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.
On Mr. Teal's rubicund features showed no visible emotion beyond the isolated, slow, incredulous expansion of his eyes: the Saint's tanned face was debonairly impassive: but behind the Saint's steady blue eyes his brain was covering ground at a speed it had already been required to make before.
Once before, and once only, in Simon's hectic career, Teal had caught him red-handed; but then there had been a perfect alibi prepared, a grim challenge ready, and a clear getaway in the offing. At other times, of course, there had been close calls, but they had also been anticipated and legislated for in advance. And, with that alibi or getaway at hand, events had taken their natural course. Teal had been baited, defied, dared, punched in the tummy, or pulled by the nose: those were the rich rewards of foresight. But there was none of that now.
And the Saint smiled.
Teal's right hand was still poised in mid-air, raised for the official and peremptory knock that he had been about to deliver when the door opened so astonishingly in front of him: he might have forgotten its existence. But the Saint reached out and drew it down and shook it, with that incomparable Saintly smile lighting his face again with as gay a carelessness as it had ever held.
"Come in, Claud," he said. "You're just in time."
And with that breaking of the silence Teal came back to earth with a jolt that closed his mouth almost with a snap. He advanced solidly into the room, and another burly man in plain clothes who was with him followed him in. They took in the scene in a couple of purposeful glances.
"Well?"
The interrogation broke from the detective's mouth with a curt bluntness that was as self-explanatory as a cannonball. The Saint's eyebrows flickered.
"This," he murmured, with the air of a Cook's guide conducting a tour, "is Mr. Julian Lamantia, who recently revived the ancient game of inviting suckers to —"