11 The Brighter Buccaneer

Using our renowned gifts of vivid description, it would be possible for us to dilate upon Mr. Lamantia's emotions at greater length; but we have not the time. Neither, in point of fact, had Mr. Lamantia. He suffered more or less what a happy bonfire would suffer if the bottom fell out of a reservoir suspended directly over it. With eighty-five thousand pounds in banknotes of small denominations in his bag, an express service to the tall timber mapped out in front of him, and his aesthetic soul ripe with the remembered beauty and tacit ac­quiescence of the most beautiful girl he had ever seen, he opened his door with the vision of her face rising before his eyes, and saw the vision smashed into a whirling kaleidoscope of fragments that came together again at the lean smiling figure of the man who had once come striding through the wet night to drag him out of his car and immerse him in the Thames. His eyes bulged and his jaw dropped; and then the lean" figure's hand pushed him kindly but firmly backwards and followed him on into the room, and Peter Quentin closed the door behind them and put his back to it.

"Well, Julian," said the Saint breezily, "how are all the little stocks and shares today?"

A tinge of colour squeezed slowly back into Mr. Lamantia's ashen face. When he had first seen the figures of men outside his door he had had one dreadful instant of the fear that perhaps after all he had left his retirement too late.

"How did you get up here?" he stammered.

"We flew," said the Saint affably.

Suddenly his left fist shot over with the whole weight of his shoulder behind it. The upper knuckles came on the line of Mr. Lamantia's twitching mouth, the lower knuckles on the point of his jaw-bone, clean and crisp in the horizontal centre of his face; and Mr. Lamantia had a hazy feeling that his brain had been knocked off its moorings and was revolving slowly and painfully inside his skull. When it had settled down again to a rhythmic but stationary singing, he became aware that the automatic which he had been trying to pull from his hip pocket was gone.

"Tie him up, Peter," said the Saint calmly.

Peter Quentin came off the door and produced a coil of stout cord from under his coat. Mr. Lamantia went down fighting, but Peter's muscular handling rapidly reduced him to mere verbal protest, which was largely biological in tone.

"I'll get you for this, you swine," was his only printable comment.

"And gag him," said the Saint.

The process was satisfactorily completed under the Saint's expert supervision. Simon had found Mr. Lamantia's cigar-case; and while the knots were being tested he talked and smoked.

"I notice that the welkin hasn't rung with your shrieks for help, Julian. Can it be that you have something on your conscience? . . . I'm sorry about all these formalities, but we don't really want a disturbance, and in the heat of the moment you might have been tempted to do something rash which we should all regret. The staff are sure to find you in a year or two, and then you can explain that some pals did this to you for a joke. I'm sure you'll decide that's the best story to tell, but you need a little time to think it over."

He strolled round the room examining the items of Mr. Lamantia's baggage, and eventually chose the smallest bag.

"Is this the one, Peter?"

"That's it."

Simon turned the lock with an instrument he had in his pocket, and glanced inside. The notes were there, in thick bundles, exactly as they had been passed across the counter of the bank. With a sigh of righteous satisfaction the Saint closed the attache case again and picked it up.

"Let's go."

He bowed politely to the speechless man on the bed, re­placed the excellent cigar between his teeth, and sauntered to the door. Without a care in the world he opened it-and looked straight into the face of Chief Inspector Claud Eustace Teal.

If there had been any competition for grades of paralysis in that doorway, it would have been a thankless task for the judge. Mr. Lamantia had already given his own rendering of a man being kicked in the mid-section by an invisible mule; and now for two or three strung seconds Simon Templar and Chief Inspector Teal gazed at each other in an equally cataleptic immobility. Out in the great world around them, ordinary policemen scurried innocently about their beats, the London traffic dashed hither and thither at a rate of hundreds of yards an hour, the surface of the earth was rotating at five hundred miles every half-hour, whizzing around the sun at seventy-six miles a minute, and tearing through space with the rest of the solar system at over twelve miles per second; but in the midst of all this bustle of cosmic activity those two historic antago­nists stared at each other across a yard of empty air without the movement of a muscle.