"It's all signed up legal," he said dolefully. "We'll have to spend our own dough and buy him out."
"Get your hat," said Mr. Urlaub shortly. "We'll cook up a story on the way."
When Rosalind Hale walked into the Saint's apartment at the Waldorf-Astoria that afternoon, Simon Templar was counting crisp new hundred-dollar bills into neat piles.
"What have you been doing?" she said. "Burgling a bank?"
The Saint grinned.
"The geetus came out of a bank, anyway," he murmured. "But Comrades Quarterstone and Urlaub provided the checks. I just went out and cashed them."
"You mean they bought you out?"
"After a certain amount of haggling and squealing — yes. Apparently Aaron Niementhal changed his mind about backing the show, and Urlaub didn't want to offend him on account of Aaron offered to cut him in on another and bigger and better proposition at the same time; so they gave me ten thousand dollars to tear up the contracts, and the idea is that I ought to play the lead in Niementhal's bigger and better show."
She pulled off her hat and collapsed into a chair. She was no longer gaunt and masculine and forbidding, for she had changed out of a badly fitting tweed suit and removed her sallow make-up and thrown away the gold-rimmed glasses and fluffed out her hair again so that it curled in its usual soft brown waves around her face, so that her last resemblance to anyone by the name of Wohlbreit was gone.
"Ten thousand dollars," she said limply. "It doesn't seem possible. But it's real. I can see it."