“But before he starts to work, he’s got to be sure that you’ve really got his daughter and that she hasn’t been harmed.”
“The gal’s okay.”
Simon looked at him steadily.
“I have to see her myself. Then I’ll write him a note, which you can have delivered. I’ll tell you right now that it’ll have a code word in it, which is to prove that I really wrote it and that nobody was twisting my arm to make me say the right things.”
Unciello contemplated him with the immobility of a Buddha. Then his eyes switched to a point over the Saint’s head.
“ Mena la giovane,” he said.
The hoodlum who never spoke came around from behind the Saint’s chair and crossed the big room to disappear through one of the doors at the other end. Unciello smoked his cigar impassively. There was no idle conversation.
Presently the man who had left came back, and with him he brought Sue Inverest.
She was so exactly like Simon had seen her last, and as he remembered her, that for a moment it felt as if they were back in the Colosseum. Only in a strange dislocation of time they now seemed to belong rather with the expendables who had once stood on the floor of the arena, while a modern but no less vicious Nero squatted like a toad on his brocaded throne and held their lives in his hands. But the girl still carried her curly fair head high, and Simon smiled into her shocked gray eyes.
“Your father sent me to see if you were all right, Sue,” he said gently. “Have they hurt you?”