"I've been enjoying myself," she said; and in her own Slavic and slavish way she was still laughing at him and with him, enjoying the tranquility of her own uncomplaining acceptance of everything. "Tell me how you talk to editors."
He told her something absurd; and she sat close against him and laughed gaily aloud as he drove towards the Blue Goose. He was very disconcertingly conscious of the supple firmness of her body as she leaned innocently towards him, and the loveliness of her face against its plaque of yellow braided hair; and he had to make himself remember that she was not so young, and she had been around.
He stopped at the Blue Goose, and opened her door for her without leaving the wheel.
"Aren't you coming in?" she asked.
He was lighting a cigarette with the dashboard gadget, not looking at her.
"I'll try to get back before closing time," he said, "and have a nightcap with you. But I've got a small job to do first. I'm a working man — or did you forget?"
She moved, after an instant's silence and stillness; and then he felt his hand brushed away from his mouth with the cigarette still freshly lighted in it, and her mouth was there instead, and this was like the night before only more so. Her arms were locked around his neck, and her face was the ivory blur in front of him, and he remembered that she had been a surprising warm fragrance to him when she did that before, and this was like that again. He had a split second of thinking that this was it, and he had slipped after all, and he couldn't reach his gun or his knife with her kissing him; and his ears were awake for the deafening thunderbolts that always rang down the curtain on careers like his. But there was nothing except her kiss, and her low voice saying, docilely like she said everything: "Be careful, tovarich. Be careful."
"I will be," he said, and put the gears scrupulously together, and had driven quite a fair way before it coordinated itself to him that she was still the only named name of the ungodly whom he had met and spoken to, and that there was no reason for her to warn him to be careful unless she knew from the other side that he could be in danger.
He drove cautiously back to the Alamo House, collected his key from the desk, glanced around to make sure that Detective Yard had found a comfortable chair, and went up to his room in search of a refreshing pause beside a cool alcoholic drink.
Specifically, the one person he had most in mind was the venerable Mr Peter Dawson, a tireless distiller of bagpipe broth who, as we recollect, should have been represented among the Saint's furniture by the best part of a bottle of one of his classic consommes. Simon Templar was definitely not expecting, as any added attraction, the body of Mr Port Arthur Jones, trussed up and gagged with strips of adhesive tape, and anchored to his bed with hawsers of sash cord, and looking exactly like a new kind of Ethiopian mummy with large rolling eyes; which is precisely what he was.