“Keep it up and you’ll make drill sergeant.”
“Would you rather I used womanly wiles? I’m just telling you what I want. You don’t have to do either one.”
Simon’s mind jumped forward over the next couple of days. He had no binding plans.
“I think I’ll do both,” he said.
He bent down and softly kissed her parted lips.
“I’ll have to phone you tomorrow about getting together,” he told her.
She was looking into his eyes with such melting adoration that he felt uncomfortable about having kissed her. She had asked for it, but apparently there was a very susceptible, childlike female just below that bold and mischievous surface. The elevator doors slid soundlessly open, and Simon shepherded her gently into the mahogany and brass of the cabin.
“Why aren’t you riding up too?” she asked.
“I didn’t park the car very tidily,” he said.
She seemed to come back to earth suddenly.
“You’re not going back to that bar, are you?”
“I’d much rather go to bed,” he said deviously. “Thanks for a wonderful evening.”
She felt an urge to reach for his hand and keep him there, to protect him from the danger she sensed was waiting for him out in the night, but he had stepped back from the elevator, and the doors moved between them. She was alone in a costly cocoon, as she had been during so much of her life, and then she was rising smoothly by virtue of some unseen mechanism to a roost high above the noise and grime of city streets.
She found her father in the living-room of the penthouse, relaxing in purple silk pajamas and dressing gown as he sipped a brandy. His white hair was neatly brushed as always, but his eyes were weary.
Carole kissed him on the cheek.
“I’ll bet you’re waiting up for me. You’re really incorrigible.”
“I don’t like you going off with strangers,” he said, gently rather than critically. “Especially late at night.”
“Simon isn’t a stranger,” she replied dreamily. “I feel as if I’d known him all my life. And if you really don’t trust him, I can tell you that I gave him all sorts of chances to kidnap me... hoping he would... but he didn’t.”
Hyram Angelworth smiled and shook his head. “I’m afraid you’re the one who’s incorrigible.”
She became aware that Richard Hamlin had materialised near the entrance to the adjacent study off the main room. He was ostensibly looking through some papers, but listening as always. Didn’t he ever sleep? And didn’t it ever occur to him that she might like to talk to her father alone?
She tossed her handbag on to a sofa and kicked off her shoes, trying not to let her irritation get the better of her.
“We did have a sort of adventure, though.” She flopped into a chair and pointed her toes and stretched her legs. “In my efforts to get myself kidnapped I lured Simon into a sleasy bar — Sammy’s Booze & Billiards, to be precise.”
An expression of intense pain developed on her father’s face as she recited the full name of Sammy’s establishment, which only served to encourage her to continue with greater relish.
“Simon wasn’t keen to go in, but I insisted, and there were these very underworld-looking characters playing pool, and Simon recognised one of them and called him by name. He didn’t remember until too late that this guy named Brad Ryner was a detective, and so he was probably pretending to be a crook to collect information for the police. Ryner claimed his name was Joe and he’d never seen Simon before. He really acted nasty. Simon’s worried to death he may have gotten this detective in trouble. Isn’t that thrilling?”
“It’s troubling,” Angelworth growled. “It’s bad enough to know there are so many crooks and parasites in the world without having to worry that my own daughter’s out rubbing elbows with them. I can’t say I think much of your friend for taking you to a place like that.”
“I needled him into it. I’ve been there a couple of times before, with the gang, and I wanted to see how he’d take it.”
“And what about this man Templar? We don’t know a thing about him. Why should he recognise a plainclothes policeman?”
Carole stood up, suddenly wanting to end the conversation as soon as she could.
“Well, at least he recognised the policeman instead of the crooks — if they were crooks.” She touched him on the shoulder. “It’s all over anyway, Daddy. I’m really tired, and you must be too. Good night.”
He was still brooding in his chair as she went down the hall to her bedroom, and she wondered if Richard Hamlin would be commenting on her escapade after she had left.
Chapter 3
Two alternatives duelled in Simon Templar’s mind: One claimed that the best thing he could do for Brad Ryner was to stay as far away from him as possible, hoping that Ryner’s playmates would forget the whole episode if they were not reminded of it; the other rebutted that having inadvertently placed Ryner in danger, the Saint owed it to him to get back in touch with him and help him in any way possible.
When logic was deadlocked, the Saint was inclined to let his instincts take over. He literally found himself driving towards Sammy’s Booze & Billiards before his rational mind had reached a conclusion.
Simon made no effort to resist the decision of his reflexes. His mind went on to process future possibilities. If Ryner was still at the pool table with his companions them the Saint would ignore them and try to follow Ryner when he left the bar. If the three men had left, he would try to trace one or more of them.
He had faultlessly memorised the route, in reverse, on the way back to the New Sylvania, and retracing it this time was no problem.
The neighbourhood of Sammy’s bar was a hodgepodge of shabby and squalid in the creeping process of becoming one hundred per cent squalid. Sammy’s was at the approximate halfway point of decay, and the Saint had to slow down sharply in order to avoid a couple of unsteady drunks who staggered into the road just ahead of him as he came within a block of the bar.
It occurred to him later that if those two alcohol-laden human tankers had not pitched and rolled across his path at just that time, Brad Ryner might have died. Because it was when Simon jammed on the brakes that the edge of his field of vision picked up a trace of movement in an alley to his right. It might have been a cat. It might have been some nocturnal stroller taking a short cut home. It might have been a newspaper blown by the wind that was whipping a few drops of rain against the windows of his car.
But the Saint was so keyed up and watchful that he could not ignore even such an undefined flash of motion in a dark place near Sammy’s bar. He pulled immediately over to the kerb under a no-parking sign about fifty feet beyond. He was out of the car in an instant, sprinting back along the sidewalk to the mouth of the alley. There he stopped short, drizzle sprinkling his face and wilting his clothes, and listened. There was an ominous economy in what he heard: feet scuffing on pavement, muffled thumps, a sudden stifled expulsion of cries...
The Saint judged the distance of the sounds down the alley, then catapulted into action. He knew that surprise would favour him for only a few seconds, but those few seconds were all he needed. His long legs carried him down the alley so fast that he just had time to take in the rudiments of the shadowy scene before he made physical contact with it: one man holding another while a third punched and kicked him.
The big man who was doing the beating turned with fist raised as the Saint bore down on him like some wild spectre set free by the night wind. The man’s flabbergasted defense would have had some effect against a less swift and co-ordinated blitzkrieg than the Saint’s, because this was the very big brawny man from the pool room, lowering in the semidarkness with a trace of street-light touching the raindrops on his sallow face, sparking a glint of squinting eyes and clenched teeth.