He laughed again, a gentle lilt of a laugh that floated through the room like sunshine with a flicker of steel.
"Hence the bravado," said the Saint. "Of course that note made it more difficult—but that just gave us a chance to demonstrate our surpassing brilliance. And it was so easy. I had the gun under that outfit, and I caught him as he came out. Just once. . . . Then I let out a thrilling scream and rushed towards him. I was urging him to repent and confess his sins while they were looking for me. There was quite a crowd around, and I think nearly all of them were arrested."
He slipped an automatic from his pocket and removed the magazine. His long arm reached out for the cleaning materials on a side table which he had been using before he went out. He slipped a rectangle of flannelette through the loop of a weighted cord and pulled it through the barrel, humming musically to himself.
The white-haired man paced over to the window and stood there with his hands clasped behind his back.
"Kestry and Bonacci were here today," he said.
The Saint's humming continued for a couple of bars. He moistened his cleaning rag with three measured drops of oil.
"Too bad I missed them," he murmured. "I've always wanted to observe a brace of your hard-boiled New York cops being tactful with an innocent suspect."
"You may get your chance soon enough," said the other grimly, and Simon chuckled.
As a matter of fact, it was not surprising that Inspector John Fernack's team had failed to locate the Saint.
Kestry and Bonacci had had an interesting time. Passing dutifully from one hostelry to another, they had trampled under their large and useful feet a collection of expensive carpets that would have realized enough for the pair of them to retire on in great comfort. They had scanned registers until their eyes ached, discovering some highly informative traces of a remarkable family of John Smiths who appeared to spend their time leaping from one hotel to another with the agility of influenza germs, but finding no record of the transit of a certain Simon Templar. Before their official eyes, aggravating the aforesaid ache, had passed a procession of smooth and immaculate young gentlemen technically described as clerks but obviously ambassadors in disguise, who had condescendingly surveyed the photograph of their quarry and pityingly disclaimed recognition of any character of such low habits amongst their distinguished clientele. Bellboys in caravanserai after caravanserai had gazed knowingly at the large, useful feet on which the tour was conducted, and had whispered wisely to one another behind their hands. There had been an atmosphere of commiserating sapience about the audiences of all their interviews which to a couple of seasoned sleuths professedly disguised as ordinary citizens was peculiarly distressing.
And it was scarcely to be expected that the chauffeur of a certain William K. Valcross, resident of the Waldorf Astoria, would have swum into their questioning ken. They were looking for a tall, dark man of about thirty, described as an addict of the most luxurious hotels; and they had looked for him with commendable doggedness, refusing to be lured into any byways of fantasy. Mr. Valcross being indubitably sixty years old and by no stretch of imagination resembling the photograph with which they had been provided, they passed him over without loss of time—and, with him, his maidservant, his manservant, his ox, his ass, and the stranger within his gates.
"If they do find me," remarked the Saint reflectively, "there will probably be harsh words."
He squinted approvingly down the shining barrel of his gun, secured the safety catch, and patted it affectionately into his pocket. Then he rose and stretched himself and went over to the window where Valcross was standing.
Before them was spread out the ragged panorama of south Manhattan, the wonder island of the West. A narrow hump of rock sheltered from the Atlantic by the broad shoulder of Brooklyn, a mere ripple of stone in the ocean's inroads, on which the indomitable cussedness of Man had elected to build a city—and, not contented with the prodigious feat of overcoming such a dimensional difficulty at all, had made monuments of its defiance. Because the city could not expand laterally, it had expanded upwards; but the upward movement was a leap sculptured in stone, a flight born of necessity that had soared far beyond the standards of necessity, in a magnificent impulse of levitation that obliterated its own source. Molehills had become mountains in an art begotten of pure artifice. In the shadow of those grey and white pinnacles had grown up a modern Baghdad where the ends of the earth came together. A greater Italian city than Rome, a greater Irish city than Dublin, a greater German city than Cologne; a city of dazzling wealth whose towers had once looked like peaks of solid gold to hungry eyes reaching beyond the horizons of the Old World; a place that had sprung up from a lonely frontier to a metropolis, a central city, bowing to no other. A place where civilization and savagery had climbed alternately on each other's shoulders and reached their crest together. . . .
"This has always been my home," said Valcross, with a queer softness.
He turned his eyes from east to west in a glance that swept in the whole skyline.
"I know there are other cities; and they say that New York doesn't represent anything but itself. But this is where my life has been lived."
Simon said nothing. He was three thousand miles from his own home; but as he stood there at the window he saw what the older man was seeing, and he could feel what the other felt. He had been there long enough to sense the spell that New York could lay on a man who looked at it with a mind not too tired for wonder—the pride and amazement at which cynical sophisticates laughed, which could still move the heart of a man who was not ashamed to sink below the surface and touch the common humanity that is the builder of cities. And because Simon could understand, he knew what was in the other's mind before it was spoken.
"I have to send for you," Valcross said, "because there are other people, more powerful than I am, who don't feel like that. The people to whom it isn't a home, but a battle-field to be looted. That is why you have to come here, from the other side of the world, to help an old man with a job that's too big for him."
He turned suddenly and looked at the Saint again, taking him in from the sweep of his smoothly brushed hair to the stance of his tailored shoes—the rakish lines of the dark, reckless face, the level mockery of the clear blue eyes, the rounded poise of muscular shoulders and the curve of the chest under the thin, jaunty shirt, the steady strength of one brown half-raised hand with the cigarette clipped lightly between the first two fingers, the lean fighter's hips and the reach of long, immaculate legs. No man whom he had ever known could have been so elegantly at ease and at the same time so alert and dangerous—and he had known many men. No other man he had known could ever have measured up in his judgment to the stature of devil-may-care confidence that he had demanded in his own mind and set out to find—. and Valcross called himself a judge of men.
His hands fell on the Saint's shoulders; and they had to reach up to do it. He felt the slight, supple stir of the firm sinews and smiled.
"You might do it, son," he said. "You might clean up this rotten mess of crooks and grafters that's organizing itself to become the biggest thing this city of mine has ever had to fight. If you can't do it, I'll let myself be told for the first time that it's impossible. Just be a little bit careful. Don't swagger yourself into a jail or a shower of bullets before you've had a chance to do any good. I've seen those things happen before. Other fellows have tried—bigger men than you, son—stronger men than you, braver men than you, cleverer men than you——"
The Saint smiled back.
"Admitting for the moment that they ever lived," he remarked amiably, "you never saw anyone luckier than me."
But his mind went back to the afternoon in Madrid when Valcross had sat next to him in the Plaza de Toros and had struck up a conversation which had resulted in them spending the evening together. It went back to a moment much later that night, after they had dined together off the indescribable suckling pig at Botin's, when they sat over whi
skies and sodas in Valcross's room at the Ritz; when Valcross had admitted that he had spent three weeks chasing him around Europe solely to bring about that casual encounter, and had told him why. He could hear the old man's quiet voice as it had spoken to him that night
"They found him a couple of weeks later—I don't want to go into details. They aren't nice to think about, even now. . . . Two or three dozen men were pulled in and questioned. But maybe you don't know how things are done over there. These men kept their mouths shut. Some of them were let out. Some of them went up for trial. Maybe you think that means something.
"It doesn't. This business is giving work to all the gangsters and gunmen it needs—all the rats and killers who found themselves falling out of the big money when there was nothing more to be made out of liquor. It's tied up by the same leaders, protected by the same crooked politicians—and it pays more. It's beating the same police system, for the same reason the old order beat it—because it's hooked up with the same political system that appoints police commissioners to do as they're told.
"There wasn't any doubt that these men they had were guilty. Fernack admitted it himself. He told me their records —everything that was known about them. But he couldn't do anything. They were bailed out, adjourned, extradited, postponed—all the legal tricks. In the end they were acquitted. I saw them walk out of the court grinning. If I'd had a gun with me I'd have tried to kill them then.
"But I'm an old man, and I wasn't trained for that sort of thing. I take it that you were. That's why I looked for you. I know some of the things you've done, and now I've met you in the flesh. I think it's the kind of job you might like. It may be the last job you'll ever attempt. But it's a job that only an outlaw can do.
"I've got plenty of money, and I'm expecting to spend it You can have anything you need to help you that money will buy. The one thing it won't buy is safety. You may find yourself in prison. You're even more likely to find yourself dead. I needn't try to fool you about that
"But if you can do your justice on these men who kidnapped and killed my son, I'll pay you one million dollars. I want to know whether you think it's worth your while—tonight."
And the Saint could feel the twitch of his own smile again, and hear himself saying: "I'd do it for nothing. When do we go?"
These things came back to him while Valcross's hands still rested on his shoulders; and it was the first time since that night in Madrid that he had given any thought to the magnitude of the task he had undertaken.
* * *
Simon Templar had been in New York before; but that was in the more spacious and leisurely days when only 8.04 of the gin was amateur bathtub brew, before the Woolworth Building was ranked as a bungalow, when lawbreakers were prosecuted for breaking the law more frequently than for having falsified their income-tax returns. Times Square and 42nd Street were running a shabby second to the boardwalk at Coney Island; the smart shops had moved off the Avenue one block east to Park; and the ever-swinging doors of the gilded saloons that had formerly decorated every street corner had gone down before that historic wave of righteousness which dyed the Statue of Liberty its present bilious shade of green.
But there was one place, one institution, that the Saint could have found in spite of far more sweeping changes in the geography of the city. Lexington Avenue could still be followed south to 45th Street; and on 45th Street Chris Cellini should still be entertaining his friends unless a tidal wave had removed him catastrophically from the trade he loved. And the Saint had heard no news of any tidal wave of sufficient dimensions for that.
In the circumstances, he had less than no right to be paying calls at all; in a city even at that moment filled with angry and vigilant men who were still searching for him, he should have stayed hidden and been grateful for having any place to hide; but it would have taken more than the combined dudgeon of a dozen underworlds and police forces to keep him away. He had to eat; and in all the world there are no steaks like the steaks that Chris Cellini broils over an open fire with his own hands. The Saint walked with an easy, swinging stride, his hands tucked in his trouser pockets, and the brim of his hat tilted at a reckless angle over his eyes. The lean brown face under the brim of the hat was open for all the world to see; the blue eyes in it were as gay and careless as if he had been a favoured member of the Four Hundred sauntering forth towards an exclusive cocktail party; only the slight tingling in his superb lithe muscles was his reward for that light-hearted defiance of the laws of chance. If he were interfered with on his way—that would be just too bad. The Saint was prepared to raise merry hell that night; and he was sublimely indifferent to the details of where and how the fun broke loose.
But nobody interfered with him on that passage. He turned in, almost disappointed by the tameness of the evening, before the basement entrance of a three-story brownstone house and pressed the bell at the side of the iron-barred door. After a moment the inner door opened, and the silhouette of a stocky shirt-sleeved man came out against the light.
"Hullo, Chris," drawled the Saint.
For a second or two he was not recognized; and then the man within let out an exclamation:
"Buon Dio! And where have you been for so many years?"
A bolt was drawn, and the portal was swung inwards. The Saint's hand was taken in an iron grip; another hand was slapping him on the back; his ears throbbed to a rich, jovial laughter.
"Where have you been, eh? Why do you stay away so long? Why didn't you tell me you were coming, so I could tell the boys to come along?"
"They aren't here tonight?" asked the Saint, spinning his hat dexterously onto a peg.
Chris shook his head.
"You ought to of telephoned, Simon."
"I'm just as glad they aren't here," said the Saint looking at him; and Chris was serious suddenly.
"I'm sorry—I forgot. . . . Well, you know you will be all right here." He smiled, and his rich voice brightened again. "You are always my friend, whatever happens."
He led the Saint down the passage towards the kitchen, with a brawny arm around his shoulders. The kitchen was the supplement to the one small dining-room that the place boasted—it was the sanctum sanctorum, a rendezvous that was more like a club than anything else, where those who were privileged to enter found a boisterous hospitality undreamed of in the starched expensive restaurants, where the diners are merely so many intruders, to be fed at a price and bowed stiffly out again. Although there were no familiar faces seated round the big communal table, the Saint felt the reawakening of an old happiness as he stepped into the brightly lighted room, with the smell of tobacco and wine and steaming vegetables and the clatter of plates and pans. It took him back at one leap to the ambrosial nights of drinking and endless argument, when all philosophies had been probed and all the world's problems settled, that he had known in that homely place.
"You'll have some sherry, eh?"
Simon nodded.
"And one of your steaks," he said.
He sat back and sipped the drink that Chris brought him, watching the room through half-closed eyes. The flash of jest and repartee, the crescendo of discussion and the ring of laughter, came to his ears like the echo of an unforgettable song. It was the same as it had always been—the same humorous camaraderie presided over and kept vigorously alive by Chris's own unchanging geniality. Why were there not more places like that in the world, he began to wonder— places where a host was more than a shopkeeper, and men threw off their cares and talked and laughed openly together, without fear or suspicion, expanding cleanly and fruitfully in the glow of wine and fellowship?
But he could only take that in a passing thought; for he had work to do that night. The steak came—thick, tender, succulent, melting in the mouth like butter; and he devoted himself to it with the wholehearted concentration which it deserved. Then, with his appetite assuaged, he leaned back with the remains of his wine and a fresh cigarette to ponder the happenings of the day.
> At all events he had made a good beginning. Irboll was very definitely gone; and the Saint inhaled with deep contentment as he recalled the manner of his going. He had no regrets for the foolhardy impulse that had made him attach his own personal signature uncompromisingly to the deed. Some of the terror that had once gone with those grotesque little drawings still clung to them in the memories of men who had feared them in the old days; and with a little adroit manipulation much of that terror could be built up again. It was good criminal psychology, and Simon was a great believer in the science. Curiously enough, that theatrical touch would mean more to a brazen underworld than anyone but an expert would have realized; for it is a fact that the hard-boiled gangster constitutes a large proportion of the dime novelette's most devoted public.
At any rate, it was a beginning. The matter of Irboll had been disposed of; but Irboll was quite a minor fish in the aquarium. Valcross had been explicit on that point. The small fry were all right in their appointed place: they could be neatly dismembered, drenched in ketchup and tabasco, exquisitely iced, and served up for a cocktail—on the way. But one million dollars of anybody's money was the price of the leaders of the shoal; and apart from the simple sport of rod and line, Simon Templar had a nebulous idea that he might be able to use a million dollars. Thinking it over, he had some difficulty in remembering a time when he could not have used a million dollars.
"If you offered me a glass of brandy," he murmured, as Chris passed the table, "I could drink a glass of brandy."
There was a late edition of the World-Telegram abandoned on the chair beside him, and Simon picked it up and cast an eye over the black banner of type spread across the front page. To his mild surprise he found that he was already a celebrity. An enthusiastic feature writer had launched himself on the subject with justifiable zeal; and even the Saint was tempted to blush at the extravagant attributes with which his modest personality had been adorned. He read the story through with a quizzical eye and the faintest suspicion of a smile on his lips.
15 The Saint in New York Page 2
