Instantly, and before Simon could move at all, a new voice spoke behind him. It was a voice with a rich bass croak that Simon seemed to have heard before, very recently.
"Okay," said the voice. "Hold it. Don't move anything if you want to go out of here breathing."
The Saint held it. He knew quite well where he had heard that deep grating voice before.
It spoke again, sounding a little nearer.
"I been saving this for you, bud," it said.
After that there was only a fierce jarring agony that crashed through the Saint's skull like a bolt of lightning, with a scorching white light that broke into a million rainbow stars that danced away into a deep engulfing darkness.
3
Coming back to consciousness was a distant brilliance that hurt his eyes even through his closed eyelids, a sharp cold wet monotonous nagging slapping on his cheeks that turned out to be a sodden towel unsympathetically wielded by Karl Morgen.
"That's enough, Karl," said Walter Devan's voice.
Simon rubbed his face with his hands and cleared his eyes. The tall raw-boned man stood over him, looking as if he would enjoy repeating both the assault and the remedy.
"Beat it, Karl," Devan said.
Morgen went out reluctantly.
Simon tried to get his bearings in a rather unusual room. It was small and somewhat bare. The walls and ceiling were plain white cement, and they looked new and clean. There was a plain new-looking carpet on the floor. There was the plain heavy unpainted door through which Karl had gone out, and another identical door in another wall. Near the ceiling in one wall was a sort of open embrasure, but it was too high up to see out of from where the Saint sat. There was no other window.
The Saint sat on a simple divan with blankets over it, and on the opposite side of the room was another similar divan. There were some low shelves against another wall on which he saw a small radiophone, some records, half a dozen books, a couple of packs of cards, a bottle of brandy, a bottle of Scotch, a box of chocolates, half a dozen cans of assorted food, and a package of paper plates. The air had a slightly damp chill in it.
"People in stories always ask 'Where am I?' " said the Saint, "so I will."
"This is Mr. Quennel's private air-raid shelter," replied Devan. "He had it built about a year ago."
He sat in a comfortable chair behind a card table, smoking a freshly lighted cigar. He wielded the cigar with his left hand, because his right hand held an automatic which the Saint recognized as his own. He didn't point the gun. His hand was relaxed with it on the table. But he was twelve feet from the Saint, and pointing was not necessary.
"Very nice it looks," Simon murmured. "And handy," he added.
"Cigarette?" Devan tossed a pack into the Saint's lap, and followed it with a book of matches. "Keep 'em," he said. "I'm afraid Karl took everything you had away from you."
"Naturally."
Simon didn't have to check over his pockets and other hiding places. He had no doubt that the search would have been thorough. An intellectual organization like that wouldn't have risked leaving anything that could conceivably have concealed some ingenious means of making unexpected trouble.
He lighted a cigarette and said reminiscently: "Karl really owes you something, after Washington. You did a nice job of looking after him and his pal."
Devan nodded.
"It was the only thing to do."
"You took quite a risk."
"I couldn't expect people to take risks for me if they didn't know I'd do the same for them. I took a bit of a beating, too, if you haven't forgotten. That's why I'm keeping this gun handy, and I want you to stay sitting down where you are."
Simon grinned wryly.
"Have you been saving something for me too?"
Devan shook his head.
"Let's forget that. That's kid stuff. I'm here because Bart asked me to see if I couldn't talk you into reconsidering his proposition, and that's all I want to do."
"You've been studying all the best Nazi heavies in the movies," said the Saint admiringly. "I see all the delicate touches. And when I go on saying No, you most regretfully call back the storm troopers and they beat the bejesus out of me."
"I'm not a Nazi, Templar. Neither is Mr. Quennel."
"You have some unusual thugs on your staff. I'll bet you Karl heils Hitler every time he goes to the bathroom."
"I'm not concerned about that. When Gray fired him and he came to us, I thought he could be useful. He has been. So long as he does what I tell him I don't have to ask about his politics. He isn't going to find out any Quenco secrets. And I know one thing — being what he is, no matter what happens, he can't squawk."
"Now I really know what Quennel meant about the diplomacy of Big Business," said the Saint. "Getting a German spy to do your dirty work for you ought to be worth some kind of Oscar."
"We've been lucky to have the use of him. But that's the only connection there is. I'm an American, and I don't want to be anything else."
"I know all about you, Walter. I could tell you your own life story. I've read a very complete secret dossier on you. Oh, I know there's nothing in it that could put you in jail, or you'd have been there before this. But the indication is quite definite. You are Quennel's chief private thug, which means his own personal Gestapo."
Devan sat still, with only a slight dull red glow under his skin.
"There's nothing Nazi about it. If you know all about us, you know that we're working one hundred per cent for America. I work for Quennel because he has to have a man who can be tough and handle tough situations. He told you himself — an industry like Quenco is like a little empire. You have to have your own police and your own laws and your own enforcement. This is nothing but business."
"Business, because Calvin Gray's invention would shift a great big slice of Government backing away from you, and you'd be in the hole to the extent of your own investment."
"As Mr. Quennel said, it's not going to be any use winning the war if we win it by ruining our own economic structure."
"How catching his phrases are," drawled the Saint. "I suppose it wouldn't have occurred to you that Mr. Quennel might have been thinking first of Mr. Quennel's own economic structure?"
"We aren't Nazis," Devan reiterated stubbornly.
Simon drew a fresh drift of smoke into his lungs.
"No," he said. "You aren't Nazis. Or even conscious fifth columnists. That's one of the things that bothered me for a while. I couldn't understand the half-hearted villainy. The Nazis would have been much more positive and drastic, and Calvin Gray and his invention would probably have been mopped up long ago."
"We don't like violence," Devan said. "It makes trouble and a stink and it's dangerous, and we bend over backwards to avoid it. Only sometimes it's forced on us, and then we have to be able to handle it. We tried to handle Gray without going too far."
"And the hell with what difference it made to the net cost and efficiency of our war production?"
"Superficial savings and efficiences aren't always the best thing when you take a broad long view. You learn that in a big industry. Mr. Quennel knows all about that, because that's his job."
"The Führer principle," Simon observed, almost to himself. He looked at Devan again, and said: "And now that I've really butted in, and you know you're stuck with it?"
"The sky's the limit."
Simon smoked again, and looked at the end of his cigarette. "You think you can get away with it?"
"I'm sure we can."
"There's a little matter of murder involved, and the police take such an oldfashioned view of that."