"But Lieutenant," protested the dumbfounded Yard, "what about the Chief? What about…"
"The Chief," Kinglake said shortly, "and the Commissioner, and the Sheriff, and everybody behind them, can—"
He did not say that they could jump in the lake, or go climb a tree, or perform any of the more conventional immolations. It is indeed highly doubtful whether they could have done what the Lieutenant said they could do. But Kinglake was not very concerned just then with literal accuracy. He had an objective of his own which mattered a lot more to him, and he left his extraordinary statement fluttering forgotten in the air behind him as he stalked out.
Simon Templar was also dominated by one single idea. The murder of Matson had been unfortunate, but he could exonerate himself from it. The murder of Vaschetti had been still more unfortunate, but the excuses he could make for himself for that were flimsy gauze before his own ruthless self-criticism. But his reaction to that had already reversed itself into a positive driving force that would go on until the skies fell apart — or he did. For the ungodly to have murdered two men almost under his nose and within split seconds of giving him the precious information that he had to get was an insolence and an effrontery that he was going to make them wish they had never achieved. The Saint was angry now in a reckless cold savage way, not as he had been when he first went from Police Headquarters to the offices of the Times-Tribune, but in a way that could only be soothed out in blood.
And now he thought he knew where he was going to find the blood that night.
A taxi took him to the Blue Goose; but this time he didn't need the driver to vouch for him. The doorkeeper remembered him, and let him in at once. He walked through the blue melodious dimness towards the bar, loose-limbed and altogether at his ease; yet there were filaments stirring through all the length of him that kept no touch at all with that lazily debonair demeanor. He caught sight of Olga Ivanovitch sitting at a table with another girl and two obvious wholesale bottle-cap salesmen, but he only gave her a casual wave and went on to find a stool at the bar. He knew she would join him, and he waited good-humoredly while the brawny blond bartender worked over complicated mixtures for a complicated quartet at the other end of the counter.
Then she was beside him; and he knew it by the perfume she used and the cool satin of her hand before he looked at her.
"I'm glad you got here," she said. "Did you get your job done?"
She was exactly the same, lovely and docile, as if she was only glad of him and wanting to be glad for him; as if death had never struck near her or walked with the men she knew.
Simon made a movement of his head that seemed to answer the question unless one stopped to wonder whether it meant yes or no. He went on before that could happen: "I nearly didn't come here. What I'd really hoped to do was curl up at home with a good book from the circulating library."