Saint Steps In (20 page)

Orphaned
at twenty-one, Quennel had sold the drug store and gone north. He went to law
school, graduated, joined a
New York firm of corporation attorneys, worked hard and
brilliantly, became a partner at
twenty-eight. Married, and
sired
Andrea. Six years later, the deaths or retirements of the senior partners had
made him the head of the firm. Two years later, he became the receiver in
bankruptcy of an obscure
manufacturing
drug company in Cincinnati. One year from
that, after a series of highly complicated
transactions which
had
never been legally disputed, he was a majority stockholder
and the firm was getting on its feet
again. That was the begin
ning of the great Quennel Chemical Corporation.

The
further developments were even more complicated in
detail—in fact, Treasury experts had spent large sums
of public money in efforts to unravel them—but fairly simple in outline.
The obscure manufacturing drug company
had prospered and
grown
until it was one of the most important in the country.
It had absorbed small competitors and enlarged its
interests.
Somewhere quite early in
the tale, Mrs. Quennel, who had
been
an earnest art student of Greenwich Village, found that
her married life was unbearably
deficient in romance, and left
for
Reno with a Russian poet of excitingly Bolshevist philos
ophy. Encouraged rather than
discouraged, Hobart Quennel
left his law business entirely to the junior partners he had
taken, and devoted his legal genius exclusively to his own
commerical
interests. Over the following
years, and out of a maze
of loans,
liquidations, mergers, stock exchange manipulations, mortgages, flotations, and
holding companies, Quenco finally emerged—an octopus with factories in four
different states, no
longer concerned
only with such simple products as aspirin
and lovable laxatives, but branching out into all the fields of
fertilisers, vitamins, synthetics, and plastics,
and presenting im
peccable balance
sheets full of astronomical figures in which Mr. Quennel’s personal
participation ran to millions of dollars
a year.

His present life was busy but well upholstered. He kept the
reins of Quenco firmly in his hands,
but found time to belong
to a long list of golf, chess, bridge, polo, and country clubs.
For several years before the war he had
regularly taken a sum
mer
vacation in Europe, accompanied by Andrea as soon as
she was old enough. He was one of those Americans who
once
sang the praises of Mussolini
because he made the trains run
on
time. He had rescued Andrea from three or four escapades
which had made news—one concerned with
a Prussian baron,
one with
the breaking of bottles over the heads of gendarmes
in the casino at Deauville, and one with an accountant
in Chi
cago whose wife had
old-fashioned ideas about the sanctity of
the home. There was a note that several of Andrea’s
other
liaisons which had not
become public scandals seemed to have
been impartially divided between her father’s business asso
ciates and business rivals. Hobart
Quennel himself was a model
of
genial good behavior. He was a Shriner, staunch Republican, and a dabbler in
state and national politics. He also had been the subject of a Senate
investigation, a defendant under
the
Sherman Act, and an implacable feudist of the Labor rela
tions Board; but with seasoned forensic
skill he had managed
to emerge as nothing worse than a rugged individualist who
had built up a great industry without
ever being accused of
robbing
hungry widows, who was a diehard opponent of gov
ernment interference, and who had to be respected even
if disagreed with. Curiously, he had made public denunciations
of the America First Committee, and
had voluntarily pio
neered in
the compulsory fingerprinting of employees and in
laying off all Axis nationals even before there had
been any
official moves in that direction.

“A deep guy,” thought the Saint. “A very deep guy
indeed.” He had his own interpretation of some of the items in Quen
nel’s biography. He could see the
connection between the mid
dle-class beginning and the gigantic plant at Mobile, the local
boy making good. He could see the link
between the Bolshevik
poet and the Mussolini railroad schedules. He could even tie up the
bourgeois Southern background with the advancement
of Walter Devan as the Imperial Wizard of a strictly
private
Ku Klux Klan. But all of
that still didn’t tarnish Hobart Quen
nel’s unimpeachable Americanism, misguided as you might
think it, or the fact that even the
most scurrilous attacks on
him
had never been able to attach him adhesively to any subversive faction or
foreign-controlled activity.

Hobart Quennel was indisputably a very clever man; but
could he have been as clever as that, for so many years,
exposed
all the time to any sniper who
wanted to load a gun for him?

The Saint lowered his drink an inch, and made himself ac
knowledge that something he had been
looking for was still
missing. And for the first time he began to wonder whether
he had been wrong from the start. An easily preconceived
idea,
even a series of very ready deductions,
were desperately tempting
to coast on
 
and glutinously hard to shake off once the ride
had started. But facts were facts; and the dossiers in his hands
hadn’t been compiled by dewy-eyed romanticists. If
Hobart
Quennel had even been more than
essentially polite to any
Nazi or
known fifth columnist, the slip would almost certainly
have been recorded.

And yet …

Simon thought about Andrea Quennel again. She had the
build and beauty and coloring that
Wagner was probably
dreaming
of before the divas took over. She might easily have
been flattered by the ideals of the Herrenvolk …
There had
been the Prussian baron… And definitely she was the Diana
Barry who had commissioned Schindler
…
If you disre
garded the rules of legal evidence, her own father had
transparently taken advantage of her glandular propensities before.
In the same way that she had been
using them ever since the
Saint
met her.

That
was so much. like the words she had used herself that
he could almost hear her saying them again. He saw
her lifelike in front of him, her warm rich lips and the too-perfect
contours of her body; and the
remembrance was not helpful
to dwell on.

He lighted a cigarette and picked up the last docket of the
sheaf ——
the
story of the man who was still
the most nebulous
personality of all.

Frank Imberline.

Born in New York’s most expensive maternity home. A
silver spoon case. Private school.
Princeton. Colonial Club.
Graduated
minima cum laude,
being much too busy for affairs of the higher
intellect. Was then drafted by his father into the
service of Consolidated Rubber. Served a six-year
apprentice
ship, being driven sluggishly through all the
different depart
ments of the business,
Steadied down, acquired a stodgy and
even pompous sense of
responsibility, became an executive, a
Rotarian
a member of the Akron Chamber of Commerce;
eventually became Consolidated Rubber’s head or figurehead.
The latter seemed more probable, for there was a
board of
directors with plenty of shrewd experience behind them. The
character estimate of Imberline said:
“Generally considered
honest and
well-meaning, but dull.” He played golf in the
nineties, subscribed
to all the good causes, and could always be
depended
on for a salvo of impressive and well-rounded
clich
é
s at any public dinner. His
farthest traveling had been to Miami Beach. He had no labor battles, no
quarrels with any
Government bureaus.
He did everything according to what it
said
in the book. His only political activity had been when some group persuaded him
to run for Mayor on what was
vaguely called a “reform ticket”:
he lost the election by a com
fortable
minority, and stated afterwards that politics were too
confusing for him. Certainly the things that Simon
had heard him say made that sound plausible. All the rest of his career—
if such a swift-sounding word could be applied to
anything so
rutted and ponderous—had
been devoted to Consolidated Rub
ber,
from that early enforced apprenticeship until the time
when he had resonantly donated his services to the
National
Emergency.
And that was that.
Nothing else.

Not
the barest hint of sharp practice, corruption, chicanery, rebellion, conniving,
strongarming, conspiracy, political ambition, or adventuring in social
philosophies. “Generally consid
ered honest and well-meaning, but dull
…”

Of
all the suspect records, his was the most open and humdrum and unassailable.

Which turned everything inside out and upside down.
The Saint lay back with his glass held
between his knees and
blew
chains of spaced smoke-rings towards the ceiling. Once
again he put all the pieces together, fitting and
matching them
against all the facts that
he had learned and memorised, esti
mating and analyzing with the utter impersonality of a
mathematician. And only getting back again and again to the same
irreconcilable equations.

He got up and freshened the melted ice in the remains of
his drink, and lighted another
cigarette. For several minutes
he paced the room with monotonous precision, up and down
on one seam of the carpet like a slow
shuttle in a machine.

He
could cogitate his brain into a pretzel, but it wouldn’t
advance him a single millimeter. He
would be in the same fore
doomed position as an Aristotelian philosopher trying to dis
cover the nature of the universe with
no other instrument
than pure
and transcendent logic. But one renegade factor
might be within a few yards of him at that moment, and
if he
left it untouched it would
only be his own fault that the solution didn’t come out.

There
had been moments like that in many of his adventures
—there nearly always seemed to be. Moments when the fragile
swinging balance of thought became a maddening
pendulum
that only physical action
would stop. And this was one of them.

From there on he was through with theories. He knew what
he knew, he had dissected all the
arguments, he had pinned
down
and anatomised all the ifs and buts. He would never
have to go back to them. The solution and the answers
were all
there, if he could beat
them out of the raw material. The loose ends, the contradictions, the gaps,
would all merge and blend
and fill out and explain themselves as the shape forged. But
from there on, win or lose, right or
wrong, the rest was action.

He
still had time before he had to meet Andrea.

He
put on his tie, his holster, and his coat, and left his room.
He went a few yards down the corridor
and knocked on the
door of
1013.
             

4

Imberline was in his shirtsleeves, his waistcoat unbuttoned.
He recognised the Saint in a surprised
and startled way that
was
too slow in maturing to influence the course of events.
Simon was inside the door and closing it for him before he
had decided on his response.

“You’ll begin to think this is a habit of mine, Frank,” said
the Saint apologetically. “But honestly, I do make appoint
ments when I have time.”

“This
is going too far,” Imberline spluttered belatedly. “I
told you I’d see you and your—er—-Miss
Gray when I got back
to Washington. I don’t expect you to follow me all over the country.
Even if it’s a hotel, a man’s house is his castle——
”