Charteris, Leslie - 25, page 6
"And there, my love," he continued, as the antique apparatus began its glubbering descent, "you will sit in your ivory tower with the night chain on the door, refusing all phone calls and| unbarring the portals only to admit slaves bearing food which you are damn sure you ordered, or when you hear my rich and resonant voice announcing that I have a COD package for you from Saks Fifth Avenue. All characters who demand entrance with telegrams, special deliveries, flowers, plumbing tools, or dancing hears will be ignored. In that way I hope I shall save the expense of having to pay for cleaning a lot of your red corpuscles off the carpet,"
Then he kissed her, because she was still very beautiful looking at him, and other things that were rooted in neither of them as people had forced him into a part that he would never have chosen, and he knew it even while it would never shake the lucid distances of his mind.
It was like kissing an orchid; and the seismic grounding of the elevator was only just in time to save him from the disturbance of discovering what it might mean to kiss an orchid that became alive.
He glanced up and down the street as he followed her to the cab which was fortunately waiting at the stand outside. There was nobody he recognised among the few people within range, but nowhere in Simon Templar's professional habits was there an acceptance of even temporary immunity without precautions.
"Penn Station," he told the driver. The girl looked at him questioningly, but before she could speak he said quickly: "We'll just catch the twelve-thirty, and that'll get us to Washington in plenty of time."
He chattered blithely on about non-existent matters, giving her no chance to make any mistakes, and glancing back from time to time through the rear window. But the traffic was thick enough all the way to make it almost impossible to be certain of identifying any following vehicle. He could only be secure by taking no chances.
He had the fare and tip ready in his hand as the taxi swooped down the ramp and wedged itself into the jam at the unloading platform. Without waiting for the cab to creep any closer, he hauled out the heavy bag, shook his head at a hopeful redcap, grasped Barbara Sinclair by the elbow, and propelled her dextrously and without a pause through the crowded rotunda of the station to the escalators with a nimbleness of dodging and threading that would have brought tears to the eyes of a football coach. In a mere matter of seconds they were out on Seventh Avenue opposite the Pennsylvania Hotel.
"Not that one," said the Saint. "It's too obvious. I've got another place in mind. Let's joy-ride some more."
"But why——"
"Darling, that is a one-hack stand in front of your building. Anyone who was trailing us wouldn't have much trouble finding our last driver."
"Do you think he'd remember? He must have so many passen-gers——"
The Saint sighed.
"Didn't you ever wonder why taxi drivers always haul out a pad at the first red light and start scribbling in it? Did you think they were putting in a quick paragraph on the Great American Novel? Well, they weren't. That's a record that the Law makes them keep. Where from and to. So our driver doesn't need such a memory. With that note to goose him, he'll probably even remember that we were talking about going to Washington. Now if your glamor boy has any respect for my genius, which he may or may not have, he probably won't believe we went to Washington. But he won't be sure. If he's very bright, he will immediately begin to think of what I was talking about just now —the technique of deception by the obvious. And he will begin to feel quite ill. Uncertainty will breed in his mind. And uncertainty breeds fear; and fear often leads clever men to do quite unclever things. Anyway, this will all help to make him miserable, and since he never set me up in a fancy apartment I don't owe him anything. Taxi!"
He signed her into a small residential hotel off Lexington Avenue as the wife of an entirely fictitious Mr Tombs whose sar-cophagal personality had given him much private entertainment for many years, and left her there after he had made sure that she remembered his password seriously.
"You can do your thinking here, in pleasant surroundings," he said. "Search your soul to the core and make your decision. I'm sorry I can't stay to help you, but I have things to do while you wrestle with your private confusions."
Her eyes wandered around the apartment, and then back to him, in a lost sort of way.
"Do you really have to go now?"
She didn't have to ask that, and he wished that he didn't have to make an answer.
"I'm sorry," he repeated with a smile. "But this little war is still going on, and maybe the enemy isn't waiting."
The same bellboy who had just carried the rawhide suitcase in and out of the elevator met him in the small lobby with a somewhat unresolved blend of eagerness and suspicion. The contents of the bag alone weighed a full hundred pounds, and the Saint swung it in one hand as if it had been empty.
"The lining in this damn thing is all coming unstuck," he said casually. "Is there any place near here where I could get it fixed?"
The boy's dilemma resolved itself visibly in his slightly bovine eyes.
"There's a luggage store a couple of blocks down on Lexington," he said; and the Saint gave him another quarter and sauntered out, still airily swinging the bag.
Not being Superman, he was wielding it a little less jauntily when he turned into the store; but apart from a mild feeling of dislocation in his left shoulder he was able to amuse himself a little with the business of making the purchases which he had in mind—one of which was somewhat eccentric, to say the least, and fairly baffling to the proprietor of the adjoining sporting goods emporium.
His next stop was at the Fiftyfirst Street police station, where he had a weighty message to leave for Inspector Fernack. Then he took another cab to the Algonquin, and walked into the lobby just as the gray handsome figure of Allen Uttershaw turned away from the desk and caught sight of him.
" 'The ass will carry his load'," Uttershaw observed cheerily, raising his eyebrows at the Saint's burden. "I was just asking for you."
Simon surrendered his bag to a bellboy to be taken to his room, and shook hands.
"With all the doormen in the Army, the ass has to," he said. "Do you carry a pocket edition of Familiar Quotations?"
"A weakness of mine, I'm afraid," Uttershaw admitted. "But at least it's a little more distinctive than the usual conversational cliches." He sighed deprecatingly. "I was thinking of taking you up on that invitation to lunch."
Simon realised that he was hungry himself, for the prisoner's breakfast with which he had been regaled at some unholy hour had not been planned to induce the vigorous vibrations to which his constitution was accustomed.
"Why don't you?" he said.
They went into the bright paneled dining room and ordered Little Necks and sole veronique, with sherry for a preface. Simon sipped his glass of pale gold Cedro and remarked: "This is a little more restful than the love-nest we met in."
" 'Domestic happiness, thou only bliss of Paradise that has survived the Fall'," said Uttershaw ironically. "I very seldom let my business connections lure me into their private lives, but sometimes one just can't avoid it. I was sorry for you. If you'll forgive my saying it, your method of getting to see him was clever enough in theory, but if you'd known more about Milton Ourley you'd never have tried it that way."
The Saint passed over the assumption that he had engineered his introduction from the start, and appreciated Uttershaw's tacit and friendly elimination of a number of unnecessary pretenses.
"Do you think he could have talked if he'd wanted to?"
"If he'd wanted to. Yes. I don't doubt it. He seems to be getting the iridium he needs, and he certainly isn't getting it from me. And I'm not trying to sound like a great king of commerce, but the fact remains that there just isn't any other legitimate way of getting it that I wouldn't know about."
Simon considered the statement for a few moments while he watched a waiter threading his way through the tables towards them, brandishing platters of clams with the legerdemain of some phenomenal cymbalist. He gazed down at them appreciatively as they settled in front of him—seven beautiful bivalves, glistening with their own juicy freshness. The Saint felt very pleased about clams, in a generous and cosmic way. He was glad he had invented them.
He did careful things with horseradish, tabasco, and lemon.
"By the way," he inquired casually, "has your insurance company offered any reward for the recovery of your iridium?"
"Ten per cent of the value of the amount recovered, I believe." Uttershaw's glance was mildly interrogative in turn. "Is that the motive of your interest?"
"Partly," said the Saint with a slight smile. "But only partly."
He speared a fat young clam from its shell, dunked it in cocktail sauce, and savored its delicate succulence with unmitigated relish.
Uttershaw went through the same motions, but he went on looking at the Saint with a directness that contrived to be quite undisconcerting.
"I didn't miss your exit line last night," he said. "How much did the Linnet sing?"
"A little less than enough," Simon said warily. "You heard about him?"
"I read a morning paper."
"What did you think?"
Uttershaw hunched his shoulders faintly as he went for another clam.
"As a mere amateur at this sort of thing, I wondered whether he was punished for singing too much, or whether he was choked off before he really hit a tune. What's your opinion?"
Simon let the question go unanswered while he tasted his sherry again, and when he put his glass down he seemed to have a convenient impression that he had already answered and could start again on another tack.
"He made quite a lot of headlines," he observed idly.
"fie was quite a figure in his business, you know," Uttershaw J said.
"You must have known him, of course."
"Fairly well. He bought his iridium from my firm—in the good old days when we had some."
"And then?"
Uttershaw spread his hands.
"Then, I suppose, the poor devil dipped into the black market, with the results already noted. You probably know much more about that than I do. How deeply was he mixed up in it?"
Simon waited until the sole was in front of them and he had enjoyed his first taste; and then he said directly, but with the same amiable presupposition of a common intelligence: "How would it be if you told me why I should tell you anything, before you ask too many questions?"
"That's fair enough," Uttershaw agreed easily. "As I explained last night, I've got a financial interest. 'The loss of wealth is loss of dirt', if you believe John Heywood—or should I have said Christopher Morley?—but it happens to be my dirt, and I think that's a responsibility as well as a privilege. The other interest is —well, I've got to be trite and call it patriotic. Then, I like you as a person; and I'd like you to bring this off. I'd like to help you, if I could; but I don't want to sound foolish by making great revelations which might be all old and stale to you."
"For instance," said the Saint, just as pleasantly, "what was the great revelation you had in mind?"
"I was wondering if you'd formed any definite conclusions about Ourley."
Simon enjoyed more mouthfuls. He was hungry. But he didn't miss any of the lines of sober anxiety in the other's thinly sculptured face.
"He appears to be a little man with a large wife," he said trivially.
" 'And though his favorite seat be feeble woman's breast'," quoted Uttershaw mournfully. "Milton really does prefer them feeble, and with all that—shall we say?—giddiness of hers, Tiny Titania is as tough as her own stays. And while she likes her own dancing partners, she watches him like a hawk. He isn't even allowed to have a typist under forty in his office."
The Saint had a sudden strange creeping feeling in his spine.
"Does Milton take it and like it," he asked, "or does he still manage to get his fun?"
LJttershaw shook his head deprecatingly.
"I wouldn't know about that," he said. "I told you we were never very close."
"Didn't he ever talk?"
LJttershaw pursed his lips as he brought a hand up to his lean jaw and stroked his face meditatively.
"There was one time . . ." he said slowly, and stopped.
"Yes?"
"Oh, hell, it doesn't amount to anything. There was a stag affair at some escapist club for downtrodden business men that he belongs to, and he insisted on dragging me along. For some reason or other I couldn't get out of it, or perhaps I didn't think of an excuse quickly enough. Ourley . . . but it was all so alcoholic that it really doesn't mean a thing."
To the Saint, it felt as if the air about the table was charged with the static electricity of an approaching storm, but he knew that it was only a mystic prescience within himself which was generating that sense of overloaded tension.
"Suppose you give me a chance to decide that for myself," he suggested genially.
"Well, Ourley was pretty tight—most of them were—and he cornered me and babbled a lot of damn foolishness. I guess getting out from under Tiny's iron fist for even that one night had unsettled him, and given him delusions of grandeur. 'In vino veritas', I suppose. Anyway, he was in quite a Casanova mood. Told me he had a key that Tiny didn't know about, and how he was really much too smart for her, and all that sort of thing. I didn't pay much attention, and I got away as soon as I could. Next morning he called me up and explained that he'd had too much to drink, which was obvious, and said he'd been talking a lot of nonsense and would I forget it. I never gave it another thought, and of course I wouldn't . . ." Uttershaw broke off, and smiled rather sheepishly. "But that's just what I am doing, isn't it?"
8 The Saint ate a little more, and scarcely noticed what he was doing. The creepy sensation in his backbone had spread out over his whole body, so that every bone in him felt faintly tingling and detached, and his brain was sitting up in a corner of the ceiling moving them with strings.
It was at that moment, for the first time, that a whole chain of the crazy pieces in his jigsaw fell together and began to make a section of a recognisable picture which did curious things to his breathing.
But all that was within himself again, and his face was a study in untroubled bronze.
"I wouldn't worry about its going any further," he said care-lessly; and the other nodded, but went on looking at him with a lightly interrogative frown.
"Naturally. But I can't help wondering what made you ask."
"It just came into my head," said the Saint. "On the other hand, I'm wondering why you were thinking about Ourley."
"This isn't easy to say," Uttershaw replied hesitantly. "But I do know from my business dealings with him—and you may have gathered the same impression yourself—that Milton is a bit 'too grasping to care for mere delight'. And it seems to me that any man would need some very good reason for taking Titania to his bosom and keeping her there. ... I know that some of Milton's financial manipulations have been—well, what you might call complicated. At least, complicated enough for him to keep most of his holdings in his wife's name."
"You're sure of that?"
"Quite sure. As a matter of fact, there are those who would believe that Tiny herself has had a lot to do with the planning and staging of some of those manipulations. There are skeptics who maintain that Tiny's giddiness is more or less of a pose. Although if that's true, the stakes must be very high for a woman to make such an awful caricature of herself."
"If Tiny is Milton's partner behind the scenes, and the duenna of the do-re-mi," Simon remarked thoughtfully, "it must make his home life even more interesting."
" 'Dire was the noise of conflict'." Uttershaw laughed shortly. "You know, I'm still embarrassed about going on with this."
Simon moved his plate a little away from him with an unconscious gesture of finality, and reached for his Pall Malls. He extended the pack towards his guest, and said: "Let me try to help you. How far do you think Milton would go to create a new business life of his own?"
Uttershaw blinked before he bent to accept the Saint's proffered light. He straightened up and exhaled his first puff of smoke a little gustily.
"I hadn't even thought that far," he said, and suddenly he looked shocked and strained. "Do you really mean what I think you're getting at?"
"I was just asking."
"But that's unbelievable. No man could build up anything like this black market alone. He'd have to have at least some associates. And I mean plain criminal associates. A man like Ourley just wouldn't have any connections like that."
"Men like Ourley have had them before. It isn't such a hell of a long time ago that speakeasy proprietors and bootleggers were quite social characters. You get to know a lot of queer people. Big business sometimes deals with queer people, when there are labor troubles or the competition gets rough. The impresarios who put on stag shows at escapist clubs for downtrodden business men move in and out of a world of queer people. Any man can make any connections he wants, if he wants them seriously enough."
Uttershaw made a helpless sort of movement with his hands.
"It seems so fantastic—to think of Milton Ourley as a criminal master mind. Why, he's—he's——"
"He's what?" Simon prompted quietly.
"He's such a dull, irascible, unimaginative, uninventive sort of windbag!" Uttershaw protested. "All he thinks about is how much money he's got, or how much he might make if it wasn't for Roosevelt; and what Tiny is doing with her latest gigolo or how he could be kept late at the office and go out on the town with the boys."
"A master mind," said the Saint didactically, "doesn't always go around with an illuminated forehead. That's the first thing to remember in this detective racket—if you read any stories. Besides which, he can really be just as stupid and boring as anyone else outside of his own field of brilliance. Why shouldn't he be? The greatest bacteriologist in the world could look like a half-wit in a gathering of structural engineers. And he could even be a pain in the neck at a soiree of other bacteriologists. He could be addicted to thunderous belching, or insisting on describing every stroke of his last golf game, without——"
