“You mean that seedy gigolo sort of bird who was with the Mayor?”
She nodded.
“He’s the man who really runs the town. Purdell is just a figurehead.”
“Some people don’t seem to think he’s so dumb.”
“They don’t know. There’s nothing wrong with Purdell except that he is dumb. But Eisenfeld—”
“Maybe you have inside information,” said the Saint.
She looked at him over her clenched fists, dry-eyed and defiant.
“If there were any justice in the world Al Eisenfeld would be hanged.”
The Saint raised his eyebrows, and she read the thought in his mind and met it with cynical denial.
“Oh, no—you couldn’t bring any legal evidence in any court of law that he’d ever done any physical harm to anyone that I ever heard of. But he’s a murderer, just the same. He murdered my father.”
And the Saint waited without interrupting. The story came tumbling out in a tangle of words that bit into his brain with a burden of meaning that was one of the most profound and illuminating surprises that he had had for some time. It was so easy to talk to him that before long he knew nearly as much as she did herself, and it never seemed strange to her until afterwards that she had been pouring out so much to a man she had known for less than an hour.
“This fellow Underman is a friend of Eisenfeld’s. He’s a director of the Paxolith Construction Company, and he’s the head of Underman and Co., who get most of the building contracts around here—they’re building the Riviera now. My father used to be the county surveyor, and he opposed giving the contract for the by-pass to the Paxolith Company. He knew what was going on, and he kept on fighting Eisenfeld’s graft as much as he could. Eisenfeld offered him two thousand a year to keep quiet, and say what he was told to say—there weren’t any witnesses, of course, but Daddy told me. He used to tell me everything. He threw Eisenfeld out of his office. So they framed him. Underman reported to the Council that Daddy had asked him for ten thousand pounds to see that his tender for the Riviera went through, and Daddy was fired. He lost his temper at the meeting they held to question him, and just blazed away with everything he knew and suspected about Underman and Eisenfeld. But he hadn’t any proof of anything, so they thought he was just trying to cover himself by making wild charges against everybody else, and when he started to attack Eisenfeld it was all up with him. Purdell couldn’t believe any harm of Eisenfeld even if he caught him red-handed—he’s such a straightforward and simple-minded old ass himself. Purdell was all for having Daddy arrested and prosecuted, so I suppose he took the only way out that he could see. I suppose you’d say he was a coward to do it, but he must have known they were too strong for him and it was only a question of waiting to have his name dragged through the mud.”
“When was this?” asked the Saint quietly.
“Last night…The shot woke me. I…I found him. I haven’t slept since then. How could I? This morning I made up my mind. I came out to do the only thing that was left. I didn’t care what happened to myself after that.” She broke off helplessly. “Oh, I must have been crazy. I know. But I couldn’t think of anything else. Why should they get away with it? Why should they?”
“Don’t worry,” said the Saint quietly. “They won’t.”
He spoke with a quiet and matter-of-fact certainty which was more than mere conventional encouragement. It made her look at him with a perplexity which she had been able to forget while he made her talk. For the first time since they had sat down, it seemed, she was able to remember that she still knew nothing about him, that he was no more than a sympathetic stranger who had loomed up unheralded and unintroduced out of the fog which still hadn’t cleared completely from her mind.
“If you aren’t a detective,” she asked childishly, “what are you?”
He smiled.
“I’m the guy who gives all the detectives something to work for,” he said. “I’m the source of more aches in the heads of the ungodly than I should like to boast about. I am Trouble, Unlimited—managing director, Simon Templar, at your service. They call me the Saint.”
He heard the catch of her breath and saw her eyes widen.
“You?”
“Go on,” he said, with that lazy and half-mocking smile which made the revelation suddenly seem so natural and so easy to believe. “Give me some more of the inside dope about Al.”
He ordered two more cocktails while she recovered.
“I think I’ve told you almost everything I know,” she said at last.
“Doesn’t everyone else here know it?”
“Hardly anybody—except Eisenfeld’s friends. He’s clever enough to make everyone believe that he just happens to be Purdell’s business partner and a personal friend, and that he doesn’t know anything about local politics. But it’s the other way round. It’s Purdell who doesn’t know anything. All he thinks about is his roads and hospitals and Rivieras, and he honestly believes that he’s doing the best he can for the town. He doesn’t get any graft out of it. Eisenfeld gets all that, and he’s clever enough to work it so that if anybody thinks about it at all they think Purdell is the twister. Most people won’t even believe that—Purdell’s the sort of man you’d trust with your last penny and know that if you didn’t get it back the only possible reason would be that he’d forgotten where he put it.”
The Saint lighted a cigarette and gazed at her meditatively through a stream of smoke.
“I hate to think what might have happened if I hadn’t met you, Molly,” he murmured. “But it’s a great idea…And the more I think of it, the more I think you must be right.”
He let his mind play with the situation for a moment. Maybe he was too subtle himself, but there was something about Mr Eisenfeld’s technique which appealed to his incorrigible sense of the artistry of corruption. To be the power behind the scenes while some lifelike figurehead stood up to receive the rotten eggs was just ordinary astuteness. But to choose for that figurehead a man who was so honest and stupid that it would take an earthquake to make him realise what was going on, and whose honest stupidity was so transparent that even the potential egg-throwers would usually be disarmed—that indicated a quality of guile to which Simon Templar raised an appreciative hat. But his admiration of Mr Eisenfeld’s ingenuity was purely theoretical.
He made a note of the girl’s address.
“I’ll keep the gun,” he said before they parted. “You won’t be needing it, and I shouldn’t like you to lose your head again when I wasn’t around to interfere. And don’t go jumping off the pier or throwing yourself under a bus or anything like that, because that would be a waste of a perfectly good life. You’ll see that it’ll be perfectly good in a day or two.” His blue eyes held her for a little while with quiet confidence. “Al Eisenfeld is going to be dealt with—I promise you that.”
It was one of his many mysteries that the fantastic promise failed to rouse her to utter incredulity. Afterwards she would be incredulous, after he had fulfilled the promise even more so, but while she listened there was a spell about him that made all miracles seem possible.
“What can you do?” she asked, in the blind but indescribably inspiring belief that there must be some magic which he could achieve.
“I have my methods,” said the Saint. “I came here anyhow because I was interested in the stories I’d heard, and we’ll just call it lucky that I happened to be taking a look at the Mayor when you had your brainstorm. Just do one thing for me. Forget all about today—forget that you ever met me or even heard of me. Let me do the remembering.”
Mr Eisenfeld’s memory was less retentive. When he came home a few nights later he had completely forgotten the fleeting squirm of uneasiness which the reference to the Saint in the Bulldog had given him. He had almost as completely forgotten the late county surveyor; although when he did remember him it was with a feeling of satisfaction that he had got rid of himself so considerately, instead of putting up a fight which might have been troubl
esome. Already Mr Eisenfeld had selected another occupant for that conveniently vacated office, whom it would be easy to persuade Sam Purdell to recommend, and who he was assured would prove more amenable to reason. And that night he was expecting another visitor whose mission would give him an almost equal satisfaction.
The visitor arrived punctually, and was hospitably received with a whisky and soda and a cigar. After a brief exchange of cordial commonplaces, the visitor produced a bulging envelope and slid it casually across the table. In the same casual manner Mr Eisenfeld picked it up, inspected the contents, and slipped it into his pocket. After which the two men refilled their glasses and smoked for a time in companionable silence.
“We got that extra load of cement delivered yesterday,” remarked the visitor, in the same way that he might have bridged a conversational hiatus with some bromidic comment on the weather.
Mr Eisenfeld nodded.
“Yes, I saw it. They’ve got the monument about a quarter full already—I was walking around there this afternoon.”
Mr Underman gazed vacantly at the ceiling.
“When that new Town Hall contract comes up we’ll still be making good cement,” he said, with the same studied casualness. “We might have a chat about it some time.”
“Sure, I’ll remember it,” said Mr Eisenfeld amiably.
Mr Underman fingered his chin.
“Too bad about Provost, wasn’t it?” he remarked.
“Yes,” agreed Mr Eisenfeld. “Too bad.”
Half an hour later he escorted his guest out to his car. The light over the porch had gone out when he returned to the house, and without giving it any serious thought he attributed it to a blown fuse or a faulty bulb. He was in too good a humour to be annoyed by it, and he was actually humming complacently to himself as he groped for the door handle. The light in the hall had gone out as well, and he frowned faintly over the deduction that it must have been a fuse. He turned to close the door after him, and then a hand clamped over his mouth, and something hard and uncongenial pressed into the small of his back. A gentle voice spoke chillingly in his ear.
“Just one word,” it whispered invitingly, “just one word out of you, Al, and your life story is going to be an obituary notice.”
Mr Eisenfeld stood still, with his muscles rigid. He was not a physical coward, but the grip which held his head pressed back against the chest of the unknown man behind him had a firm competence which announced that there were adequate sinews behind it to back up its persuasion in any hand-to-hand struggle. Also the object which prodded into the middle of his spine constituted an argument in itself which he was wise enough to understand.
The clasp on his mouth relaxed tentatively, and slid down to rest lightly on his throat. The same gentle voice breathed again on his right eardrum.
“Let us go out into the great open spaces and look at the night,” said the Saint.
Mr Eisenfeld allowed himself to be conducted back down the walk over which he had just returned. He had very little choice in the matter. The gun of the uninvited guest remained glued to his backbone as if it intended to take root there, and he knew that the fingers which rested so caressingly on his windpipe would have detected the first shout he tried to utter before it could reach his vocal chords.
A few yards down the road a car waited with its lights burning. They stopped beside it.
“Open the door and get in.”
Mr Eisenfeld obeyed. The gun slipped round from his back to his right side as his escort followed him into the seat behind the wheel. Simon started the engine and slipped the gear lever into first. He switched on the headlights as they moved away from the kerb, and Mr Eisenfeld found his first opportunity of giving vent to the emotions that were chasing themselves through his system.
“What the hell’s the idea of this?” he demanded violently.
“We’re going for a little drive, dear old bird,” answered the Saint. “But I promise you won’t have to walk home. My intentions are more honourable than anyone like you could easily imagine.”
“If you’re trying to kidnap me,” Eisenfeld blustered, “let me tell you that you’ve got a lot of trouble coming to you. There’s a law in this country for people like you. Why, you—”
Simon let him make his speech without interruption. The lights of the residential streets twinkled steadily past them, and presently even Eisenfeld’s flood of outraged eloquence dwindled away before that impenetrable calm. It was after one o’clock, and the streets were practically deserted—Eisenfeld realised that any outcry he attempted to make from that speeding car would be merely a waste of effort. He sat silently fuming, until the car jolted off the sea front to the unfinished road that ran through the Elmford Riviera. Exactly in the middle of the new esplanade, under the very shadow of the central monument which Sam Purdell had been so modestly unwilling to accept, the car stopped.
“This is as far as we go,” said the Saint, and motioned politely to the door.
Mr Eisenfeld got out. He was sweating a little with perfectly natural fear, and above that there was a growing cloud of mystification through which he was trying to discover some coherent design in the extraordinary sequence of events which had enveloped him in those last few minutes. He seemed to have been caught up in the machinery of some hideous nightmare, in which the horror was intensified by the fact that he could find no reason in the way it moved. If he was indeed the victim of an attempted kidnapping, why should he have been brought to a place like that?
The spidery lines of scaffolding on the monument rose up in a futuristic filigree over his head, and at the top of it the shadowy outlines of the chute where the cement was mixed and poured into the hollow mould of stone roosted like a grotesque and angular prehistoric bird.
“Let’s climb up and look at the view,” said the Saint.
Still wondering, Mr Eisenfeld felt himself steered towards a ladder which ran up one side of the scaffolding. He climbed mechanically, as he was ordered, while a stream of unanswerable questions drummed bewilderingly through his brain. Once the wild idea came to him to kick downwards at the head of the man who followed him, but when he looked down he saw that the head was several rungs below his feet, keeping a safely measured distance, and when he stopped climbing the man behind him stopped also. Eisenfeld went on, up through the dark. He was free to shout then, but he knew that there was half a mile of deserted ground between him and the nearest person who might have heard him.
They came out on the plank staging which ran round the top of the monument. A moment later, as he looked back, Mr Eisenfeld saw the silhouette of his unaccountable kidnapper rising up against the dimly luminous background of stars and reaching the platform to lean lazily against one of the ragged ends of a scaffold pole which rose above the narrow catwalk. Behind him, the hollow shaft of the monument was a square void of deeper blackness in the surrounding dark.
“This is the end of your journey, Al,” said the stranger softly. “But before you go, there are just one or two things I should like to remind you about. Also we haven’t been properly introduced, which is probably making things rather difficult for you. You had better know me…I am the Saint.”
Eisenfeld started and almost overbalanced. Where had he heard that name before? Suddenly he remembered, and an uncanny chill crawled over his flesh.
“There are various reasons why it doesn’t seem necessary for you to go on living,” went on that very gentle and dispassionate voice, “and your ugly face is only one of them. I suppose people have got away with different forms of graft before, and I suppose they’ll do it again, but I’ve heard a story from a girl called Molly Provost—her father committed suicide for your benefit, I believe.”
“She’s a liar,” gasped Eisenfeld hoarsely. “You’re crazy! Listen—”
He would have sworn that the stranger had never touched him except with his gun since they got into the car, but suddenly an electric flashlight spilled a tiny strip of luminance over the boards between them, an
d in the bright centre of the beam he saw the Saint’s hand running through the contents of an envelope which looked somehow familiar. All at once Eisenfeld recognised it, and clutched unbelievingly at his pocket. The envelope which his guest had given him three quarters of an hour ago was gone, and Eisenfeld’s heart almost stopped beating.
“What are you doing with that?” he croaked.
“Just seeing how much this instalment of graft is worth,” answered the Saint calmly. “And it looks exactly like five thousand pounds to me. Well, it might have been more, but it’ll have to do. I suppose in the circumstances there won’t be any pension paid to Provost’s dependants. I think they ought to be looked after, and I don’t see why it shouldn’t be at your expense. I suppose this is part of your commission for getting Underman the contract for this job, isn’t it…? It seems very appropriate.”
Eisenfeld’s throat constricted, and the blood began to pound in his temples.
“I’ll get you for this,” he snarled. “You bloody crook—”
“Maybe I am a crook,” said the Saint, in a voice that was no more than a breath of sound in the still night. “But in between times I’m something more. In my simple way I am a kind of justice—The Law may have nothing to say to you, Eisenfeld, but to my mind you are as guilty of wilful murder as if you had killed Provost yourself. Do you know any good reason why you should wait any longer for what you deserve?”
There is a time in every man’s life when he knows beyond doubt or common fear that the threads of Destiny are running out. It had happened to Al Eisenfeld too suddenly for him to understand—he had no time to look back and count the incredible minutes in which his world had been turned upside down. Perhaps he himself had no clear idea of what he was doing, but he knew that he was hearing death in the quiet voice that spoke out of the darkness in front of him.
His muscles carried him away without any conscious command from his brain, and he was unaware of the queer growling cry that rattled in his throat. There was a crash of sound in front of him as he sprang blindly forward, and a tongue of reddish-orange flame spat out of the darkness almost in his face…
The Happy Highwayman (The Saint Series) Page 9
