If the police raided his humble premises (as one rash officer did once) he had the ideal legitimate justification for any springs, cogs, timing devices, electrical parts, tools or instruments that might be found there; the explosives never entered his shop but were always added on the job at the last moment.
“It might be five or ten years before a combo like that makes a slip that would stick in court, Bill — if they ever make it,” Simon argued. “I just want to speed up the odds.”
This was after Fernack had refused another drink and departed for his office downtown, muttering further threats of what would happen if the Saint presumed to take the law into his own hands, and Simon had waited for the editor of the syndicate which Boyd had been working for, with whom he already had a date for lunch.
“I couldn’t get away with setting you up to be shot at,” was the answer. “Even if you talked me into it, my boss wouldn’t let me go through with it.”
“You could hire me to continue Boyd’s column,” Simon wheedled. “Any self-respecting newspaper should refuse to let itself be bullied into dropping this subject just because the goons have hit back once, and my reputation as an expert on skulduggery and dirty pool is certainly good enough to account for picking me to carry on. Then when you start publishing me, and I say in my first article that by an odd coincidence I was the little bird who told Boyd where to dig up the dirt that he was going to publish on Grendel, and that I’m just as qualified to go on raking it out — well, you could hardly refuse to print that, because for all you know it might be the truth. And then if anything unfortunate did happen to me as a result, nobody could blame you, because obviously I’d asked for it myself.”
“But what you’re thinking is that they’ll have to try to give you something like the same treatment they gave Lester, but you’re going to be fast enough to duck.”
“And maybe catch them off base, too — if you don’t mind how a metaphor gets mangled. You’d go a long way to see that somebody pays for Boyd’s murder, wouldn’t you?”
The editor rubbed his chin.
“I don’t think Fernack is going to like this,” he said.
“What we have to hope is that Nat and Herman like it even less,” said the Saint.
Nat Grendel would have objected venomously to hearing it reported that he blew his top when the first article under Simon Templar’s by-line was shown to him, for he prided himself on having risen above such vulgar displays, but he came frighteningly close to it.
In the course of a career professedly devoted to improving the status of the working man, Nat Grendel had improved nobody more than himself. Rising from origins as lowly as those of any of the toilers he claimed to represent, he had managed to transform himself into a fair facsimile of their own traditional bogey-man. Always impeccably barbered, groomed, and tailored, he looked as if he had never soiled his manicured fingers on any cruder tool than a fountain pen. Not for him was the rugged, raucous, homespun, back-slapping pose of certain other labor leaders who were always trying to prove that inflated salaries and unlimited expense accounts had not made them feel any less spiritually akin to the common man whose cause they championed. Grendel always spoke softly and moreover had taught himself to do it in the language and even a good imitation of the accents of education and breeding, and he comported himself with a reserved and worldly suavity which often exceeded that of the corporation executives with whom he had to negotiate. Yet by some paradox which a Freudian psychologist would not find totally baffling, he commanded the genuine loyalty of a full fourth of the members of the key union local which he dominated, and the steel talons inside his kid gloves were sharp enough to control the rest. Even some of the more conservative and constitutional modern hierarchy of union bosses secretly envied Grendel’s unchallenged rule over his self-chosen province, and although the supreme councils of organized labor disclaimed and deplored his tactics, he was still far too powerful a figure to be disowned or even seriously disciplined.
At fifty, he had plenty of wavy hair of a distinguished gray, though his brows and the pencil-line of mustache which he cultivated were still jet-black, and he was quite vain of his somewhat actorish good looks and well-preserved figure. Along with the appearance, he had developed the tastes of a sybarite: he liked to dine in expensive restaurants, accompanied by showy if not scintillating young women, and his terrace apartment overlooking Central Park housed a collection of antiques which few of the tycoons he professionally sneered at would have been ashamed of.
The concluding paragraph of the Saint’s first essay said:
Those who still want to know the facts which the late Lester Boyd meant to publish will not be disappointed if they continue to watch this space. But I don’t want to put Nat Grendel out of his misery too quickly. I want him to sweat for a few days and lie awake for a few nights first. And meanwhile I am thinking of a few extra ways to make him unhappy which even Boyd couldn’t have handled.
Grendel found this partly puzzling, but the text which preceded it was essentially ominous enough to make him acutely uneasy for about twenty hours.
The second article, however, did nothing but elaborate an assortment of generalities, and he began to feel his confidence rebuilding as he allowed himself to consider the possibility that the whole thing might be a hoax, or at best a very crude and hollow bluff.
Although when it seemed expedient Nat Grendel had employed enough gunmen, thugs, plug-uglies, pipe-wielders, rock-slingers, and brass-knuckle masseurs to make up a sizeable task force, he had contrived to hold himself so personally aloof from violence that he would have scorned the mere suggestion of maintaining a private bodyguard. And it is an interesting fact that he had never had any occasion to doubt the wisdom of that arrogant economy until the third morning after Simon Templar had finagled himself a short-term mortgage on the Fourth Estate.
When his Puerto Rican houseboy announced the visitor, Grendel was examining a china lion-dog figurine of the Yin dynasty which had reached him through the mail only that morning. “This is one of a pair my grandfather brought back from Shanghai,” said the letter enclosed in the parcel, from an address in Buffalo. “A dealer has offered $100 for them, and we could use the money, but I don’t know if it is a fair price. I have read where you are a collector yourself and I know you would always help one of your union men not to get gypped whatever the papers say, so please tell me if I should take it.” Grendel was still far from being an expert himself, but he knew that if the figures were fakes no dealer would pay ten dollars for them, but if he would pay one hundred they must be worth many times that amount. Grendel was trying to distract himself from his major anxiety by deliberating whether in the circumstances one hundred twenty-five or one hundred fifty dollars would be the ideal offer for him to make on his own account — the object being to seem magnanimous without encouraging his follower to try for more competitive bids — and his first reaction when he heard the name “Templar” was to be so incensed by the effrontery that he forgot to be afraid.
“Send him in,” he snapped, and as soon as the Saint entered he went on in the same tone: “You’ve got a nerve thinking you could just drop in and get an interview from me, after the lies you’ve already printed!”
Simon shook his head gently.
“I’m not a bit interested in anything you’re likely to tell me. And I’m not here to ask if you’d care to buy me off, as you may have been thinking. I just came to keep the promise I published and bring a little personal woe into your life, in case you hadn’t decided yet whether to take me seriously.”