"Do you mean you don't want me to stay?"
The Saint felt an odd thrill of breathlessness. There was a subtle tension in the room that had not been there before even in spite of the display of artillery which was still in evidence. To the Saint's preternaturally sharpened senses it was perceptible in the darkened sullenness of Jopley, in the harsh rigidity of Borieff, even in the frozen fixity of Lasser's expansive smile.
And there could only be one explanation for it. It meant that he must have been right in the one wild theory which had come to him on the way there when it was too late to probe into it, that Brenda Marlow and her contradictions were accounted for and that it was no longer necessary to look to Messalina and Lucrezia Borgia for her prototype. It gave the Saint a curious sense of lightness and relief, even though it did nothing to improve his own position. There were worse things than to be at the mercy of men like Lasser and Jopley and Borieff, and in Simon Templar's own inconsequential philosophy to have to think of a girl as he had been thinking of her was one of them.
"I don't mean that at all," Lasser was saying jovially. "No. Of course not. But that — um — envelope has got to be delivered, and this is rather a private matter—"
"Doesn't it concern all of us?"
The Saint raised his glass and drank with a certain deep satisfaction.
"Comrade Lasser has his own views about who's concerned with one thing and another, darling," he explained. "For instance, there was that business about Pargo. I'll bet he didn't tell you that Pargo was tortured to death and dumped on my—"
Borieff's lunging fist thudded against the side of the Saint's head and sent the glass he was holding spinning away to splinter itself on the edge of a table.
Simon's muscles gathered themselves in spontaneous reaction. And then as he gazed squarely into the muzzle of Borieff's automatic they slowly loosened again. Just as slowly he took out a handkerchief and wiped a few drops of spilt liquid from his coat.
After the sudden crash of shattering glass there was a brief interval of intense silence. And then Lasser spoke with his eyes creased up to slits in his plump jolly face.