With her cheeks coloring under the glances that could not help converging on her, the girl said, “Oh yes, but—”
“But at least once your fiancé was annoyed enough to warn him.”
“I told him to keep his hands off her,” Ingram blurted straightly, “or he and I would have to talk it over somewhere outside. But I wouldn’t’ve jumped him from behind like that, like Mr Templar says it happened.”
“I don’t think there was any need to bring that up,” Rand interposed fussily. “It’s true that Oakridge was quite difficult in some ways. Not the scientific type that we’re used to in this country. I was strongly opposed to having him on this project at all, as a Russian, but his qualifications were so outstanding—”
“Hey!” Tanner almost bellowed suddenly. “You say he was a Russian?”
Professor Rand blinked at him irritably.
“Yes, but the FBI gave him a full clearance. He escaped into Poland from the Russian army that was invading it from one side while Hitler was driving in from the other — that was before Stalin suddenly changed allies. From there he got away to England and then to America. He worked on the Manhattan Project, which developed the A-bomb. His name was Dmitri Okoloff. He took the name of Edward Oakridge when he became a citizen — from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where he’d worked.”
“You squawk about me bringing the Saint here,” Tanner grumbled ominously, “and you had him working — a Russian!”
“Shut up, Harry,” said the Saint with unexpected sharpness. “This is the slob who got murdered. Not a suspect. Get it?’
He had drawn all the eyes again, but they held him like nails, uncertain and exasperated in diverse ways, but nearly all ready to crucify him. And he felt astonishingly unconcerned.
“Had Oakridge learned English very well?” he asked, with his gaze on Rand like a blue flame.
“Quite well,” Rand said. “Without as much — er — vernacular as Dr Soren. But he was always trying. Except when he got excited. Then he’d blow up and start screaming in Russian.”
“Listen,” said the Saint tensely. “Oakridge had been conked on the head and a screwdriver rammed through his throat. He’s knocked out with a severe concussion, and he’s also bleeding to death. But the human body is awful tough — and from what I saw of him, Okoloff-Oakridge had an extra tough one. His brain recovered from the hit on the head before he bled to death through his gullet. But he knew he was gone, and he couldn’t yell, and he wanted to say who did it. He was only an adopted American, but he was going to write the name of a traitor, if it was the last thing he did.”
“You don’t have to be so theatrical,” Professor Rand said edgily. “We’ve all seen what he wrote.”
“But you couldn’t read it,” said the Saint. “It never occurred to anyone — including me — until this moment, that he was writing in Russian. Waking up from a crack on the head, dazed and dizzy and knowing that he was dying, he blew up. As you said, Professor. And in that foggy state he reverted to the writing that was most natural to him... And if this were one of those detective stories, I guess this is where everybody would be asked to take a deep breath and try to beat the Great Sleuth to the sniff.”
For enough seconds to be counted there were no takers. Then Harry Tanner said, almost as if he had been accepting a dare, “Does COP mean something else in Russian?”
“If it does, I wouldn’t know,” said the Saint. “About all I know besides tovarisch and vodka is some of the alphabet. But anyone who’s ever seen a newsreel or a news photo from behind the Iron Curtain must have noticed a word that’s bound to crop up in a lot of their posters, which looks like PYCCKU, and if they had an inquiring mind they could have figured out that it stood for Russky. You see, in Russian letters, ‘G’ is ‘S,’ and ‘P’ is ‘R,’ and if Oakridge had been starting to write, in his way, S-O-R-E-N—”
Tanner and Ingram began to move at the same time, in an oddly synchronized and yet spontaneous way.
Simon Templar eased the ash from his cigarette.
“I could make quite a phony production,” he said, “about who felt obliged to suggest the word COPY, and then had to knock it down, and who was so very intellectual about the kind of false clue that a clever murderer wouldn’t leave, and who had to try to drag in the angle of Jock and Marj’s romance and Oakridge’s wolfiness, and so on, but I will feel rather let down if they don’t find a Minox camera, or some prototype which the Russians must have invented first, on Dr Soren.”
Soren stood his ground until Tanner and Ingram put their hands on him, and then he started to thunder something incoherent about the Constitution.
They found the camera on him, anyhow.
It was the kind of evening in Harry Tanner’s home that Simon Templar heartily detested, even though Mrs Tanner, the inevitable plump, motherly woman, cooked an excellent dinner.
Marjorie Tanner was very eager and pretty and held hands a great deal of the time with Jock Ingram, who was very stalwart and modest and sincere. They would make a dream couple like the ideal Boy Scout and Girl Guide, and he could only wish every blessing on them.
Harry Tanner, bovinely exhilarated and unbent, said, “Anybody tell me you aren’t a detective, I’ll punch him right in the nose.”
“A dying man writes out the name of his murderer, and when someone tells us the alphabet he wrote in I’m just lucky enough to be able to read it,” said the Saint sourly. “That should qualify me as an Honorary Cop anywhere.”
Not to anyone would he ever admit that far more fragile threads of discernment had started to bring his sights to bear on Dr Soren before ever an alphabetical coincidence gave him the ammunition to fire a decisive challenge. If any such legend got around, he might never be able to shake off the stigma of being a natural detective.
The perfect sucker
“Don’t ever run away with the idea that any fool can play the fool,” Simon Templar was heard to say once, without a blush. “To turn in a first-class performance as the ideal chump, the answer to the bunco artist’s prayer, the way I’ve played it sometimes to hook them on their own line, takes more talent than ordinary actors win awards for. If you overdo it and make yourself look too utterly stupid, a con man might pass you up simply because you seem too dumb to have even the rudimentary larcenous instinct which he needs for his routine. If you strike any false note, you’re likely to scare him into a dead run. You have to ad-lib all your own dialog, and you don’t get any rehearsal. And the discouraging thing is that no matter how much you polish your technique, you’ll never do so well as when you aren’t even trying.”
He was certainly not trying when he met Mr Irving Jardane, or Mr Jardane met him, for he had come to the Rogue River in Oregon with no thought of hooking anything more predatory than a few rainbow trout. At such times the Saint had to make no effort to look worthy of his often incongruous nickname. In the complete relaxation which a man can only achieve when solely preoccupied with the leisured assembling of a fly rod and reel in anticipation of a peaceful evening’s fishing, all the bronze and sapphire hardness which could edge the Saint’s face at some other moments was softened to an almost unbelievable innocence, which a more bemused critic than some of the sharks he had gaffed in his lifetime might have claimed was the revelation of a wonderful childishness of heart which he had never really outgrown.
Mr Jardane was a rather stout gentleman of about sixty, with bristly white hair and the florid complexion of one who liked to live well — though perhaps not in the same sense as a dietician might define it. He came by the white frame cottage where Simon was sitting on the stoop and paused to ask, “Been doing any good here?”