“You’d better do something about those train reservations,” Patricia said finally. “I’m going to sink myself in a bubble bath and think about the life of a traveling salesman.”
“Make yourself beautiful, and we’ll go dancing somewhere,” Simon told her. “I’ll go over to the Brown Derby and drown a sorrow, and catch up with you.”
There was just one vacant place at the bar, and as the Saint slid into it and ordered a Peter Dawson he recognized the soldier on the next stool, and felt the first premonitory flutter of psychic moth wings as the pattern of coincidence began to build. For his neighbor was the sergeant to whom his attention had been indirectly drawn at lunch time.
Only it was a very different-looking sergeant with the same face. His eyes stared a light-year into space, his straight lips were frozen into a white line, and his fingertips also were white from the force with which they pressed on the bar. He looked less like a man with a beautiful piece of real estate and a beautiful realtress thrown in than anything the Saint could imagine.
Simon Templar’s reflexes of observation and curiosity were automatic. The form of his response was just as spontaneous even when it seemed most theatrical, for his sense of drama had a fundamental impishness that was as natural to him as breathing. He managed to corner the sergeant’s blank stare for an instant, and said, “Did you lose out on the house or the babe — or both?”
The soldier’s eyes came stiffly into focus.
“What’s that?”
“You don’t,” said the Saint with a smile, “look like a man who’s found a place to live ought to look, in this day and age.”
He was expecting a reaction, but nothing like what he got.
The head which Pat had admired a few hours earlier swung towards him with an expression that only seemed to belong with a gunsight. One of the hands on the bar balled into a white-knuckled fist, and the shoulder muscles tensed under the olive drab.