“Have another drink?” asked the doctor, when he had dressed the wound.
Simon nodded. His face was a trifle pale under his tan.
Fay Edwards poured it out, and the doctor went back to his cracked basin and washed his hands again.
“It was worth going to, that exhibition,” he said. “I was too hot to enjoy it, but it was worth seeing. I don’t know how they managed to put on some of those shows in the Streets of Paris.”
He came back and peered at the Saint through his thick lenses, which made his eyes seem smaller than they were.
“That will cost you a thousand dollars,” he said blandly.
The Saint felt in his pockets and remembered that he hadn’t a nickel. Fortunately, he had deposited his ten-thousand-dollar bonus in a safe place before he went to interview Inselheim, but all his small change had been taken when he was searched after his capture. That was a broad departure from the underworld tradition which demands that a man who is taken for a ride shall be left with whatever money he has on him, but it was a tribute to the fear he had inspired which could transform even a couple of five-dollar bills and some silver into potential lethal weapons in his hands.
He smiled crookedly.
“Is my credit good?”
“Certainly,” said the surgeon without hesitation. “Send it to me tomorrow. In small bills, please. Leave the dressing on for a couple of days, and try to take things easy. You may have a touch of fever tomorrow. Take an aspirin.”
He ushered them briskly down the hall, fondling the girl’s hand unnecessarily.
“Come and see me any time you want anything, Fay. Good night.”
Throughout their visit he had not raised an eyebrow or asked a pertinent question: one gathered that a wounded man knocking him up for attention in the small hours of the morning was nothing epoch-making in his practice, and that he had long since found it wise and profitable to mind his own business.
They sat in the car, and Simon lighted a cigarette. The doctor’s brandy had taken off some of the deathly lassitude which had drained his vitality before, but he knew that the stimulation was only temporary, and he had work to do. Also there was still the enigma of Fay Edwards, which he would have to face before long. If only she would be merciful and leave the time to him, he would be easier in his mind: he had his normal share of the instinct to put off unpleasant problems. He didn’t know what answer he could give her; he wanted time to think about it, although he knew that time and thought would bring him no nearer to an answer. But he knew she would not be merciful. The quality of mercy was rare enough in women, and in anyone like her it would be rarest of all. She would face his answer in the same way that she faced the fact of death, with the same aloof impregnable detachment; he could only sense, in an indefinable intuitive way, what would lie behind that cold detachment, and the sensation was vaguely frightening.
“Where would you like to go?” she asked.
He smoked steadily, avoiding her eyes.
“Back to New York, I suppose. I haven’t finished my job tonight. But you can drop me off anywhere it suits you.”
“You’re not fit to do any more today.”
“I haven’t finished,” he said grimly.
She regarded him inscrutably; her mind was a thousand miles beyond his horizon, but the fresh sweetness of her body was too close for comfort.
“What did you come here to do?”
“I had a commission,” he said.
He put his hand in his breast pocket, took out his wallet, and opened it on his knee. She leaned towards him, looking over his shoulder at the scrap of paper that was exposed. His forefinger slid down the list of names written on it.
“I came here to kill six men. I’ve killed three—Jack Irboll, Morrie Ualino, and Eddie Voelsang. Leaving three.”
“Hunk is dead,” she said, touching the list. “That was Jenson—the man who drove this car tonight.”
“Leaving two,” he amended quietly.
She nodded.
“I wouldn’t know where to find Curly Ippolino. The last I heard of him, he was in Pittsburgh.” Her golden-yellow eyes turned towards him impassively. “But Dutch Kuhlmann is next.”
The Saint forced himself to look at her. There was nothing else to be done. It had to be faced, and he was spellbound by a tremendous curiosity.
“What will you do? He’s one of your friends, isn’t he?”
“I have no…friends,” she said, and again he was disturbed by that queer haunting music in her voice. “I’ll take you there. He’ll just about be tired of waiting for Joe and Maxie by the time we arrive. You’ll see him as he comes out.”
Simon looked at the lighted panel of instruments on the dash. He didn’t see them, but they were something to which he could turn his eyes. If they went back to find Dutch Kuhlmann, her challenge to himself would be in abeyance for a while longer. He might still escape. And his work remained: he had made a promise, and he had never yet failed to keep his word. He was certain that she was not leading him into a trap—it would have been fantastic to imagine any such complicated plan, when nothing could have been simpler than to allow Maxie to complete the job he had begun so well. On the other hand, she had offered the Saint no explanation of why she should help him, had asked him to give no reasons for his own grim mission. He felt that she would have had no interest in reasons. Hate, jealousy, revenge, a wager, even justice—any reasons that logic or ingenuity might devise would be only words to her. She was waiting, with her hand on the starting switch, for anything he cared to say.
The Saint bowed his head slowly.
“I meant to go back to Charley’s Place,” he said.
A little more than one hour later Dutch Kuhlmann gulped down the dregs of his last drink, up-ended his glass, pulled out his large old-fashioned gold watch, yawned with Teutonic thoroughness, and shoved his high stool back from the bar.
“I’m goin’ home,” he said. “Hey, Toni—when Joe an’ Maxie get here, you tell them to come und see me at my apartment.”
The barman nodded, mechanically wiping invisible stains from the spotless mahogany.
“Very good, Mr Kuhlmann.”
Kuhlmann stood up and glanced towards the two sleek sphinx-faced young men who sat patiently at a strategic table. They finished their drinks hurriedly, and rose to follow him like well-trained dogs as he waddled towards the door, exchanging gruff good nights with friends and acquaintances as he went. In the foyer he waited for them to catch up with him. They passed him, and stood between him and the door while it was opened. Also they went out first, and inspected the street carefully before they nodded to him to follow. Kuhlmann came out and stood between them on the sidewalk—he was as thorough and methodical in his personal precautions as he was in everything else, which was one reason why his czardom had survived so long. He lighted his cigar, and flicked the match sportively at one of his equerries.
“Go und start der car, Fritzie,” he said.
One of the sphinx-faced young men detached himself from the little group and went and climbed into the driving-seat of Kuhlmann’s Packard, which was parked a little distance up the road. He was paid handsomely for his special duty, but the post was no sinecure. His predecessor in office, as a matter of fact, had lasted only three weeks—until a bomb planted under the scuttle by some malicious citizen had exploded when the turning of the ignition key had completed the necessary electrical circuit.
Kuhlmann’s benign but restless eyes roved over the scene while the engine was being warmed up for him, and so he was the first to recognise the black sedan which swept down the street from the west. He nudged the escort who had remained with him.
“Chust in time,” he said jovially. “Here is Joe and Maxie comin’ back.”
He went forward towards the approaching car as it drew closer to the kerb. He was less than two yards from it when he saw the ghost—too late for him to turn back or even cry out. He saw the face of the man whom he had sent away to execution, a pa
le ghost with stony lips and blue eyes cold and hard like burnished sapphires, and knew in that instant that the sands had run out at last. The sharp crack of a single shot crashed down the echoing channel of the street, and the black sedan was roaring away to the east before his body touched the pavement.
3
The police sirens were still moaning around like forlorn banshees in the distances of the surrounding night when Fay Edwards stopped the car again in Central Park. Simon had a sudden vivid memory of the night when he had sat in exactly the same spot, in another car, with Inspector Fernack; it was considerably less than thirty-six hours ago, and yet so much had happened that it might as well have been thirty-six years. He wondered what had happened to Fernack, and what that grim-visaged massive-boned detective was thinking about the volcano of panic and killing which had flamed out in the underworld since they had had that strange irregular conversation. Probably Fernack was scouring the city for him at that moment, harried to superhuman efforts by the savage anxiety of commissioners and politicians and their satellites; their next conversation, if they ever had one, would probably be much less friendly and tolerant. But that also seemed as far away as if it belonged in another century. Fay Edwards was waiting.
She had switched off the engine, and she was lighting a cigarette. He saw the calm, almost waxen beauty of her face in the flicker of the match she was holding, the untroubled quiet of her eyes, and had to make an effort to remember that she had killed one man that night and helped him to kill another.
“Was that all right?” she asked.
“It was all right,” he said.
“I saw your list,” she said reflectively. “You had my name on it. What have I done? I suppose you want something with me. I’m here—now.”
He shook his head.
“There should have been a question mark after it. I put you down for a mystery. I was listening-in when you spoke to Nather—that was the first time I heard your voice. I was watching you with Morrie Ualino. You gave me the gun that got me out of there. I wanted to know who you were—what you had been—why you were in the racket. Just curiosity.”
She shrugged.
“Now you know the answer.”
“Do I?” The response was automatic, and at once he wished he had checked it. He felt her eyes turning to look at him, and added quickly, “When you came and told Maxie tonight that the Big Fellow said he was to let me go—that wasn’t the truth.”
“What makes you think so?”
“I’m guessing. But I’ll bet on it.”
She drew on her cigarette placidly. The smoke drifted out and floated down the beam of the lights.
“Of course it wasn’t true. The Big Fellow was on your list as well, wasn’t he?” she said inconsequently. “Do you want him too?”
“Most of all.”
“I see. You’re very determined—very single-minded—aren’t you?”
“I have to be,” said the Saint. “And I want to finish this job. I want to write ‘The End’ to it and start something else. I’m a bit tired.”
She was smoking thoughtfully, a very faint frown of concentration cutting one tiny etched line between her brows—the only wrinkle in the soft perfection of her skin. She might have been alone in her room, preparing to go out, choosing between one dress and another. It meant nothing to her emotions that the only things they shared in their acquaintance were killings, that the Saint’s mission was set down in an unalterable groove of battle and sudden death, that all the paths they had taken together were laid to the same grim goal. He had an eerie feeling that death and killings were the things she understood best—that perhaps there was nothing else she really understood.
“I think I could find the Big Fellow,” she said, and he tried to appear as casual and unconcerned as she was.
“You know him, don’t you?”
“I’m the only one who knows him.”
It was indescribably weird to be sitting there with her, wounded and tired, and to be discussing the greatest mystery that the annals of New York crime had ever known with her, waiting on the threshold of unthinkable revelations, where otherwise he would have been faced with the same illimitable blank wall as had confronted him from the beginning. In his wildest daydreams he had never imagined that the climax of his quest would be reached like that, and the thought made him feel unwontedly humble.
“He’s a great mystery, isn’t he?” said the Saint meditatively. “How long have you known him?”
“I met him nearly three years ago, before he was the Big Fellow at all—before anyone had ever heard of him. He picked me up when I was down and out.” She was as casual about it as if she had been discussing an ephemeral scandal of nine days’ importance, as if nothing of great interest to anyone hung on what she said. “He told me about his idea. It was a good one. I was able to help him because I knew how to contact the sort of people he had to get hold of. I’ve been his mouthpiece ever since—until tonight.”
“D’you mean you—parted company.”
“Oh, no. I just changed my mind.”
“He must be a remarkable fellow,” said the Saint.
“He is. When I started, I didn’t think he’d last a week, even though his ideas were good. It takes something more than good ideas to hold your own in the racket. And he couldn’t use personality—direct contact—of any kind. He was determined to be absolutely unknown to anyone from beginning to end. As a matter of fact, he hasn’t got much personality—certainly not of that kind. Perhaps he knows it. That may be why he did everything through me—he wouldn’t even speak to any of the mob over the telephone. Probably he’s one of those men who are Napoleons in their dreams, but who never do anything because directly they meet anyone face to face it all goes out of them. The Big Fellow found a way to beat that. He never met anyone face to face—except me, and somehow I didn’t scare him. He just kept on dreaming, all by himself.”
A light was starting to glimmer in the depths of Simon Templar’s understanding. It wasn’t much of a light, little more than a faint nimbus of luminance in the caverns of an illimitable obscurity, but it seemed to be brightening, growing infinitesimally larger with the crawling of time, as if a man walked with a candle in the infinities of a tremendous cave. He had an uncanny illogical premonition that perhaps after all the threads were not so widely scattered—that perhaps the wall might not be so blank as he had thought. Some unreasonable standard of the tightness of things demanded it; anything else would have been out of tune with the rest of his life, a sharp discord in a smooth flow of harmony, but he did not know why he should have that faith in such a fantastic law of coincidence.
“Were his ideas very clever?” he asked.
“He had ways for us to communicate that nobody ever found out,” she replied simply. “Morrie Ualino tried to find out who he was—so did Kuhlmann. They tried every trick and trap they could think of, but there was never any risk. I call that clever. He had a way of handling ransom money, between the man who picked it up and the time when he eventually got his share himself, which took the dicks into a blind alley every time. You know the trouble with ransom money—it’s nearly always fixed so that it can be traced. The Big Fellow never ran the slightest risk there, either, at any time. That was only the beginning. Yes, he’s clever.”
Simon nodded. All of that he could follow clearly. It was grotesque, impossible, one of the things that do not and cannot happen, but he had known that from the start. And yet the impossible things had to happen sometimes, or else the whole living universe would long since have sunk into a stagnant morass of immutable laws, and the smug pedants whose sole ambition is to bind down all surprise and endeavour into their smugly catalogued little pigeon-holes would long since have inherited their empty earth. That much he could understand. To handle thugs and killers, the brutal dehumanised cannon-fodder of the underworld, men whose scruples and loyalties and dissensions are as volatile and unpredictable as the flight of a flushed snipe, calls for a peculiar type of dom
inance. A man who would be a brilliant success in other fields, even a man who might organise and control a gigantic industry, whose thunder might shake the iron satraps of finance on their golden thrones, might be an ignoble failure there. The Big Fellow had slipped round the difficulty in the simplest possible way—had possibly even gained in prestige by the mystery with which he shielded his own weakness. But the question which Maxie had not had time to answer still remained.
“How did the Big Fellow start?” asked the Saint.
“With a hundred thousand dollars.” She smiled at his quick blend of puzzlement and attention. “That was his capital. I went to Morrie Ualino with the story that this man, whose name I couldn’t give, wanted another man kidnapped and perhaps killed. I had the contact, so we could talk straight. You can find some heels who’ll bump off a guy for fifty bucks. Most of the regulars would charge you a couple of hundred up, according to how big a noise the job would make. This man was a big shot. It could probably have been done for ten thousand. The Big Fellow offered fifty thousand, cash. He knew everything—he had the inside information, knew everything the man was doing, and had the plans laid out with a footrule. All that Morrie and his mob had to do was exactly what the Big Fellow told them, and ask no questions. They thought it was just some private quarrel. They put the snatch on this man, and then I went behind their backs and put in the ransom demand, just as the Big Fellow told me. It had to be paid in thirty-six hours, and it wasn’t. The Big Fellow passed the word for him to be rubbed out, and on the deadline he was thrown out of a car on his own doorstep. That was Flo Youssine.”
“The theatrical producer?…I remember. But the ransom story came out as soon as he was killed—”
“Of course. Morrie sent back to the Big Fellow and said he could do that sort of thing himself, without anybody telling him. The Big Fellow’s answer was ‘Why didn’t you?’ At the same time he ordered another man to be snatched off, at the same price. Morrie did it. There was just as much information as before, the plan was just as perfect, there wasn’t a hitch anywhere. Youssine having been killed was a warning, and this time the ransom was paid.”
The Saint In New York (The Saint Series) Page 18
