"But we still want to know how you got here," said the girl huskily.
Simon's glance reflexed to the doors again. But it didn't really matter. He had nothing to say just then that couldn't be overheard.
"I'll tell you," he said.
He lay on the other divan and told them, stretched out in an amazing restful relaxation that was not actually any testimonial to the steel in his nerves at all, but only to the supreme conversation of energy that a trapped tiger would have had.
He told them everything he had thought from the beginning; and in as much detail as he could remember he gave them an account of the dinner conversation in which so many things had been so elementarily explained.
He tried to do a good job of it; but he still didn't know how well he had made his point when he had finished reporting and Calvin Gray said: "How can a man like Quennel be like that?"
He was a fairly tall wiry man, lean almost to the verge of emaciation, with a tousled mop of perfectly white hair and eyes that blinked with nervous frequency behind square rimless glasses; and he said it with an air of academic perplexity, as if he were fretting over a chemical paradox.
The Saint put one hand behind his head and gazed at the ceiling.
"Simply because he is a man like that. Because he's more dangerous than any fifth columnist or any outright crook, because he sincerely believes that he's a just and important and progressive citizen. Because he can talk contemptuously about Café Society and the playboy class, and really believe it and feel austerely superior to them, and sandwich it in between mentioning his new strings of polo ponies and the parties he throws for his daughter where they drink thirty cases of champagne. 'They're dead but they don't know it' — but he's one of them and he doesn't know it… Because he can disclaim profiteering while he feels very contented about 'increased capital values'… Because he's very proud of his share in the War Effort, but he thinks nothing of faking the registration of the family cars so as to get more than his share of gas to play with. Because he doesn't mind using a German agent like Morgen if Morgen can be useful, instead of turning him over to the FBI; but he'd be full of righteous indignation if you called him a fifth columnist… Because he hates Fascism and he's a patriotic one-hundred-per-cent American; but he believes in what he calls 'social stability' and 'a strong and capable executive class' whose divine mission it is to dish out liberty and democracy in reasonable doses to the dumb unruly proletariat… Because he's thoroughly satisfied that Big Business is wide awake and wading into the war effort with both hands, but he's also ready to sabotage a rival process that would speed up and cheapen a very vital production, because it would lose him a hell of a lot of dough… Because he builds model homes and organizes baseball teams and sewing bees for his employees to keep them happy, but he believes that nabobs like himself should have a law of their own which transcends the rights of ordinary mortals… Because he's exactly the same type as Thyssen and the other Big Business men who backed Hitler to preserve their own kind of Social Stability; because he'd back his own kind of dictatorship in this country, under another name, and still think what a fine level-headed liberal he was… Because he's a goddam bloody Nazi himself, and you can never hang it on him because even he hasn't begun to realise it."
His voice seemed to linger in the air, so quiet and sensible, and yet with a feeling so much deeper than any dramatics, so that it seemed as if it should have gone on for ever, and there should have been something permanent about it, and it should have spread out wherever the minds of those who listened would take it on.
Calvin Gray rubbed his rough white hair and said hazily: "But when he goes into actual crime—"
"Quennel," said the Saint, "never went into a crime in his life. If he tells Devan that you and your invention are a Bad Thing, and ought to be stopped, he's only giving his opinion. If things happen to you and stop you, he's naturally very pleased about it. If he tells Devan to try and talk me into forgetting you and taking a job with Quenco, that's entirely legitimate. If Devan succeeds, fine. If he doesn't, but an unfortunate accident eliminates me, that's providential… It would have been the same with Imberline. I don't doubt that Quennel finally went off and left Devan to go on arguing. If Devan could talk Imberline around, that would be swell. If Imberline dropped dead in the bathroom before the argument was settled, that was too bad, but it saved a whole lot of trouble."
"But he tried to tell you I was a fraud."
"A diplomatic fiction. And very well done. If it hadn't been me, he might easily have put it over. And even if it didn't completely go over, it might still have served — with the offer of a wonderful job to wash it down. I could have helped myself to believe it, if I'd wanted to: it would have been a fair enough excuse to stop worrying about you and put my conscience to sleep. But it was no crime."
Calvin Gray shook his head helplessly.
"The man must be insane. It's such incredible hypocrisy."
"It's not hypocrisy. And he's perfectly sane. He just doesn't ask what methods Devan uses, and therefore he doesn't know. He could probably justify them out of his philosophy if he had to, but his great mind is occupied with so many more important things that it's much simpler not to know. I don't suppose Hitler ever does any positive thinking about what happens to prisoners in Dachau, either."
There was silence for a little while, an odd calm silence that made it almost fantastic to think that this was a profoundly philosophical conversation in a bright and comfortable death cell.
It was the girl who brought it back to that.
"You don't think Devan is bluffing at all?" she said.
"Not for an instant," said the Saint gently. "Don't let's waste any effort kidding ourselves about that. Devan will arrange whatever he has to arrange, and he'll do as neat a job as I could do myself."
Her brown eyes that smiled so easily were big and deep and unflinching.
"I feel so guilty," she said, "for dragging you into it."
"Don't worry about it," he answered carelessly. "If it hadn't been this, it would have been something else."
She looked around the room.
"Isn't there any way you could get out?"
He laughed a little, and got back on his feet.
"If there were, I wouldn't be here. I tell you, our Walter isn't an amateur."
But he strolled over to the high embrasure like the one he had noticed in the other room. Standing on a chair, he saw that it sloped downwards towards the outside, and at the outside was a heavy steel Venetian shutter. He guessed that the shelter was built in the side of the hill running down to the Sound, and the embrasure peeped out through the hillside, providing natural ventilation but still safe from the blast of anything but a direct hit on the opening. The steel shutter was set solidly in the concrete, and he took one look at it and stepped down with a shrug.
"Why can't you tell Quennel that you'll accept his offer?" asked Gray. "Then, later on, you'd have a chance—"
"Do you imagine they haven't thought of that?" Simon retorted patiently. "I think Quennel meant every word of his offer, and I think he still means it in spite of everything, and I'm sure he'd live up to it to the letter; but I'm also sure that he'd want to be damn certain that I was the same. I don't know what proof or security he'd want — I can think of half a dozen devices — but it doesn't matter. You can take it that it would be good."