So it was the fire escape and the bedroom window; and he had not waited in vain.
There had been an instant of tingling stillness when he heard the sound, but now he was as smooth and cool as a hand-trued machine, and his pulses were as light as the ripples on a landlocked bay at sunset. Now he backed noiselessly out of his neutral corner and flattened himself easily along the wall, towards the front door and away from the rooms, so that the visitor would have to step clear into the living-room before he could see the Saint at all.
The Saint's ears followed the movements in the bedroom step by step. He heard the occasional scuff of exploring feet, and a hoarse "For Christ's sake, hurry up!" There was the clicking of the blind again, and more movement. It was surprising how you could hear sounds, after all, in spite of the radio: when it came to the point, these sounds had a totally different texture, so that there was no confusion, just as you could have heard a hiccup in the next seat in a movie in spite of the sound effects of a newsreel bombardment. He could even hear the thin strained sound of consciously controlled breathing.
In addition, he became ethereally aware of a new richness in the atmosphere which he could still identify in spite of his recent bludgeoning by the assorted smells of Mrs Ourley, and he knew that he was perceiving the particularly obnoxious pomade of Mr Varetti even before the sleek head that wore it slid into his sidelong field of vision.
Varetti stood looking down at the rawhide bag as Cokey Walsh followed him out of the bedroom.
"Here it is," he said, with superfluous but deep satisfaction.
"If only that sonofagun Templar was here too," said Mr Walsh, "I'd like to…"
He enumerated a few things he would have liked to do which it would be useless to repeat here, since the elevated minds of the readers of this reportage would never believe that any person could have such depraved ambitions.
Varetti, a more practical man, cut him off in the middle of a fine phrase with the kind of question which from time immemorial has nipped the poet's prettier fancies in the bud.
""Why don't you shut your trap?"