To any individual who, like the present chronicler, is acutely conscious of the need to conserve paper in order that there may never be any lack of raw materials on which the latest governmental artist can design new forms to be filled out in sesquicentuplicate, the mere thought of wasting one milligram of precious pulp which might be better devoted to the production of monogrammed kleenex is instinctively repugnant. Your correspondent therefore proposes to expend no words on describing the reactions of Messieurs Varetti and Walsh, beyond mentioning that they looked as if they had been kicked three inches above the navel by an exacerbated elephant.
Where after, as an equally simple matter of record, it was Cokey Walsh who digested the ultimate total into the single sizzling sentence without which all detective-story dialogue would have dried up long ago.
"I ain't talking."
"That remains to be seen," said the Saint, with proper patience, having been in stories before. "But you'll have to start with some sort of alibi when the cops arrive, and I thought you might like a rehearsal."
Varetti moistened his lips.
"That's still easy," he said. "You brought us in here and started all this. You say we were trying to steal something. Well, what was it and where did you get it?"
"You're doing fine," said the Saint encouragingly. "Go on."
Varetti shrugged.
"I don't have to go on for you. But I can tell you that if there's going to be any squealing at all, Cokey and I will squeal on you first. And if we have to take any rap, we'll share it out with you.
We could even say that you were in with us all the time, until you started to double-cross us just now."
"That's right," Cokey chimed in brightly. "When we found out what you was up to, we didn't want any part of it. So we was just tryin' to do our duty and turn you in."
The Saint sighed.
"I can't stop you dreaming," he said, "but do you honestly believe that even the dumbest cop you ever hoped for is going to buy a yarn like that from a couple of characters like you?"
"What's wrong with our characters?" Cokey demanded aggrievedly. "Our word is as good as yours—"
"But is it?" Simon asked gently. "I imagine that your record must be rather involved. And I don't suppose you got your name because of your passion for drinking colas. I can see other stuff in your eyes now. Are you quite sure that a junkie's word is as good as mine? What do you think, Ricco? — and incidentally, how is your police record? Will the YMCA vouch for you? Are you in line for an honorary commission in the Salvation Army?"
Varetti said nothing. He stared back at the Saint with adequate outward composure, and Simon gathered that he had all the misdirected courage of his profession. The Saint didn't underestimate Mr Varetti, in spite of his revolting clothes and coiffure.
There was, meanwhile, the matter of a cigarette which was becoming increasingly overdue… Simon dipped into his breast pocket and secured one with his left hand, without the most microscopic shift of the automatic in his right. He fished out a match booklet in the same way, and began shaping a match over without tearing it out, in order to strike it one-handed.
He said: "I don't have to make speeches to you, either. I just hope you don't think I'm kidding about Kestry and Bonacci. Because if you do, we're wasting a lot of time, and we haven't got much to spare."
Varetti's mouth curled derisively.
"Don't give us that stuff. You didn't know we were coming here until we walked into the room."
"That's true. I was only guessing that you were coming. But I knew that somebody was. I knew that somebody would be checking on me here, and I couldn't bring that bag in in my pocket. Therefore somebody would know that something had gone wrong. And somebody would want to do something fast about getting the bag back. That's what I told Inspector Fernack; and that's why Kestry and Bonacci are on their way. I do hope you know Kestry and Bonacci. They don't have any of those Lord Peter Wimsey whimsies, but they get a lot more confessions in their own way. Are you looking forward to a romp with them in the massage parlor?"
The hoodlum glared at him with hot hateful eyes.
"I don't believe you," he said flatly. "It's a stall, that's what it is."
"Is that all you're betting on?"
Varetti's mouth was a tight line.
"If you mean I should spill, there isn't a chance."
Simon wiped his bent match over the striking strip on the booklet and put the flame to his cigarette.
He said: "How about you, Cokey? How are you looking forward to going without your inhaler for a while? Have you ever been through that experience before? I expect you have. On top of being slapped around a bit, it's quite a lot of fun — isn't it?"
Cokey Walsh's face was pallid and lined. "With his hands clasped behind his head as he had been ordered, only his elbows could tremble. But they did. His eyes were jittering buttons in a yellow mask.
"Remember it, Cokey?" Simon asked gently. "Remember how all your nerves jump and twitch, and you're all empty inside except for your stomach being a tight knot in the middle, and there are hammers inside your head beating it apart from the middle, and you know that if it doesn't stop you're going to scream and go crazy?"
Cokey swallowed twice as if he were trying to get a tough dry mouthful down his throat.
"I—"
"You're not talking, either," Varetti cut in savagely. "Take hold of yourself, Cokey! This punk hasn't got a thing on us, except maybe a breaking and entering charge that won't stick. You make one peep, and you'll wind up in the hot squat — unless I croak you first. Which I will, so help me!"
Cokey struggled again with the bolus of dry hay in his gullet.
"I ain't talking," he rasped again. "You can't make me talk."
Simon Templar took a deep rib-lift of smoke down into his system and let it circulate leisurely around. But the pulse in the back of his brain that was ticking away seconds had nothing leisurely about it. Time marched on, inexorably and alarmingly, and he was getting nothing out of it. There was no doubt that Cokey would sing eventually, if he had any music to give out, but there was also no doubt that he would take quite a little loosening up. Any fears he had of the police or even of the Saint himself were still plainly dominated by his fear of Varetti. And Varetti was still dominated, for one reason or another, by someone else. And it was still an impasse, and time was slipping away like water out of a bath…
And the Saint's idle smile still didn't change as he let the smoke out through it and held the two gonsels with easy and impossible blue eyes.
"Now let's face a few facts, kiddies," he said quietly. "You were sent here to collect a lot of very valuable green dust. You don't find any. You pick up a collection of spherical souvenirs which cost me quite a lot of dough, but which don't have such a terrific market value. Therefore you are not going home and collect a great big commission on the trip. In fact, your boss may not even be pleased with you at all… I'm trying to be honest with you, boys. I bought another bag and put the boodle you're looking for in it, and it's safe now where you'll never get your hands on it again. So you can't win. And Kestry and Bonacci will beat it out of you eventually, anyway. Why not tell me now and let me save you a lot of pain?"
"You're scaring me to death," sneered Varetti.
He should have been scared. For the Saint was most dangerous when his smile was gentle and detached like that. And it wasn't always a physical danger. Varetti was tough enough to brace himself against that, at least for a time. He was concentrating on that.
And so it was unfortunate for him, and for certain other people, that he was psychologically satisfied with that threat alone. It was clear enough to him so that it was twisting up his nerves and drawing on all his resistance, while his constructive imagination was fully occupied with a desperate groping for some trick of escape. And that left him nothing to spare with which to encompass the really frightening idea that all of that build-up might only be a feint in force for a much more complicated attack in depth. He watched the falling bludgeon and never saw the stealthy approach of the stiletto.
The Saint stepped closer, and he looked taller and harder, and the edges were sharpening in his voice.
"Sure, Ricco, you're tough," he said. "You can take plenty. But how much can your girl friend take? How long will she keep her mouth buttoned when we start working on her? And where are you and Cokey going to find the answers when she sings about you?"
"She can't sing about us," Varetti retorted. "She doesn't know anything."
There were tiny little beads of moisture on his face. Simon could see them as he drew closer still.
"Oh, no?" he said in a voice of silken needles. "What makes you think the boss never talked to anyone except you? What makes you so sure he never told her anything? Are you quite ready to take your chance on what she'll spill when I talk to her?"
Varetti laughed, in a sort of nervous triumph.
"You won't ever talk to her! The boss is taking care of—"
He was exactly that far when Kestry and Bonacci arrived, turning a key in the door and entering with a rush, rather like a pair of stampeding hippopotami, which in other respects they slightly resembled.
They came in with their guns drawn, and Simon stepped back to give them room to take over, without even glancing at them or shifting his gun until they had the scene under control. There was the snick-snack of handcuffs, and the Saint still didn't move at once.
"Thank you," he said; and his eyes were still on Varetti.
"That's okay, pal." The big bulk of Kestry shouldered across his view, heavy-jawed and unfriendly-eyed. "How did you get here?"
For the first time Simon looked at him, and put the gun away in his pocket.
"It's my room," he mentioned calmly. "I was here when they arrived. Now you can take them away. They bother me."
"They won't bother you any more. They're both three-timers, an' they'll get the book thrown at them."
"That's fine," said the Saint cynically. "Unless they get the right lawyer. They've probably done it before."
"They won't do it this time. Not after they've sung. And they'll sing." Kestry was certain and unemotional like a rock, and no more changed or changeable. He said, without any alteration of stance or stare: "I still want to know more about you."
"Why don't you read a newspaper?"
"You just put a gun in your pocket. That makes it a concealed weapon. Where did you get it, an' where's your permit?"
The Saint put his cigarette to his lips and drew at it with a light easy breath.
"Fernack told you what to do," he said. "If you want to write in a new scene for yourself, you're on your own. Otherwise, I wish you'd just drag the bodies out. I'm in a hurry."
Kestry's eyes were bitter and glistening, the Saint's cool and bright like chips of sapphire with indefinable gleams of insolence shifting over them. It was a clash from which tinder might have been ignited at close range. But the measure of Kestry's defeat, and the value of its future repercussions, were plain in the heavy viciousness with which he turned back to his captives.
"Let's get 'em out of here, Dan," he said.
He grasped Varetti's arm in a ham-like fist and yanked him off the couch, while his partner performed a similar service for Walsh. Cokey let out a yelp as the steel bracelets cut into his wrists.
"Shut up, you," growled Bonacci. "That ain't nothing to what you're gonna get."
He shoved the two men roughly towards the door.
Kestry took a last pointless look around, and followed. How-evcr, he turned to favor the Saint with one lingering farewell glower.
"It still don't seem right to be goin' out of here without you," he said; and the Saint smiled at him sweetly.
"You must drop in again," he murmured, "and get used to it."
He waited until the door had slammed after the departing populace, and then he picked up the telephone and called Centre Street.
Inspector Fernack must have gabbled his evidence and rushed back to his office like a broker returning from lunch during a boom, for he was on the wire as soon as Simon asked for him.
"This is the Voice of Experience, Henry," he said. "Your beef trust has just oozed out, taking Cokey and Ricco with them. I think they'll make noises eventually, so you can take your boots off and get ready to hear them vocalise. Now while you and the boys are getting cosy with them, I've got one final little job to do. So if you'll excuse me…"
"Hey, wait a minute!" The anguish in Fernack's voice was almost frantic. "If you've got any further information, you ought to—"
"My dear Henry, if I waited around to do all the things I ought to, I'd be wasting as much energy as you spend on your setting-up exercises."
"I don't do any setting-up exercises!"
"Then you certainly ought to. That fine manly figure of yours must be preserved. Now I really must get busy, because you've got plenty on your hands as it is, and I don't want you to have another murder to worry about."
"You let me worry about my own worrying," Fernack said grimly. "All I want to know is what else you know now."
"You didn't get the significance of the lock?"
"What lock?"
"Never mind," said the Saint. "It will dawn on you one of these days. Now I really must be going."
"But where?" wailed the detective.
The Saint smiled, and blew a slender smoke-ring through a teasing pause.
"I'll leave a note for you at the desk here. You climb on to your little bicycle and come and pick it up."
"Why not give it to me now?"
"Because I want to be there first. Because I want a little time to set the stage. And because cops rush in where Saints are smart enough to wait. Be patient, Henry. Everything will be under control… I hope. I'm just trying to make it easy for you. And please, when you get there, do me the favor of listening for a minute before you thunder in. I don't want to be interrupted in the middle of a tender passage… Goodbye now."
He hung up in time to disconnect a jolt of verbal heat and explosion that might have threatened the New York Telephone Company with a general fusing of wires between the Murray Hill and Spring exchanges, scribbled rapidly on a sheet of paper, and sealed it into an envelope and wrote Fernack's name on it while he waited for the service elevator.
"Get this to the desk, will you?" he said to the operator as they rode down. "To be called for."
The timekeeper let him out, and he emerged from the side door on to Forty-fourth Street, walking east. In a few strides he turned into the Seymour Hotel, and walked quickly up the corridor towards the lobby. There he stopped for a minute, waiting to see if anyone entered after him. It was always possible that Kestry might have brooded enough to wait for him, or even that the ungodly themselves might have another representative lurking around. But no one followed him in within a reasonable time; and that part of the chase was won. For the Seymour ran cleat through the block, and he went out on to Forty-fifth Street and stepped into a passing taxi with reasonable assurance that he was alone.
The clock in his head ran with sidereal detachment and precision, and on that spidery tightrope of timing his brain balanced as lightly as a shadow.
He had had to put everything together very quickly and coldly; and yet it seemed to him now that he had always known just where each person who mattered would be, from instant to instant, as though they had been linked to him by threads of extrasensory perception. But he had to be right. He had to be right now, or else he had thrown away all the completeness of what he had tried to do.
And with that sharp sting of awareness in his mind he walked into the lobby of the hotel where he had left Barbara Sinclair.
He nodded to the desk clerk who had signed them in, and rode up in the elevator to her floor. He knocked on the door, and waited a little while. He said: "Saks Fifth Avenue, ma'am. A C.O.D. package for Mrs Tombs."