Saint Steps In (2 page)

DON’T TRY TO SEE IMBERLINE

“I never
wanted to see him,” said the Saint.

“You don’t have to. But I’ve got an appointment with him
at eight o’clock.”

“Just who is
Imberline?”

“He’s in the WPB.”

The name began to sound faintly familiar; although Simon Templar had
very little more general knowledge of the multi
tudinous personnel of the various Washington bureaus
than
any average citizen.

He said: “Hasn’t he heard about making the world safe for
the forty-hour week?”

“Maybe
not.”

“And somebody doesn’t want you to put him wise.”

“I
don’t know, exactly. All I know is that the note you’re
looking at was tossed into my lap
about twenty minutes ago.”
,
Simon glanced at the paper again. It was wrinkled and
crumpled as it should have been, if it had been made
into a
ball, as the girl implied.
He said: “You didn’t see where it
came from?”

“Of course
not.”

He
admitted that. It could easily have been done. And just
as readily he admitted the cold
spectral fingers that slid caress
ingly up his spine. It was right and inevitable, it always
had
been, that adventure
should overtake him like that, just as
naturally and just as automatically, as soon as he was
“at li
berty” again. But
when it was too easy and too automatic, also,
it could have other angles … He was precisely as
relaxed
and receptive as a
seasoned guerilla entering a peaceful valley.

“As
a matter of interest,” he murmured, “is this the first you’ve heard
about this conspiracy to keep Imberline away
from your dazzling beauty?”

“Oh,
no,” she said. She had regained her composure now
and her voice was almost bland. “I had a phone call this morn
ing that was much more explicit. In fact, the man
said that if I wanted to live to be a grandmother I’d better start working
at it now—and he meant by going home and staying
there.”

“It sounds like rather a dull method,” said the Saint.

“That’s why
I spoke to you,” she said.

The turn of his
lips was frankly humorous.

“As a potential grandfather?”

“Because I
thought you might be able to get me to see Im
berline
in one piece.”

Simon turned in his chair and looked around the room.

He saw an average section of Official Washington at cocktail
time—senators, representatives,
bureaucrats, brass hats, men
with strings to
pull and men with things to see. Out of the bab
ble of conversation, official secrets reverberated through the
air in deafening sotto voces that would have
gladdened
the hearts of a whole army
of fifth columnists and spies, and
probably
did. But all of them shared the sleek solid look of
men in authority and security, bravely bearing up
under the
worry of wondering where their next hundred grand was com
ing from. None of them had the traditional
appearance of
men who could spend
their spare time carving pretty girls
into
small sections.

The dialogue
would have sounded perfect in a vacuum; but
somehow,
from where the Saint sat, none of it sounded right.
He turned back to Madeline Gray.

“This may sound a bit out of line,” he remarked, “but I
like
to know things in advance.
You don’t happen to have a heart
interest in this Imberline that his spouse or current girl friend
might object to?”

She shook her head decisively.

“Heavens, no!”

“Then
what do you have to see him about?” he asked, and
tried not to seem perfunctory.

“I don’t know whether I should tell you that.”

The Saint was
still very patient. And then he began to laugh inside, it was still fun, and
she was really interesting to look at, and after all you couldn’t have
everything.

A round stocky man who must once have been a door-to-
door salesman crowded heavily past
the table to a vacant seat
nearby
and began shouting obstreperously at the nearest
waiter. Simon eyed him, decided that he was
unusually objec
tionable, and consulted his watch.

“You’ve
still got more than an hour to spare,” he said. “Let’s
have some food and talk it over.”

They
had food. He ordered lobster Cardinal and a bottle of
Chateau Olivier. And they talked about everything
else under
the sun. It passed the time
surprisingly quickly. She was
fun
to talk to, although nothing was said that either of them
would ever remember. He enjoyed it much more than the soli
tary meal he had expected. And he was almost
sorry when they
were at their coffee,
and for the sake of the record he had to
call a showdown.

He said:
“Darling, I’ve enjoyed every minute of this, and I’ll
forgive you anything, but if you really wanted me
to help you it must have occurred to you that I’d want to have some idea
what I was helping. So let’s finish the story
about Imberline and the mysterious tosser of notes. Since you’ve told me that
Romance hasn’t reared its lovely head, that you’re
not a news
paper gal nor a spy, I’m a
bit at a loss.”

Her dark eyes studied him quietly for several seconds.

Then she searched through her purse again

“A filing system,” Simon murmured, “would be
indicated.”

The
girl’s hand came up with something about six inches
long, like a thick piece of tape, and a sort of shiny pale trans
lucent orange in color. She passed it across the
table.

Simon took it and fingered it experimentally. It was soft but
resistant, tough against the pressure
of a thumbnail, flexible
and—elastic. He stretched it and snapped it back a couple of
times, and then his gaze was cool and
estimating on her.

“Rubber?” he asked.

“Synthetic.”

His eyebrows hardly moved.

“What kind?”

“Something quite new. It’s made mostly of sawdust, vinegar,
milk—plus, of course, two or three
other important things.
But it isn’t derived from butadiene.”

“That must be a load off its mind,” he remarked. “What
in
the world is butadiene?”

Her unaffected solemnity could have been comic if it had
not seemed so completely natural.

“I thought
everybody knew that,” she said. “Butadiene is
something you make out of petroleum, or grain alcohol. It’s
the base of the buna synthetic rubbers. Of course,
that might
be a bit technical for you.”

“It might,” he admitted. He wondered whether she had
been taken in by his wide-eyed
wonderment or not. He rather
thought not.

“The thing that matters,” she said, “is that the
production
of buna is still pretty
experimental, and in any case it involves
a fairly elaborate and expensive plant. This stuff
can be
mixed in a bathtub,
practically. My father invented it. His
name is Calvin Gray. You’ve probably never heard of
him, but
he’s rated one of the top research chemists in
the country.”

“And you’re here to get Imberline interested in this—to
get his WPB sanction?”

She nodded.

“You make it sound frightfully easy. But it hasn’t been so
far… My father started working on
this idea years ago, but
then
natural rubber was so cheap that it didn’t seem worth
going on with. When the war started and the Japs
began mov
ing in on Thailand, he saw what was coming and
started work
ing again.”

“He must have hundreds of people rooting for him.”

“Is that what you think? After he published his first results, his
laboratory was burned out once, and blown up twice. Accidents, of course. But
he knows, and I know, that they were
accidents that had been—arranged. And then, when he had his
process perfected, and he came here to try to give it to
the Government—you should have seen
the runaround they
gave
him.”

“I can imagine it.”

“Of course, part of the brush-off he got here might have
been his fault. He’s quite an
individualist, and he hasn’t read
those books about winning friends and influencing people.
At
the same time,
pardoxically, he’s rather easily discouraged. He
ended up by damning everybody and going home.”

“And so?”

“I came back
here for him.”

Simon handed the sample back to her with a tinge of regret.
It was a lovely performance, and he
didn’t believe a word of i
t. He wished that
some day some impressionable and person
able
young piece of loveliness would have the outrageous
honesty to come up to him and simply say “I
think you’re
marvelous and I’d give anything to see you in action”,
without
trying to feed him an inferior plot
to work on. He felt really
sorry about
it, because she seemed like nice people and he
could have liked her.

“If
you think you’re on the spot, you ought to talk to the
FBI,” he said. “Or if you’re just getting
the old runaround,
squawk
to one of the papers. If you pick the right one, they’ll pour their hearts into
a story like that.”

She
stood up so suddenly that some of his coffee spilled in
the saucer. She looked rather fine
doing that, and the waste
of it hurt him.

“I’m sorry,” she said huskily. “It was a silly idea,
wasn’t it?
But it was nice to have dinner with you, just
the same.”

He sat there quite sympathetically while she walked away.

The dining room seemed unusually dull after she had dis
appeared. Perhaps, he thought, he had
been rather uncouthly
hasty. After all,
he had been enjoying himself. He could have
gone
along with the gag.

But
then, life was so short, and there were so many impor
tant things.

He was sitting there, pondering over the more important
things, when a group of men bore down
on him, crowding their way through the too-narrow aisles between the tables.
In the van of the group was a large
person with a domineer
ing air, and Simon knew that he was almost certain to be
jostled, as he had been jostled in the cocktail lounge.

He was getting
tired of being bumped and shoved by individuals who seemed to get the idea
that the “DC” after Wash
ington
meant “disregard courtesy”. He prepared himself for
the
inevitable encounter.

The big man did not disappoint him. Simon felt the pressure
on the back of his chair, and a coat
sleeve ruffled the hair on
the
back of his head. He shoved back his chair quickly and
beamed inwardly as he heard the involuntary
“oof” that the
big man gave as
the chairback dug into his stomach. Templar
stretched
his lean length upright and turned to the man he
had effectively body-checked with his chair.

“Terribly
sorry,” he said very politely.

The
big man looked at him. He had the crimson-mottled face of a person who enjoyed
good food, good liquor, and
good cigars, and
had had too many of each. His little eyes re
garded
Simon speculatively for a moment, and there might
have been a flare behind them, or there might not
have been,
before he wreathed his face in a beaming smile.

“It’s
all right,” he said. “Accidents will happen, you know.”

“Yes,
indeed,” Simon murmured.

The others in the
party, were waiting respectfully, almost
reverently,
for the big man to proceed. The man whom Simon had prodded with the chair gave
the Saint another enigmatic
glance and then turned away. His disciples
followed.

“But Mr. Imberline,” one of them cried in a voice that ap
proached a
wail. “Think of
the inconvenience that this pro
gram will mean to certain parties.”