a war.”

“He didn’t want any commercial protection?”

“I
told you that once, and I meant it. He doesn’t need
money; doesn’t want it. Really, we’re horribly
comfortable.
My grandfather bought a
gold mine in California for two old
mules and a can of corned beef. All Father is trying to do
is to
give his process to the
right people. But he’s been soured by
his experiences here in Washington, and of course he can’t
just write a letter or fill out a
form, and tell all about it, because then it would be sure to leak out to the
wrong people.”

“Something
seems to have leaked out already,” Simon ob
served.

“Maybe
some people have more imagination than others.”

“You haven’t anyone special in mind?”

She moved her hands helplessly.

“The Nazis?” she suggested. “But I don’t know how they’d
have heard of it … Or
the Japs. Or anyone …”

“Anyone,” said the Saint, “is a fair guess. They don’t
neces
sarily have to be clanking
around with swastikas embroidered
on their underwear and sealed orders from the Gestapo up
their sleeves. Anyone who isn’t as
big-hearted as your father,
but
who believes in him, might be glad to get hold of this rec
ipe—just for the money. Which would
make the field a good
bet
on any mutuel.” 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 atten
tion 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 old 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 sur
mised 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 con
science.
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 ex
perts in Government offices who were much more competent
to judge such matters than he was.