The profit from his visit had been precisely nil—in fact, a mercenary estimate might have assessed it as a dead loss of ninety thousand dollars—but that was his own fault. As he slid nimbly down the iron ladders he cursed himself gently for that moment’s unwariness which had permitted Inselheim to put a finger on the bell. And yet, without the shock of seeing that last denial actually accomplished, without that final flurry of insensate panic, the broker’s awakening might never have been completed. And Simon had a premonition that if Inselheim’s chance came again the result would be a little different.
Oddly enough, in his preoccupation with that angle on the task in hand, the Saint had forgotten that there were other parties who would be likely to develop an interest in Sutton Place that night. He stepped off the last ladder into the inky blackness of the narrow alley where it let him down without a thought of immediate danger, and heard the slight movement behind him too late. He spun round with his right hand darting to his pocket, but before it had touched his gun a strong arm was flung round his neck from behind and the steel snout of an automatic jabbed into his back. A voice harsh with exultation snarled in his ear, “Come a little ways with us, will ya…pal?”
2
Not a shadow of uneasiness darkened the Saint’s brow as he crossed the threshold of the back room of Charley’s Place and stood for a moment regarding the faces before him. Behind him he heard the click of the latch as the door was closed, and the men who had risen from their seats in the front bar and followed him as his captors hustled him through ranged themselves along the walls. More than a dozen men were gathered in the room. More than two dozen eyes were riveted on him in the same calculating stares—eyes as hard and unwinking as coloured marbles, barren of all humanity.
He was unarmed. He had nothing larger than a pin which might have been used as an offensive weapon. His gun had been taken from him, and the knife which he carried in his sleeve, having left men alive the day before to tell the tale of its deadliness, had been removed almost as quickly. The new desperate suspicion of concealed weapons with which his earlier exploits had filled the minds of the mob had prompted a vastly less perfunctory search than the deceased Mr Papulos had thought necessary—a search which had left no inch of his person untouched, and which had even seized on his penknife and cigarette-case as possible sources of danger. The thoroughness of the examination had afforded the Saint some grim amusement at the time, but not for a moment had he lost sight of what it meant. Yet his poise had never been more easy and debonair, the steel masked down more deceptively in the mocking depths of his eyes, than it was as he stood there smiling and nodding to the assembled company like an actor taking a bow.
“How! my pale-faced brothers,” he murmured. “The council sits, though the pipe of peace is not in evidence. Well, well, well—every time we get together you think of new games, as the bishop said to the actress. And what do we play tonight?”
A weird light came into the eyes of Heimie Felder, who sat at the table with a fresh bandage round his head. He leaned across and whispered to Dutch Kuhlmann.
“Nuts,” he said, almost pleadingly. “De guy is nuts. Dijja hear what he says?”
Kuhlmann’s contracted pupils were fixed steadily on the Saint’s face. He made no answer. And after that first general survey of the congregation in which he had been included, Simon had not looked at him. For all of the Saint’s interest was taken up with the girl who also sat at the table.
It was strange what a deep impression she had made on him in the places where she had crossed his path. He realised that even now he knew nothing about her. He had heard, or assumed that he heard, her voice over the telephone; he had seen, or assumed that he saw, the owner of that disembodied voice in the house on Long Island where Viola Inselheim was held and Morrie Ualino died; and once he had felt her hand in the darkness and she had pressed a gun into his hand. But she had never identified herself to more than one of his senses at the same time, and he knew that his cardinal belief that this slim fair-haired girl with the inscrutable amber eyes was that mysterious Fay Edwards of whom Fernack had spoken rested on nothing but intuition. And yet, even while the active part of his brain had been most wrapped up in the practical mechanics of his vendetta, her image had never been very far from his mind.
The sight of her in that room, the one glimpse of colour and beauty in the grim circle of silent men, brought back to the Saint every question that he had asked himself about her. Every question had trailed off into the same nebulous voids of guesswork in which the hope of any absolute answer was more elusive than the end of a rainbow, but to see her again at such a moment gave him a throb of pleasure for which there was no logical accounting. Once when he was in need she had helped him; he might never know why. Now he was again in need, and he wondered what she was thinking and what she would do. Her face told him nothing—only a spark of something to which he could give no name gleamed for an instant in her eyes and was gone.
Dutch Kuhlmann turned to her.
“This is der Saint?” he asked.
She answered without shifting her gaze from Simon: “Yes. That’s the man who killed Morrie.”
It was the first time he had ever seen her and heard her speak at once, the first definite knowledge that his intuition had been right, and a queer thrill leapt through him at the sound of her voice. It was as if he had been fascinated by a picture and it had suddenly come to life…“Good evening, Fay,” he said.
She looked at him for a moment longer, and then took a cigarette from her bag and struck a match. The movement veiled her eyes, and the spark which he thought he had seen there might have existed only in his imagination.
Kuhlmann nodded to a man who stood by the wall, and another door was unlocked and opened. Through it, after a brief pause, came two other men.
One of them was a big burly man with grey hair and a florid complexion on which the eyebrows stood out startlingly black and bushy, as if they had been gummed on by an absent-minded make-up artist. The other was a small bald-headed man with a heavy black moustache and gold-rimmed pince-nez, whose peering and fluttering manner reminded the Saint irresistibly of a weasel. Seen together, they looked rather like a vaudeville partnership which, either through mishap or design, had been obliged to share the props originally intended for one, and who had squabbled childishly over the division: between them they possessed the material for two normally sized men of normal hairiness, but on account of their disagreement they had both emerged with extravagant inequalities. Simon had an irreverent desire to remove the bushy eyebrows from the large man and glue them where it seemed they would be more appropriate, above the luxuriant moustache of the small one. Their bearing was subtly different from that of the others who were assembled in the room, and the Saint gave play to his flippant imaginings only for a passing second, for he had recognised them as soon as they came in and knew that the conference was almost complete. One of them was the District Attorney, Marcus Yeald; the other was the political boss of New York City himself, Robert Orcread—known by his own wish as “Honest Bob.”
They studied the Saint with open interest while chairs were vacated for them at the table. Yeald did his scrutinising from a safe distance, peering through his spectacles nervously. Simon barely overcame the temptation to say “Boo!” to him and find out if he would jump as far as he seemed prepared to. Orcread, on the other hand, came round the table without sitting down.
“So you’re the guy we’ve been looking for,” he said, and the Saint smiled.
“I guess you know who you were looking for, Honest Bob,” he said.
Orcread’s face hardened.
“How did you know my name?”
“I recognised you from your caricature in The New Yorker last week, brother,” Simon explained, and gathered at once that the drawing had not met with the Tammany dictator’s approval.
Orcread chewed on the stump of dead cigar in his mouth and hooked a thumb into his waistcoat. He looked the Saint up and down
again with flinty eyes.
“Better not get too fresh,” he advised. “I been wanting a talk with you, but I’ll do the wise-cracking. You’ve given us plenty of trouble. I suppose you know you could go to the chair for what you’ve done.”
“Probably,” admitted the Saint. “But that was just ignorance. When I first came here, I didn’t know that I had to get an official licence to kill people.”
“You should have thought of that sooner,” Orcread said. His voice had the rich geniality of the professional orator, but underneath it the Saint’s sensitive ears could detect a ragged edge of strain. “It’s liable to be tough for a guy who comes here and thinks he can clean up the town by himself. You know what I ought to be doing now?”
The Saint’s smile was very innocent.
“I can guess that one. You ought to be calling a cop and handing me over to him. But that would be a bit awkward for you—wouldn’t it? I mean, people might want to know what you were doing here yourself.”
“You know why I’m not calling a cop?”
“It must be the spring,” Simon hazarded. “Or perhaps today was your old grandmother’s birthday, and looking into her dear sweet face you felt the hard shell of worldliness that hides your better nature softening like an overripe banana.”
Orcread took the cigar-stub from between his teeth and rolled it in his fingers. The leaves crumpled and shredded under the roughness of his hand, but his voice did not rise.
“I’m trying to do something for you,” he said. “You ain’t so old, are you? You wouldn’t want to get into a lot of trouble. It ain’t right to go to the chair at your age. It ain’t right to be taken for a ride. And why should you?”
“Don’t ask me,” said the Saint. “If I remember rightly, the suggestion was yours.”
“I could do a lot for a guy like you. If you’d come and seen me first, none of this would have happened. But these things you’ve been doing don’t make it easy for us. I don’t say we got a grudge against you. Irboll was just a no-account hoodlum, and Ualino was getting too big for himself anyway—I guess he had it coming to him before long. But you’re trying to go too fast, and you make too much noise about it. That sort of thing don’t go with the public, and it’s my job to stop it. It’s Mr Yeald’s job to stop it—ain’t it, Mark?”
“Certainly,” said the lawyer’s dry voice, like the voice of a parrot repeating a lesson. “These things have got to be stopped. They will be stopped.”
Orcread tapped the Saint on the chest.
“That’s it,” he said impressively. “We have given our word to the electors that this sort of thing shall be stamped out, and we gotta keep our promises. But we don’t want to be too hard on you. So I says to Mark, ‘Look here, this Saint must be a sensible young guy. Let’s make him an offer.’ ”
Simon nodded thoughtfully, but Orcread’s words only touched the fringes of his attention. He had been trying to find a reason why Orcread and Yeald should ever have entered the conference at all, and in searching for that reason he had made a remarkable discovery. For about the first time in his career he had grossly under-estimated himself. He knew that his spectacular advent upon the New York scene had caused no small stir in certain circles, as indeed it had been designed to do, but he had not realised that his modest efforts could have raised so much dust as Orcread’s presence appeared to indicate.
And then he began to understand what a small disturbance could throw a complicated machine out of gear, when the machine was balanced on an unstable foundation of bluff and apathy and chicane, and the disturbance was of that one peculiar kind. The newspaper headlines which he had enjoyed egotistically flashed across his mind’s eye with a new meaning. He had not thought, until Orcread told him, that the coincidence of the right man and the right moment, coupled with the mercurial enthusiasms of the New World, could have flung the figure of the Saint almost overnight on to a pinnacle where the public imagination would see it as a rallying-point and the banner of a reformation. He had not thought that his disinterested attempts to brighten Manhattan and Long Island entertainments could have started a fresh wave of civic ambition whose advance ripples had already been felt under the sensitive thrones of the political rulers.
He listened to Orcread again with renewed interest.
“So you see, we’re being pretty generous. Two hundred thousand bucks is worth something to any man. And we get you out of a tough spot. You get out of here without even feeling uncomfortable—you go to England or anywhere else you like. A young guy like you could have a good time with two hundred grand. And I’m here to tell you that it’s on the up-and-up.”
Simon Templar looked at him with a slow and deceptive smile. The glitter of amusement in the Saint’s eyes was very faint.
“You’re making me feel almost sentimental, Bob,” he said gravely. “And what is the trivial service I have to do to earn all these benefits?”
Orcread threw his mauled cigar away, and parked the thumb thus released in the other armhole of his waistcoat. He rocked back on his heels, with his prosperous paunch thrown out, and beamed heartily.
“Well…nothing,” he said. “All we want to do is stop this sort of thing going on. Well, naturally it wouldn’t be any good packing you off if things went on just the same. So all we’d ask you to do is tell us who it is that’s backing you—tell us who the other guys in your mob are—so we can make them the same sort of proposition, and that’ll be the end of it. What d’you say? Do we call it a deal?”
The Saint shook his head regretfully.
“You may call it a deal, if you like,” he said gently, “but I’m afraid I call it bushwash. You see, I’m not that sort of a girl.”
“He’s nuts,” said Heimie Felder doggedly, out of a deep silence, and Orcread swung round on him savagely.
“You shut your dam’ mouth!” he snarled.
He turned to the Saint again, the benevolent beam still hollowly half-frozen on his face, as if he had started to wipe it off and had forgotten to finish the job, his jaw thrust out and his flinty eyes narrowed.
“See here,” he growled, “I’m not kidding, and if you know what’s good for you, you’ll lay off that stuff. I’m giving you a chance to get out of this and save your skin. What’s funny about it?”
“Nothing,” said the Saint blandly, “except that you’re sitting on the wrong flagpole. Nobody’s backing me, and I haven’t got a mob—so what can I do about it? I hate to see these tender impulses of yours running away with you, but—”
A vague anger began to darken Orcread’s face.
“Will you talk English?” he grated. “You ain’t been running this business by yourself just to pass the time. What are you getting out of it, and who’s giving it to you?”
The Saint shrugged wearily.
“I’ve been trying to tell you,” he said. “Nobody’s backing me, and I haven’t got a mob. Ask any of this beauty chorus whether they’ve ever seen me with a mob. I, personally, am the whole works. I am the wheels, the chassis, and the gadget that squirts oil into the gudgeon-pins. I am the one-man band. So all you’ve got to do is to hand me that two hundred grand and kiss me good-bye.”
Orcread stared at him for a moment longer, and then turned away abruptly. He walked across the room and plumped himself into a chair between Yeald and Kuhlmann. In the voiceless pause that followed, the lips of Heimie Felder could be seen framing tireless dogmas about nuts.
The Saint smiled to himself, and bummed a cigarette from the nearest member of the audience. He was obliged dispassionately. Inhaling the smoke dreamily, he glanced around at the hard emotionless faces under the lights, and realised quite calmly that any amusement which he derived from the situation originated entirely in his own irresponsible sense of humour.
Not that he was averse to tight corners and dangerous games—his whole history, in fact, was composed of a long series of them. But it occurred to him that the profitable and amusing phase of the soiree, if there had ever been one, was now
definitely over. He had established beyond question the fact that Orcread and the District Attorney were in the racket up to their necks, but the importance of that confirmation was almost entirely academic. More important than that was the concrete revelation of their surprisingly urgent interest in his own activities. Judged solely on its merits, the hippopotamoid diplomacy of Honest Bob Orcread earned nothing but a sustained horse-laugh—Simon had not once been under the delusion that any of the gentlemen present would have allowed him to be handed two hundred thousand dollars under their noses, or that after the ceremony they would have escorted him to the next outward liner with mutual expressions of philanthropy and goodwill—but the fact that the offer had been made at all, and that Orcread had thought it worthwhile lending his own rhetorical genius to it, wanted some thinking over. And most certainly there were places in New York more conducive to calm and philosophic thought than the spot in which he was at present. In short, he saw no good point in further dalliance at Charley’s Place, and the real difficulty was how he could best take his leave.
From the fragments of conversation that reached him from the table, he gathered that altruistic efforts were being made to solve his problem for him. The booming voice of Honest Bob Orcread, even when lowered to what its owner believed to be an airy whisper, was penetrating enough to carry the general theme of the discussion to the Saint’s ears.
“How do we know it ain’t a stall?” he could be heard reiterating. “A guy couldn’t do all that by himself.”
The District Attorney pursed his lips, and his answer rustled dustily like dry leaves.
“Personally, I believe he is telling the truth. I was watching him all the time. And nobody has seen anybody else with him.”
“Dot’s right,” Kuhlmann agreed. “It’s chust von man mit a lot of luck, taking everybody by surprise. I can look after him.”
Orcread was worried, in a heavy struggling way.
The Saint In New York (The Saint Series) Page 14