06 Alias the Saint

Simon Templar, even in his superlatively casual acquaintance with the newspapers, had bad every opportunity to become familiar with the face of Miles Hallin, though he had never seen the man in the flesh. That square-jawed, pugnacious profile, with the white teeth and crinkled eyes and flashing smile, had figured in more photographs than the Saint cared to remember. Mr. Miles Hallin standing beside the wreckage of his Furillac at Le Mans-- Mr. Miles Hallin being taken on board a tug after his speedboat Red Lady had capsized in the Solent --Mr. Miles Hallin after his miraculous escape during the King's Cup Air Race, when his Eiton "Dragon" caught fire at five thousand feet--Mr. Miles Hallin filming a charging buffalo in Tanganyika--Simon Templar knew them all. Miles Hallin did everything that a well-to-do sportsman could possibly include in the most versatile repertory, and all his efforts seemed to have the single aim of a spectacular suicide; but always he had escaped death by the essential hair's breadth that had given him his name. No one could say that it was Miles Hallin's fault.

Miles Hallin had survived being mauled by a tiger, and had killed an infuriated gorilla with a sheath knife. Miles Hallin had performed in bull fights before the King of Spain. Miles Hallin had gone into a tank and wrestled with a crocodile to oblige a Hollywood movie director. Miles Hallin had done everything dangerous that the most fertile imagination could conceive--and then some. So far as was known, Miles Hallin couldn't walk a tight rope; but the general impression was that if Miles Hallin could have walked a tight rope he would have walked a tight rope stretched across the crater of Vesuvius as a kind of appetizer before breakfast.

Miles Hallin bothered the Saint through the whole of that week-end.

Simon Templar, as he was always explaining, and usually explaining in such a way that his audience felt very sorry for him, had a sensitivity for anything the least bit out of the ordinary that was as tender as a gouty toe. The lightest touch, a touch that no one else would have felt, made him jump a yard. And when he boasted of his subtle discriminations, though he boasted flippantly, he spoke no less than the truth. That gift and nothing else had led him to fully half his adventures--that uncanny power of drawing a faultless line between the things that were merely eccentric and the things that were definitely wrong. And Miles Hallin struck him, in a way that he could not explain by any ordinary argument, as a thing that was definitely wrong.

Yet it so chanced, this time, that the Saint came to his story by a pure fluke--another and a wilder fluke than the one that had merely introduced him to a man whose brother had been a friend of Hallin's. But for that fluke, the Saint might to this day have been scowling at the name of Miles Hallin in the same hopeless puzzlement. And yet the Saint felt no surprise about the fluke. He had come to accept these accidents as a natural part of his life, in the same way that any other man accepts the accident of finding a newspaper on his breakfast table, with a sense (if he meditated it at all) that he was only seeing the inevitable outcome of a complicated organization of whose workings he knew nothing, but whose naturally continued existence he had never thought to question. These things were ordained.

In fact, there was an unexpected guest at a house party at which the Saint spent his week-end.

Simon Templar had met Teddy Everest in Kuala Lumpur, and again, years later, at Corfu. Teddy Everest was the unexpected guest at the house party; but it must be admitted that he was unexpected only by the Saint.

"This is my lucky day," murmured Simon, as he viewed the apparition. "I've been looking for you all over the world. You owe me ten cents. If you remember, when you had to be carried home after that farewell festival in K.L., I was left to pay for your rickshaw. You hadn't a bean. I know that, because I looked in all your pockets. Ten cents plus five percent compound interest for six years--"

"Comes to a lot less than you borrowed off me in Corfu," said Everest cheerfully. "How the hell are you?"

"My halo," said the Saint, "is clearly visible if you get a strong light behind me. , . . Well, damn your eyes!" The Saint was smiling as he crushed the other's hand in a long grip. "This is a great event, Teddy. Let's get drunk."

The party went with a swing from that moment.

Teddy Everest was a mining engineer, and the Saint could also tell a good story; between them, they kept the ball rolling as they pleased. And on Tuesday, since Everest had to go London on business, he naturally travelled in the Saint's car.

They lunched at Basingstoke; but it was before lunch that the incident happened which turned Teddy Everest's inexhaustible fund of reminiscence into a channel that was to make all the difference in the world to the Saint--and others.