The man looked up from under his heavy brows without moving. His mouth was clinched up so that his underlip was the only one visible, and his big frame looked lumpy, as if all the muscles in it were knotted. He went on sitting there stolidly and didn't answer.
"Get up," said the Saint quietly.
The man crossed his legs and turned away to gaze into a far corner of the room.
Simon's hand moved quicker than a striking snake. It took hold of the driver and yanked him up onto his feet as if the chair had exploded under him. The man must have been expecting something to happen, but the response he had produced was so swift and unanswerable that for a moment his eyes were blank with stupefaction. Then he drew back his fist.
The Saint didn't stir or flinch. He didn't even seem to take any steps to meet that crudely telegraphed blow. From the slight tilt of his head and the infinitesimal lift of one eyebrow he might almost have been vaguely amused. But his eyes held mockery rather than amusement — a curious cold glitter of devilish derision that had a bite like steel sword points. There was something about it that matched the easy and untroubled and yet perfectly balanced way he was standing, something that seemed an essential offshoot of the supple width of his shoulders and the sardonic curve of his lips and the driver's disturbing memory of an apparently incredible incident only a short time before; something that belonged unarguably to the whiplash quality that had crackled under the quietness of his voice when he spoke… And somehow, for no other reasons, the blow didn't materialize. The driver's fist sank stiffly down to his side.
The Saint smiled.
"Have a cigarette," he said genially.
The driver stared at the packet suspiciously.
"Wot's this all abaht?" he demanded.
"Nothing, Algernon. Nothing at all. Hoppy and I are just a couple of humble philosophers looking for pearls of knowledge. By the way, is your name Algernon?"
"Wot's my name got to do with you?"
"It would help us to talk about you, Algernon. We can't just point at you all the time — it looks so rude. And then there's the blonde you didn't introduce us to. We want to know who she was, so we can give the vicar her phone number. What's her name?"
"Wouldn't you like to know?" snarled the driver belligerently.
Simon nodded with unaltered cordiality.
"You're asking as many questions as I am, Algernon," he remarked. "Which isn't what I brought you here for. But I don't mind letting you into the secret. I would like to know all these things. Go on — have a cigarette."
As the man's mouth opened for another retort the Saint flipped a cigarette neatly into it. The driver choked and snatched it out furiously. The Saint kindled his lighter. He held it out, and his cool blue eyes met the driver's reddening gaze over the flame. There was no hint of a threat in them, no offer of a challenge, nothing but the same lazy glimmer of half-humorous expectancy as they had held before, and yet once again they baffled the driver's wrath with a nonchalance that his brain was not capable of understanding. He put the cigarette back in his mouth and bent his head sulkily to accept the light.
Mr Uniatz, reclining in an abandoned attitude on the settee, had been taking advantage of being temporarily relieved of his duties to sluice his parched throat with the contents of the bottle he had brought in with him. Now after having remained for some minutes with his head tilted back and the bottle upended towards the ceiling he came reluctantly to the conclusion that no more liquid was flowing into the desert and simultaneously returned to a sense of his responsibilities.
"Lemme give him a rubdown, boss," he suggested. "He'll come t'ru fast enough."
Simon glanced at him thoughtfully.
"Do you think you could make him talk, Hoppy?"
"Sure I could, boss. I know dese tough guys. All ya gotta do is boin deir feet wit' a candle, an' dey melt. Lookit, I see a box of candles in de kitchen last night—"
Mr Uniatz struggled up from the couch, fired with ambition and a lingering recollection of having seen a case of whisky in the kitchen at the same time, but the Saint put out an arm and checked him.
"Wait a minute, Hoppy."
He turned back to the driver.
"Hoppy's so impulsive," he explained apologetically,
"and I don' really want to turn him loose on you. But I've got an appointment in an hour or so, and if we can't get together before then I'll have to leave Hoppy to carry on.And Hoppy has such dreadfully primitive ideas. The last time I had to leave him to ask a fellow a few questions, when I came back I found that he'd got the mincingmachine screwed on to our best table and he was feeding this guy's fingers into it. He got the right answers, of course, but it made such a mess of the table."
"I'm not afraid o' you—"
"Of course you aren't, Algernon. And we don't want you to be. But you've got to change your mind about answering questions, because it's getting late."
The man watched him stubbornly, but his fists were tightening and relaxing nervously, and there was a shining dampness of perspiration breaking out on his forehead. His eyes switched around the room and returned to the Saint's; face in a desperate search for escape. But there was no hope there of the kind he was looking for. The Saint's manner was light and genial, almost brotherly; it passed over unpleasant alternatives as remote and improbable contingencies that were hardly worth mentioning at all, and yet the idea of unpleasantness didn't seem to disturb it in any way. A blusterer himself, the driver would have answered bluster in its own language, but that dispassionate imperturbability chilled him with an unfamiliar sensation of fear…
And at that moment, with his uncanny genius for keeping his opponents in suspense, the Saint left the last word unsaid and strolled over to sit on the table, leaving the driver nothing but the threat of his own imagination.
"What's your name, Algernon?" he asked mildly.
"Jopley."
The word fell out after a tense pause, as if the man was fighting battles with himself.
"Been driving these trucks for long?"
"Wot's that got—"
"Been driving these trucks for long?"
"I bin drivin' 'em for a bit."
"Do pretty well out of it?"
The driver was silent again for a space, but this time his silence was not due to obstinacy. His frown probed at the Saint distrustfully; but Simon was blowing wisps of smoke at the ceiling.
"I don't do too bad."
"How much is that?"
"Ten quid a week."
"You know, you're quite a character, aren't you?" said the Saint. "There aren't many people who'd let Hoppy singe their tootsies for ten quid a week. How d'you work it out — a pound a toe?"
The man dragged jerkily at his cigarette without answering. The question was hardly answerable anyway — it was more of a gentle twitch at the driver's already overstrung nerves, a reminder of those unpleasant possibilities which were really so unthinkable.
"If I were you," said the Saint with an air of kindly interest, "I'd be looking for another job."
"Wot sort of job?"
"I think it'd be a kind of sideline," said the Saint meditatively. "I'd look round for some nice generous bloke who wouldn't let people toast my feet or anything like that but who'd just pay me an extra twenty quid a week for answering a few questions now and again. He might even put up fifty quid when I had anything special to tell him, and it wouldn't hurt me a bit."
"It's a waste of money, boss," said Mr Uniatz with conviction. "If de candles don't woik I got a new one I see in de movies de udder day. You mash de guy's shins wit' a hammer—"
"You won't pay too much attention to him, will you, Algernon?" said the Saint. "He gets a lot of these ideas, you know — it's the way he was brought up. It's not my idea of a spare-time job, though."
The driver shifted himself from one foot to the other. It wasn't his idea of a spare-time job either — or even a legitimate part of the job he had. He didn't need to have the balance of the alternatives emphasized to him. They were so clean cut that they made the palms of his hands feel clammy. But that lazily, frighteningly impersonal voice went on:
"Anyway, you don't have to make up your mind in a hurry if you don't want to. Hoppy '11 keep you company if you don't mind waiting till I come back, so you won't be lonely. It's rather a lonely place otherwise, you know. We were only saying the other day that a bloke could sit here and scream the skies down, and nobody would hear him. Not that you'd have anything to scream about of course…"
"Wot is this job?" asked the man hoarsely.
Simon flicked the ash from his cigarette and hid the sparkle of excitement in his eyes.
"Just telling us some of these odd things we want to know."
The man's lips clamped and relaxed spasmodically, and his broad chest moved with the strain of his breathing. He stood with his chin drawn in, and his eyes peered up from under a ledge of sullen shadow.
"Well," he said. "Go on."
"Who was the girl friend?"
"Why don't you ask her?"
The voice was soft and musical, startlingly unlike the harsh growl that Simon's ears had been attuned to, and it came from behind him.
The Saint spun round.
She stood in the open doorway, her feet astride with a hint of boyish swagger, still in her soiled overalls, one hand in the trouser pocket, with the yellow curls turn-Ming around her exquisitely moulded face, a slight smile on her red lips. Her eyes, he discovered, now that he saw them open for the first time, were a dark midnight grey — almost the same shade as the automatic he held steadily levelled at his chest.
For three seconds the Saint stood rigidly spellbound. And then a slow smile touched the corners of his mouth in response.
"Well, darling," he murmured, "what is your name?"