"Am I going to see you again? I'd like to very much."
He reached for a cigarette.
"I'm flattered. But I've only just paid one installment on the Blue Goose."
"I don't have to be there till ten. What are you doing for dinner?"
"Eating with you," he said with abrupt decision. "I'll meet you in the lobby here at eight o'clock."
He hung up, and still wondered which category that belonged in. But anything would be better than waiting in idleness.
He washed and freshened himself and changed his shirt, and went downstairs a little before eight. There was a note in his box when he turned in his key.
"It was delivered by hand just a few minutes ago," said the clerk.
Simon slit open the envelope. The letter inside was written in pencil on a cheap lined paper of an uncommon but typical pattern. There was no address; but Simon knew what that would be even without the clues in the context.
Dear Mr Templar,
I just read your piece in the paper, and I can tell you you sure have got it over these dumb bastards. I am getting a chap to take this out for me. I can tell you a lot more about this case and I will tell you if you can fix it to talk to me alone. You are right all the way and I can prove it, but I will not talk to anyone except you. After that you can do what you like with what I tell you but I will not give these dumb cops anything.
Simon looked up from the note because someone was practically leaning on him and breathing in his face.
"Got a love-letter?" asked Detective Yard. "Or is it fan mail?"
Simon put the letter in his pocket.
"Yes," he said. "But not for you. In fact, I hate to tell you, but my admirer calls you a dumb bastard."
The detective's face swelled as if he were being strangled.
"Listen, you," he got out. "One of these days—"
"You're going to forget your orders and be unkind to me," said the Saint. "So I'll be kind to you while I can. In a few minutes I'll be going out to dinner. I'll try to pick a restaurant where they'll let you in. And if I start to leave before you've finished, just yell at me and I'll wait for you."
Simon thought afterwards that it was criminal negligence on his part that he was so seduced by the frustration of Detective Yard that he didn't even notice the thin gray-blond man and the fat red-haired man who occupied chairs in the farther reaches of the lobby. But there was an excuse for him; because while he had heard their names and heard their sketchy descriptions, he had never before laid eyes on Johan Blatt and Fritzie Weinbach.
6
He went back up to his room and phoned the city desk of the Times-Tribune.
"Could you work it for me to have a private chat with a prisoner in the City Jail?"
"It might be done," said the editor cautiously, "if nobody knew it was you. Why — have you had a bite?"
"I hope so," said the Saint. "The guy's name is Nick Vaschetti." He spelt it out. "He says he won't talk to anybody but me; but maybe the jail doesn't have to know me. See what you can do, and I'll call you back in about an hour."
He sat on the bed in thought for a minute or two, and then he picked up the telephone again and asked for "Washington. He hardly had to wait at all, for although the hotel operator didn't know it the number he asked for was its own automatic priority through all long distance exchanges.
"Hamilton," said the phone. "I hear you're a newspaper man now."
"In self-defense," said the Saint. "If you don't like it, I can pack up. I never asked for this job, anyway."
"I only hope you're getting a good salary to credit against your expense account."
The Saint grinned.
"On the contrary, you'll probably be stuck for my union dues… Listen, Ham: I'd rather lay it in your lap, but I think I'd better bother you. These three men—"
"Blatt, Weinbach, and Maris?"
"Your carrier pigeons travel fast."
"They have to. Is there anything else on them?"
Simon gave him the two rough descriptions.
"There's a good chance," he said, "that they may have cor on from Chicago. But that's almost a guess. Anyway, try it."
"You never want much, do you?"
"I don't like you to feel left out."
"You're not leaving out the beautiful swooning siren, of course."
"In this case, she's a blonde."
"You must like variety," Hamilton sighed. "How much longer are you expecting to take?"
"Depending on what you can dig up about the Three Neros, and what breaks tonight," said the Saint, "maybe not long. Don't go to bed too early, anyhow."
Which left him laughing inwardly at the breath-taking dimensions of his own bravado. And yet it has already been recorded in many of these chronicles that some of the Saint's tensest climaxes had often been brewing when those almost prophetic undercurrents of swashbuckling extravagance danced in his arteries…
Olga Ivanovitch was waiting in the lobby when he came downstairs again.
"I'm sorry," he said. "There was a letter I had to answer."
"Nitcbevo," she said in her low warm memorable voice. "I was late myself, and we have plenty of time."
He admitted to himself after he saw her that he had had some belated misgivings about the rendezvous. The lighting in the lobby of the Alamo House was a different proposition from the blue dimness of the Blue Goose: she might have looked tired and coarsened, or she might have been overdressed and overpainted into a cheap travesty of charm. But she was none of those things. Her skin was so clear and fresh that she actually looked younger than he remembered her. She wore a long dress; but the decolletage was chastely pinned together, and she wore an inappropriate light camelhair polo coat over it that gave her a kind of carelessly apologetic swagger. She looked like a woman that any grown man would be a little excited to take anywhere.
"I've got a car," he said. "We can take it if you can direct me."
"Let me drive you, and I'll promise you a good dinner."
He let her drive, and sat beside her in alert relaxation. This could have been the simplest kind of trap; but if it was, it was what he had asked for, and he was ready for it. He had checked the gun in his shoulder holster once more before he last left his room, and the slim two-edged knife in the sheath strapped to his right calf was almost as deadly a weapon in his hands — and even less easy to detect. It nested down under his sock with hardly a bulge, but it was accessible from any sitting or reclining position by the most innocent motion of hitching up his trouser cuff to scratch the side of his knee.
Simon Templar was even inclined to feel cheated when the drive ended without incident.
She steered him into a darkened bistro near the Gulf shore with bare wooden booths and marble-topped tables and sawdust on the floor.
"You have eaten bouillabaisse in Marseille," she said, "and perhaps in New Orleans. Now you will try this, and you will not be too disappointed."
The place was bleakly bright inside, and it was busy with people who looked ordinary but sober and harmless. Simon decided that it would be as safe as anything in his life ever could be to loosen up for the length of dinner.
"What made you call me?" he asked bluntly.
He had always felt her simple candor as the most cryptic of complexities.
"Why shouldn't I?" she returned. "I wanted to see you. And you turn out to be such an unusual kind of traveling salesman."
"There are so few things you can sell these days, a guy has to have a side line."
"You write very cleverly. I enjoyed your story. But when you were asking me questions, you weren't being honest with me."
"I told you everything I could."