"I suppose," he said, "you want me to take care of everything and get the Campeche to withdraw the complaint."
"I suppose you can do it. You didn't say anything, so there it is."
"I can put a man on it. I'll have him out in a couple of hours, as you said. But don't ask what happens to me for conspiring to suppress evidence, because I don't know."
"We write up the story," said the Saint, "and we hand King-lake a proof while the presses are rolling. Pie gets the complete dope, and we get the beat. What could be fairer?"
The city editor continued to look dyspeptic and unhappy with all of his face except his bright eyes.
He said: "Where are you going now?"
"Call me at the Alamo House as soon as your stooge has Vaschetti under control," Simon told him. "I've got to take Olga to her treadmill, if she hasn't run out by this time."
But Olga Ivanovitch was still sitting in the Saint's car, to all appearances exactly as he had left her, with her hands folded in her lap and the radio turned on, listening happily to some aspiring and perspiring local comedy program.
She was able to make him feel wrong again, even like that, because she was so naively and incontestably untroubled by any of the things that might have been expected to rasp the edges of deliberate self-control.
"I'm sorry 1 was so long," he said, with a brusqueness that burred into his voice out of his own bewilderment. "But they've started teaching editors two-syllable words lately, and that means it takes them twice as long to talk back to you."