He was a rather small man, spare and wiry, with the heavy eyebrows and hollow cheeks which so often seem to go together. His hair needed combing and his chin needed scraping. His clothes were neither good nor bad, but they were rumpled and soiled as if they had been slept in, which they doubtless had.
The Saint gave him a cigarette and said: "I don't think there are any dictographs planted here, so just keep talking. What made you write to me?"
"Because I don't like cops. I see where you've made suckers out of the cops plenty of times, and I'd like to see you do it again. Especially to those sons of bitches who threw me in here."
"You did pass a bum check, didn't you?" Simon mentioned.
"Yeah, but only because I had to, because Blatt didn't come through with my dough and I was broke. I wouldn't have squawked just for that, though. I've taken raps before. I've stood for a lot of things in my time, but I don't want any part of this." Vaschetti puffed at his cigarette shakily, and moved about the room with short jerky strides. "Not murder. No, sir. I don't want to sit in the hot seat, or dance on the end of a rope, or whatever they do to you in this state."
Simon kindled a cigarette for himself, and propped himself on the window sill.
"Why should anyone do things like that to you? Or were you one of the three fire-bugs?"
"No, sir. But that Kinglake might find out any time that I'd seen Blatt and been asking for him at the Blue Goose, and what chance would I have then? I don't want Blatt gunning for me either, and I guess he might be if he thought I might put the finger on him. I'd rather squeal first, and then if they know it's too late to shut my mouth maybe they won't bother with me."
"I see your point," said the Saint thoughtfully. "Suppose you sit down and tell me about your life as a courier."
Vaschetti attempted a laugh that didn't come off, licked his lips nervously, and sat down on a creaky chair.
"I met Fritz Kuhn when I was doing time in Dannernora. We got on pretty well, and he said if I wanted to make some money when I got out I should see him. Well, I did. I got this job carrying packages from place to place."
"How did that work?"
"Well, for instance, I'd have a package to deliver to Mr Smith at the Station Hotel in Baltimore. I'd go there and ask for him. Maybe he'd be out of town. I'd hang around until he showed up — sometimes I'd have to wait for a week and more. Then I'd give Smith the package; and he'd pay me my dough and my expenses, and maybe give me another package to take to Mr Robinson at Macfarland's Grill in Miami. Any time there wasn't anything more for me, I'd go back to Jersey and start again."
"These Smiths and Robinsons weren't anything to do with the joints you met them in?"
"Mostly not. I'd just ask a bartender if he knew Mr Smith, and he'd point out Mr Smith. Or sometimes I'd be hanging around and Mr Robinson would come in and say he was Robinson and had anyone been asking for him."
"How much did you get for this?"
"Seventy-five a week and all my expenses."
"You got paid by the Smiths and Robinsons as you went 'along."
"Yeah."
"You knew that this was obviously connected with something illegal."
Vaschetti licked his lips again and nodded.
"Sure, sure. It had to be things they didn't want to send through the mail, or they didn't want to chance having opened by the wrong person."
"You knew it was more than that. You knew it was for the Bund, and so it was probably no good for this country."
"What the hell? I'm an Italian, and I got brothers in Italy. And I never did like the goddam British. This was before the war got here. So what?"
"So you still went on after Pearl Harbor."
Vaschetti swallowed, and his eyes took another of those fluttering whirls around the room.
"Yeah, I went on. I was in it then, and it didn't seem to make much difference. Not at first. Besides, I still thought Roosevelt and the Jews were getting us in. I was scared, too. I was scared what the Axis people here might do to me if I tried to quit. But I got a lot more curious."
"So I started opening these packages. I was taking one to Schenectady at the time. I steamed it open, and inside there was four smaller envelopes addressed to people in Schenectady. But they had wax seals on them with swastikas and things, and I was afraid it might show if I tried to open them. So I put them back in the big envelope and delivered it like I was told to. Sometimes I had big parcels to carry, but I didn't dare monkey with them. I still had to eat, and I didn't want no trouble either… But then I got more scared of the FBI and what'd happen to me if I got caught. Now there's this murder, and I'm through. I been a crook all my life, but I don't want no federal raps and I don't want to go to the chair."
Simon's sapphire blue eyes studied him dispassionately through a slowly rising veil of smoke. There was nothing much to question or decipher about the psychology of Signor Vaschetti — or not about those facets which held any interest for the Saint. It was really nothing but a microcosmic outline of Signor Mussolini. He was just a small-time goon who had climbed on to a promising bandwagon, and now that the ride ahead looked bumpy he was anxious to climb off.
There could hardly be any doubt that he was telling the truth — he was too plainly preoccupied with the integrity of his own skin to have had much energy to spare on embroidery or invention.
"It's a fine story," said the Saint lackadaisically. "But where does it get us with Matson?"
"Like you wrote in the paper, he must have been paid to do some sabotage. He didn't do it, but he kept the money and took a powder. But you can't run out on that outfit. That's why I'm talking to you. They traced him here and gave him the business."
"That is about how I doped it out," Simon said with thistledown satire. "But what are you adding besides the applause?"
"I'm telling you, I took one of those letters to Matson in St Louis. That proves he was being paid by the Germans, and that proves you're right and Kinglake is a horse's—"
"But you made this delivery in St Louis. Why are you here in Galveston now?"
Vaschetti sucked on the stub of his cigarette, and dropped it on the floor and trod on it.
"That's on account of Blatt. I came here from El Paso two weeks ago with a package to give to Blatt at the Blue Goose. I didn't know Matson was coming here. I didn't know anything about Matson, except he told me he was working for Quenco. Blatt only paid me up to date and kept me hanging around waiting for some letters he said he'd be sending out. I ran up a pretty big bill at the hotel, and Blatt never came around and I couldn't reach him. That's why I flew the kite."
"Did you meet any of my other friends?"
"I met Weinbach. He's a fat kraut with a red face and red hair and the palest eyes you ever saw."
Simon placed the word-picture alongside the description that Port Arthur Jones had given him of the stranger who had been inquiring about him at the Alamo House, and it matched very well. So that was Weinbach.
And that left Maris, whom nobody seemed to have seen at all.
The Saint went on staring at the twitching representative of the Roman Empire.
"You could have told Kinglake this," he said.
"Yeah. And I'd be here as an accessory to murder, if that sourpussed bastard didn't try to make out I was all three murderers in one. No, sir. It's yours now. Gimme a break, and I'll write it down and sign it. I'm not going to give any of these dumb cops a free promotion. I'd rather you showed 'em up instead. Then I'll feel better about the spot I'm in."
Simon spun out his smoke in a few moments' motionless contemplation.
"If it was some time ago that you met Matson in St Louis," he said, "how come you connected all this up?"
"I remembered." The other's eyes shifted craftily. "And I got notes. I didn't dare play with those inside envelopes, but I been writing down the names of people. And the places I went to in different' cities. A fellow never knows when some things will come in handy. You can have that list too, if you take care of me, and I don't care what you do with it. None of those bastards tried to do anything for me when I got in this jam, so the hell with them."
The Saint barely showed polite interest; yet he felt so close to one of the real things that he had come to Galveston for that he was conscious of rationing his own breathing.
"It's only fair to tell you, Comrade," he said very carefully, "that if you give me any information that seems worth it, I shall have to turn it straight over to the FBI."
Vaschetti's face was pale in the clearings between his eyebrows and the stubble on his chin, yet in a foolish way he looked almost relieved.
"What you do after you've got it is your affair," he said. "Just gimme a couple hundred dollars and a chance to blow this town, and it's all yours."
Simon glanced at the city editor of the Times-Tribune, who was reclining in a junk-pile armchair in the corner with his shabby hat tilted over his eyes, who might have been passed over as asleep except that the eyes were visible and open under the stained straw brim. The eyes touched the Saint briefly and brightly, but nothing else in the composition looked alive. The Saint knew that he was still on his own, according to the agreement.
He said: "What hotel were you working on?"
"The Campeche."
"How much for?"
"Fifty bucks. And my bill."
"I'll take care of all that. You can probably be sprung in a couple of hours. Then I'll meet you at the Campeche and give you two hundred bucks for that statement and your list of names. Then I'll give you two hours to start traveling before I break the story. After that, you're on your own."
"You made a deal, mister. And as soon as I get that dough, I'll take my chance on getting out of here or I'll take what's coming to me. I don't want anything except to be all washed up with this."
His cathartic relief or else his blind faith in his ability to elude the seines of the FBI was either way so pathetic that Simon didn't have the heart to freeze him down any more. He hitched himself out of the window frame and opened the office door to call back the jailer.
The city editor rocked his antique panama back on his head and tried to keep step beside him as they left.
"I suppose," he said, "you want me to take care of everything and get the Campeche to withdraw the complaint."
"I suppose you can do it. You didn't say anything, so there it is."
"I can put a man on it. I'll have him out in a couple of hours, as you said. But don't ask what happens to me for conspiring to suppress evidence, because I don't know."
"We write up the story," said the Saint, "and we hand King-lake a proof while the presses are rolling. Pie gets the complete dope, and we get the beat. What could be fairer?"
The city editor continued to look dyspeptic and unhappy with all of his face except his bright eyes.
He said: "Where are you going now?"
"Call me at the Alamo House as soon as your stooge has Vaschetti under control," Simon told him. "I've got to take Olga to her treadmill, if she hasn't run out by this time."
But Olga Ivanovitch was still sitting in the Saint's car, to all appearances exactly as he had left her, with her hands folded in her lap and the radio turned on, listening happily to some aspiring and perspiring local comedy program.
She was able to make him feel wrong again, even like that, because she was so naively and incontestably untroubled by any of the things that might have been expected to rasp the edges of deliberate self-control.
"I'm sorry 1 was so long," he said, with a brusqueness that burred into his voice out of his own bewilderment. "But they've started teaching editors two-syllable words lately, and that means it takes them twice as long to talk back to you."
"I've been enjoying myself," she said; and in her own Slavic and slavish way she was still laughing at him and with him, enjoying the tranquility of her own uncomplaining acceptance of everything. "Tell me how you talk to editors."
He told her something absurd; and she sat close against him and laughed gaily aloud as he drove towards the Blue Goose. He was very disconcertingly conscious of the supple firmness of her body as she leaned innocently towards him, and the loveliness of her face against its plaque of yellow braided hair; and he had to make himself remember that she was not so young, and she had been around.
He stopped at the Blue Goose, and opened her door for her without leaving the wheel.
"Aren't you coming in?" she asked.
He was lighting a cigarette with the dashboard gadget, not looking at her.
"I'll try to get back before closing time," he said, "and have a nightcap with you. But I've got a small job to do first. I'm a working man — or did you forget?"
She moved, after an instant's silence and stillness; and then he felt his hand brushed away from his mouth with the cigarette still freshly lighted in it, and her mouth was there instead, and this was like the night before only more so. Her arms were locked around his neck, and her face was the ivory blur in front of him, and he remembered that she had been a surprising warm fragrance to him when she did that before, and this was like that again. He had a split second of thinking that this was it, and he had slipped after all, and he couldn't reach his gun or his knife with her kissing him; and his ears were awake for the deafening thunderbolts that always rang down the curtain on careers like his. But there was nothing except her kiss, and her low voice saying, docilely like she said everything: "Be careful, tovarich. Be careful."
"I will be," he said, and put the gears scrupulously together, and had driven quite a fair way before it coordinated itself to him that she was still the only named name of the ungodly whom he had met and spoken to, and that there was no reason for her to warn him to be careful unless she knew from the other side that he could be in danger.
He drove cautiously back to the Alamo House, collected his key from the desk, glanced around to make sure that Detective Yard had found a comfortable chair, and went up to his room in search of a refreshing pause beside a cool alcoholic drink.
Specifically, the one person he had most in mind was the venerable Mr Peter Dawson, a tireless distiller of bagpipe broth who, as we recollect, should have been represented among the Saint's furniture by the best part of a bottle of one of his classic consommes. Simon Templar was definitely not expecting, as any added attraction, the body of Mr Port Arthur Jones, trussed up and gagged with strips of adhesive tape, and anchored to his bed with hawsers of sash cord, and looking exactly like a new kind of Ethiopian mummy with large rolling eyes; which is precisely what he was.