The Saint to the Rescue

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The Saint met Otis Q Fennick on the fire escape of the Hotel Mercurio, in San Francisco at about four o’clock in the morning.

Like many another eminently simple statements, the foregoing now involves an entirely disproportionate series of explanations.

Simon Templar was staying at the Mercurio, which was a long way from attaining the luxurious standards of the kind of hotel that he usually frequented, because when he headed for San Francisco he had neglected to inform himself that a national convention of the soft-drink and candy industry was concurrently infesting that otherwise delightful city. After finding every superior hostelry clogged to the rafters with manufacturers and purveyors of excess calories, he had decided that he was lucky to find a room in any hotel at all.

The room itself was one of the least desirable even under that second-rate roof, being situated at the back of the building overlooking a picturesque alley tastefully bordered with garbage cans and directly facing an eye-filling panorama of grimy windows and still grimier walls appertaining to the edifice across the way. The iron steps of the outside fire escape partly obscured this appealing view by slanting across the upper half of the window, and it was there that Simon first heard the stealthy feet of Mr Fennick, and a moment later, being of a curious disposition, saw them through a gap at the edge of the ill-fitting blind.

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