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 split 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.
* * *
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 lamppost 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 57th 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 onto 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 license 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 50th 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 reckernized 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.
The chauffeur nodded.
"Sure, I read aboutcha. I like dat job. I been waitin' to see Morrie Ualino get his ever since I had to 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' to knock ya off?"
"Trying."
The driver shook his head.
"I can't figure 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 washroom to repair some of the slight damage which the accident had done to his appearance, and finally let himself out onto 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 oh with a muttered apology never knew that he had touched the man for whom all the police and the underworld were searching.
Valcross came in about lunchtime. Simon was lounging on the davenport reading an afternoon paper; he looked up at the older man and smiled.
"You didn't expect to see me back so early—isn't that what you were going to say?"
"More or less," Valcross admitted. "What's wrong?"
Simon swung his legs off the sofa and came to a sitting position.
"Nothing," he said, lighting a cigarette, "and at the same time, everything. A certain Mr. Papulos, whom you wot of, has been taken off; but he wasn't really on our list. Mr. Kuhlmann, I'm afraid, is still at large." He told his story tersely but completely. "Altogether, a very unfortunate misunderstanding," he concluded. "Not that it seems to make a great deal of difference, from what Pappy was saying just before the ukulele music broke us up. Pappy was all set to shoot the works, but the works we want were not in him. However, in close cooperation with the bloke who
carries a scythe and has such an appalling taste in nightshirts, we may be able to rectify our omissions."
Valcross, at the decanter, raised his eyebrows faintly.
"You're taking a lot of chances, Simon. Don't let this—er —bloke who carries the scythe swing it the wrong way."
"If he does," said the Saint gravely, "I shall duck. Then, in sober and reasonable argument, I shall endeavour to prove to the bloke the error of his ways. Whereupon he will burst into tears and beg my forgiveness, and we shall take up the trail again together."
"What trail?"
Simon frowned.
"Why bring that up," he protested. "I'm blowed if I know. But it occurs to me, Bill, that we shall have to be a bit careful about the taking off of some of these other birds on our list— if they all went out like Pappy there wouldn't be anyone left who could lead us to the Big Fellow, and he's a guy I should very much like to meet. But if Papulos was talking turkey there may be a line to something in the further prospective tribulations of Zeke Inselheim; and that's why I came home."
Valcross brought a filled glass over to him.
"Does that supply the need?" he asked humorously.
The Saint smiled.
"It certainly supplies one of them, Bill. The other is rather bigger. I think you told me once that the expenses of this jaunt were on you."
The other looked at him for a moment, and then took out a checkbook and a fountain pen.
"How much do you want?"
"Not money. I want a car. A nice, dark, ordinary-looking car with a bit of speed in hand. A roadster will do, and a fairly new second-hand one at that. But I'll let you go out and buy it, for the reason you mentioned yourself—things may be happening pretty fast around the Château Inselheim, and I'd rather like to be there."
He had no very definite plan in mind; but the penultimate revelation of the late Mr. Papulos was impressed deeply on his memory. He thought it over through the afternoon, till the day faded and New York donned her electric jewels and came to life.
The only decision he came to was that if anything was going to happen during the next twenty-four hours it would be likely to happen at night; and it was well after dark when he set out in the long underslung roadster that Valcross had provided. After the day had gone, and the worker had returned to his fireside, Broadway came into its own: the underworld and its allies, to whom the sunset was the dawn, and who had a very lukewarm appreciation of firesides, came forth from their hiding places to play and plot new ventures; and if Mr. Ezekiel Inselheim and his seed were still the target, they would be likely to waste no time.
It was, as a matter of fact, one of those soft and balmy nights on which a fireside has a purely symbolical appeal. Overhead, a full moon tossed her beams extravagantly over an unappreciative city. A cool breeze swept across the Hudson, whipping the heat from the granite of the mighty metropolis. Over in Brooklyn, a certain Mr. Theodore Bungstatter was so moved by the magic of the night that he proposed marriage to his cook, and swooned when he was accepted; and the Saint sent his car roaring through the twinkling canyons of New York with a sublime faith that this evening could not be less productive of entertainment than any which had gone before.
As a matter of fact, the expedition was not embarked on quite so blindly as it might have appeared. The information supplied by the late Mr. Papulos had started a train of thought, and the more Simon followed it the more he became convinced that it ought dutifully to lead somewhere. Any such racket as Papulos had described depended for its effectiveness almost entirely upon fear—an almost superstitious fear of the omnipotence and infallibility of the menacing party. By the failure of the previous night's kidnapping that atmosphere had suffered a distinct setback, and only a prompt and decisive counter-attack would restore the damage. On an expert and comprehensive estimate, the odds seemed about two hundred to one that the tribulations of Mr. Inselheim were only just beginning; but it must be confessed that Simon Templar was not expecting quite such a rapid vindication of his arithmetic as he received.
As he turned into Sutton Place he saw an expensive limousine standing outside the building where Mr. Inselheim's apartment was. He marked it down mechanically, along with the burly lounger who was energetically idling in the vicinity. Simon flicked his gear lever into neutral and coasted slowly along, contemplating the geography of the locale and weighing up strategic sites for his own encampment; and he had scarcely settled on a spot when a dark plump figure emerged from the building and paused for a moment beside the burly lounger on the sidewalk.
The roadster stopped abruptly, and the Saint's keen eyes strained through the night. He saw that the dark plump figure carried a bulky brown-paper package under its arm; and as the brief conversation with the lounger concluded, the figure turned towards the limousine and the rays of a street lamp fell full across the pronounced and unforgettable features of Mr. Ezekiel Inselheim.
Simon raised his eyebrows and regarded himself solemnly in the driving mirror.
"Oho," he remarked to his reflection. "Likewise aha. As Mr. Templar arrives, Mr. Inselheim departs. We seem to have arrived in the nick of time."
At any rate, the reason for the burly lounger's presence was disposed of, and it was not what the Saint had thought at first. He realized immediately that after the stirring events of the last twenty-four hours the police, with their inspired efficiency in locking the stable door after the horse was stolen, would have naturally posted a guard at the Inselheim residence; and the large-booted idler was acquitted of any sinister intentions.
The guilelessness of Mr. Inselheim was less clearly established, and Simon was frowning thoughtfully as he slipped the roadster back into gear and watched Inselheim entering the limousine. For a few moments, while the limousine's engine was warming up, he debated whether it might not have been a more astute tactical move to remain on the spot where Mr. Inselheim's offspring might provide a centre of more urgent disturbances. And then, as the limousine pulled out from the curb, he flicked an imaginary coin in his mind, and it came down on the memory of a peculiar brown-paper package. With a slight shrug he pulled out a cigarette case and juggled it deftly with one hand as he stepped on the gas.
"The hell with it," said the Saint to his attractive reflection. "Ezekiel is following his nose, and there may be worse landmarks."
The limousine's taillight was receding northwards, and Simon closed up until he was less than twenty yards behind, trailing after it through the traffic as steadily as if the two cars had been linked by invisible ropes.
* * *
After a while the dense buildings of the city thinned out to the quieter, evenly spaced dwellings of the suburbs. There the moon seemed to shine even more brightly; the stars were chips of ice from which a cool radiance came down to freshen the summer evening; and the Saint sighed gently. In him was a certain strain of the same temperament which blessed our Mr. Theodore Bungstatter of Brooklyn: a night like that filled him with a sense of peace and tranquillity that was utterly alien to his ordinary self. He decided that in a really well-organized world there would have been much better things for him to do on such an evening than to go trailing after a bloke who boasted the name of Inselheim and looked like it. It would have been a very different matter if the mysterious and beautiful Fay Edwards, who had twice passed with such surprising effect across the horizons of that New York venture, had been driving the limousine ahead. . . .
He thrust a second cigarette between his lips and struck a match. The light revealed his face for one flashing instant, striking a rather cold blue light from thoughtfully reckless eyes —a glimpse of character that might have interested Dutch Kuhlmann not a little if that sentimentally ruthless Teuton had been there to see it. The Saint had his romantic regrets, but they subtracted nothing from the concentration with which he was following the job in hand.
His hand waved the match to extinction, and in his next movement he reached forward and switched out all the lights in
the car. In the closer traffic of the city there was no reason why he should not legitimately be following on the same route as the limousine, but out on the less populated thoroughfares his leech-like devotion might cause a nervous man some inquisitive agitation which Simon Templar had no wish to arouse. His left arm swung languidly over the side as the roadster ripped round a turn in the road at an even sixty and roared on to the northwest.
The road was a level strip of concrete laid out like a silver tape under the sinking moon. He steered on in the wake of the limousine's headlight, soothing his ears with the even purr of tires swishing over the macadam, his nerves relaxed and resting. Above the hum of the engines rose a faint and not unmelodious sound. Simon Templar was serenading the stars. . . .
The song ended abruptly.
Something flashed in the corner of his eye—something jerky and illuminating like an electric torch. It flashed three times, with the precision of a lighthouse; and then the darkness settled down again.
Simon's hands steadied on the wheel, and he shut off the engine and declutched with two swift simultaneous movements. His foot shifted to the brake and brought the roadster to a standstill as quickly as it could be done without giving his tires a chance to scream a protest.
In the last mile or two, out on the open road, he had fallen behind a bit, and now he was glad that he had done so. The red taillight of the limousine leapt into redder brilliance as Inselheim jammed on the brakes, pulling it over to the side of the road as it slowed down. Then, right at its side, the flashlight beamed again.
From a safe distance, Simon saw a dark object leave the window at the side of the limousine, trace an arc through the air, and vanish into the bushes at the side of the highway. Then the limousine took off like a startled hare and shot away into the night as if it had seen a ghost; but by that time the Saint was out of his car, racing up the road without a sound.
The package which Inselheim had thrown out remained by the roadside where it had fallen, and Simon recognized it at once as the parcel which the millionaire had carried under his arm when he left his apartment. That alone made it interesting enough, and the manner of its delivery established it as something which had to be investigated without delay— although Simon could make a shrewd grim guess at what it contained. But his habitual caution slowed up his steps before he reached it, and he merged himself into the blackness beneath a tree with no more sound than an errant shadow. And for a short time there was silence, broken only by the soft rustle of leaves in the night wind.
15 The Saint in New York Page 11