“I can be very convincing, especially when I don’t have to bluff. As a matter of fact—”
The wall telephone broke in with a tinny stutter, and for some reason everything else went quiet.
Eberhardt answered it. He put the receiver to his ear and then took it away again and looked at Julius.
“Pardon me,” said Julius punctiliously, and went to the instrument.
He spent most of the time listening, with an occasional monosyllable of acknowledgment. It was not long. Then he spoke one sentence in German, which the Saint understood perfectly, and hung up the receiver and came back. He seemed even pinker and shinier and squirmily complacent than before.
“As a matter of fact,” he resumed, as if there had been no interruption, “Miss Morland is with us already. Party Member Nagel has just brought her in. You knew him, I understand, as ‘Nails.’ ”
8
Time crawled over the Saint’s head — long-drawn-out intense dissected months of it, it seemed. He stood absolutely motionless, like a statue, through a crawling eternity, and this was solely because he knew that the slightest movement he made would betray him. He had to wait until his muscles and nerves linked themselves up again, as they would have to do after an unwarned smash on the head.
Actually it could only have been very few seconds, and Dr Julius was still facing him with that smug and pseudo-deferential leer.
The Saint said, “You’re fairly thorough yourself, aren’t you, Ludwig?”