“I hope you’re right. But that don’t settle anything. We gotta do something that’ll satisfy the public. If you make a martyr of him it’ll only make things worse. Now, if we could get him in court an’ make a monkey out of him, we could say, ‘Well, we done our duty. We caught the guy that was making all the trouble. And now look at him.’ We could fix things so he didn’t get any sympathy.”
“I doubt it,” Yeald said. “Once he was in court it would be difficult to stop him talking. I wouldn’t dare to hold the trial in camera, and all the reporters would be wanting interviews. You couldn’t keep them away.”
“Well, I think we oughta make an example. How would it be if…”
The rumbling and the rustling went on, and the Saint smoked his cigarette with no outward signs of concern. But not for a moment had he ceased to be aware that the old gentleman with the scythe, of whom he had undertaken to make an ally, was very close to him that night. Yet his smile was undimmed and his eyes had the stillness of frozen sea-water as he idly watched the whispering men who were debating how the processes of justice could best be turned to meet their own ends. And within him was a colder deadlier contempt than anything he had felt since the beginning of that adventure.
In the room before him were more than a dozen men whose lives were dedicated to plunder and killing, mercenaries of the most amazing legion of crime that modern civilisation had ever known, but it was not against them that he felt the deadliest chill of that cold anger. It was against the men who made their looting possible—the men who held positions of trust, whom a blind public had permitted to seize office, whose wages were paid over and over again out of the pockets of ordinary honest citizens, whose co-operation allowed robbery and murder to go unpunished and even commended. The law meant nothing; except when it was an expedient instrument to remove an obstacle to further pillage.
Outside, beyond that room, lay a great city, a monument in brick and granite to the ingenuity of man, and in that city seven million people paid tribute to a lawless handful. The Saint had never been given to glorifying himself into any kind of knightly hero; in the end he was a mercenary himself, hired by Valcross to do an outlaw’s work, but if he had had any doubts of the justice of his cause, they would have been swept away that night. Whether he acknowledged it or not, whether they knew it or not, he was the champion of seven million, facing sentence in that hushed room for a thing that perhaps none of the seven million could have put into words, and it had never seemed more vital that he should come out alive to carry the battle on…
And then, as if in answer, Orcread’s voice rammed itself into his consciousness again and brought him out of his reverie.
“You’ve heard all we’ve got to say, Saint. There’s only two ways out for you—mine or yours. You can think again if you like.”
“I’ve done all the thinking I can,” said the Saint evenly.
“Okay. You’ve had your chance.”
He got up heavily, and stood staring at Simon with the same worried perplexity; he was not satisfied yet that he had heard the truth—it was beyond his comprehension that a menace which had attacked the roots of his domination could be so simple—but the consensus of opinion had gone against him. Marcus Yeald twiddled the locks of his brief-bag, stood up, and fidgeted with his gloves. He glanced at the door speculatively, in his peering petulant way, and one of the men opened it.
Orcread hitched himself round reluctantly, and nodded to Kuhlmann.
“Okay, Dutch,” he said, and went out, followed by Yeald. The door was closed and locked again, and a ripple of released suppression went over the room. The conference, as a conference, was over…
“Come here, Saint,” said Kuhlmann gutturally.
After that single scuffle of movement which followed Orcread’s exit an electric tension had settled on the room—a tension that was subtly different from that which had just been broken. Kuhlmann’s unemotional accents did not relieve it. Rather, they seemed to key up the tautness another notch, but the Saint did not appear to feel it. Cool, relaxed, serene as if he had been in a gathering of intimate friends, he sauntered forward a couple of steps and stood in front of the racketeer.
He knew that there was nothing he could do there. The odds were impossible. But he stood smiling quietly while Kuhlmann looked up into his face.
“You’re a goot boy,” Kuhlmann said. “You give us a liddle bit of trouble, und that is bad. But we cannot finish our talk here. So I think”—he swallowed a lump in his throat, and his voice broke—”I think you go outside and vait for us for a minute.”
Quick hands grabbed the Saint’s wrists and twisted him round, but he did not struggle. He was led to the door, and as he went out Kuhlmann nodded, blinking, to two of the men who stood along the wall.
“You, Joe, and you, Maxie—give him der business. Und meet me here again aftervards.”
Without a flicker of expression the two men detached themselves from the wall and followed the Saint out, their hands automatically feeling in their pockets. The door closed behind the cortège, and for a moment nobody moved.
And then Dutch Kuhlmann dragged out his large white handkerchief and dabbed with it at his eyes. A distinct sob sounded in the room, and the remaining gunmen glanced at each other with almost sheepish grins. Dutch Kuhlmann was crying.
3
The moon which had shed its light over the earlier hours of the evening, and which had germinated the romance of Mr Bungstatter of Brooklyn, had disappeared. Clouds hung low between the earth and the stars, and the night nestled blackly over the city. A single booming note from the Metropolitan Tower announced the passing of an hour after midnight.
On the fringe of the town sleep claimed honest men. In the Bronx and the nearer portions of Long Island, in Hoboken, Peekshill, and Poughkeepsie, families slept peacefully. In Brooklyn, Mr Theodore Bungstatter slept in ecstatic bliss—and, it must be confessed, snored. And with the hard nozzle of Maxie’s automatic grinding deep into his ribs Simon Templar was hurried across the pavement outside Charley’s Place and into a waiting car.
Joe piled in on the other side, and a third man took the wheel. The muzzle of another gun stabbed into the Saint’s other side, and there was a cold tenseness in the eyes of the escort which indicated that their fingers were taut on the triggers. On this ride they were taking no chances.
Simon looked out of the windows while the driver jammed his foot down on the starter. The few pedestrians who passed scarcely glanced aside. If they had glanced aside, they would have seen nothing extraordinary, and if they had seen anything extraordinary, the Saint reflected with a wry grin, they would have run for their lives. He had taken a hand in a game where he had to play alone, and there would be no help from anyone but himself…But even as he looked back, he saw the slim figure of Fay Edwards framed in the dark doorway through which he had been brought, and the old questions leapt to his mind again.
The brim of her hat cast a shadow over her eyes, and he could not even tell whether she was looking in his direction. He had no reason to think that she would. Throughout his interview with Orcread she had sat like an inattentive spectator, smoking, and thinking her own thoughts. When Kuhlman’s sentence had been passed upon him she had been lighting another cigarette; she had not even looked up, and her hand had not shaken. When he was turned and hustled out of the room she had been raising her eyes to look at him again, with a calm impersonal regard that told him no more than her present pose.
“Better take a good look,” advised Maxie.
There was no derision, no bitterness in his voice—it simply uttered a grim reminder of the fact that Simon Templar was doomed to have few more attractive things to look at.
The Saint smiled, and saw the girl start off to cross the road behind the car, without looking round, before Joe reached forward and drew the curtains.
“She’s worth a look,” Simon murmured, and slanted an eyebrow at the closed draperies which shut out his view on either side. “This wagon looks
like a hearse already.”
Joe grunted meaninglessly, and the car pulled away from the kerb and circled the block. The blaze of Broadway showed ahead for a moment, like the reflection of a fire in the sky; then they were turned around and driving west, and the Saint settled down and made himself as comfortable as he could.
The situation had no natural facilities for comfort. There was something so business-like, so final and confident, in the manner of his captors, that despite himself an icy finger of doubt traced its chill course down the Saint’s spine. Except for the fact that no invisible but far-reaching hand of the Law sanctioned this strange execution, it had a disturbing similarity to the remorseless ritual of lawful punishment.
Before that he had been in tight corners from which the Law might have saved him if he had called for help, but he had never called. There was something about the dull ponderous interventions of the Law which had never appealed to him, and in this particular case their potentialities appealed to him least of all. Intervention, even if it succeeded, meant arrest and trial, and his brief acquaintance with Orcread and Yeald had been sufficient to show him how much justice he could expect from that. Not that the matter of justice was very vital in his case. The most incorruptible court in the world, he had to admit, could do nothing else but sentence him to about forty years’ imprisonment even if it didn’t go so far as ordering execution, and on the whole he preferred his chances with the illicit sentence. It would not be the first time that he had sat in a game of life and death and played the cards out with a steady hand no matter how the luck ran, and now he would do it again, though at that precise moment he hadn’t the faintest idea what method he would use. Yet for the first time in many years he wondered if he had not taken on too much.
But no hint of what passed in his mind showed on his face. He leaned back, calm-eyed and nonchalant, as if he were one of a party of friends on their way home, and even when they stopped at the driveway of a ferry he did not move. He cocked one quizzical blue eye at Maxie.
“So it’s to be Jersey this time, is it?”
“Yeah,” said the gunman, with a callous twist of humour. “We thought ya might like a change.”
An efficient-looking blue-coated patrolman stood no more than four yards away, but no sixth sense, no clairvoyant flash of prescience, warned him to single out the gleaming black sedan from the line of other vehicles which were waiting their turn to go on board. He dreamed his dreams of an inspectorship in a division well populated with citizens who would be unselfishly eager to dissuade him with cash and credit from the obvious perils of overworking himself at his job, and the Saint made no attempt to interrupt him. The driver paid their fares, and they settled into their place on the ferry to wait until it chose to sail.
Simon gazed out at the inky waters of the Hudson and wondered idly why it should be that the departure of a ferry was always accompanied by twice as much fuss and anxiety as the sailing of an ocean liner, and he derived a rather morbid exhilaration even from that vivid detail of his experience. He had heard much, and speculated more, about that effective American method of removing an appointed victim, but in spite of his flippant remarks to Valcross he had not expected that he would have this unique opportunity of learning at first hand the sensations of the man who played the leading rôle in the drama. He felt that in this instance the country which had adopted the “ride” as a native sport for wet week-ends was rather overdoing itself in its eagerness to show him the works so quickly and comprehensively, but the tightness of his corner was not capable of damping a keen professional interest in the proceedings. And yet, all the time, he missed the reassuring pressure of the knife-blade that should have been cuddling snugly along his forearm, and his eyes were very cold and bright as he flicked his cigarette-end through the open front window and watched it spring like a red tracer bullet across the dark…
Maxie rummaged in his pockets with his free hand, drew forth a crumpled pack of cigarettes, and extended it politely.
“Have another?”
“A last smoke for the condemned man, eh?”
Equally courteous and unruffled, the Saint thumbed a Chesterfield from the package and carefully straightened it out, Maxie passed him the cigar lighter from the arm-rest, and then lighted a smoke for himself, but in none of the motions of this studious observance of the rules of etiquette was there an opening for a surprise attack from the victim. Simon felt Joe’s automatic harden against his side almost imperceptibly while the exchange of courtesies was going on, and knew that his companions had explored all the possibilities of such situations before they began to shave. He sighed and leaned back again, exhaling twin streams of smoke from his nostrils.
“What is that girl Fay?” he asked casually, taking up a natural train of thought from the gunman’s penultimate remark.
Maxie tilted back his hat.
“Whaddaya mean, what is she? She’s a doll.”
Simon reviewed the difficulties of reaching Maxie’s intellect with the argument that was occupying his own mind. He knew better than anyone that the glamorous woman of mystery whose feminine charms rule hard-boiled desperadoes as with a rod of iron, and whose brilliant brain outwits criminals and detectives with equal ease, belonged only in the pages of highly-spiced fictional romance, and that in the underworld of New York she was the most singular curiosity of all. To the American hoodlum and racketeer the female of the species has only one function, reserved for his hours of relaxation, and requiring neither intelligence nor outstanding personality. When he calls her a “doll,” his vocabulary is an accurate psychological revelation. She is a toy for his diversion, on which he can squander his easily-won dollars to the advertisement of his own wealth, to whom he can boast and in boasting expand his own ego and feel himself a great guy, but she has no place in the machinery of his profession except as a spy, a stringer of suckers, or a dumb instrument for putting a rival on the spot, and she has no place in his councils at all.
The Saint saw no easy approach to Maxie from that angle, but he said, “She’s good to look at, all right, but I can’t see anything else she’s got that you could use. I wouldn’t let any girls sit in on my business—you can never trust ’em.”
Maxie regarded him pityingly.
“Say, why don’t ya get wise? That dame has got it here.” He tapped the area where his brain might be presumed to reside. “She’s got more of it than you or anybody else like ya.”
Simon shrugged dubiously.
“You ought to know. But I wouldn’t do it. The cleverer a dame is, the more she’s dangerous. You can’t ever be sure of ’em. They ride along with you for a while, and then the first thing you know they’ve fallen for some other guy and they’re working like hell to double-cross you.”
“What, her?” Maxie’s stare deepened with indignation as well as scorn. “I guess Heimie was right—you must be nuts. Who’s she going to double-cross? She’s the Big Fellow’s mouthpiece.”
The Saint’s face was expressionless.
“Mouthpiece?” he repeated slowly.
“Yeah. She talks for him. If he’s got something to say, she says it. If we got anything to say, she takes it back. She’s the only one in the mob who knows everything that’s going on.”
Simon did not move. He sat perfectly still, watching the lights along the riverside begin to slide across the darkness as the ferry pulled out from the pier. The urgency of his predicament dropped out of his mind as if a trapdoor had fallen open, leaving a sensation of emptiness through which weaved an eerie squirm of excitement. Maxie’s frank expansiveness fairly took his breath away.
It was about the last thing he had expected to develop from that ride. And then, in another moment, he realised how it came about. The callous confidence of his executioners was an attitude which worked two ways; the utter irrevocable finality of it was sufficient to make conversations possible which could never have happened otherwise. In a different setting, threats and torture and even the menace of certain death would
have received no response but a stony iron-jawed silence, according to that stoical gangland code of which the late Mr Papulos had been such a faithless exponent, but to a condemned prisoner on the road to execution a gunman could legitimately talk, and might even derive some pleasure from the dilation of his ego and the proof of his own omniscience and importance in so doing—death loomed so inevitably ahead, and dead men told no tales. It gave the Saint a queer feeling of fatality to realise that he had to come to the end of his usefulness before he could make any headway in his quest, but even if dissolution had been a bare yard away he could never have separated himself from the instinct to learn all that he could while knowledge was being offered. And even at that stage he had not lost hope.
“I’m sorry I didn’t meet this Big Fellow,” he remarked, without a variation in his even tone of casual conversation. “He must be worth knowing.”
“You got too near as it was,” Joe said matter-of-factly. “You shouldn’t of tried it, pal.”
“He sounds an exclusive sort of bird,” Simon admitted, and Maxie took the cigarette out of his mouth to grin widely.
“You ain’t said nuth’n yet. Exclusive ain’t the word for it. Say, you don’t know how good we’re bein’ to ya. You’re lucky to of got away from Morrie Ualino—Morrie’d’ve had ya in the hot box for sure.”
As if he felt a glow of conscious pride at this discovery of his own share in such an uncustomary humaneness, he pulled out his crumpled pack of Chesterfields and offered them again. Simon took one and accepted a light, the procedure being governed by exactly the same courtesy and caution as before.
“Yes,” he said thoughtfully, “your Big Fellow must be the wrong kind of bloke to buck.”
“You’re learning late,” Maxie agreed laconically.
“All the same,” pursued the Saint, with an air of vague puzzlement, “I can’t quite see what makes you and the rest of the mob take your orders from a fellow who isn’t in the racket—a bird you haven’t ever even seen. I mean, what have you got to gain by it?”
The Saint In New York (The Saint Series) Page 15
