“Okay, boss.”
“I thought so!” Inspector Fernack bared his teeth in uneasy triumph.
Hoppy shuffled to the divan, bent over, and reached under it.
“Here dey are!” he announced, hauling them out. He thrust the damp leather mitts at Fernack with all the graciousness of a dyspeptic mastodon. “Take ’em!”
The Saint selected a cigarette from the silver box on the table.
“I borrowed them for the same reason you want them,” he said. “I was afraid there’d be a substitution before you thought of it.”
He held a lighter to his cigarette, smiling at the Inspector over its little golden spear-point of flame.
Fernack scowled, staring at the Saint for a longish moment.
“So that’s your story!” he began, with an imminent crescendo. “Now let me tell you—”
And there, in a hopeless anti-climax, he stopped. Galling memories of past pitfalls into which his headlong suspicions had tripped him in previous encounters with the Saint seemed for once to take all the conviction out of his attack. What, after all, was he going to tell the Saint? That he was under arrest for stealing a pair of boxing gloves?
The Saint was engagingly frank.
“I examined them quite carefully, John Henry,” he said, “and they’re really quite in order, believe me. None of the stitches has been tampered with, or the lining torn, or any chemical such as oil of mustard soaked into the leather. I also had a look at Bilinski’s hand wraps. No plaster of Paris, pads of tinfoil, or calking compound. No hunks of lead—”
“All right, wise guy!” Fernack exploded. “If these are the gloves, the police lab will tell me all I want to know!”
The Saint spread his hands with mock resignation, laughter sparkling in his cobalt eyes like sunlight on an Alpine lake.
“Of course, John Henry, if you don’t believe me. However, if you should ever feel the need of any further enlightenment, always remember that our motto is service. Sure you won’t change your mind about that drink?”
“All right!” Fernack grated, repeating himself. “Be a wise guy. Play the lone wolf. But remember this, Templar. Sooner or later you’re going to make a false move, a mistake you can’t get out of. And when that happens, brother, I’ll be right there waiting to tag you for it!”
“You an’ who else?” Hoppy inquired brilliantly.
Inspector Fernack ignored him. He thrust a finger at the Saint.
“One of these days you’re going to reach out just a little too far — and you’re going to draw back a bloody stump!”
The Saint’s face crinkled in a shrugging smile as he put his cigarette to his mouth with a careless gesture. And as if by accident its glowing tip touched the finger Inspector Fernack held under his nose.
The detective jerked his hand back with a yelp.
“Oh, sorry, John!” Simon exclaimed contritely. “That should teach me a lesson, shouldn’t it?”
Fernack glared at him speechlessly. Then, thrusting the gloves under his arm, he turned and stalked out of the living-room. Simon followed him politely to the apartment’s threshold.
“Good night,” said the Saint, as Fernack yanked open the door. “If you should ever need me, you know where to find me.”
“If I ever want you,” Inspector Fernack growled, “I’ll find you, don’t worry.”
He strode out, and with a cheerful grin at the two harness bulls waiting outside by the elevators, Simon quietly closed the door.
“Well,” he sighed, “now maybe we can get some sleep at last!”
Hoppy yawned in soporific sympathy, but had enough presence of mind to reach for the Old Forester, which still contained an appreciable amount of fluid.
“I better have a nightcap,” he explained. “I don’t wanna stay awake t’inkin’ about Torpedo.”
“A nightcap that size,” Simon observed, watching the level of the bottle descending, “could double as a sleeping-bag.”
He retrieved what was left and poured it into a glass, for a private relaxer of his own.
He tried to tot up what scores there were on hand, to determine exactly where he stood at the moment. He had to confess to himself that so far he’d been working with mists, trying to assemble a concrete pattern, a design out of the stuff that emanated almost entirely from his intuitive processes. The promise of hovering danger had dissolved in two unsatisfactory climaxes: the dressing-room brawl and Fernack’s visit. Unsatisfactory because they resolved nothing, answered no questions, gave no reason for the ghostly centipedes he still felt parading up his spine... The mystery of Connie Grady’s disproportionate agitation, the Masked Angel’s incredible victory, still stood as prime question-marks.
But perhaps, he told himself, they weren’t real question-marks. Perhaps he’d been over-dramatising his perceptions. Connie was young and in love. Her fear for Steve’s safety could well have inspired her strangely distraught plea. And the Masked Angel might have initially stunned Smith with such a short, swift jab that his eye had missed it entirely.
He told himself this and knew he was kidding himself. He knew he had missed nothing in the fight. Therefore there must have been something else — something that he still had to search for.
He stood up and stretched himself.
And once again the telephone rang.
“This is getting monotonous,” said the Saint.
He lifted the instrument from its cradle.
“Templar’s Telephone Chums, Incorporated,” he said.
Silence.
It was a kind of receptive cylindrical silence, open at both ends.
“We’re having a breakfast meeting at 9 a.m.,” Simon confided into the receiver. “Would you like to come, too?”
He heard a faint click — a sudden blank deadness.
The Saint hung up thoughtfully, and an airless draught prickled along his nerves like a spectral breeze. It was a well-remembered sensation, a wave-length registered on the sensitive antenna of a sixth sense which selected and amplified it throughout his being into an unmistakable alarum. It had warned him before more times than he could remember of impending danger and sudden death — just as it whispered to him now.
Someone had hung up as soon as he’d recognised the Saint’s voice. Someone who wanted to make sure whether he was there.
“Hoppy,” he said, “something tells me we’re going to have more visitors tonight.”
Mr Uniatz’s cogitative machinery ground to an excruciating halt.
“What for, boss?”
“It’s the price we pay for being so irresistibly attractive.”
He was taking a rapid mental inventory of the room, until his eyes settled on a table lamp with a fairly long cord. He pulled the plug out of the baseboard outlet and broke the lamp cord off close to the lamp, while Hoppy stared at him.
“What gives, boss? What’s dat for?”
The Saint nodded at the empty whisky bottle still clutched in Hoppy’s hand.
“Take that dead soldier, go to the bathroom, fill it with water, and bring it over there.”
Hoppy opened his mouth to speak, closed it, and lumbered off obediently, confident that on whatever path the Saint pointed for him to follow, devious though it might be, a goal would unfold somehow at the end.
From the chest of drawers in his bedroom the Saint took a slim leather case which, on being unzipped, revealed a highly specialised collection of peculiar articles. Skipping the more obviously illegal tools, he selected a small spool of copper wire, a roll of adhesive tape, and a razor-blade knife. Armed with these, he returned to the entrance hall, where Mr Uniatz extended the whisky bottle to him as though it contained an unclean substance.