The Saint stepped closer, and he looked taller and harder, and the edges were sharpening in his voice.
"Sure, Ricco, you're tough," he said. "You can take plenty. But how much can your girl friend take? How long will she keep her mouth buttoned when we start working on her? And where are you and Cokey going to find the answers when she sings about you?"
"She can't sing about us," Varetti retorted. "She doesn't know anything."
There were tiny little beads of moisture on his face. Simon could see them as he drew closer still.
"Oh, no?" he said in a voice of silken needles. "What makes you think the boss never talked to anyone except you? What makes you so sure he never told her anything? Are you quite ready to take your chance on what she'll spill when I talk to her?"
Varetti laughed, in a sort of nervous triumph.
"You won't ever talk to her! The boss is taking care of—"
He was exactly that far when Kestry and Bonacci arrived, turning a key in the door and entering with a rush, rather like a pair of stampeding hippopotami, which in other respects they slightly resembled.
They came in with their guns drawn, and Simon stepped back to give them room to take over, without even glancing at them or shifting his gun until they had the scene under control. There was the snick-snack of handcuffs, and the Saint still didn't move at once.
"Thank you," he said; and his eyes were still on Varetti.
"That's okay, pal." The big bulk of Kestry shouldered across his view, heavy-jawed and unfriendly-eyed. "How did you get here?"
For the first time Simon looked at him, and put the gun away in his pocket.
"It's my room," he mentioned calmly. "I was here when they arrived. Now you can take them away. They bother me."
"They won't bother you any more. They're both three-timers, an' they'll get the book thrown at them."
"That's fine," said the Saint cynically. "Unless they get the right lawyer. They've probably done it before."
"They won't do it this time. Not after they've sung. And they'll sing." Kestry was certain and unemotional like a rock, and no more changed or changeable. He said, without any alteration of stance or stare: "I still want to know more about you."
"Why don't you read a newspaper?"
"You just put a gun in your pocket. That makes it a concealed weapon. Where did you get it, an' where's your permit?"
The Saint put his cigarette to his lips and drew at it with a light easy breath.
"Fernack told you what to do," he said. "If you want to write in a new scene for yourself, you're on your own. Otherwise, I wish you'd just drag the bodies out. I'm in a hurry."
Kestry's eyes were bitter and glistening, the Saint's cool and bright like chips of sapphire with indefinable gleams of insolence shifting over them. It was a clash from which tinder might have been ignited at close range. But the measure of Kestry's defeat, and the value of its future repercussions, were plain in the heavy viciousness with which he turned back to his captives.
"Let's get 'em out of here, Dan," he said.
He grasped Varetti's arm in a ham-like fist and yanked him off the couch, while his partner performed a similar service for Walsh. Cokey let out a yelp as the steel bracelets cut into his wrists.
"Shut up, you," growled Bonacci. "That ain't nothing to what you're gonna get."
He shoved the two men roughly towards the door.
Kestry took a last pointless look around, and followed. How-evcr, he turned to favor the Saint with one lingering farewell glower.
"It still don't seem right to be goin' out of here without you," he said; and the Saint smiled at him sweetly.
"You must drop in again," he murmured, "and get used to it."
He waited until the door had slammed after the departing populace, and then he picked up the telephone and called Centre Street.
Inspector Fernack must have gabbled his evidence and rushed back to his office like a broker returning from lunch during a boom, for he was on the wire as soon as Simon asked for him.
"This is the Voice of Experience, Henry," he said. "Your beef trust has just oozed out, taking Cokey and Ricco with them. I think they'll make noises eventually, so you can take your boots off and get ready to hear them vocalise. Now while you and the boys are getting cosy with them, I've got one final little job to do. So if you'll excuse me…"
"Hey, wait a minute!" The anguish in Fernack's voice was almost frantic. "If you've got any further information, you ought to—"
"My dear Henry, if I waited around to do all the things I ought to, I'd be wasting as much energy as you spend on your setting-up exercises."
"I don't do any setting-up exercises!"
"Then you certainly ought to. That fine manly figure of yours must be preserved. Now I really must get busy, because you've got plenty on your hands as it is, and I don't want you to have another murder to worry about."
"You let me worry about my own worrying," Fernack said grimly. "All I want to know is what else you know now."
"You didn't get the significance of the lock?"
"What lock?"
"Never mind," said the Saint. "It will dawn on you one of these days. Now I really must be going."
"But where?" wailed the detective.
The Saint smiled, and blew a slender smoke-ring through a teasing pause.
"I'll leave a note for you at the desk here. You climb on to your little bicycle and come and pick it up."
"Why not give it to me now?"
"Because I want to be there first. Because I want a little time to set the stage. And because cops rush in where Saints are smart enough to wait. Be patient, Henry. Everything will be under control… I hope. I'm just trying to make it easy for you. And please, when you get there, do me the favor of listening for a minute before you thunder in. I don't want to be interrupted in the middle of a tender passage… Goodbye now."
He hung up in time to disconnect a jolt of verbal heat and explosion that might have threatened the New York Telephone Company with a general fusing of wires between the Murray Hill and Spring exchanges, scribbled rapidly on a sheet of paper, and sealed it into an envelope and wrote Fernack's name on it while he waited for the service elevator.
"Get this to the desk, will you?" he said to the operator as they rode down. "To be called for."
The timekeeper let him out, and he emerged from the side door on to Forty-fourth Street, walking east. In a few strides he turned into the Seymour Hotel, and walked quickly up the corridor towards the lobby. There he stopped for a minute, waiting to see if anyone entered after him. It was always possible that Kestry might have brooded enough to wait for him, or even that the ungodly themselves might have another representative lurking around. But no one followed him in within a reasonable time; and that part of the chase was won. For the Seymour ran cleat through the block, and he went out on to Forty-fifth Street and stepped into a passing taxi with reasonable assurance that he was alone.
The clock in his head ran with sidereal detachment and precision, and on that spidery tightrope of timing his brain balanced as lightly as a shadow.
He had had to put everything together very quickly and coldly; and yet it seemed to him now that he had always known just where each person who mattered would be, from instant to instant, as though they had been linked to him by threads of extrasensory perception. But he had to be right. He had to be right now, or else he had thrown away all the completeness of what he had tried to do.
And with that sharp sting of awareness in his mind he walked into the lobby of the hotel where he had left Barbara Sinclair.