Nather did three things simultaneously. He dropped the sheaf of bills, spun round in his swivel chair as if its axle had suddenly got tangled up in a high-speed power belt, and made a tentative pass for a side drawer of the desk. It was the last of these movements which never came to completion. He found himself staring into the levelled menace of a blue steel automatic, gaping into a pair of the most mocking blue eyes that he had ever seen. They were eyes that made something cringe at the back of his brain, eyes with a debonair gaze like the flick of a rapier thrust—eyes that held a greater terror for the Honourable Judge than the steady shape of the automatic.
He sat there, leaning slightly forward in his chair, with his heavy body stiffening and his fleshy nostrils dilating, for a space of ten terrific seconds. The only sound was the thud of his own heart and the suddenly abnormally loud tick of the clock that stood on his desk. And then, with an effort which brought the sweat out in beads on his forehead, he tried to shake off the supernatural fear that was winding its icy grip around his chest.
He started to heave himself forward, but he got no farther than that brief convulsive start. With a faint flippant smile, the Saint whirled the automatic once around his forefinger by the trigger-guard, and came on into the room. After that one derisive gesture the butt of the gun settled into his hand again, as smoothly and surely as if there were a socket there for it.
“Don’t disturb yourself, comrade,” purred the Saint. “I know the book of rules says that a host should always rise when receiving a guest, but just for once we’ll forget the formalities. Sit down, Your Honour—and keep on making yourself at home.”
The judge shifted his frozen gaze from the automatic to the Saint’s face. The cadences of that gentle mocking voice drummed eerily on through his memory. It was a voice that matched the eyes and the debonair stance of the intruder—a voice that for some strange reason reawakened the clammy terror that he had known when he first looked up and met that cavalier blue gaze. The last of the colour drained out of his sallow cheeks, and twin pulses beat violently in his throat.
“What is the meaning of this infernal farce?” he demanded, and did not recognise the raw jaggedness of his own voice.
“If you sit down I’ll tell you all about it,” murmured the Saint. “If you don’t—well, I noticed a slap-up funeral parlour right around the corner, with some jolly-looking coffins at bargain prices. And this is supposed to be a lucky month to die in.”
The eyes of the two men clashed in an almost physical encounter, like the blades of two duellists engaging, but the Saint’s smile did not change. And presently Judge Nather sank back heavily in his chair, with his face a pasty white and the dew of perspiration on his upper lip.
“Thanks a lot,” said the Saint.
He relaxed imperceptibly, loosening the crook of his finger fractionally from the trigger. With unaltered elegance he moved himself sideways to the door and turned the key in the lock with a flick of his wrist. Then he strolled unhurriedly back across the deep-piled rug towards His Honour.
He hitched his left hip up on to the corner of the mahogany desk and settled himself there, with one polished shoe swinging negligently back and forth. One challenging blue eye slid over the fallen heap of bills that lay between himself and his host, and his brows tilted speculatively.
He poked at the nest-egg with the nozzle of his gun, scattering the bills across the table in a golden cascade.
“Must be quite a cosy little total, Algernon,” he remarked. “Almost enough to make me forget my principles.”
“So it’s robbery, eh?” grated Nather, and the Saint thought he could detect a note of relief in the words.
He shook his head rather sadly, turning wide innocent eyes on his victim.
“My dear judge—you wrong me. I merely mentioned that I was struggling against temptation. This really started to be just a sociable interview. I want to know where you were born and why, and what penitentiary you graduated from, and what you think about disarmament, and whether your face was always so repulsive or if somebody trod on it. I wasn’t thinking of stealing anything.”
His gaze reverted to the sheaf of bills, meditatively, as though the thought was nevertheless penetrating slowly into his mind, against his will, and the judge moistened his dry lips.
“What is all this nonsense?” he croaked.
“Just a little friendly call.” Simon poked at the bills again, wistfully. It was clear that the idea which Nather had dragged in was gaining ground. “You and your packet of berries—me and my little effort at housebreaking. On second thoughts,” said the Saint, reaching a decision with apparent reluctance, “I’m afraid I shall have to borrow these. Just sitting and looking at them like this is getting me all worked up.”
Nether stiffened up in his chair, his flabby hands curling up into lumpish fists, but the gun in the Saint’s hand never wavered from the even keel that held it centred on the helpless Judge like a finger of fate. Nather’s small eyes flickered like burning agates as the Saint gathered up the stack of notes with a sweeping gesture and dropped them into his pocket, but he did not try to challenge the threat of the .38 Colt that hovered a scanty yard from his midriff. His impotent wrath exploded in a staccato clip of words that rasped gropingly through the stillness.
“Damn you—I’ll see that you don’t get away with this!”
“I believe you would,” agreed Simon amiably. “I admit that it isn’t particularly tactful of me to do things like this to you, especially in this man’s city. It’s a pity you don’t feel sociable. We might have had a lovely evening together, and then if I ever got caught and brought up in your court you’d burst into tears and direct the jury to acquit me—just like you’d have done with Jack Irboll eventually, if he hadn’t had such a tragic accident. But I suppose one can’t have everything…Never mind. Tell me how much I’ve borrowed and I’ll give you a receipt.”
The pallor was gone from Nather’s cheeks, giving place to a savage flush. A globule of perspiration trickled down his cheek and hung quivering at the side of his jaw.
“There were twenty thousand dollars there,” he stated hoarsely.
The Saint raised his eyebrows.
“Not so bad,” he drawled quietly, “for blood money.”
Nather’s head snapped up, and a fleeting panic widened the irises of his eyes, but he said nothing. And the Saint smiled again.
“Pardon me. In the excitement of the moment, and all that sort of thing, I forgot to introduce myself. I’m afraid I’ve had you at a disadvantage. My name is Templar—Simon Templar.” He caught the flash of stark hypnotic fear that blanched the big man’s lips, and grinned even more gently, “You may have heard of me. I am the Saint.”
A tremor went over the man’s throat, as he swallowed mechanically out of a parched mouth. He spoke between twitching lips.
“You’re the man who sent Irboll that note.”
“And killed him,” said the Saint quietly. The lilt of banter was lingering only in the deepest undertones of his voice—the surface of it was as smooth and cold as a shaft of polished ice. “Don’t forget that, Nather. You let him out—and I killed him.”
The judge stirred in his chair, a movement that was no more than the uncontrollable reaction of nerves strained beyond the limits of their strength. His mouth shaped an almost inaudible sentence.
“What do you want?”
“Well, I thought we might have a little chat.” Simon’s foot swung again, in that easy untroubled pendulum. “I thought you might know things. You seem to have been quite a pal of Jack’s. According to the paper I was reading tonight, you were the man who signed his permit to carry the gun that killed Ionetzki. You were the guy who signed the writ of habeas corpus to get Irboll out when they first pulled him in. You were the guy who adjourned him the last time he was brought up. And three years ago, it seems, you were the guy who acquitted our same friend Irboll along with four others who were tried for the murder of a kid named Billie Valcross. One w
ay and another, Algernon, it looks like you must be quite a useful sort of friend for a bloke to have.”
CHAPTER TWO
HOW SIMON TEMPLAR EAVESDROPPED TO SOME ADVANTAGE AND INSPECTOR FERNACK WENT FOR A RIDE
1
Nather did not try to answer. His body was sunk deep into his chair, and his eyes glared venomously up at the Saint out of a face that was contorted into a mask of hate and fury, but Simon had passed under glares like that before.
“Just before I came in,” Simon remarked conversationally, “you were reading a scrap of paper that seemed to have some connection with those twenty grand I borrowed.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the judge.
“No?” Simon’s voice was honeyed, but none of the chill had gone out of his blue eyes. “Let me remind you. You screwed it up and plugged it into the wastebasket. It’s there still—and I’d like to see it.”
Nather’s eyelids flickered.
“Why don’t you get it?”
“Because I’d hate to give you the chance to catch me bending—my tail’s tender today. Fetch out that paper!”
His voice crisped up like the flick of a whip-lash, and Wallis Nather jerked under the sting of it. But he made no move to obey.
A throbbing stillness settled over the room. The air was surcharged with the electric tension of it. The smile had faded from the Saint’s lips when his voice tightened on that one curt command, and it had not come back. There was no variation in the graceful ease with which he held his precarious perch on the edge of the desk, but the gentle rocking of his free foot had died away like the pendulum of a clock that had run down. And a thin pin-prickling temblor frisked up the Saint’s spine as he realised that Nather did not mean to obey.
Instead, he realised that the judge was marshalling the last fragments of his strength and courage to make one desperate lunge for the automatic that held him crucified in his chair. It was fantastic, incredible, but there could be no mistake. The intuitive certainty had flashed through his mind at the same instant as it was born in the brain of the man before him. And Simon knew, with the same certainty, that just as surely as that desperate lunge was made, his own finger would constrict on the trigger, ending the argument beyond all human revision, without hesitation and without remorse.
“You wouldn’t dare to shoot,” said Nather throatily.
He said it more as if he were trying to convince himself, and the Saint’s eyes held him on needle-points of blue ice.
“The word isn’t in my dictionary—and you ought to know it! This isn’t a country where men carry guns for ornament, and I’m just getting acclimatised…”
But even while Simon spoke, his brain was racing ahead to explore the reasons for the insane resolution that was whitening the knuckles of the judge’s twitching hands.
He felt convinced that such a man as Wallis Nather would not go up against that gaping automatic on account of a mere twenty thousand dollars. That was a sum of money which any man might legitimately be grieved to lose, but it was not large enough to tempt anyone but a starving desperado to the gamble that Nather was steeling himself to make.
There could be only one other motive—the words scrawled on that scrap of paper in the wastebasket. Something that was written on the crumpled slip of milled rag held dynamite enough to raise the ghostly hand of Nemesis itself. Something was recorded there that had the power to drive Nather forward inch by inch in his chair into the face of almost certain death…
With fascinated eyes Simon watched the slight nerve-tingling movements of the judge’s body as Nather edged himself up for that suicidal assault on the gun. For the first time in his long and chequered career he felt himself a blind instrument in the working out of an inexorable fate. There was nothing more that he could do. The one metallic warning that he had delivered had passed unheeded. Only two things remained. In another few seconds Nather would lunge, and in that instant the automatic would bark its riposte of death…
Simon was vaguely conscious of the quickening of his pulse. His mind reeled away to those trivial details that sometimes slip through the voids of an intolerable suspense—there must be servants somewhere in the place—but it would only take him three swift movements, before they could possibly reach the door, to scrawl his sign manually on the blotter, snatch the crumple of paper from the wastebasket, and vanish through the open windows into the darkness…
And then a bell exploded in the oppressive atmosphere of the room like a bomb. A telephone bell.
Its rhythmic double beat sheared through the silence like a guillotine, cleaving the overstrained chord of the spell with the blade of its familiar commonplaceness, and Nather’s effort collapsed as if the same cleavage had snapped the support of his spine. He shuddered once, and slouched back limply in his chair, passing a trembling hand across his eyes.
Simon smiled again. His shoe resumed its gentle swinging, and he swept a gay mocking eye over the desk. There were two telephones on it—one of them clearly a house phone. On a small table to the right of the desk stood a third telephone, obviously a Siamese twin of the second, linked to the same outside wire and intended for His Honour’s secretary. The Saint reached out a long arm and brought it over on to his knee.
“Answer the call, brother,” he suggested persuasively.
A wave of his automatic added its imponderable weight to the suggestion, but the fight had already been drained out of the judge’s veins. With a grey drawn face he dragged one of the telephones towards him, and as he lifted the receiver Simon matched the movement on the extension line, and slanted his gun over in a relentless arc to cover the other’s heart. Definitely it was not Mr Wallis Nather’s evening, but the Saint could not afford to be sentimental.
“Judge Nather speaking.”
The duplicate receiver at the Saint’s ear clicked to the vibrations of a clear feminine voice.
“This is Fay.” The speech was crisp and incisive, but it had a rich pleasantness of music that very few feminine voices can maintain over the telephone—there was a rare quality in the sound that moved the Saint’s blood with a queer delightful expectation for which he could have given no account. It was just one of those voices. “The Big Fellow says you’d better stay home tonight,” stated the voice. “He may want you.”
Nather’s eyes seemed to glaze over; then they switched to the Saint’s face. Simon moved his gun under the desk lamp and edged it a little forward, and his gaze was as steady as the steel. Nather swallowed.
“I…I’ll be here,” he stammered.
“See that you are,” came the terse conclusion, in the same voice of bewitching overtones, and then the wire went dead.
Watching Nather, the Saint knew that at least half the audience had understood that cryptic conversation perfectly. The judge was staring vacantly ahead into space with the lifeless receiver still clapped to his ear, and his mouth hung half open.
“Very interesting,” said the Saint softly.
Nather’s mouth closed jerkily. He replaced the receiver slowly on its hook and looked up.
“A client of mine,” he said casually, but he was not casual enough.
“That’s interesting, too,” said the Saint. “I didn’t know judges were supposed to have clients. I thought they were unattached and impartial…And she must be very beautiful, with a voice like that. Can it be, Algernon, that you are hiding something from me?”
Nather glowered up at him.
“How much longer are you going on with this preposterous performance?”
“Until it bores me. I’m easily amused,” said the Saint, “and up to now I haven’t yawned once. So far as I can see, the interview is progressing from good to better. All kinds of things are bobbing up every minute. This Big Fellow of yours, now: let’s hear some more about him. I’m inquisitive.”
Nather’s eyes flinched wildly.
“I’m damned if I’ll talk to you anymore!”
“You’re damned if you won’t.”
/>
“You can go to hell.”
“And the same applies,” said the Saint equably.
He stood up and came round the desk, poising himself on straddled feet a pace in front of the judge, lean and dynamically balanced as a panther.
“You’re very dense, Algernon,” he remarked calmly. “You don’t seem to get the idea at all. Maybe our little interlude of song and badinage has led you up the wrong tree. You can make a good guess why I’m here. You know that I didn’t drop in just for the pleasure of admiring your classic profile. You know who I am. I don’t care what you pick on, but you can tell me something. Any of your maidenly secrets ought to be worth listening to. Come through, Nather—or else…”
“Or else what?”
The Saint’s gun moved forward until it pressed deep into the judge’s flabby navel.
“Or else find out what Ionetzki and Jack Irboll know!”
Nather’s heavy sullen lips twisted back from yellowed teeth. And Simon jabbed the gun a notch further into the judge’s stomach.
“And don’t lie,” said the Saint caressingly, “because I’m friendly to undertakers, and that funeral parlour looked as if it could do with some business.”
Nather passed a fevered tongue over hot dry lips. He had not lived through thirty years of intermittent contacts with the underworld without learning to recognise that queer bitter fibre in a man that makes him capable of murder. And the terrific inward struggle of that last moment before the telephone bell rang had blunted his vitality. The strength was not in him to screw himself to that desperate pitch again. He knew, beyond all question, that if he refused to talk, if he attempted to lie, that bantering tiger of a man who was squeezing the gun even deeper into his vitals would destroy him as ruthlessly as he would have crushed an ant. Nather’s larynx heaved twice, convulsively, and then, before he could speak, a muffled tread sounded beyond the locked door.
The Saint tautened, listening. From the ponderous flat-footed measure of the stride he guessed it to belong to the butler. Nather looked up with a sudden gleam of hope, but the steady pressure of the gun-muzzle in his yielding flesh did not vary by a milligram. The Saint’s light whisper floated to his ears in an airy breath.
The Saint In New York (The Saint Series) Page 4
