“It’s a pity it was so absorbing, or I might have felt you breathing down my neck.”
“Obviously it had not occurred to you that anyone might be following you: therefore you must believe that in this affair, whatever it is, you have all the initiative.”
“Did Emile Gaboriau get any of his inspiration from you?”
“He could have, but I was not so old then... Eh bien at last you discover Pierrot-le-Fût. He does not recognize you, and you are not wearing a false beard, so one deduces easily that he is not aware of your interest in him. But although you hardly exist for anyone else, you can be so skilful at submerging yourself on the rare occasions when you choose to, it is you I am watching from my concealment outside. I suspect you identify him from a picture or a description that has been given you, since it is manifest that you have never met, and the identification is ratified for you when his friends call him Pierrot. I see you studying him closely from behind your magazine, for a long time, until you seem to be satisfied and you leave.”
“And what makes you think I was looking for this Pierrot character, out of all the others I must have looked at while you were spying on me?”
“You did not look at any others in the same way. And after you had finished studying him, you left, and you did not try any more bars. You hailed this taxi and asked to be taken to your hotel. When I heard that, I knew that you had accomplished your object, at least for the present, and I allowed myself to intrude on you.”
Simon threw back his head and laughed almost inaudibly.
“If you don’t qualify for some sort of award, I’ll have to institute one for you,” he said. “What would you think of calling it the Prix Poulet?... Now, let me tell you. I’ve had such a bellyful of some of these elegant places where one is accustomed to find me, as you put it, that I had an overwhelming urge tonight to go slumming. I wanted to sit in some dull dives and look at some drab characters of the type that I sometimes ran into in the bad old days. Obviously I had to try to make myself inconspicuous, or at least not too much like an American tourist. But things don’t seem the same as they used to seem. Or maybe it’s me who is getting old. But I sat in a couple of joints without finding anything to be nostalgic about, and then in the last one there was this Pierrot, a survival from what seems like another era. I watched him for a while, and concluded that he was no longer amusing, only a gross bullying pig. I decided to stop trying to recapture the past and return to the soporific civilization of the Champs Élysées.”
Quercy nodded sympathetically.
“I understand you perfectly,” he said. “And therefore I have to warn you that although Pierrot-le-Fût is without doubt a pig of outstanding swinishness, the responsibility for slaughtering him must be left to a French court and the authorized machinery of the State.”
“When do you think they will get around to it?”
“That is not for me to predict, Monsieur Templar. But after this, if anything violent should happen to Pierre Norval that cannot instantly be attributed to his equally abominable associates, I predict that I shall be obliged to investigate every possibility that it was an act of the Saint.”
“Do you mean,” asked the Saint incredulously, “that you don’t believe me?”
The Inspector rubbed his sad sunken jowls forbearingly.
“We have been through more than one case together, and I have learned a great respect and fondness for you, mon cher ami. But I do not forget the record which was the first thing I had to study about you, and I do not think you have quite overcome all your bad habits — especially when you mock a serious policier.”
They had arrived at the hotel. Simon got out, and said with unabated impudence, “Must we make it such an early night? How about bringing your tape measure and we’ll walk over and process the G-strings at the Crazy Horse Saloon?”
But Quercy shook his head and remained in the cab.
“Merci. I am too comfortable now, so I shall ride the rest of the way home. But I beg you, do not forget what I have said. For I shall not forget.”
“Everyone should have his beautiful memories, Archimède,” said the Saint.
But upstairs in his suite, he paced the floor for half an hour before he could relax enough even to lie down on the bed.
The wild coincidence that Quercy had chanced to spot him in the first café, and had deployed such unexpected talents for analytical observation, had transformed with one malign stroke what should have been a virtually kindergarten exercise in meritorious homicide into a disconcertingly serious hazard.
The Saint was even less inclined to allow Pierrot-le-Fût to continue to pollute the universe than he had been when he set out for Montmartre that night, but he had no intention of losing his head over the project, figuratively or literally — and Inspector Quercy had made the latter possibility much too explicit for complacency.
The mopping-up of Pierre Norval would have to be as clean a job as the Saint had ever engineered.
It was not until he was horizontal, but still tussling frustratedly with the problem, that he had a sudden dazzling recollection of a certain cocktail party and the pompously infuriating Dr Wilmot Javers.
There was a BEA flight to London at eleven o’clock in the morning which he was able to catch with no indecent scrambling, and thanks to the anomaly of daylight-saving time he arrived in England a little earlier than he had left France. He called Dr Javers from the first telephone he could reach at the airport, and was fortunate to catch him at his office.
“You remember, you warned me your puzzle would haunt me,” he said, with shamelessly hypocritical humility. “I didn’t believe you at the time, but eventually it did. But I simply don’t have the technical knowledge to solve it. Anyway, this being the first time I’ve been back here since you gave me that headache, the top-priority item on my list is to get you to put me out of my misery.”
He could hear the man’s jocund gurgle of self-satisfaction. “I remember our little talk perfectly. And I think you’ve suffered enough. Can you dine with me tonight at my club? It just happens to be the evening I keep free for my scientific reading, but for an occasion like this the Medical Journal can wait!”
Dr Javers was just as unctuously patronizing when they met, and maliciously refused to be the first to bring up the reason for their meeting. Simon out-waited him through two Dry Sacks and a lot of small talk, and finally had the minor satisfaction of forcing the other to advert to the topic after they had sat down to dinner.
“So you couldn’t stand it any longer, eh? You admit that was one mystery that stumped you?”
“You can have it in writing if you like. But don’t make me rack my feeble brain any longer.”
Dr Javers took his time, sipping a spoonful of soup and savouring it deliberately along with his moment of triumph.
“The subject was poisoned by carbon tetrachloride — otherwise, the commonest kind of cleaning fluid.” Simon stared at him, blinking.
“I thought that was supposed to be harmless. Unless he drank it. But I’m positive you never gave me any hint that he might have done that.”
“I didn’t, and he didn’t. The clue I gave you was the lipstick stain on his coat. Although it was comparatively innocent, he probably thought it would be better to get rid of it than have to explain it to his wife. He got out a bottle of this cleaner and started to work on it. But, being in the condition he was, he knocked the bottle over and spilt what there was in it. After that, he gave up and went to bed.”