"What did you buy last night?" Hamilton asked suspiciously.
"You'll see it on my expense account — I don't think it'll mean raising the income tax rate more than five per cent," said the Saint, and hung up.
He ate his brunch at leisure, and saved his coffee to go with a definitive cigarette.
He had a lot of things to think about, and he only began trying to co-ordinate them when the coffee was clean and nutty on his palate, and the smoke was crisp on his tongue and drifting in aromatic clouds before his face.
Now there was Cookie's Canteen to think about. And that might be something else again.
Now the dreaming was over, and this was another day.
He went to the closet, hauled out a suitcase, and threw it on the bed. Out of the suitcase he took a bulging briefcase. The briefcase was a particularly distinguished piece of luggage, for into its contents had gone an amount of ingenuity, corruption, deception, seduction, and simple larceny which in itself could have supplied the backgrounds for a couple of dozen stories.
Within its hand-sewn compartments was a collection of documents in blank which represented the cream of many years of research. On its selection of letterheads could be written letters purporting to emanate from almost any institution between the Dozey Dairy Company of Kansas City and the Dominican Embassy in Ankara. An assortment of visiting cards in two or three crowded pockets was prepared to identify anybody from the Mayor of Jericho to Sam Schiletti, outside plumbing contractor, of Exterior Falls, Oregon. There were passports with the watermarks of a dozen governments — driving licenses, pilot's licences, ration books, credit cards, birth certificates, warrants, identification cards, passes, permits, memberships, and authorisations enough to establish anyone in any role from a Bulgarian tight-rope walker to a wholesale fish merchant from Grimsby. And along with them there was a unique symposium of portraits of the Saint, flattering and unflattering, striking and nondescript, natural and disguised — together with a miscellany of stamps, seals, dies, and stickers which any properly conditioned bureaucrat would have drooled with ecstasy to behold. It was an outfit that would have been worth a fortune to any modern brigand, and it had been worth exactly that much to the Saint before.
He sat down at the desk and worked for an unhurried hour, at the end of which time he had all the necessary documents to authenticate an entirely imaginary seaman by the name of Tom Simons, of the British Merchant Marine. He folded and refolded them several times, rubbed the edges with a nail file, smeared them with cigarette ash, sprinkled them with water and a couple of drops of coffee, and walked over them several times until they were convincingly soiled and worn.
Then he finished dressing and went out. He took a Fifth Avenue bus to Washington Square, and walked from there down through the gray shabby streets of the lower east side until he found the kind of store he was looking for.