He went back to his own hotel with the memory of that parting in his mind.
She was the Spanish Cow. So he had christened her, and so she would always be. A fat, repulsive, noisy, quarrelsome, imbecile vulgarian — with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar collection of jewels. And it was a part of his career to take those jewels away and apply them to a better use than encircling her billowy neck. To make that possible he had had to play her like a fish on a line, and it had so happened that the fish had taken the line for a lifeline. It had ceased fighting — had brought itself to a wild grotesque travesty of coyness. When it discovered how it had been hoodwinked, it would fight again — but with other anglers. It would be bitter, coarse, obstreperous again, pulling faces and putting out its tongue. And that also was in the game.
In his room, he took a small case of instruments from a drawer, and selected a key blank that matched the impression on his wax plaque. It took him a full hour and a half to file a duplicate to his rigorous satisfaction, and then he changed his clothes and picked up an ordinary crook-handle walking stick and went out again.
It was late enough for him to have the road to himself, and no inquisitive eye observed the course he steered for the fire escape of the Provençal. With the calm dexterity of a seasoned Londoner boarding a passing bus, he edged the crook of his stick over the lowest platform and swung himself nimbly up. Then he flitted up the iron zigzag like a ghost on rubber-soled shoes. The lights were on behind the curtains of a room on the second floor, and a passionate declaration of eternal love wafted out into the balmy night as he went by. The Saint grinned faintly to himself and ascended to the third floor. The nearest window there was dark. He slid over the sill with no more noise than a ray of moonlight, and crossed as silently to the door. In another moment he was outside, the latch jammed back with a wedge of cardboard so that he could make his retreat by the same route, and the corridor stretching out before him like a broad highway to his Eldorado.
The key he had made fitted soundlessly into the lock of Mrs Nussberg’s suite, and he turned it without a scrape or a click and let himself into the sitting-room. He had closed the door again from the inside before he saw a thin strip of luminance splitting the darkness on his right, where the communicating door of the bedroom was and he realized, with a sudden settling of all his faculties into a taut-strong vigilance, that for some unaccountable reason the Spanish Cow had not yet sought the byre.
The Saint rested where he was, while he considered the diverse aspects of the misfortune. And then, with the effortless silence of a cat, he glided on towards the bedroom door.
It was at that moment that he heard the incredible noise.
4
For a couple of seconds he thought that after all he must have been mistaken — that Mrs Nussberg had gone to sleep, leaving the light on as a protection against banshees and things that go bump in the night, and was snoring with all the high bugle-like power of which her metallic nasal cavities should have been capable. Then, as the cadence dropped, and he made out a half-dozen words, he considered whether she might be giving tongue in her sleep. And then, as the sound continued, the truth dawned upon him with an eerie shock.
Porphyria Nussberg was singing.