“Catch airplanes in my teeth like Superman?” Simon suggested.
“No kidding,” said Mr Ufferlitz. “You’re the greatest proposition that ever hit this town. I’ve got all the angles worked out. Tell you all about it at lunch. Let’s say the Vine Street Derby at one o’clock. Okay?”
“Okay,” said the Saint tolerantly.
It was exactly why and because he was Simon Templar, the Saint, that things always happened to him. The last few sentences of Mr Ufferlitz had given him a sudden and fairly clear idea of what sort of proposition Mr Ufferlitz would consider “great,” and what kind of angles Mr Ufferlitz would have worked out — even before he turned to the telephone directory and found an entry under Ufferlitz Productions, Inc. Anyway, he had nothing else to do and no other plans for lunch, and Mr Ufferlitz could always provide comic relief.
He was right about that, but he also had no inkling whatever of a number of quite unfunny things that were destined to cross his path as a direct result of his amused acceptance of that invitation.
During the morning he called a friend of his, an agent, and after they had exchanged a suitable amount of nonsense he inquired further about Mr Ufferlitz.
“Byron Ufferlitz?” repeated Dick Halliday. “He’s quite an up-and-coming producer these days. A sort of cross between Sammy Click and Al Capone. I don’t suppose you’d know about it, but he bobbed up only a little over a year ago with some wildcat Studio Employees Union that he’d invented, and somehow he got so many studio employees to join it and made such a nuisance of himself with a few well-timed strikes that finally they had to buy him off.”
“By suddenly discovering that he was a production genius?”
“Something like that. The Government tried to get him for extortion, but the witnesses called it off, and he was supposed to be wanted in New Orleans on some old charge of sticking up a bank, but nothing came of that either. Now he’s quite the white-haired boy. He brought in a picture for about fifty thousand dollars, and surprisingly enough it wasn’t bad. What does he want you to do — sell him your life story or bump somebody off?”
“I’m going to find out,” said the Saint, and went to his appointment with even a shade more optimism.