"You'd better not try!" said Mr Teal hoarsely as he shifted his ample paunch well out of range of the Saint's questing forefinger.
"Have a drink, and let's get together," pleaded the Saint. "The mistake you made was natural enough — and if the worst comes to the worst you can always shove the blame onto Sergeant Barrow. You probably will anyhow. Hut that doesn't make it up to me. The thing which pains me is that you should have mistaken me for this bird of prey who calls himself the Z-Man. A bloke who can cause a girl full of charm and glamour and a hard-boiled detective to frizzle me with a couple of looks like the interior of a sewage incinerator must be pretty epizootic. Tell me, Claud, who is this descendant of Dracula?"
But something else had settled upon Mr Teal's tortured presence — something oddly stubborn and impenetrable that didn't fit in with his earlier demonstrations any more than it belonged to the stunned paralysis which had since overcome him. It was as if he had drawn back inside himself and locked a door.
"Forget it," he said stonily.
"I can't forget something 1 don't know. Be reasonable, dear old nitwit. It's only fair to me—"
"I don't know anything about the Z-Man, and nobody else knows anything about the Z-Man," Teal said deliberately. "I was just trying to be funny. Understand?"
He nodded sleepily, jerked his head towards Sergeant Barrow, and they both left. As the front door gave a vicious slam Hoppy Uniatz reached for the whisky decanter and thrust the neck of it into his capacious mouth.
"Boss," he said, coming to the surface, "I don't get nut'n."
"Except the whisky," murmured the Saint, rescuing the decanter. "For once, Hoppy, I'm right in your street. I don't get nut'n either."
"Why ja let dem bums get away wit' it?" asked Mr Uniatz discontentedly. "Dey got a noive, bustin' in like dat. Say, if we knew some politicians we could have dose mugs walkin' a beat again so fast—"