by Greenberg
It was a voice that he knew, even if he had not known it long – a deep musical voice with appealing foreign inflections.
“You aren’t only handsome, but you have talent,” she said. “‘Why didn’t you tell me you were a writer too?”
“My union doesn’t allow it.”
“Am I going to see you again? I’d like to very much.”
He reached for a cigarette.
“I’m flattered. But I’ve only just paid one installment on the Blue Goose.”
“I don’t have to be there till ten. What are you doing for dinner?”
“Eating with you,” he said with abrupt decision. “I’ll meet you in the lobby here at eight o’clock.”
He hung up, and still wondered which category that belonged in. But anything would be better than waiting in idleness.
He washed and freshened himself and changed his shirt, and went downstairs a little before eight. There was a note in his box when he turned in his key.
“It was delivered by hand just a few minutes ago,” said the clerk.
Simon slit open the envelope. The letter inside was written in pencil on a cheap lined paper of an uncommon but typical pattern. There was no address; but Simon knew what that would be even without the clues in the context.
Dear Mr. Templar,
I just read your piece in the paper, and I can tell you sure have got it over these dumb bastards. I am getting a chap to take this out for me. I can tell you a lot more about this case and I will tell you if you can fix it to talk to me alone. You are right all the way and I can prove it, but I will not talk to anyone except you. After that you can do what you like with what I tell you but I will not give these dumb cops anything.
Yours truly, NICK VASHCETTI
Simon looked up from the note because someone was practically leaning on him and breathing in his face.
“Got a love letter?” asked Detective Yard. “Or is it fan mail?”
Simon put the letter in his pocket.
“Yes,” he said. “But not for you. In fact I hate to tell you, but my admirer calls you a dumb bastard.”
The detective’s face swelled as if he were being strangled.
“Listen, you,” he got out. “One of these days – ”
“You’re going to forget your orders and be unkind to me,” said the Saint. “So I’ll be kind to you while I can. In a few minutes I’ll be going out to dinner. I’ll try to pick a restaurant where they’ll let you in. And if I start to leave before you’ve finished, just yell at me and I’ll wait for you.”
Simon thought afterwards that it was criminal negligence on his part that he was so seduced by the frustration of Detective Yard that he didn’t even notice the thin gray-blond man and the fat red-haired man who occupied chairs in the farther reaches of the lobby. But there was an excuse for him; because while he had heard their names and heard their sketchy descriptions, he had never before laid eyes on Johan Blatt and Fritzie Weinbach.
6
He went back up to his room and phoned the city desk of the Times-Tribune.
“Could you work it for me to have a private chat with a prisoner in the City Jail?”
“It might be done,” said the editor cautiously, “if nobody knew it was you. Why – have you had a bite?”
“I hope so,” said the Saint. “The guy’s name is Nick Vaschetti.” He spelt it out. “He says he won’t talk to anybody but me; but maybe the jail doesn’t have to know me. See what you can do, and I’ll call you back in about an hour.”
He sat on the bed in thought for a minute or two, and then he picked up the telephone again and asked for Washington. He hardly had to wait at all, for although the hotel operator didn’t know it the number he asked for was its own automatic priority through all long distance exchanges.
“Hamilton,” said the phone. “I hear you’re a newspaper man now.”
“In self-defense,” said the Saint. “If you don’t like it, I can pack up. I never asked for this job, anyway.”
“I only hope you’re getting a good salary to credit against your expense account.”
The Saint grinned.
“On the contrary, you’ll probably be stuck for my union dues . . . Listen, Ham: I’d rather lay it in your lap, but I think I’d better bother you. These three men – ”
“Blatt, Weinbach, and Maris?”
“Your carrier pigeons travel fast.”
“They have to. Is there anything else on them?”
Simon gave him the two rough descriptions.
“There’s a good chance,” he said, “that they may have come on from Chicago. But that’s almost a guess. Anyway, try it.”
“You never want much, do you?”
“I don’t like you to feel left out.”
“You’re not leaving out the beautiful swooning siren, of course.”
“In this case, she’s a blond.”
“You must like variety,” Hamilton sighed. “How much longer are you expecting to take?”
“Depending on what you can dig up about the Three Neros, and what breaks tonight,” said the Saint, “maybe not long. Don’t go to bed too early, anyhow.”
Which left him laughing inwardly at the breathtaking dimensions of his own bravado. And yet it has already been recorded in many of these chronicles that some of the Saint’s tensest climaxes had often been brewing when those almost prophetic undercurrents of swashbuckling extravagance danced in his arteries . . .
Olga Ivanovitch was waiting in the lobby when he came downstairs again.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “There was a letter I had to answer.”
“Nitchevo,” she said in her low warm memorable voice. “I was late myself, and we have plenty of time.”
He admitted to himself after he saw her that he had had some belated misgivings about the rendezvous. The lighting in the lobby of the Alamo House was a different proposition from the blue dimness of the Blue Goose: she might have looked tired and coarsened, or she might have been overdressed and overpainted into a cheap travesty of charm. But she was none of those things. Her skin was so clear and fresh that she actually looked younger than he remembered her. She wore a long dress; but the decolletage was chastely pinned together, and she wore an inappropriate light camelhair polo coat over it that gave her a kind of careless apologetic swagger. She looked like a woman that any grown man would be a little excited to take anywhere.
“I’ve got a car,” he said. “We can take it if you can direct me.”
“Let me drive you, and I’ll promise you a good dinner.”
He let her drive, and sat beside her in alert relaxation. This could have been the simplest kind of trap; but if it was, it was what he had asked for, and he was ready for it. He had checked the gun in his shoulder holster once more before he last left his room, and the slim two-edged knife in the sheath strapped to his right calf was almost as deadly a weapon in his hands – and even less easy to detect. It nested down under his sock with hardly a bulge, but it was accessible from any sitting or reclining position by the most innocent motion of hitching up his trouser cuff to scratch the side of his knee.
Simon Templar was even inclined to feel cheated when the drive ended without incident.
She steered him into a darkened bistro near the Gulf shore with bare wooden booths and marble-topped tables and sawdust on the floor.
“You have eaten bouillabaisse in Marseilles,” she said, “and perhaps in New Orleans. Now you will try this, and you will not be too disappointed.”
The place was bleakly bright inside, and it was busy with people who looked ordinary but sober and harmless. Simon decided that it would be as safe as anything in his life ever could be to loosen up for the length of dinner.
“What made you call me?” he asked bluntly.
He had always felt her simple candor at the most cryptic of complexities.
“Why shouldn’t I?” she returned. “I wanted to see you. And you turn out to be such an unusual kind of traveling salesma
n.”
“There are so few things you can sell these days, a guy has to have a side line.”
“You write very cleverly. I enjoyed your story. But when you were asking me questions, you weren’t being honest with me.”
“I told you everything I could.”
“And I still told you everything I knew. Why do you think I was – what do you call it – holding out on you?”
“I told you everything I know, tovarich. Even if you did place me for a salesman.”
“You didn’t ask me about Blatt, Weinbach, and Maris.
“Only about Blatt.”
He had to say that, but she could still make him feel wrong. Her air of straightforwardness was so unwavering that it turned the interrogator into the suspect. He had tried every device and approach in a rather fabulous repertoire the night before, and hadn’t even scratched the surface of her. He knew exactly why even Lieutenant Kinglake might have left her alone, without any political pressure. Take her into court, and she could have made any public prosecutor feel that he was the prisoner who was being tried. It was the most flawlessly consistent stonewall act that Simon Templar had ever seen.
“You could have asked me about the others,” she said. “If I could have told you anything, I would have. I’d like to help you.”
“What could you have told me?”
“Nothing.”
At least she had told him the truth about the bouillabaisse. He gave himself up to that consolation with fearful restraint.
It was half an hour later when he made one more attempt to drag the conversation back from the delightful flights of nothingness into which she was able to lead it so adroitly.
“Aside from my beautiful profile and my great literary gifts,” he said, “I’d still like to know what made you want to see me again.”
“I wanted you to pay for my dinner,” she said seriously. “And I do like you – very much.”
He remembered the way she had kissed him at her door, and forced himself to consider that if he had gone for that he would probably have heen going for something as calculated as her simplicity.
“It couldn’t have been, by any chance, because you wanted to find out if I knew anymore?”
“But why should I? I am not a detective. Do I keep asking you questions?” She was wide open and disarming. “No, I am just guilty of liking you. If you wanted to tell me things, I would listen. You see, my dear, I have that Russian feeling which you would think stupid or corny: that a woman should be the slave of a man she admires. I am fascinated by you. So I must be interested in what you are doing. That is all.”
The Saint’s teeth gripped together while he smiled.
“Then, sweetheart, you’ll be interested to know that I’m going to make an important phone call, if you’ll excuse me a minute.”
He went to a coin phone at the rear of the restaurant and called the Times-Tribune again.
“It’s all set,” said the flat voice of the city editor. “Any time you want to pick me up.”
“I’m just finishing dinner,” said the Saint grimly. “If nothing happens on the way, I’ll pick you up within thirty minutes.”
He went back to the table, and found Olga placidly powdering her perfect nose.
“I hate to break this up,” he said, “but I have a short call to make; and have to deliver you back to the Blue Goose in time to catch the next influx of salesmen.”
“Whatever you like,” she replied calmly. “I don’t have to be exactly on time though, so you do whatever you want to do.”
It was impossible to stir her even with virtual insult.
But he drove the Ford himself this time, knowing that it could have seemed a much better moment for ambush than before dinner. Yet even then nothing happened, in such a way that the mere failure of anything to happen was a subtle rebuke in exactly the same key as all her refusals to rise to his varied provocations.
His sleepless sense of direction enabled him to drive without a mistake to the offices of the Times-Tribune; and he arrived there with no more alarm than a slight stiffness in muscles which had been poised too long on an uncertain fuse. But then, the egregious efficiency of Detective Yard had still conspired to blind him to the shift of concealing newspapers which had punctuated his exit from the Alamo House.
“I have to complain to my editor about the size of my headlines,” he said. “It’s a union rule. Do you mind waiting a little while?”
“Of course not,” she said with that sublime and demoralizing pliability. “Waiting is an old Russian pastime.”
Simon went up to the editorial floor, and this time he swept through the interceptor command without interference, powered by the certainty of his route and destination.
The city editor saw him, and took his feet off the desk and crammed a discolored and shapeless panama on to the small end of his pear-shaped head.
“I’ll have to go with you myself,” he explained. “Not that I think you’d sell out to the UP, but it’s the only way I could fix it. Let me do the talking, and you can take over when we get your man.”
“What’s he in for?”
“Passing a rubber check at his hotel. I hope you have some idea what strings I had to pull to arrange this for you.”
Simon handed him the note that had been delivered to the Alamo House. The editor read it while they waited for the elevator.
“Smuggled out, eh? . . . Well, it might come to something.”
“Is there a back alley way out of the building?”
“When I was a copy boy here, we used to know one. I haven’t noticed the building being altered since.” The city editor turned his shrewd sphinxlike face toward Simon with only the glitter of his eyes for a clue to his expression. “Are we still expecting something to happen?”
“I hope, yes and no,” said the Saint tersely. “I left Olga in my car outside, for a front and a cover. I’m hoping she’s either fooled herself or she’ll fool somebody else.”
He knew that he had seldom been so vulnerable, but he never guessed how that flaw in his guard was to mature. He just felt sure that a prisoner in the City Jail couldn’t be the trigger of any of the potential traps that he was waiting to recognize. Provided he took the obvious precautions, like leaving Olga Ivanovitch in his car outside the newspaper building while he slipped out through a back alley . . .
The Times-Tribune man’s dry bulbous presence was a key that by-passed tired clerks and opened clanging iron doors, and exacted obedience from soured disinterested jailers, and led them eventually into a small barren and discouraging office room with barred windows where they waited through a short echoing silence until the door opened again to admit Mr. Vaschetti with a turnkey behind him.
The door closed again, leaving the turnkey outside; and Mr. Vaschetti’s darting black eyes switched over the city editor’s somnolent self-effacement and made one of their touch landings on the Saint.
“You’re Templar,” he stated. “But I said this had to be private.”
“This is Mr. Beetlespats of the Times-Tribune,” said the Saint inventively. “He published the article you read, and he organized this meeting. But we can pretend he isn’t here. Just tell me what you’ve got on your mind.”
Vaschetti’s eyes whirled around the room like small dark bugs exploring the intricacies of a candelabra.
“I can tell you,” he said, “you were dead right about Matson. I’ve been a courier for the Bund for a long time. I took a letter to Matson in St. Louis, and I brought a letter to your Mr. Blatt and other people in Galveston too.”
7
He was a rather small man, spare and wiry, with the heavy eyebrows and hollow cheeks which so often seem to go together. His hair needed combing and his chin needed scraping. His clothes were neither good nor bad, but they were rumpled and soiled as if they had been slept in, which they doubtless had.
The Saint gave him a cigarette and said: “I don’t think there are any dictographs planted here, so just keep talking. What
made you write to me?”
“Because I don’t like cops. I see where you’ve made suckers out of the cops plenty of times, and I’d like to see you do it again. Especially to those sons of bitches who threw me in here.”
“You did pass a bum check, didn’t you?” Simon mentioned.
“Yeah, but only because I had to, because Blatt didn’t come through with my dough and I was broke. I wouldn’t have squawked just for that, though. I’ve taken raps before. I’ve stood for a lot of things in my time, but I don’t want any part of this.” Vaschetti puffed at his cigarette shakily, and moved about the room with short jerky strides. “Not murder. No, sir. I don’t want to sit in the hot seat, or dance on the end of a rope, or whatever they do to you in this state.”
Simon kindled a cigarette for himself, and propped himself on the window sill.
“Why should anyone do things like that to you? Or were you one of the three fire-bugs?”
“No, sir. But that Kinglake might find out any time that I’d seen Blatt and been asking for him at the Blue Goose, and what chance would I have then? I don’t want Blatt gunning for me either, and I guess he might be if he thought I might put the finger on him. I’d rather squeal first, and then if they know it’s too late to shut my mouth maybe they won’t bother with me.”
“I see your point,” said the Saint thoughtfully. “Suppose you sit down and tell me about your life as a courier.”
Vaschetti attempted a laugh that didn’t come off, licked his lips nervously, and sat down on a creaky chair.
“I met Fritz Kuhn when I was doing time in Dannemora. We got on pretty well, and he said if I wanted to make some money when I got out I should see him. Well, I did. I got this job carrying packages from place to place.”
“How did that work?”
“Well, for instance, I’d have a package to deliver to Mr. Smith at the Station Hotel in Baltimore. I’d go there and ask for him. Maybe he’d be out of town. I’d hang around until he showed up – sometimes I’d have to wait for a week and more. Then I’d give Smith the package; and he’d pay me my dough and my expenses, and maybe give me another package to take to Mr. Robinson at MacFarland’s Grill in Miami. Anytime there wasn’t anything more for me, I’d go back to Jersey and start again.”
