His present life was busy but well upholstered. He kept the reins of Quenco firmly in his hands, but found time to belong to a long list of golf, chess, bridge, polo, and country clubs. For several years before the war he had regularly taken a summer vacation in Europe, accompanied by Andrea as soon as she was old enough. He was one of those Americans who once sang the praises of Mussolini because he made the trains run on time. He had rescued Andrea from three or four escapades which had made news — one concerned with a Prussian baron, one with the breaking of bottles over the heads of gendarmes in the casino at Deauville, and one with an accountant in Chicago whose wife had old-fashioned ideas about the sanctity of the home. There was a note that several of Andrea's other liaisons which had not become public scandals seemed to have been impartially divided between her father's business associates and business rivals. Hobart Quennel himself was a model of genial good behavior. He was a Shriner, staunch Republican, and a dabbler in state and national politics. He also had been the subject of a Senate investigation, a defendant under the Sherman Act, and an implacable feudist of the Labor relations Board; but with seasoned forensic skill he had managed to emerge as nothing worse than a rugged individualist who had built up a great industry without ever being accused of robbing hungry widows, who was a diehard opponent of government interference, and who had to be respected even if disagreed with. Curiously, he had made public denunciations of the America First Committee, and had voluntarily pioneered in the compulsory fingerprinting of employees and in laying off all Axis nationals even before there had been any official moves in that direction.
"A deep guy," thought the Saint. "A very deep guy indeed." He had his own interpretation of some of the items in Quennel's biography. He could see the connection between the middle-class beginning and the gigantic plant at Mobile, the local boy making good. He could see the link between the Bolshevik poet and the Mussolini railroad schedules. He could even tie up the bourgeois Southern background with the advancement of Walter Devan as the Imperial Wizard of a strictly private Ku Klux Klan. But all of that still didn't tarnish Hobart Quennel's unimpeachable Americanism, misguided as you might think it, or the fact that even the most scurrilous attacks on him had never been able to attach him adhesively to any subversive faction or foreign-controlled activity.
Hobart Quennel was indisputably a very clever man; but could he have been as clever as that, for so many years, exposed all the time to any sniper who wanted to load a gun for him?
The Saint lowered his drink an inch, and made himself acknowledge that something he had been looking for was still missing. And for the first time he began to wonder whether he had been wrong from the start. An easily preconceived idea, even a series of very ready deductions, were desperately tempting to coast on and glutinously hard to shake off once the ride had started. But facts were facts; and the dossiers in his hands hadn't been compiled by dewy-eyed romanticists. If Hobart Quennel had even been more than essentially polite to any Nazi or known fifth columnist, the slip would almost certainly have been recorded.
And yet…
Simon thought about Andrea Quennel again. She had the build and beauty and coloring that Wagner was probably dreaming of before the divas took over. She might easily have been flattered by the ideals of the Herrenvolk… There had been the Prussian baron… And definitely she was the Diana Barry who had commissioned Schindler… If you disregarded the rules of legal evidence, her own father had transparently taken advantage of her glandular propensities before. In the same way that she had been using them ever since the Saint met her.
That was so much. like the words she had used herself that he could almost hear her saying them again. He saw her lifelike in front of him, her warm rich lips and the too-perfect contours of her body; and the remembrance was not helpful to dwell on.
He lighted a cigarette and picked up the last docket of the sheaf — the story of the man who was still the most nebulous personality of all.
Frank Imberline.
Born in New York's most expensive maternity home. A silver spoon case. Private school. Princeton. Colonial Club. Graduated minima cum laude, being much too busy for affairs of the higher intellect. Was then drafted by his father into the service of Consolidated Rubber. Served a six-year apprenticeship, being driven sluggishly through all the different departments of the business, Steadied down, acquired a stodgy and even pompous sense of responsibility, became an executive, a Rotarian a member of the Akron Chamber of Commerce; eventually became Consolidated Rubber's head or figurehead. The latter seemed more probable, for there was a board of directors with plenty of shrewd experience behind them. The character estimate of Imberline said: "Generally considered honest and well-meaning, but dull." He played golf in the nineties, subscribed to all the good causes, and could always be depended on for a salvo of impressive and well-rounded clichés at any public dinner. His farthest traveling had been to Miami Beach. He had no labor battles, no quarrels with any Government bureaus. He did everything according to what it said in the book. His only political activity had been when some group persuaded him to run for Mayor on what was vaguely called a "reform ticket": he lost the election by a comfortable minority, and stated afterwards that politics were too confusing for him. Certainly the things that Simon had heard him say made that sound plausible. All the rest of his career — if such a swift-sounding word could be applied to anything so rutted and ponderous — had been devoted to Consolidated Rubber, from that early enforced apprenticeship until the time when he had resonantly donated his services to the National Emergency. And that was that. Nothing else.
Not the barest hint of sharp practice, corruption, chicanery, rebellion, conniving, strongarming, conspiracy, political ambition, or adventuring in social philosophies. "Generally considered honest and well-meaning, but dull…"
Of all the suspect records, his was the most open and humdrum and unassailable.
Which turned everything inside out and upside down. The Saint lay back with his glass held between his knees and blew chains of spaced smoke-rings towards the ceiling. Once again he put all the pieces together, fitting and matching them against all the facts that he had learned and memorised, estimating and analyzing with the utter impersonality of a mathematician. And only getting back again and again to the same irreconcilable equations.
He got up and freshened the melted ice in the remains of his drink, and lighted another cigarette. For several minutes he paced the room with monotonous precision, up and down on one seam of the carpet like a slow shuttle in a machine.
He could cogitate his brain into a pretzel, but it wouldn't advance him a single millimeter. He would be in the same foredoomed position as an Aristotelian philosopher trying to discover the nature of the universe with no other instrument than pure and transcendent logic. But one renegade factor might be within a few yards of him at that moment, and if he left it untouched it would only be his own fault that the solution didn't come out.
There had been moments like that in many of his adventures — there nearly always seemed to be. Moments when the fragile swinging balance of thought became a maddening pendulum that only physical action would stop. And this was one of them.
From there on he was through with theories. He knew what he knew, he had dissected all the arguments, he had pinned down and anatomised all the ifs and buts. He would never have to go back to them. The solution and the answers were all there, if he could beat them out of the raw material. The loose ends, the contradictions, the gaps, would all merge and blend and fill out and explain themselves as the shape forged. But from there on, win or lose, right or wrong, the rest was action.