"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 clichés, and he uttered them all the time as if he were addressing 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 potentially 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?
Because he was more profoundly afraid that the Saint had something else up his sleeve? Or for some other reason?
Imberline was returning his scrutiny just as shrewdly. He took the cigar out of his mouth and bit off the end. "You tell me that Miss — er — Gray is a very attractive young woman," he said.
"She is."
"Young man, I'm going to ask you a question."
"Shoot."
"Is there any romantic reason for this interest of yours?"
The Saint shook his head.
"None at all."
"Have you invested any money in this so-called invention?"
"No."
Imberline struck a match and put it to the cigar.
"Well, then," he said in a gust of smoke, "what the hell are you here for?"
"That's a fair question," said the Saint. "I have some quaint reasons of my own for believing that this invention may have more in it than you think. If that's true, I'm as interested as any citizen in wanting to see something done about it. If there's any fake about it, I'm still interested — from another angle. And from that angle, I'd be even more interested if the invention was really good and there was a powerful and well-organized campaign of skullduggery going on to prevent anything being done about it."
"Why?"
"I've told you my name. But perhaps you'd know me better if I said — the Saint."
Imberline's cigar jerked in his mouth as his teeth clamped on it, and his eyes squeezed up again. But there was no change of color in the florid face. No — Frank Imberline, with or without a guilty conscience, wasn't panicked by shadows. He stared back at the Saint, without blinking, puffing smoke out of the side of his mouth in intermittent clouds.
"You're a crook," he said.
"If you'd care to put that in writing," said the Saint calmly, "I shall be very glad to sue you for libel. There isn't a single legal charge that can be brought against me — other than this little matter of breaking and entering tonight."
The other made a short impatient gesture.
"Oh, I'm sure you've been clever. And I've read some of that stuff about your Robin Hood motives. But your methods, sir, are not those which have been set up by our democratic constitution. The end does not justify the means. No individual has the right to take the law into his own hands. The maintenance of our institutions and our way of life, sir, rests upon the subordination of private prejudice to the authorised process of our courts."
He gave the pronouncement a fine oratorical rotundity, paused as if to allow the acclamation of an unseen audience to subside, and said abruptly: "However. Your suggestion that, my Department could be influenced by anything but the best interests of the country is insulting and intolerable. I'm going to prove to you that you're talking a lot of crap."
"Good."
"You bring this Miss Gray to see me, and I'll prove to you that she has a chance to present her case if she's got one."
Simon could hardly believe his ears,
"Do you mean that?"
"What the hell are you talking about, do I mean it? Of course I mean it! I'm not condoning your behavior, but I do know how to put a stop to the sort of rumor you're starting."
"When? Tomorrow?"
"No. I'm leaving first thing in the morning for New York and Akron on Government business. But as soon as I get back. In a couple of days. Keep in touch with my office."
The Saint went on looking at him with a sense of deepening bafflement that had the question marks pounding through his head like triphammers. His blue eyes were cool and inscrutable, but behind the mask of his face that strange perplexity went on. If this was a stall to get him out of there and keep him quiet for a couple of days, perhaps while further shenanigans were concocted, it was still a perfect stall. There was still no way of exposing it except by waiting. Imberline had taken the wind out of his sails. But if it wasn't a stall… Simon found his head aching with the new incongruities that he would have to untangle if it wasn't a stall.
"Now get the hell out of here," Imberline said defiantly.
There was nothing else to do.
Simon stood up, crushed his cigarette in an ashtray, and hoped that his nonchalant impassivity had enough suggestion of postponed menace and loaded sleeves to conceal the completely impotent confusion of his mind. For perhaps the first time in his life he felt that he hadn't a single answer in him.
"Thank you," he said, and left the room like that.
He let himself out of the front door, and crossed the lawn diagonally towards the street, moving through the dark patches cast by the thick spruce trees with the silence that was as natural to him as breathing.
He was just emerging from the deepest gloom when he stumbled over somebody who had been taken unawares by his catlike approach. The man he had bumped into straightened, squeaked, and vanished like a startled rabbit. But although he disappeared in the time it might take eyelash to meet eyelash in a slow blink, the Saint knew who he was. It was the funny little man, Sylvester Angert…
2
Simon Templar walked back to the Shoreham, conscious always of the movement of shadows about him. He knew he was wide open for a pot shot, but he had the idea that nobody wanted to kill him — yet. They might kill Madeline Gray, and her father, but not before they got the formula from one of the two. He himself was a recent nuisance, not yet thoroughly estimated; and the forces that were working against the Grays would hardly want to complicate their problem with a police investigation until they were convinced that there was no alternative.
He was a trifle optimistic in this prognosis, as it was soon to be demonstrated.
Madeline Gray opened her door when he gave the password he had written down, and he almost laughed at the solemn roundness of her eyes.
"I'm not a returning ghost," he said. "Come back downstairs and I'll buy you another drink."