“Were you, Pappy?” he murmured pleasantly. “What a coincidence! It seems as if we must be soul-mates, drifting through life with our hearts singing in tune. Tell me some more bedtime stories, brother—I like them.”
Papulos swallowed. The Saint’s almost miraculous appearance had caught him before he had even had time to consider a possible line of approach, and for the first time since he had plunged out of Charley’s Place on that mad quest he became aware of the hopeless obstacles that didn’t even begin to crop up until he had found his quarry. Now, unasked and uninvited, his quarry had obligingly found him, and he was experiencing some of the almost hysterical paralysis that would seize an ardent huntsman if a fox walked up to him and rolled over on its back, expectantly wagging its tail. The difference in this case was that the quarry was much larger and more cunning and more dangerous than any fox; it had a wickedly mocking gleam in its steel-blue eyes, and under the bantering surveillance of that clear and glittering gaze Mr Papulos recalled, in a most unwelcomely apt twist of reminiscence, that on the last occasion when he had seen the quarry face to face, and there were a considerable number of armed and husky hoodlums within call, he, Mr Papulos, had been misguided enough to poke the said quarry in the kisser. The prospects of establishing a rapid and brotherly entente seemed a shade less bright than they had appeared in his first exuberant enthusiasm for the idea.
“Yeah—I was lookin’ for you,” he repeated jerkily. “I thought you and me might have a talk.”
“One gathers that you were in no small hurry to exercise your jaw,” Simon remarked. “You nearly left the back part of the bus behind when you started off. What’s after you?”
Something inside the Greek rasped through to the surface under the pressure of that gentle bantering voice. His breath grated in his throat.
“If you want to know what’s after me,” he blurted, “it’s a bullet. A whole raft of bullets.”
“Do they travel on rafts?” asked the Saint interestedly. “I didn’t know you were joining the Navy.”
Papulos gulped.
“I’m not kidding,” he got out desperately, “The finger’s on me—on account of you. I sent you to Morrie, with that knife on you, an’ they’re saying I double-crossed ’em. You gotta listen to me, Saint—I’m on the spot!”
The Saint’s eyebrows lifted.
“So you figure that if you go out and bring my head back in an Oshkosh they may forgive you—is that it?” he drawled. “Well, well, well, Pappy, I’m not saying it wasn’t a grand idea, but I’ve got a morbid sort of ambition to be buried all in one piece—”
“I tell you I’m not kidding!” Papulos pleaded wildly. “I gotta talk to you. I’ll talk turkey. Maybe we can make a bargain—”
“How much credit do you reckon to get on that sock you gave me last night?” inquired the Saint.
Papulos swallowed again, and found difficulty in doing it. His eyes, mechanically picking a route through the traffic, were reddened and frantic.
“For God’s sake,” he gasped, “I’m talkin’ turkey. I’m tryin’ to make a deal—”
“Not for sanctuary?”
“Yeah—if that’s the word for it.”
The Saint’s eyes narrowed. His smile suddenly acquired a tremendous scepticism.
“That sounds like an awful lot of fun,” he murmured. “How do we play this game?”
“Any way you like. I’m on the level, Saint! I wouldn’t double-cross you. I’m shootin’ square with you, Saint. The mob’s after me. They’re putting me on the spot—an’ you’re the only guy in the world who might get me off of it…Yeah, I took that sock at you last night—but that was different. You can take a sock back at me any time—you can take twenty! I wouldn’t stop you. But what the hell, you wouldn’t see a guy rubbed out just because he took a sock at you—”
Simon pondered gently, but beneath his benign exterior it was apparent that he regarded the Greek with undiminished suspicion and distaste.
“I don’t know, Pappy,” he said reflectively. “Blokes have been rubbed out for less—much less.”
“I was just nervous, Saint. It didn’t mean a thing. I guess you might of done the same yourself. Lookit, I could help you a lot if you forgot last night an’ helped me—”
“In exchange for what?” asked the Saint, and his voice was even less reassuring than before.
Papulos licked his lips.
“I could tell you things. Say, I ain’t the only guy in the racket. I know you were waitin’ to take me for this ride when I came out, but—”
For the first time since he had been there the Saint laughed. There was no comfort for Papulos in that laugh, no more than there had been in his soft voice or his pleasant smile, but he laughed.
“You flatter yourself, Pappy,” he said. “You aren’t nearly so important as that. We step on things like you on our way, wherever they happen to wriggle out—we don’t make special appointments for ’em. I thought this car belonged to Dutch. But since you happen to be here, Pappy, I’m afraid you’ll have to do. As you kindly reminded me, we have one or two slight arguments to settle—”
“You want Dutch, don’t you? You want Dutch more’n you want me—ain’t that right? Well, I could help you to get Dutch. I can tell you everything he does, an’ when he does it, an’ where he goes, an’ how he’s protected. I could help you to get the whole mob, if you want ’em. Listen, Saint, you gotta let me talk!”
Simon smiled pleasantly. His face was tolerant and kindly, but Papulos did not see that. Papulos saw only the cold blue steel in his eyes—and a vision of death that had come to Irboll and Voelsang and Ualino. Papulos heard the hard ring behind the gentle tones of his voice, and knew that he had yet to convince the Saint of his terrible sincerity.
The Saint gazed at him through a wreathing screen of smoke, and his left hand did not stir from his coat pocket, where it had rested ever since he had been in sight.
A chequered and perilous career had done much to harden that tender trustfulness in which Simon Templar’s blue eyes had first looked out upon the light of day. Regretfully, he admitted that the gross disillusionments of life had left their mark. It is given to human faith to survive just so much and no more, and a man who in his time has been scarred to the core by the bitter truth about fairies and Santa Claus cannot be blamed if a certain doubt, a certain cynicism, begins in later life to taint the virgin freshness of his innocence. Simon had met Papulos before, and had taken his measure. He did not believe that Papulos was a man who could be driven by the fear of death to betray the unwritten code of his kind.
What he forgot was the fact that most men live in frightful fear of death—frightful fear of that black oblivion which will snatch their lusts and their enjoyments from them in a single tortured instant. He forgot that though a man like Papulos would fight in the battles of gangland like a maniac, though he would stand up brutally unafraid under the hails of hot death that come whistling through the open streets, he might become nothing but a cringing coward in the threat of cold-blooded unanswerable obliteration. Even the stark panic that showed in the Greek’s eyes did not convince him.
“I wouldn’t lie to you,” Papulos was babbling hoarsely. “This is on the level. I got nothin’ to gain. You don’t have to promise me nothin’. You gotta believe me.”
“Why?” asked the Saint callously.
Papulos swung the car round Columbus Circle and headed blindly to the east. His face was haggard with utter despair.
“You think this is a stall—you don’t believe I’m on the level?”
“Yes,” said the Saint, “and no.”
“What d’ya mean?”
“Yes, brother,” said the Saint explicitly, “I do think it’s a stall. No, brother, I don’t believe you’re on the level…By the way, Pappy, which cemetery are you heading for? It’d save a lot of expense if we did the job right on the premises. You can take your own choice, of course, but I’ve always thought the Gates of Heaven Cemetery, Valhalla,
New York, was the best address of its kind I ever heard.”
Papulos looked into the implacable blue eyes, and felt closer to death than he had ever been.
“You gotta listen,” he said, almost in a whisper. “I’m shootin’ the works. I’ll talk first, an’ you can decide whether I’m tellin’ the truth afterwards. Just gimme a break, Saint. I’m shootin’ square with you.”
Simon shrugged.
“There’s lots of time between here and Valhalla,” he pointed out affably. “Shoot away.”
Papulos caught at the breath that would not seem to fill the void in his lungs. The sweat was running down his sides like a trickle of icicles, and his mouth had stiffened so that he had to labour over the formation of each individual word.
“This is straight,” he said. “Puttin’ the snatch on that kid was an accident. That ain’t the racket any more—it’s too risky, an’ there ain’t any need for it. Protection’s the racket, see? You say to a guy like Inselheim: ‘You pay us so much dough, or it’ll be too bad about your kid, see?’ Well, Inselheim stuck in his toes over the last payment. He said he wouldn’t pay any more, so we put the arm on the kid. You didn’t do him no good, takin’ her back.”
“You don’t tell me,” said the Saint lightly, but his voice was grim and watchful.
Papulos babbled on. He had spent long enough getting a hearing; now that he had it, the words came in a flood like a breaking dam. In a matter of mere minutes, it might be too late.
“You didn’t do no good. Inselheim got his daughter back, but he’s still gotta pay. We won’t be snatching her again. Next time, she gets the works. We phoned him first thing this morning: ‘Pay us that dough, or you won’t have no daughter for the Saint to rescue.’ Even a guy like you can’t bring a kid back when she’s dead.”
“Very interesting,” observed the Saint, “not to say bloodthirsty. But I can’t somehow see that even a story like that, Pappy, is going to keep you out of the Gates of Heaven. You’ll have to talk much faster than this if we’re going to fall on each other’s shoulders and let bygones be bygones.”
The Greek’s hands clenched on the wheel.
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know!” he gabbled wildly. “Ask me anything you like—I’ll tell you. Just gimme a break—”
“You could only tell me one thing that might be worth a trade for your unsavoury life, you horrible specimen,” said the Saint coldly. “And that is—who is the Big Fellow?”
Papulos turned, white-faced, staring.
“You can’t ask me to tell you that—”
“Really?”
“It ain’t possible! I’d tell you if I could—but I can’t. There ain’t nobody in the mob could tell you that, except the Big Fellow himself. Ualino didn’t know. Kuhlmann don’t know. There’s only one way to talk to him, an’ that’s by telephone. An’ only one guy has the number.”
Simon drew the last puff from his cigarette and pitched it through the window.
“Then it seems just too bad if you aren’t the guy, Pappy,” he said sympathetically, and Papulos shrank away into the farthest corner of the seat at the ruthless quietness of his voice.
“But I can tell you who it is, Saint! I’m coming clean. Wait a minute—you gotta let me talk—”
His voice rose suddenly into a shrill scream—a scream whose sheer crazed terror made the Saint’s head whip round with narrowed eyes stung to a knife-edged alertness.
In one spit second he saw what Papulos had seen.
A car had drawn abreast of them on the outside—a big powerful sedan that had crept up without either of them noticing it, that had manoeuvred into position with deadly skill. There were three men in it. The windows were open, and through them protruded the gleaming black barrels of submachine-guns. Simon grasped the scene in one vivid flash, and flung himself down into the body of the car. In another instant the staccato stammer of the guns was rattling in his ears, and the steel was drumming round him like a storm of death.
2
The window on his right shattered in the blast and spilled fragments of glass over him, but he was unhurt. He was aware that the car was swerving dizzily, and a moment later there was a terrific crashing impact that flung him into a bruised heap under the dashboard, with his head singing as if a dozen vicious mosquitoes were imprisoned inside his skull. And after that there was silence.
Some seconds passed before other sounds reached him as if they came out of a fog. He heard the rumble of invisible traffic and the screeching of brakes, the shrilling of a police whistle and the scream of a woman close by. It took another second or two for his battered brain to grasp the fundamental reason for that strange impression of stillness: the ear-splitting crackle of the machine-guns had stopped. It was as if a tropical squall had struck a small boat, smashed it in one savage instant, and whirled on.
The Saint struggled up. The car was listing over to starboard, and he saw that the front of it was inextricably entangled with a lamp-post at the edge of the sidewalk. A crowd was already beginning to gather, and the woman who had screamed before screamed again when she saw him move. The car which had attacked them had vanished as suddenly as it had appeared.
He looked for Papulos. After that one abruptly strangled shriek the man had not made a sound. In another moment Simon understood why. The impact had hurled the Greek halfway through the windscreen: he lay sprawled over the scuttle with one arm limply spread out, but it was quite clear that he had been dead long before that happened. And the Saint gazed at him for an instant in silence.
“I was wrong, my lad,” he said softly. “Maybe they were after you.”
There was scarcely room for any further apologies to the deceased. In the far distance Simon could see a blue-clad figure lumbering towards him, blowing its whistle as it ran, and the crowd was swelling. They were on Fifty-Seventh Street, near the corner of Fifth Avenue, and there was plenty of material around to develop an audience far larger than the Saint would have desired. A rapid departure from those regions struck him as being one of the most immediate requirements of the day.
He got the nearest door open and stepped out. The crowd hesitated: most of them had been reading newspapers long enough to gather that standing in the way of escaping gunmen is a pastime that is severely frowned upon by the majority of insurance companies, and the Saint dropped a hand to his coat pocket in the hope of reminding them of the fact. The gesture had its desired effect. The crowd melted away before him, and he raced round the corner and sprinted southwards down Fifth Avenue without a soul attempting to hinder him.
A cruising taxi went by, and he leapt on to the running-board and opened the door before the driver could accelerate. In another second the partition behind the driver was open, and the unmistakable cold circle of a gun-muzzle pressed gently into the back of the man’s neck.
“Keep right on your way, Sebastian,” advised the Saint, coolly reading the chauffeur’s name off the licence card inside, “and nothing will happen to you.”
The driver kept right on his way. He had been driving taxis in New York for a considerable number of years, and had developed a fatalistic philosophy.
“Where to, buddy?” he inquired stolidly.
“Grand Central,” ordered Simon. “And don’t worry about the lights.”
They cut away to the left on Fiftieth Street under the very nose of a speeding limousine, and the chauffeur half turned his head.
“You’re de Saint, aintcha, pal?” he said.
“How did you know?” Simon answered carefully.
“I t’ought I reckernised ya,” said the driver, with some satisfaction. “I seen pictures of ya in de papers.”
Simon steadied his gun.
“So what?” he prompted caressingly.
“So nut’n. I’m pleased ta meetcha, dat’s all. Say, dat job ya pulled on Long Island last night was a honey!”
The Saint smiled.
“We ought to have met before, Sebastian,” he murmured.
T
he chauffeur nodded.
“Sure, I read aboutcha. I liked dat job. I been waitin’ ta see Morrie Ualino get his ever since I had ta pay him protection t’ree years ago, when he was runnin’ de taxi racket. Say, dat was some smash ya had back dere. Some guys tryin’ ta knock ya off?”
“Trying.”
The driver shook his head.
“I can’t figger what dis city is comin’ to,” he confessed. “Ya ain’t hoit, though?”
“Not the way I was meant to be,” said the Saint.
He was watching the traffic behind them now. The driver had excelled himself. After the first few hectic blocks he had reverted to less conspicuous driving, without surrendering any of the skill with which he dodged round unexpected corners and doubled on his own tracks. Any pursuit which might have got started soon enough to be useful seemed to have been shaken off: there was not even the distant siren of a police car to be heard. The man at the wheel seemed to have an instinctive flair for getaways, and he did his job without once permitting it to interfere with the smooth flow of his loquacity.
As they covered the last stretch of Lexington Avenue, he said, “Ja rather go in here, or Forty-Second Street?”
“This’ll do,” said the Saint. “And thanks.”
“Ya welcome,” said the driver amiably. “Say, I wouldn’t mind doin’ a job for a guy like you. Any time you could use a guy like me, call up Columbus 9-4789. I eat there most days around two o’clock.”
Simon opened the door as the cab stopped, and pushed a twenty-dollar bill into the driver’s collar.
“Maybe I will, some day,” he said, and plunged into the station with the driver’s “So long, pal,” floating after him.
Taking no chances, he dodged through the subways for a while, stopped in a wash-room to repair some of the slight damage which the accident had done to his appearance, and finally let himself out on to Park Avenue for the shortest exposed walk to the Waldorf. Once again he demonstrated how much a daring outlaw can get away with in a big city. In the country he would have been a stranger, to be observed and discussed and inquired into, but a big city is full of strangers, and nearly all of them are busy. None of the men and women who hurried by, either in cars or on their own feet, were at all interested in him; they scurried intently on towards their own affairs, and the absent-minded old gentleman who actually cannoned into him and passed on with a muttered apology never knew that he had touched the man for whom all the police and the underworld were searching.
The Saint In New York (The Saint Series) Page 11