The Saint's ears followed the movements in the bedroom step by step. He heard the occasional scuff of exploring feet, and a hoarse "For Christ's sake, hurry up!" There was the clicking of the blind again, and more movement. It was surprising how you could hear sounds, after all, in spite of the radio: when it came to the point, these sounds had a totally different texture, so that there was no confusion, just as you could have heard a hiccup in the next seat in a movie in spite of the sound effects of a newsreel bombardment. He could even hear the thin strained sound of consciously controlled breathing.
In addition, he became ethereally aware of a new richness in the atmosphere which he could still identify in spite of his recent bludgeoning by the assorted smells of Mrs Ourley, and he knew that he was perceiving the particularly obnoxious pomade of Mr Varetti even before the sleek head that wore it slid into his sidelong field of vision.
Varetti stood looking down at the rawhide bag as Cokey Walsh followed him out of the bedroom.
"Here it is," he said, with superfluous but deep satisfaction.
"If only that sonofagun Templar was here too," said Mr Walsh, "I'd like to…"
He enumerated a few things he would have liked to do which it would be useless to repeat here, since the elevated minds of the readers of this reportage would never believe that any person could have such depraved ambitions.
Varetti, a more practical man, cut him off in the middle of a fine phrase with the kind of question which from time immemorial has nipped the poet's prettier fancies in the bud.
""Why don't you shut your trap?"
He picked up the heavy bag with an effort.
"We'll walk down the stairs and walk straight out the front," he said.
"Suppose he's in the lobby," Cokey suggested.
"You go ahead and make sure he isn't."
"I wanna see that sonofabitch again."
"You'll have plenty of time."
Varetti turned towards the door. And there the Saint faced him, elegant and graceful and smiling, with his gun level and tremor less at his waist and blue lights of devilish mockery dancing in his eyes.
It seemed quite unfortunate at that moment that the Algonquin Hotel had omitted to provide two vats of soft plaster of paris among the otherwise well-planned furnishings of the joint. If it had not been for that almost incredible lack of foresight, the cataleptic rigidity of the two men might easily have allowed the Saint to immerse them and withdraw them again without the slightest disturbance of their articulation, thereby creating a pair! of moulds for which any wax museum would have been glad to bid. But such sad wastes are an inevitable symptom of our unplanned economy, and Simon Templar had learned to exercise his philosophy on them.
He said, without undue gloom: "The hands up and clasped behind the back of the head, gentlemen — if you don't mind my borrowing your own fancy formula, Ricco. Although to be quite candid it just struck me that your vocabulary had slipped a bit. Or is it because you save your party dialogue for the cash customers?"
Varetti put the bag down gradually and deliberately, and raised his hands in the same way, so that his movements were rather like those of a trained snake; and his eyes were a snake's eyes, bright and beady and unblinking.
"How the hell did you get here?" demanded Mr "Walsh, almost indignantly.
"I heard you wanted me," said the Saint, "so I came a-running. A little faster with the hands, if you don't mind, Cokey… Thank you… Now if you'll both turn your backs I'll see whether you've picked up any new weapons since we last met, and if you are very polite I may refrain from goosing you."
Apparently they had been rushed out of either the time or the opportunity to replenish their armory, or else they had anticipated no such disconcerting need for one, for the only trophy which rewarded his excavations was a six-inch jackknife from the pocket of Comrade Varetti with a trick spring that whipped the blade open when you pressed a button.
The Saint was not too disappointed. He had discovered before then that it is only in the less conscientious crime stories that the ungodly are endowed with inexhaustible reserves of artillery from which they can rebound on a few minutes' notice from any setback, armed to the teeth again and spitting javelins; and moreover he realised that the armament program must have placed additional handicaps even on the hoodlums who were accustomed to buy their gats by the carton. But he did not complain. He was not the complaining type. He was prepared to make his small contribution to the exigencies of global war.
He put the knife through its paces with the most detached and fascinated interest while he allowed the two men to turn around again.
"Very ingenious, Ricco, and quite a credit to the Mafia, or whatever your dear old alma mater was," he observed appreciatively. "I'm afraid you must have been a very bad little boy when you were young."
Varetti showed his white rabbit teeth in a smile that was half a snarl.
"You'll find out what kind of a bad boy I am before we're through," he said. "Your luck will run out one of these days, and I'm going to be there when it does. You and your exploding cigarettes! I certainly was a chump to be taken in by an old gag like that."
"You certainly were, brother," Simon agreed consolingly. "But you can cheer yourself with the thought that smarter men than you have fallen for it before. And now, if we have to keep up these old-world courtesies, may I trouble you two creeps to back off and park your bottoms on that beautiful period sofa behind you? Keeping the hands in the same position, if you don't mind… That's the idea… I want you to be comfortable, because I still think of you as my guests, and we are now going to have a brief chat about one thing and another."
With just a little more thoughtful reluctance than Walsh, Varetti sank obediently on to the couch; but there was no shift in the bland display of his incisors.
"Don't you know you're wasting your time?" he asked. "We aren't going to tell you anything. Why don't you just call the cops?"
"And then?" Simon inquired, smiling and silky.
"Then you'll have to prove that you didn't invite us in here. And you'll have to explain why you were so mad when we found that you had a bag full of stolen indium in your apartment."
The Saint's eyes danced with boreal lights.
"Mr Walsh," he said, "would you be good enough to open the bag that Ricco is talking about?… Go on… I won't shoot you."
In a state of partial hypnosis buffeted between the menace of the Saint's gun and the impudent spear-tips in the Saint's eyes, Mr Walsh slid dubiously off the sofa to obey. He laid the suitcase on its side, and clicked the catch. He raised the lid. He looked.
So did Ricco Varetti.
They beheld what must have been one of the finest collections of assorted spheres that had ever been hastily improvised. It ranged from the ripe solidity of bowls that should have been booming smoothly down polished alleys, down to ball bearings designed to speed the wheels of roller skates, and down from there to buckshot and BB pills for airguns. It included baseballs, cricket balls, billiard balls, and one large sand-packed medicine ball. It was a truly amazing crop of balls.
"All right," said the Saint amiably. "Let's have the showdown on that basis. The cops are on their way already, whether you believe it or not, and they are a couple of tough babies. They'll be crashing in here in a matter of minutes — if they take that long. I'm giving you this one chance to scream everything you can remember about your boss man; and if you don't want to play with me I'm sure that Kestry and Bonacci will just love showing you the town."
11
To any individual who, like the present chronicler, is acutely conscious of the need to conserve paper in order that there may never be any lack of raw materials on which the latest governmental artist can design new forms to be filled out in sesquicentuplicate, the mere thought of wasting one milligram of precious pulp which might be better devoted to the production of monogrammed kleenex is instinctively repugnant. Your correspondent therefore proposes to expend no words on describing the reactions of Messieurs Varetti and Walsh, beyond mentioning that they looked as if they had been kicked three inches above the navel by an exacerbated elephant.