The telephone at the clerk’s elbow buzzed. He picked it up and said, “Night clerk speaking...” His eyes went to the Saint and he said, “Yes, he just came in—”
Then his eyes bulged while they still rested on the Saint. Simon watched them grow wider and rounder before the man backed away from the counter and turned his head.
The Saint deliberately dawdled over lighting a cigarette, but even his supersensitive ears could pick nothing up, for all the rest of the conversation came from the other end of the line, until the clerk muttered, “Okay, I’ll do my best.”
Simon started to move away.
“Er... Mr Templar...”
He turned.
“Yes?”
The clerk was sweating. His face had a slightly glazed surface from the strain of trying to look natural.
“The manager just called, Mr Templar, and wanted to speak to you about... about an overcharge on your bill.”
“I’ll be glad to speak to him in the morning,” said the Saint co-operatively. “We should have lots to talk about — everything on my bill looks like an overcharge to me.”
“He’s on his way here now, sir,” said the clerk from his tonsils. If you could wait a few minutes—”
The Saintly smile would have glowed ethereally in a stained-glass window.
“I’m afraid I haven’t time,” he said. “But when Lieutenant Kearney gets here, do congratulate him for me on his new job. Oh, and give him this letter, will you?”
He laid the communication from the real-estate agents on the desk, and hurried Hoppy out of the lobby before the clerk could reassemble his wits for another attempt to delay him.
Again his car snaked through the traffic at the maximum speed that would still leave it immune from legal interference.
The Saint’s hands were light and steady on the wheel, his keen tanned profile implacably calm against the passing street lights. And while he drove like a precision machine he thought about Monica. Monica drugged, her velvet voice incoherent, her enigmatic eyes blank, her proud body listless and helpless... He thought of worse things than that, and a black coldness lanced through him with an aching intensity that froze his eyes as they stared ahead.
“I’m the dope, Hoppy,” he said in a dead toneless level. “I should have known better than to think I could push her off the stage... She put on that beggar woman’s outfit again, of course. She went back to the Elliott Hotel. But on account of what Junior had spilled, she didn’t last a minute. They were probably taking care of her last night while I was lying there wondering why they didn’t do anything about me.” His voice had a bitterness beyond emotion. “By this time they’ve given her a treatment and they know all the rest about me. Except where I am now. This is the showdown.”
“Who’d’a t’ought it,” Hoppy said amazedly. “Elliott — de old goat!”
Simon said nothing.
The house on Kelly Drive was as dark as the last time they had seen it, an unimaginative two-storey pile of brick with drawn blinds that made the windows look like sightless eyes.
Simon went to the back door, with Hoppy at his heels. Having picked the lock once before, he took a mere few seconds to open it again.
They stepped into darkness and silence broken only by the monotonous slow pulse of a dripping tap. This was the kitchen. On the other side of the room was the door at the head of the stairs that led down to the basement where initiations into the brotherhood of the beggars were performed. As Simon touched it, it gave way a fraction: it was not quite closed, but the darkness was blacker still beyond the slight opening. He stopped and listened again, and heard nothing. The darkness of the house had not seemed to indicate that there was a guard, but he was jumping to no rash conclusions.
He balanced the gun in his hand and pushed the door wider.
Then he heard it — a faint but clear rustle of movement that threw a momentary uncontrollable syncopation into his heartbeats and sent a flying column of eskimo beetles skirmishing up into his scalp. And with the rustle, a low, sleepy, inarticulate moan.
“What’s dat?” breathed Mr Uniatz hoarsely.
The Saint hardly bothered to whisper. After the first instant’s shock, he understood the rustle and the moan so vividly that the needlessness of further stealth seemed to be established.
“That’s Monica,” he said, and went down the steps.
His pencil flashlight broke the darkness as he reached the bottom, and in the round splash where the beam struck, he saw her.
She lay on a canvas cot in one corner of the cellar. Her wrists were strapped to the side members. As he had expected, she was dressed in the grimy shapeless rags in which he had first met her, but most of the beggar-woman make-up had been roughly wiped from her face. Her eyes were closed, but as the light fell on them her eyelids lifted a little as if with an infinite effort.
“No,” she mouthed huskily. “No...”
“Monica,” he said.
He checked the eagerness of his stride as he reached the cot, to come up to her gently.
“It’s me,” he said. “Simon. Simon Templar.”
Her eyes sought for him as he touched her, and he could see the pin-point contraction of the pupils. He turned the flashlight on his own face, then back to her.
She knew him — the sound of his voice and the glimpse of him. Even through the mists of the drug he saw the awareness of him struggle into her mind, and saw the tiny smile that lighted her whole face for an instant. She tried to raise her head, and her lips formed his name: “Simon...”
The effort was all she could make. Her head fell back and the lids closed over that shining look.
And then suddenly there was a blaze of lights that smashed away all shadows and wiped out the beam of his pencil light like a deluge would put out a match.
“Okay,” said the saw-toothed voice of Frankie Weiss. “This is a tommy gun. Don’t try anything, or I’ll blast all three of you.”
The Saint turned.
The stairs behind him had horizontal treads but no solid rises. Thus a man concealed behind them had a good vantage point. The unmistakable nozzle of a sub-machine-gun projected through one of the openings, and behind the Saint, Monica Varing lay directly in the line of fire.
“Drop your guns and reach,” Frankie said.
Simon obeyed.
Hoppy said, “Boss—”
“No,” said the Saint. “You haven’t a chance. Do what Frankie tells you.”
Hoppy’s Betsy clattered ignominiously on the floor.
The gross bulk of Big Hazel Green came out from behind the stairs. She circled around them, kicked their guns out of reach, and searched them with competent hamlike hands. Then she stepped aside again, and Frankie Weiss moved out into the open.
There was a small dew of perspiration on his face, but the weapon he held was perfectly steady.
“How nice to see you, Frankie,” Simon drawled. “You’re looking well, too. That work-out we had together must have done you good.”
“You think you’re smart, don’t you?” Frankie bit out of the side of his mouth. “Well, when I get through giving you a work-out—”
“The same old dialogue,” sighed the Saint. “I wish I could remember how many times I’ve heard that line. Frankie, you kill me.”
“Maybe you’re not kidding,” Frankie sneered. “Sit down on the bed and keep your hands where I can see ’em.”
The Saint sat down, and Monica Varing stirred again uneasily. He felt very calm and quiet now. The inward exultation that danger could always ignite in him had steadied down and chilled. He had a cold estimate of all their chances, an equally cold watchfulness for his own first opening, an arrogant confidence that when the time came he could do more than any other human being could do.
“I just want you to know,” he said, “that if you’ve done anything to Monica Varing—”
“Don’t be ridiculous, Mr Templar,” said a new voice from the top of the stairs. “We may have to kill Miss Varing, but I would never allow that sort of thing.”
It was Mrs Laura Wingate.