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the Pinčde,” Carozza explained. “We were having the siesta, and they woke us up. But it’s hard to believe he’s been murdered.”
    Who said he was?” Simon asked.
    “That was the rumor. It is not true?”
    Wilbert repeated the facts, very precisely, with the addition of what they had observed and discussed in the boat, like a new member of an undergraduate committee making his first report.
    “I am not a criminal expert,” Carozza said at the end, looking very significantly at the Saint, “but how can it be anything but murder? I knew him, and he was not a man who would take a boat forty miles towards Africa by himself, with no one to admire him. He was taken out by someone who killed him and threw him overboard, and escaped in another boat.”
    “Why in another boat?” Simon inquired.
    “To make a mystery. Like the famous Marie Celeste, the ship from which all the passengers and crew disappeared and left everything in perfect order. This was the work of an artist!”
    His wife studied him fixedly.
    “You are not often so quick to talk,” she said. “Be careful that someone does not think you are describing yourself.”
    She had not given the Saint more than the most perfunctory recognition at the beginning, and she continued to ignore him as calmly as if they had never had anything but the casual introduction of the previous evening. It was hard even for him to believe in the reality of the tempting pressure of her body and the tantalization of her mouth that he had known in between, or the monstrous bargain that she had offered. Indubitably she was an actress with more intelligence than her detractors gave her credit for; and if only as a tribute to that talent he had to nudge her off a hazardous tack.
    “If there’s going to be any murder investigation,” he said, “we might all have to look to our alibis.”
    “Lee and I could have nothing to do with it,” she said scornfully. “All this morning we were in Nice, at the studio, where I do an interview for the television. And afterward we have lunch with a reporter from France-Soir. And we come back to our hotel, the Pinčde, for the siesta. We have no time for anything else.”
    “Simon and I were together,” Maureen said, “from-when was it?-about a quarter to one until we met Mr Wilbert just now.”
    “I was at the villa,” Wilbert said weakly. “Doing the petty cash accounts, going through letters, making a few phone calls-“
    He was suddenly very helpless and bewildered.
    “Alors,” said the police sergeant, who had been trying to regain command for a long while, “there must now be a proper statement from everyone.”
    “By all means,” said the Saint. “And let me start with a simple debunking of the whole razzmatazz. Undine was drunk last night, as witnessed by Miss Herald and doubtless many restaurateurs and waiters. This morning he had the gueule de bois. He also had an important business meeting to cope with. He went out for a spin in the speedboat to clear his head. And everyone knows he was a crazy boat driver. He made a turn too fast, and in his condition he lost his balance and fell overboard, and the boat went on without him. And let us all think kindly of him when we eat lobsters.”
    There was a sequel to this rambling anecdote almost a year later, when a production entitled Messalina, in Colossoscope and Kaleidocolor, was world-premiered with all the standard fanfares at the Caracalla auditorium in Rome, Italy, with simultaneous openings in six other towns called Rome in the United States.
    Simon Templar, who was by nature attracted to such functions as irresistibly as he would have been drawn to a cholera epidemic, was a notable guest; and one of the first personages that he encountered was a ginger-haired bat-eared apparition upon whom a white tie and tails conferred an appallingly pasteboard dignity.
    “I gather that you were able to satisfy the flics about the loose joints in your alibi,” Simon greeted him