Simon had no doubt of it. He had never met Urivetzky in person, but his memory for faces was as accurate as a card index, and his private collection of photographs and descriptions of outstanding members of the international underworld contained items that would have been envied by more than one official bureau of records. And that sallow, thick-lipped, skull-like face with the curved scar under the left eye was as unmistakable as any face could be without previous firsthand examination.
For some seconds the Saint stood motionless, while the door closed and the empty taxi rattled on out of the driveway and departed into the night. Then he moved on with a tremor of exquisite excitement tugging at his nerves.
He made a complete circuit of the block in which the house stood. It was quite a small block, and the rest of the buildings in it consisted of the ordinary, monotonously identical, tall narrow houses common to that part of London. Built in an unbroken row one against the other, they formed a solid three-sided wall with no openings other than a couple of narrow alleys in one side which led into little courtyards of mews garages buried in the heart of the block. Nowhere did the place seem less effectively protected than it did at the front.
Standing once more on the corner from which he had started off, the Saint drew his cigarette to brightness and studied the fagade again with that tingle of reckless ecstasy working its way deep into the pro-foundest recesses of his being.
Somehow or other he had to get into Quintana's house, and if the only way to get in was at the front then he would get in at the front. Not that the front door entered into his plans. Any vague idea he might have set out with of brazenly bluffing his way into the owner's presence had been annihilated beyond resurrection by that one breath-stopping glimpse of Urivetzky's arrival. The brazenness and the bluff might come later, and probably would; but before that the Saint wanted to know what a man who was supposed to be dead was doing at the house of a man whose friend really was dead, and why a man who was admitted to have been the greatest forger of his time was visiting the friend of a man who had had an unaccountable collection of bonds which might have been forged, and why one thread in the lives of all these strangely assorted people linked them together when that thread had its roots in a country where death had lately become a commonplace — and the Saint wanted to know all these things without announcing his intrusion. Wherefore he stood and dissected the possibilities with that stir of lawless delight roaming through his insides. On each side of the house the ground floor was wider than the upper part of the building, so that its flat roof formed a kind of terrace onto which upstairs windows opened. And beyond the garden wall there were two tall trees, growing so close to the side of the house that it looked as if one could step off one of their branches onto the terrace as easily as stepping across a garden path…
The Saint crossed the road.
He had no qualms about the enormity of what he proposed to do. What occupied his mind much more were the chances of being allowed to commit his crime. There seemed to be an entirely unnecessary number of street lamps clustered around that corner; and while they could never have competed with the noonday sun, they were bright enough to illumine the scene for the eyes of any passer-by who might tend to regard the sight of a man climbing over a wall as a spectacle to which the attention of the neighbourhood might justifiably be directed. But Cambridge Square is a quiet place, and at that hour it was sunk in its regular postprandial coma. The Saint slowed his steps to allow a lone prowling taxi to drag itself past him, and at the same time he measured the wall with his eye. It was not more than seven feet high, and the top was protected with curved iron spikes set in the brickwork — but they were spikes of an old-fashioned pattern which had been clearly designed for a day when burglarious agility was still an undeveloped art. To a wall-climber of the Saint's experience they were not much more of an obstacle than a row of feathers…
The prowling taxi had hauled itself wearily on, and the nearest other car was the limousine in which Peter Quentin was waiting. For the moment there was no other human being nearer than that. Simon Templar's glance swept once over the panorama, and he knew that it was no use waiting for a better opportunity. The rest was on the lap of the gods.
He made a leap for the top of the wall, caught the base of one spike with his right hand and the curve of another with his left and was over like a flash of dark lightning. A roving cat could hardly have cleared the obstacle with more silent speed.
His feet padded down with the same catlike softness on a paved path on the other side; and for a second he crouched there without movement, exactly as he had landed, listening for any trace of a disturbing sound in the world outside. But his straining ears caught nothing that stood out from the vague normal background of London noise, and in another moment he was darting across an open patch of grass like a fleeting shadow to the foot of one of the trees he had marked down in his survey.
Its branches grew so low down that his hands could reach the lowest of them with the help of an easy jump, and with only a moment's pause he was working himself up into the short young foliage with the swift suppleness of a trained gymnast. In less than a minute from the time when he had surmounted the wall he was poising himself for the short leap onto the terrace that was his first objective.
Until then he had been screened by the wall and the new leaves that partly clothed the tree; but now he was in the open again, plainly visible to anyone who looked up or looked out, even when he had crossed the terrace to the partial shelter of one of the dark window-doorways that opened onto it. He tried the handle cautiously, but it was fastened on the inside. For some time, which was probably a minute or two but which seemed like a week, he had to work on it with a slender tool which he took from his pocket, before the window opened and let him into the dark room beyond.
He closed the window after him and stood looking out through it, scanning the square below. Beside the limousine near the corner he saw a dark shape pacing to and fro and saw also the erratically fluctuating pin point of a lighted cigarette end; and the sketch of a smile touched his lips. Peter was doubtless collecting enough material to give a heart specialist a year's course of study, but there was the consoling thought that a few more repetitions of the same stimulus would probably give him a lifelong immunity of incalculable value… Otherwise there were no visible signs of commotion. If any stray wanderers in the vicinity had witnessed any excerpts from the recent unrolling of events they had apparently decided that such affairs were none of their dull and respectable business and had proceeded untroubled on their prosaic ways.
The Saint turned away from the window and undipped the pencil flashlight from his breast pocket. Its thin subdued beam swivelled once round the room — and snapped out again suddenly.
He was in some kind of formal reception room, a gaunt bare chamber with gilt-edged mirrors and velvet drapes and stuffy, uninviting chairs ranged around the walls to leave most of the floor clear. There was nothing remarkable about it except its monumental ugliness, which would have impressed the spiritual descendants of Queen Victoria as being delightfully respectable and dignified. Facing the Saint, as he stood by the window, was a door which presumably led out to a landing or corridor; and on his right was another door communicating with an adjoining room. It was through this communicating door that he had heard the sound of voices which had made him extinguish his torch with involuntary abruptness.
He had heard the answer to a muffled question quite distinctly, spoken in good English but with a strong foreign accent:
"I met him in Sevilla when he was visiting Jerez for his company."
A slow smile of deep contentment touched the Saint's lips, and he put his torch away with an inaudible sigh. If he had known all the inside geography of the house and had moreover been gifted with second sight he couldn't have organized his entrance more accurately and appropriately. It was one of those moments when his guardian angel seemed to have hooked him bodily onto the assembly line of adventure and launched him onto an unerringly triumphant sequence of developments like the routine of some supernal mass-production factory.
In a few swift noiseless steps he was at the door with his ear close to the panels, in time to hear the first thin grumbling voice say: "In a case like this you should have more sense. You say you work for what you think is good for your country, but you are as stupid as a little child. I am only working for money for myself, but even I am more careful. Or is that the reason why I cannot afford to be stupid?"
"My dear Urivetzky!" The second voice was conciliatory. "It was not so easy as you think. We had to find agents quickly, and at a time when we could take no risks, when everything had to be done in secret, when, if we made a mistake, we could have been imprisoned or even executed. Ingleston had many friends in Sevilla, expropriated aristocrats, and they assured me that he was in sympathy with our cause. I heard the highest recommendations of him before I spoke to him, and we wished to use foreigners whenever possible because they would arouse no suspicion. But every man can be tempted—"
"It is the business of a leader to choose men who are difficult to tempt," Urivetzky retorted sourly. "Anyone who was not stupid would know that when you entrust a man with bearer bonds which are not traceable, which can be used for any purpose by the man who possesses them, that you must take care how you choose him."
"I am not so experienced in these matters as yourself." The other's voice had an edge to it. "Unfortunately all the gold of Spain is held by the Banco de Espana, in Madrid, which is held by the Reds, and we shall never know what they have done with it. I regret the necessity for these tricks, but we have no choice."
"Pah! You have choice enough. How many thousand Germans and Italians are fighting on your side?"
"They are in sympathy with us, but even they would not help us for nothing."
Urivetzky grunted.
"I also regret your necessities, if they are necessities," he said. "And I shall regret them more if your other agents have been as badly chosen."
"They have not been badly chosen. At this moment I have nearly forty thousand pounds in American and English money in my safe, all of it paid over to me by our other agents. Ingleston was the only mistake we have made."
"And he won't trouble us any more," said a third voice, speaking for the first time.
It was a moment after the Saint had decided that it was time for him to locate the keyhole and add another dimension to the drama which was being unfolded for his benefit. He found the hole just as the third voice reached his ears, and scanned the scene through it with some interest.
The room beyond was smaller than the one which he was in, and from the more habitable furnishings and the lines of bookshelves along the walls it appeared to be a small private study.
Urivetzky sat in an armchair with his back to the keyhole — the hairless cranium which showed over the back of the chair could only have belonged to him. In a swivel chair beyond the desk sat another man whom the Saint recognized at once from the photograph he had seen as Luis Quintana himself; he was smiling at the time, exposing the characteristic Spanish row of irregular fangs covered with greenish-yellow slime, like rocks left naked at low tide, which ought to be exhibited in museums for the education of Anglo-Saxon maidens who have been misled by ceaseless propaganda into believing in the dentifricial glamour of the Latin grin.
Simon observed those details with his first perfunctory glance. From a curiosity point of view he was more immediately interested in the third member of the party, who sat puffing a cigar in the chair directly facing him. He was a man with a square-looking body and a close-cropped, square-looking grey head; the expression of his mouth was hidden by a thick straggling moustache, but his black eyes were flat and vicious. And the Saint knew intuitively that he must be the unidentified assassin whom for the purposes of convenient reference he had christened Pongo.
"The other bonds have not yet been found," Urivetzky said acidly.
"They will be found," Quintana reassured him.
"They had better be found. Otherwise this will be the finish. I am not interested in your country, but I am interested in my living."
The Rebels' representative raised his eyebrows.
"Perhaps you exaggerate. If these forgeries are so perfect—"
"Of course they are perfect. No man in the world could have done better. But they are forgeries. Why are you so stupid? A bond is a work of art. To those who have eyes it has the signature of the creator in every line. So is a forgery a work of art. Look at a connoisseur in an art gallery. Without any catalogue he will study the pictures and he will say, 'That is a Velasquez, that is a Rembrandt, that is an El Greco.' So there are men in the world who will look at forgeries of bonds and say, 'That is a So-and-so, that is a Somebody, that is a Urivetzky.' It makes no difference if the Urivetzky is most like the original. There are still men who will recognize it."
"It is hardly likely to fall into their hands. And it was to disarm their suspicion that we had the story sent out that you had been killed."
"And so perhaps you make more suspicion. This man Templar is not a fool — I have heard too much of him."
"He will be taken care of also," said the man known as Pongo. "I have been working all day—"
He was interrupted by a knock on the door. A servant came in as Quintana answered and turned towards the eliminator of problems.
"There is someone to speak to you on the telephone, senior," he said.
The square man gestured smugly at Urivetzky.
"You see?" he said. "Perhaps this is the report I've been waiting for."
He got up and went out; and the Saint straightened the kinks out of his neck and spine. He had done as good a job of eavesdropping as he could have hoped to do, and he had no complaints. Nearly all the questions in his mind had been answered.
But on Quintana's own statement there were nearly forty thousand pounds in ready cash in the safe, and they were forty thousand reasons for some deep and sober cogitation before he retired from the scene into which he had so seasonably introduced himself. After all, there was still the outstanding matter of a tenner which the late Mr Ingleston had owed; and in the light of what Simon had learned he could see even less reason than before why it should not be repaid with interest… And there was also the telephone conversation to which Senor Pongo had hastened away, which might be worth listening to.
The voices went on coming through the door while he stood for a while undecided.
"Even you take risks," Quintana was saying. "If I had known that you would drive here—"
"That was no risk. There are no policemen looking for me, and taxi drivers are not detectives."
This might be the best chance he would have to do something about the safe, while the odds in the study were reduced from three to two. But Pongo might return at any moment — and by the same token his telephone conversation wouldn't last forever. Whereas the safe and its contents would probably manage to keep a jump ahead of disintegration for a few minutes more.
Simon made his choice with a shrug. He tiptoed back across the room towards the door that opened onto the landing. He had no idea what was on the other side of it, but that was only an incidental gamble among many others.
Even so, he was still destined to be surprised.
The carpet outside must have been very thick or the door very solid, for he heard nothing until he was a couple of yards from it. And then the door was flung open and Pongo rushed in.
The light from the landing caught the Saint squarely and centrally as it streamed in; but Pongo was entering so hastily that he was well inside the room before he could check himself.
Simon leapt at him. His left hand caught the man by the lapels of # his coat, and at the same time he sidestepped towards the door, pushing it shut with his own shoulder and turning the key with his right hand. But the shock had slowed up his reaction by a fatal fraction, and the other recovered himself enough to let out a sharp choking yelp before the Saint shifted his grip to his throat.
The Saint smiled at him benevolently and reached for his gun. But his fingers had only just touched his pocket when light flooded the room from another direction, and a voice spoke behind him.
"Keep still," rasped Luis Quintana.