The old man nodded.
“Dot is how I mean, I didn’t do it all by myself. If I hadn’t done that I should’ve had to vork some more years.”
Simon Templar’s eyes fell to the newspaper on his knee. For it was on that day that the collapse of the Voyson Plastics Company was exposed by the sudden disappearance of the President, and ruined investors learned for the first time that the rock on which they had been lured to found their fortunes was nothing but a quicksand. Even the local sheet which the Saint had bought devoted an entire column to the first revelations of the crack-up.
Simon drew a slow breath as if he had received a physical blow. There was nothing very novel about the story; there never will be anything very novel about these things, except for the scale of the disaster, and certainly there was nothing very novel about it in the Saint’s experience. But his heart went oddly heavy. For a second he thought that he would rather anyone but himself should bring the tragedy — anyone who hadn’t seen what he had seen, who hadn’t been taken into the warmth and radiance of the enchanted castle that had been opened to him. But he knew that the old man would have to know, sooner or later. And the girl would have to know.
He held out his paper.
“Maybe you haven’t read any news lately,” he said quietly, and turned away to the window because he preferred not to see.
2
The lottery of travel had done a good job. It reached out into the world and threw lives and stories together, shuffled them in a brief contact, and then left them altered forever. An adventurer, a Rhine Maiden, an old man. Hope, romance, a crooked company promoter, a scrap of cheap newsprint, tragedy. Perhaps every route that carries human freight is the same, only one doesn’t often see the working of it. Human beings conquering and falling and rising again, each in his own trivial little play, in the inscrutable loneliness which everything human makes for itself wherever crowds mingle and never know each other’s names. Simon Templar had loved the lottery for its own sake, because it was a gamble where such infinitely exciting things could happen, but now he thought that it looked on its handiwork and sneered. He could have punched it on the nose. After a long time the old man was speaking to him.
“It isn’t true. It couldn’t be true. Der great big company like dot couldn’t break down!”
Simon looked into the dazed honest eyes.