Saint Steps In (7 page)

And
just the same he knew that he was still evading, and he
felt exasperated with himself.

He
asked: “What was your idea when you did see Imberline
?”

“Get him to come to the laboratory himself, or send some
one who was absolutely reliable. They could watch us make
as
much rubber as they’d need for their
tests, and then they could
be sure it
was a genuine synthetic.”

“But eventually other people would have to be in on it—if
it were going to be manufactured in any
quantity.”

“Father has that all worked out. You could have a dozen
different ingredients shipped to the
plant and stored in tanks.
Three
of them would be the vital part of the formula. The
other nine would mean nothing. But they’d all be piped
down
through a mixing room that
only one man need go into. The
unnecessary ingredients would be destroyed by acids and run down the
drain, so that no checkup would be possible. The real
formula would be piped from the mixing room direct to
the
vats. One man could
control a whole plant by just working two
or three hours a day. I could control one myself. But
even if
anyone on the outside knew
every chemical that was brought
in and used, it
would take them years to try out every combina
tion and proportion and treatment until they might hit on the
right one.” -

It
was a sound answer. But it had the tinge of being a pat
answer, too. As if it had been
rehearsed carefully to reply to embarrassing questions.

Or maybe he still
had a hangover of his own first skepticism.

He made a
decision with characteristic abruptness.

“Suppose,” he suggested, “you go to your room. Lock and
night-lock the door and don’t open it
to anyone, except me.”

He
went to the desk, scrawled a word on a slip of paper,
folded it and handed it to her. She looked at it and
nodded. He
took the paper back and touched a match to it.
As the ashes
crumbled, they took into
nothingness the word he had written,
the
word he was to say when he called her.

He was taking no
chances that Mr. Sylvester Angert’s cousin
might
be looking for his room in the hall outside, complete
with a little tube that heard through doors.

“Will you be long?” she asked.

“I
hope not. I’ll take you to your room, if you don’t mind.”

“I’d appreciate it.”

He escorted her to the elevators, rode up five floors, and s
aw her safely to her door. He waited
until the night latch
clicked and then returned to the elevators. He rode to the main
lobby and spent a few minutes looking
into the dining room. It was virtually deserted—for Washington—and the man he
was looking for wasn’t there.

Simon left the hotel and bought a taxi driver for the second
time that night.

He leaned back on the cracked-leather upholstery and
reached for a cigarette.

“Take me to a street that enters into Scott Circle,” he
directed. “One that hits the
circle near the low numbers.”

“You got any
special number in mind, Chief?”

“Yeah,
bud. I got me a number in mind, but just do like I
told you, see?”

“Okay, okay.
I just wanted to know.”

He lit his
cigarette, wondering if his tough-guy talk would
convince a radio casting director, in a pinch. He decided that
it wouldn’t. He hadn’t used it for quite a while,
and he was out
of practice. He made a
mental note to polish up on it.

The
cab drifted to a street corner on the rim of the circle,
and the hackman turned.

“How’s this, Cap?” he asked.

“This is swell.”

He paid off the driver, waited until the cab drove away, and
waited a few minutes more to make
certain that the cabbie
was
not too curious. He surveyed the dimned-out houses on
the circle and picked out the mansion which he had
already
visited once this evening.

There
was a light in the downstairs hallway and lights in a
second-floor room that must be a bedroom. As he
watched,
Simon saw a bulky shadow pass the drawn shade.
The shadow
was of proportions that hardly
could have belonged to anyone else but Frank Imberline.

The
downstairs light went out. The Saint moved along the
sidewalk enough to see a tiny window in the back of
the house go on. That meant that the colored butler must be going to bed.

Walking in the deep shadows, Simon Templar made his way
to the front door of the house that
surely must have been built
as an ambassadorial dwelling. He worked on the lock for about
a minute with an instrument from his
pocket, and it ceased to
be an obstruction.

“Now,” he told himself, “if there’s no burglar alarm,
and
if there’s no bolt, we
might get to see Comrade Imberline in
person.”

There
was neither alarm nor bolt. Simon let himself noise
lessly into the front hall and closed the door gently
behind
him. A circular staircase
wound its way up toward the second floor, and there was no creak of a loose
joist as the Saint made
his way aloft. A
crack of light under a door told him that Frank
Imberline was still awake.

Simon pushed open the door and calmly walked into the
great man’s bedroom.

Imberline was seated at a desk, scanning a sheaf of papers.
He was clad in maroon and gold pajamas
that made the Saint
blink for
a moment. As Simon stepped into the room, the rub
ber tycoon swung his heavy head in his direction and
popped
his eyes, the unhealthy
ruddiness slowly ebbing from his face.

“Who are
you?” he croaked.

“Don’t be alarmed, Mr. Imberline,” said the Saint sooth
ingly. “I’m not a hold-up man, and
I’m not an indignant tax
payer
proposing to beat you up.”

“Then who the devil are you, and what do you want?”

“My
name is Simon Templar, and I just wanted to talk to
you.”

“How did you get in here?”

“I
walked in,” said the Saint, “through the front door.”

“You broke in!”

Simon shook his head.

“I didn’t break anything,” he said innocently. “I just
used
one of my little tricks on
the lock. Really. I did no damage at
all.”

Imberline made gargling noises in his throat.

“This is—this is——
”

“I
know,” said the Saint wearily. “I know. I should have ap
plied for an audience through the usual channels,
and filled out half a dozen forms in quintuplicate. But after all there is
a war going on—to coin a phrase—and it just
occurred to me
that this might save
us waiting a few months to meet each
other.”

The
red came back into Frank Imberline’s square face and
he seemed to swell within his gorgeous pajamas.

“I’ll have you know,” he said, in a half-bellow, “that
such high-handed tactics as this—these—must be dealt with by the
proper authorities I I will not be intimidated,
sir, by any high
handed——
”

“You said that before,” Simon reminded him politely.
“Well—what in hell do you want?”

“I want to talk to you about a man who has invented a syn
thetic rubber process. One Calvin Gray.”

Imberline drew his heavy brows down over his little eyes.
“What about Calvin Gray?” he demanded.

“I’m
interested in Mr. Gray’s process,” said the Saint, “and
I’m wondering why the man can’t get a hearing with
you.”

Imberline waved a
pudgy hand in a disdainful gesture.

“A
nut, Mr.—er—Templar,” he said. “A nut, pure and sim
ple. From what I’ve heard, he claims
he can make rubber out
of rhubarb, or something. Impossible, of course. I hope you
haven’t invested any money in his invention, sir.”

“A
fool and his money are soon parted,” Simon said wisely.

“Yes,” Imberline grunted. “Quite so. But this outrageous
breaking into a man’s
house—a man’s house is his castle, you
know—you really have no excuse for that.”

The
big man got out of the chair by the desk and stalked
over to the bureau. He took a fat cigar from the box
on the
bureau top and rammed it
into his mouth. Simon’s eyes were
watchful. But Imberline’s hand did not move toward the han
dle of any drawer that might have
contained a gun. He
marched back across the room
and slumped down into a deep
easy chair.

“Okay,”
he said over his cigar. “So you broke in here to talk
to me about Gray’s invention. I could
throw you out or have you arrested, but instead I’ll listen to what you have to
say.”

“Very kind of you,”
 
Simon
 
murmured.
 
“A soft
 
answer
turneth away stuff.”

“What
is it you want to know?” Imberline asked bluntly.
“I’m a busy man, and every minute counts.”

“While time and tide wait for no man.”

“Get to the
point. Why are you here?”

Simon placed a
cigarette between his lips and snapped his
lighter.
He was aware of Imberline’s gimlet eyes watching his
every movement. He exhaled a long plume of smoke
and sat
on the end of the bed.

“Have you ever seen Gray’s product?” he asked.

“Once—or maybe twice.”

“And what was your opinion?”

If
it were possible for the hulking shoulders of Frank Imberline
to shrug, they would have.

“It’s something that could be synthetic—and it’s something
that could be made-over rubber,
cleverly disguised.”

“You investigated it thoroughly, I suppose?”

“I
had my staff investigate it. Their report was bad. That
man Gray pestered me for weeks, trying
to get to see me, and
finally gave up. I hear his daughter is in town now, still trying
to waste my time.”

“You haven’t made an appointment with her?”

“Certainly not. There are only so many hours in the day——
”

“And so many
days in the week——”

“Young
man,” said Mr. Imberline magisterially, “I am a
public servant. I have the most humble
respect for the trust
which has been placed in me, and my daily responsibility is to
make sure that not one hour—not one
minute—of my time
shall be frittered away on things
from which the Community cannot benefit.”

“You
couldn’t by any chance have made an appointment
with her for tonight and forgotten it?” Simon
asked, unawed
by that resounding statement.

Imberline drew
his chins together.

“Certainly
not! I never forget an appointment. Punctuality
is the politeness of princes——
”

“You really ought to have seen her. She’s quite something to
look at.”

There seemed to be a flicker of interest in the close-set eyes.
Suddenly, the middle-aged lecher was there for Simon to
see.
The big man grinned nauseatingly.

“A nice dish, eh?”

“A very nice dish. But to get back to Gray’s invention—you
haven’t seen it demonstrated yourself, I take it?”

Imberline shook his head.

“No. I’m a busy man. I can’t be running all over the country to
view the brainstorm of every crackpot. I looked at his sample and I told my
staff to investigate it. That’s all I could do. Even you might understand
that.”

Simon stared at
him thoughtfully through a couple of clouds of smoke. He was beginning to get
an odd feeling about this
interview which
fitted with nothing that he had expected.
Frank Imberline was as pompous and phony as a bullfrog with
a megaphone; his thinking appeared to be done in
resonant
clich
é
s, and he uttered
them all the time as if he were address
ing
a large rally in a public square. And yet from the beginning his reaction to
Simon’s presence had been one of righteous
indignation and not fear. It was true that the Saint hadn’t
waved a knife under his nose or made any
threatening noises.
But the Saint had
also calmly admitted a technical act of burglary, which there was no denying
anyhow; and any normal
citizen would have regarded such an intruder as
at least a po
tentially dangerous screwball.
Well, possibly Imberline was
one of those men who are too obtuse to be
subject to ordinary
fear. But in that case,
why hadn’t he simply rung or called for help and had the Saint arrested?