They walked down to his floor, and he waited until she was curled up on the sofa with her feet tucked under her and a Peter Dawson in her hand.
Then he said, without preface: "I've just been to see Imberline."
Her mouth opened and stayed open in an unfinished gasp of amazement and incredulity, and he had time to light a cigarette before she got it working again.
"H-h-how?"
"I burgled his house and walked in on him. Rather illegal, I suppose, but it suddenly seemed like such an easy way to cut out a lot of red tape and heel-cooling." The Saint grinned a little now in reminiscent enjoyment of his own simplifying impudence; and then without a change of that expression he added bluntly: "He says your father is a crackpot phony."
His eyes fastened on hers, and he saw resentment and anger harden the bewilderment out of her face.
"I told you Mr. Imberline has never seen a demonstration of Father's process. He doesn't dare, because of what our invention might do to the natural rubber business after the war."
"He says he told his staff to investigate it."
"His staff!" she snorted. "His stooges! Or maybe just some other men with their own axes to grind. Father met them, and wouldn't talk to them after they demanded to see the formula before they'd see a demonstration. I told you he isn't the most tactful person in the world. He suspected Imberline's men from the first, and he made no bones about throwing them out of the laboratory when they came up to Stamford."
"On the other hand, Imberline promised to give you a hearing himself if I brought you to see him."
She couldn't be stunned with the same incredulity again, but it was as if she had been jarred again behind the eyes.
"He told you that?"
"Yes. In a couple of days. As soon as he gets back from a trip that he has to rush off on tomorrow."
She breathed quickly a couple of times, so that he could hear it, in a sort of jerky and frantic way.
"Do you think he meant it?"
"He may have. He didn't have to say that. He could have screamed bloody murder, thundered about the police, or told me to go to hell. But he didn't even try."
She put her glass down on the low table in front of her and rubbed her hands shakily together as if they felt clammy. Her lips trembled, and the voice that came through them had a tremor in it to match.
"I–I don't know what to say. You've been so wonderful — you've done so much — made everything seem so easy. I feel so stupid. I–I don't know whether I ought to kiss you, or burst into tears, or what. I don't know how to believe it."
He nodded.
"That," he said flatly, "is my problem."
"What did you do to persuade him?"
"Very little. It was too easy."
"Well, why do you think he did it?"
"I wish I knew." The Saint scowled at his cigarette. "He may have been scared of the trouble I might stir up — but he didn't look scared of anything. He may have been afraid that I really had something on him. He may be a very clever and a very cunning guy, and he may have been just getting himself elbow room to hit back with a real brick in his glove. He may be on somebody's payroll, and he may have to go back to his boss for orders when he's in a jam. He may just have a sort of caliph complex, and get a shot in his ego from making what he thinks is a grand eccentric gesture — something to make an anecdote out of and show what a big-minded down-to-earth democrat he is. All of that's possible. And none of it seems enough, somehow… So I muddle and brood around, and I still come back to one other thing."
"What's that?"
He said: "How much of this persecution of you and your father is real? How much of that is crackpot, how much is imagination — and how much is fake?"
The new disbelief in her eyes was sharp with hurt.
"After all this — are you still thinking that?"
He gazed at her detachedly, trying to persuade himself that he could make the same decision that he would have made if she had been fat and fifty with buck teeth and a wart on her nose.
Then he stopped looking at her. He was not so hot at being detached. He strolled over to the window and gazed out at the panorama of distant lights beyond the grounds and the Park…
Ping!
The glass in front of him grew an instantaneous spider-web around a neat round hole, and the plunk of the bullet lodging itself in the wall paster somewhere above and behind him came at about the same moment.
He was probably already in motion when he heard it, for his impressions seemed to catch up with it quite a little while later. And by that time he was spun around with his back to the wall between the two windows, temporarily safe from any more careless exposure, and looking at Madeline Gray's white face with a quite incorrigible silent laughter in his eyes.
"By God," he said, "even the Washington mosquitoes have war fever. They must be training to be dive bombers."
She looked up at the opposite wall, near the ceiling, where his glance had also gone to search for the scar of the shot. After a second or two she found her voice somewhere.
"Somebody shot at you," she said, and sounded as if she knew it was the only possible foolish thing to say.
"That would be another theory," he admitted.
"But where from?"
"From the grounds, or the Park. They had the window spotted, of course. I'm afraid I'm getting careless in my old age."
He reached sideways cautiously for the edge of the shade, and pulled it all the way down. Then he did the same thing for the other window. After that he felt free to move again.
"Won't you catch them, or — or something?"
He laughed.
"I'm not Superman, darling. By the time I got downstairs they could be blocks away. I should have known better — I was warned once, at least." Then his face was sober again. "But I guess the ungodly are still answering for you. If all this is fooling, it's certainly an awful complicated game."
She met his eyes with a visible tumult of thoughts that couldn't form into words.
Then, in the silence, the telephone rang.
Simon crossed to it and picked it up.
"This is Miss Brown of the Associated Press," it said. "I heard that you were in town, and I wondered if you'd be terribly angry if I asked you for a short interview."
It was a light and engaging and unusually arresting voice, but Simon Templar had met specialised voices before.
"I don't know what you could interview me about," he said. "I'm thirty-five years old, I think J. Edgar Hoover is wonderful, I believe that drinking is here to stay, I want everyone to buy War Bonds, and I am allergic to vitamins. Beyond that, I haven't anything to say to the world."
"I'd only take a few minutes, really, and you wouldn't have to answer any questions you didn't like."
"Suppose you call me tomorrow and I'll see what I'm doing," he suggested, giving himself a mental memorandum to see that his telephone was cut off.
"Why, are you in bed already?"
The Saint's brows climbed fractionally and drew down again.
"When I was a girl that would have been called a rather personal question," he said.
"I'm downstairs in the lobby now," she said. "Why couldn't we get it over tonight? I promise you can throw me out as soon as you've had enough."
And that was when the last of the Saint's hesitations winked out like a row of punctured bubbles, so that he wondered how he could ever have wasted time on them.
For girl reporters in real life do not come as far as the lobby of their victim's hotel before they ask for an interview. Nor do they press for ordinary interviews in the middle of the night. Nor do they use a sexy voice and a faintly suggestive turn of phrase to wheedle their way into the presence of a reluctant subject.
The sublime certainty of his intuition crescendoed around him with the symphonic grandeur of a happy orchestra. The decision had been taken out of his hands. He could resist temptation just so long, but there was a limit to how much he could be pushed. The note he had found in his pocket had been bad enough. The encounter with the aspiring kidnapers had been worse. The episodes of Mr. Angert and Mr. Imberline had been a bonus of aggravation. To be potted at in his own window by a sniper was almost gross provocation, even if he was broad-minded enough to admit that it was his own fault for providing the target. But this — this was positively and finally going too far.