“You mean... they gave you my house?”
His eyes actually grew moist as they stole lingeringly around the appalling interior.
“Don’t worry — I’ll give it back to you,” said the Saint generously. “All I want from you is just as much as you can tell me. For instance: when Frankie and Fingers were talking, did they let anything drop that would give you any idea where the King of the Beggars has his main hideaway? Or where they might have kept Junior if they’d wanted to keep him?”
Sammy chewed thoughtfully for a while, and made a decision.
“I ain’t no squealer,” he said, “but after what those two rats done to me... They didn’t say much, either. But Fingers said, ‘Why not work him over here?’ and Frankie said, ‘They’re waiting for us at Elliott’s, and we got a better trick there.’ ”
Mr Uniatz came out of a prolonged silence during which he had been refreshing himself from a pint bottle of bourbon which he had discovered among Sammy’s supplies. His return to the conversation might have been due to the stirring of a thought, or to the fact that the bottle was now empty.
“De Elliott Hotel?” he said. “But we just come from dere—”
“And we didn’t search it,” Simon said. “That was only the place where I started thinking about secret passages. So naturally I was too dumb to start there... Wait a minute!” He came to his feet suddenly, and his eyes were alight. “Sammy — did he say ‘Elliott’s’ or ‘the Elliott Hotel’?”
Sammy stared at him.
“He said ‘Elliott’s,’ ” he stated positively. “I never heard of an Elliott Hotel.”