By that time the houseboy had withdrawn, closing the door after him, and Grendel’s first physical qualm came a little late.
The Saint was surveying the decorations and ornaments with elaborate and unblushing curiosity.
“You’ve come a long way, Nat,” he remarked. “If only you’d picked up some honesty along with the other cultural trimmings, you’d be quite a success story.”
“Listen to who’s talking,” Grendel jeered.
For an instant the Saint’s eyes were like sword-points of sapphire.
“Don’t ever get one thing wrong,” he said. “I never robbed anyone who wasn’t a thief or a blackguard, although they might have been clever enough to stay within the law. I’ve killed people too, but never anyone that the world wasn’t a better place without. Sometimes people seem to forget it, since I got to be too well known and had to give up some of the simple methods I used to get away with when I was more anonymous, but my name used to stand for a kind of justice, and I haven’t changed.”
“If that’s how you feel, you shouldn’t be picking on me,” Grendel said automatically, and was even angrier to hear how hollow it sounded.
“You are a parasite and an extortioner, among other things, and you’ve had dozens of men beaten and maimed for obstructing your chosen escalator to a penthouse,” said the Saint dispassionately. “But an ordinary judge and jury might have cut you back to size eventually. Only the man who seemed most likely to help that happen was conveniently blown away, and a friend of mine who knows his onions thinks that, whatever happens now on the other counts, you’re a cinch to literally get away with murder. So for old time’s sake, I decided I should do something about it.”
He smiled again, with renewed geniality, and sauntered across to a glass cabinet which obviously enshrined some of Grendel’s most fragile treasures. He opened the door calmly, and with unerring instinct lifted out a delicate vase from the central position on an upper shelf.
“This is a nice piece, isn’t it?” he murmured. “I bet it cost you plenty of skimmings off the union dues.”
“That’s none of your business. Be careful—”
“It would be a crime to destroy it, wouldn’t it? But is it quite such a crime as destroying a man, wantonly, for no better reason than that he might have told the truth about you?”
“Put that down,” Grendel said savagely, starting across the room, “and get out of here—”
Simon Templar put down the vase, sadly and very seriously, but none the less firmly, as an executioner might have swung down a switch that sent a lethal voltage into an electric chair, crisply and positively, on the edge of the nearest table, with an unflinching force that shattered it into a shower of fragments.
In a white paroxysm into which no other goad could have stung him, Grendel sprang forward into a collision course with an orbiting set of knuckles which he intercepted with his right eye.
He reeled and swung wildly, contacting nothing but thin air, and another wickedly accurate fist jarred his teeth sickeningly and sent him staggering back to collapse ignominiously in an armchair which caught him behind the knees.
The Saint sat on the edge of a table and lighted a cigarette.
“You’d better relax, Nat, before something permanent happens to your beauty.”
Dabbing a silk handkerchief on his bloody lips, Grendel spat out some crude words that he had not used for fifteen years. But pain and shock had already quenched his momentary flare of violence. Outside of that instant of uncontrollable madness he would never have exposed himself to physical conflict at all, for he had neither the muscles nor the spirit for personal combat. Now the awareness of his abject impotence at the hands of the Saint was linked with the bitter memory of other half-buried humiliations suffered in his youth, before he learned more devious ways of fighting, and the mocking eyes of the contemptuous buccaneer gazing speculatively at him seemed to know it.
“I wonder what you’ll do now, Nat? You could call the police and charge me with assault, or call your lawyer and sue me. But if I said I was only trying to interview you, and you went berserk and knocked that vase out of my hand when you took a poke at me, and I had to smack you a couple of times to cool you down in self-defense — it’d only be your word against mine, and you might have a tough time selling it.”
“I’ll get you for this, don’t worry!”
“With one of your goon squads? But you’ll never get the same satisfaction out of hearing what they did to me as I’ve had out of slapping you with my own hands. I suppose if they were good enough to kidnap me they might be able to hold me while you beat me up. But that wouldn’t be so good for you, because you’d be proving in front of your own men that you were a white-livered punk who couldn’t lick anyone that didn’t have his hands tied behind him, and they mightn’t forget it. Besides, beating me up isn’t enough. I’ve got to be killed, or else I give you my word I’m going to send you to jail as surely as Lester Boyd would have. And you wouldn’t have the nerve to kill anyone yourself even if he was trussed up like a mummy.”
“You’ll find out,” Grendel said.
Simon contemplated him skeptically.
“You’ll probably end up just farming the job out as usual,” he said. “The whole trouble is, you’re yellow. Even if the Engineer could set me up with some radio-controlled bomb that you could fire from here without the slightest risk that it could ever be proved you did it, I don’t think you’d have the guts to press the button. You’ve made yourself into a little two-bit czar, but you’ll never find out what it feels like to play God.”
He stubbed out his cigarette, most deliberately, on the beautifully polished table top, and slid himself lazily off it to straighten up on his feet.
“I’ll leave you to brood about it,” he said lightly. “But don’t brood too long, because in a day or two I may drop by again and do something else horrible. And I’ve got plenty more printable things to write about you.” He paused at the door. “Any time you’ve got a few husky friends with you and feel brave, you don’t have to waste a lot of time looking for me. I’m staying at the Algonquin.”
Herman Uberlasch felt phlegmatically confident that he had nothing to apologize for in the bomb that had silenced Lester Boyd — although it was one of his less intricate contraptions, it had been entirely adequate for the job, and the conscientious craftsmanship that went into it was evidenced by the fact that it had admittedly hurt no extraneous characters whose injury might have beclouded the issue and unnecessarily increased the volume of public indignation.
Therefore he was somewhat puzzled by the curt and rancorous tone of voice in which Grendel phoned him a few days afterward and summoned him to another conference. But he went, because Grendel was an old established client and never haggled over a fee, and when he got there he could see very plainly why his customer was emotionally distraught.
“Dot iss a beautiful shiner you got, Nat,” he commented tactlessly, in the accent which he had guarded as an artistic flourish rather than from any linguistic disability. “Und der schvelling of der mouth also. I didn’t know it vos so true vot I read in der paper.”
The Saint’s latest article had begun:
The reason why Nat Grendel, the tapeworm of organized labor, will be not sampling the caviar in his favorite haunts for a few days is that he is ashamed to show his face in public. Not, I regret to say, on account of the things I’ve been saying about him here, but simply because of some inglorious contusions inflicted on it by the rude hands of an unidentified person who may have felt he was paying an interim dividend on the late Lester Boyd’s account.
“Never mind about that,” Grendel said coldly. “I want you to do something about Templar.”