He sat there quite sympathetically while she walked away.
The dining room seemed unusually dull after she had disappeared. Perhaps, he thought, he had been rather uncouthly hasty. After all, he had been enjoying himself. He could have gone along with the gag.
But then, life was so short, and there were so many important things.
He was sitting there, pondering over the more important things, when a group of men bore down on him, crowding their way through the too-narrow aisles between the tables. In the van of the group was a large person with a domineering air, and Simon knew that he was almost certain to be jostled, as he had been jostled in the cocktail lounge.
He was getting tired of being bumped and shoved by individuals who seemed to get the idea that the "DC" after Washington meant "disregard courtesy". He prepared himself for the inevitable encounter.
The big man did not disappoint him. Simon felt the pressure on the back of his chair, and a coat sleeve ruffled the hair on the back of his head. He shoved back his chair quickly and beamed inwardly as he heard the involuntary "oof" that the big man gave as the chairback dug into his stomach. Templar stretched his lean length upright and turned to the man he had effectively body-checked with his chair.
"Terribly sorry," he said very politely.
The big man looked at him. He had the crimson-mottled face of a person who enjoyed good food, good liquor, and good cigars, and had had too many of each. His little eyes regarded Simon speculatively for a moment, and there might have been a flare behind them, or there might not have been, before he wreathed his face in a beaming smile.
"It's all right," he said. "Accidents will happen, you know."
"Yes, indeed," Simon murmured.
The others in the party, were waiting respectfully, almost reverently, for the big man to proceed. The man whom Simon had prodded with the chair gave the Saint another enigmatic glance and then turned away. His disciples followed.
"But Mr. Imberline," one of them cried in a voice that approached a wail. "Think of the inconvenience that this program will mean to certain parties."
"As the fellow says," announced the prow of the group, majestically. "This is war, arid it's up to every one of us to put our shoulders to the wheel. Waste not, want not, is my motto, and this is a case of too many cooks spoiling the broth."
"Incredible," the Saint told himself, gazing after the group as it barged its way to the long table that had been reserved at the further end of the room. "That must be the great Imberline himself."
He put a cigarette between his lips, and felt in his coat pocket for a match.
He didn't find the match, but his fingers encountered something else that he knew at once didn't belong there. It was a folded piece of paper which he knew quite certainly he had never put in that pocket. He took it out and opened it.
It was the same clumsy style of block capitals that he had seen very recently, and it said:
MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS
He had a curious feeling in looking at it, like walking out of a rowdy stifling honky-tonk into a silent snow night. Because all the time they had been in the cocktail lounge, Madeline Gray had been on his left, and he had been half turned towards her, so that his right-hand pocket was almost against the table, and it was impossible that she could have put that paper into his pocket while they were there. And, aside from the fact that he had been surrounded by Imberline satellites a few seconds earlier, there had definitely been no chance since…
2
The doorman said: "Yes, she went that way. She was walking." He put away the dollar bill that Simon handed him, and added: "She asked me the way to Scott Circle."
Simon turned back into the lobby and found a telephone booth. The directory gave him the address of Frank Imberline. It was one of the low numbers on Scott Circle.
Simon Templar frowned thoughtfully.
From the address, it was evident that Mr. Imberline might indeed be a gentleman of some importance, for Scott Circle is the center of one of the best residential sections of Washington, and the list of householders there reads like a snob hostess's dream.
Madeline Gray had told him that she had an appointment with Imberline at eight. He checked his strap watch and saw that it was close to eight now. Still, Imberline — or at least an Imberline had just entered the hotel dining room, obviously bent on food. For a fairly prominent bureaucrat to ignore an appointment was not unheard of in Washington, and that might be the answer. Or Frank Imberline might have a brother or a cousin or a namesake who possessed some Government job and its accompanying entourage.
Still… Simon wished that he had questioned Madeline about the appointment, and how she had arranged it. For a Government official to arrange an appointment at his home, in the evening, sounded a little strange.
He left the hotel again and acquired a taxi by the subtle expedient of paying an extortionate bribe to a driver who maintained that he was waiting for a customer who had just stepped into the hotel for a moment. With the taxi in motion, Simon sat forward and watched the road all the time with an accelerating impatience that turned into an odd feeling of emptiness as he began to realize that the time was approaching and passing when they should have overtaken the girl. Unless she had taken a different route, or picked up a taxi on the way, or…
Or.
Then they were entering Scott Circle, and stopping at the number he had given the driver. He didn't see another taxi at the door, or anywhere in the vicinity.
He got out and paid his fare. The front of the house seemed very dark, except for a light shining through the transom above the door. That was explainable, he told himself, if this really was a romantic tryst, if there was another Imberline besides the one in the hotel dining room, but it seemed to the Saint to be an odd set of circumstances under which a bureaucrat would carry on a conference concerning synthetic rubber.
To the Saint, direct action was always better than dim speculation. He rang the bell.
The butler said: "No, suh. Mr. Imberline ain't to home."
"He is to me," said the Saint cheerfully. "I've got an appointment with him. The name is Gray."
"Ah'm sorry, suh, but Mr. Imberline ain't here. He ain't been back since he left this mawnin', an' he told the cook he was eatin' out."
Simon pursed his lips wryly.
"I guess he forgot his appointment," he said. "I guess, being such a busy man, he forgets a lot of them."
"No suh!" said the butler loyally. "Not Mr. Imberline, suh! He makes a date to be somewheres an' he gits there. Mebbe you got the wrong evenin', suh. Mebbe it's tomorrer you's supposed to have your 'pointment."
"Perhaps," the Saint said easily. "I may have mixed up my times. Tell me, did a young lady named Gray call here this evening? I rather expected to meet her here."
The woolly white head moved negatively.
"Ain't nobody called here, suh," the butler said.
"Then I must have the dates mixed up."
He turned away from the door, saying things silently to himself. He addressed himself with a searing minuteness of detail which would almost certainly have been a cue for mayhem if it had been done by anybody else.
There was still no other cab in sight.
He turned south on 23rd Street, and he had reached the intersection of Q Street before he began to wonder where he was going or what good it was likely to do. He paused uncertainly on the corner, looking towards the bridge over Rock Creek Park. A dozen alternatives chased through his mind, and so many of them must be wrong and so few of them offered anything to pin much to.
And then he saw her coming around the curve of the bridge, walking with her young steady stride, and everything he had imagined seemed foolish again. For about five or six seconds.