Valcross came in about lunch-time. Simon was lounging on the davenport reading an afternoon paper; he looked up at the older man and smiled.
“You didn’t expect to see me back so early—isn’t that what you were going to say?”
“More or less,” Valcross admitted. “What’s wrong?”
Simon swung his legs off the sofa and came to a sitting position.
“Nothing,” he said, lighting a cigarette, “and at the same time, everything. A certain Mr Papulos, whom you wot of, has been taken off, but he wasn’t really on our list. Mr Kuhlmann, I’m afraid, is still at large.” He told his story tersely but completely. “Altogether, a very unfortunate misunderstanding,” he concluded. “Not that it seems to make a great deal of difference, from what Pappy was saying just before the ukulele music broke us up. Pappy was all set to shoot the works, but the works we want were not in him. However, in close cooperation with the bloke who carries a scythe and has such an appalling taste in night-shirts, we may be able to rectify our omissions.”
Valcross, at the decanter, raised his eyebrows faintly.
“You’re taking a lot of chances, Simon. Don’t let this—er—bloke who carries the scythe swing it the wrong way.”
“If he does,” said the Saint gravely, “I shall duck. Then, in sober and reasonable argument, I shall endeavour to prove to the bloke the error of his ways. Whereupon he will burst into tears and beg my forgiveness, and we shall take up the trail again together.”
“What trail?”
Simon frowned.
“Why bring that up?” he protested. “I’m blowed if I know. But it occurs to me, Bill, that we shall have to be a bit careful about the taking off of some of these other birds on our list—if they all went out like Pappy there wouldn’t be anyone left who could lead us to the Big Fellow, and he’s a guy I should very much like to meet. But if Papulos was talking turkey there may be a line to something in the further prospective tribulations of Zeke Inselheim, and that’s why I came home.”
Valcross brought a filled glass over to him.
“Does that supply the need?” he asked humorously.
The Saint smiled.
“It certainly supplies one of them, Bill. The other is rather bigger. I think you told me once that the expenses of this jaunt were on you.”
The other looked at him for a moment, and then took out a cheque-book and a fountain pen.
“How much do you want?”
“Not money. I want a car. A nice, dark, ordinary-looking car with a bit of speed in hand. A roadster will do, and a fairly new second-hand one at that. But I’ll let you go out and buy it, for the reason you mentioned yourself—things may be happening pretty fast around the Château Inselheim, and I’d rather like to be there.”
He had no very definite plan in mind, but the penultimate revelation of the late Mr Papulos was impressed deeply on his memory. He thought it over through the afternoon, till the day faded and New York donned her electric jewels and came to life.
The only decision he came to was that if anything was going to happen during the next twenty-four hours it would be likely to happen at night, and it was well after dark when he set out in the long underslung roadster that Valcross had provided. After the day had gone, and the worker had returned to his fireside, Broadway came into its own; the underworld and its allies, to whom the sunset was the dawn, and who had a very lukewarm appreciation of firesides, came forth from their hiding-places to play and plot new ventures, and if Mr Ezekiel Inselheim and his seed were still the target, they would be likely to waste no time.
It was, as a matter of fact, one of those soft and balmy nights on which a fireside has a purely symbolical appeal. Overhead, a full moon tossed her beams extravagantly over an unappreciative city. A cool breeze swept across the Hudson, whipping the heat from the granite of the mighty metropolis. Over in Brooklyn, a certain Mr Theodore Bungstatter was so moved by the magic of the night that he proposed marriage to his cook, and swooned when he was accepted, and the Saint sent his car roaring through the twinkling canyons of New York with a sublime faith that this evening could not be less productive of entertainment than any which had gone before.
As a matter of fact, the expedition was not embarked on quite so blindly as it might have appeared. The information supplied by the late Mr Papulos had started a train of thought, and the more Simon followed it the more he became convinced that it ought dutifully to lead somewhere. Any such racket as Papulos had described depended for its effectiveness almost entirely upon fear—an almost superstitious fear of the omnipotence and infallibility of the menacing party. By the failure of the previous night’s kidnapping that atmosphere had suffered a distinct set-back, and only a prompt and decisive counter-attack would restore the damage. On an expert and comprehensive estimate, the odds seemed about two hundred to one that the tribulations of Mr Inselheim were only just beginning, but it must be confessed that Simon Templar was not expecting quite such a rapid vindication of his arithmetic as he received.
As he turned into Sutton Place he saw an expensive limousine standing outside the building where Mr Inselheim’s apartment was. He marked it down mechanically, along with the burly lounger who was energetically idling in the vicinity. Simon flicked his gear lever into neutral and coasted slowly along, contemplating the geography of the locale and weighing up strategic sites for his own encampment, and he had scarcely settled on a spot when a dark plump figure emerged from the building and paused for a moment beside the burly lounger on the sidewalk.
The roadster stopped abruptly, and the Saint’s keen eyes strained through the night. He saw that the dark plump figure carried a bulky brown-paper package under its arm, and as the brief conversation with the lounger concluded, the figure turned towards the limousine and the rays of a street lamp fell full across the pronounced and unforgettable features of Mr Ezekiel Inselheim.
Simon raised his eyebrows and regarded himself solemnly in the driving mirror.
“Oho,” he remarked to his reflection. “Likewise aha. As Mr Templar arrives, Mr Inselheim departs. We seem to have arrived in the nick of time.”
At any rate, the reason for the burly lounger’s presence was disposed of, and it was not what the Saint had thought at first. He realised immediately that after the stirring events of the last twenty-four hours the police, with their inspired efficiency in locking the stable door after the horse was stolen, would have naturally posted a guard at the Inselheim residence, and the large-booted idler was acquitted of any sinister intentions.
The guilelessness of Mr Inselheim was less clearly established, and Simon was frowning thoughtfully as he slipped the roadster back into gear and watched Inselheim entering the limousine. For a few moments, while the limousine’s engine was warming up, he debated whether it might not have been a more astute tactical move to remain on the spot where Mr Inselheim’s offspring might provide a centre of more urgent disturbances. And then, as the limousine pulled out from the kerb, he flicked an imaginary coin in his mind, and it came down on the memory of a peculiar brown-paper package. With a slight shrug he pulled out a cigarette-case and juggled it deftly with one hand as he stepped on the gas.
“The hell with it,” said the Saint to his attractive reflection. “Ezekiel is following his nose, and there may be worse landmarks.”
The limousine’s tail-light was receding northwards, and Simon closed up until he was less than twenty yards behind, trailing after it through the traffic as steadily as if the two cars had been linked by invisible ropes.
3
After a while the dense buildings of the city thinned out to the quieter, evenly-spaced dwellings of the suburbs. There the moon seemed to shine even more brightly; the stars were chips of ice from which a cool radiance came down to freshen the summer evening, and the Saint sighed gently. In him was a certain strain of the same temperament which blessed our Mr Theodore Bungstatter of Brooklyn: a night like that filled him with a sense of peace and tranquillity that was utterly
alien to his ordinary self. He decided that in a really well-organised world there would have been much better things for him to do on such an evening than to go trailing after a bloke who boasted the name of Inselheim and looked like it. It would have been a very different matter if the mysterious and beautiful Fay Edwards, who had twice passed with such surprising effect across the horizons of that New York venture, had been driving the limousine ahead…
He thrust a second cigarette between his lips and struck a match. The light revealed his face for one flashing instant, striking a rather cold blue light from thoughtfully reckless eyes—a glimpse of character that might have interested Dutch Kuhlmann not a little if that sentimentally ruthless Teuton had been there to see it. The Saint had his romantic regrets, but they subtracted nothing from the concentration with which he was following the job in hand.
His hand waved the match to extinction, and in his next movement he reached forward and switched out all the lights in the car. In the closer traffic of the city there was no reason why he should not legitimately be following on the same route as the limousine, but out on the less populated thoroughfares his leech-like devotion might cause a nervous man some inquisitive agitation which Simon Templar had no wish to arouse. His left arm swung languidly over the side as the roadster ripped round a turn in the road at an even sixty and roared on to the north-west.
The road was a level strip of concrete laid out like a silver tape under the sinking moon. He steered on in the wake of the limousine’s headlight, soothing his ears with the even purr of tyres swishing over the macadam, his nerves relaxed and resting. Above the hum of the engines rose a faint and not un-melodious sound. Simon Templar was serenading the stars…
The song ended abruptly.
Something flashed in the corner of his eye—something jerky and illuminating like an electric torch. It flashed three times, with the precision of a lighthouse, and then the darkness settled down again.
Simon’s hands steadied on the wheel, and he cut out the engine and declutched with two swift simultaneous movements. His foot shifted to the brake and brought the roadster to a standstill as quickly as it could be done without giving his tyres a chance to scream a protest.
In the last mile or two, out on the open road, he had fallen behind a bit, and now he was glad that he had done so. The red tail-light of the limousine leapt into redder brilliance as Inselheim jammed on the brakes, pulling it over to the side of the road as it slowed down. Then, right at its side, the flashlight beamed again.
From a safe distance, Simon saw a dark object leave the window at the side of the limousine, trace an arc through the air, and vanish into the bushes at the side of the highway. Then the limousine took off like a startled hare and shot away into the night as if it had seen a ghost, but by that time the Saint was out of his car, racing up the road without a sound.
The package which Inselheim had thrown out remained by the roadside where it had fallen, and Simon recognised it at once as the parcel which the millionaire had carried under his arm when he left his apartment. That alone made it interesting enough, and the manner of its delivery established it as something which had to be investigated without delay—although Simon could make a shrewd grim guess at what it contained. But his habitual caution slowed up his steps before he reached it, and he merged himself into the blackness beneath a tree with no more sound than an errant shadow. And for a short time there was silence, broken only by the soft rustle of leaves in the night wind.
The package lay in a patch of moonlight, solitary and forlorn as a beer-bottle on a Boy Scout picnic ground. The Saint’s eyes were fixed on it unwinkingly, and his right hand slipped the gun out of his pocket and noiselessly thumbed the safety catch out of gear. A gloved hand moved out of the darkness, reaching for the parcel, and Simon spoke quietly.
“I don’t think I’d touch that, Ferdinand,” he said.
There was a gasp from the darkness. By rights there should have been no answer but a shot, or the sounds of a speedy and determined retreat, but the circumstances were somewhat exceptional.
The leaves stirred, and a cap appeared above the greenery. The cap was followed by a face, the face by a pair of shoulders, the shoulders by a chest and an abdomen. The appearance of this human form rising gradually out of the blackness as if raised on some concealed elevator had an amazingly spooky effect which was marred only by the physiognomy of the spectre and the pattern of its clothes. Simon could not quite accept an astral body with such a flamboyant choice of worsteds, but he gazed at the apparition admiringly enough.
“Well, well, well!” he remarked. “If it isn’t my old college chum, wearing his old school tie. Can you do any more tricks like that, Heimie?—it’s fun to be fooled, but it’s more fun to know!”
Heimie Felder goggled at him dumbly. The developments of the past twenty-four hours had been no small strain on his limited intellect, and the stress and surprise of them had robbed him of much of his natural elasticity and joie-de-vivre. Standing waist-high in the moonlight, his face reflected a greenish pallor which was not entirely due to the lunar rays.
“Migawd,” he said, expressing his emotions in the mildest possible terms.
The Saint smiled.
“In a year or two you’ll be quite used to seeing me around, won’t you?” he remarked chattily. “That is, if you live as long as a year or two. The mob you belong to seems to have such suspicious and hasty habits, from what Pappy was telling me…Excuse me if I collect this.”
He stooped swiftly and picked up the brown-paper parcel from its patch of moonlight. Heimie Felder made no attempt to stop him—the power of protest seemed to have deserted him at last, never to return. But his lips shaped a dazed comment of one word which groped for the last immutable landmark of sanity in his staggering universe.
“Nuts,” Heimie said hollowly.
The Saint was not offended. He tucked the parcel under his arm.
“I’m afraid I must be going,” he murmured. “But I’m sure we shall be getting together again soon. We seem to be destined…”
His voice dropped to nothing as he caught the sound of a footfall somewhere on his right. Staring into the bulging eyes of the man in front of him, he saw there a sudden flicker of hope, and his teeth showed very white in the moonlight.
“I think not,” he advised softly.
His gun moved ever so slightly, so that a shaft of moonlight caught the barrel for a moment, and Heimie Felder was silent. The Saint shifted himself quietly in the darkness, so that his automatic half covered the visible target and yet was ready to turn instantly into the obscurity of the road at his side, and another voice spoke out of the gloom.
“You got it, Heimie?”
Heimie breathed hard, but did not speak, and the Saint answered for him. His voice floated airily through the night.
“No, brother,” he said smoothly. “Heimie has not got it. I have it—and I also have Heimie. You will advance slowly with your hands well above your head, or else you may get it yourself.”
For the third time that night the moon demonstrated its friendliness. On his right the Saint could make out a dark and shadowy figure, though he could not see the newcomer clearly on account of the trees at the roadside. But a vagrant beam of the moon danced glitteringly on something metallic in the intruder’s hand, and the new voice spoke viciously.
“You rat!”
The gun banged in his hand, spitting a venomous squirt of orange flame into the blackness, and the bullet whisked through the leaves and thudded into the tree where the Saint stood. Simon’s eyes narrowed over the sights as coldly deliberate as if he had been firing on a range; his forefinger closed on the trigger, and the metallic object on which the moonbeam danced spun crazily from the man’s hand and flew across the road. A roar of pain and an unprintable oath drowned the clatter of metal on the macadam, and the same voice yelled, “Get him, Heimie!”
In the next second the black bulk of the man was charging down on him. Simon pressed th
e trigger again coolly, but nothing happened—the hammer fell on a dud cartridge. He dropped the parcel under his arm and snatched at the sliding jacket, but the charging weight of the man caught him before the next shell was in the chamber.
Simon went back against the tree with a force that seemed to bruise his very lungs through the pads of muscle across his back. His breath came with a grunt and he rebounded out again, sluggishly, like a sandbag, and felt his fist smack into a chest like a barrel. Then the man’s arms whipped round him and they went down together, rolling heavily over the uneven ground.
The sky was shot with daubs of vivid colour, while a blackness deeper than the blackness of night struggled to close over the Saint’s brain. His chest was a dull mass of pain from that terrific crash against the tree, and the air had to be forced into it with a mighty effort at each agonising breath, as if his face were smothered with a heavy cushion. Nothing but a titanic vitality of will kept him conscious and fighting. The man on top of him was thirty pounds heavier than he was, and he knew that if Heimie Felder recovered from the superstitious paralysis which had been gripping him, and located the centre of the fight soon enough, there would be nothing but a slab of carved marble to mark the spot where a presumptuous outlaw had bucked the odds once too often.
They crashed through a low bush and slithered down a slight gradient, punching and kicking and grappling like a pair of wildcats. The big man broke through Simon’s arms and got hold of his head, gouging viciously. The Saint’s head bumped twice against the hard turf, and the flashing daubs of colour whirled in giddy gyrations across his vision. Suddenly his body went limp, and the big man let out an exultant yell.
The Saint In New York (The Saint Series) Page 12
