The Saint and the People Importers/Three Minutes to Midnight/The Gremlin's Grampa [antikvár]

ONEyiow Simon 7emplar Read About AH, and Tiis Curry Was DelayedThe identity of the passenger who left his evening paper behind in a certain London taxi one dull September afternoon will probably never be discovered: he passed through this world but once, and may have nothing else in the course of his transit that will ever concern posterity. But the newspaper was still lying there on the seat when Simon Templar hailed the cab on Jermyn Street behind Fort-num & Mason's, within which epicurean supermarket he had just concluded a transaction involving several thousand sturgeon eggs, and thus has a fair claim to have been the starting point of this adventure.Simon Templar had long ago given up trying to predict where Adventure would come from: his only certainty was that he could never escape it. He would stumble upon it, or it would trip over him; but one way or another they were fated to come together, by the same kind of destiny that had ordained perhaps as a symbol for that afternoon, that Mr. Fortnum would be forever linked with Mr. Mason.There had been an era long ago, admittedly, when Simon Templar had gone more than halfway to meet this agreeable doom. With an imagination as unlimited as possibility itself he had set out on his hunt; his territory was the world and his prey the two-legged predators who fattened on other men's toil and hopes and sufferings: extortioners, swindlers, racketeersevery manner of human parasite that crept on the scalp of the earth, and especially those who had burdened themselves with a weighty enough load of ill-gotten gold to warrant the attention of a man of Simon's expensive tastes.But while a fair share of the wealth he rescued from the coffers of the Ungodly found its way into his own bank accounts, a large proportion of it ended up back in the hands of its original rightful owners. This fact, combined with Simon's penchant for extralegal action