He rounded the corner and approached the restaurant’s modest front entrance, an ordinary glass door flanked on either side by plate-glass windows, each bearing in appropriately gilt lettering the words golden cresent restaurant. Above the door, so that it could be seen by prospective customers approaching from east or west, hung another gilded announcement of the restaurant’s identity. It seemed unlikely that even the most unobservant pedestrian could feel any doubt that he was, indeed, at the portals of the Golden Crescent, but in case there should be any last-minute doubts among the exceptionally dull-witted the fact was confirmed once more by neat gold lettering on the glass of the entrance door itself.
Mr. Abdul Haroon was loquacious even in his advertising.
Before going inside, the Saint glanced through one of the windows, over a row of sickly ferns which had somehow survived the sunless and spice-laden atmosphere of the interior. It was barely six o’clock, and he was glad to see that he would be the first customer to arrive that evening.
He opened the door and stepped in. There was no entrance alcove, and he was immediately in the midst of white-covered tables packed as close together as sheep in an overcrowded fold. Along the walls were red-yellowish lamps and hand-painted murals of imaginative Eastern landscapes in which all the trees were palms and all the buildings were variations on the Taj Mahal. To the right in the rear was a small but well-stocked bar. A passageway led past the bar to the kitchen and cloakrooms.
The first thing the Saint’s senses registered as he entered was the wonderful smell of the place, dominated at the moment by cloves and saffron. The second fact that struck him was that there was not a single waiter in sight.
He tried to close the air-cushioned door as noisily as possible behind him, and picked out a table where he would be able to sit with his back to the wall and see the entrance, the bar, and the passage that gave access to the back rooms. Before he could take a seat a waiter, already known to him from previous visits as Mahmud, came rushing out around the bar from the inner sanctuary, jerking the hem of his white jacket into place over his baggy Eastern trousers.
“I am so sorry, sir!” he was exclaiming. “We have just opened our door this minute.”
“Not to worry,” Simon said. “I’d like this table, if it’s not reserved.”
“Mr. Templar!” the waiter said with sudden recognition.
He hurried to help Simon slip off his raincoat. “So long since you were here and no one to greet you!”
Mahmud, a Pakistani like Abdul Haroon, as his Muslim name indicated, was of moderate height, light-skinned, black-haired, and quick. He was in his early twenties and despite a professionally subservient manner gave the impression that he was destined for higher things than dishing up rice and poppadums and knew it.
“You have a good memory,” said the Saint. “It’s been some time since I was here — and it was usually Ali who waited on me.”
The Golden Crescent employed only three waiters and the evening paper had not made it clear which of them had been murdered. If it had been the one called Ali, a middle-aged quiet man, Mahmud gave no indication of it.
“It helps to cultivate the memory in my profession,” he said with smiling complacency.
He had pulled the table away from the wall so that Simon could sit down on the banquette. Now he pushed the table back and flicked an imaginary crumb off the clean white cloth. Like most tablecloths at restaurants of the Golden Crescent’s class, this one had a small but very neatly mended torn spot. It amused Simon to see the little white scar as soon as he looked to confirm his guess that it would be there — almost as much as it amused him that waiter Mahmud insisted on being completely unaware that one of his colleagues was even at this moment making grisly news posters all over London.
“Thank you,” Simon said coolly. “Would you please hand me that paper from the pocket of my coat before you hang it up?”
“Of course, sir.”
As the Saint took the paper he unfolded it on the table in front of him. Mahmud studiously avoided noticing the headline; but Simon refused to let him escape. When the waiter came back from hanging up the coat the Saint tapped the fat black letters.
“With your memory,” he said, “you can’t have forgotten Ali.”
Mahmud stiffened into a rigidly formal posture.
“No, sir.”
“It was the Ali who worked here then?”
“Yes, sir. Would you like a drink, sir?”
Mahmud staunchly met the Saint’s eyes through an invisible barrier as thick as the armour plating of a battleship.
“I’ll have a Peter Dawson with ice.”
“Yes, sir,” said Mahmud. “With plain water?”
The Saint nodded and smiled.
“You do have a very fine memory,” he said pleasantly. “I hope as the evening goes on you’ll find that it covers things other than customers’ names and drinking habits.”
Mahmud’s face was still expressionless but he permitted his dark eyes to glance again at the newspaper.
“You are interested in this matter?”
“Yes,” Simon said.
“For reasons of your own profession?”
For an instant Mahmud did not sound like a waiter.
“Possibly,” said the Saint.
“Thank you, sir,” Mahmud replied, sounding like a waiter again. “I will get your drink and the menu.”
3
Simon realised as Mahmud walked quickly away that the waiter’s sudden departure coincided with the advent of another more exalted personage in the dining room. It was Abdul Haroon himself, the proprietor and maître d’hotel of the Golden Crescent. He billowed in past the bar, resplendent in a red silk tunic which may or may not have resembled some mode of Pakistani national dress, and sailed towards the Saint’s table like a runaway balloon on a weakening wind.
He was, as if to advertise the bountiful nourishment he could offer, fat. His face was as nearly a perfect circle as a human countenance can be, and within it were the two nearly perfect circles of the lenses of his steel-rimmed spectacles. The roundness of his face was emphasised by the fact that before the onslaughts of time his hair had withdrawn from the area of his brow to form a secondary line of defence farther back on his scalp. His hair itself was as black as tar and glistened as if it had been copiously anointed with the same ghee in which its owner’s cook fried the chopped lamb.
There was a babyish look built into Abdul Haroon’s pliant features, and his voice had what promised to be a permanently youthful tone and lilt.
“Greetings, Mr. Simon Templar, greetings!” he declaimed, parting the air between him and his customer with a pair of beringed hands. “You do me honour. I am so sorry we have not seen you in such a long time.”
The Saint’s reputation had reached a point where he no longer stood much chance of remaining incognito anywhere in London, and he had to comfort himself over that loss of the advantages of anonymity with the knowledge that restaurant service was often considerably better when the Saint was on the receiving end than it might have been for some less distinguished, or less notorious patron. Abdul Haroon, as soon as he had found out who Simon was during one of his first visits, had asked him for a large signed portrait-photograph which would be hung in a prominent spot on the dining-room wall, but Simon had gently declined the invitation.
“And I’m sorry I haven’t been here,” he told Abdul. “I’d be happy to run through the whole menu twice a month if I could find the time.”
Abdul rotated with pleasure and glanced around hopefully to see if there were any other patrons within earshot. Unhappily, there were still no other patrons at all, but he failed to let that dampen his good spirits — good spirits which the Saint found remarkable considering the unwholesome circumstances in which Abdul had just lost one of his employees.