What was she doing now? What was she doing at any time, in that bloodthirsty half-world? Simon realised that even now he had not heard her speak—his assumption that she was the girl of Nather’s telephone was purely intuitive. But he had seen her face an instant after his knife had laid Ualino open from groin to breast-bone, and there had been neither fear nor horror in it. Just for that instant the amber eyes had seemed to blaze with a savage light which he could not understand, and then he had smashed the electric bulb and was on his way. He might have thought that the whole thing was a moment’s hallucination, but there was the metal of the automatic still between his teeth to be explained. His brain tangled with that ultimate amazing mystery while he warped himself along the edge of yawning nothingness, and he was no nearer a solution when the window that he was aiming for came vertically under his eyes.
At least there was nothing intangible or mysterious about that, and he knew that there was no prospect of the general tempo of whoopee and carnival slackening off before he got home to bed. With one searching glance over the ground below to make sure that there was no lurking sentinel waiting to catch him in mid-air, the Saint slid himself forward head first into space, neatly reversed his hands, and curled over into the precarious dark.
He hung at the full stretch of his arms, facing the window of his objective. It was closed, but a stealthily inquiring pressure of one toe told him that it was fastened only by a single catch in the centre.
There was no further opportunity for caution. The rest of his evening had to be taken on the run, and he knew it. Taking a deep breath, he swung himself backwards and outwards, and as his body swung in again towards the house on the returning pendulum he raised his legs and drove his feet squarely into the junction of the casements.
The flimsy fastening tore away like tissue paper under the impact, and the casements burst inwards and smacked against the inside wall with a crash of breaking glass. A treble wail of fright came out to him as he swung back again; then he came forward a second time, and arched his back with a supple twist as his hands let go the gutter. He went through the window neatly, skidded on a loose rug, and fetched up against the bed.
The room was in darkness, but his eyes were accustomed to the dark. A small white-clad shape with dark curly hair stared back at him, big eyes dilated with terror, whimpering softly. From the floor below came the thud of heavy feet and the sound of hoarse voices, but the Saint might have had all the time in the world. He took the gun from between his teeth and pushed down the safety catch with his right hand; his left hand patted the girl’s shoulder.
“Poor kid,” he said. “I’ve come to take you home.”
There was a surprising tenderness in his voice, and all at once the child’s whimpering died down.
“You want to go home, don’t you?” asked the Saint.
She nodded violently, and with a soft comforting laugh he swung her up in the crook of his arm and crossed the room. The door was locked, as he had expected. Simon held her a little tighter.
“We’re going to make some big bangs, Viola,” he said. “You aren’t frightened of big bangs, are you? Big bangs like fireworks? And every time we make a big bang we’ll kill one of the wicked men who took you away.”
She shook her head.
“I like big bangs,” she declared, and the Saint laughed again and put the muzzle of his gun against the lock.
The shot rocked the room like thunder, and a heavy thud sounded in the corridor. Simon flung open the door. It was the scrawny-necked individual on guard outside who had caused the thud: he was sprawled against the opposite wall in a grotesque huddle, and nothing was more certain than that he would never guard anywhere again. Apparently he had been peering through the keyhole, looking for an explanation of the disturbance, when the Saint shot out the lock, and what remained of his face was not pleasant to look at. The child in Simon’s arms crowed gleefully.
“Make more bangs,” she commanded, and the Saint smiled.
“Shall we? I’ll see what can be done.”
He raced down the passage to the stairs. The men below were on their way up, but he gained the half-landing before them with one flying leap. The leading attacker died in his tracks and never knew it, and his lifeless body reared over backwards and went bumping down to the floor below. The others scuttled for cover, and Simon drew a calm bead on the single frosted bulb in the hall and left only the dim glow from the bar and the dance-room for light.
A tongue of orange fire spat out of the dark, and the bullet spilled a shower of plaster from the wall a yard over the Saint’s head. Simon grinned, and swung his legs over the banisters. Curiously enough, the average gangster has standards of marksmanship that would make the old-time bad man weep in his grave: most of his pistol practice is done from a range of not more than three feet, and for any greater distances than that he gets out his submachine-gun and sprays a couple of thousand rounds over the surrounding county on the assumption that one of them must hit something. The opposition was dangerous, but it was not certain death. One of the men poked an eye warily round the door of the bar, and leapt back hurriedly as the Saint’s shot splintered the frame an inch from his nose, and the Saint let go the handrail and dropped down to the floor like a cat.
The front door was open, as the men had left it when they rushed back into the house. Simon made a rapid calculation. There were four men left, so far as he knew, and of their number one was certainly watching the windows at the back, and another was probably guarding the parked cars. That left two to be taken on the way, and the time to take them was at once, while their morale was still shaken by the diverse preposterous calamities that they had seen.
He put the girl down and turned her towards the doorway. She was moaning a little now, but fear would lend wings to her feet.
“Run!” he shouted suddenly. “Run for the door!”
Her shrill voice crying out in terror, the child fled. A man sprang up from his knees behind the hangings in the dance-room entrance; Simon fired once, and he went down with a yell. Another bullet from the Saint’s gun went crashing down a row of bottles in the bar; then he was outside, hurdling the porch rail and landing nimbly on his toes. He could see the girl’s white dress flying through the darkness in front of him. A man rose up out of the gloom ahead of her and lunged, and she screamed once as his outstretched fingers clawed at her frock. Simon’s gun belched flame, and the clutching hand fell limp as a soft-nosed slug tore through the fleshy part of the man’s forearm. The gorilla spun round and dropped his gun, bellowing like a bull, and Simon sprinted after the terrified child. An automatic banged twice behind him, but the shots went wide. The girl shrieked as he came up with her, but he caught her into his left arm and held her close.
“All right, kiddo,” he said gently. “It’s all over. Now we’re going home.”
He ducked in between the parked cars. He already knew that the one in which he had arrived was locked: if Ualino’s car was also locked there would still be difficulties. He threw open the door, and sighed his relief—the key was in its socket. What was it Fernack had said? “He rides around in an armoured sedan.” Morrie Ualino seemed to have been a thoughtful bird all round, and the Saint was smiling appreciatively as he climbed in.
A scattered fusillade drummed on the coachwork as he locked the car through a tight arc in reverse, and the bullet-proof glass starred but did not break. As the car lurched forward again he actually slowed up to wind down an inch of window.
“So long, boys,” he called back. “Thanks for the ride!”
And then the car was swinging out into the road, whirling away into the night with a smooth rush of power, with the horn hooting a derisively syncopated farewell into the wind.
2
Simon stopped the car a block from Sutton Place, and looked down at the sleepy figure beside him.
“Do you know your way home from here?” he asked her.
She nodded vigorously. Her hysterical sobbing had stopped long ago—in a few days she wou
ld scarcely remember.
He took a scrap of paper from his pocket and made a little drawing on it. It was a skeleton figure adorned with a large and rakishly slanted halo.
“Give this to your daddy,” he said, “and tell him the Saint brought you home. Do you understand? The Saint brought you back.”
She nodded again, and he crumpled the paper into her tiny fist and opened the door. The last he saw of her was her white-frocked shape trotting round the next corner, and then he let in the clutch and drove on. Fifteen minutes later he was back at the Waldorf Astoria, and Morrie Ualino’s armour-plated sedan was abandoned six blocks away.
Valcross, in pyjamas and dressing-gown, was dozing in the living-room. He roused to find the Saint smiling down at him a little tiredly, but in complete contentment.
“Viola Inselheim is home,” said the Saint. “I went for a lovely ride.”
He was wiping the blade of his knife on a silk handkerchief, and Valcross looked at him curiously.
“Did you meet Ualino?” he asked, and Simon Templar nodded.
“Tradition would have it that Morrie sleeps with his fathers,” he said, very gently, “but one can’t be sure that he knows who they were.”
He opened the bureau and took out a plain white card. On it were written six names. One of them—Jack Irboll’s—was already scratched out. With his fountain pen he drew a single straight line through the next two, and then, at the bottom of the list, he wrote another. It was The Big Fellow. He hesitated for a moment and then wrote an eighth, lower down, and drew a neat panel round it: Fay Edwards.
“Who is she?” inquired Valcross, looking over his shoulder, and the Saint lighted a cigarette and pushed back his hair.
“That’s what I’d like to know. All I can tell you is that her gun saved me a great deal of trouble, and was a whole lot of grief to some of the ungodly…This is a pretty passable beginning, Bill—you ought to enjoy the headlines tomorrow morning.”
His prophecy of the reactions of the Press to his exploits would have been no great strain on anyone’s clairvoyant genius, in the morning he had more opportunities to read about himself than any respectably self-effacing citizen would have desired.
Modesty was not one of Simon Templar’s virtues. He sat at breakfast with a selection of the New York dailies strewn around him, and the general tenor of their leading pages was very satisfactory. It is true that The Times and The Herald-Tribune, following a traditional policy of treating New York’s annual average of six hundred homicides as regrettable faux pas which have no proper place in a sober chronicle of the passing days, relegated the Saint to a secondary position, but any aloofness on their part was more than compensated by the enthusiasm of The Mirror and The News. “SAINT RESCUES VIOLA,” they howled, in black letters two and a half inches high. “UALINO SLAIN.” “RACKET ROMEO’S LAST RIDE.” “UALINO, VOELSANG, DIE.” “SAINT SLAYS TWO, WOUNDS THREE.” “LONG ISLAND MASSACRE.” “SAINT BATTLES KIDNAPPERS.” There were photographs of the rescued Viola Inselheim with her stout papa, photographs of the house where she had been held, gory photographs of the dead. There was a photograph of the Saint himself, and Simon was pleased to see that it was a good one.
At the end of his meal, he pushed the heap of vociferous newsprint aside and poured himself out a second cup of coffee. If there had ever been any lurking doubts of his authenticity—if any of the perspiring brains at police headquarters down on Centre Street, or any of the sizzling intellects of the underworld, had cherished any shy reluctant dreams that the Saint was merely the product of a sensational journalist’s overheated imagination—those doubts and dreams must have suffered a last devastating smack on the schnozzola with the publication of that morning’s tabloids. For no sensational journalist’s imagination, overheated to anything below melting point, could ever have created such a story out of unsubstantial air. Simon lighted a cigarette and stared at the ceiling through a haze of smoke with very clear and gay blue eyes, feeling the deep thrill of other and older days in his veins. It was very good that such things could still come to pass in a tamed and supine world, better still that he himself should be their self-appointed spokesman. He saw the kindly grey head of William Valcross nodding at him across the room.
“Just now you have the advantage,” Valcross was saying. “You’re mysterious and deadly. How long will it last?”
“Long enough to cost you a million dollars,” said the Saint lightly.
He went over to the bureau and took out the card on which the main points of his undertaking were written down, and carried it across to the open windows. It was one of those spring mornings on which New York is the most brilliant city in the world, when the air comes off the Atlantic with a heady tang like frosted wine, and the white pinnacles of its towers stand up in a sky from which every particle of impurity seems to have been washed by magic; one of those mornings when all the vitality and impetuous aspiration that is New York insinuates itself as the only manner of life. He filled his lungs with the cool clean alpine air, and looked down at the specks of traffic crawling between the mechanical stops on Park Avenue; the distant mutter of it came up to him as if from another world into which he could plunge himself at will, like a god going down to earth, and on that morning he understood the cruelty and magnificence of the city, and how a man could sit there in his self-made Olympus and be drunk with faith in his own power…And then the Saint laughed softly at the beauty of the morning and at himself, for instead of being a god enthroned he was a brigand looking down from his eyrie and planning new forays on the plain, and perhaps that was even better.
“Who’s next on the list?” he asked, and looked at the card in his hand.
Straight away west on Fortieth Street, beyond Seventh Avenue, the same urgent question was being discussed in the back room of Charley’s Place. It was too early in the day for the regular customers, and the bar in the front part of the building had a dingy and forsaken aspect in the dim rays of daylight that struggled through the heavy green curtains at the windows. White-coated, smooth-faced, and inscrutable as ever, Toni Ollinetti dusted the glass-topped tables and paid no attention to the murmur of voices from the back room. He looked neither fresh nor tired, as he looked at any hour out of the twenty-four: no one could have told whether he had just awoken or whether he had not slept for a week.
The scene in the back room was livelier. The lights were switched on, flooding the session with the peculiarly cold yellow colour that electricity has in the daytime. There was a bottle of whisky and an array of glasses on the table to stimulate decision, and the air was full of tobacco smoke of varying antiquities.
“De guy is nuts,” Heimie Felder had proclaimed, more than once.
His right arm was in a sling, as an advertisement of the Saint’s particular brand of nuttiness. He enjoyed the distinction of being one of the few men who had done battle with the Saint and survived to tell of it, and it was a pity that his vocabulary was scarcely adequate to deal with the subject. He had given much painful thought to the startling events of the previous night, but he had been unable to make any notable advance on his first judgment.
“You ought to of seen him,” said Heimie. “When we took him in de udder room, over in de hotel, he was just surly an’ kep’ his mout’ shut like he was an ordinary welsher. We asks him, ‘Whereja get dat dough?’ an’ Pappy gives him a poke in de kisser, an’ he hauls off an’ tries to take a sock at Pappy dat was so slow Pappy could of gone off an’ played anudder hand an’ come back an’ it still wouldn’t of reached him. So Pappy rings up Judge Nather, an Nather says, ‘Yeah, de guy holds me up an’ takes de dough off of me a coupla hours ago. So we take him along to Morrie Ualino, out there on Long Island where dey got de kid, an’ it seems de Saint knows about dat, too. But nobody ain’t worryin’ about what he knows any more, becos we’re all figurin’ dat when he goes out of there he won’t be comin’ back unless his funeral procession goes past de house. De guy is nuts. He stands there an’ starts ribbin’ Morrie
about him bein’ a dude, an’ you know how mad dat useta make Morrie. You can see Morrie is gettin’ madder’n’ madder every minute, but dis guy just grins an’ goes on kidding, I tell ya, he’s nuts. An’ then he’s got hold of a knife from somewhere, an’ he cuts my wrist open till I has to let go, an’ then, zappo, he’s got his knife in Morrie’s guts an’ broke de electric-light bulb, an’ while we’re chasin’ him he ducks over de roof somehow an’ gets de kid. He’s gotten a Betsy from somewhere, an’ he shoots up de jernt an’ gets away in Morrie’s car. De guy is nuts,” explained Heimie, clinching the matter.
Dutch Kuhlmann poured himself out a half-tumbler of whisky and downed it without blinking. He was a huge fleshy man with flaxen hair and pale blue eyes, and he looked exactly like an amiable waiter from a Bavarian beer-garden. No one, glancing at him in ignorance, would have suspected that before the unhonoured demise of the Eighteenth Amendment he was the man who supplied half the thirsty East with beer, reigning in stolid sovereignty over the greatest czardom of illicit hops in American history. No one would have suspected that the brain which guided the hulking flabby frame had carved out and consolidated and maintained that sovereignty with the ruthlessness of an Attila. His record at police headquarters was clean: to the opposition, accidents had simply happened, with nothing to connect them with Dutch Kuhlmann beyond their undoubtedly fortunate coincidence with the route of his ambitions; but those who moved in the queer dark stratum which touches the highest and the lowest points in Manhattan’s geology told their stories, and his trucks ran unchallenged from Brooklyn to New Orleans.
“Dot is a great shame, about Morrie,” said Kuhlmann. “Morrie vass a goot boy.”
He took out a large linen handkerchief, dried a tear from the corner of each eye, and blew his nose loudly. The passing of Morrie Ualino left Dutch Kuhlmann the unquestioned captain of the coalition whose destinies were guided by the Big Fellow, but there was no doubt of the genuineness of his grief. After he had given the orders which sent his own cousin and strongest rival in the beer racket on the long one-way ride, it was said that Kuhlmann had wept all night.
The Saint In New York (The Saint Series) Page 9
