Maxie hitched himself round and tapped a nicotine-stained forefinger on his brain-pan again, in that occult gesture which appeared to be his synonym for a salute to intelligence.
“Say, that guy has got what it takes. An’ if a guy has got what it takes, an’ shoots square an’ can find the dough, I’ll take orders from him. And that goes for Joe and Heimie an’ Dutch and the rest of the mob too. The dough ain’t been so easy since they made liquor legal, see?”
The Saint frowned with inviting perplexity, and Maxie, not at all reluctant, endeavoured to clarify his point.
“When we had prohibition, a bootlegger an’ his mob were all right, see? They were breaking the law, but it wasn’t a law that anybody cared about. Everybody, even respectable citizens, guys on Park Avenue an’ everything, useta know bootleggers and ring ’em up and talk to ’em an’ be proud to know them. Why, guys would boast about their bootleggers like they would about their doctors or their lawyers, and get into arguments and fights with other guys about whose bootlegger was the best. They paid us our dough an’ didn’t grumble, because they knew we had to take risks to get the stuff they wanted, and the cops was sort of enemies of the public because they tried to stop us getting the stuff—sometimes. Ya couldn’t get a guy to testify against a guy that was getting him his liquor, in favour of another guy who was trying to stop the liquor comin’ through, see?”
“Mmm,” conceded the Saint doubtfully, more for punctuation than anything else.
“Well, when prohibition went out that changed everything, see? A bootlegger wasn’t any guy’s friend any more. He was just a racketeer that was trying to stick something on the prices of stuff that any guy could go and buy legitimate, an’ the cop was a guy that was trying to put the racketeer out of business an’ keep the prices down, and everybody suddenly forgot everything we’d done for ’em in the dry years, an’ turned right round on us.” Maxie scowled mournfully at the flimsiness of human gratitude. “Well, we hadda do something, hadn’t we? A guy’s gotta live.”
“I suppose so,” said the Saint. “Which guy is this?”
Maxie wrinkled his nose.
“A lotta guys got in trouble about that time,” he said reminiscently. “We had a sort of reform drive, an’ got hunted about a lot. It got worse all the time. A lotta guys couldn’t get it into their coconuts that it wasn’t going to be easy money any more, an’ it was too bad about them. You had to have it here.” He thumbed his forehead again mysteriously. “Business wasn’t good, so we hadn’t got the money to pay the cops, an’ the cops not getting money started going after us again an’ makin’ things worse.” Maxie sighed reminiscently. “But then the Big Fellow came along,” he said, cheering up, “an’ everything was jake again.”
“Why?” Simon asked, with the same ingenuously puzzled air.
“Well, he put us in the big dough again, see?”
“With the same old rackets.”
“Yeah. But he’s got brains. An’ information. He’s got everything taped out. When he says, ‘The layout is like this and that, we gotta fix it this way and that way,’ we know it’s going to be just like he says. So we don’t make no mistakes.”
The lights of the waterside had ceased to move, and there was a general stir of voyagers gathering themselves to continue on their way. The driver climbed back into the car and settled himself, waiting for their turn to pull out in the line of disembarking traffic.
Keeping their place decorously in the procession, they climbed the winding road that leads upwards from the Jersey shore, and in a short time they were speeding across the Jersey Meadows. The drive became a monotonous race through unfamiliar country—straight lines of highway which might have been laid across the face of the moon for all the landmarks that Simon could pick out, straggling lights of unidentifiable small towns, blazing headlights of other cars which leapt up out of the blackness and roared by in an instant of noise to be swallowed up in the gulf of dark behind. The powerful sedan, guided by the expert hands of the silent driver, flashed at a reckless pace through the countryside, slowed smoothly down from time to time to keep well within the prescribed speed limits of a village, then leapt ahead down another long stretch of open road. Despite the speed at which they were travelling, the journey seemed interminable: the sense of utter isolation, of being shut away from the whole world in that mass-produced projectile whirling through the uncharted night, would have had an overwhelmingly soporific effect if it had not been for the doom to which they were driving.
The Saint had no means of knowing how far ahead that destination lay, and a cold fatalism would not let him ask. He knew that it could not be very far away—knew that his time must be getting short and his need more desperately urgent—but still he had had no opportunity to save himself. The vigilance of his companions had never relaxed, and if he made the slightest threatening move it would hardly inconvenience them at all to shoot him where he sat and fling his body out of the car without slackening speed.
They could have done that anyhow, might even be preparing to do it. He did not know why he had assumed that he was being taken to a definite place of execution, to be slain there according to a crude gangland ritual, but it was on that expectation that he had based his only hopes of escape.
He stole a glance at Maxie. The gunman was lounging nonchalantly in his corner, the backward tilt of his hat serving to emphasise the squat impassivity of his features, twirling an unlighted cigar in one side of his thick mouth. To say that he was totally unimpressed by the enormity of the thing he was there to do would convey only the surface of his attitude. He was, if anything, rather bored.
Simon fought to maintain his outward calm. The length of the journey, the forced inaction under the strain of such a deadly suspense, was slowly wearing down his nerves, but at all costs he had to remain master of himself. His chance would be thin enough even if it ever came, he knew, and the faintest twitch of panic, the very slightest disordering of the swift cold precision and co-ordination of brain and arm, would eliminate that chance to vanishing point. And all the time another aloof and wholly dissociated thread in his mind, akin to the phlegmatic detachment of a scientist who notes his own symptoms on his death-bed, was weaving the fact that Maxie might still go on talking to a man whom he believed to be helpless…
The Saint cleared his throat and tried to resume the conversation in the same tone of innocent puzzlement as before—as if it had never been broken off. He had to go on trying to learn those things which he might never be able to turn to advantage, had to do something to occupy his mind and ease the strain on his aching self-control.
“How do you mean, the Big Fellow came along?” he said. “If he wasn’t even in the racket, if you’d never heard of him before and haven’t even seen him yet—how did you know you could trust him? How did you know he’d be any use to you?”
“How did we know he’d be any use to us? Say, he showed us. Ya can’t get around facts. He had it all worked out.”
“Yes, I know, but he must have started somewhere. How did he get in touch with you? What was the first you heard of him?”
Maxie grunted, and peered ahead through the windshield.
“I guess you’ll have to figure that out yourself—you’ll have plenty of time,” he said, and Simon looked out and saw that the car was slowing down.
CHAPTER SEVEN:
HOW DUTCH KUHLMANN SAW A GHOST AND SIMON TEMPLAR RETURNED HOME
1
At first the Saint could see nothing but a stretch of deserted highway that seemed to reach for endless miles into the distance, and then the driver spun the wheel sharply to the right, and the car bounced off the road into a narrow lane.
Simon was not surprised that he had failed to spot it. The sweeping branches of trees almost met over the bumpy disused by-path: their foliage scraped the top of the sedan and brushed with a slithering sound against the sides as they went down the side road at a considerably reduced speed. Before they had gone five yards they were effectivel
y screened from the view of any car that might be travelling along the main thoroughfare.
With both hands clinging to the wheel, which leapt and shuddered in his grasp like a live thing, the driver headed deeper and deeper along the narrow track. If the combined bulks of Joe and Maxie had not formed a system of human wedges pinning him tightly to the cushions, the Saint would have been bumped clear of the seat each time the tyres caromed off the boulders that studded the roadbed.
Simon Templar was aware of the quickened beating of his heart. There was a dryness in his throat and a vague feeling of constriction about his chest that made him breathe a little deeper than normally, but the breathing was slow, steady, and deliberate, not the quick shallow gasps of fear. The tension of his nerves had passed the vibrating point—they were strung down to a terrific immobility that was as impermanent as the stillness of a compressed spring. The waiting and suspense was over; now there was nothing but the end of the ride to see, and a chance for life to be taken if fate offered it. And if the chance did not offer, that was the end of adventures.
The lane was growing even narrower as they went on; the trees and bushes that lined its sides closed in upon them. Plainly it had been derelict for years: the march of macadamised arteries had swept by and left it for no other service but for such journeys as they were on, and its destination, if it had ever had one, had long since found other and faster communications with the outside world. At last, when the streamlined body of the sedan could make no further headway, the driver jammed on the brakes and brought the car to a lurching halt. Then he snapped off the headlights, leaving only the bright glow of the parking lights to illuminate the scene.
A good enough spot for a murder, the Saint was forced to admit, and he wondered how many other men had dared the vengeance of Dutch Kuhlmann and the Big Fellow, only to pay for their temerity in that lonely place. With the switching off of the purring engine all sound seemed to have been blotted out of the night, as if the world had been folded under a dense pack of wool; even the distant hum of other cars way back on the highway they had left, if there were any, was inaudible. As far as the Saint could see, there was nothing around them but a wilderness of trees and shrubbery scattered over an undulating stony common; a man could die there with no sound that the world would ever hear, and his body might lie there for weeks before some chance passer-by stumbled on it and sent a new blare of headlines screaming across the front pages. Suddenly the Saint guessed why he had been taken so far, with such precautions, instead of simply being pushed out on any New York street and riddled with bullets as the car drove away. It had been sufficient often enough for other victims, but this case was different. The handling of it linked up with certain things that Orcread and Yeald had discussed. The Saint was not to become a martyr or even a sensation: he was to disappear, as swiftly and unaccountably as he had come, like a comet—all questions could go unanswered perhaps for ever, and the fickle public would soon forget…
Something creaked at the back of the car, breaking the stillness, and Maxie roused himself. He climbed out unhurriedly, and turned round again as soon as he was outside, his automatic glinting dully in the subdued light. He jerked it at the Saint expressively.
“Out, buddy.”
Behind the Saint, Joe’s gun added its subtle pressure to the command.
Simon pulled himself up slowly. Now that the climax of the ride was reached he had ceased speculating upon the reactions of a doomed man. Every cell in his keen brain, every nerve and fibre of his body, was dynamically alive and watchful. His mind had never worked more clearly and smoothly, his body had never been keyed to a more perfect pitch of physical fitness, than they were at that moment in the deepening shadow of death. It was impossible to think that in a few brief moments, with one inconceivably numbing crashing shock, that vibrant pulsing life could be stilled, the brilliant mind dulled for ever, the play and delight of sensual experience and the sweet awareness of life swallowed up in a black nothingness from which there was no return.
He stepped down gradually to the running-board. A yard from him, Maxie’s automatic was levelled steadily at his chest; behind him, Joe’s gun pushed no less steadily into his back. The wild thought crossed his mind that he might launch himself on to Maxie from the running-board in a desperate smothering leap, trusting to the surprise to bowl him over before he could shoot, and to the beneficent darkness to take care of the rest. But in the next instant he knew that there was no hope there. In spite of his outward stolidity, Maxie was watching him like a cat, and he had measured his distance perfectly. To have jumped then would have been to jump squarely into a bullet, and Joe would probably have got him from behind at the same time.
With a face of iron the Saint lowered himself to the ground and straightened up, but his eyes met Maxie’s calmly enough.
“Is this as far as we go?” he inquired.
“You said it,” Maxie assented curtly.
Behind him, Simon could hear the crunch of Joe’s brogans on the soil as the other gunman followed him out, and the brusque click of the door closing again. The weight of the gun-muzzle touched his back again. He was gripped between two potential fires as securely as if he had been held in a pair of tangible forceps, and for the second time that icy qualm of doubt squirmed clammily in the pit of his stomach. In every movement that was made there was a practised confidence, an unblinking vigilance, such as he had never encountered before. No other two men he had ever met could have held him in the car so long, talking to him and lighting his cigarettes, without giving him a moment’s chance to take them off their guard. No other two men that he could think of could have manoeuvred him in and out of it without offering at least one even toss-up on a break for freedom. He had always known, at the back of his mind, that one day he must meet his match—that sometime, somewhere, the luck which had followed him so faithfully throughout his career must turn against him, as it does in the life of every gambler and adventurer who refuses to acknowledge any limits. But he had not thought that it would happen there—just as no man ever believes that he will die tomorrow although he knows that there must come a tomorrow when he will die…A thin shadow of the old Saintly smile touched his lips and did not reach his eyes.
“I hope you’re going to do this with all the regular formalities,” he said gently. “You know, I’ve often wondered just how the thing was done. I’d be awfully disappointed if you didn’t bump me off in the most approved style.”
At the back of him, Joe choked on an oath, but Maxie was unimpressed.
“Sure,” he agreed affably. “We’ll give you a show. But there ain’t much to it. Just in the line of business, see?”
“I see,” said the Saint quietly.
The complete unconcern, the blandly brutal callousness of Maxie’s reply, seemed to have frozen something deep in his heart. He had faced death before—death that flamed out at him in violent seething hate, death that dispassionately proposed his annihilation as a matter of cold expediency. He had dealt out death himself, in various ways. But never had he known a man to attempt to snuff out another’s life so casually, with such an indescribable absence of all personal feeling, as this ruthless killer who was preparing to send a bullet through his vitals—“just in the line of business…”
The Saint had had his own rules of the game, but at that moment they were forgotten. If he ever broke loose from the trap in which he was held, if Destiny offered him that one lone ghost of a break to get away and join in the game again, for the rest of that adventure he would play it as his opponents played it—giving no quarter. He would be the same as they were—utterly without mercy or compunction. He would have only one remedy for all mistakes—the same as theirs.
In the dim light his eyes had lost all expression. Their gaze was narrowed down to a mere frosty gleam of jagged ice.
“Over by that tree,” directed Maxie conversationally. “That’s the best spot.”
His phrasing of the words held a sinister implication that many other
spots in that locality had been tried, and that his choice was based on the findings of long experience, but the suggestion was absolutely unconscious. He seemed even more indifferent than if he had been posing the Saint for a photograph.
Simon looked at him for a moment, and then turned away. There was nothing else he could do. Sometimes he had wondered why even on the way to certain death a man should still submit to the dictation of a gun; now, with a terrible clarity of reason, he knew the answer. Until death had actually struck him, until the ultimate unanswerable instant of annihilation, he would cling to the hope that some miracle must bring reprieve; obedient to some illogical blind instinct of self-preservation, he would do nothing to precipitate the end.
Under the turning muzzle of Maxie’s gun, the Saint took up his position against the trunk of a towering elm, and turned round again. Joe nodded approvingly, and at a sign from Maxie stepped closer to prepare the victim for execution according to the gangland code.
Methodically he unbuttoned the Saint’s coat and opened it; then began a similar task upon his shirt.
“Some guys started wearin’ bulletproof vests,” Maxie explained cheerfully.
Simon’s nerves were tensed to the last unbearable ounce; his body was rigid like a steel bar. Now there was only Maxie covering him: Joe was fully taken up with his gruesome ritual, and the voiceless driver had raised the bonnet of the car and was seemingly engrossed in some minor ailment that he had detected in its mechanism. If he was to have a chance at all, it could only be now.
He moved slightly, as if to help Joe with his unbuttoning. Then, with a lightning movement, his left hand shot up. Lean fingers closed on Joe’s left wrist as he fumbled with the Saint’s shirt, and a sudden whipping contraction of steel sinews jerked the man aside, throwing him off balance and turning him half round on the leverage of his extended arm. The gun in his right hand was flung out of aim: Simon heard the crack of the explosion and saw the vicious splash of flame from the barrel, but the shot went off at right angles to the line it should have taken.
The Saint In New York (The Saint Series) Page 16
