"By all means," said Quintana. "Give it back to him, Perez."
Simon took back the case and opened it with a certain feeling of relief which he kept strictly to himself. At least, with that in his hands, he had something on his side, little as it was.
"And now," he said through a veil of smoke, "what about this forty thousand quid?"
"That can be arranged fairly quickly."
Quintana had sat down in the swivel chair behind the desk. He leaned back in it, turning his gun between his hands as if he had ceased to regard it as a useful weapon; but Simon knew that he could bring it back to usefulness quicker than the distance between them could be covered.
"Mr Templar, you are a bold man. Let me point out that you are now inside the residence of the representative of the Spanish Nationalist party. If I shot you now and the fact was ever discovered I doubt whether anything very serious could ever happen to me."
"Except some of the things I was telling you about," murmured the Saint.
The other nodded.
"Yes, it would be very inconvenient. But it would not be fatal. I am only mentioning that to show my appreciation of your — nerve. And for some other reasons. Now the alternative to killing you is to pay you your price of forty thousand pounds. But we could not do that without satisfactory guarantees that your own side of the bargain would be kept."
"And what would they be?"