And an elegant bowl of soup it made when you got it all stirred up, Simon reflected that evening as he was being trundled down the dim baronial corridors of Cornwall House. But of all the extraneous characters who had been spilled by some coincidence or other into the pot, he was the only one who could make that reflection with the same ecstatic confidence.
"It doesn't seem to make sense," Patricia had said helplessly when he contributed the last item of certain knowledge that he had.
"It sings songs to me," said the Saint.
But he had gone into no more details, for the Saint had a weakness for his mysteries. They had only been able to make desperate guesses at what was in his mind, knowing that there must be something seething there from the mocking amusement in his eyes and the unholy Saintliness of his smile. It was as if a rocket had exploded inside him, flooding all the dark places in his mind with light, when he had caught up in that dynamic moment with the lead his instinct for adventure had given him.
At this particular time, however, neither his eyes nor his smile could have given any information to anyone who might have been watching him, for they were completely hidden by the white beard and moustache and dark glasses which left very little of his face uncovered. He had put on those useful pieces of scenery with some care before he let himself through a panel in the back of a built-in wardrobe in his bedroom which brought him into a similar built-in wardrobe in the bedroom of the adjoining flat, which was occupied by an incurable invalid of great age who rejoiced in the name of Joshua Pond, as any inquisitive person might have discovered from the head porter, Sam Outrell, or the register of tenants. What it would not have been so easy for the inquisitive person to discover was that Mr Pond's existence was entirely imaginary and took concrete form only when it suited the Saint's purposes. Mr Pond rarely went out at all, a fact which was easily explained by his antiquity and failing health.
Securely screened behind his smoked glasses and masses of snowy facial shrubbery, with a white muffler wound round his neck and a black homburg planted squarely on his head, Mr Pond sat in his wheeled chair and was tenderly propelled down the passage by Sam Outrell and a smart young chauffeur in livery. Two men in overalls working on some telephone wiring with a mass of tools spread round them looked up as the door of the flat opened and ignored him as he went by. The chair was pushed into the lift and passed out of their ken. In the lobby downstairs a man reading a newspaper looked up as the lift doors opened and returned automatically to his reading. The chair passed him and was wheeled out into the street, where a sedate black limousine stood waiting. Sam Outrell and the chauffeur each took one of the invalid's elbows and helped him to totter through the door of the car. The chauffeur wrapped a rug round his knees, Sam Outrell closed the door and saluted, the chauffeur took the wheel, and the car whisked away into the night, followed by the disinterested eyes of another large man who stood making a half-hearted attempt to sell newspapers on the opposite side of the street.
"And what exactly," asked the chauffeur as the car streaked westwards along Piccadilly, "are we out for tonight?"
The Saint laughed.
"I'm sorry I had to drag you away from that cocktail party, Peter, old lad, but Claud Eustace is having one of his spasms. Did you see 'em all? Four of 'em — about three square yards of feet all told. That is, if there weren't any more."
He was looking back through the rear window, deciding whether they were being followed. Presently he was satisfied and turned round again.
"Take a cruise through the park, Peter, while I peel off my whiskers."
He stowed the outfit carefully away in a concealed locker in front of him, ready to be put on again when it was required. The venerable black homburg joined it, along with the grey suede gloves; and he took off the lightweight black overcoat and laid it folded on the seat beside him. In a few minutes he was smoothing down his own dark hair and lighting a cigarette.
"What's Teal having a spasm about this time?" demanded Peter Quentin. "And why didn't you let me in on it before?"
"It's only just begun," said the Saint.
He told the story from the beginning, in a synoptic rapid-fire outline which omitted no important details except the connecting links which his own imagination was still working on.
"Sherry, Spain, Spanish Rebels, American bearer bonds, mysterious Pongos with hammers and artillery and a Polish forger who was stood up against a wall in Oviedo," he repeated at the end of it. "And a Spanish civil war still going on and getting bloodier and messier every day, in case you've forgotten it. I've seen a lot of odd things mixed up together in my time, but I think this is in the running for a prize."
"But who's doing what?" said Peter.
"That's what I'm still trying to get straight," said the Saint frankly. "Oviedo's changed hands about half a dozen times, and I don't remember who was holding it when Urivetzky was wiped up. I don't know which side Urivetzky was on or why he should have been mixed up in it at all — except that there seem to be amateurs from half the countries in Europe taking sides in the picnic anyway. But I have got an idea what's in the wind, and I'm going to know some more before I go to bed."
The car slowed up, and Peter said: "Shall I go round again while you're thinking?"
Simon flicked the stub of his cigarette through the window.
"I did all my thinking before I sent for you," he said. "You can cut out here — we're going to Cambridge Square."
"I have heard of it," said Peter with heavy irony. "But not from you. What's it got to do with this party? I thought you said Graham's digs were in Bloomsbury."
"So they are," said the Saint equably. "And Quintana's digs are in Cambridge Square."
There was a certain pregnant interval of silence while Peter brought the car out of the park and squeezed it through the tide of traffic swirling around Hyde Park Corner.
"I always thought you were daft," he said as they floated out of the maelstrom into the calmer waters of Grosvenor Place. "And now I know it."
"But why?" asked the Saint reasonably. "Comrade Quintana seems to have been quite a pal of Ingleston's, so he ought to be interested in the news about his boy friend. Or if he's already heard it he'll want someone to condole with him in his bereavement. But if he has heard it I should be interested to know how — I sent for all the evening papers, and there wasn't a line about the murder in any of them."
"Why shouldn't he have heard about it from the police?"
"He might have. And yet somehow I don't think so. I stuck that photograph right under Teal's bloodhound nose, and he was too busy boiling with thwarted rage because I'd accounted for knowing the name of the corpse to be able to smell a clue when he'd got one. Of course he may have done some more sniffing since then, but even then it may take him some time to realize who Luis Quintana is. And anyway we've got to chance it, because Quintana's our own best clue… You can stop the car here, Peter — I won't drive up to the door."
"What's making you so modest all of a sudden?" Peter enquired innocently as he applied the brakes.
The Saint smiled and stepped out onto the pavement.
"It comes natural to me," he said. "And this isn't going to be an official visit."
"I'll bet you don't even know what sort of a visit it is going to be," said Peter accusingly; and Simon grinned at him without shame.
"I don't — which only makes it more interesting. Wait for me here, old lad, and I'll tell you all about it later."
He was only confessing the simple truth, but in the way he looked at it there was nothing about it to depress the spirits. The Saint had always been like that — daft, as Peter had called him, but daft with a magnificent insolence of daftness that had driven more than one of his adversaries to desperation as they essayed the hopeless task of predicting his unpredictable impulses. Having nothing to make plans for, the Saint had seen no reason to expend his energy on making them, particularly when so much of it would have been spent on meeting hypothetical difficulties while the real ones were probably never thought of. He had obtained Quintana's address from a friend on a newspaper, and all he knew about it was that it was number 319 in the square. He had no idea what type of house it was; and on that depended the development of his campaign. On that and on whatever other schemes crossed his mind on the way.
He sauntered along the south side of the square, assimilating numbers and opening his mind impartially to the free influx of inspiration. Number 319, he discovered, stood in the very southeast corner of the square at the right-angle junction of the two streets that entered the square at that point. It was a broad two-storied house of vaguely Georgian architecture, flanked by the wings of wall common to that type of facade which apparently screened a small surrounding garden. Across the front an entrance driveway ran in past the front door under a pillared portico. And as the Saint stood on the corner, lighting a cigarette and taking in every detail of the building with the trained eye of a veteran, a taxi turned into the drive and coughed itself to a standstill under the porch. Simon moved a little so that he could see between the pillars, and for one moment only he saw the passenger who got out of the cab, as he paid off the driver before he turned and went up the steps through the front door, which had been opened for him as soon as the taxi pulled up.
For one moment only — but that was enough to make the Saint catch his breath so quickly that the lighter in his hand went out. For the man who had gone in, the man whose face he had seen for that paralyzing instant, was Ladek Urivetzky, the supreme forger of the twentieth century, the man who was reported to have been eliminated by a firing squad in Oviedo four weeks ago.