"But where?" wailed the detective.
The Saint smiled, and blew a slender smoke-ring through a teasing pause.
"I'll leave a note for you at the desk here. You climb on to your little bicycle and come and pick it up."
"Why not give it to me now?"
"Because I want to be there first. Because I want a little time to set the stage. And because cops rush in where Saints are smart enough to wait. Be patient, Henry. Everything will be under control… I hope. I'm just trying to make it easy for you. And please, when you get there, do me the favor of listening for a minute before you thunder in. I don't want to be interrupted in the middle of a tender passage… Goodbye now."
He hung up in time to disconnect a jolt of verbal heat and explosion that might have threatened the New York Telephone Company with a general fusing of wires between the Murray Hill and Spring exchanges, scribbled rapidly on a sheet of paper, and sealed it into an envelope and wrote Fernack's name on it while he waited for the service elevator.
"Get this to the desk, will you?" he said to the operator as they rode down. "To be called for."
The timekeeper let him out, and he emerged from the side door on to Forty-fourth Street, walking east. In a few strides he turned into the Seymour Hotel, and walked quickly up the corridor towards the lobby. There he stopped for a minute, waiting to see if anyone entered after him. It was always possible that Kestry might have brooded enough to wait for him, or even that the ungodly themselves might have another representative lurking around. But no one followed him in within a reasonable time; and that part of the chase was won. For the Seymour ran cleat through the block, and he went out on to Forty-fifth Street and stepped into a passing taxi with reasonable assurance that he was alone.
The clock in his head ran with sidereal detachment and precision, and on that spidery tightrope of timing his brain balanced as lightly as a shadow.
He had had to put everything together very quickly and coldly; and yet it seemed to him now that he had always known just where each person who mattered would be, from instant to instant, as though they had been linked to him by threads of extrasensory perception. But he had to be right. He had to be right now, or else he had thrown away all the completeness of what he had tried to do.