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 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?"
Oscread 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 bushwah. 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 damn 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 realized 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 horselaugh—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 good will—but the fact that the offer had been made at all, and that Orcread had thought it worth while 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 and struggling way.
"I hope you're right. But that don't settle anything. We gotta do something that'll satisfy the public. If you make a martyr of him it'll only make things worse. Now, if we could get him in court an' make a monkey out of him, we could say: "Well, we done our duty. We caught the guy that was making all the trouble. And now look at him. We could fix things so he didn't get any sympathy."
"I doubt it," Yeald said. "Once he was in court it would be difficult to stop him talking. I wouldn't dare to hold the trial in camera; and all the reporters would be wanting interviews. You couldn't keep them away."
"Well, I think we oughta make an example. How would it be if . . ."
The rumbling and the rustling went on, and the Saint smoked his cigarette with no outward signs of concern. But not for a moment had he ceased to be aware that the old gentleman with the scythe, of whom he had undertaken to make an ally, was very close to him that night. Yet his smile was undimmed, and his eyes had the stillness of frozen sea water as he idly watched the whispering men who were debating how the processes of justice could best be turned to meet their own ends. And within him was a colder, deadlier contempt than anything he had felt since the beginning of that adventure.
In the room before him were more than a dozen men whose lives were dedicated to plunder and killing, mercenaries of the most amazing legion of crime that modern civilization had ever known; but it was not against their that he felt the deadliest chill of that cold anger. It was against the men who made their looting possible—the men who held positions of trust, whom a blind public had permitted to seize office, whose wages were paid over and over again out of the pockets of ordinary honest citizens, whose cooperation allowed robbery and murder to go unpunished and even commended. The law meant nothing; except when it was an expedient instrument to remove an obstacle to further pillage.
Outside, beyond that room, lay a great city, a monument in brick arid granite to the ingenuity of man; and in that city seven million people paid tribute to a lawless handful. The Saint had never been given to glorifying himself into any kind of knightly hero; in the end he was a mercenary himself, hired by Valcross to do an outlaw's work; but if he had had any doubts of the justice of his cause, they would have been swept away that night. Whether he acknowledged it or not, whether they knew it or not, he was the champion of seven million, facing sentence in that hushed room for a thing that perhaps none of the seven million cou
ld have put into words; and it had never seemed more vital that he should come out alive to carry the battle on. . . .
And then, as if in answer, Orcread's voice rammed itself into his consciousness again and brought him out of his reverie.
"You've heard all we've got to say, Saint. There's only two ways out for you—mine or yours. You can think again if you like."
"I've done all the thinking I can," said the Saint evenly.
"Okay. You've had your chance."
He got up heavily and stood staring at Simon with the same worried perplexity; he was not satisfied yet that he had heard the truth—it was beyond his comprehension that a menace which had attacked the roots of his domination could be so simple—but the consensus of opinion had gone against him. Marcus Yeald twiddled the locks of his briefcase, stood up, and fidgeted with his gloves. He glanced at the door speculatively, in his peering petulant way, and one of the men opened it.
Orcread hitched himself round reluctantly and nodded to Kuhlmann.
"Okay, Dutch," he said and went out, followed by Yeald. The door was dosed and locked again, and a ripple of released suppression went over the room. The conference, as a conference, was over. . . .
"Come here, Saint," said Kuhlmann gutturally.
After that single scuffle of movement which followed Orcread's exit an electric tension had settled on the room— a tension that was subtly different from that which had just been broken. Kuhlmann's unemotional accents did not relieve it. Rather, they seemed to key on the tautness another notch; but the Saint did not appear to feel it. Cool, relaxed, serene as if he had been in a gathering of intimate friends, he sauntered forward a couple of steps and stood in front of the racketeer.
He knew that there was nothing he could do there. The odds were impossible. But he stood smiling quietly while Kuhlmann looked up into his face.
"You're a goot boy," Kuhlmann said. "You give us a liddle bit of trouble, und that is bad. But we cannot finish our talk here. So I think"—he swallowed a lump in his throat, and his voice broke—"I think you go outside und vait for us for a minute."
Quick hands grabbed the Saint's wrists and twisted him round, but he did not struggle. He was led to the door; and as he went out, Kuhlmann nodded, blinking, to two of the men who stood along the wall.
"You, Joe, und you, Maxie—give him der business. Und meet me here again aftervards."
Without a flicker of expression the two men detached themselves from the wall and followed the Saint out, their hands automatically feeling in their pockets. The door closed behind the cortege, and for a moment nobody moved.
And then Dutch Kuhlmann dragged out his large white handkerchief and dabbed with it at his eyes. A distinct sob sounded in the room; and the remaining gunmen glanced at each other with almost sheepish grins. Dutch Kuhlmann was crying.
* * *
The moon which had shed its light over the earlier hours of the evening, and which had germinated the romance of Mr. Bungstatter of Brooklyn, had disappeared. Clouds hung low between the earth and the stars, and the night nestled blackly over the city. A single booming note from the Metropolitan Tower announced the passing of an hour after midnight.
On the fringe of the town, sleep claimed honest men. In the Bronx and the nearest portions of Long Island, in Hoboken, Peekskill, and Poughkeepsie, families slept peacefully. In Brooklyn, Mr. Theodore Bungstatter slept in ecstatic bliss— and, it must be confessed, snored. And with the hard nozzle of Maxie's automatic grinding deep into his ribs Simon Templar was hurried across the pavement outside Charley's Place and into a waiting car.
Joe piled in on the other side, and a third man took the wheel. The muzzle of another gun stabbed into the Saint's other side, and there was a cold tenseness in the eyes of the escort which indicated that their fingers were taut on the triggers. On this ride they were taking no chances.
Simon looked out of the windows while the driver jammed his foot down on the starter. The few pedestrians who passed scarcely glanced aside. If they had glanced aside, they would have seen nothing extraordinary; and if they had seen anything extraordinary, the Saint reflected with a wry grin, they would have run for their lives. He had taken a hand in a game where he had to play alone, and there would be no help from anyone but himself. . . . But even as he looked back, he saw the slim figure of Fay Edwards framed in the dark doorway through which he had been brought; and the old questions leapt to his mind again.
The brim of her hat cast a shadow over her eyes, and he could not even tell whether she was looking in his direction. He had no reason to think that she would. Throughout his interview with Orcread she had sat like an inattentive spectator, smoking, and thinking her own thoughts. When Kuhlmann's sentence had been passed upon him she had been lighting another cigarette: she had not even looked up, and her hand had not shaken. When he was turned and hustled out of the room she had been raising her eyes to look at him again, with a calm impersonal regard that told him no more than her present pose.
"Better take a good look," advised Maxie.
There was no derision, no bitterness in his voice—it simply uttered a grim reminder of the fact that Simon Templar was doomed to have few more attractive things to look at.
The Saint smiled and saw the girl start off to cross the road behind the car, without looking round, before Joe reached forward and drew the curtains.
"She's worth a look," Simon murmured and slanted an eyebrow at the closed draperies which shut out his view on either side. "This wagon looks like a hearse already."
Joe grunted meaninglessly, and the car pulled away from the curb and circled the block. The blaze of Broadway showed ahead for a moment, like the reflection of a fire in the sky; then they were turned around and driving west, and the Saint settled down and made himself as comfortable as he could.
The situation had no natural facilities for comfort. There was something so businesslike, so final and confident, in the manner of his captors, that despite himself an icy finger of doubt traced its chill course down the Saint's spine. Except for the fact that no invisible but far-reaching hand of the Law sanctioned this strange execution, it had a disturbing similarity to the remorseless ritual of lawful punishment.
Before that he had been in tight corners from which the Law might have saved him if he had called for help; but he had never called. There was something about the dull, ponderous interventions of the Law which had never appealed to him, and in this particular case their potentialities appealed to him least of all. Intervention, even if it succeeded, meant arrest and trial; and his brief acquaintance with Orcread and Yeald had been sufficient to show him how much justice he could expect from that. Not that the matter of justice was very vital in his case. The most incorruptible court in the world, he had to admit, could do nothing else but sentence him to about forty years' imprisonment even if it didn't go so far as ordering execution, and on the whole he preferred his chances with the illicit sentence. It would not be the first time that he had sat in a game of life and death and played the cards out with a steady hand no matter how the luck ran; and now he would do it again, though at that precise moment he hadn't the faintest idea what method he would use. Yet for the first time in many years he wondered if he had not taken on too much.
But no hint of what passed in his mind showed on his face. He leaned back, calm-eyed and nonchalant, as if he were one of a party of friends on their way home; and even when they stopped at the driveway of a ferry he did not move. He cocked one quizzical blue eye at Maxie.
"So it's to be Jersey this time, is it?"
"Yeah," said the gunman, with a callous twist of humour. "We thought ye might like a change."
An efficient-looking blue-coated patrolman stood no more than four yards away; but no sixth sense, no clairvoyant flash of prescience, warned him to single out the gleaming black sedan from the line of other vehicles which were waiting their turn to go on board. He dreamed his dreams of an inspectorship in a division well populat
ed with citizens who would be unselfishly eager to dissuade him with cash and credit from the obvious perils of overworking himself at his job; and the Saint made no attempt to interrupt him. The driver paid their fares, and they settled into their place on the ferry to wait until it chose to sail.
Simon gazed out at the inky waters of the Hudson and wondered idly why it should be that the departure of a ferry was always accompanied by twice as much fuss and anxiety as the sailing of an ocean liner; and he derived a rather morbid exhilaration even from that vivid detail of his experience. He had heard much, and speculated more, about that effective American method of removing an appointed victim; but in spite of his flippant remarks to Valcross he had not expected that he would have this unique opportunity of learning at first hand the sensations of the man who played the leading role in the drama. He felt that in this instance the country, which had adopted the "ride" as a native sport for wet week-ends was rather overdoing itself in its eagerness to show him the works so quickly and comprehensively, but the tightness of his corner was not capable of damping a keen professional interest in the proceedings. And yet, all the time, he missed the reassuring pressure of the knife blade that should have been cuddling snugly along his forearm; and his eyes were very cold and bright as he flicked his cigarette end through the open front window and watched it spring like a red tracer bullet across the dark. . . .
Maxie rummaged in his pockets with his free hand, drew forth a crumpled pack of cigarettes, and extended it politely.
"Have another?"
"A last smoke for the condemned man, eh?"
Equally courteous and unruffled, the Saint thumbed a Chesterfield from the package and carefully straightened it out. Maxie passed him the cigar lighter from the arm rest and then lighted a smoke for himself; but in none of the motions of this studious observance of the rules of etiquette was there an opening for a surprise attack from the victim. Simon felt Joe's automatic harden against his side almost imperceptibly while the exchange of courtesies was going on, and knew that his companions had explored all the possibilities of such situations before they began to shave. He signed and leaned back again, exhaling twin streams of smoke from his nostrils.
15 The Saint in New York Page 14