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 realized 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 Grover 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 Scottish 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 high-lights of perspiration on his flushed cheekbones. 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 outgoing 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 Ms 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 his 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 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 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 his 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!"
* * *
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 paralyzed. And in that space of time Simon slid in onto 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. . . .
"We'll try the park," Fernack said.
A heavy blucher tramped on the starter, and the gears meshed. They turned out of Tenth Street and swung north up Seventh Avenue. Simon leaned comfortably back and used the lighter on the dashboard for his cigar; nothing more was said until they were threading the tangle of traffic at Times Square.
"You know," said the Saint calmly, "I'm getting a bit tired of throwing this gun around. Couldn't we dispense with it and call this conference off the record?"
"Okay by me," rumbled Fernack, without taking his eyes from the road.
Simon dropped the automatic into the side pocket of his coat and relaxed into the whole-hearted enjoyment of his smoke. There was no disturbing doubt in his mind that he could rely absolutely on the truce. They rode on under the blazing lights and turned into Central Park by the wide entrance at Columbus Circle.
A few hundred yards on, Fernack pulled in to the side of the road and killed the engine. He switched on his shortwave radio receiver and lighted his cigar deliberately before he turned. The glow of the tip as he inhaled revealed his rugged face set in a contour of phlegmatic inquiry.
"Well," he said, "what's the game?" Simon shrugged.
"The same as yours, more or less. You work within the law, and I work without it. We're travelling different roads, but they both go the same way. On the whole, my road seems to get places quicker than yours—as witness the late Mr. Irboll."
Fernack stared ahead over his dimmed lights.
"That's why I'm here, Saint. I told the commissioner this morning that I could love any man who rubbed out that rat. But you can't get away with it."
"I've been getting away with it pretty handsomely for a number of years," answered the Saint coolly.
"It's my job to take you in, sweat a confession out of you, and send you up for a session in the hot squat. Tomorrow I may be doing it. You're slick. I'll hand it to you. You're the only man who ever took me for a ride twice in one hour, and made me like it. But to me you're a crook—a killer. The underworld has a big enough edge in this town, without giving it any more. Officially, it's my job to put you away. That's how the cards are stacked."
"Fair enough. You couldn't come any cleaner with me than that. But I've got my own job, Fernack. I came here to do a bit of cleaning up in this town of yours, and you know how it needs it. But it's your business to see that I don't get anywhere. You're hired to see that all the thugs and racketeers in this town put on their goloshes when it rains, and tuck them up in their mufflers and make sure they don't catch cold. The citizens of New York pay you to make sure that the only killing is done by the guys with political connections—"
"So what?"
"So maybe, off the record, you'd answer a couple of questions while there isn't an audience."
Fernack chewed the cigar round to the other corner of his mouth, took it out, and spat expertly over the side of the car. He put the cigar back and watched a traffic light turn from green to red.
"Keep on asking."
"What is this Big Fellow?"
The tip of Fernack's cigar reddened and died down, and he put one elbow on the wheel.
"I should like to know. Ordinarily, it's just a name that some of these big-time racketeers get called. They called Al Capone 'the Big Fellow.' All these rats have got egos a mile wide. 'The Big Boy'—'the Big Shot'—it's the same thing. It used to make 'em feel more important to have a handle like that tacked onto 'em, and it gave the small rats something to flatter 'em with."
"Used to?"
"Yeah." The detective's cigar moved through an arc at the end of his arm as he flicked ash into the road. "Nowadays things are kind of different. Nowadays when we talk about the Big Fellow we mean the guy nobody knows: the man who's behind Morrie Ualino and Dutch Kuhlmann and Red McGuire and all the rest of 'em and bigger than any of them ever were. The guy who's made himself the secret king of the biggest underworld empire that ever happened. . . . Where did you hear of him?" Fernack asked.
The Saint smiled.
"I was eavesdropping—it's one of my bad habits."
"At Nather's?"
"Draw your own conclusions."
Fernack turned in his seat, his massive body cramped by the wheel; and the grey eyes under his down-drawn shaggy brows reflected the reddish light of his cigar end.
"Get this," he said harshly. "Everything you say about me and the rest of the force may be true. I'm not arguing. That's the way this town's run, and it's been like that ever since I was pounding a beat. But I'm telling you that some day I'm gonna pin a rap on that mug, judge or no judge—an' make it stick! If that line you shot at me was said to Nather, it means there's something dirty brewing around here tonight; and if there's any way of tying Nather in with it, I'll nail him. And I'll see that he gets the works all the way up the line!"
"Why should it mean that?"
"Because Nather is just another stooge of the Big Fellow's, the same as Irboll was. Listen: If that bunch is going out tonight, there's always the chance something may go blooey. One or two of 'em may get taken in by the cops. That means they'll get beaten up. Don't kid yourself. When we get those guys in the station house we don't pat them with paper streamers. Mostly the only punishment they ever get is what we give them in the back room. An' they don't like it. You can be as tough as you like and never let out a peep, but a strong-arm dick with a yard of rubber hose can still hurt you. So when a bunch is smart, they have a lawyer ready to dash in with writs of habeas corpus before we can even get started on 'em—and those writs have to be signed by a judge. One day a law will be passed to allow racketeers to make out the writs themselves an' save everyone a lot of expense, but at present you still gotta find a judge at home."
"I see," said the Saint gently.
Fernack grunted, and his fingers hardened on the cigar.
"Who gave that order?" he grated.
"I haven't the faintest idea," said the Saint untruthfully. He sympathized with Fernack, but it was too late in his career to overcome an ingrained objection to letting any detective get ahead of him. "The speech came over the phone, and that's all there was."
"What did you go to Nather's for?"
"I asked you the same question, but I don't have to repeat it. I stayed right under the window and listened."
Fernack's cigar fell out of his mouth and struck his knee with a fountain of sparks.
"You what?"
"Just in case you'd decided to follow me," explained the Saint blandly. "This business of haring for the tall timber in front of squads of infuriated poli
cemen is all right for Charlie Chaplin, but it's a bit undignified for me." He grinned reminiscently. "I admired your vocabulary," he said.
The detective groped elaborately for his fallen weed.
"I had to do it," he growled. "That son of a——pulled just one too many when he acquitted Irboll. I may be transferred for it, but I couldn't of stayed away if I'd been told beforehand that I was going to wake up tomorrow pounding a two-mile beat out on Staten Island."
Simon put his head back and gazed up at the low roof of the sedan. "What's the line-up?"
Fernack leaned on the wheel and smoked, staring straight ahead again. Taxis and cars thrummed past them in conflicting streams, and up in a tree over their heads a night bird bragged about what he was going to do to his wife when she came home.
The traffic lights changed twice before he answered.
"Up at the top of this city," he said slowly, "there's a political organization called Tammany Hall. They're the boys who fill all the public offices, and before you were born they'd made electioneering into such an exact science that they just don't even think about it any more. They turn out their voters like an army parade, their hired hoodlums guard the polls, and their employees count the votes. The boss of Tammany Hall is a man called Robert Orcread, and the nickname he gave himself is Honest Bob. Outside the City Hall there's a fine bit of a statue called Civic Virtue, and inside there's the biggest collection of crooks and grafters that ever ran a city.
"There's a district attorney named Marcus Yeald who's so crooked you could use him to pull corks with; and his cases come up before a row of judges like Nather. Things are different here from what they are in your country. Over here our judges get elected; and every time a case comes up before them they have to sit down and figure out what the guy's political pull is, or maybe somebody higher up just tells 'em so they won't make any mistake, because if a judge sends a guy up the river who's got a big political drag there's going to be somebody else sittin' in his chair when the next election comes round.
"The politicians appoint the police commissioner, and he does what they say and lays off when they say lay off. The first mistake they ever made was when they put Quistrom in. He takes orders from nobody; and somehow he's gotten himself so well liked and respected by the decent element in this city that even the politicians daren't try and chisel him out now— it'd make too much noise. But it all comes to the same thing in the end. If we send a guy up for trial, he's still got to be prosecuted by Marcus Yeald or one of Yeald's assistants, and a judge like Nather sits on the case an' sees that everything is nice and friendly.
15 The Saint in New York Page 5