“What language!” he remarked reprovingly. “You’re liable to bite your tongue, Junior.”
He batted the gunman lightly on the chin with his automatic, and the resultant inarticulate mouthings seemed to prove that the Saint’s warning had been justified.
The beggar woman looked like a puppet whose strings had stopped moving. Her dirt-rimmed eyes glared at the Saint in indecision, and her puffy features twisted unpleasantly. And yet as the Saint gazed at her he felt the stirring of a preposterous intuition.
“What’s eatin’ de old witch?” Mr Uniatz demanded from somewhere in the background. “No ya don’t!” He deftly intercepted the woman as she made a dart for safety. “Not wit’out ya broomstick ya don’t make no getaway. Gimme dat rod.”
The Saint finished frisking the gunman. Then he stepped back a pace and regarded the beggar woman again, with a small crinkle forming between his brows.
Hoppy said, “Hey, what kind of a heater is dis?”
“It squirts ammonia,” Simon said. “Junior here got a whiff of it in his eyes. I wonder—” He glanced along the alley. “Perhaps at this point we should adjourn. This alley would be perfect for a quiet murder, but it isn’t private enough for a confessional, and I want Junior to open his heart to me.”
Junior profanely denied any intention of making Simon Templar his confidant. The Saint rapped him across the head again and said, “Quiet. We’ll be bosom pals before you know it.” He turned his clear blue gaze on the beggar woman, who had subsided into sullen quiet. “My hotel’s across the street,” he said. “Shall we have an audition there?”
For an instant her eyes flashed across his, startlingly bright and alert. The thing Simon had already sensed — the incongruous vitality under those shapeless rags and puffy features — was unmistakable for that fleeting moment before the mask dropped again.
“I dunno what this is all about, mister. I don’t know nothing. I got my own troubles...”
Simon said, “You’ll be back in time for the performance.”
Her eyes searched his face. When she spoke, her voice had changed. It was deeper, more resonant.
“All right,” she said. “I’ll take a chance.”
“The service elevator is indicated, I think. Hoppy, if you’ll escort the lady, I’ll follow with Junior.”
“Okay, boss.”
Simon Templar captured the gunman’s arm and bent it deftly upward.
“You’re going to be a good boy and come quietly, aren’t you?”
“Like hell,” Junior said.
Simon applied a little more torque.
“I’m not an unreasonable man,” he remarked. “I’ll give you a choice. Either stop wriggling and keep your mouth shut, or let me break your arm and give you something to yell about. I should warn you that I have a weakness for compound fractures. But don’t feel that I’m trying to influence you. You’re perfectly free to take your pick.”
Chapter three
Junior, by request, sat cross-legged in the middle of the carpet, his unclean hands in his lap.
“Should we tie him up?” Hoppy asked.
The Saint had a better idea. He wound a piece of wire several times around Junior’s thumbs and twisted the ends tight.
“There,” he said, stepping back and beaming down at Junior. “He’s safe as houses. Besides, we may need the rope later to hang him.”
The captive remained silent, his thin, pinched face sulkily intent on the carpet. Aside from the fact that he rather strikingly resembled a rat, he had few distinguishing characteristics.
“All right,” the Saint said. “Keep an eye on him, Hoppy. Kick his protruding teeth in if he tries to get up.”
He moved to a side table and did things lovingly with ice and bourbon. But his eyes kept returning to the beggar woman.
She had come alive. There was no other word for it. Even under the patched and threadbare dress her body had shed thirty years. And her eyes were no longer dull.
She said, “You’re the Saint, aren’t you?”
Simon said, “You’re one up on me. I don’t know your name... yet.”
“I recognised you. That’s why I came along.”
“What will you have?”
She nodded at the glass he was holding and Simon moved across the room and gave her the drink. Then he knew that he had been right. His fingers touched hers, and what he felt was proof enough. Her hand was firm and yet soft, the skin like satin.
She had done a beautiful job of make-up. The Saint could appreciate it. Quite frankly, he stared. And through the muddy blotched surface and cunningly drawn wrinkles her real face began to come into view, the clear, clean sculpture that even disfiguring rolls of wax padding in mouth and nostrils could not entirely hide.
She looked away.
The Saint did not. Presently he murmured,
She opened her mouth to speak, but Simon Templar’s low voice went on,
Hoppy said, “Huh?”
It was a young woman’s laughter that sounded then. And it was not the cracked voice of the beggar woman that said, “Mr Templar, I’m beginning to understand the reasons for your reputation. How did you know I was an actress? You didn’t recognise me?”
The Saint replaced his drink, gave Hoppy a bottle to himself, and sat down, stretching his long legs.
“I just realised why you were never at your corner during theatre hours. A real beggar would have been. That’s when the money flows fastest. Saturday afternoon you weren’t there either — a matinée, I suppose? But I didn’t recognise you, no.”
She said, “I’m Monica Varing.”
The Saint raised his brows. Varing was one of the great names, as well-known in theatrical circles as he was himself in his own peculiar field. Drew, Barrymore, Terry, Varing — they were all names that had blazed across the marquees of the world’s capitals. For ten years Monica Varing had been that rare thing, an actress — not merely a star, but a follower of the tradition that has come down through the London Globe from the Greek amphitheatres. More than that, if he remembered other pictures of her, she was the most unchanged beauty of the modern stage. She nodded towards the man squatting on the rug and said, “I don’t know whether I should say any more in front of him.”
“In case he gets away — or talks, you mean?” Simon suggested, his blue eyes faintly amused. “You needn’t worry about that. Junior’s not going to talk indiscriminately from now on. We can manage that, can’t we, Hoppy?”
Hoppy said broodingly, “I never hoid nobody talk after dey was dropped in de lake wit’ deir feet in a sack of cement.”
“Listen!” Junior yelped. “You can’t do this to me!”
“Why not?” the Saint asked, and in the face of that logical query Junior was silent.
Monica Varing said, “I never thought this would happen. I set a trap, with myself as the bait—”
“Start at the beginning,” Simon interrupted. “With your predecessor, say. What happened to him?”
Monica said, “John Irvine. He was blind. He was a stage manager in vaudeville — where a lot of us started. He was blinded ten years ago, and got a begging permit. Whenever I played Chicago, I’d look him up and put something in his cup. It was a — well, a libation, in the classic sense. But it wasn’t only that. No matter how long it would be between runs, John would always recognise my footsteps. He’d say hello and wish me luck. On opening night I always gave him a hundred dollars. I wasn’t the only one, either. Plenty of other troupers were big enough to remember.”