Saint Steps In

It was a
note drawn in crudely blocked
letters, and it had fallen from the handbag
of the
beautiful woman sitting across the
table from Simon Templar, the Saint.

And from
the way he reacted to the ex
pression of terror on her face, the Saint
knew he
was on his way to new adventure
—an adventure in espionage that was to
help
settle a deadly conflict!

By LESLIE CHARTERIS

FICTION PUBLISHING COMPANY
      
NEW YORK

Copyright, 1942,1943, by Leslie Charteris.
  

Published by arrangement
with Doubleday & Company, Inc.
  
Printed in U.S.A.

1. How Simon Templar dined in Washington,

and Sylvester Angert spoke of his Nervousness.

She was young and slender, and she had smiling brown eyes
and hair the color of old mahogany.
With a lithe grace, she
squeezed
in beside Simon Templar at the small table in the
cocktail room of the Shoreham and said :“You’re
the Saint.”

Simon smiled back, because she was easy to smile at; but not
all of the smile went into his very
clear blue eyes that always
had
a faint glint of mockery away behind them, like an amused spectator sitting far
back in a respectful audience.

He said: “Am I?”

“I recognised you,” she said.

He
sighed. The days of happy anonymity that once upon a time had made his lawless
career relatively simple seemed
suddenly as far away as his last diapers. Not that even today
he was as fatefully recognisable as
Clark Gable: there were
still several million people on earth to whom his face, if not his
name, would have meant nothing at all:
but he was recognised often enough for it to be what he sometimes called an
occu
pational hazard.

“I’m
afraid there’s no prize,” he said. “There isn’t even a reward out at
the moment, so far as I know.”

It hadn’t always been that way. There had been a time, ac
tually not so very long ago, when half
the police departments
of
the world carried a dossier on the Saint in their active and
urgent file, when hardly a month went
by without some news
paper headlining a new story on the amazing brigand whom
they had christened the Robin Hood of
modern crime, and
when any
stranger accosting the Saint by name would have
seen that lean tanned reckless face settle into new
lines of
piratical impudence, and
the long sinewy frame become lazy and supple like the crouch of a jungle cat.
Those days might
come
back again at any time, and probably would; but just
now he was almost drearily respectable. The war had changed
a lot of things.

“I
wanted to talk to you,” she said.

“You
seem to be making out all right.” He looked into his
empty glass. “Would you like a
drink?”

“Dry Sack.”

He
managed to get the attention of one of the harried waiters in the crowded
place, with an ease that made the perfor
mance seem ridiculously simple. He ignored the
glowerings
of several finger-snapping
congressmen, as well as the dark
looks of some young lieutenants and ensigns who, because they
fought the “Battle of
Constitution Avenue” without flinching,
thought they deserved a priority on service,
Washington’s
scarcest commodity. Simon ordered the Dry Sack,
and had another Peter Dawson for himself.

“What shall we talk about?” he asked. “I can’t tell you
the
story of my life, because
one third of it is unprintable, one
third is too incriminating, and the rest of it you wouldn’t
be
lieve anyhow.”

The
girl’s eyes flashed around the crowded noisy smoky
place, and Simon felt the whirring of gears somewhere
within
him; the gears which instinctively sprang into
action when he
sensed the possiblity of
excitement in the offing. And the girl’s
behavior was just like the
beginning of an adventure story.

Her voice was so
low that he barely caught her words, when
she
said: “I was going to ask you to help me.”

“Were
you?” He looked at her and saw her eyes dart about
the cocktail lounge again as if she were momentarily
expecting
to see someone whose appearance
would be decidedly unwel
come. She felt his gaze on her and made an
effort to ease the
tautness of her face. Her
voice was almost conversational
when
next she spoke.

“I don’t know why,” she said, “but I’d sort of imagined
you
in a uniform.”

Simon didn’t look
tired, because he had heard the same dia
logue
before. He had various answers to it, all of them in
accurate. The plain truth was that most of the
things he did
best were not done in
uniforms—such as the interesting epi
sode which had reached its
soul-satisfying finale only twelve
hours
ago, and which was the reason why he was still in Wash
ington, relaxing over a drink for the first time
in seven very
strenuous days. But
things like that couldn’t be talked about
for a while.

“I got fired, and my uniform happened to fit the new door
man,” he said. He waited until
the waiter placed the two
drinks on the table. “How do you think I could help you?”

“I suppose you’ll think I’m stupid,” she said, “but I’m
just
a little bit
frightened.”

The slight lift
of his right eyebrow was noncommittal.

“Sometimes it’s stupid not to be frightened,” he said.
“It all
depends. Excuse the
platitudes, but I just want to find out
what you mean.”

“Do you
think anything could happen to anyone in Wash
ington?”

“Anything,”
said the Saint with conviction, “could happen
to anyone in Washington. And most of the time it does. That’s
why so many people here have ulcers.”

“Could
anyone be killed here?”

He shrugged.

“There was a man named Stavisky,” he offered, “but of
course that was officially labeled a
suicide. But I could imagine
somebody being
killed here. Is that the proposition, and whom
do you want bumped off?”

She
turned the stem of her glass between her fingers, her
head bent, not looking at him.

“I’m sorry,” she Said. “I didn’t think you’d be like
that.”

“I’m sorry too,” he said coolly. “But after all, you
make the
most unusual openings. I
only read about these things in magazines. You seem to know something about me.
I don’t know anything about you, except that I’d rather look at you
than a fat senator. Let’s begin with
the introduction. I don’t
even know your name.

“Madeline
Gray.”

“It’s a nice
name. Should it ring bells?”

“No.”

“You aren’t working for a newspaper, by any chance?”

“No.”

“And you’re not a particularly unsophisticated Mata Hari?”

“I—no, of course not.”
       
‘

“You just have an academic interest in whether I think it
would be practical to ease a guy off
in this village.”

“It isn’t exactly academic,” she said.

He took a cigarette from the pack in front of him on the
table.

“I’m
sorry, again,” he said. “But you sounded so very
cheerful and chatty about it—”

“Cheerful and chatty,” she interrupted as the tautness re
turned to her face, “because I
don’t want anyone who’s watching me to know everything I’m talking to you
about.
I thought you’d be quick
enough to get that. And I didn’t have
in mind any guy who might be eased off, as you put
it.”

The Saint put a
match to his cigarette. Everything inside him
was
suddenly very quiet and still, like the stillness after the
stopping of a clock which had never been noticed
until after
it left an abrupt
intensity of silence.

“Meaning yourself?” he asked easily.

She was spilling
things out of her handbag, searching for a
lipstick.
She found it. The same movement of her hand that
picked it up slid a piece of paper out of the junk pile in his
direction. Shoulder to shoulder with her as he was,
it lay right
under his eyes.
In
crudely blocked capitals, it said: