He turned on his heel and issued a series of sharp orders to the two guards.
One word out of the arrangements for his disposal was enough for Simon Templar’s ears. His strategy had worked exactly as he had psychologised it from the beginning. By permitting himself to be trapped by Papulos he had taken one more step up the ladder. He was being passed on to the man higher up for the final disposition of his fate, and that man was Morrie Ualino. And where Ualino was, the Saint felt sure, there was a good sporting chance that the heiress of all the Inselheims might also be.
“March,” ordered the first guard.
“But what about my twenty grand?” protested Simon aggrievedly.
The second guard grinned.
“Where you’re going, buddy, they use asbestos money,” he said. “Shove off.”
Papulos unlocked the door. The twenty thousand dollars was in the side pocket of his coat, just as he had stuffed it away when he rose from the poker table, and Simon Templar never took prophecies of his eventual destination too seriously. He figured that a nation which had Samuel Insull in its midst would not be unduly impoverished by the loss of twenty thousand berries, and as he reached the door he stopped to lay a hand on the Greek’s shoulder with a friendliness which he did not feel.
“Remember, little buttercup,” said the Saint outrageously, “whatever you do, we shall always be sweethearts—”
Then one of the guards pushed him on, and Simon stowed twenty thousand dollars unobtrusively away in his pocket as they went through the hall.
3
Simon rode beside the first torpedo, while the other drove the sedan north and east. If anything, the pressure of the gun that bored suggestively into his side had the pleasantly familiar touch of an old friend. It was a gentle reminder of danger, a solid emblem of battle and sudden death, and there were a few dozen men in hell who would attest to the fact that he was a stranger to neither.
They rolled smoothly across the Queensborough Bridge which spans the East River at Fifty-Ninth Street, and the car picked up speed as they blared their way through the semi-deserted streets of Astoria. Then the broad open highways of Long Island stretched before them, and the Saint lighted a cigarette and turned his brain into a perfectly functioning machine that charted every yard of the route on a memory like a photographic plate.
The outlying suburbs of New York flashed by in quick succession—Flushing, Garden City, Hempstead. They had travelled some miles beyond Riverdale when the car slowed down and turned abruptly into a bumpy unfinished driveway that terminated a hundred yards farther on in front of a sombre and shuttered two-story house, where another car was already parked.
One of the guards nudged him out, and the three of them mounted the short flight of steps to the porch in single file. The inevitable face peered through a grille, recognised the leading guard, and said, “Hi, Joe.” The bolts were drawn, and they went in.
The hall was lighted by a single heavily-frosted orange bulb which did very little more than relieve the blackest shades of darkness. On the right, an open door gave a glimpse of a tiny room containing a small zinc-topped bar; on the left, a larger room was framed between dingy hangings. The larger room had a bare floor with small booths built around the walls, each containing a table covered with a grubby cloth. There was an electric piano in one corner, a dingy growth of artificial vines straggling over the tops of the booths and tacking themselves along the low ceiling, and a half-dozen more of the same feeble orange bulbs shedding their watery glimmer on to the scene. It was a typical gangster’s dive, of a pattern more common in New Jersey than on Long Island, and the atmosphere was intended to inspire romance and relaxation, but it was one of the most depressing places in which Simon Templar had ever been.
“Upstairs?” queried the gorilla who had been recognised as Joe, and the man who had opened the door nodded.
“Yeah—waitin’ for ya.” He inspected the Saint curiously. “Is dis de guy?”
The two guards made simultaneous grunting noises designed to affirm that dis was de guy, and one of them took the Saint’s arm and moved him on towards the stairway at the back of the hall. They mounted through a curve of darkness and came up into another dim glow of light on the floor above. The stairs turned them into a narrow corridor that ran the length of the house; Simon was hurried along past one door before which a scrawny-necked individual lounged negligently, blinking at them as they went by with heavy-lidded eyes like an alligator’s; they passed another door, and stopped before the third and last. One of his escorts hammered on it, and it was yanked open. There was a sudden burst of brighter light from within, and the Saint went on into the lion’s den with an easy unhurried stride.
Simon had seen better dens. Except for the brighter illumination, the room in which he found himself was no better than the social quarters on the ground floor. The boards underfoot were uncarpeted, the once dazzlingly patterned wallpaper was yellowed and moulting. There was a couch under the window where two shirt-sleeved hoodlums sat side-saddle over a game of pinochle; they glanced up when the Saint came in, and returned to their play without comment. In the centre of the room was a table on which stood the remains of a meal, and at the table, facing the door, sat Ualino.
Simon identified him easily from Fernack’s description. But he saw the man only for one fleeting second, and after that his gaze was held by the girl who also sat at the table.
There was no logical reason why he should have guessed that she was the girl Fay who had spoken to Nather on the telephone—the Fay Edwards of whom Fernack had begun to speak. In a house like that there were likely to be numbers of girls, coming and going, and there was no evidence that Morrie Ualino was an ascetic. But there was something to this girl that might quite naturally have spoken with a voice like the one which Simon had heard. In that stark shabby room her presence was even more incongruous than the immaculate Ualino’s. She was slender and fair, with eyes like amber, and her mouth was a soft curve of amazingly innocent temptation. Perhaps she was twenty-three or twenty-four, old enough to have the quiet confidence which adolescence never has, but still she was young in an ageless enduring way that the years do not change. And once again that queer intuitive throb of expectation went through the Saint, as it had done when he first heard the voice on Nather’s telephone; the stirring of a chord in his mind whose note rang too deep for reason…
It was to her, rather than to Ualino, that he spoke.
“Good evening,” said the Saint.
No one in the room answered. Ualino dipped a brush into a tiny bottle and stroked an even film of liquid polish on the nail of his little finger. A diamond the size of a bean flashed from his ring as he inspected his handiwork under the light. He corked the bottle and fluttered his graceful hand back and forth to dry off the polish, and his tawny eyes returned at leisure to the Saint.
“I wanted to have a look at you.”
Simon smiled at him.
“That makes us both happy. I wanted to have a look at you. I heard you were the Belle of New York, and I wanted to see how you did it.” The ingenuousness of the Saintly smile was blinding. “You must give me the address of the man who waves your hair one day, Morrie—but are you sure they got all the mud-pack off last time your face had a treatment?”
There was a hideous clammy stillness in the room, a stillness that sprawled out of sheer open-mouthed incredulity. Not within the memory of anyone present had such a thing as that happened. In that airlessly expanding quiet, the slightest touch of fever in the imagination would have made audible the thin whisper of eardrums waving foggily to and fro, like wet palm-fronds in a breeze, as they tried dazedly to recapture the unbelievable vibrations that had numbed them. The faces of the two pinochle players revolved slowly, wearing the blank expressions of two men who had been unexpectedly slogged with blunt instruments and who were still wondering what had hit them.
“What did you say?” asked Ualino pallidly.
“I was just looking for some beauty
hints,” said the Saint amiably. “You know, you remind me of Papulos quite a lot, only he hasn’t got the trick of those Dietrich eyebrows like you have.”
Ualino stroked down a thread of hair at one side of his head.
“Come over here,” he said.
There was no actual question of whether the Saint would obey. As if answering an implied command, each of the two gorillas on either side of the Saint seized hold of his wrists. His arms were twisted up behind his back and he was dragged round the table, and Ualino turned his chair round and looked up at him.
“Did you ever hear of the hot box?” Ualino asked gently.
In spite of himself, the Saint felt an instant’s uncanny chill. For he had heard of the hot box, that last and most horrible product of gangland’s warped ingenuity. Al Capone himself is credited with the invention of it: it was his answer to the three amazing musketeers who pioneered the kidnapping racket in the days when other racketeers, who had no come-back in the Law, were practically the only victims; and Red McLaughlin, who led that historic foray into the heart of Crook County—who extorted hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom from Capone’s lieutenants and came within an ace of kidnapping the Scarface himself—died by that terrible death. A cold finger seemed to touch the Saint’s spine for one brief second, and then it was gone, leaving its icy trace only in the blue of his eyes.
“Yeah,” said the Saint. “I’ve heard of it. Are you getting it ready for Viola Inselheim?”
Again that appalling silence fell over the room. For a full ten seconds nobody moved except Ualino, whose manicured hand kept up that steady mechanical smoothing of his hair.
“So you know about that, too,” he purred at last.
The Saint nodded. His face was expressionless, but he had heard the last word of confirmation that he wanted. His inspiration had been right—his simple stratagem had achieved everything that he had asked of it. By letting himself be taken to Ualino as a helpless prisoner, already doomed, he had been shown a hide-out that he could never otherwise have found, for which Fernack and his officers could search for weeks in vain.
“Sure I know,” said the Saint. “Why else do you think I should have let your tame gorillas fetch me along here? There isn’t any other attraction about the place—except that chat about complexion creams that you and I were going to have.”
“He’s nuts,” explained one of the guards vaguely, as if seeking comfort for his own reeling sanity.
Simon smiled to himself, and looked towards the open window. Through it he could see the edge of the roof hanging low over the oblong blackness, the curved metal of the gutter catching a gleam of light from the bulb over the table. From the sill, it should be within easy reach, and the rest lay with the capricious gods of adventure…And he found his gaze wandering back with detached curiosity, even in that terrific moment, to the girl who must be Fay Edwards. He could see her over Ualino’s shoulder, watching him steadily, but he could read nothing in her amber eyes.
Ualino took the hand down from caressing his hair, and stuck the thumb in his vest pocket. He seemed to be playing with a vial of sadistic malignance as a child might play with a ball, for the last time.
“What did you think you’d do when you got here?” he asked, and the Saint’s level gaze returned to his face with the chill of Antarctic ice still in it.
“I’m here to kill you, Ualino,” Simon said quietly.
One of the pinochle players moved his leg, and a card slipped off the sofa and hit the floor with a tiny scuff that was as loud as a drum-beat in the soundless void. A stifling silence blanketed the air that was like no silence which had gone before. It was a stillness that reached out beyond the deadest infinities of disbelief, an unfathomable immobility in which even incredulity was punch-drunk and paralysed. It rose out of the waning vibrations of the Saint’s gentle voice and throbbed back and forth between the walls like a charge of static electricity, and the Saint’s blue eyes gazed through it in an inclement mockery of bitter steel. It could not last for more than a second or two—the fierce tension of it was too intolerable—but for that space of time no one could have interrupted. And that quiet, gentle voice went on, with a terrible softness and simplicity, holding them with a sheer ruthless power that they could not begin to understand.
“I am the Saint, and I have my justice. This afternoon Jack Irboll died, as I promised. I am more than the Law, Ualino, and I have no corrupt judges. Tonight, you die.”
Ualino stood up. His tawny eyes stared into the Saint’s with a greenish glow.
“You’re pretty smart,” he said venomously, and then his fist lashed at Simon’s face.
The Saint’s head rolled coolly sideways, and Ualino’s sleeve actually brushed his cheek as the blow went by. A moment later the Saint’s right hand touched the hilt of his knife and slid it up in its sheath—with both his arms twisted up behind his back. It was hardly more difficult than it would have been if his hand and wrist had come together in front of him. Ualino’s eyes blazed with sudden raw fury as he felt his clenched fist zip through into unresisting air. He drew his arm back and smashed again, and then a miracle seemed to happen.
The man on the Saint’s right felt a stab of fire lance across the tendons of his wrist, and all the strength went out of his fingers. He stared stupidly at the gush of blood that broke from the severed arteries, and while he stared something flashed across his vision like a streak of quicksilver, and he heard Ualino cry out.
That was about as much as anybody saw or understood. Somehow, without a struggle, the Saint was free, and a steel blade flashed in his hand. It swept upwards in front of him in a terrible arc, and Ualino clutched at his stomach and sank down, with his knees buckling under him and a ghastly crimson tide bursting between his fingers…Nobody else had time to move. The sheer astounding speed of it numbed even the most instinctive processes of thought—they might as easily have met and parried a flash of lightning…And then the knife swept on upwards, and the hilt of it struck the electric-light bulb over the table and brought utter darkness with an explosion like a gun.
Simon leapt for the window.
A hand touched his arm, and his knife drew back again for a vicious thrust. And then, with a sudden effort, he checked it in mid-flight…
For the hand did not tighten its grip. Halting in the black dark, with the shouts and blunderings of infuriated men roaring around him, his nostrils caught a faint breath of perfume. Something cold and metallic touched his hand, and instinctively his fingers closed round it and recognised it for the butt of an automatic. And then the light touch on his sleeve was gone, and with the trigger-guard between his teeth he sprang to the window-sill and reached upwards and outwards into space.
CHAPTER FOUR:
HOW SIMON TEMPLAR READ NEWSPAPERS AND MR PAPULOS HIT THE SKIDS
1
He lay out on the tiles at a perilous downward angle of forty-five degrees, as he had swung himself straight up from the window-sill, with his feet stretched towards the sky and only the grip of his hands in the gutter holding him from an imminent nose-dive to squishy death. Directly below him he could see the torsos and bullet heads of two gorillas illuminated in the light of a match held by a third, as they leaned out from the window and raked the dark ground below with straining startled eyes. Their voices floated up to him like the music of checked hounds to a fox that has crossed its own scent.
“He must of gone that way.”
“Better get down an’ see he don’t take the car.”
“Take the car hell—I got the keys here.”
The craning bodies heaved up again and vanished back into the room. He heard the quick thumping of their feet and the crash of the door, and then for a space another silence settled on the Long Island night.
Simon shifted the weight on his aching shoulders and grinned gently under the stars. In its unassuming way it had been a tense moment, but the advantage of the unexpected was still with him. The minds of most men run on well-charted rails
, and perhaps the mind of the professional killer in limes of sudden death has fewer side-tracks than any. To the four raging and bewildered thugs who were even then pounding down the stairs to guard their precious car and comb the surrounding meadows, it was as inconceivable as it had been to Inspector Fernack that any man in the Saint’s position, with the untrammelled use of his limbs, should be interested in any other diversion than that of boring a hole through the horizon with the utmost assiduousness and dispatch. But like Inspector Fernack, the four public enemies who fell into this grievous error were enjoying their first encounter with that dazzling recklessness which made Simon Templar an incalculable variant in any equation.
With infinite caution the Saint began to manoeuvre himself sideways along the roof.
It was a gymnastic exercise for which no rules had been devised in any manual of the art. He had circled up to the roof in that position because it was quicker than any other, and, once he was up there, it was practically impossible to reverse it. Nor would he have gained anything if he had by some incredible contortions managed to get his feet down to the gutter and his head up to its proper elevation, for his only means of telling when he had reached his destination was by peering down over the gutter at the windows underneath. And that destination was the room outside which the scrawny-necked individual had been lounging when he arrived.
Once a loose section of metal gave him the most nerve-racking two-yard journey of his life; more than once, when one of the men who were searching for him prowled under the house, he had to remain motionless, with all his weight on the heels of his hands, till the muscles of his arms and shoulders cracked under the strain. It was a task which should have taken the concentration of every fibre of his being, but the truth is that he was thinking about Fay Edwards for seven-eighths of the way.
The Saint In New York (The Saint Series) Page 8
