“Heroes die young,” it murmured pithily.
A knock sounded on the door—a discreet knock that could only have been made by a servant. Nather, with his vengeful eyes frozen on the Saint, lip-read the order rather than heard it.
“Ask him what he wants.”
“Well?” Nather growled out.
“Inspector Fernack is downstairs, sir. He says it’s important.”
Nather stared at the Saint. And the Saint smiled. Once again his reckless fighting lips shaped an almost inaudible command.
“Tell him to come up,” Nather repeated after him, and could not believe that he was obeying an order.
He sat silent and rigid as the butler’s footsteps receded and died away, and at last Simon withdrew the gun-barrel which had for so long been boring insidiously into the judge’s abdomen.
“Better and better,” said the Saint amazingly, flipping a cigarette into his lips. “I was wanting to meet Fernack.”
Nather gaped at him incredulously. The situation was grotesque, unbelievable, and yet it had occurred. The automatic had been eased out of his belly—it was even then circling around the Saint’s forefinger in one of those carelessly confident gyrations—which it certainly would not have been if any of the Saint’s instructions had been disobeyed. The thing was beyond Nather’s understanding. The glacial recklessness of it was subtly disquieting, in a colder and more deadly way than the menace of the gun had ever been: it argued a self-assurance that was frightening, and with that fear went the crawling question of whether the Saint’s mind had leapt to some strategy of lightning cunning that Nather could not see.
“You’ll get your chance,” said the judge gruffly, searching for comprehension through a kind of fog.
Simon rasped the head of a match with his left thumb-nail, applied the spluttering flame to the tip of his cigarette, and inhaled luxuriously. With a drift of smoke trailing back through his lips, he lounged towards a large tapestried Morris chair that stood between the French windows by which he had entered, and swung the chair round with his foot so that its heavily padded side was presented to the door through which the detective would enter.
He came back, overturned the wastebasket with an adroit twist of his toe, and picked up the crumpled scrap of paper and dropped it into his pocket in one smooth swoop that frustrated the judge’s flash of fight even before the idea was conceived. He pulled open the drawer to which Nather’s hand had jumped at the first sound of his voice, and transferred the revolver from it to his hip. And then, with the scene set to his satisfaction, he walked back to his chosen chair and settled himself comfortably in it with his right leg draped gracefully over the arm.
He flicked a quarter-inch of ash from his cigarette on to the expensive carpet.
“When your man announces Fernack,” he directed, “open the door and let him in. And come back yourself. Understand?”
Nather did not understand. His brain was still fumbling dazedly for the catch that he could not find. On the face of it, it seemed like the answer to a prayer. With Fernack on the scene, there must be the chance of a way out for him—a way to retrieve that scrap of paper buried in Templar’s pocket, and to dispose of the Saint himself. But something told him that the calm smiling man in the chair was not legislating for any such denouement.
Simon read his thoughts.
“The gun won’t be in evidence for a while, Nather. But it’ll be handy. And at this range I’m a real sniper. I shouldn’t want you to get excited over any notions of ganging up on me with Fernack. Somebody might get hurt.”
Nather’s gaze rested on him venomously.
“Someday,” said the judge slowly, “I hope we shall meet again.”
“In Sing Sing,” suggested the Saint breezily. “Let’s call it a date.”
He drew on his cigarette again and listened to the returning footsteps of the butler, accompanied by a heavier, more determined tread. As a matter of fact, he was innocent of all subterfuge. There was nothing more behind his decision than appeared on the face of it. Fernack was there, and the Saint saw no reason why they should not meet. His whole evening had started off in the same spirit of open-minded expectation, and it had turned out very profitably. He awaited the addition to his growing circle of acquaintances with no less kindly interest.
The butler’s knuckles touched the door again.
“Inspector Fernack, sir.”
Simon waved the judge on, and Nather crossed the room slowly. Every foot of the distance he was conscious of the concealed automatic that was aiming into his back. He snapped the key over in the lock and opened the door, and Inspector Fernack shouldered his brawny bulk across the threshold.
2
“Why the locked door, Judge?” Fernack inquired sourly. “Getting nervous?”
Nather closed the door without answering, and Simon decided to oblige.
“I did it,” he explained. Fernack, who had not noticed him, whirled round in surprise, and Simon went on: “Would you mind locking it again, Judge—just as I told you?”
Nather hesitated for a second, and then obeyed. Fernack stared blankly at the figure lounging in the armchair, and then turned with puzzled eyes to the judge. He pushed back his battered fedora and pulled reflectively at the lobe of his left ear.
“What the hell is this?” he demanded, and Nather shrugged.
“A nut,” he said tersely.
Simon ignored the insult, studying the man who had come in. On the whole, Fernack conformed closely enough to the pattern in his mind of what a New York police inspector was likely to be, but the reality went a little beyond that. Simon liked the belligerent honesty of the frosted grey eyes, the strength and courage of the iron jaw. He realised that whatever else Fernack might be, a good or bad detective, he fell straight and clean-cut into the narrow outline of that rarest thing in a country of corrupted law—a square dick. There were qualities in that mountain of toughened flesh that Simon Templar could have appreciated at any time, and he smiled at the man with an unaffected friendliness which he never expected to see returned.
“What ho, Inspector,” he murmured affably. “You disappoint me. I was hoping to be recognised.”
Fernack’s eyes hardened in perplexity as he studied the Saint’s tanned features. He shook his head.
“I seem to know your face, but I’m damned if I can place you.”
“Maybe it was a bad photograph,” conceded the Saint regretfully. “Those photographs usually are. All the same, seeing it was only this afternoon that you were handing out copies of it to the reporters—”
Illumination hit Fernack like a blow.
His eyes flamed wide, and his jaw closed with a snap as he took three long strides across the room.
“By God—it’s the Saint!”
“Himself. I didn’t know you were a pal of Algernon’s, but since you arrived I thought I might as well stay.”
Fernack’s shoulders were hunched, his pugnacious chin jutting dangerously. In that instant shock of surprise, he had not paused to wonder why the Saint should be offering himself like an eager victim.
“I want you, young fellow,” he grated.
He lunged forward, with his hand diving for his hip.
And then he pulled up short, a yard from the chair. His hand was poised in the air, barely two inches from the butt of his gun, but it made no attempt to travel further. The Saint did not seem to have moved, and his free foot was still swinging gently back and forth, but somehow the blue-black shape of an automatic had come into his right hand, and the round black snout of it was aimed accurately into the detective’s breast-bone.
“I’m sorry,” said the Saint, and he meant it. “I hate being arrested, as you should have gathered from my biography. It’s just one of those things that doesn’t happen. My dear chap, you didn’t really think I stayed on so you could take me home with you as a souvenir!”
Fernack glared at the gun speechlessly for a moment, and shifted his gaze back to the Saint. For a moment Simo
n was afraid—with a chin like that, it was an even chance that the detective might not be stopped, and Simon would have hated to shoot. But Fernack was not foolhardy. He had been bred and reared in a world where foolhardiness went down under an elemental law of the survival of the wisest, and Fernack faced facts. At that range the Saint could not miss, and the honour of the New York police would gain a purely temporary glow from the heroic suicide of an inspector.
Fernack grunted, and straightened up with a shrug.
“What the hell is this?” he repeated.
“Just a social evening. Sit down and get the spirit of the party. Maybe you know some smoke-room stories, too.”
Fernack pulled out a chair and sat down facing the Saint. After the first stupefaction of surprise was gone he accepted the situation with homely matter-of-factness. Since the initiative had been temporarily taken out of his hands, he could do no harm by listening.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, and there was the beginning of a grim respect in his voice.
Simon swung his gun around towards Nather and waved the judge back to his swivel chair.
“I might ask the same question,” he remarked.
Fernack glanced at the judge, thoughtfully, and Simon’s quick eyes caught the distaste in his gaze, and realised that Nather saw it too.
“You do your own asking,” Fernack said dryly.
Simon surveyed the two men humorously.
“The two arms of the Law,” he commented reverently. “The guardian of the peace and the dispenser of Justice. You could pose for a tableau. The pea-green incorruptibles.”
Fernack frowned, and the judge squirmed slightly in his chair. There was a strained silence in the room, broken by the inspector’s rough voice.
“Know any more fairy-tales?”
“Plenty,” said the Saint. “Once upon a time there was a great city, the richest city in the world. Its towers went up through the clouds and its streets were paved with golden-backed treasury notes, which were just as good as the old-fashioned fairy-tale paving stones and much easier to carry around. And all the people in it should have been very happy, what with Macy’s Basement and Groven Whalen and a cathedral called Minsky’s. But under the city there was a greedy octopus whose tentacles reached from the highest to the lowest places—and even outside the city, to the village greens of Canarsie and North Hoosick and a place called Far Rockaway where the Scotch citizens lived. And this octopus prospered and grew fat on a diet of blood and gold and the honour of men.”
Fernack’s bitter voice broke in on the recitation.
“That’s too true to be funny.”
“It wasn’t meant to be—particularly. Fernack, you know why I’m here. I did a job for you this afternoon—one of those little jobs that Brother Nather is supposed to do and never seems to get around to. Ionetzki was quite a friend of yours, wasn’t he?”
“You know a lot.” The detective’s fists knotted at his sides. “What next?”
“And Nather seems to have been quite a friend of Jack Irboll’s. I’m doing your thinking for you. On account of this orgy of devotion, I blew along to see Nather, and I haven’t been here half an hour before you blow in yourself. Well, a little while back I asked you why you were here, and I wasn’t changing the subject.”
Fernack’s mouth tightened. His eyes swerved around to the judge, but Nather’s blotchy face was as inexpressive as a slab of lard, except for the highlights of perspiration on his flushed cheek-bones. Fernack looked at the Saint again.
“You want a lot of questions answered for you,” he stated flatly.
“I’ll try another.” Simon drew on his cigarette, and looked at the detective through a haze of out-going smoke. “Maybe you can translate something for me. Translate it into words of one syllable—and try to make me understand.”
“What?”
“The Big Fellow says you’d better stay home tonight. He may want you!”
Simon flipped the quotation back hopefully enough, without a pause. It leapt across the air like the twang of a broken fiddle-string, without giving the audience a half-second’s grace in which to brace themselves or rehearse their reactions. But not even in his moments of most malicious optimism had the Saint expected the results which rewarded him.
He might have touched off a charge of blasting powder at their feet. Nather caught his breath in a gasping hiccough like a man shot in the stomach. Fernack rose an inch from his chair on tautened thighs: his grey eyes bulged, then narrowed to glinting slits.
“Say that again!” he rasped.
“You don’t get the idea.” The Saint smiled, but his sapphire gaze was as quiet as the levelled gun. “I was just asking you to translate something. Can you tell me what it means?”
“Who wants to know?”
Nather scrambled up from his chair, his fists clenched and his face working. His face was putting in a big day.
“This is intolerable!” he barked hoarsely. “Isn’t there anything you can do, Fernack, instead of sitting there listening to this—this maniac?”
Fernack glanced at him.
“Sure,” he said briefly. “You take his gun away, and I’ll do it.”
“I’ll report you to the Commissioner!” Nather half screamed. “By God—I’ll have you thrown out of the force! What do we have laws for when an armed hoodlum can hold me up in my own house under your very nose—”
“And gangsters can shoot cops in broad daylight and get acquitted,” added the Saint brightly. “Let’s make it an indignation meeting. I don’t know what the country’s coming to.”
Nather choked, and the Saint stood up. There was something in the air which told him that the interview might more profitably be adjourned—and the judge’s blustering outburst had nothing to do with it. With that intuitive certainty in his mind, he acted on it in cool disregard of dramatic sequence. That was the way he liked best to work, along his own paths, following a trail without any attempt to dictate the way it should go. But this evening had only just begun.
He strolled to the desk and lifted the lid of a bronze humidor. Selecting a cigar, he crackled it at his ear and sniffed it appreciatively.
“You know good tobacco if you don’t know anything else good, Algernon,” he murmured.
He discarded the stub of his cigarette and stuck the Corona-Corona at a jaunty angle between his teeth. As an afterthought, he tipped over the humidor and helped himself to a bonus handful of the same crop.
“Well, boys,” he said, “you mustn’t mind if I leave you. I never overstay my welcomes, and maybe you have some secrets to whisper in each other’s ears.” He backed strategically to the window, and paused there to button his coat. “By the way,” he said, “you needn’t bother to rush up to this window and wave me good-bye. These farewells always make me feel nervous.” He spun the automatic around his finger for the last time, and hefted it in his hand significantly. “I’d hate there to be any accidents at the last minute,” said the Saint, and he was gone.
Fernack stared at the rectangle of empty blackness, and emptied his lungs in a long sigh. After some seconds he got up. He walked without haste to the open casements, and stood there looking silently out into the dark; then he turned back to the room.
“That’s a guy I could like,” he said thoughtfully.
Nather squinted at him.
“You’d better get out, too,” snarled the judge. “You’ll hear more about this later—”
“You’ll hear more about it now,” Fernack said coldly, and there was something in his voice which made Nather listen.
What the detective had to say did not take long. Fernack on business was not a man to expand himself wordily at any time, and any euphemistic phrases which he might have revolved in his mind had been driven out of it entirely. He stowed his kid gloves high up on the shelves of his disgust, and propounded his assessment of the facts with a profane brutality that left Nather white and shaking.
Three minutes after Simon Templar’s departure
, Inspector Fernack was also barging out of the room, but by a more orthodox route. He thundered down the stairs and shouldered aside the obsequious butler who made to open the door for him, and flung himself in behind the wheel of his prowl car with a short-winded violence that could not be accounted for solely by an ardent desire to remove himself from those purlieus. But this evening was not finished either; though he did not know this at that moment.
He slammed the door, switched on the ignition, and unlocked the steering column, and then something hard probed its way gently but firmly into his ribs, and the soft voice of the Saint wafted into his right ear.
“Hold on, Inspector. You and I are going for a little joy-ride!”
3
Inspector Fernack’s jaw sagged.
Under the stress of his unrelieved emotions, he had not noticed the Saint’s arrival, or the noiseless opening of the other door. There was no reason on earth why he should have looked for either. According to his upbringing, it was so baldly axiomatic that the Saint would by that time be skating through the traffic three or four miles away that he had not even given the subject a thought. The situation in which he found himself for the second time was so deliriously unexpected that he was temporarily paralysed. And in that space of time Simon slid in on to the cushions beside him and closed the door.
Fernack’s jaw closed, and he looked into the level blue eyes behind the gun.
“What’s your idea?”
“We’ll go places. I’d like to talk to you, and it’s just possible you might like to talk to me. We’ll go anywhere you like bar Centre Street.”
The granite lines of the detective’s face twitched. There were limits to his capacity for boiling indignation, a point where the soaring curve of his wrath curled over and fell down a precipitous switchback—and the gay audacity of the man at his side had boosted him to that point in two terrific jumps. For a second the detective’s temper seemed to teeter breathlessly on the pinnacle like a trolley stalling on a scenic railway, and then it slipped down the gradient on the other side…
The Saint In New York (The Saint Series) Page 5