He finished his lobster, swallowed the last of his Bollinger, got up from his table, and walked over to the door marked private.
He had scarcely applied his knuckles to the varnished wood when his waiter, a nervous little man whose head-hair was entirely concentrated in a miniature black mop under his nose, raced up to him and tapped him on the arm.
“Don’t put your hands on me, Bug-face,” the Saint ordered him coarsely, “or I’ll play Turkey in the Straw’ with my heels all up and down your backbone.”
Suddenly a red-hot skillet could not have seemed less attractive to the waiter’s touch than the Saint’s forearm. Simon’s natural inflections had been flattened out for the occasion into a raspy Western accent, and his face had a cruel toughness that would have made a chunk of flint seem mushy by comparison.
“Was something wrong with your dinner, sir?” the waiter asked with quavering unctuousness.
“Where’s the manager?” Simon barked back.
The waiter was making frantic gestures in the air with one hand while trying to keep the Saint appeased with a servile smile.
“If you’ll tell me what was wrong...”
Simon bent over him menacingly.
“Look, you pinheaded spaghetti-wrangler, I won’t talk to anybody but the manager.”
The suave headwaiter arrived on the scene, more self-possessed than his. colleague.
“What seems to be the trouble, sir?” he enquired smoothly.
“What the hell use are you?” Simon growled. “Are you going to knock this door down for me? What do I have to do to see the manager here — dynamite the joint?”
He reckoned that the more noise he made, the sooner he would be admitted to the inner sanctum. With one possible danger: a bouncer (Simon had already spotted the black barrel shape of the front-door greeter taking an interest from the dining-room entrance) might simply try to throw him out. The Saint was confident that he could throw the bouncer out instead, but he preferred a less devious way of getting the attention of the higher ups. He banged harder on the private door.
The headwaiter, who was no more a roughhouse type than his subordinate, glanced around to locate the tuxedoed gorilla, who moved unobtrusively down one side of the dining room towards them.
“If you would please tell me what your complaint is,” the headwaiter said placatingly, “I’ll be glad to—”
“I don’t have no complaint,” Simon said. “I’m here on business, and I wanna see the manager.”
He continued pounding on the door. Just before the bouncer reached him, the barrier swung partially open. A surly crinkly-haired head appeared, and a voice said, “What’s going on out here?”
The Saint sensed the bouncer behind him, about to grasp his arms if necessary, and he decided that the moment for crossing this particular Rubicon had come. With a strength given added force by swiftness and surprise, he shoved the door farther open, stepped inside the private room, slammed the door again and turned the metal knob that threw the bolt. He did it so quickly that the three men behind him were left standing flat-footed in the dining room, excluded entirely from even the sound of the ensuing proceedings.
In front of Simon was the temporarily flustered man who had opened the door. Three other men sat on sofas or chairs, while another came to his feet behind a desk at the rear of the room. Within two seconds, two pistols had appeared.
Simon carefully showed the nature of his intentions by keeping his hands away from his body.
“Sorry to bust in like this,” he murmured, “but I’ve got important business that can’t wait.” Then he verbally lit the fuse of his private brand of dynamite and tossed it hissing into the centre of the room. “I want to see the Supremo.”
Chapter 6
A naked belly dancer erupting from a nine-layer cake at a conclave of the College of Cardinals could not have produced more of a sensation than Simon Templar did when he presented himself in the private room of the club Pear Tree. The hefty characters who had been decorating the furniture were all at attention, but their vocal cords were temporarily out of contact with their brains.
Although the Saint was now looking down the steel throats of four pistols, he relaxed. The character he was portraying never smiled, as Simon himself might have done under similar circumstances. Instead he swept his gaze from one side of the room to the other, taking in everyone and everything, while his lips held an arrogant sneer.
It was a very expensively furnished room, but designed for business, not for guests. There were as many telephones as there were pistols. There were two radios, two television sets, several filing cabinets, and a stock ticker, along with other knobbed and dialed devices which the Saint did not have time to identify. His new friends obviously liked to keep up with what was going on in the world. The place, on the face of it, looked more like a communications centre than a restaurant manager’s office, and that was exactly what Simon had expected.
The man behind the desk finally got his tongue back in touch with his cerebrum.
“Who the hell are you?” he snapped.
A couple of the men in the room, the two who had been fastest with their pistols, looked fairly brutish. This one had blond hair and an Ivy League accent. His blue silk tie was enviable; in more normal times, the Saint would have cheerfully complimented him on it.
“You’re not the Supremo,” Simon said roughly.
“I know what I’m not,” the other answered. He realised that he was clutching the edge of his desk, and eased his hands away. “I asked you who you are.”
“I’m somebody who wants to see the Supremo.”
The blond man jerked a half smile at one of his colleagues.
“What’s a Supremo — a cigar? You’ll find them in the lobby. By God, I’m going to have Ansel’s ears for letting drunks wander all over this building.” He focussed cold turquoise eyes on the Saint again. “This is a business meeting, and you’ve got no business here.”
“Funny,” Simon remarked, “it looks more like a shooting gallery. Or what are you scared of?”
The man at the desk drew back his shoulders.
“I’m not going to explain our security measures to you. I suggest you walk out of here right now, or else take your choice of being thrown out on your head or being arrested.”
“I’ve come too far to walk out,” Simon said flatly. “You say this is a business meeting. Well, I got business. But it’s got to be with the Supremo or nobody.”
“I’d put my money on nobody,” one of the other men said. “Are you walking out or getting carried out?”
“I guess you guys have heard of West Coast Kelly,” Simon said. “That’s who I’m talking for.”
He was expecting the announcement to have an interesting impact, and his disappointment was catastrophic. For at the same moment as it should have been registering, a door at the back of the room opened, and in walked the fat seal-like man Simon had met the night before.
He blinked exactly three times as his mouth formed a large O and his dewlaps dropped to his collarbones.
“That’s him!” he squealed. “That’s him — the sonovabitch I told you about, from Sammy’s!”
It was one of those disastrous sneaky backhanders with which a malicious Fate delights in upsetting applecarts, which a pessimist might have predicted but an optimist had no way to guard against. The Saint tried his best to cope with it, but even his inventiveness had been caught flat-footed.
“Sure, I stopped you and your meat-head pal from killing a cop who’d been playing you for suckers. I figured it was worth more to sell myself to him as a good guy, and get an ‘in’ that we could all use.”