"They have not been badly chosen. At this moment I have nearly forty thousand pounds in American and English money in my safe, all of it paid over to me by our other agents. Ingleston was the only mistake we have made."
"And he won't trouble us any more," said a third voice, speaking for the first time.
It was a moment after the Saint had decided that it was time for him to locate the keyhole and add another dimension to the drama which was being unfolded for his benefit. He found the hole just as the third voice reached his ears, and scanned the scene through it with some interest.
The room beyond was smaller than the one which he was in, and from the more habitable furnishings and the lines of bookshelves along the walls it appeared to be a small private study.
Urivetzky sat in an armchair with his back to the keyhole — the hairless cranium which showed over the back of the chair could only have belonged to him. In a swivel chair beyond the desk sat another man whom the Saint recognized at once from the photograph he had seen as Luis Quintana himself; he was smiling at the time, exposing the characteristic Spanish row of irregular fangs covered with greenish-yellow slime, like rocks left naked at low tide, which ought to be exhibited in museums for the education of Anglo-Saxon maidens who have been misled by ceaseless propaganda into believing in the dentifricial glamour of the Latin grin.
Simon observed those details with his first perfunctory glance. From a curiosity point of view he was more immediately interested in the third member of the party, who sat puffing a cigar in the chair directly facing him. He was a man with a square-looking body and a close-cropped, square-looking grey head; the expression of his mouth was hidden by a thick straggling moustache, but his black eyes were flat and vicious. And the Saint knew intuitively that he must be the unidentified assassin whom for the purposes of convenient reference he had christened Pongo.
"The other bonds have not yet been found," Urivetzky said acidly.
"They will be found," Quintana reassured him.
"They had better be found. Otherwise this will be the finish. I am not interested in your country, but I am interested in my living."
The Rebels' representative raised his eyebrows.