Mr Peabody’s idiosyncrasy was that of displaying his choicest wares in his window—and leaving them there for the passing crowd to feast their eyes upon. Not for him the obscurity of safes and strong-rooms: that was only the fate of the undistinguished bulk of his stock, the more commonplace articles of vertu. His prize pieces were invariably set out behind the glass on velvet-lined shelves lighted by chastely shielded bulbs. An act of deliberate criminal foolishness, from the point of view of almost anyone except Mr Peabody. From the point of view of the Green Cross boys, an act of sublime charity.
It was a very good bust, from the point of view of a detached connoisseur—carried out with all the slick perfection of technique of which the Green Cross boys were justly proud. The coup was no haphazard smash-and-grab affair, but a small-scale masterpiece of which every detail had been planned and rehearsed until the first and only public presentation could be guaranteed to flutter through its allotted segment of history with the smooth precision of a ballet. Mr Peabody’s emporium had been selected for the setting out of a list of dozens of other candidates simply on account of that aforesaid idiosyncrasy of his, and every item to be taken had been priced and contracted for in advance.
Joe Corrigan was booked to drive the car; Clem Enright heaved the brick, and Ted Orping, a specialist in his own line, was ready with the bag. In the space of four seconds, as previously timed by Ted Orping’s stop-watch, a collection of assorted bijouterie for which any receiver would cheerfully have given two thousand pounds in hard cash vanished from Mr Peabody’s shattered window with the celerity of rabbits fading away from a field at the approach of a conjuror with an empty top-hat, A gross remuneration, per head of the parties concerned, of five hundred pounds for the job—if you care to look at it that way. Fast money, for on the big night the performance went through well within scheduled limits.
It was precisely two o’clock in the morning when Clem Enright’s brick went through Mr Peabody’s plate-glass, and the smash of it startled a constable who was patrolling leisurely down his beat a matter of twenty yards away. Ted Orping’s hands flew in and out of the window with lightning accuracy while the policeman was fumbling with his whistle and lumbering the first few yards towards them. Before the Law had covered half the distance the job was finished, and the two Green Cross experts were piling into the back of the car as it jolted away and gathered speed towards Oxford Circus. The stolen wagon whizzed over the deserted cross-roads as the first shrill blast of alarm wailed into the night far behind.
“Good work,” said Ted Orping, speaking as much for his own share in the triumph as anybody else’s.
He settled back in his corner and pulled the brim of his hat—a broad-shouldered, prematurely old young man of about twenty-eight, with a square jaw and two deep creases running down from his nose and past the corners of his thin mouth. He was one of the first examples of a type of crook that was still new and strange to England, a type that founded itself on the American hoodlum, educated in movie theatres and polished on the raw underworld fiction imported by F. W. Woolworth—a type that was breaking into the placid and gentlemanly paths of old-world crime as surely and ruthlessly as Fate. In a few years more his type was no longer to seem strange and foreign, but in those days he was an innovation, respected and feared by his satellites. He had learned to imitate Transatlantic callousness and pugnacity so well that he was no longer conscious of playing a part. He had the bullying swagger, the taste for ostentatious clothes, the desire for power, and he said “Oh, yeah?” with exactly the right shade of contempt and belligerence.
“Easy pickings,” said Clem Enright.
He tried to ape Ted Orping’s manner, but he lacked the physical personality. He was a Cockney sneak-thief born and bred, with the pale peaked face and shifty eyes of his inheritance. Alone and sober, his one idea was to avoid attracting attention, but in the shelter of Ted Orping’s massive bravado he found his courage expanding.
He also lolled back in the seat, and produced a battered yellow packet of cigarettes.
“Fag?”
Ted Orping looked down his nose.
“Y’ain’t still smokin’ those things?”
He twitched the packet out of the Cockney’s fingers and flipped it over the side. A rolled-gold cigarette case came out of his pocket and pushed into Clem Enright’s ribs under a black-rimmed thumbnail.
“Take ’alf a dozen.”
Clem helped himself, and struck a match. They lounged back again, exhaling the fumes of cheap Turkish tobacco with elaborate relish. Either of them would secretly have preferred the yellow gaspers to which they were accustomed, but Ted Orping insisted on their improved status.
Suddenly he leaned forward and punched the driver on the shoulder.
“Hey, Joe! Time you were turning east The Flying Squad ain’t after us tonight.”
The driver nodded. They were speeding up the west side of Regent’s Park, and the driving mirror showed no lights behind.
“And easy on the gas,” Ted snapped. “You don’t want to be copped for dangerous driving.”
The car spun round a bend with a sharpness that sent Ted Orping lurching back into his corner, and held its speed. They drove east, and turned south again.
Ted Orping scowled. He wanted all his colleagues to acknowledge him as the boss, the Big Fellow, whose word was law—to be obeyed promptly and implicitly. Joe Corrigan didn’t seem to cotton to the idea. And he had broad shoulders too—and grey Irish eyes that didn’t flinch readily. Independent. Maybe too independent, Ted Orping thought. It was Joe Corrigan who had insisted that they should go into a pub and have a bracer before they did the job, and who had got his way against Ted Orping’s opposition. Maybe Joe was getting too big for his boots…Ted ran a hand over the hard bulge at his hip, thoughtfully. Four or five years ago the independence of Joe Corrigan would never have stimulated Ted to thoughts of murder, but he had been taught that when a guy got too big for his boots he was just taken for ride.
The car swung left, violently, and then to the right again. They were droning down a street of sombre houses on the east side of the park. One or two upper windows were lighted, but there were no pedestrians about—only another long-nosed silvery-grey speed wagon drawn up by the kerb with its side lights dimmed, facing towards them.
All at once their brakes went on with a screaming force that jerked the two men behind forward in their seats. They skidded to a stop by the pavement, with their bonnet a dozen feet away from the nose of the silver car.
Ted Orping cursed and hitched himself farther forward. His broad hand crimped on the driver’s shoulder.
“What the hell—?”
He fell back as the driver turned…with his jaw dropping.
The two Green Cross boys sat side by side, staring at the face of the man in the heavy leather coat that had been worn by Joe Corrigan when they set out. It was a lean sunburnt face, recklessly clean-cut and swashbuckling in its rakish keenness of line, in which the amazingly clear and mocking blue eyes gleamed like chips of crystal. There was a coolness, an effrontery, a fighting ruthlessness about it that left them momentarily speechless. It was the most dangerously challenging face that either of them had ever seen. But it was not the face of Joe Corrigan.
“The jaunt is over, boys,” said the face amiably. “I hope you’ve had a good time and caught no colds. And thanks for the job—it was about the best I’ve been able to watch. You two ought to take it up professionally—you’d do well.”
Ted Orping wetted his lips.
“Who are you?” he asked.
The driver smiled. It was a benevolent, almost seraphic smile, that bared a glint of ivory-white teeth, and yet there was nothing reassuring about it. It was as full of the hair-trigger threat of sudden death as the round hollow snout of the gun that slid up over the back of the seat in the driver’s hand. Ted Orping had seen smiles like that in the movies, and he knew.
“I am the Saint,” said the driver gently. “I see you’ve heard o
f me. Perhaps you thought I’d gone out of business. Well, you can work it out. I’m sorry about Joe, but he kind of had an accident coming out of that pub. It seemed as if you were left without a driver, but I hated to disappoint you—so I took his place…You might keep your hands on your lap, Ted—it makes me nervous when they’re out of sight.”
The muzzle of the gun shifted slightly, so that Ted Orping looked down the barrel. His hands ceased to stray behind him, and lay still.
The Saint reached a long arm over to the floor at Ted Orping’s feet, and picked up the bag. He weighed it, speculatively and judiciously under the two Green Cross boys’ noses.
“A nice haul—as you were both saying,” he murmured. “I couldn’t have done better myself. But I think it’s worth too much money for you lads to have all to yourselves. You might want to move up another stage in life and take to cigars—and cigars, Ted, need a strong tum-tum when you aren’t used to them. So I’ll just take care of it for you. Give my love to Joe and the rest of the gang, and if you hear any more of those rumours about my having retired you’ll know what to say. And I hope you’ll say it. It cannot be too widely known—”
Ted Orping came to life, grimly and desperately. It may have been that the actual sight of so much hard won wealth vanishing into the hands of the mocking hijacker in front spurred him to the gamble; it may have been that he had to prove to himself that he wasn’t afraid of any other man who carried a gun; or it may only have been the necessity of retaining Clem Enright’s respect. Whatever his motive was, he took his chance, with a blaze of sheer animal courage.
He hurled himself forward out of his seat and grabbed at the gun in the Saint’s hand. And the Saint pressed the trigger.
There was no report—only a sharp liquid hiss. A shining jet of ammonia leapt from the muzzle of the gun like a pencil of polished glass, and struck Ted Orping accurately on the bridge of his nose. It sprayed out over his face from the point of impact, burning his eyeballs with its agonising sting and filling his lungs with pungent choking vapours. Orping fell back with a gasp, and Simon Templar opened the door.
He stepped out on the pavement, and his gun still covered the two men. Clem Enright cringed away.
“So long, Clem,” said the Saint genially.
He ran down to the other car. The engine was ticking smoothly over as he reached it, and he swung himself nimbly in beside the girl who sat waiting at the wheel. The car swung out and skimmed neatly past the front wheels of the motionless bandit wagon ahead, and the Saint turned to wave a farewell to the two helpless men as they went by.
Then he sank back with a laugh and lighted a cigarette.
“Haven’t you ever noticed that the simplest ideas are usually the best?” he remarked. “That old water-pistol gag, for instance: could anything be more elementary, and yet more bright and beautiful? I see that our technique is not yet perfect, Pat—all we need is to discover some trick with the smell of the Ark still wafting fruitily about it, and we could clean up the world.”
Patricia Holm steered the huge Hirondel round another corner and the wind caught her fair hair as she turned to smile at him.
“Simon,” she said dispassionately, “you have no conscience.”
“None,” said Simon Templar.
He was wearing a dinner jacket under his leather coat, and Joe Corrigan’s cap went into a pocket in the car. Half an hour later they were strolling into the Breakfast Club for a celebratory plate of bacon and eggs and a final turn round the minute dance floor. And to any casual observer who saw the Saint drifting debonairly through the throng of elegant idlers, exchanging words with an acquaintance here and there, straightening the head waiter’s tie, and at last demolishing a large dish of the Club’s world-famous speciality, it would have been difficult to believe that the police and the underworld alike reckoned him the most dangerous man in England—or that a matter of mere minutes earlier he had been giving a convincing demonstration that his hand had lost none of its cunning.
It amused Simon Templar to be taken for one of those elegant idlers, just as it amused him to be known for something totally different in other and no less exclusive circles. He was due to derive a great deal of amusement from the fact that a certain gentleman from St. Louis counted him the most serious obstacle to a well-planned campaign that was just coming to maturity.
2
The city of St. Louis was not particularly proud of Tex Goldman. It knew him as a man who had successfully “beaten the rap” on five notorious occasions, who was no less at home with typewriters and pineapples than he was with the common heater, who had a choice selection of judges and police captains eating out of his hand, and who secured whatever subscriptions to the funds of “protection” that he set out to collect. He ranked third on the city’s roll of public enemies, and he made no secret of his aspirations to an even higher position, but nearly nine months ago an unfortunate incident had dictated a lengthy holiday. Tex Goldman had taken on the task of reducing a recalcitrant section of the Chinese laundry proprietors to a proper sense of their responsibilities, and in the process one of his bullets had found its mark in the heart of the leader of a powerful Tong. Before nightfall the war gongs were beating for him, and Tex Goldman, who was no coward, took the advice of his friends and left St. Louis for his health.
He headed for New York, and felt homesick. He was used to being recognised as a big shot, but he found that Manhattan Island scored him as a small town hoodlum. When it formed any other estimate of him, the result was a warning to watch his step and pipe down. The Great White Way had its own emperors, who were not disposed to encourage competition. If he had been a smaller man he could probably have found a billet for his heater in one of the Broadway Czars’ bodyguards; if he had been bigger he might have negotiated for a little kingdom of his own; but Tex Goldman in those days came just between the useful extremes, and he wasn’t wanted. Also he had a tip that the Tong’s hatchet men were close behind him. There was plenty of jack in his pocket, and for reasons known only to himself his thoughts wandered to a holiday in the Old World.
He came to England, looked around, and thought of business.
He was a big man running to fat, a little thin on top, with a round blue jowl and cold black eyes. A killer by nature and experience, of the authentic type that Ted Orping tried to emulate. He wore a yellow belted overcoat and a solitaire diamond in his tie, and the one thing he knew all about was how to pay for such adornments without wearing himself out in honest labour. He studied London, and called it soft.
“There’s a fortune to be picked up here by any man who ain’t too particular,” he said, “But you got to get organised. What’s the use of a few bum stickup men who’ve scarcely learnt to tell one end of a rod from the other? They’re just nibbling at it—and they got the police scared already. All they want is pulling together by a man who knows the racket, and that guy’s name is Tex Goldman.”
He said that to Mr Ronald Nilder, who was not a willing audience.
“You won’t get away with it over here,” said Mr Nilder. “They’re hot on murder in this country, and you can’t bribe the police over anything big.”
“You gotta show me,” said Tex Goldman.
He extinguished a half-smoked cigar, and lighted a fresh one. Tex Goldman never smoked more than half a cigar, and he paid two bucks for each of them.
“Can’t bribe the dicks, huh? Are you telling me that no policeman ever took graft? Sure, the London police are wonderful—they ain’t even human…Forget it, Nilder. You can bribe anyone if you make it big enough. Cuts in police pay mean men who want more money, and they get a sense of grievance that eases their consciences.”
Mr Nilder sat on the edge of a chair and twirled the handle of his umbrella. He was a well-fed and nattily-dressed little man with close-set eyes and a loose lower lip. Tex Goldman knew what he was, despised him heartily, and intended to make use of him.
“I don’t like it, Mr Goldman.”
“You ain�
��t asked to like it or not like it,” said the man from St. Louis bluntly. “All you got to do is take your orders from me and cash your shakedown, and you can put your feelings where they belong. You got a dandy little motor launch, and you got connections on the other side of the ditch. You just be a good boy and run the guns over for me as I order ’em, or do anything else I tell you with that boat of yours, and you and me will mix in fine. Otherwise Scotland Yard might hear some more about your vice racket.”
Mr Nilder winced slightly. He disliked hearing his business described so candidly. The Cosmolite Vaudeville Agency, which he controlled, was a prosperous organisation that supplied cabaret artists to every part of Europe and South America. Frequently the cabarets concerned were not so purely artistic as they might have been, but since the girls who went there had no relatives there were no embarrassing inquiries. Mr Nilder was not troubled with moral scruples. He was a simple tradesman, like a green-grocer or a butcher, supplying a continuous demand, and his sole object was to avoid the attention of the police. The “cabaret” game was already almost played out, but there were other and less widely advertised channels which Mr Ronald Nilder knew.
“It means prison if we’re caught, Mr Goldman,” he said.
“It means prison if you’re caught doing other things,” said Goldman, significantly. “But don’t worry—I shouldn’t ask you to do any shooting. All you gotta do is run those heaters, and you start Monday.”
He peeled a dozen ten-pound notes off a thick pack, and slipped them contemptuously across the table. Nilder picked them up, fingered them nervously, and pushed them into his pocket. He knew that Goldman could order him about as he willed—he was afraid of the big man from St. Louis, afraid of his cold black eyes and deep masterful voice, even more afraid of what the man from St. Louis could have told the police. But he was not happy. Violence was not in his line—not even when he had to take no active part in it, and was still paid generously.
The Saint and Mr. Teal (The Saint Series) Page 9
