They looked at each other again, grinned, and stood up to shake hands.
“I’m Vic Lazaroff,” said the gray-haired man. “This is Bob Kendricks. Consider yourself one of us. Sit down and make yourself unhappy.”
“How are you getting on with the epic?” Simon inquired.
“Your life story? Fine. Of course, we’ve had a lot of practice with it. It started off to be a costume piece about Dick Turpin. Then we had to make it fit a soldier of fortune in the International Brigade in Spain. That was when Orlando Flane was getting interested. Then we took it to South America when everyone was on the goodwill rampage. We worked in a lot of stuff that they threw out of one of the Thin Man pictures, too.”
“Were you ever befriended by a Chinese laundryman when you were a starving orphan in Limehouse?” Kendricks asked.
“I’m afraid not,” Simon confessed. “You see—”
“That’s too bad; because it ties in with a terrific routine where you’re flying for the Chinese Government and the Japs have captured one of the guerrilla chieftains and they’re going to have a ceremonial execution, and you find out that this chieftain is the guy who once saved your life with chop suey, and you set out for practically certain death to try and save him. Flane thought it was swell.”
“I think it’s swell too,” said the Saint soothingly. “I was only mentioning that it didn’t happen.”
“Look here,” said Lazaroff suspiciously, “are you trying to set us right about your life?”
“We’ve got to have some dramatic license,” explained Kendricks. “But we’ll do right by you. You’ll see. We’ll give you the best life story any guy ever had.”