Saint Steps In (28 page)

He didn’t even bother about calling Jetterick for a double
check. He didn’t need that melancholy
confirmation. He knew.

As for calling Jetterick or Wayvern to make them do some
thing—that was just dreamy thinking.
That would mean start
ing
all over again. And there was nothing more to start with
than there had been before, when Calvin Gray vanished. You
could have all the microscopes and all the
organization on
earth, but you
couldn’t do much If nobody had seen anyone
and nothing was left behind and there was nothing to start
with. Not for a long time, anyway. And that might
be much
too long.

And under the
handicaps of democratic justice, you couldn’t
make
inspirational forays in all directions in the hope of blast
ing out something that would justify them. You
couldn’t take the bare word and extravagant theories even of a Saint as a
sound basis for hurling reckless charges against
a man with the
power and prominence
of Hobart Quennel. Because if you
were
pulling a boner it would be just too damn bad about
you.

Unless your name
happened to be Simon Templar, the Saint, and you never had given a damn.

Simon
thought all that out, and hammered the shape of it
into his mind.

The Ungodly had thought it out, too. Just as he’d hoped they
would. But sooner.

And
now he was an outlaw again, nothing else; and any
riposte he made could only be in his own way.

It was five o’clock when he called Westport.

He wondered if
she would be there. But she was. Her voice
answered
the ring, as if she had been expecting it. She might
have been expecting it, too. He could take that in
his stride,
now, with everything
else. He was on his own now, regardless
of Hamilton or anyone. And all the hell-for-leather brigand
lilt of the old days was rousing in his voice and
edging into
the piratical hardening of his blue eyes as he greeted her.

“Andrea,” he said. “Thanks. For everything. And I
decided
to take you up on that
invitation. I’ll be over for dinner.”

6. How Hobart
Quennel discoursed about Busi
ness,

and Calvin Gray
did what the Saint told
Him.

Mr.
Hobart Quennel looked no more like a millionaire than
any other millionaire; and probably he was just as
secretly
proud of the fact as any
other up-to-date millionaire. He was
one of hundreds of modern refutations of the old crude Communist
caricatures of a captialist, so that
Simon Templar won
dered
whether there might be some congenital instinct of
camouflage in the cosmogony of millionaires which
caused
them as a race to keep one
jump ahead of their unpopular
prototypes. It was, as if in these days of ruthless social
consciousness a millionaire required some kind of protective col
oration to enable him to succeed in
his d
é
class
é
profession.

Mr. Quennel was
physically a fairly big and well-built man,
with
his daughter’s fair hair sprinkled with gray and balding back from his
forehead, and the same pale blue inexpressive
eyes. But he gave no
impression of being either frightening or furtive, for in these days of higher
education it is no longer so
easy as it may
once have been to bludgeon the crisp cabbage out of the public purse, and a man
who looks either frighten
ing or
furtive has too many strikes against him when he bids
for the big bullion. His face was smooth and bony
without
being cadaverous, so that its
fundamental hardness was calm and without strain. His clothes were good when
you noticed them, but it was just as easy not to notice them at all. He had
no softening around the middle, for that mode is
also out of
fashion among
millionaires, who are conspicuous among seden
tary workers for being able to afford all the trainers and
masseurs and golf clubs and other exercising
appliances that
can be prescribed to restrain the middle-aged equator.
He was
that new and fascinating evolution of
the primitive tycoon
who simply worked at the job of being a
millionaire, as un-excitedly as other men worked at the job of being
bricklayers,
and probably with no more
grandiose ideas of his place in the
engine
of civilisation. It was just a job in which you weighed
different
factors and did different things in different ways, and
you had a different wage scale and standard of living; but then
bricklayers were different again from cowboys, but they didn’t
confuse their personal reactions by thinking about
cowboys.

He
shook hands with the Saint, and said “I’m very glad to
meet you,” and personally poured Martinis from the
shaker he
had been stirring.

He had a pleasant voice and manner, dignified but cordial,
neither ingratiating nor domineering. He had the soothing
con
fidence of a man who didn’t need to ask
favors, or to go out of his way to offer them. He was a guy you could like.
Simon
Templar liked him in his own
way, and felt just as comfortable.
He
sat down on the sofa beside Andrea Quennel, and crossed his long legs, and
said: “This is quite a place you have here.”

“Like it?” She sounded as if she wanted it to be liked, as if
it were a new dress. “But I think you’d like Pinehurst much
more. I do. It’s more sort of outdoorsy.”

She
looked as sort of outdoorsy as an orchid. She wore one
of those house-coat-dinner-dress effects that would
get by any
where between a ballroom
and a boudoir and still always have
a faint air of belonging somewhere else. It had a high
strapped
Grecian bodice line that
did sensational things for her sensa
tional torso. She had opened the door when he arrived, and
it had seemed to him that her classic
face and melting receptive mouth were like candy in a confectioner’s window,
lovely
and desirable but without
volition. He knew now that this
was a fault of his own perception, but he was still inching his way
through the third dimension that had to bring the whole picture into sudden life
and clarity.

It felt a little unearthly to be meeting her like that, in this
atmosphere of ordinary and pleasant
formality, after the way
they had last seen each other. He wondered what she was think
ing. But he had been able to read
nothing in her face, not even
embarrassment;
and they hadn’t been alone together for a moment. He didn’t know whether to be
glad of that or not.
They watched each other inscrutably, like a pair of cats at opposite
ends of a wall.

There was one
other person who had to be there to complete
the
pattern, and a few minutes later he came in, looking very
much freshly scrubbed and brushed, in a plain blue
suit that was a little tight around the chest and biceps, so that he had
some of the air of a stevedore dressed up in his
Sunday best.
Mr. Quennel patted him on
the shoulder and said: “Hullo,
Walter
… You’ve met Mr. Templar, haven’t you?”

“I certainly
have.” Walter Devan shook hands with a cordial
grin. “1 didn’t know who I was picking a fight with at that
time, though, or I’d have been a bit more careful
about butt
ing in.”

“I’m
glad you weren’t,” Simon said just as cordially, “or
you might have done much too good a job.”

“What do you think about the news from Russia?” Quennel
asked.

So
it was to be played like that. And the Saint was quite
ready to go along with it that way. Perhaps he even
preferred
it. He had quite a little
background to fill in, and in it he knew
that there were things which were important to his
philosophy,
even if anyone else would
have found them incidental. He
could wait now for the explosive action which was ultimately
the only way in which the difference
of basic potential could be resolved, like the difference between two
thunderclouds. But before that he was glad to explore and weigh the charge
that was going to match itself
against his own.

He
lighted a cigarette, and relaxed, and for the first time
since the beginning of the episode he knew that it had a
sig
nificance beyond any simple violence
that might come out of
it.

They
had another drink. And dinner. It was not a lavish-
dinner, but just quietly excellent, served by a butler
whose
presence didn’t keep
reminding you of the dignity of having
a butler. There was not a dazzling display of silver
and crystal on the table. They drank, without discussion or fanfares, an
excellent Fountaingrove Sonoma Cabernet. Everything had the
cachet of a man to whom luxury was as
natural and essential
as
a daily bath, without making a De Mille sequence out of it.

“I
think you’ll like Pinehurst, if Andrea takes you down
there,” Quennel said. “I just got a couple
of new strings of
polo
ponies from Buenos Aires—I haven’t even seen them yet.
You might be able to try them out for me. Do you play
polo?”

“A bit,” said the Saint, who had once had a six-goal rating.

“I can’t wait to get down there myself,” said Quennel.
“But
Washington never stops
conspiring against me.”

“I imagine
the war has something to do with it, too.”

Quennel nodded.

“It
has made us pretty important,” he said deprecatingly.
“We were doing quite all right
before, but war-time require
ments
are making us expand very considerably. Of course,
we’re working about ninety-five per cent on
Government orders
now. But
after the war we’ll really have the advantage of a
tremendous amount of building and plant expansion, as
well
as some great strides in
technical experience.”

“All
of which the Government, meaning the people, will
have given you and paid for,” Simon observed sympathetically.

“Yes.”
Quennel accepted it quite directly and disarmingly.
“We don’t expect to do any profiteering at this
time, and in
any case the tax system wouldn’t let us, but in
the end we shall
get our
return—fundamentally in improved methods and in
creased capital values, which good management will turn back into
income.”

Simon made idle mosaics with a fork in the things on his
plate; and presently he said:
“How have you been making out
with labor problems in your field?”

“We really don’t have any labor trouble. All our plants are
in the South, of course, where you get
less of that sort of thing
than
anywhere else. Labor is always a bit of a problem in these
days, but I honestly think it only
boils down to knowing how
to handle your employees? How about it, Walter?—that’s your
headache.”

“Quenco
pays as good wages as any other industry in our
areas,” Devan said ruggedly. “And I think
we do as much to
look
after them as any other firm you can mention. You’d be
surprised at what we do. We have our own health
insurance,
and our own group
clinics—we organise all kinds of social and athletic clubs for them—we even
build their homes and finance them.”