"I might have known you'd be a great organizer, brother," murmured the Saint as he led the way obediently into the library of Gad Cliff House with his hands held high in the air. "But you were certainly in form tonight."
The compliment was perfectly sincere. When Simon Templar fell into traps he liked them to be good ones for the sake of his own self-esteem; and the one he had just walked into so docilely struck him as being a highly satisfactory specimen from every point of view.
It was all so neat and simple and psychologically watertight, once you were let into the secret. He had kept his first appointment with Brenda Marlow as anyone would have known he would. He had been duly suspicious of the second appointment at the crossroads in East Lulworth as he was meant to be. He had accepted it merely as a confirmation of those suspicions when Jopley arrived with the warning of the machine-gun party — exactly as he was meant to do. And with the memory of the proposition he had made to Jopley the night before still fresh in his mind, the rest of the machinery had run like clockwork. He had been so completely disarmed that even Jopley's well-simulated reluctance to lead him into the very trap he was meant to be led into was almost a superfluous finishing touch. A good trap was something that the Saint could always appreciate with professional interest; but a trap within a trap was a refinement to remember. He had announced himself as being in the market for bait, and verily he had swallowed everything that was offered him.
Simon admitted the fact and went on from there. They were in the soup, but even if it was good soup it was no place to stay in. He reckoned the odds dispassionately. Their guns had been taken away from them, but his knife had escaped the search. That was the only asset he could find on his own side — that, and whatever his own quickness of thought was worth, which on its recent showing didn't seem to be very much. And yet no one who looked at him would have seen a trace of the grim concentration that was driving his brain on a fierce, defiant search for the inspiration that would turn the tables again.
He smiled at Lasser with all the carefree and unruffled ease that only reached its airiest perfection with him when the corner was tightest and the odds were too astronomical to be worth brooding over.
"What does it feel like to be a master mind?" he enquired interestedly.
Lasser beamed back at him, with his rich jolly face shining as if it had been freshly scrubbed.
"I've read a lot about you," he said, "so I knew I should have to make a special effort. In fact I'm not too proud to admit that I've picked up a few tips from the stories I've heard of you. Naturally when I knew who our distinguished opponent was I tried not to disappoint him."
"You haven't," said the Saint cordially. "Except that I may have expected a larger deputation of welcome."
His gaze drifted over the assembly with the mildest and most apologetic hint of criticism. Besides Lasser there was only Jopley and one other man, presumably the gatekeeper — a short, thick-set individual with a cast in one eye and an unshaven chin that gave him a vicious and sinister aspect which was almost too conventional to be true. There was also Brenda Marlow, who came into the room last and sat on the arm of a chair near the door, watching from the background with an expression that the Saint couldn't quite analyze.
"I think there are enough of us," said Lasser blandly. He turned to Jopley. "You searched them all thoroughly?"
The man grunted an affirmative, and Lasser's glance passed fleetingly over Peter Quentin and Hoppy and glowed on the Saint again.
"You can put your hands down," he said. "It will be more comfortable for you. And sit down if you want to." He tugged at the lobe of his ear absentmindedly while the Saint turned a chair round and relaxed in it, crossing his legs. "Ah — about this deputation of welcome. Yes. I had thought of giving you more of a show, but I decided not to. You see, I brought you here to talk over some more or less private business, and I thought that the fewer people who knew about it the better. You have rather a persuasive way with you, Mr Templar, so Jopley tells me, and I shouldn't want you to tempt any more of my employees. Will you have a drink?"
"I'd love one," said the Saint graciously, and Lasser turned to the villainous specimen with the unshaven chin.
"Some drinks, Borieff."
Simon took out his cigarette case while Borieff slouched over to a cupboard under one of the bookshelves and brought out a bottle and a siphon.
"You know, this makes me feel quite guilty," he said. "I've had so many drinks with you before, and yet I've never bought you one."
"Two vanloads, isn't it?" Lasser agreed with his fat bright smile. "And the other van with — um — silks and things in it. Yes. Yes. That's what I brought you here to talk to you about. We shall have to have those vans back, of course, what you haven't actually used of them."
"Hoppy certainly has rather improved the shining hour," Simon admitted. "But there's quite a lot left. What sort of an offer were you thinking of making?"
Lasser shook his head.
"No," he said judiciously. "No, I wasn't thinking of making an offer. I just want them back. I'm afraid you're going to have to tell us where to find them. That's why I arranged for you to come here."
"What's all this," Brenda Marlow asked quietly, "about bringing them here?"
She had been so much in the background that the others seemed to have forgotten her, and when she spoke it was as startling an intrusion as if she had not been there before and had just walked in. Lasser looked round at her, blinking.
"Eh?"
"What's all this," she repeated in exactly the same quiet voice, "about bringing them here?"
Lasser rubbed his chin.
"Oh, of course," he said. "Bringing them here. Yes.
I didn't tell you — I didn't really mean them to meet me at Lulworth. That was just to get them ready for the story Jopley had to tell them. It was all arranged so that they'd be sure to come here, so I suppose I can say we brought them."
"I see," she said innocently. "So you were just using me as a sort of stuffed decoy."
Lasser's broad smile did not waver.
"I shouldn't say that, my dear. No. Not at all. You couldn't have played your part nearly so well if you hadn't believed in it. I was just making it easier for you." He tugged at his ear again for a moment and then pulled out his watch, consulted it, stuffed it back in his pocket and rubbed his hands briskly together with an air of breezy decision. "Now, Brenda, it's time you were off. As a matter of fact I thought you'd have started by this time. Remember you're due in London at one o'clock."
Her shoulders moved slightly.
"I can make it in three hours easily in the new Lagonda," she said slowly. "And since I'm here I'd like to see how you get on."
"But you've got to allow for accidents. If you had a puncture—"
"Do you mean you don't want me to stay?"
The Saint felt an odd thrill of breathlessness. There was a subtle tension in the room that had not been there before even in spite of the display of artillery which was still in evidence. To the Saint's preternaturally sharpened senses it was perceptible in the darkened sullenness of Jopley, in the harsh rigidity of Borieff, even in the frozen fixity of Lasser's expansive smile.
And there could only be one explanation for it. It meant that he must have been right in the one wild theory which had come to him on the way there when it was too late to probe into it, that Brenda Marlow and her contradictions were accounted for and that it was no longer necessary to look to Messalina and Lucrezia Borgia for her prototype. It gave the Saint a curious sense of lightness and relief, even though it did nothing to improve his own position. There were worse things than to be at the mercy of men like Lasser and Jopley and Borieff, and in Simon Templar's own inconsequential philosophy to have to think of a girl as he had been thinking of her was one of them.
"I don't mean that at all," Lasser was saying jovially. "No. Of course not. But that — um — envelope has got to be delivered, and this is rather a private matter—"
"Doesn't it concern all of us?"
The Saint raised his glass and drank with a certain deep satisfaction.
"Comrade Lasser has his own views about who's concerned with one thing and another, darling," he explained. "For instance, there was that business about Pargo. I'll bet he didn't tell you that Pargo was tortured to death and dumped on my—"
Borieff's lunging fist thudded against the side of the Saint's head and sent the glass he was holding spinning away to splinter itself on the edge of a table.
Simon's muscles gathered themselves in spontaneous reaction. And then as he gazed squarely into the muzzle of Borieff's automatic they slowly loosened again. Just as slowly he took out a handkerchief and wiped a few drops of spilt liquid from his coat.
After the sudden crash of shattering glass there was a brief interval of intense silence. And then Lasser spoke with his eyes creased up to slits in his plump jolly face.
"Tie them up," he said; and as Jopley and Borieff moved to obey the order the smile that had been only temporarily shaken came back to his wide elastic mouth. "I'm sorry, Templar, but you must have some respect for the position you're in. I can't have you saying things like that. Now for the rest of this interview you'd better confine yourself to speaking when you're spoken to, or I may have to do something you won't like."
Simon looked at the girl.
"You see how touchy he is?" he drawled recklessly. "I don't know how well you know the signs of a guilty conscience—"
Out of the corner of his eye he could see Lasser's forefinger tightening on the trigger of his levelled gun, but there were provocations that could bring the Saint's contempt for such things to the verge of sheer insanity. What might have happened if he had been allowed to go on was something that he could hardly have refused to bow to in cold blood; but before he could say any more the girl stepped forward.
"Leave him alone, Lasser," she said. "I'm interested in this. What did happen to Pargo?"
"We sent him to Canada, of course, as I told you," Lasser replied brusquely. "You surely don't believe any of this fellow's wild accusations?"
Her dark grey eyes went over him with an unexpectedly mature kind of thoughtfulness.
"I believe what I see," she said. "And I saw Borieff hit him. I think that was a better answer than yours."
She was opening her bag as she spoke, and Lasser went to meet her suddenly with a swiftness that was surprising and somehow horrible in a man of his build. His downward-striking fist knocked the bag through her hands, and then he was holding her by the wrists.
"You mustn't interfere in things like this," he said, still smiling. "Of course I don't tell you everything — you wouldn't like it if I did. But we've got to put a stop to Templar's interference, and that isn't your business unless you want to make it so." He looked at the Saint over his shoulder. "You're going to tell me what happened to those three vans — and do you know why you'll tell me the truth? Because I'm going to take each one of you separately into the next room and ask you questions in my own way, and when you all tell me the same thing I'll know you aren't lying!"