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had some sort of bomb on board, in case the rifle didn't work. It must have
short-circuited, or something, and gone off. It's just too bad about him."
CHAPTER V
SIMON took Patricia back to the hotel where he had booked a suite. They went
there with the comforting feeling that they were not being followed, since at
that moment there was no one available to follow them, and had a cocktail in
the lounge with the knowledge that it would be sheer bad luck if any of the
ungodly hap-pened to come upon them there. Temporarily they had disappeared
into the wide world, so far as Tex Gold-man's information was concerned.
This hotel was the Dorchester, where the Saint had taken two small but
luxurious rooms, with bath, overlooking Hyde Park. They were commended by the
fact that they were faced by no other buildings from which shots might be
fired; and although they cost twelve pounds a day Simon was untroubled by the
thought of what the Sunday-night orators a short distance away at Marble Arch
might say about his extravagance if they knew. The accommodation satisfied
that instinct in him which demanded the best of everything at any price; and
he was not proposing to pay for it himself.
"It is a fascinating thought," said the Saint, nibbling a potato chip, "that
there are well over forty million living souls in this great England. If every
one of them gave me sixpence, none of them would really miss it, and I should
be a millionaire."
''You'd better start collecting," said Patricia.
"I'm afraid it would take too long," said the Saint regretfully. "Especially
when we got north of the Tweed. No we shall have to muck along with what we
can collect in lumps from just a few people. Which reminds me that it must be
nearly three months since we last thought of Mr. Nilder."
It was quite true that Simon Templar's memory had almost lost hold of that
natty and unsavoury little gentleman. Three months ago he had sent him through
the post a polite intimation that a gift of about ten thousand pounds to the
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Actors' Orphanage would be in order, but that had been rather more of a
derisive gesture to Mr. Teal than a proposal of serious dimen-sions. The other
exciting things that had happened about that time had driven the idea out of
his head, but now it came back to him out of the blue.
He felt that a brief interlude of change from the some-what strenuous
circumstances of his war with Tex Goldman would do him good. Ordinary gang
wars, after all, were not strictly in his line. They provided a definite
interest in life, and a plentiful supply of sky-larking and song, but taken
continuously they were a heavy diet. Simon Templar required his share of the
lighter things as well.
No one knew better than the Saint that Scotland Yard was perfectly capable of
taking care of the ordinary and open forms of law-breaking. In the Saint's
various arguments with the Tex Goldman mob, he had done very little more than
could have been done by any detective with an original turn of mind and an
equal freedom from responsibility to the stolidly un-imaginative Powers who
draw princely salaries for encumbering with red tape and ballyhoo the
perfectly simple process of locating ungodliness and smacking it on the nose.
His self-appointed mission was far more concerned with those ugly twists of
ungodliness which rarely come within the ken of Scotland Yard at all and
which, if they do come within that myopic ken, are usually found to be so
studiously legal that officialdom can find nothing to do about them.
The profession of Mr. Nilder came very fairly into that category.
At that moment Simon Templar knew little about him. A word of information had
come his way through one of the mysterious channels by which such words
reached his ears. It was a word that would have meant nothing to Scotland
Yard, but to the Saint it opened up an avenue of fascinating speculation which
he knew he would have to explore some day. Three months ago he had seized on
it blindly for a passing need, and now it seemed to him that the time was ripe
for investigating it further.
"We ought to know more about Ronald," said the Saint.
It was quite natural for him to turn aside like that to such a comparatively
trivial affair, though his life had been called for twice in the last few days
and the Green Cross boys were still combing London for him with their message
of death. Numbers of beefy men were drawing their weekly pay envelopes for
looking after the Green Cross boys, but he was not included in the
distribution.
Mr. Ronald Nilder left London the next morning, as a matter of history alone,
and driving the modest two-year-old Buick which was the limit of his
ostenta-tion on the road. Simon Templar, also as a matter of history, went
with him though Mr. Nilder did not know this.
The preparation of successful buccaneering raids on the aforesaid members of
the ungodly requires an extensive knowledge of the victims' habits. The actual
smacking of them on the nose is very spectacular and entertaining to behold;
but although it is those high spots of privateering that the chronicler is
happiest to record, it is still tediously true that if there were no dull
periods of preparation there would be no high spots. You have to get to the
top of the Eiffel Tower before you can dive off, and the elevator is often out
of order.
Simon figured it was a nice day for a drive. London was in the grip of its
brief summer. From Aldgate to the Brompton Road, locked lines of grumbling
traffic edged along their routes in rackety crawls of a few feet at a time,
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and subsided again into jammed immobility with a ceaseless belching of blue
smoke and mephitic fumes an unforgettable procession of tribute to the
singular genius of the authorities who had organized enormous gangs of workmen
to dig up roads and excavate new and superfluous Underground stations at every
point where their activities could set a cap-stone on the paralytic confusion.
The slobbering sultans of Whitehall thought about the colossal tax on petrol,
and rubbed their greasy hands gleefully at the idea of the tens of thousands
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