Simon kept his head down while he examined and signed the check that was already on the table, and then he caught the eye of the maitre d'hotel and brought him over with a mere wisp of a gesture.
"Raul," he said, "how could anyone get out of here without going through the lobby?"
If the maitre d'hotel had his own and incidentally erroneous theories about the Saint's motives, he was far too polished a diplomat to give them any expression. In addition to which, and for no professional reasons, he had long since taken the Saint under his generous wing.
"There is a back way out," he said. "Would you like to see it?"
"I might even fall in love with it," said the Saint.
They went down to the other end of the dining room, through well-organised pantries and one end of the clean busy kitchen, and past a row of food lockers to a wire-mesh door where the timekeeper rose from his little table and a plate of roast beef to let them out. Beyond that there was a short narrow passage and another door that opened inconspicuously on to Forty-fourth Street.
Simon stopped and looked back the way they had come. He pointed.
"Is that the service elevator?"
"Yes, sir. Do you want to use it?"
"That would get me upstairs and back again without going through the lobby too, wouldn't it?"
"Yes, sir."
The Saint rubbed his chin.
"I'd like to do that first. But will George here let me out when I come down again?"
"Of course." Raul turned to the timekeeper. "Please let Mr Templar out whenever he's ready." He turned back to the Saint with a flourish. "Is there anything else I can do?"
Simon grinned as he strolled back towards the service lift.
"You've done plenty already, Raul," he said. "As it is, I expect you've broken all the regulations in the joint, and Mr Case will probably fire you."
The maitre d'hotel shrugged cheerfully.
"Regulations are for everybody else, but not for the Saint." He said to the elevator operator: "Take Mr Templar upstairs and bring him down again any time he wants to come." He smiled at the Saint with the happy magnificence of a mayor who has just bestowed the keys of his city, and said with charming impersonality: "Do you wish to leave any message?"
Simon shook his head.
"Just stay out of trouble and pretend you didn't see me go."
"But I won't have seen you go, Mr Templar," said Raul. "I won't look."
He turned his back, and Simon stepped into the car and was wafted upwards at a suitable pace for a sedate hotel.
He glanced at his wrist watch automatically as he stepped out on the third floor, but it was almost a reflex movement and the position of the hands scarcely impressed itself on him at all. The real timing was all in his head — it was a matter of how long it would have taken to discuss this and decide that and then to do something about it. He was working to almost psychically close tolerances, and an error of even a few minutes in his mental clocking might have catastrophic results. And even then he was trying to timetable something so nebulous that his own intuition was practically the only guarantee that it would work out that way at all.
He slid the key into his door with millimetric stealth, and went into his suite with weightless feet and one hand on the gun which he had borrowed from Mr Varetti before lunch. He had beer caught once that day, and he was not going to make the same mistake again.
But apparently he was still within his margin of time — if it had any real existence at all. There was no one in his living room, or behind the portieres that shut off the bedroom, or in the bathroom or the closet or under the bed. He took each hazard separately and methodically, making no sound to betray his presence until he had covered all of them.
Even then he was very quiet, and denied himself a cigarette that he would have enjoyed because he didn't want to leave fresh smoke in the air.
The suitcase which he had sent up stood beside the sofa in the living room. He didn't touch it.
The iron structure of the fire escape ran outside the bedroom window. Simon had chosen his suite for that reason; but it could work two ways. The front door of the suite could be penetrated in one way or another, but it would present difficulties. Simon thought it would be the fire escape.
The hallway from the front door met the living room at an angle so that there was a corner from which he could cover any entrance from equal concealment. He flattened himself into it and waited, as patient and motionless as a statue in a niche.
Somebody in the adjoining suite turned on a radio at full volume, and it blared away for two or three minutes before it was turned down. Even then, it was too loud.
Of course, it might be the front door. Either Varetti or Walsh might be good with locks, or might be clever enough to con a master key out of somewhere. Or they might even be tough enough to try it with a frontal assault, on a simple smash-grab-and-run basis.
It was curious how he had always assumed that it would be Varetti and Walsh. Even when he spoke to Fernack on the telephone. He had left them locked up in Barbara Sinclair's closet intending to have been back there by that time and busy with the job of advancing their acquaintance on his own terms; but all that had been changed for quite a while. He wasn't quite sure how long ago he had been sure that they were no longer waiting where he had left them, but it seemed now that he had always been sure that they wouldn't be there. It was one of those fourth-dimensional elisions that saw an end before it could pin down all the steps and stages through which the end would come about.
He knew that Varetti and Walsh were out again, because only since they were out again could certain other things have happened. Or, conversely, because other things had happened, they must be out again.
And the rawhide suitcase was standing beside the sofa and someone would come to get it.
It wouldn't take much shopping around to settle on one of the suites directly above the one he was in. And from any such starting point a fire escape that ran down through a gloomy inside courtyard that nobody would ever want to look out at anyway would present virtually no problems at all…
He could really have enjoyed that cigarette.
But how long could he afford to wait, backing his hunch, while he might always be wrong, and the fox might be away in another spinney?
The radio next door was blatting forth some emetic commercial about the perils of fungoid feet or some such attractive ailmen He could hear every word as if he were in the room with it. wondered if it would be loud enough to drown one of the sounds he was listening for.
But it wasn't.
He heard it.
It was the slow cautious rasp of a window-sash being eased quietly upwards. And, after that, the subdued rattle of the slats of the Venetian blind being lifted from below.
So it was the fire escape and the bedroom window; and he had not waited in vain.
There had been an instant of tingling stillness when he heard the sound, but now he was as smooth and cool as a hand-trued machine, and his pulses were as light as the ripples on a landlocked bay at sunset. Now he backed noiselessly out of his neutral corner and flattened himself easily along the wall, towards the front door and away from the rooms, so that the visitor would have to step clear into the living-room before he could see the Saint at all.