"You mean those bonds I took?"
"Exactly. So after a while Pongo gives it up and amscrays, muttering curses in his beard. But he isn't ready to quit altogether, so this morning he's back on watch, waiting to see if he can get a line on the lost boodle. And what does he see but a car containing yourself, the bloke who came out of the place last night, and me. We look as if we were going to pull up at the door, and then we suddenly whizz on and stop around the next corner. All very suspicious. Pongo curls his mustachios and lurks like anything. I hop out of the car, and you go on with it. Pongo has one awful moment while he wonders which way he ought to go and whether he can split himself in half, and then he decides to stick to me — (a) because I'm a new factor that might be worth investigating, (b) because I'm obviously going back to the scene of the crime and you aren't, and possibly (c) because he knows who you are and knows he can pick you up again if he wants to. Pongo sees me speak to the cop at the door and go in; presently I come out again, so he takes his chance and lets fry."
"But why?"
The Saint shrugged.
"Maybe he didn't like my face. Maybe he knew who I was and was scared things might get too hot if I was butting in. Maybe he'd already trailed you here and he'd only just made up his mind what to do about both of us, which would mean you're next on his list.
Maybe a lot of things. That's one of the questions we've got to find the answer to."
"But what's it all about?"
"It appears to be about seven thousand quid's worth of bearer bonds, which is enough reason for a good many things to happen. What I'd like to know is how a man who couldn't pay you a tenner collected all that mazuma. What sort of a job was he in?"
"He was with a firm of sherry importers in the City."
"Sherry!"
The Saint was motionless for a moment, and then he took another cigarette. He couldn't have explained himself what it was that had struck that sudden new crispness into his nerves — it was as if he was trying to make his conscious mind catch up with a spurt of intuition that had outdistanced it.
"You told me that Ingleston had been abroad recently," he said. "Would he have been likely to go to Spain?"
"I expect so. He'd been sent there several times before. He spoke Spanish very well, you see—"
"Did he have a lot of Spanish friends?"
"I don't know."
"He had one anyway — there was a signed photograph inscribed in Spanish on his mantelpiece. Did you ever hear of Luis Quintana?"
"No."
"He's a representative that the Spanish Rebels sent over a few weeks ago…"
Simon jumped up and moved restlessly across the room. There was a fierce drive of energy in the restrained movements of his limbs that had to reach some hidden objective quickly or burn itself to exhaustion.
"Sherry," he said. "Spain. Spanish Rebels. American bearer bonds. And mysterious Pongos cutting loose with hammers and popguns. There must be something to mix them together and make soup."
He took the bundle of bonds out of his pocket and studied one of them again more closely. And then he was wrapped in stillness for so long that the others felt as if they were gripped in the same trance, without knowing why.
At last he spoke.
"They look genuine," he said softly. "Engraving, ink, paper, everything. They look all right. You couldn't say they were fakes without some special tests. And yet they might be… "But there's only been one man in our time who could do a forgery like this — if it is a forgery."
"Who was that?" said Patricia.
The Saint met her gaze with blue eyes glinting with lights that held the essence of the mystery which he himself had just been trying to fathom.
"He was a Pole called Ladek Urivetzky — and I read in the paper that he was executed by a firing squad in Oviedo about a month ago."
V
And an elegant bowl of soup it made when you got it all stirred up, Simon reflected that evening as he was being trundled down the dim baronial corridors of Cornwall House. But of all the extraneous characters who had been spilled by some coincidence or other into the pot, he was the only one who could make that reflection with the same ecstatic confidence.
"It doesn't seem to make sense," Patricia had said helplessly when he contributed the last item of certain knowledge that he had.
"It sings songs to me," said the Saint.
But he had gone into no more details, for the Saint had a weakness for his mysteries. They had only been able to make desperate guesses at what was in his mind, knowing that there must be something seething there from the mocking amusement in his eyes and the unholy Saintliness of his smile. It was as if a rocket had exploded inside him, flooding all the dark places in his mind with light, when he had caught up in that dynamic moment with the lead his instinct for adventure had given him.
At this particular time, however, neither his eyes nor his smile could have given any information to anyone who might have been watching him, for they were completely hidden by the white beard and moustache and dark glasses which left very little of his face uncovered. He had put on those useful pieces of scenery with some care before he let himself through a panel in the back of a built-in wardrobe in his bedroom which brought him into a similar built-in wardrobe in the bedroom of the adjoining flat, which was occupied by an incurable invalid of great age who rejoiced in the name of Joshua Pond, as any inquisitive person might have discovered from the head porter, Sam Outrell, or the register of tenants. What it would not have been so easy for the inquisitive person to discover was that Mr Pond's existence was entirely imaginary and took concrete form only when it suited the Saint's purposes. Mr Pond rarely went out at all, a fact which was easily explained by his antiquity and failing health.
Securely screened behind his smoked glasses and masses of snowy facial shrubbery, with a white muffler wound round his neck and a black homburg planted squarely on his head, Mr Pond sat in his wheeled chair and was tenderly propelled down the passage by Sam Outrell and a smart young chauffeur in livery. Two men in overalls working on some telephone wiring with a mass of tools spread round them looked up as the door of the flat opened and ignored him as he went by. The chair was pushed into the lift and passed out of their ken. In the lobby downstairs a man reading a newspaper looked up as the lift doors opened and returned automatically to his reading. The chair passed him and was wheeled out into the street, where a sedate black limousine stood waiting. Sam Outrell and the chauffeur each took one of the invalid's elbows and helped him to totter through the door of the car. The chauffeur wrapped a rug round his knees, Sam Outrell closed the door and saluted, the chauffeur took the wheel, and the car whisked away into the night, followed by the disinterested eyes of another large man who stood making a half-hearted attempt to sell newspapers on the opposite side of the street.
"And what exactly," asked the chauffeur as the car streaked westwards along Piccadilly, "are we out for tonight?"
The Saint laughed.
"I'm sorry I had to drag you away from that cocktail party, Peter, old lad, but Claud Eustace is having one of his spasms. Did you see 'em all? Four of 'em — about three square yards of feet all told. That is, if there weren't any more."