"I guess they can take care of the situation," he admitted. "As a matter of fact, there must be very few situations in which those two goons couldn't take care of themselves."
"I expect they can keep out of trouble," Fernack agreed with ponderous deference. "But what are they supposed to hold Varetti and Walsh for?"
"I don't know what technical charge would be the worst they'd settle for," said the Saint, "but if they can't work out a good one on the spot, they must have slipped a lot since I met them. And anyhow, I'm sure they'll be able to do some great detecting in a back room with a rubber hose. Or has this priority business got-ten so tough that you can't even buy your laboratory equipment any more?"
The receiver seemed to grow hot against his ear.
"You can be funny about that some other time," Fernack grunted. "But I'm telling you, Templar, if this turns out to be mother of your—"
"Henry," said the Saint patiently, "I haven't got much more time to waste. And if you're just trying to keep me here until your flying squad arrives, don't say I didn't warn you."
"I haven't got any flying squad out after you."
"Then why did you call me?"
"I just wanted to find out if you'd been back; and when they put you on the wire—"
"Your little heart had kittens. Now cancel the prowl car and carry on. I've got a job to do."
"But where did you—"
"I'll call you back in a little while," said the Saint. "Keep in touch with your office, give my love to the judge, and I hope you win your case without perjuring yourself."
He hung up on a last imploring squawk from the other end of the wire, and went back to the dining room to close out an interrupted chapter.
He still wanted to hear a little more from Mrs Ourley, and yet he was conscious of time ticking away, and of the vital connections that he had to make. But there was nothing he could ignore, and no prejudice that he could permit to blind him to the reversals of new knowledge.
He sat down again as if no counterplot at all had intervened, and picked up the conversation as smoothly as if he had never been away at all.
"I don't think Milton needs to worry about a little thing like a club membership," he offered. "He must be doing pretty well these days."
"I can't complain," Mrs Ourley said smugly. "Although of course the taxes are frightful and I don't know what we shall do next year if That Man keeps on trying to ruin everybody. But I make Milton save every penny he can; and then I take care of it for him. One of these days, when I've got enough put by, I'm going to buy some War Bonds. I think War Bonds are a wonderful investment… But I know you don't want to be bored with things like that. I don't think any young man, I mean any attractive young man, should ever be bothered about money matters."
"Neither do I," Simon agreed. "But quaintly enough, there isn't any organisation giving away free meals and clothing and alcohol to attractive young men."
The old gleam was in Mrs Ourley's eyes, but her voice burbled on with the same analgesic inanity.
"You just haven't met the right people," she insisted, and eyed the place next to him archly. "Or else you're just too shy with them, making them sit out in the middle of the gangway when there's plenty of room—"
Simon moved the table and made room for her on the banquette beside him. Her circumambient nimbus of perfume moved in with her and pushed away the lunchers on the other side.
"I wish you weren't so terribly busy," she said, and went on to develop her theme without waiting for him to confirm or deny. "You ought to find time to cultivate some people who might help you. I mean really help you. Of course, dashing about after criminals must be very exciting, but is it an altogether complete life?"
"I don't really know," said the Saint mildly. "You seemed to think it was fairly complete when you came to see me and asked me to dash after Milton."
She giggled in a thin falsetto.
"I was thoroughly mad with him," she confessed. "But then I didn't know you personally like I do now. Now I'm just thinking of you as a friend, and I do so want you to do well for yourself. So I was just wondering why you'd want to work so hard and run such frightening risks, when I imagine there'd be plenty of people who'd pay you, oh, enormous amounts of money just for being yourself."
Simon looked up at her, and his blue eyes were icily clear.
"You mean there might be somebody who'd bribe me quite lavishly to leave this iridium racket alone?" he asked, and his voice was completely lazy.
Mrs Ourley laughed again, making a noise which probably sounded to her like the tinkling of fairy bells. It sounded exactly like broken glass going down a garbage chute.
"You do say the funniest things! I was only thinking how nice it would be if I could take you to see the new show at the Copacabana. And the music is just heavenly. It does the most exciting things to me. Milton told me he'd have to work late tonight, and I was hoping…"
She babbled on, and Simon made vaguely helpful responses. But behind it his mind was far away and running like a machine. The electrification that he had felt a few minutes before, that had spread out and become pervading, was something as firmly with him now as the meal he had just eaten.
He knew that he had almost everything in his hands now. At least, he had as much as he was likely to get. The rest of it lay with his own judgment and perception and choice. He had to read character and motive and physical possibility right. He had to take apart the things people had said, and distinguish the sinister from the stupid, and be a razor edge of separation between the stupid things that looked sinister and the sinister things that looked stupid. He had to eschew all red herrings and perceive only the one true fish.
And he couldn't sit there for ever while he made up his mind, lie had to move. He had to move swiftly and rightly, before there was another murder to be solved, and another sacrifice to be accounted to the dull golden gods who had declared themselves for the enemy.
And at that perfect point he raised his eyes and saw Milton Ourley standing at the entrance of the dining room.
10
It is a simple fact that the Saint was not even surprised. The appearance of Mr Ourley was merely the natural and inevitable slipping of a link in a chain that had been forming for some time, a chain that must ultimately be so solid and inescapable that the failure of one link to make its appearance would have dissolved every other materialising loop. And this link was so ineluctable that it was uncannily like seeing a revival of some half-remembered play, rather than meeting a new and sudden complication.
He said: "Don't look now, but I think your husband is joining us."
Mrs Ourley did look, of course; but she did not come out with the squeak of coy consternation which one might reasonably have expected from her past performance in her own hallway at Oyster Bay. Instead, her carmined nails dug into the tablecloth so hard that they left furrows in the linen, and her complexion paled under its crust of powder until she looked like a fat frostbitten ghost. The sheer coagulation of her face was a distillate of all that unearthly majestic austerity that wins battles in the committee meetings of women's clubs.
"Let me take care of this," she said ominously, and stood up.
She moved with surprising swiftness for her bulk, and she met Milton Ourley halfway down the room. Once again she was like a stately galleon ploughing through a cluttered harbor. Milton might have been compared with a squat broad fussy tug, except that it was the galleon which took him in tow. Simon could hear something like a hoarse spluttering "dabbity dab dab", like a rumble of distant thunder, but it made just as little difference to the general flow of motion. Mr Ourley might actually have made a great physical effort to struggle towards the Saint's table, but the achievements of his kampf were not readily discernible. Borne like a cockleshell upon his spouse's regal bow wave, he was washed back into the lobby, still booming like a frustrated foghorn, and disappeared from the scene.