The bartender was standing over them expectantly. Simon said: "Dawson for me; and I guess you know what the lady's drinking." He became absorbed in the way the man worked with his big deft hands.
And then suddenly he knew all about everything, and it was like waking up under an ice-cold shower.
He took his breath back gradually, and said without a change in.his voice except that the smile was no longer there: "You don't know Brother Blatt and his playmates very well, do you, Olga? Especially Maris. But if I'd only been a little brighter I'd have just stayed here and found Maris."
She was staring at him rigidly, with wide tragical eyes. It was a good act, he thought cynically.
The bartender stirred their drinks and set them up, fastidiously wiping spots of moisture from the bar around them. Simon appealed to him.
"I should have asked you in the first place, shouldn't I, Joe? You could have shown me Maris."
The man's big square face began to crinkle in its ready accommodating smile.
And the Saint knew he was right — even though the conclusion had come to him in one lightning-flash of revelation, and the steps towards it still had to be retraced.
Maris, the man nobody knew. Maris, the man nobody had ever heard of. The truly invisible man. The man whom the assistant manager of the Ascot might have been referring to, and have forgotten, even, when he said that he had been chatting with a friend when Nick Vaschetti came home to die. The man nobody ever saw, or ever would see; because they never looked.
Simon lifted his glass and took a sip from it.