Simon hitched himself off the table, and Lauber's gun jerked up at him again. Simon went on elaborately ignoring it. He sauntered over to the door of the bedroom and waved his hand towards the interior. Graner and Lauber followed him. They stood there looking in at the rumpled coverlet and the pieces of cloth and cut rope which were scattered on the bed and the floor in silent testimony.
Graner's bright black eyes slid off the scenery and went back to the Saint.
"What happened to them?"
"I let them go," said the Saint tranquilly.
2 It would give the chronicler, whose devotion to his Art is equalled only by his distaste for work, considerable pleasure to discourse at some length on the overpowering silence which invaded the room and the visible reactions which took place in it-besides bringing him several pages nearer to the conclusion of this seventh chapter of the Saint saga. The fusillade of words which one reviewer has so lucidly likened to "a display of fancy shooting in which all the shots are beautifully grouped on the target an inch away from the bull" tugs almost irresistibly at his trigger finger. The simultaneous distension of Lauber's and Graner's eyes, the precise degree of roundness which shaped itself into Lauber's heavy lips, the tightening of Graner's thin straight mouth, the clenching of Lauber's fists and the involuntary upward lift of Graner's gun- all these and many other important manifestations of emotion could be the subject of an essay in descriptive prose in which the historian could wallow happily for at least a thousand words. Only his anxious concern for the tired brains of his critics forces him to stifle the impulse and deprive literature of this priceless contribution.
But it was an impressive silence; and the Saint made the most of it. All the time he had been talking, he had known that he would inevitably have to answer Graner's last question: it had been as inescapably foredoomed as the peal of thunder after a flash of lightning, with the only difference that he had been able to lengthen the interval and give himself time to choose his reply. There had never been more than three posssibilities, and the Saint had worked them out and explored their probable consequences as far, ahead as his imagination would reach in an explosive intensity of concentration that crowded a day's work into a space of minutes.
Now he relaxed for a moment, while the result of the explosion sent the other two spinning through mental maelstroms of their own. He read murder in Graner's eyes, but he knew that curiosity would beat it by a short head.
"You let them go?" Graner repeated, when he had recovered his voice.
"Naturally," said the Saint, with undisturbed equanimity.
"What for?"
Simon raised his eyebrows.
"I'm supposed to be in cahoots with that outfit- or did I misunderstand you when we talked it over?"
"But those two --"
"They haven't got the tickets. I searched every stitch on them. Besides, Christine told me --"
"You're a damned liar!"
It was Lauber who interrupted, with his voice thick and choking. His gun pushed forward at the Saint's chest, and there was a flare of desperate fury in his face that gave the Saint all the confirmation he wanted.
Simon had foreseen it-it was one of the factors that he had weighed one against the other in his feverish analysis of the situation. If the story that Graner had taken back to the house had shaken the world of Palermo and Aliston to its foundations, it must have knocked the foundations themselves from under Lauber's. Simon had been expecting his intervention, even more than Graner's. He knew that for the moment he might have even more to fear from Lauber than from Graner, but he allowed none of his thoughts to move a muscle of his face.
He looked Lauber in the eye and said with a quiet significance which he hoped only Lauber would understand: "It won't hurt you to wait till you've heard what I've got to say before you call me a liar."
Doubt crept into Lauber's face. He was caught off his balance and didn't know how to go on, like a horse that has been sharply checked in front of a jump. The Saint had made him stop to think, and the pause was fatal. Lauber glared at him, held rigid between fear and perplexity; but he waited.
"What did Christine tell you?" said Graner.
"She told me herself that Joris and the other guy hadn't got the ticket. It's obvious, anyway-otherwise Palermo and Aliston would have had it by this time. They parked it somewhere."
The Saint glanced at Lauber again, with a measured meaning which could have conveyed nothing to anybody else. On the face of it, it was only the natural action of a man who wanted to keep two people in the conversation at once. But to the recipient it spoke a whole library of volumes. It told Lauber that the Saint was lying, told Lauber that the Saint meant him to know it, told Lauber that the Saint could also come out with the truth if he chose to and invited Lauber to play ball or consider the consequences. And Simon read the complete reception of the message in the way Lauber's gun sagged again out of the horizontal.
Graner was untouched by any such influence. He went on staring at the Saint with the vicious lines deepening on either side of his mouth.
"Where had they put it?"
Simon shrugged.
"I'm blowed if I know, Reuben. It doesn't seem to matter, either, because they've gone off to look for it."
"And you sent them off --"
The Saint lounged back against the door frame and regarded him pityingly.
"My dear ass," he said, "how many more times have I got to tell you that you need more of my brains? I've got Christine, haven't I? And they don't know where she is, and they haven't an earthly chance of finding out. I told them the same thing that I told you-that she's my hostage for a square deal. D'you think Joris will let anyone start any funny business while his daughter is in my hands?"
The Saint's first blow had punched Graner in the stomach and knocked the wind out of him. This one hit him under the chin. He took it with a slight involuntary backward jerk of his head which rearranged the expressive lines of his face. Comprehension hammered some of the cold malevolence out of his eyes.
"What else did you tell them?"
"I told them they could have till midnight to show me the ticket, or it would be too bad about Christine. When they've produced the ticket we'll go on talking business. It all came to me in a flash, after I'd sent the girl to phone you."
"Did they hear what you told her?"
"Yes. But that only made it more effective. It was as if I'd saved their lives. I told them I'd find a way to square you, and turned 'em loose. It was a brain wave. Why shouldn't we let them work for us? They're holding more cards than we are-let them play the hand for us. We can still pick up the stakes. I told them the deal I'd made with Christine, and made 'em see that they'd got to accept it. They had to fall into line, and they can't fall out. They haven't any choice left, and I made them see it. No ticket, no Christine."
Graner took the words into his system one by one and kept them there. The crisp, incontrovertible logic of the Saint's exposition crushed all the argument out of him.
Simon watched him with encouraging affability. He was beginning to get Graner's measure. The Saint treated his opponents like a boxer sizing up an antagonist in the ring, ruthlessly searching for the weaknesses that would open the way for a winning punch. Graner's weakness was his conceit of himself as a strategist: the appeal to a point of generalship was a bait that brought him on to the hook every time. And once again, as on the last occasion, Simon saw the murderous suspicion in Graner's gaze overshadowed by a glitter of unwilling respect.
The Saint's mocking blue eyes turned towards Lauber; and the expression on the big man's face completed the picture in its own way.
"I guess I'm due for an apology," he said slowly. "You were too far ahead of me."
"I usually am," said the Saint modestly. "But you get used to that after a while."
Graner seemed to become aware that he was still holding his automatic pointed at the Saint. He looked down at it absently and put it away in his pocket.