Saint Steps In (8 page)

Because he was
more profoundly afraid that the Saint had
something
else up his sleeve? Or for some other reason?

Imberline was returning his scrutiny just as shrewdly. He took the
cigar out of his mouth and bit off the end. “You tell
me that Miss—er—Gray is a very
attractive young woman,” he
said.

“She is.”

“Young man, I’m going to ask
you
a
question.”

“Shoot.”

“Is there any romantic reason for this interest of yours?”

The Saint shook his head.

“None at all.”

“Have you invested any money in this so-called invention?”

“No.”

Imberline struck a match and put it to the cigar.
   

“Well,
then,” he said in a gust of smoke, “what the hell are
you here for?”

“That’s a fair question,” said the Saint. “I have some
quaint
reasons of my own for believing that this
invention may have
more in it than you
think. If that’s true, I’m as interested as
any citizen in wanting to see something done about it. If
there’s any fake about it, I’m still
interested—from another
angle. And from that angle, I’d be even more
interested if the
invention was really good
and there was a powerful and well-
organized campaign of skullduggery
going on to prevent any
thing being done
about it.”

“Why?”

“I’ve told you my name. But perhaps you’d know me better
if I said—the Saint.”

Imberline’s cigar jerked in his mouth as his teeth clamped
on it, and his eyes squeezed up again. But there was no
change of color in the florid face. No—Frank Imberline, with or with
out a guilty conscience, wasn’t panicked by shadows.
He stared
back at the Saint, without
blinking, puffing smoke out of the
side
of his mouth in intermittent clouds.

“You’re a crook,” he said.

“If
you’d care to put that in writing,” said the Saint calmly, “I shall
be very glad to sue you for libel. There isn’t a single legal charge that can
be brought against me—other than this
little matter of breaking and entering tonight.”

The other made a short impatient gesture.

“Oh,
I’m sure you’ve been clever. And I’ve read some of
that stuff about your Robin Hood motives. But your
methods,
sir, are not those which have been set up by
our democratic constitution. The end does not justify the means. No individual
has the right to take the law into his own hands.
The maintenance of our institutions and our way of life, sir, rests upon
the subordination of private prejudice to the
authorised
process of our
courts.”

He
gave the pronouncement a fine oratorical rotundity,
paused as if to allow the acclamation of an unseen
audience to
subside, and said
abruptly: “However. Your suggestion that,
my Department could be influenced by anything but the best
interests of the country is insulting and
intolerable. I’m going
to prove to
you that you’re talking a lot of crap.”

“Good.”

“You bring this Miss Gray to see me, and I’ll prove to you
that she has a chance to present her
case if she’s got one.”

Simon could hardly believe his ears,

“Do you mean that?”

“What
the hell are you talking about, do I mean it? Of
course I mean it! I’m not
condoning your behavior, but I do
know how to put a stop to the sort of rumor you’re
starting.”

“When? Tomorrow?”

“No. I’m leaving first thing in the morning for New York
and Akron on Government business. But as soon as I get
back.
In a couple of days. Keep in touch
with my office.”

The Saint went on
looking at him with a sense of deepening
bafflement
that had the question marks pounding through his
head like triphammers. His blue eyes were cool and inscrutable,
but behind the mask of his face that strange
perplexity went
on. If this was a
stall to get him out of there and keep him
quiet for a couple of days, perhaps while further shenanigans
were concocted, it was still a perfect stall. There
was still no
way of exposing it
except by waiting. Imberline had taken the
wind out of his sails. But if it wasn’t a stall … Simon found
his
head aching with the new incongruities that he would have to untangle if it
wasn’t a
stall.

“Now get the
hell out of here,” Imberline said defiantly.

There was nothing
else to do.

Simon
stood up, crushed his cigarette in an ashtray, and
hoped that his nonchalant impassivity had enough
suggestion
of postponed menace and
loaded sleeves to conceal the com
pletely impotent confusion of his mind. For perhaps the
first
time in his life he felt
that he hadn’t a single answer in him.

“Thank you,” he said, and left the room like that.

He let himself
out of the front door, and crossed the lawn
diagonally
towards the street, moving through the dark patches
cast by the thick spruce trees with the silence
that was as nat
ural to him as breathing.

He was just emerging from the deepest gloom when he stum
bled over somebody who had been taken
unawares by his cat
like approach.
The man he had bumped into straightened,
squeaked, and vanished like a startled rabbit. But
although he
disappeared in the time it
might take eyelash to meet eyelash
in a slow blink, the Saint knew who he was. It was the
funny
little man, Sylvester Angert.
.

2

Simon Templar walked back to the Shoreham, conscious al
ways of the movement of shadows about
him. He knew he was
wide
open for a pot shot, but he had the idea that nobody
wanted to kill him—yet. They might kill Madeline Gray,
and
her father, but not before
they got the formula from one of
the two. He
himself was a recent nuisance, not yet thoroughly
estimated; and the forces that were working against the Grays would
hardly want to complicate their problem with a police
investigation
until they were convinced that there was no alternative.

He was a trifle
optimistic in this prognosis, as it was soon to be demonstrated.

Madeline Gray opened her door when he gave the password he had written
down, and he almost laughed at the solemn
roundness of her eyes.

“I’m not a returning ghost,” he said. “Come back down
stairs and I’ll buy you another
drink.”

They walked down to his floor, and he waited until she was
curled up on the sofa with her feet
tucked under her and a
Peter Dawson in her hand.

Then he said,
without preface: “I’ve just been to see Imberline.”

Her mouth opened and stayed open in an unfinished gasp of
amazement and incredulity, and he had
time to light a cigarette before she got it working again.

“H-h-how?”

“I
burgled his house and walked in on him. Rather illegal,
I suppose, but it suddenly seemed like such an easy way to
cut
out a lot of red tape and
heel-cooling.” The Saint grinned a
little now in reminiscent enjoyment of his own simplifying im
pudence; and then without a change of that
expression he
added bluntly: “He says your father is a crackpot
phony.”

His eyes fastened
on hers, and he saw resentment and anger
harden
the bewilderment out of her face.

“I told you Mr. Imberline has never seen a demonstration of
Father’s process. He doesn’t dare,
because of what our invention might do to the natural rubber business after
the war.”

“He says he told his staff to investigate it.”

“His staff!” she snorted. “His stooges! Or maybe just
some other men with their own axes to grind. Father met them, and wouldn’t talk
to them after they demanded to see the formula
before they’d see a demonstration. I told you he isn’t the most
tactful person in the world. He suspected
Imberline’s men
from the first, and he
made no bones about throwing them out
of the laboratory when they came
up to Stamford.”

“On the other hand, Imberline promised to give you a hear
ing himself if I brought you to see him.”

She couldn’t be stunned with the same incredulity again,
but it was as if she had been jarred
again behind the eyes.

“He
told you that?”

“Yes. In a couple of days. As soon as he gets back from a trip
that he has to rush off on tomorrow.”

She breathed
quickly a couple of times, so that he could hear it, in a sort of jerky and
frantic way.

“Do you think he meant it?”

“He
may have. He didn’t have to say that. He could have
screamed bloody murder, thundered about the police,
or told
me to go to hell. But he
didn’t even try.”

She put her glass down on the low table in front of her and rubbed her
hands shakily together as if they felt clammy. Her
lips trembled, and the voice that came through them
had a
tremor in it to match.

“I—I don’t
know what to say. You’ve been so wonderful—
you’ve
done so much—made everything seem so easy. I feel so
stupid. I—I don’t know whether I ought to kiss
you, or burst
into tears, or what. I don’t know how to believe it.”

He nodded.

“That,”
he said flatly, “is my problem.”

“What did you do to persuade him?”

“Very little. It was too easy.”

“Well, why
do you think he did it?”

“I wish I knew.” The Saint scowled at his cigarette. “He
may
have been scared of the
trouble I might stir up—but he didn’t
look
scared of anything. He may have been afraid that I really
had something on him. He may be a very clever and
a very
cunning guy, and he may have
been just getting himself elbow
room to hit back with a real brick in
his glove. He may be on
somebody’s payroll,
and he may have to go back to his boss for
orders when he’s in a jam. He
may just have a sort of caliph
complex, and
get a shot in his ego from making what he thinks is a grand eccentric
gesture—something to make an anecdote
out
of and show what a big-minded down-to-earth democrat
he is. All of that’s possible. And none of it seems
enough, some
how.
…
So
I muddle and brood around, and I still come back to one other thing.”

“What’s that?”

He
said: “How much of this persecution of you and your
father is real? How much of that is
crackpot, how much is imagination—and how much is fake?”

The
new disbelief in her eyes was sharp with hurt.

“After
all this—are you still thinking that?”

He
gazed at her detachedly, trying to persuade himself that
he could make the same decision that
he would have made if she had been fat and fifty with buck teeth and a wart on
her
nose.

Then
he stopped looking at her. He was not so hot at being
detached. He strolled over to the window and gazed out
at the
panorama of distant lights
beyond the grounds and the
Park.
…

Ping!

The
glass in front of him grew an instantaneous spider-web
around a neat round hole, and the plunk of the bullet
lodging
itself in the wall paster
somewhere above and behind him came
at about the same moment.

He was probably already in motion when he heard it, for his
impressions seemed to catch up with it
quite a little while later. And by that time he was spun around with his back
to the wall
between the two windows,
temporarily safe from any more care
less exposure, and looking at Madeline Gray’s white face
with
a quite incorrigible silent
laughter in his eyes.

“By
God,” he said, “even the Washington mosquitoes have
war fever. They must be training to be
dive bombers.”

She looked up at the opposite wall, near the ceiling, where
his glance had also gone to search for
the scar of the shot. Af
ter a second or two she found her voice somewhere.