Saint Steps In (3 page)

“As the
fellow says,” announced the prow of the group,
majestically. “This is war, arid it’s up to every one of us to
put our shoulders to the wheel. Waste not, want
not, is my
motto, and this is a case of too many cooks spoiling the
broth.”

“Incredible,” the Saint told himself, gazing after the group
as it barged its way to the long table
that had been reserved at
the
further end of the room. “That must be the great Im
berline himself.”

He
put a cigarette between his lips, and felt in his coat
pocket for a match.

He didn’t find
the match, but his fingers encountered some
thing
else that he knew at once didn’t belong there. It was a
folded piece of paper which he knew quite
certainly he had
never put in that
pocket. He took it out and opened it.

It was the same clumsy style of block capitals that he had
seen very recently, and it said:

MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS

He had a curious feeling in looking at it, like walking out of a rowdy
stifling honky-tonk into a silent snow night. Because
all the time they had been in the cocktail lounge,
Madeline
Gray had been on his
left, and he had been half turned towards
her, so that his right-hand pocket was almost against the table,
and it was impossible that she could have put that
paper
into his pocket while they were there. And, aside from the fact
that he had been surrounded by Imberline satellites
a few
seconds earlier, there had
definitely been no chance since …

2

The doorman said:
“Yes, she went that way. She was walk
ing.”
He put away the dollar bill that Simon handed him, and added: “She asked
me the way to Scott Circle.”

Simon turned back into the lobby and found a telephone
booth. The directory gave him the
address of Frank Imberline.
It was one of the low numbers on Scott Circle.

Simon Templar frowned thoughtfully.

From the address, it was evident that Mr. Imberline might
indeed be a
gentleman of some
importance, for Scott Circle
is the center of one of the best residential sections of Washing
ton, and the list of householders there
reads like a snob
hostess’s
dream.

Madeline
Gray had told him that she had an appointment
with Imberline at eight. He checked his strap watch
and
saw that it was close to
eight now. Still, Imberline—or at least
an
Imberline
had just entered the hotel dining room, ob
viously bent on food. For a fairly prominent
bureaucrat to ig
nore an
appointment was not unheard of in Washington, and
that might be the answer. Or Frank Imberline might
have
a brother or a cousin or a
namesake who possessed some Gov
ernment job and
its accompanying entourage.

Still
… Simon wished that he had questioned Madeline
about the appointment, and how she had arranged it.
For a
Government official to
arrange an appointment at his home,
in the
evening, sounded a little strange.

He
left the hotel again and acquired a taxi by the subtle
expedient of paying an extortionate bribe to a driver
who maintained that he was waiting for a customer who had just
stepped into the hotel for a moment.
With the taxi in mo
tion,
Simon sat forward and watched the road all the time
with an accelerating impatience that turned into an
odd feel-i
ng of emptiness as he
began to realize that the time was ap
proaching and passing when they should have overtaken the
girl. Unless she had taken a different route, or picked up
a taxi
on the way, or
…

Or.

Then they were entering Scott Circle, and stopping at the
number he had given the driver. He
didn’t see another taxi at
the door, or anywhere in the vicinity.

He got out and paid his fare. The front of the house seemed
very dark, except for a light shining
through the transom
above
the door. That was explainable, he told himself, if this
really was a romantic tryst, if there was another Imberline
be
sides the one in the hotel dining room,
but it seemed to the
Saint to be an odd set of circumstances under which
a bureau
crat would carry on a conference
concerning synthetic rubber.

To the Saint, direct action was always better than dim
speculation. He rang the bell.

The butler said: “No, suh. Mr. Imberline ain’t to home.”

“He is to me,” said the Saint cheerfully. “I’ve got an
appointment with him. The name is Gray.”

“Ah’m
sorry, suh, but Mr. Imberline ain’t here. He ain’t
been back since he left this mawnin’, an’ he told the
cook he
was eatin’ out.”

Simon pursed his lips wryly.

“I guess he
forgot his appointment,” he said. “I guess, being
such a busy man, he forgets a lot of them.”

“No suh!” said the butler loyally. “Not Mr. Imberline,
suh! He makes a date to be somewheres
an’ he gits there.
Mebbe
you got the wrong evenin’, suh. Mebbe it’s tomorrer
you’s supposed to have your ‘pointment.”

“Perhaps,” the Saint said easily. “I may have mixed up
my times. Tell me, did a young lady named Gray call here this
evening? I rather expected to meet her here.”

The woolly white head moved negatively.

“Ain’t
nobody called here, suh,” the butler said.

“Then
I must have the dates mixed up.”

He turned away from the door, saying things silently to himself. He
addressed himself with a searing minuteness of detail which would almost
certainly have been a cue for mayhem if it had been done by anybody else.

There was still
no other cab in sight.

He turned south on 23rd Street, and he had reached the in
tersection of Q Street before he began
to wonder where he was
going
or what good it was likely to do. He paused uncer
tainly on the corner, looking towards the bridge over
Rock
Creek Park. A dozen alternatives
chased through his mind,
and so many of them must be wrong and so few of them offered
anything to pin much to.

And then he saw her coming around the curve of the bridge,
walking with her young steady stride, and everything he had
imagined seemed foolish again. For about
five or six seconds.

A car came crawling up from behind her, passed her,
stopped, and backed up into an alley
that branched diagonally
off
from the north side of the street. He had instinctively
stood still and merged himself into
the shadow of a tree when
he
saw her, so the two men who came out of the alley a mo
ment later must have thought the block was deserted
except
for themselves and the girl. They wore
handkerchiefs tied over
the lower part of
their faces, and they closed in on her, one on
each side, very professionally, and he was too far away to hear
whatever they said, but he saw them turn her into
the alley
as he started running
soundlessly towards them.

He came up on them in such a swift catlike silence that it
must have seemed to all of them as if
a shadow materialised
before
their eyes.

“Hullo,
Madeline,” he drawled.
 
“I was
afraid I’d missed
you,
darling.”
, Her
face looked pale and vague in the gloom.

The masked man on her left spoke in muffled accents. He was tall and
wide-shouldered, and he seemed to be of the type that
never lost a fist fight when he was a schoolboy.

“Better stay out of this, bud, if you don’t want to get into
trouble.”

His
voice was a deep hollow rasp, behind the mask. He
looked like a man who could provide trouble or cope
with it. The man on the other side had much the same air. He weighed
a little more, but he was inches
shorter and carried it chunkily
.

“I like trouble,” Simon said breezily. “What kind have
you
got?”

“FBI
trouble,” said the tall man flatly. “This girl’s—uh—
being detained for questioning, Run
along.”

“Detained?” asked the Saint. “Just why?”

“Beat
it,” growled the chunky one. “Or we might think of
taking you along with us.”

“You,” said the Saint calmly, “are the first FBI
operatives
I’ve ever met who wore
handkerchiefs over your noses and so far forgot their polish that they’d say
anything like ‘beat it’, or
call anybody ‘bud’. If you’re posing as G-men, you’re making
a horrible mess of it. So, if you show
your credentials, I’ll be
happy to go along with the young lady. But I don’t think you
will, or can.”

He was ready for the swing the tall man launched at him, and he swayed
back just the essential six inches and let the
wind of it fan his chin. Then he shifted his weight
forwards
again and stepped in with
his right forearm pistoning at waist
level. The jar of the contact ran all the way up to his
shoulders. The tall man grunted and leaned over from the middle
and the Saint’s left ripped up in a
short smash to the mufflered jaw that would have dropped the average citizen in
his tracks.
The tall man was somewhat
tougher than the average. He
went pedaling back in a slightly ludicrous race with his own center of
gravity, but he still had nothing but his feet on the
ground when a large part of his companion’s weight
descended
on the Saint’s neck and
shoulders.

Simon’s eyes were blurred for an instant in a pyrotechnic
burst of lights, and his knees began
to bend; then he got his
hands locked behind the chunky man’s head, and let his knees
sag even lower before he heaved up
again. The chunky man
came somersaulting over his shoulder and hit the ground
with a thud that a deaf man could have
felt several feet
away. He
rolled over in a wild flurry and wound his arms
around the Saint’s shins, binding Simon’s legs
together from
ankle to knee.

In a clutch like that, Simon knew that he had no more
chance of staying upright than an
inverted pyramid. He tried
to come down as vertically as possible, so as to stay on top of the
chunky man, trying to land on him with his weight on his
knees and aiming a downward left at him at the same time.

Neither of those schemes connected. Simon afterwards had a
dim impression of running feet, of Madeline Gray crying out
something incoherent; then a very
considerable weight hit him in the middle and sent him spinning.

Half
winded, he grappled blindly for a hold while the man
who had tackled him swarmed over him with the same
inten
tion. He had had very little leisure for
thinking, and so it was a
moment or two
before he realised that this was not the comeback of the tall bony partner.
This man’s outlines and archi
tecture
were different again. And then even before Simon
could puzzle any more about it the girl was clawing at his
antagonist, beating ineffectually on his broad
back with her
fists; but it was enough
of an interruption to nullify the
Saint’s temporary disadvantage, and he
got first a knee into the
man’s stomach,
and then one foot in what was more of a shove
than a kick, and then he was free and up again and looking
swiftly
around to see who had to be next.

He was just in time to catch a glimpse of the chunky man’s
rear elevation as it fell into the parked
car a few yards away.
The
tall bony one had already disappeared, and presumbly
he was at the wheel, for the engine roared up even
before the
door slammed, and the car leapt away with a
grind of spinning
tires that would have made
any normal war-time motorist
wince. It
screamed out of the alley as Simon turned again to
look for the third
member of the opposition.

The
third member was holding one hand over his dia
phragm and making jerky little bows over it, and
saying in a
painful and puzzled voice:
“My God … You’re Miss Gray,
aren’t
you?”