Saint on Guard by Leslie Charteris

observed, with dispassionate expertness, that even broad daylight could find no flaw in the clear olive smoothness of her skin.
    Another and less simple observation was that she seemed at first too surprised and angry to be afraid.
    “Well I’m damned,” she said. “How did you get in here?”
    “I burgled the joint,” said the Saint candidly.
    “You’ve got a nerve,” she said. “On top of what you did to me last night.”
    The act looked quite terrific. But the lift of the Saint’s right eyebrow was only mildly impudent.
    “Did they make you wash a lot of dishes?” he inquired inter-estedly.
    The flare in her eyes was like lightning reflected in pools of jet. She was Certainly wonderful. And it was no help to her at all that anger only cleared her beauty of the magazine-cover sugariness and gave it a more vivid reality.
    “So you’re damned smart,” she said in a frozen voice that came like icicles out of a blast furnace. “You make a fool out of me in front of half the waiters in New York. You stick me with a dinner check for about thirty dollars–-“
    “But you must admit it was a good dinner.”
    “And then you have the gall to break into my apartment and try to be funny about it.” Her voice thawed out on the phrase, as if she was coming out of a momentary trance into the full spoken realisation of what he had actually done; and then it sizzled like oil on hot coals. “Well, we can soon settle that–-“
    “Not so fast, darling.”
    His arm shot out almost lazily, and he hardly seemed to have moved towards her at all, but her wrist was caught in fingers of steel before she had taken more than one full step towards the telephone.
    He stopped her without any apparent effort at all, and calmly disengaged the hatbox and tossed it into the nearest armchair.
    “Before you add half the cops in New York to half the waiters, in this audience of yours,” he said, “I think we should talk some more.”
    “Let me go!” she blazed.
    “After all,” he continued imperturbably, “it is a pretty nice apartment. And you did invite me here originally, if you remember. There must be some handy dough in this modeling racket for you to be able to keep up a pied-d-terre like this. Or, if it isn’t rude question, who else is contributing at the moment?”
    Her ineffectual struggle almost ceased for a moment; and then, when it sprang up again, for the first time it had the wild flurry of something close to the delayed panic that should have been there long before.
    “You must be crazy! You’re hurting me–-“
    “And that,” said the Saint, nodding towards a veneered cabinet against the wall, without any change either in the steel of his grip| or the engaging velvet of his voice, “is presumably the radio whose| dulcet tones were to beguile me last night—while I was being cosily framed into the neatest murder rap that I’ve had to answer for a long time.”
    “You crazy lunatic …”
    Her voice faded out just like that. And the fight faded out of her in exactly the same way, abruptly and completely, so that she was like a puppet with the strings suddenly cut.
    “What do you mean,” she whispered, “murder?”
    Simon let go her wrist and put his cigarette to his mouth again, gazing down at her with eyes of inexorable blue ice. His mind was clear and passionless like the mind of a surgeon in an operating room. In the back of his mind he could hear the whirr of wheels in a production line, and again he could remember candlelight and soft music and rich food and wine in a penthouse hideaway, and still behind that in his mind was the rumble of tanks and the drone of airplanes and the numbing thunder of shells and bombs, and men sweating and cursing in the smoke of hell; and the war was there in that room, he could feel it as fierce and vital as the hush in a front-line trench before an attack at dawn, and he knew that even in those incongruous and improbable settings he was fighting not one battle but