"Why not?" she asked naively. "If that's what you want, I'll do it"
A slight shiver went through the Saint—he did not know whether the night had turned colder, or whether it was a sudden, terrible understanding of what lay behind that flash of almost childish innocence.
"You're very kind," he said.
She did not reply at once.
"After that," she said at length, "will you have finished?"
"That will be about the end."
She threw her cigarette away and sat still for a moment, contemplating the darkness beyond the range of their lights. Her profile had the aloof, impossible perfection of an artist's ideal.
"I heard about you as soon as you arrived," she said. "I was hoping to see you. When I had seen you, nothing else mattered. Nothing else ever will. When you've waited all your life for something, you recognize it when it comes."
It was the nearest thing to a testament of herself that he ever heard, and for the rest of his days it was as clear in his mind as it was a moment after she said it. The mere words were unimpassioned, almost commonplace; but in the light of what little he knew of her, and the time and place at which they were said, they remained as an eternal question. He never knew the answer.
He could not tell her that he was not free for her, that even in the lawless workings of his own mind she was for ever apart and unapproachable although to every sense infinitely desirable. She would not have understood. She was not even waiting for a response.
She had started the car again; and as they ran southwards through the park she was talking as if nothing personal had ever arisen between them, as if only the ruthless details of his mission had ever brought them together, without a change in the calm detachment of her voice.
"The Big Fellow would have liked to keep you. He admired the way you did things. The last time I saw him, he told me he wished he could have got you to join him. But the others would never have stood for it. He told me to try and make things easy for you if they caught you—he sort of hoped that he might have a chance to get you in with him some day."
She stopped the car again on Lexington Avenue, at the corner of 50th Street.
"Where do we meet?" she asked.
He thought for a moment. The Waldorf Astoria was still his secret stronghold, and he had a lurking unwillingness to give it away. He had no other base.
"How long will you be?" he temporized.
"I ought to have some news for you in an hour and a half or two hours."
An idea struck him from a fleeting, inconsequential gleam of memory that went back to the last meal he had enjoyed in peace, when he had walked down Lexington Avenue with a gay defiance in the tilt of his hat and the whole adventure before him.
"Call Chris Cellini, on East 45th Street," he said. "I probably shan't be there, but I can leave a message or pick one up. Anything you say will be safe with him."
"Okay." She put a hand on his shoulder, turning a little towards him. "Presently we shall have more time—Simon."
Her face was lifted towards him, and again the fragrant perfume of her was in his nostrils; the amazing amber eyes were darkened, the red lips parted, without coquetry, in acquiescence and acknowledgment. He kissed her, and there was a fire in his blood and a delicious languor in his limbs. It was impossible to remember anything else about her, to think of anything else. He did not want to remember, to strive or plot or aspire; in the surrender to her physical bewitchment there was an ultimate rest, an infinity of sensuous peace, beyond anything he had ever dreamed of.
"Au revoir," she said softly; and somehow he was outside the car, standing on the pavement, watching the car slide silently away into the dark, and wondering at himself, with the freshness of her lips still on his mouth and a ghost of fear in his heart.
Presently he awoke again to the throbbing of his shoulder and the maddening tiredness of his body. He turned and walked slowly across to the private entrance of the Waldorf apartments. "Well," he thought to himself, "before morning I shall have met the Big Fellow, and that'll be the end of it" But he knew it would only be the beginning.
He went up in the private elevator, lighting another cigarette. Some of the numbness had loosened up from his right hand: he moved his fingers, gingerly, to assure himself that they worked, but there was little strength left in them. It hurt him a good deal to move his arm. On the whole, he supposed that he could consider himself lucky to be alive at all, but he felt the void in himself which should have been filled by the vitality that he had lost, and was vaguely angry. He had always so vigorously despised weariness and lassitude in all their forms that it was infuriating to him to be disabled—most of all at such a time. He was hurt as a sick child is hurt, not knowing why; until that chance shot of Maxie's had found its mark, the Saint had never seriously imagined that anything could attack him which his resilient health would not be able to throw off as lightly as he would have thrown off the hangover of a heavy party. He told himself that if everything else about him had been normal, if he had been overflowing with his normal surplus of buoyant energy and confidence, not even the strange sorcery of Fay Edwards could have troubled him. But he knew that it was not true.
The lights were all on in the apartment when he let himself in, and suddenly he realized that he had been away for a long time. Valcross must have despaired of seeing him again alive, he thought, with a faint grim smile touching his lips; and then, when no familiar kindly voice was raised in welcome, he decided that the old man must have grown tired in waiting and dozed off over his book. He strolled cheerfully through and pushed open the door of the living room. The lights were on there as well, and he had crossed the threshold before he grasped the fact that neither of the two men who rose to greet him was Valcross.
He stopped dead; and then his hand leapt instinctively towards the electric:light switch. It was not until then that he realized fully how tired he was and how much vitality he had lost. The response of his muscles was slow and clumsy, and a twinging stab of pain in his shoulder checked the movement halfway and put the seal on its failure.
"Better not try that again, son," warned the larger of the two men harshly; and Simon Templar looked down the barrel of a businesslike Colt and knew that he was never likely to hear a word of advice which had a more soberly overwhelming claim to be obeyed.
Chapter 8
How Fay Edwards Kept Her Word, and Simon Templar Surrendered His Gun
"Well, well, well!" said the Saint and was surprised at the huskiness of his own voice. "This is a pleasant surprise." He frowned at one of the vacant chairs. "But what have you done with Marx?"
"Who do you mean—Marx?" demanded the large man alertly.
The Saint smiled.
"I'm sorry," he said genially. "For a moment I thought you were Hart & Schaffner. Never mind. What's in a name?—as the actress said to the bishop when he told her that she reminded him of Aspasia. Is there anything I can do for you, or has the hotel gone bankrupt and are you just the bailiffs?"
The two men looked at each other for a moment and found that they had but a single thought. The smaller man voiced it, little knowing that a certain Heimie Felder had beaten him to it by a good number of hours.
"It's a nut," he affirmed decisively. "That's what it is. Let's give it the works."
Simon Templar leaned back against the door and regarded them tolerantly. He was stirred to no great animosity by the opinion which the smaller man had expressed with such an admirable economy of words—he had been hearing it so often recently that he was getting used to it. And at the back of his mind he was beginning to wonder if it might contain a germ of truth. His entrance into that room had been one of the most ridiculously careless manoeuvres he had ever executed, and his futile attempt to reach the light switch still made him squirm slightly to think of. Senile decay, it appeared, was rapidly overtaking him. . . .