The Saint and the Happy Highwayman s-21

by Leslie Charteris

  He finished speaking as the taxi drew up at an apartment hotel near the corner of East Twelfth Street.

  Fernack was sitting forward, with his jaw square and hard and his eyes fixed brightly on the Saint's face.

  "Go on," he said gruffly.

  Simon shook his head and indicated the door.

  "We'll change the scene again."

  He got out and paid off the driver and the other two followed him into the hotel. Corrio's face seemed to have gone paler under its olive tan.

  Simon paused in the lobby and glanced at him.

  "Will you ask for the key, or shall I? It might be better if you asked for it," he said softly, "because the clerk will recognize you. Even if he doesn't know you by your right name."

  "I don't quite know what you're talking about," Cor-rio said coldly, "but if you think you can wriggle out of this with any of your wild stories, you're wasting your time." He turned to Fernack. "I have got an apartment here, sir--I just use it sometimes when I'm kept in town late and I can't get home. It isn't in my own name, because--well, sir, you understand--I don't always want everybody to know who I am. This man has got to know about it somehow, and he's just using it to try and put up some crazy story to save his own skin."

  "All the same," said Fernack with surprising gentleness, "I'd like to go up. I want to hear some more of this crazy story."

  Corrio turned on his heel and went to the desk. The apartment was on the third floor--an ordinary two-room suite with the usual revolting furniture to be found in such places. Fernack glanced briefly over the living room into which they entered and looked at the Saint again.

  "Go on," he said. "I'm listening."

  The Saint sat down on the edge of the table and blew smoke rings.

  "It would probably have gone on a lot longer," he said, "if this smart detective hadn't thought one day what a supremely brilliant idea it would be to combine business with profit, and have the honour of convicting a most notorious and elusive bandit known as the Saint-- not forgetting, of course, to collect the usual cash reward in the process. So he used a very good-looking young damsel--you ought to meet her sometime, Fernack, she really is a peach--having some idea that the Saint would never run away very fast from a pretty face. In which he was damn right. . . . She had a very well-planned hard-luck story, too, and the whole act was most professionally staged. It had all the ingredients that a good psychologist would bet on to make the Saint feel that stealing Oppenheim's emeralds was the one thing he had left glaringly undone in an otherwise complete life. Even the spadework of the job had already been put in, so that she could practically tell the Saint how to pinch the jewels. So that our smart detective must have thought he was sitting pretty, with a sucker all primed to do the dirty work for him and take the rap if anything went wrong--besides being still there to take the rap when the smart detective made his arrest and earned the reward if everything went right."

  Simon smiled dreamily at a particularly repulsive print on the wall for a moment.

  "Unfortunately, I happened to drop in on this girl one time when she wasn't expecting me, and I heard her phoning a guy named Corrio to tell him I was well and truly hooked," he said. "On account of having read in the Daily Mail some talk by a guy of the same name about what he was going to do to me, I was naturally interested."

  Corrio started forward.

  "Look here, you----"

  "Wait a minute." Fernack held him back with an iron arm. "I want the rest of it. Did you do the job, Saint?"

  Simon shook his head sadly. It was at that point that his narrative departed, for the very first time, from the channels of pure veracity in which it had begun its course--but Fernack was not to know this.

  "Would I be such a sap?" he. asked reproachfully. "I knew I could probably get away with the actual robbery because Corrio would want me to; but as soon as it was over, knowing in advance who'd done it, he'd be chasing round to catch me and recover the emeralds. So I told the girl I'd thought it all over and decided I was too busy." The Saint sighed as if he was still regretting a painful sacrifice. "The rest is pure theory; but this girl gave me a checkroom ticket on Grand Central this morning and asked me if I'd collect a package on it this afternoon and take it along to an address on Fifty-second Street. I didn't do it because I had an idea what would happen; but my guess would be that if somebody went along and claimed the parcel they'd find emeralds in it. Not all the emeralds, probably, because that 'd be too risky if I got curious and opened it; but some of them. The rest are probably here--I've been looking around since we've been here, and I think there's some new and rather amateurish stitching in the upholstery of that chair. I could do something with that reward myself."

  Corrio barred his way with a gun as he got off the table.

  "You stay where you are," he grated. "If you're trying to get away with some smart frame-up----"

  Simon looked down at the gun.

  "You talk altogether too much," he said evenly. "And I don't think you're going to be safe with that toy in a minute."

  He hit Corrio very suddenly under the chin, grabbing the gun with his other hand as he did so. The gun went off crashingly as Corrio reeled backwards, but after that it remained in the Saint's hand. Corrio stood trembling against the wall, and Simon looked at Fernack again and rubbed his knuckles thoughtfully.

  "Just to make sure," he said, "I fixed a dictagraph under the table yesterday. Let's see if it has anything to say."

  Fernack watched him soberly as he prepared to play back the record. In Fernack's mind was the memory of a number of things which he had heard Corrio say which fitted into the picture which the Saint offered him much too vividly to be easily denied.

  Then the dictagraph record began to play. And Fernack felt a faint shiver run up his spine at the uncannily accurate reproduction of Corrio's voice.

  "Smart work, Leo. . . . I'll say these must be worth every penny of the price on them."

  The other voice was unfamiliar.

  "Hell, it was a cinch. The layout was just like you said. But how you goin' to fix it on the other guy?"

  "That's easy. The broad gets him to fetch a parcel from Grand Central and take it where I tell her to tell him. When he gets there, I'm waiting for him."

  "You're not goin' to risk givin' him all that stuff"

  "Oh, don't be so thick. There 'll only be just enough in the parcel to frame him. Once he's caught, it'll be easy enough to plant the rest somewhere and find it."

  Corrio's eyes were wide and staring.

  "It's a plant!" he screamed hysterically. "That's a record of the scene I played in the film test I made yesterday."

  Simon smiled politely, cutting open the upholstery of the armchair and fishing about for a leather pouch containing about fourteen hundred thousand dollars' worth of emeralds which should certainly be there unless somebody else had found them since he chose that ideal hiding place for his loot.

  "I only hope you'll be able to prove it, Gladys," he murmured, and watched Fernack grasp Corrio's arm with purposeful efficiency.

  III THE WELL-MEANING MAYOR

  Sam purdell never quite knew how he became Mayor. He was a small and portly man with a round blank face and a round blank mind, who had built up a moderately profitable furniture business over the last thirty-five years and acquired in the process a round pudding-faced wife and a couple of suet dumplings of daughters; but the inexhaustible zeal for improving the circumstances and morals of the community, that fierce drive of ambition and the twitching of the ears for the ecstatic screams of "Heil" whenever he went abroad, that indomitable urge to be a leader of his people from which Hitlers and Mussolinis are born, was not naturally in him.

  It is true that at the local reform club, of which he was a prominent member, he had often been stimulated by an appreciative audience and a large highball to lay down his views on the way in which he thought everything on earth ought to be run, from Japanese immigration to the permissible percentage of sulphur dioxide in dr
ied apricots; but there was nothing outstandingly indicative of a political future in that. This is a disease which is liable to attack even the most honest and respectable citizens in such circumstances. But the idea that he himself should ever occupy the position in which he might be called upon to put all those beautiful ideas into practice had never entered Sam Purdell's head in those simple early days; and if it had not been for the drive supplied by Al Eisenfeld, it might never have materialized.

  "You ought to be in politics, Sam," Al had insisted, at the close of one of these perorations several years before.

  Sam Purdell considered the suggestion.

  "No, I wouldn't be clever enough," he said modestly.

  To tell the truth, he had heard the suggestion before, had repudiated it before and had always wanted to hear it contradicted. Al Eisenfeld obliged him. It was the first time anybody had been so obliging.

  This was three years before the columnist of the Elmford News was moved to inquire:

  "How long does our mayor think he can kid reporters and deputations with his celebrated pose of injured innocence?

  "We always thought it was a good act while it lasted; but isn't it time we had a new show?"

  It was not the first time that it had been suggested in print that the naive and childlike simplicity which was Sam Purdell's greatest charm was one of the shrewdest fronts for ingenious corruption which any politician had ever tried to put over on a batch of sane electors, but this was the nearest that any commentator had ever dared to come to saying that Sam Purdell was a crook.

  It was a suggestion which left Sam a pained and puzzled man. He couldn't understand it. These adopted children of his, these citizens whose weal occupied his mind for twenty-four hours a day, were turning round to bite the hand that fed them. And the unkindest cut of all, the blow which struck at the roots of his faith in human gratitude, was that he had only tried to do his best for the city which had been delivered into his care.

  For instance, there was the time when, dragged forth by the energy of one of his rotund daughters, he had climbed laboriously one Sunday afternoon to the top of the range of hills which shelter Elmford on the north. When he had got his wind and started looking round, he realized that from that vantage point there was a view which might have rejoiced the heart of any artist. Sam Purdell was no artist, but he blinked with simple pleasure at the panorama of rolling hills and wooded groves with the river winding between them like the track of a great silver snail; and when he came home again he had a beautiful idea.

  "You know, we got one of the finest views in the state up there on those hills! I never saw it before, and I bet you didn't either. And why? Because there ain't no road goes up there; and when you get to my age it ain't so easy to go scrambling up through those trees and brush."

  "So what?" asked Al Eisenfeld, who was even less artistic and certainly more practical.

  "So I tell you what we do," said Sam, glowing with the ardour of his enthusiasm almost as much as with the aftereffects of his unaccustomed exercise. "We build a highway up there so they can drive out in their automobiles week ends and look around comfortably. It makes work for a lot of men, and it don't cost too much; and everybody in Elmford can get a lot of free pleasure out of it. Why, we might even get folks coming from all over the country to look at our view."

  He elaborated this inspiration with spluttering eagerness, and before he had been talking for more than a quarter of an hour he had a convert.

  "Sure, this is a great idea, Sam," agreed Mr Eisenfeld warmly. "You leave it to me. Why, I know--we'll call it the Purdell Highway. . . ."

  The Purdell Highway duly came into being at a cost of four million dollars. Al Eisenfeld saw to it. In the process of pushing Sam Purdell up the political tree he had engineered himself into the strategic post of Chairman of the Board of Aldermen, a position which gave him an interfering interest in practically all the activities of the city. The fact that the cost was about twice as much as the original estimate was due to the unforeseen obstinacy of the owner of the land involved, who held out for about four times the price which it was worth. There were rumours that someone in the administration had acquired the territory under another name shortly before the deal was proposed, and had sold it to the city at his own price--rumours which shocked Sam Purdell to the core of his sensitive soul.

  "Do you hear what they say, Al?" he complained, as soon as these slanderous stories reached his ears. "They say I made one hundred thousand dollars graft out of the Purdell Highway I Now, why the hell should they say that?"

  "You don't have to worry about what a few rats are saying, Sam," replied Mr Eisenfcld soothingly. "They're only jealous because you're so popular with the city. Hell, there are political wranglers who'd tell stories about the Archangel Gabriel himself if he was Mayor, just to try and discredit the administration so they could shove their own crooked party in. I'll look into it."

  Mr Eisenfeld's looking into it did not stop the same rumours circulating about the Purdell Bridge, which spanned the river from the southern end of the town and linked it with the State Highway, eliminating a detour of about twenty miles. What project, Sam Purdell asked, could he possibly have put forward that was more obviously designed for the convenience and prosperity of Elmford? But there were whispers that the Bennsville Steel Company, which had obtained the contract for the bridge, had paid somebody fifty thousand dollars to see that their bid was accepted. A bid which was exactly fifty percent higher than the one put in by their rivals.

  "Do you know anything about somebody taking fifty thousand dollars to put this bid through?" demanded Sam Purdell wrathfully, when he heard about it; and Mr Eisenfeld was shocked.

  "That's a wicked idea, Sam," he protested. "Everyone knows this is the straightest administration Elm-ford ever had. Why, if I thought anybody was taking graft, I'd throw him out of the City Hall with my own hands."

  There were similar cases, each of which brought Sam a little nearer to the brink of bitter disillusion. Sometimes he said that it was only the unshaken loyalty of, his family which stopped him from resigning his thank-less labours and leaving Elmford to wallow in its own ungrateful slime. But most of all it was the loyalty and encouragement of Mr Eisenfeld.

  Mr Eisenfeld was a suave sleek man with none of Sam Purdell's rubicund and open-faced geniality, but he had a cheerful courage in such trying moments which was always ready to renew Sam Purdell's faith in human nature. This cheerful courage shone with its old unfailing luminosity when Sam Purdell thrust the offending copy of the Elmford News which we have already referred to under Mr Eisenfeld's aggrieved and incredulous eyes.

  "I'll show you what you do about that sort of writing, Sam," said Mr Eisenfeld magnificently. "You just take it like this----"

  He was going on to say that you tore it up, scattering the libellous fragments disdainfully to the four winds but as he started to perform this heroic gesture his eye was arrested by the next paragraph in the same column, and he hesitated.

  "Well, how do you take it?" asked the mayor peevishly.

  Mr Eisenfeld said nothing for a second and the mayor looked over his shoulder to see what he was reading.

  "Oh, that 1" he said irritably. "I don't know what that means. Do you know what it means, Al?"

  "That" was a postscript about which Mr Purdell had some excuse to be puzzled.

  "We hear that the Saint is back in this country. People who remember what he did in New York a couple of years ago might feel like inviting him to take a trip out here. We can promise he would find plenty of material on which to exercise his talents."

  "What Saint are they talkin' about?" asked the mayor. "I thought all the Saints was dead."

  "This one isn't," said Mr Eisenfeld; but for the moment the significance of the name continued to elude him. He had an idea that he had heard it before and that it should have meant something definite to him. "I think he was a crook who had a great run in New York a while back. No, I remember it now. Wasn't he a sort of f
ree-lance reformer who had some crazy idea he could clean up the city and put everything to rights. . . ?"

  He began to recall further details; and then as his memory improved he closed the subject abruptly. There were incidents among the stories that came filtering back into his recollection which gave him a vague discomfort in the pit of his stomach. It was ridiculous, of course--a cheap journalistic glorification of a common gangster; and yet, for some reason, certain stories which he remembered having read in the newspapers at the time made him feel that he would be happier if the Saint's visit to Elmford remained a theoretical proposition.

  "We got lots of other more important things to think about, Sam," he said abruptly, pushing the newspaper into the wastebasket. "Look here--about this monument of yours on the Elmford Riviera . . ."