"Of course not."
He admitted that. It could easily have been done. And just as readily he admitted the cold spectral fingers that slid caressingly up his spine. It was right and inevitable, it always had been, that adventure should overtake him like that, just as naturally and just as automatically, as soon as he was "at liberty" again. But when it was too easy and too automatic, also, it could have other angles… He was precisely as relaxed and receptive as a seasoned guerilla entering a peaceful valley.
"As a matter of interest," he murmured, "is this the first you've heard about this conspiracy to keep Imberline away from your dazzling beauty?"
"Oh, no," she said. She had regained her composure now and her voice was almost bland. "I had a phone call this morning that was much more explicit. In fact, the man said that if I wanted to live to be a grandmother I'd better start working at it now — and he meant by going home and staying there."
"It sounds like rather a dull method," said the Saint.
"That's why I spoke to you," she said.
The turn of his lips was frankly humorous.
"As a potential grandfather?"
"Because I thought you might be able to get me to see Imberline in one piece."
Simon turned in his chair and looked around the room.
He saw an average section of Official Washington at cocktail time — senators, representatives, bureaucrats, brass hats, men with strings to pull and men with things to see. Out of the babble of conversation, official secrets reverberated through the air in deafening sotto voces that would have gladdened the hearts of a whole army of fifth columnists and spies, and probably did. But all of them shared the sleek solid look of men in authority and security, bravely bearing up under the worry of wondering where their next hundred grand was coming from. None of them had the traditional appearance of men who could spend their spare time carving pretty girls into small sections.
The dialogue would have sounded perfect in a vacuum; but somehow, from where the Saint sat, none of it sounded right. He turned back to Madeline Gray.
"This may sound a bit out of line," he remarked, "but I like to know things in advance. You don't happen to have a heart interest in this Imberline that his spouse or current girl friend might object to?"
She shook her head decisively.
"Heavens, no!"
"Then what do you have to see him about?" he asked, and tried not to seem perfunctory.
"I don't know whether I should tell you that."
The Saint was still very patient. And then he began to laugh inside, it was still fun, and she was really interesting to look at, and after all you couldn't have everything.
A round stocky man who must once have been a door-to-door salesman crowded heavily past the table to a vacant seat nearby and began shouting obstreperously at the nearest waiter. Simon eyed him, decided that he was unusually objectionable, and consulted his watch.
"You've still got more than an hour to spare," he said. "Let's have some food and talk it over."
They had food. He ordered lobster Cardinal and a bottle of Chateau Olivier. And they talked about everything else under the sun. It passed the time surprisingly quickly. She was fun to talk to, although nothing was said that either of them would ever remember. He enjoyed it much more than the solitary meal he had expected. And he was almost sorry when they were at their coffee, and for the sake of the record he had to call a showdown.
He said: "Darling, I've enjoyed every minute of this, and I'll forgive you anything, but if you really wanted me to help you it must have occurred to you that I'd want to have some idea what I was helping. So let's finish the story about Imberline and the mysterious tosser of notes. Since you've told me that Romance hasn't reared its lovely head, that you're not a newspaper gal nor a spy, I'm a bit at a loss."
Her dark eyes studied him quietly for several seconds.
Then she searched through her purse again
"A filing system," Simon murmured, "would be indicated."
The girl's hand came up with something about six inches long, like a thick piece of tape, and a sort of shiny pale translucent orange in color. She passed it across the table.
Simon took it and fingered it experimentally. It was soft but resistant, tough against the pressure of a thumbnail, flexible and — elastic. He stretched it and snapped it back a couple of times, and then his gaze was cool and estimating on her.
"Rubber?" he asked.
"Synthetic."
His eyebrows hardly moved.
"What kind?"
"Something quite new. It's made mostly of sawdust, vinegar, milk — plus, of course, two or three other important things. But it isn't derived from butadiene."
"That must be a load off its mind," he remarked. "What in the world is butadiene?"
Her unaffected solemnity could have been comic if it had not seemed so completely natural.
"I thought everybody knew that," she said. "Butadiene is something you make out of petroleum, or grain alcohol. It's the base of the buna synthetic rubbers. Of course, that might be a bit technical for you."
"It might," he admitted. He wondered whether she had been taken in by his wide-eyed wonderment or not. He rather thought not.
"The thing that matters," she said, "is that the production of buna is still pretty experimental, and in any case it involves a fairly elaborate and expensive plant. This stuff can be mixed in a bathtub, practically. My father invented it. His name is Calvin Gray. You've probably never heard of him, but he's rated one of the top research chemists in the country."
"And you're here to get Imberline interested in this — to get his WPB sanction?"
She nodded.
"You make it sound frightfully easy. But it hasn't been so far… My father started working on this idea years ago, but then natural rubber was so cheap that it didn't seem worth going on with. When the war started and the Japs began moving in on Thailand, he saw what was coming and started working again."
"He must have hundreds of people rooting for him."
"Is that what you think? After he published his first results, his laboratory was burned out once, and blown up twice. Accidents, of course. But he knows, and I know, that they were accidents that had been — arranged. And then, when he had his process perfected, and he came here to try to give it to the Government — you should have seen the runaround they gave him."
"I can imagine it."
"Of course, part of the brush-off he got here might have been his fault. He's quite an individualist, and he hasn't read those books about winning friends and influencing people. At the same time, pardoxically, he's rather easily discouraged. He ended up by damning everybody and going home."
"And so?"
"I came back here for him."
Simon handed the sample back to her with a tinge of regret. It was a lovely performance, and he didn't believe a word of it. He wished that some day some impressionable and personable young piece of loveliness would have the outrageous honesty to come up to him and simply say "I think you're marvelous and I'd give anything to see you in action", without trying to feed him an inferior plot to work on. He felt really sorry about it, because she seemed like nice people and he could have liked her.
"If you think you're on the spot, you ought to talk to the FBI," he said. "Or if you're just getting the old runaround, squawk to one of the papers. If you pick the right one, they'll pour their hearts into a story like that."
She stood up so suddenly that some of his coffee spilled in the saucer. She looked rather fine doing that, and the waste of it hurt him.
"I'm sorry," she said huskily. "It was a silly idea, wasn't it? But it was nice to have dinner with you, just the same."