"You're talking about Angert? That was stupid of Morgen, but he didn't mean to kill him. He didn't know who he was. But that'll be Morgen's bad luck, if he gets caught. I'll try to see that he doesn't get caught. But if he did, we wouldn't know anything about him."
"You ought to worry about being caught yourself. If you read the papers, you may have seen something about a certain Inspector Fernack, who has just gotten ambitious about collecting the scalp of the guy who removed a very dull bureaucrat named Imberline last night — and nearly managed to hang the job on me."
Devan looked him straight in the eye.
"I read the papers. But I wasn't anywhere near the Savoy Plaza last night. And I thought Imberline was still in Washington."
That was his story. And probably he could prove it. Quennel could probably prove the same. It would be very careless of them if they couldn't, and the Saint didn't think they were careless. If they had been addicted to making egregious mistakes, someone else would have taken care of them before he ever came along.
It was a rather depressing thought. But he had to finish covering the ground. He took another breath through his cigarette.
"A man like Calvin Gray, and his daughter, can't just disappear without any questions being asked."
"Calvin Gray won't disappear. He'll be back tomorrow from a visit to some friends in Tennessee, and he'll be very surprised at the commotion. His daughter will have gone to New York with some friends — who have an apartment there, by the way — and he will have reached her on the telephone there. When she hears that it's all a false alarm and he's quite all right, she will tell him that she's going on a trip to Cuba with some other friends. From there she'll probably fly down to Rio. She may even get married down there and not come back for a very long time."
The Saint's eyes were cold and realistic.
"And of course Gray will go along with that."
"I think so, after I've had another talk with him. I think he'll even discover that there was a flaw in his formula after all, and forget about it."
"You aren't even interested in it yourselves?"
"Oh, yes, of course he'll have to tell us the formula. It may be valuable one day, if we have one of our own chemists discover it. But for the present Mr. Quennel is quite satisfied with our own setup."
"And Gray will never open his mouth so long as you have his daughter for a hostage."
Devan shrugged.
"I don't have to be melodramatic with you. You know what these things are all about. You know what he'll do."
The Saint knew. There was heroism of a kind for the lone individual, although even that could almost always be broken down eventually under pitiless scientific treatment. He doubted how much ultimate heroism there would ever be against the peril of a man's own daughter.
He didn't doubt that Walter Devan was the man to see the job through competently and remorselessly. Devan was no common thug, or he would not have had the position he held. He could easily have passed as having had a college education, even if most of it had been spent on the football field. He had a definite intelligence. He really belonged in Quennel's entourage. He had enough intelligence to assimilate Quennel's intellectual arguments. He also believed in what he was doing, and he was just as sure that it was right. And he wouldn't make any stupid mistakes. Simon didn't need to press him for elaborate details. Walter Devan would know just how to finish what he had started.
There was only one question left in the Saint's mind.
"How does Andrea feel about all this?" he asked.
"Andrea doesn't think," Devan said casually. "She does a sort of roping job for Bart now and again. He probably told her you might be connected with someone who was trying to put over a dirty deal on him in business. He wouldn't tell her anything else. But she seems to be carrying quite a torch for you." Devan met the Saint's gaze with brash man-to-man candor. "You're on your own, as far as that goes. She could be a lot of fun."
"If I played ball," said the Saint.
Devan made an affirmative movement with his head and his cigar at the same time.
"Why be a dope? You can't win. But there aren't any hard feelings. Bart and I both appreciate what you've done, and what you're after. And the proposition he made you still goes. One hundred per cent."
"But if I turn you down—"
"Why bring that up? I don't have to tell you we can't leave you around now. But you belong with us."
Simon glanced at the stump of his cigarette. Having been warned once, he didn't try to get up and move towards the ashtray that Devan was using. He trod the cigarette out on the carpet, and lighted another.
He had heard the threat of death many times in his life, but never with such utter certainty and conviction. Even though not a word had been said about it at all. It gave him a sense of frozen inevitability that no noise and savagery could have done. And he knew that Walter Devan was just as aware of it as he was. They spoke the same language so closely that it would have been merely a waste of energy to shout…
Devan stood up, still holding the gun.
"Why don't you take a few minutes to think it over?" he said.
He went to the door through which the long big-boned man had gone out; and as he opened it he jerked his head towards the second door.
"Calvin Gray and his daughter are in the next room," he said. "Say hullo to them if you want to."
Simon Templar was alone.
He got to his feet after a moment, surveyed the room once more in a detached way, and turned to the other door.
It opened when he tried the handle, and he went in.
It was a room very much like the one he had left. Madeline Gray and her father sat side by side on a divan close to the door. It had to be Calvin Gray, of course, before she jumped up and introduced them.
"How do you do," said the Saint.
They shook hands. A strange formality, and a stranger tribute to the perdurance of common customs.
Madeline Gray left her hand resting on the Saint's arm, and he smiled down at her and said: "How soundproof are the doors?"
"We heard all of it, in the other room," she said.
It was all very quiet; and when you came down to it there didn't seem to be any other way it could be.
"Then we can save a lot of repetition," said the Saint. "I don't even care very much about the details of how you two were snatched. It's relatively unimportant now."
"What were you saying in there," she asked, "about Imberline?"
"They killed him."
He told them all about that, from the dossiers he had studied through to his session with Fernack in the morning. He skipped as lightly as he could through the interval he had spent with Andrea. He gave her credit for having tried to keep him out of that trap without telling him about it, but he didn't elaborate on the counter-attractions she had offered. But he saw Madeline watching him rather thoughtfully.
"In one way," he said grimly, "you could say that I killed him. Just like I got the two of you into this. By being, too clever… You were quite wrong about him. On the evidence, he had to be honest. So I went to him as an honest man — to see if I couldn't convert him to our side. I wasn't able to do that in five minutes — it took him too long to understand anything that wasn't a proverb — but at least I figured that I'd laid up some more trouble for the Ungodly. Unfortunately, I had. But I didn't know he'd be seeing Quennel and Devan that same night. And even after I saw Devan downstairs, I didn't think of it in the right way. I suppose they were having this conference in New York because too many people are watching too many other people's maneuvers in Washington; they knew by then that the ice was awful thin and getting thinner by the minute with me breathing on it, and they had to make sure they could keep Imberline where they wanted him. Instead of that, they got just the reverse. Suspicion had started to penetrate into that mess of porridge he used for a brain, and there was no talking him out of it. When he checked with Jetterick, they knew they were up against it. They may have tried threats or bribery at that point, but he was just too stubborn or stupid to be scared or bought — it doesn't make any difference now. There was only one way to stop him then; and they stopped him."