There was a brief respectful silence in honour of the defunct Morrie—several members of the Ualino mob were present, for without the initiative or personality to take his place they drifted automatically into the cohorts of the nearest leader. And then Kuhlmann pulled his sprawling bulk together.
“Vot I vant to know,” he said with remorseless logic, “is, vot is the Saint gettin’ out of this?”
“He got twenty grand from Nather,” said Papulos.
“Probably he’s collected a reward from Inselheim for bringing the kid back. He’s getting plenty!”
Kuhlmann’s pale eyes turned slowly on to the speaker, and under their placid scrutiny Papulos felt something inside himself turning cold. For, if you liked to look at it in a certain way, Morrie Ualino had died only because Papulos had passed the Saint along to him—with that terrible knife which had somehow escaped their search. And the men around him, Papulos knew, were given to looking at such things in a certain way. The subtleties of motive and accident were too great a strain on their limited mentalities: they regarded only ultimate results, and the baldly stated means by which those results had eventuated. Papulos knew that he walked on the thinnest of ice, and he splashed whisky into his glass and met Kuhlmann’s gaze with a confidence which he did not feel.
‘‘Yeah, dot is true,” Kuhlmann said at length. “He gets plenty money—plenty enough to split t’ree-four ways.” There was a superfluous elaboration of the theme in that last phrase which Papulos did not like. “But dot ain’t all of it. You hear vot Heimie says. Ven they got him in the house he says to Morrie, ‘I came here to kill you.’ An’ he talks about justice. Vot is dot for?”
“De guy is nuts,” explained Heimie peevishly, as if the continued inability of his audience to accept and be content with that obvious solution was beginning to bother him.
Kuhlmann glanced at him and shrugged his great shoulders angrily.
“Der guy is not nuts vot can shoot Irboll right in the court-house and get avay,” he exploded mightily. “Der guy is not nuts vot can find out in one hour dot Morrie has kidnapped Viola Inselheim, und vot can get some fool to take him straight to the house vhere Morrie has der kid. Der guy is not nuts vot can pull out a knife in dot room an’ kill Morrie, und vot can pull out a gun from nowhere und shoot Eddie Voelsang and shoot his vay past four-five men out of the house mit the kid!”
There was a chorus of sycophantic agreement, and Heimie Felder muttered sulkily under his breath. “I heard him talkin’,” he protested to his injured soul. “De guy is—”
“Nuts!” snarled an unsympathetic listener, and Kuhlmann’s big fist crashed on the table, making the glasses dance.
“This is no time for your squabbling!” he roared suddenly.
“It is you dot is nuts—all of you! In von day der Saint has killed Irboll and Morrie an’ Eddie Voelsang an’ taken twenty t’ousand dollars of our money. Und you sit there, all of you fools, and argue of vether he is nuts, vhen you should be asking who is it dot he kills next?”
A fresh silence settled on the room as the truth of his words sank home; a silence that prickled with the distorted terrors of the Unknown. And in that silence a knock sounded on the door.
“Come in!” shouted Kuhlmann, and reached again for the bottle.
The door opened, and the face of the guard whose post was behind the grille of the street door appeared. His features were white and pasty, and the hand which held a scrap of pasteboard at his side trembled.
“Vot is it?” Kuhlmann demanded irritably.
The man held out the card.
“Just now the bell rang,” he babbled. “I opened the grille, an’ all I can see is a hand, holdin’ this. I had to take it, an’ while I’m starin’ at it the hand disappears. When I saw what it was I got the door open quick, but all I can see outside is the usual sort of people walkin’ past. I thought you better see what he gave me, Dutch.”
There was a whine of pleading in the doorkeeper’s voice, but Kuhlmann did not answer at once.
HE WAS STARING, WITH PALE BLUE EYES GONE FLAT AND FROZEN, AT THE CARD HE HAD SNATCHED FROM THE MAN’S SHAKING HAND. ON IT WAS A CHILDISHLY-SKETCHED FIGURE SURMOUNTED BY A SYMBOLICAL HALO, AND UNDERNEATH IT WAS WRITTEN, AS IF IN DIRECT ANSWER TO THE QUESTION HE HAD BEEN ASKING, “DUTCH KUHLMANN IS NEXT.”
3
Presently he returned his gaze to the doorkeeper’s face, and only the keenest study would have discovered any change in its bleak placidity. He threw the card down on the table for the others to crowd over, and hitched a cigar from the row which protruded from his upper vest pocket. He bit the end from the cigar and spat it out, without changing the direction of his eyes.
“Come here, Joe,” he said almost affectionately, and the man took an uneasy step forward. “You vas a goot boy, Joe.”
The doorkeeper licked his lips and grinned sheepishly, and Kuhlmann lighted a match.
“It vos you dot lets der Saint in here last night, vasn’t it?”
“Well, Dutch, it was like this. This guy rings the bell an’ asks for Fay, an’ I tells him Fay ain’t arrived yet but he can wait for her if he wants to—”
“Und so you lets him in to vait inside, isn’t it?”
“Well, Dutch, it was like this. The guy says maybe he can get a drink while he’s waiting, an’ he looks okay to me, anyone can see he ain’t a dick, an’ somehow I ain’t thinkin’ about the Saint—”
“So vot are you thinking about, Joe?” asked Kuhlmann genially.
The doorkeeper shifted his feet.
“Well, Dutch, I’m thinkin’ maybe this guy is some sucker that Fay is stringin’ along. Say, all I do is stand at that door an’ let people in an’ out, an’ I don’t know everything that goes on. So I figures, well, there’s plenty of the boys inside, an’ this guy couldn’t do nothing even if he does get tough, an’ if he is a sucker that they’re stringin’ along it won’t be so good for me if I shut the door an’ send him away—”
“Und so you lets him in, eh?”
“Yeah, I lets him in. You see—”
“Und so you lets him in, even after you been told all der time dot nobody don’t get let in here vot you don’t know, unless he comes mit one or two of the boys. Isn’t dot so?”
“Well, Dutch—”
Kuhlmann puffed at his cigar till the tip was a circle of solid red.
“How much does he give you, Joe?” he asked jovially, as if he were sharing a ripe joke with a bosom friend.
The man gulped and swallowed. His mouth was half open, and a sudden horrible understanding dilated the pupils of his eyes as he stared at the beaming mountain of fat in the chair.
“That’s a lie!” he screamed suddenly. “You can’t frame me like that! He didn’t give me anything—I never saw him before—”
“Come here, Joe,” said Kuhlmann soothingly.
He reached out and grasped the man’s wrist, drawing him towards his chair rather like an elderly uncle with a reluctant schoolboy. His right hand moved suddenly, and the doorkeeper jerked in his grasp with a choking yell as the red-hot tip of Kuhlmann’s cigar ground into his cheek.
Nobody else moved. Kuhlmann released the man and laughed richly, brushing a few flakes of ash from his knee. He inspected his cigar, struck a match, and relighted it.
“You’re a goot boy, Joe,” he said heartily. “Go and vait outside till I send for you.”
The man backed slowly to the door, one hand pressed to his scorched cheek. There was a wide dumb horror in his eyes, but he said nothing. None of the others looked at him—they might have been a thousand miles away, ignoring his very existence on the same planet as themselves. The door closed after him, and Kuhlmann glanced round the other faces at the table.
“I’m afraid we are going to lose Joe,” he said, and a sudden lump of pure grief caught in his throat as he realised, apparently for the first time, what that implied.
Papulos fingered his glass nervously. His fingers trembled, and a little of the amber fluid s
pilled over the rim of the glass and ran down over his thumb. He stared straight ahead at Kuhlmann, realising at that moment what a narrow margin separated him from the same attention as the doorkeeper had received.
“Wait a minute, Dutch,” he said abruptly. Every other eye in the room veered suddenly towards him, and under their cold scrutiny he had to make an effort to steady his voice. He plunged on in a spurt of unaccountable panic. “They’s no use rubbin’ out a guy for a mistake. If he tried to cross us it’d be a different thing, but we don’t know that it wasn’t just like he said. What the hell, anyone’s liable to slip up—”
Papulos knew he had made a mistake. Kuhlmann’s faded blue gaze turned towards him almost introspectively.
“What’s it matter whether he crossed us or made a mistake?” demanded another member of the conference, somewhere on Papulos’s left. “The result’s the same. He screwed up the deal. We can’t afford to let a guy get away with that. We can’t take a chance on him.”
Papulos did not look round. Neither did Kuhlmann, but Kuhlmann nodded slowly, thoughtfully, staring at Papulos all the time. Thoughts that Papulos had frantically tried to turn aside were germinating, growing up, in that slow methodical Teutonic brain; Papulos could watch them creeping up to the surface of speech, inexorably as a rising flood, and felt a sick emptiness in his stomach. His own words had shifted the focus to himself, but he knew that even without that rash intervention he could not have been passed over.
He picked up his glass, trying to control his hand. A blob of whisky fell from it and formed a shining pool on the table—to his fear-poisoned mind the spilt liquid was suddenly crimson, like a drop of blood from a bullet-torn chest.
“Dot is right,” Kuhlmann was saying deliberately. “You’re a goot boy, too, Pappy. Vhy did you send der Saint straight avay to see Morrie?”
Papulos caught his breath sharply. With a swift movement he tossed the fiery drink down his throat, and heard the other’s soft-spoken words hammering into his brain like bullets.
“Vhy did you send der Saint straight avay to see Morrie, as if he had been searched, und let him take a knife and a gun mit him?”
“You’re crazy!” Papulos blurted harshly. “Of course I sent him to Morrie—I knew Morrie wanted to see him. He didn’t have a knife an’ a gun when he left me. Heimie’ll tell you that. Heimie searched him—”
Felder started up.
“Why you—”
“Sit down!” Papulos snarled. For one wild moment he saw hope opening out before him, and his voice rose. “I’m sayin’ nothing about you. I’m sayin’ Dutch is crazy. He’ll want to put you on the spot next. An’ how d’you know he’ll stop there? He’ll be calling every guy who’s ever been near the Saint a double-crosser—he’ll be trying to put the finger on the rest of you before he’s through—”
His voice broke off on one high rasping note, and he sat with his mouth half open, saying nothing more.
He looked into the muzzle of Dutch Kuhlmann’s gun, levelled at him across the table, and the warmth of the whisky he had drunk evaporated on the cold weight in his stomach.
“You talk too much, Pappy,” said Kuhlmann amiably. “It’s a goot job you don’t mean everything you say.”
The other essayed a smile.
“Don’t get me wrong, Dutch,” he pleaded weakly. “What I mean is, if we got to knock somebody off, why not knock off the Saint?”
“Dat’s right,” chimed in Heimie Felder. “We’ll knock off de Saint. Why didn’t any of youse mugs t’ink of dat before? I’ll knock him off myself, poissonal.”
Dutch Kuhlmann smiled, without moving his gun.
“Dot is right,” he said. “Ve’ll knock off der Saint, und not have nobody making any more mistakes. You’re a good boy, Pappy. Go outside and vait for us, Pappy—we have a little business to talk about.”
The thumping died down in the Greek’s chest, and suddenly he was quite still and strengthless. He sighed wearily, knowing all too well the futility of further argument. Too often he had heard Kuhlmann pronouncing sentence of death in those very words, smiling blandly and genially as he spoke: “You’re a goot boy. Go outside and vait for us…”
He stood up, with a feeble attempt to muster the stoical jauntiness that was expected of him.
“Okay, Dutch,” he said. “Be seein’ ya.”
There was an utter silence while he left the room, and as he closed the door behind him his brief display of poise drained out of him. Simon Templar would scarcely have recognised him as the same sleek self-possessed bully that he had encountered twelve hours ago.
The doorkeeper sat in a far corner, turning the pages of a tabloid. He looked up with a start as Papulos came through, but the Greek ignored him. Under sentence of death himself, probably to die on the same one-way ride, a crude pride held him aloof. He walked up to the bar and rapped on the counter, and Toni came up with his smooth expressionless face.
“Brandy,” said Papulos.
Toni served him without a word, without even an inquisitive glance. Outside of that back room from which Papulos had just emerged, no one knew what had taken place; the world went on without a change. No one could have told what Toni thought or guessed. His olive-skinned features seemed to possess no register of emotion. The finger might be on him too: he had served the Saint, and directed him to the Graylands Hotel, at the beginning of all the trouble—he might have received his own sentence in the back room, three hours ago. But he said nothing, and turned away as Papulos drank.
There was a swelling emptiness below the Greek’s breastbone which two shots of cognac did nothing to fill. Even while he drank, he was a dead man, knowing perfectly well that there was no Appellate Division in the underworld to find a reversible error which might give him a chance for life. He knew that in a few useless hours death would claim him as certainly as if it had been inscribed in the book of Fate ten thousand years ago. He knew that there was no one who would join him in a challenge to Kuhlmann’s authority—no one who could help him, no one who could rescue him from the vengeance of the gang…
And then suddenly the flash of a wild idea illumined some dark recess of his memory.
In his mind he saw the face of a man. A bronzed reckless face with cavalier blue eyes that seemed to hold a light of mocking laughter. The lean hard-muscled figure of a man whose poise held no fear for the vengeance of all the legions of the underworld. A man who was called the Saint…
And in that instant Papulos realised that there was one man who might do what all the police of New York could not do—who might stand between him and the crackling death that waited for him.
He pushed his glass forward wordlessly, watched it refilled, and drained it again. For the first time that morning his stomach felt the warmth of the raw spirit. The doorkeeper knew nothing; Toni Ollinetti knew nothing—could not possibly know anything. If Kuhlmann came out and found him gone the mob would trail him down like bloodhounds and inevitably find him even though he fled to the uttermost ends of the continent, but then it might be too late.
Papulos flung a bill on the counter and turned away without waiting for change. His movements were those of an automaton, divorced from any effort of will or deliberation, impelled by nothing but an instinctive surging rebellion against the blind march of death. He waved an abrupt careless hand. “Be seein’ ya,” he said, and Toni nodded and smiled, without expression. The doomed doorkeeper looked up as he went by, with a glaze of despair on his dulled eyes. Papulos could feel what was in the man’s mind, the dumb resentful envy of a condemned man seeing his fellow walking out into the sweet freedom of life, but the Greek walked by without a glance at him.
The bright morning air struck into his senses with its intolerable reminder of the brief beauty of life, quickening his steps as he came out to the street. His movements had the desperate power of a drowning man. If an army had appeared to bar his way, he would have drawn his gun and gone down fighting to break through them.
His car stood
at the kerb. He climbed in and stamped on the self-starter. Before the engine had settled down to smooth running he was flogging it to drag him down the street, away from the doom that waited in Charley’s Place. He had no plan in his mind. He had no idea how he would find the Saint, where all the police organisations of the city had failed. He only knew that the Saint was his one hope of reprieve, and that the inaction of waiting for execution like a bullock in a slaughter-line would have snapped his reason. If he had to die, he would rather die on the run, struggling towards life, than wait for extinction like a trapped rat. But he looked in the driving mirror as he turned into Seventh Avenue, and saw no one following him.
But he saw something else.
It was a hand that came up out of the back of the car—a lean brown hand that grasped the back of his seat close to his shoulder and dragged up a man from the floor. His heart leapt into his throat, and the car swerved dizzily under his twitching hands. Then he saw the face of the man, and a racing triphammer started up under his ribs.
The man squeezed himself adroitly over into the vacant front seat, and calmly proceeded to search the dashboard for a lighter to kindle his cigarette.
“What ho, Pappy,” said the Saint.
CHAPTER FIVE:
HOW MR PAPULOS WAS TAKEN OFF AND HEIMIE FELDER MET WITH FURTHER MISFORTUNES
1
Papulos steadied the car clumsily, and flashed it under the indignant eyes of a traffic cop who was deliberating the richest terms in which he could describe a coupla mugs who seemed to think they had a PD plate in front of ’em, and who deliberated a second too long. The triphammer inside his ribs slowed up to a heavy rhythmical pounding.
“I’m glad to see you,” he said, in a voice that croaked oddly in his throat. “I was goin’ out lookin’ for you.”
With the glowing lighter at the end of his cigarette, Simon half turned to glance at him.
The Saint In New York (The Saint Series) Page 10
