Catch the Saint (21 page)

In front of Simon was the
temporarily flustered man who had
opened the door.
Three other men sat on sofas or chairs, while
another
came to his feet behind a desk at the rear of the room.
Within two seconds, two pistols had appeared.

Simon carefully showed the
nature of his intentions by keep
ing his hands away from
his body.

“Sorry to bust in
like this,” he murmured, “but I’ve got impor
tant
business that can’t wait.” Then he verbally lit the fuse of
his private brand of dynamite and tossed it hissing into the cen
tre of the room. “I want to see the Supremo.”

CHAPTER 6

A naked belly dancer
erupting from a nine-layer cake at a con
clave
of the College of Cardinals could not have produced more of a sensation than
Simon Templar did when he presented him
self
in the private room of the club Pear Tree. The hefty charac
ters who had been decorating the furniture were all at attention,
but their vocal cords were temporarily out of contact with
their
brains.

Although the Saint was
now looking down the steel throats of four pistols, he relaxed. The character
he was portraying never
smiled, as Simon himself
might have done under similar circum
stances. Instead
he swept his gaze from one side of the room to
the
other, taking in everyone and everything, while his lips held an arrogant
sneer.

It was a very expensively
furnished room, but designed for business, not for guests. There were as many telephones
as there
were pistols. There were two radios, two television sets,
several
filing cabinets, and a stock ticker,
along with other knobbed and dialed devices which the Saint did not have time
to identify. His
new friends
obviously liked to keep up with what was going on
in the world. The place, on the face of it, looked
more like a
communications centre
than a restaurant manager’s office, and
that was exactly what Simon had expected.

The man behind the desk
finally got his tongue back in touch
with his cerebrum.

“Who the hell are
you?” he snapped.

A couple of the men in the
room, the two who had been fast
est with their pistols,
looked fairly brutish. This one had blond
hair
and an Ivy League accent. His blue silk tie was enviable;
in more normal times, the Saint would have cheerfully compli
mented him on it.

“You’re not the
Supremo,” Simon said roughly.

“I know what I’m
not,” the other answered. He realised that
he
was clutching the edge of his desk, and eased his hands away.
“I asked you who you are.”

“I’m somebody who
wants to see the Supremo.”

The blond man jerked a
half smile at one of his colleagues.

“What’s a Supremo—a
cigar? You’ll find them in the lobby.
By God, I’m going
to have Ansel’s ears for letting drunks wander all over this building.”
He focussed cold turquoise eyes on
the Saint again.
“This is a business meeting, and you’ve got no
business
here.”

“Funny,” Simon
remarked, “it looks more like a shooting
gallery.
Or what are you scared of?”

The man at the desk drew
back his shoulders.

“I’m not going to
explain our security measures to you. I sug
gest
you walk out of here right now, or else take your choice of
being thrown out on your head or being arrested.”

“I’ve come too far to walk out,”
Simon said flatly. “You say
this is a
business meeting. Well, I got business. But it’s got to be with the Supremo or
nobody.”

“I’d put my money on nobody,” one of
the other men said.
“Are you walking
out or getting carried out?”

“I guess you guys have heard of West Coast
Kelly,” Simon
said. “That’s who
I’m talking for.”

He was expecting the
announcement to have an interesting im
pact,
and his disappointment was catastrophic. For at the same
moment as it should have been registering, a door at the back
of the room opened, and in walked the fat seal-like man Simon
had met the night before.

He blinked exactly three
times as his mouth formed a large
O and his dewlaps
dropped to his collarbones.

“That’s him!” he
squealed. “That’s him—the sonovabitch I
told
you about, from Sammy’s!”

It was one of those
disastrous sneaky backhanders with which a malicious Fate delights in upsetting
applecarts, which a pes
simist might have
predicted but an optimist had no way to guard
against.
The Saint tried his best to cope with it, but even his
inventiveness
had been caught flat-footed.

“Sure, I stopped you and your meat-head
pal from killing a
cop who’d been playing
you for suckers. I figured it was worth
more to sell myself to him as a good guy, and get an ‘in’ that we
could all use.”

“You didn’t need to
play-act as hard as that!”

The seal, mindful of the
juggernaut that had smitten him and
his comrade in the
rain-swept alley, was not about to calm down.
He
kept shouting, machine-gunning blasts of accusation round
the room, urging the others to do something. As on the
previous
night, he did not place himself
physically in the forefront of the battle, but the situation was still going
his way.

Simon took a step back
towards the door.

“Maybe I’d better
drop round later, when you’ve all calmed
down,”
he said diplomatically.

“Don’t let him get
out!” the seal howled.

The man behind the desk
confirmed the order, and four
thugs reached the Saint at
the same instant. Simon’s hands, elbows, knees, and feet became deadly
weapons. One of his at
tackers dropped to the floor, squirming in
agony. A second
staggered back, half
blinded by a blow to his face that sent a
cascade of blood streaming
down over his lips and chin. But a
fist
caught Simon hard on his own jaw, slamming him back
against the wall. Two apes were on him like one
four-armed
monster, and a knee in his
stomach knocked the wind momen
tarily
out of him. The seal was hopping up and down, trying to
see the centre
of the melee. Simon braced himself against the
wall and managed to ram the toe of his right shoe into the solar
plexus of one of his attackers, sending the man
backwards into
the seal. The two of
them bounced across the carpet like bowling
pins.

It was a satisfying
sight, but the last that Simon saw for sev
eral
hours. He was bashed on the head with something very
hard.
The room seemed to fill with black water, which rose very
rapidly from floor to ceiling. The shouts and grunts and heavy
breaths faded to silence.

There was no more of
anything until after a timeless time he became strangely and vaguely aware of
his own existence. He
seemed to be floating in
nowhere, unable to see or hear. His
mind was not functioning at a level that
would allow him even
to wonder who or where
he was. His being was a small unstable
ball
of pain. He felt his arm being manipulated, and a momen
tary new pinpoint of pain, and then nothingness
again.

Carole Angelworth waited
for his promised call until eleven-
thirty. Her phone
rang twice during the evening, but neither of
those
calls was the one she wanted.

She couldn’t really believe that he would stand
her up deliberately. It wouldn’t be like him to lie. He would just have told
her when he had left her at the end of the
afternoon that he
couldn’t possibly
make it that night.

She was full of
self-doubts. Had she thrown herself at him so
obviously
that he wanted to hurt her in order to get rid of her?
Had
she bored him to death with that tour of her father’s chari
ties?

She wasn’t used to being
refused anything that she wanted—a
dress, a trinket, a
car, or a man. She knew she was spoiled, but
that
didn’t make it any easier to swallow a rejection. She had de
cided that she was madly in love. And now the man she was in
love with was half an hour late phoning her. And the worst
of it
was that she felt a strange foreboding, an
apprehension that
could not be explained by the logical
part of her mind.

She picked up the hotel
phone and asked for his room. It
didn’t answer.

She felt a need to talk to
her father again, as she had always
done when faced
with anything beyond her ordinary capacity to
handle.
She went down the hall and through the living-room
and
found him in his study.

Richard Hamlin was there
too, inevitably, carrying on an
earnest conversation at
her father’s big desk. He stopped speak
ing immediately and
stood up, greeting her with the toothy,
slightly
deferential grin that he apparently thought would some
day win her trust, if not her affection. He
preferred hanging
about in the
background, almost shyly, where he could pretend
not to notice what was going on, and where he could at least
hope that no one was noticing him. But whenever
confronted
directly he came up with
that same grin, which Carole had once
said
reminded her of a slightly dishonest medieval sheepherder
tugging his forelock at his feudal lord’s
daughter.

“Well, ready for
bed?” her father asked, leaning back in his
chair.

“Not really,”
Carole answered. She walked up to the desk and
said quite rudely:
“Richard, I wish you weren’t here every time
I come in. But just this once, I’d like to speak to my father
alone.”

Hamlin looked at Hyram
Angelworth, who nodded. Carole
waited until her father’s
man Friday had left the study and then
got straight to the
point. She felt secure in this room, with its
warm
pine panelling, heavy leather upholstering, and massive,
solid furniture.

“I’m very worried
about Simon,” she began, “and don’t tell
me
you don’t know who Simon is.”

Her father had a habit of
ignoring the existence of male friends
of
hers whom he did not approve of.

“It would be a little
hard for me not to have heard the name,”
he
said indulgently. “You’ve mentioned it at least thirty times
in the past twenty-four hours. Exactly what is it you’re
worried about?”

“He had some business tonight, and I made
him promise to
call me by eleven, and he
hasn’t done it.”

The springs of Hyram
Angelworth’s desk chair squeaked
lightly as he leaned
further back and shrugged.

“Catastrophe,”
he sympathised. “I can remember occasionally being kept busy after eleven
at night myself. Why don’t you just
stop fretting and
get some sleep? I don’t doubt that you’ll track
him
down in the morning.”

Carole settled on the
edge of the desk and looked seriously at
him.

“This isn’t something
to joke about,” she said. “I’m in love
with
him.”

Her father breathed deeply,
sat forward, and drilled at his
desk blotter with his
pen.

“Carole, in the
first place you haven’t known him long enough to know whether you’re in love
with him or not.”

“Before you go on to
the second place, please let me dispose
of that. I
am in
love
with him. You haven’t heard me say that
since I came of age, have you? This one isn’t just for laughs. It’s
taken me a long time to feel like this, maybe
because you set an
example that’s
hard for most fellows to compete with.”

Angelworth flushed with
pleasure, but shook his head.

“Well, you can still pardon me for being a
little sceptical.
You’ve known this man for
almost a whole day—”

“And I’ve never met
anybody like him before.”