To Tom Ferris for all the fun of Miami Beach, for the Algonquin Alligator, and especially for some of the more improbable parts of this book, which we happen to know are strictly true.

I

The black market

1

The headline in the New York World Telegram said:

SAINT TO SMASH IRIDIUM BLACK MARKET

The story itself was relatively slight for so much black type, but it was adequately padded with a fairly accurate resume of the Saint's career and exploits, or as much of them as had ever become a matter of record; for while the Saint himself was not naturally a modest man, there are certain feats which the dull legislatures of this century do not allow a person to publicise without fear of landing behind iron bars, and Simon Templar preferred bars with bottles to the less convivial kind.

However, the mere fact that the Saint was involved made the item meaty enough from a journalistic standpoint to justify the expenditure of ink, and it is probable that hardly any of the readers felt that the space could have been more stimulatingly and entertainingly employed.

Inspector John Henry Fernack was one very solid exception. He may have been stimulated, in an adrenal way, but he was certainly not entertained. He was, in fact, a rather solemnly angry man. But he had been conditioned by too many previous encounters with Simon Templar's unique brand of modern buccaneering to view the threat of a fresh outbreak without feeling a premonitory ache somewhere in his sadly wise gray head.

He came all the way uptown from Centre Street to the Saint's suite at the Algonquin, and thrust the paper under Simon's nose, and said grimly: "Would you mind telling me just what this means?"

The Saint glanced over it with lazy and bantering blue eyes.

"You mean I should read it to you, or are you just stuck on the longer words?"

"What do you know about iridium?"

"Iridium," said the Saint encyclopedically, "is an element with an atomic weight of 193.1. It is found in platinum ore, and also in lesser quantities in some types of iron and copper ores. In metallurgical practice it is usually combined with platinum, producing an alloy of great hardness and durability, suitable for the manufacture of electrical contacts or for boring holes in policemen's heads."

Fernack breathed deeply and carefully.

"What do you know about this black market?"

Simon ran a hand through his dark hair.

"I know that there is one. There has to be. That isn't any great secret. Iridium is one of the essential metals for war production, and it's awful scarce — so scarce that after Pearl Harbor the price shot up to about four hundred dollars a Troy ounce. The present official price is about a hundred and seventy dollars, or about two thousand bucks a pound, which is still very expensive groceries. If you can get it. But you can't get it."

"You're supposed to get it if you have the proper priority."

"So the Government gives you a pretty license to buy it. They could probably give you a license to buy a web-footed unicorn, too. And then all you have to do is find it."

"What's wrong with the regular markets?"

"They just haven't got it. There never has been much to spare, and the armament boom has just been going through it like a steak through a shipwrecked sailor. And that consignment that was hijacked in Tennessee about a month ago did as much damage as putting an airplane factory oat of production for six months. It wasn't written up that way, but that's what it amounted to."

The incident he referred to had made enough headlines on its own merits, nevertheless. The sheer callous audacity of the job was obvious front-page material, and the value of the loot ranked it with the great robberies of all time.

Three glass-lined quart containers of iridium powder — the usual method of shipping the metal — were being flown from Brazil to the Fort Wayne laboratories of the Uttershaw Mining Company. They were transhipped from Pan American Airways at Miami; and there was another transfer to be made at Nashville, Tennessee. Since the consignment was insured for three hundred thousand dollars, its actual value, there were two armed guards provided by the insurance company to supervise the transhipment at Nashville; but it is certain that no trouble was expected. Perhaps it was because the value of the cargo was only dimly appreciated, in spite of the figures on the policy: iridium was just a word to most people, it wasn't like jewels or bullion or any of the well publicised forms of boodle that automatically bring exciting thoughts to mind. Perhaps the guards were negligent, or merely bored; perhaps the precautions were simply routine, and nobody took the idea of such an attack seriously. Anyway, the result was already history.

A car drove on to the airfield while the case containing the heavy flasks was being unloaded. The two armed guards were shot down before they even realised what was happening, the case was thrown into the car, and the raiders were gone again before any of the spectators had recovered enough to make a move. It had been as simple as that.

Fernack said: "What do you know about that job?"

"Only what I read in the papers."

"You think some of that stolen iridium is finding its way into the black market?"

"I wouldn't drop dead with shock if it was."

"Then it would really be a thieves' market."

"I wouldn't quibble. I imagine you ought to have a priority number even to buy stolen iridium. The point is that it's an illegal market."

"But how could a respectable manufacturer buy in a market like that?"

"Respectable manufacturers have contracts with the Government. They want to fill those contracts, patriotically or for profit or both. If the only way they can get vital materials is that way, any of them are still liable to buy. It's just about as safe as any form of criminal connivance. Only one or two men in the firm would need to know, and iridium is compact and easy to handle in the quantities they use, and it would be the hell of a thing to track down and hang on them individually. So they have some iridium, and none of the workers who are using it is going to ask questions or give a damn where it came from, and maybe they had it in stock all the time."

"How would they set out to buy it?"

The Saint stretched his long legs patiently, and regarded Fernack with kindly tolerance.

"Henry," he said, "this frightful finesse and subtlety of yours is producing the corniest dialogue. You make us remind me of the opening characters in a bad play, carefully telling each other what it's all about so that the audience can get the idea too."

"I didn't—"

"You did. You know just about as much about iridium and the black market and how and why it works as anybody else, but you're feeding me all the wide-eyed questions to see if I'll let something slip that you don't happen to know. Well, you're wasting a lot of time. I hate to tell you, comrade, but you are."

The detective's rugged forthright face reddened a little deep under the skin.

"I want to know who told you to stick your oar into this."

"Nobody. It was something I thought up in my bath."

"If there is anything in this black market story, it's being taken care of—"

"I know. By the proper authorities. How often have I heard that sweet old phrase before?"

"There are proper authorities to take care of anything like that," Fernack said religiously.

Simon nodded with speculative respect.

"Who?"

It was a little pathetic to see Fernack suffer. He ran a finger around under his collar and floundered in the awful pain of a frustrated mastodon.

"Well, the — the different agencies involved. "We're all working with them—"

"That's fine," said the Saint approvingly. "So while we're all clumping around on our great flat feet, I thought I'd stick my little oar in and see what I could do to help."

"How do you think you're helping by trying to make a monkey out of everyone else?"

"Henry, I assure you I never presumed to improve on—"

The detective swallowed.

"In this interview," he blared, "you said that since the authorities apparently hadn't been able to do anything about it yet, you were going to take it in hand yourself."

Simon inclined his head.

"That," he admitted, "is the same thought in judicial language."

"Well, you can't do it!"

"Why not?"

"Because it's — it's—"

"Tell me," said the Saint innocently. "What is the particular law that forbids any public-spirited citizen to do his little bit towards purifying a sinful world?"

"In this interview," Fernack repeated like an overstrained litany, "you said you had a personal inside line that was going to get results very quickly."

"I did."

Fernack tied the newspaper up in his slow powerful fists.

"You realise," he said deliberately, "that if you have any special information, it's your duty to cooperate with the proper agencies?"

"Yes, Henry."

"Well?"

Fernack didn't really mean to blast the challenge at him like a bullet. It was just something that the Saint's impregnable sangfroid did to his blood pressure that lent a catapult quality to his vocal cords.

Simon Templar understood that, broadmindedly, and smiled with complete friendliness.

"If I had any special information," he said, "you might easily persuade me to do my duty."

The detective took a slight pause to answer.

It was as if he lost a little of his chest expansion, and had to find a new foothold for his voice.

When he found it, there was a trace of insecurity in his belligerence.

"Are you trying to tell me that that was just a bluff?"

"I'm trying to tell you."

"You really don't know anything yet?"

The Saint extinguished his cigarette, and shook another or out of the pack beside his hand.

"But," he said gently, "anyone who didn't know that might easily think it was time to get tough with me."

Fernack looked at him for a while from under intent but reluctant brows.

At last he said: "You're just using yourself for bait?"

"I love you, Henry. You're so clever."

"And if you get any nibbles?"

"That will be something else again," said the Saint dreamily; and Fernack began to come back to the boil.

"Why? It isn't any of your business—"

Simon stood up.

"It's my business. It's everybody's business. There are airplanes and tanks and jeeps and everything else being manufactured for this war. They need magnetos and distributors. Magnetos and distributors need iridium. There are millions of wretched people paying taxes and buying bonds and doing everything to pay for them. If they cost twice as much as they should on account of some lousy racket has a corner in the stuff, every penny of that is coming out of the sacrifice of some bloody little jerk who believes he's giving it to his country. If the war production plan is being screwed up because materials are being shunted off where they aren't most urgently needed — if the airplanes and the tanks aren't getting there because some of the parts aren't finished — then there are a lot of poor damn helpless bastards having their guts blown out and dying in the muck so that some crook can buy himself a bigger cigar and keep another bird in a gilded cage. I say that's my business and it's going to be my business."

He was suddenly very tall and strong and — not lazy at all, and there was something in his reckless face of a mocking conquistador that held Fernack silent for a moment, with nothing that seemed to have any point at all to say.

It was just for a moment; and then all the detective's suspicion and resentment welled up again in a defensive reaction that was doubly charged for having so nearly been beguiled. Now I'll tell you something! I've been getting along all right in this town without any Robin Hoods. You've done things for me before this, but everything you've done has been some kind of grief to me. I don't want any more of it. I'm not going to have any more!"

"And exactly how," Simon inquired interestedly, "are you going to stop me?"

"I'm going to have you watched for twenty-four hours a day. I'm going to have this place watched. And if anybody comes near this bait at all, I'm going to know all about them before they've even told you their name."

"What a busy life you are going to lead," said the Saint.

During the next twenty-four hours, exactly thirty-eight persons called at the Algonquin, asked for Mr Templar, were briefly interviewed, and went back to their diverse affairs, closely followed by a series of muscular and well-meaning gentlemen who

placed each other in the lobby of the hotel with the regularity of a row of balls trickling up to the plunger of a pin-table.

After that, the Police Commissioner personally called a halt.

"It may be a very promising lead, Fernack," he said in his bleached acidulated way, "but I Cannot place all the reserves of the Police Department at your disposal to follow everyone who happens to get in touch with Mr Templar."

The Saint, who had hired every one of his visitors for that express purpose, enjoyed his own entertainment in his own way.

It was still going on when he had a much more succinct call from Washington.

"Hamilton," said the dry voice on the telephone, for enough introduction. "I saw the papers. I suppose you know what you're doing."

"I can only try," said the Saint. "I think something will happen."

He had visualised many possibilities, but it is doubtful whether he had ever foreseen anything exactly like Titania Ourley.

2

Mrs Milton Ourley was a great deal of woman. She was constructed according to a plan which is discreetly called statuesque. She wore brilliantly hennaed hair, a phenomenal amount of bright blue eye-shadow, and fingernails that would have done credit to a freshly blooded cheetah. Her given name, naturally, was not her fault; but it might have been prophetically inspired. If she was not actually the queen of the fairies, she certainly; impressed one as being in the line of direct succession.

She plumped herself down on the smallest available chair, which she eclipsed so completely that she seemed to be miraculously suspended some eighteen inches from the floor, and speared the Saint on an eye like an ice-pick.

"If you want to know all about iridium," she said, "I came to tell you about my husband."

Simon Templar had taken more obscure sequiturs than that in his stride. He offered her a cigarette, which she declined with fearful cordiality, and sank one hip on the edge of a table.

"Tell me about him."

"He's,been buying iridium in the black market. I heard him talking about it to Mr Linnet."

Her voice became a little vague towards the end of the sentence, as if her mind had already begun to wander. Her eye had already been wandering, but only in a very limited way. Nevertheless, it had not taken long to lose a large part of its impaling vigor. It was, in fact, becoming almost wistful.

"Do you like dancing?" she asked.

"I can take it or leave it alone," said the Saint cautiously. "Who is Mr Linnet?"

"He's in the same kind of business as my husband. He makes electrical things. My husband, of course, is president of the Ourley Magneto Company." Her rapidly melting eye traveled speculatively over the Saint's tall symmetrical frame. "You look as if you could do a wonderful rumba," she said.

Only the Saint's incomparable valor, which is already so well known to the entire reading public of the English-speaking world, enabled him to face the revolting tenderness of her smile without quailing.

"I hope I never disappoint you," he said ambiguously. "Now, about your husband—"

"Oh, yes. Of course." Her pronunciation of the last word was a caress. "Well, he uses a lot of iridium. I don't know much about his business — I think business is so dull, don't you? — but I know he uses it. So does Mr Linnet. Well, last night we had dinner with Mr Linnet, and — well, I had to powder my nose."

"Not really? Even you?"

"Yes," said Mrs Ourley vaguely. "Well, when I came back, I just couldn't help hearing what Milton — that's my husband, Milton — and Mr Linnet were talking about."

"Of course not."

"Well, Mr Linnet was saying: 1 don't know what to do. I've got to have iridium to fulfil my contracts, and the market's cornered. I don't like any part of it, but they've got me over a barrel.' Then Milton said: I'll say they have. But you'll buy it and pay through the nose, just like me. You can't afford to do anything else.' And Mr Linnet said: 'I still don't like it.' Then I had to go into the room because the butler came out into the hall, so I couldn't just stand there, and of course they stopped talking about it. But I can tell you it was a terrible shock to me."

"Naturally," Simon agreed sympathetically.

"I mean, if Milton and Mr Linnet are buying illegal iridium, that makes them almost criminals themselves, doesn't it?"

Simon studied her seriously for a moment.

"Do you really want your husband to go to jail?" he asked bluntly.

"Good Heavens, no!" She was righteously pained. "That's why I came to you instead of telling the police or the FBI. If Milton went to jail I just wouldn't know how to look my friends in the face. But as a patriotic citizen I have my duty to do. And it wouldn't do any harm if you frightened him a bit. I think he deserves it. He's been so mean to me lately. If you could only have heard what he said to the nicest boy that I met in Miami Beach—"

It seemed to the Saint, quite abstractly, that he might have enjoyed hearing that; but he was just tactful enough not to say so.

He said: "What you've told me isn't exactly enough to convict him. And for that matter, it doesn't lay the black market in my lap either. But I'd like to have a talk with your husband."

"Oh, if you only would, Mr Templar! You're sooo clever, I'm sure you could persuade him to tell you."

"I could try," he said noncommittally. "Where do you live?"

"We've got a little place out at Oyster Bay. Milton will be home by half past six. If you could manage to get out there — you could say you just happened to be passing and you dropped in for a drink—"

"Tell him we met in Havana," said the Saint, "and put him in the right frame of mind."

He got her out of the door with some remarkably firm and adroit maneuvering, and came back to pour himself a healthy dose of Peter Dawson and restore his nerves.

The fortunes of buccaneering had brought many women out of the wide world and thrown them into Simon Templar's life, and it is a happy fact that most of them had been what any man would agree that a woman out of the wide world ought to be, which was young and decorative and quite undomesticated. But he had to realise that sooner or later such good luck had to end; and he had no idea of ignoring Titania Ourley, in spite of her unprepossessing appearance and even more dreadful charm.

It was like that in the strange country of adventure where he had worn so many trails. When yo.u had no idea where your quarry was, there was nothing to bring it within range like the right bait. When you had no idea what your quarry was like, you had to find the right bait, and sometimes that wasn't at all easy, but when you had the right bait you were bound to get a nibble. And when you had a nibble, the rest depended on how good you were. Mrs Milton Ourley was definitely a nibble.

He reached Oyster Bay soon after six-thirty, and after the inevitable series of encounters with village idiots, characters with cleft palates, and strangers to the district, he was able to get himself directed to Mr Ourley's little place.

This little place was no larger than a fairly flourishing hotel, occupying the center of a small park. Simon watched the enormous iron-studded portal open as he approached it with the reasonable expectation of seeing the hallway flanked with a double line of periwigged footmen; but instead of that it was Mrs Ourley herself who stood fabulously revealed on the threshold, gowned and corseted in a strapless evening dress that made her-upper section look slightly like an overfilled ice cream cone.

"Simon! You darling boy! How wonderful of you to remember!"

She insisted on taking both his hands as she drew him in, and still holding on to them when he was inside — doubtless under the impression that this gave her some of the winsome appeal of Mary Martin in her last picture.

He found himself in an immense pseudo-baronial hall cluttered with ponderous drapes and gilt furniture, and atmospherically clogged with a concentration of perfume on which it might have' been possible to float paper boats. As Mrs Ourley dragged him closer to her bosom, it became stiflingly plain that she herself was the wellspring of this olfactory soup.

"I was just driving by," Simon began as arranged, "and—”

"And of course you had to stop! I just knew you couldn't forget—”

"What the dabbity dab is going on here?" boomed a sudden wrathful voice from the background.

Mrs Ourley jumped away with a guilty squeal; and Simon turned to inspect Mr Ourley with as much composure as Mrs Ourley's over-zealous interpretation of her part could leave him.

"Good evening," he said politely.

He saw a very short man with enormous shoulders and an even more enormous stomach swelling below a stiff white shirtfront. He carried a raggedly chewed cigar in thick hirsute fingers, and his black beetling brows arched up and down in apoplectic exasperation.

"Tiny!" he roared at his wife, thereby causing even the Saint to blink. "I've told you before that I'll make no effort to control your comings and goings outside of this house, but I will not have you bringing your gigolos into my home!"

Mrs Ourley bridled automatically.

"But he's not a… I asked him to drop in."

"So," said Milton Ourley thunderously. "You admit it. Well, | this is just about the last—"

"But Milton," she protested coldly, "this is Mr Templar. Simon Templar. You know — the Saint."

"Jumping Jehosaphat!" roared Mr Ourley. "The what?"

Simon turned back from the Beauvais tapestry which he had been surveying while he allowed the first ecstatic symptoms of marital bliss to level off.

"The Saint," he said pleasantly. "How do you do?"

"Dabbity dab dab dab," said Mr Ourley. A new flood of adrenalin in his blood stream caused him to inflate inwardly until he looked more than ever like a bellicose bullfrog. "Tiny, have you gone out of your mind? Asking this crook, this — this busybody—"

"Milton," said Mrs Ourley glacially, "I heard you and Mr Linnet talking about iridium last night. And since Simon is trying to break up that racket, I thought it would be a good idea to bring you two together."

Milton Ourley stared at the Saint, and his broad chest seemed to shrink one or two sizes. That might have been only an impression, for he stood as solid as a sawed-off colossus on his short stocky legs. Certainly he did not stagger and collapse. His glare lost none of its fundamental bellicosity. It was only quieter, and perhaps more calculating.

"Oh, did you?" he said.

The Saint fingertipped a cigarette out of the pack in his breast pocket. For his part, the approach was all ploughed up anyhow. He had given Titania Ourley little enough script to work with, and now that she had gone defensively back into simple facts it was no use worrying about what other lines might have been developed. Simon resigned himself to some hopeful adlibbing, and smiled at Mr Ourley without the slightest indication of uncertainty in his genial nonchalance.

"You see?" he murmured. "Tiny has brains as well as beauty."

Ourley's red face deepened into purple again.

"You leave my wife out of this!" he bellowed. "And as for you, you can get out of here this minute, Mister Templar. When you've got any authority to come barging into other people's affairs—"

"You heard the name," Simon replied softly. "Did you ever hear of the Saint asking for any authority?"

"And seem a saint when most I play the devil," said another voice, a deep cultured voice from somewhere else in the hall.

Simon looked around for it.

He saw, in one of the doorways, a tall spare man whose dinner clothes seemed to have been poured over his figure, smiling and twirling a Martini glass in one manicured hand. Gray at the temples, his face was hard and almost unlined, cut in the aquiline fleshless pattern of a traditional Indian chief.

"I don't want to break anything up," he said, "but all the excitement seemed to be out here." Ignoring Ourley, he sauntered towards the Saint with his free hand outstretched. "I've heard a lot about you, Mr Templar. My name's Allen Uttershaw. I'm supposed to run that Uttershaw Mining Company. I heard somebody talking about iridium. Are you going to get that stolen shipment back for us?"

"I don't know," said the Saint. "I'm afraid I only heard about you a few days ago."

"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen," Uttershaw said tolerantly, his smile widening.

Ourley made a gesture of frightful frustration with his cigar.

"What is all this?" he barked. "Who said that?"

"John Kieran," said Uttershaw gravely; and Simon looked at him with new interest. It began to seem as if Mr Allen Uttershaw might be quite a fellow.

Mr Ourley didn't have the same pure intellectual detachment. He repeated his outraged gesture with italics in smoke.

"Dabbity dab dab dab!" he roared. "Has everybody gone nuts? First I find my wife has brought this meddler into my home to spy on me, and then you keep on quoting poetry. Or maybe it's me that's crazy."

"Milton!" said Mrs Ourley sternly.

Uttershaw took Simon by the arm and started to lead him easily into the living room from which he had emerged.

"Milton, I'm ashamed of you," he said. "What will Mr Templar think of your hospitality?"

"I don't give a dab dab what he thinks," fumed Ourley, pattering helplessly after them. "My hospitality doesn't include welcoming crooks and spies with open arms."

"Now, after all — surely Mr Templar is at least entitled to the chance of saying something for himself." Uttershaw turned to a tray on which a shaker and a row of glasses were set out. "How about a drink, Mr Templar?"

"Thanks," said the Saint, with equal urbanity.

He took the glass that Uttershaw handed him, gazed into it for a moment, and then swept his cool blue eyes again over the faces of the other two men.

"I didn't exactly come here to spy," he said frankly. "I didn't actually come here with any plans at all. But after what Mrs Ourley told me, I was certainly anxious to talk to" — he inclined his head — "Mr Ourley. I thought I might possibly get you to talk to me. You know that I'm interested in the iridium situation, and it seems that you've had some dealings with the black market. You might like to tell me about it."

"My wife is an irresponsible imbecile," Ourley said balefully. "I'm just a business man with a contract to fill, and I'm filling it."

"Anyone who buys in a black market, of course, is technically compounding some sort of misdemeanor," Simon went on imperturbably. "But in this case it goes a little further. Iridium isn't so common that a black market can just scratch it up out of a junk pile. And Mr Uttershaw will certainly remember a recent robbery in which two men were killed. It seems rather obvious to me that at least some of this black market iridium is coming from that stolen shipment which started the shortage in the first place. In that case, anyone who buys it is not only receiving stolen goods, but in a sort of way he's an accessory to murder."

"Fiddlesticks!" exploded Ourley. "What do you propose to do when you get some information — turn it over to the Junior G-Men or cash in on it yourself?"

"Milton!" repeated Mrs Ourley, aghast from her quivering bust to the crimson-tipped toes that protruded through the front of her evening sandals.

"Considering my reputation, the question is not out of order," Simon said equably. "And the answer is that I shall deal with any facts I can get hold of in whatever way I think they would do the most good."

"Well," rasped Ourley, "in that case I'd be seventy-seven kinds of a dab dabbed idiot if I told you anything — if I knew anything, that is," he added hastily.

Simon's gaze was dispassionately unwavering.

"Would you say the same thing to the police or the FBI?"

"You're dabbity dab well right I would. My business is still my own business until these dabbity dab New Dealers take what's left of it away from me."

Uttershaw stepped up with a gold lighter for the cigarette which the Saint was still holding unlighted between his fingers.

"Do you know anything about this iridium black market, Milton?" he inquired curiously.

Ourley's mouth opened, and then closed again like a trap before it parted a second time to let out words.

"I have no information to give anyone," he said; "especially to interfering dab dabs like this. And that's final."

"I only wondered," Uttershaw said suavely, "because naturally I'm interested myself. Of course that iridium shipment of mine was insured, but I couldn't insure my legitimate profit, which would have been quite reasonable. And after all, we all have to make some kind of living. Besides, I can't help hating to think that some crooks are making a fantastic profit where I'm really entitled to a fair one. Personally, I wish Mr Templar a lot of luck. And I'm sure the Government would be behind him."

"Don't talk to me about the Government!" Ourley blared, his face ripening again. "What I still want to know is what right a meddling son of a dab blab like this Templar has to go around sticking his nose into my business and making passes at my wife and crashing into my house to cross-examine me. And I want him the hell out of here!"

"The eagle suffers little birds to sing," Uttershaw remembered soothingly; and Ourley's eyes bulged with his blood pressure.

"I wish everybody would stop throwing quotations at me," he howled. "Who said that?"

"Clifton Fadiman — or was it F P A?" said Uttershaw good-humoredly.

Simon Templar emptied his shallow glass and set it down. It seemed rather sadly clear that he was not going to make any substantial progress there and then, and his nibble still left him a secondary line that might be more profitable to play on. He had that in his mind as he bent over Mrs Ourley's diamond-sprinkled hand with somewhat exaggerated formality.

"It's been nice to see you again — Tiny," he said, and added with a malice that saved him from shuddering: "Perhaps we shall dance that immortal rumba one of these days." He bowed to the spluttering Mr Ourley. "I still hope you'll think this over, Milton. I do really. Prison life is so slimming," he said; and shook hands with Uttershaw. "If you hear anything in professional circles, I'm at the Algonquin. We might have lunch one day."

"I'd love to," Uttershaw said cordially. "I'd still like to know why you should take so much trouble."

Simon turned at the door. There were certain little touches and lovely curtains that he could never resist.

"I sing because I must," he said softly, and was gone.

They heard his car starting up and crunching away down the drive, and there was a longish silence in the room.

Then Milton Ourley found his voice again.

"Now what the dabbity dab goes on?" he yelped. "He sounded as if he was quoting poetry too. You've got everybody doing it. What did he mean?"

Allen Uttershaw held up his glass and turned it meditatively.

"I sing because I must," he repeated. For a moment his handsome bony brow was furrowed with thought. Then, just for another moment, it cleared. He went on: "And pipe but as the linnet sings…"

His voice died away, and left only his clear gray eyes drifting over Ourley's congested face.

3

Mr Gabriel Linnet, according to the Manhattan directory, had a residential address just off Madison Avenue in the Sixties. It proved to be a three-storey whitestone house with an air of solid prosperity which was quite different in style from that of the Ourley palazzo, but which obviously indicated a similar familiarity with spending coupons.

No lights showed from the windows as Simon stopped his car outside, but it was impossible to tell at a glance whether that might only be the effect of blackout curtains. There was another kind of light, though, that the Saint saw as he stepped out — a spark like a durable firefly hovering over a vague grayish shape in the darkness of the entrance porch. As he came to the steps, the shape developed into an ermine wrap encasing a girl who was perched on the stone balustrade beside the front door, and the firefly was a cigarette in her hand. The faintest subtlest fragrance, a thing not to be mentioned in the same breath as the stupefying reek of Mrs Ourley, crept into his nostrils as he came closer and touched his mind with a quite fanciful excitement.

He took a pencil flashlight from his pocket with a pretense of searching for the doorbell, but he was careful to turn it clumsily enough so that the beam passed over her face.

At least, it was meant to pass over; but when he saw her clearly his hand stopped, and he could no more have kept it moving for a moment than a conscientious bee could have kept flying past a freshly opened flower.

She had long-bobbed blue-black hair that shone like burnished metal, and long-lashed eyes that looked the same color. Her face was a perfect oval of softly-modeled olive, ripening into moist lips that were in themselves a justification for at least half the poems that have been written on such subjects. She was the kind of thing that a castaway on a desert island would dream about just before the seagulls started talking back to him.

The Saint should have had his mind on nothing but the job in hand; but he was still a long way from such dizzy depths of asceticism. She was so much more what a woman out of the wide world should have been, so completely everything that Titania Ourley was not, that he didn't even realize how long he looked at her before she gave him a hint of it.

"Are you quite through?" she said icily; and yet even then her voice matched the picture of her so much better than the mood that the rebuke was warmer than most other women's welcomes.

The Saint turned his light downwards so that it wasn't directly in her eyes, and she could see him equally by the reflected glow; but he didn't turn away himself.

He said, in a low reckless breath:

"Barbara the Beautiful

Had praise of lute and pen;

Her hair was like a summer night,

Dark, and desired of men…"

She sat utterly still for a few seconds.

Then she said: "How did you know my name was Barbara?"

"I didn't," he said. "I just came from a Quiz Kids reunion, and I've got a bad attack of the quotes. I'm sorry. Is your name Barbara?"

"Barbara Sinclair."

"It's a nice name."

"Now that that's settled," she said, "why don't you run along? Can't you see I'm busy?"

"So am I," said the Saint. "Don't go away now. I shan't be long."

He turned his light back on the front door, searching for the bell again.

"You're wasting your time," she said. "There's nobody in."

He took his fingers from the bell without touching it, and sat on the stone railing beside her.

"For some reason," he murmured, "that begins to seem strikingly unimportant."

"I've been here for half an hour," she said.

"I suppose life is like that. I wouldn't keep you waiting on my doorstep for half an hour."

"You don't really have to keep me waiting on anyone's doorstep for half an hour."

After an instant, he brought out a cigarette of his own and lighted it and took his time over the job.

"I suppose," he said carelessly, "you wouldn't be hinting that we might go and get a drink and maybe gnaw a bone somewhere."

"No," she said. "But a man with a car is an awful temptation these days. How's your gas ration?"

"Very healthy," he said. "How is your conscience?"

She stood up, and sent her firefly spinning on one last incandescent trajectory out into the street.

"Starving."

He turned the car south on Madison, considering places where this shining hour might be best improved, and she sat just close enough beside him so that he was always aware of her with his shoulder, and the faint insidious sweetness of her was always in the air he breathed.

Then they were in a rooftop restaurant, in a corner booth with the lights of Manhattan spread out below them, and there were shaded candles on the tables and soft music, and there were oysters and green turtle soup and much fascinatingly inconsequential chatter, and the ermine wrap was over the back of her chair and she was wearing a dress that left no questions about whether her figure would match her face; and then there was coq au vin and a bottle of burgundy, and more talk that went very quickly and meant nothing at all; and then the Saint lighted a cigarette and stretched his legs contentedly and said: "Of all the possible things that I might have run into this evening, you are the last thing I was expecting — and incidentally I'm afraid you're much more fun. Why were you waiting on Comrade Linnet's doorstep?"

"That," she said, "is my affair."

He sighed.

"I might have known it. You were obviously too beautiful to be lying around loose."

"Are you going to disappoint me now?" she said mockingly. "I thought the Saint was a buccaneer — a man who took what he wanted, and damn the torpedoes."

Simon had the last glass of wine in his hand, moving it under the candlelight to enjoy the rich purity of its color. He put it down with the liquid in it as smooth and unrippled as if it had been frozen.

"How did you know my name?"

"After that picture of you in the paper yesterday," she said casually, "who wouldn't?"

"You've known all the time?"

"Of course." She gave him a quick smile with the slightest troublement in it. "Please — did I say anything wrong? I'm not a celebrity hunter. That isn't why I came with you. I just wanted to."

"I was just a little surprised," he said.

She looked out of the window at the sparsely scattered stars that the dimout had left below; and then she said, without her eyes meeting his directly: "Couldn't we get out of here? Haven't you got an apartment somewhere? Or I have. And a radio. I'll buy you a drink and we can get sweet music on WQXR and talk about Life."

He drew slowly at his cigarette.

"That could be swell," he said; and her eyes turned to his face again.

"I'll have to make a phone call and break another date," she said with a smile. "But it doesn't seem to matter a bit."

He stood up while she left the table, and then he sat down again and propped his cigarette arm on one elbow for about as long as it took to absorb three more long and contemplative drags.

Then he got up and strolled unhurriedly out of the restaurant.

He strolled past the bar, past the men's room, past the hat-check girl. There was an elevator engorging a flock of satisfied diners. Almost accidentally, it might have seemed, the Saint drifted in on the heels of the last passenger, and was dropped with ear-numbing swiftness to the street.

Ten minutes later he was on the steps of Gabriel Linnet's house again.

This time he rang the bell.

He rang it two or three times, but there was no response.

He felt so still inside that he could hear his own pulses drumming. There might be some perfectly ordinary explanation for the fact that the house seemed empty. Yet Linnet had dined with the Ourleys the night before; and if he had been planning to close up his house and go away somewhere, Mrs Ourley would almost certainly have mentioned it. And unless Mr Linnet was an eccentric who preferred to sweep his own floors and wash his own dishes, there should have been some servant on duty at that hour in a place that size.

And of course Barbara Sinclair had always been too good to be true…

The Saint wondered if he deserved to be shot. But he was going to find out.

He took a pin from his coat lapel and used it to jam the doorbell on a steady ring, and stepped back. It could have been a major operation to force that entrance, and a street front was not the ideal place for such operations at any time, but he had already noted a narrow alley that ran between the Chateau Linnet and its next-door neighbor, and if such an alley didn't lead to a side entrance he couldn't think of any other reason for it to be there.

There was a side entrance, and like most side entrances it looked much less of a problem than the front door.

The Saint cupped his pencil flashlight vinder his hands for a preliminary diagnosis of the lock.

And as he looked at it, it receded slowly before him.

The movement was so gradual and stealthy that it didn't register instantaneously. At first it could have been only an insignificant hallucination, an effect of the movement of the light in his hands. He had to become at first unthinkingly aware that the continuous pealing of the doorbell which could be heard somewhere inside the building was growing clearer and louder; and at the same time his brain had to consent to recognise the improbable report of his eyes; and then he had to put the two things together; and then the door had unquestionably opened more than an inch, and a gossamer commando of intangible cockroaches raced up from between his snoulder-blades into the roots of his hair.

Somebody was opening the door from within.

It was too late then to switch out the torch and duck — even if there had been anywhere to duck to. The glow of light must have already been distinctively perceptible from inside the opening door. And for final proof of that, the door started to close again.

Simon's shoulder hit it with all his weight in about the same split second as it reversed itself.

The door traveled some six inches back, and thudded in a rather sharp crisp way against some obstacle which let out a sort of thin yipping cough. Then it went on with much less impetus, while a straggly tumbling effect peeled off behind it.

Simon went in and shut the door behind him, flashing his light around even while he did that.

He saw a short flight of steps with the temporary obstacle sprawled at the foot of them. The obstacle was a thin hollow-cheeked man who looked as if he had probably shaved two days before. If he hadn't, he should have. The point, however, was not suitable for immediate discussion, since the only potential source of first-hand evidence was not a good prospect for interrogation at that time. He had a vertical cut in his forehead where the edge of the door had hit him, and he looked very uninterested indeed.

Simon made sure of his continued neutrality by using his necktie to bind his ankles together, and then using the man's shoelaces to tie his wrists behind his back and link them with the Charvet hobble.

Then he went on quickly into the house.

He moved through a huge kitchen, a series of pantries, and up a flight of stairs to the main floor. He found himself in a bare but richly carpeted hall, with the front door facing him and a single onyx bowl of light burning overhead, and turned off his torch.

He didn't need any extra light to see the crudely drawn skeleton figure crowned with a symbolic halo which was chalked on one of the doors on his right.

"What a quaint touch," said the Saint to himself; but he was not smiling to himself at the same time.

The door was ajar. He pushed it open with his foot, and took the one necessary step into the room. It was a slightly conventional library with built-in bookshelves and warm wood panels and deep comfortable chairs, but all of it unmistakably tinged with the vision of an interior decorator. It seemed regrettable that this was yet another subject that could not be discussed with the person who would normally have been the most likely source of information; but it was a little obvious that there was at least one linnet who would never pipe or sing any more.

Aside from the simple probabilities, there were the initials "G L" embroidered on the breast pocket of the dark brocade dressing gown which the man wore over his tuxedo shirt and trousers. He lay on the floor in the middle of the room in an attitude of curious relaxation. But the piece of blind cord which was knotted around his throat so tightly that it had almost sunk into the skin could never have done his voice any good.

Simon Templar lighted a cigarette very carefully, and stood looking down at the body for a space that must have run into minutes, while he grimly tried to think of himself as a secondhand murderer. And all the time the doorbell was buzzing on one ceaseless monotonous note.

And then, abruptly, it was silent. After which it gave three or four distinct irregular peremptory rasps which could only have been produced by individual action.

The Saint came back into movement as if he had never paused, as if all those moments of intense and ugly thought had been nothing but the gap between the stopping of a cinema projector and the starting up again. In an instant he had flipped off they light switch, and he was crossing to the window. He only had to move the drapes a hair's breadth to peep out on to the doorway porch, and what he saw there enabled him to intellectually discard the effort of doubling back to the side door. He was a great believer in the economy of effort, and he could always tell at a glance when it would be completely wasted.

He switched the library lights on again as he went out into the hall, and opened the front door with his most disarming bonhomie.

"Hullo, there, John Henry," he said. "Come on in and play. Somebody seems to have been trying to frame me for a murder."

4

There was no answering geniality in Inspector Fernack's entrance. He stalked in rather heavily with two plain-clothes men following behind him like a pair of trained dogs, and his tough square-jawed face was as uncompromising as a cliff. His straight stolid eyes drove at the Saint like fists. Then, in a quick glance around, they fell on the childish chalked sketch on the library door, and his mouth set like a ridge of granite.

"Hold him here," he said, and went into the room.

He was gone only a couple of minutes, and when he came back he looked several years older. He spoke to one of his satellites.

"Have you searched him?"

"Yes sir. No weapons."

"Go out and phone for a homicide detail — better not use any of the phones in here. Al, you go upstairs and look over the other rooms, but don't touch anything."

The two men left, and Simon straightened his clothes to restore his natural elegance from the disorder which the rough search of his person had produced. He could never have looked more at case and debonair, as if it had never occurred to him that the most diaphanous cloud of suspicion could ever cast a shadow on his unspotted probity.

"Quite a neat little job, isn't it?" he remarked affably.

Fernack stared up at him, and his gaze was curiously sad.

"If I hadn't seen it myself, I wouldn't have believed it," he said. "Simon, what in God's name did you do it for?"

The Saint's brows rose in balanced arcs of shocked incredulity.