Leslie Charteris - The Saint Steps In

"Naturally."

Simon didn't have to check over his pockets and other hiding places. He had no doubt that the search would have been thorough. An intellectual organization like that wouldn't have risked leaving anything that could conceivably have concealed some ingenious means of making unexpected trouble.

He lighted a cigarette and said reminiscently: "Karl really owes you something, after Washington. You did a nice job of looking after him and his pal."

Devan nodded.

"It was the only thing to do."

"You took quite a risk."

"I couldn't expect people to take risks for me if they didn't know I'd do the same for them. I took a bit of a beating, too, if you haven't forgotten. That's why I'm keeping this gun handy, and I want you to stay sitting down where you are."

Simon grinned wryly.

"Have you been saving something for me too?"

Devan shook his head.

"Let's forget that. That's kid stuff. I'm here because Bart asked me to see if I couldn't talk you into reconsidering his proposition, and that's all I want to do."

"You've been studying all the best Nazi heavies in the movies," said the Saint admiringly. "I see all the delicate touches. And when I go on saying No, you most regretfully call back the storm troopers and they beat the bejesus out of me."

"I'm not a Nazi, Templar. Neither is Mr. Quennel."

"You have some unusual thugs on your staff. I'll bet you Karl heils Hitler every time he goes to the bathroom."

"I'm not concerned about that. When Gray fired him and he came to us, I thought he could be useful. He has been. So long as he does what I tell him I don't have to ask about his politics. He isn't going to find out any Quenco secrets. And I know one thing — being what he is, no matter what happens, he can't squawk."

"Now I really know what Quennel meant about the diplomacy of Big Business," said the Saint. "Getting a German spy to do your dirty work for you ought to be worth some kind of Oscar."

"We've been lucky to have the use of him. But that's the only connection there is. I'm an American, and I don't want to be anything else."

"I know all about you, Walter. I could tell you your own life story. I've read a very complete secret dossier on you. Oh, I know there's nothing in it that could put you in jail, or you'd have been there before this. But the indication is quite definite. You are Quennel's chief private thug, which means his own personal Gestapo."

Devan sat still, with only a slight dull red glow under his skin.

"There's nothing Nazi about it. If you know all about us, you know that we're working one hundred per cent for America. I work for Quennel because he has to have a man who can be tough and handle tough situations. He told you himself — an industry like Quenco is like a little empire. You have to have your own police and your own laws and your own enforcement. This is nothing but business."

"Business, because Calvin Gray's invention would shift a great big slice of Government backing away from you, and you'd be in the hole to the extent of your own investment."

"As Mr. Quennel said, it's not going to be any use winning the war if we win it by ruining our own economic structure."

"How catching his phrases are," drawled the Saint. "I suppose it wouldn't have occurred to you that Mr. Quennel might have been thinking first of Mr. Quennel's own economic structure?"

"We aren't Nazis," Devan reiterated stubbornly.

Simon drew a fresh drift of smoke into his lungs.

"No," he said. "You aren't Nazis. Or even conscious fifth columnists. That's one of the things that bothered me for a while. I couldn't understand the half-hearted villainy. The Nazis would have been much more positive and drastic, and Calvin Gray and his invention would probably have been mopped up long ago."

"We don't like violence," Devan said. "It makes trouble and a stink and it's dangerous, and we bend over backwards to avoid it. Only sometimes it's forced on us, and then we have to be able to handle it. We tried to handle Gray without going too far."

"And the hell with what difference it made to the net cost and efficiency of our war production?"

"Superficial savings and efficiences aren't always the best thing when you take a broad long view. You learn that in a big industry. Mr. Quennel knows all about that, because that's his job."

"The Führer principle," Simon observed, almost to himself. He looked at Devan again, and said: "And now that I've really butted in, and you know you're stuck with it?"

"The sky's the limit."

Simon smoked again, and looked at the end of his cigarette. "You think you can get away with it?"

"I'm sure we can."

"There's a little matter of murder involved, and the police take such an oldfashioned view of that."

"You're talking about Angert? That was stupid of Morgen, but he didn't mean to kill him. He didn't know who he was. But that'll be Morgen's bad luck, if he gets caught. I'll try to see that he doesn't get caught. But if he did, we wouldn't know anything about him."

"You ought to worry about being caught yourself. If you read the papers, you may have seen something about a certain Inspector Fernack, who has just gotten ambitious about collecting the scalp of the guy who removed a very dull bureaucrat named Imberline last night — and nearly managed to hang the job on me."

Devan looked him straight in the eye.

"I read the papers. But I wasn't anywhere near the Savoy Plaza last night. And I thought Imberline was still in Washington."

That was his story. And probably he could prove it. Quennel could probably prove the same. It would be very careless of them if they couldn't, and the Saint didn't think they were careless. If they had been addicted to making egregious mistakes, someone else would have taken care of them before he ever came along.

It was a rather depressing thought. But he had to finish covering the ground. He took another breath through his cigarette.

"A man like Calvin Gray, and his daughter, can't just disappear without any questions being asked."

"Calvin Gray won't disappear. He'll be back tomorrow from a visit to some friends in Tennessee, and he'll be very surprised at the commotion. His daughter will have gone to New York with some friends — who have an apartment there, by the way — and he will have reached her on the telephone there. When she hears that it's all a false alarm and he's quite all right, she will tell him that she's going on a trip to Cuba with some other friends. From there she'll probably fly down to Rio. She may even get married down there and not come back for a very long time."

The Saint's eyes were cold and realistic.

"And of course Gray will go along with that."

"I think so, after I've had another talk with him. I think he'll even discover that there was a flaw in his formula after all, and forget about it."

"You aren't even interested in it yourselves?"

"Oh, yes, of course he'll have to tell us the formula. It may be valuable one day, if we have one of our own chemists discover it. But for the present Mr. Quennel is quite satisfied with our own setup."

"And Gray will never open his mouth so long as you have his daughter for a hostage."

Devan shrugged.

"I don't have to be melodramatic with you. You know what these things are all about. You know what he'll do."

The Saint knew. There was heroism of a kind for the lone individual, although even that could almost always be broken down eventually under pitiless scientific treatment. He doubted how much ultimate heroism there would ever be against the peril of a man's own daughter.

He didn't doubt that Walter Devan was the man to see the job through competently and remorselessly. Devan was no common thug, or he would not have had the position he held. He could easily have passed as having had a college education, even if most of it had been spent on the football field. He had a definite intelligence. He really belonged in Quennel's entourage. He had enough intelligence to assimilate Quennel's intellectual arguments. He also believed in what he was doing, and he was just as sure that it was right. And he wouldn't make any stupid mistakes. Simon didn't need to press him for elaborate details. Walter Devan would know just how to finish what he had started.