Nather did not try to answer. His body was sunk deep into his chair, and his eyes glared venomously up at the Saint out of a face that was contorted into a mask of hate and fury; but Simon had passed under glares like that before.
"Just before I came in," Simon remarked conversationally, "you were reading a scrap of paper that seemed to have some connection with those twenty grand I borrowed."
"I don't know what you're talking about," said the judge.
"No?" Simon's voice was honeyed, but none of the chill had gone out of his blue eyes. "Let me remind you. You screwed it up and plugged it into the wastebasket. It's there still—and I'd like to see it."
Nather's eyelids flickered.
"Why don't you get it?"
"Because I'd hate to give you the chance to catch me bending—my tail's tender today. Fetch out that paper!"
His voice crisped up like the flick of a whiplash, and Wallis Nather jerked under the sting of it. But he made no move to obey.
A throbbing stillness settled over the room. The air was surcharged with the electric tension of it. The smile had faded from the Saint's lips when his voice tightened on that one curt command; and it had not come back. There was no variation in the graceful ease with which he held his precarious perch on the edge of the desk, but the gentle rocking of his free foot had died away like the pendulum of a clock that had run down. And a thin pin-prickling temblor frisked up the Saint's spine as he realized that Nather did not mean to obey.
Instead, he realized that the judge was marshalling the last fragments of his strength and courage to make one desperate lunge for the automatic that held him crucified in his chair. It was fantastic, incredible; but there could be no mistake. The intuitive certainty had flashed through his mind at the same instant as it was born in the brain of the man before him. And Simon knew, with the same certainty, that just as surely as that desperate lunge was made, his own finger would constrict on the trigger, ending the argument beyond all human revision, without hesitation and without remorse.
"You wouldn't dare to shoot," said Nather throatily.
He said it more as if he were trying to convince himself; and the Saint's eyes held him on needle points of blue ice.
"The word isn't in my dictionary—and you ought to know it! This isn't a country where men carry guns for ornament, and I'm just getting acclimatized. . . ."
But even while Simon spoke, his brain was racing ahead to explore the reasons for the insane resolution that was whitening the knuckles of the judge's twitching hands.
He felt convinced that such a man as Wallis Nather would not go up against that gaping automatic on account of a mere twenty thousand dollars. That was a sum of money which any man might legitimately be grieved to lose, but it was not large enough to tempt anyone but a starving desperado to the gamble that Nather was steeling himself to make.
There could be only one other motive—the words scrawled on that scrap of paper in the wastebasket. Something that was written on that crumpled slip of milled rag held dynamite enough to raise the ghostly hand of Nemesis itself. Something was recorded there that had the power to drive Nather forward inch by inch in his chair into the face of almost certain death. . . .
With fascinated eyes Simon watched the slight, nerve-tingling movements of the judge's body as Nather edged himself up for that suicidal assault on the gun. For the first time in his long and checkered career he felt himself a blind instrument in the working out of an inexorable fate. There was nothing more that he could do. The one metallic warning that he had delivered had passed unheeded. Only two things remained. In another few seconds Nather would lunge; and in that instant the automatic would bark its riposte of death. . . .
Simon was vaguely conscious of the quickening of his pulse. His mind reeled away to those trivial details that sometimes slip through the voids of an intolerable suspense—there must be servants somewhere in the place—but it would only take him three swift movements, before they could possibly reach the door, to scrawl his sign manual on the blotter, snatch the crumple of paper from the wastebasket, and vanish through the open windows into the darkness. ...
And then a bell exploded in the oppressive atmosphere of the room like a bomb. A telephone bell.
Its rhythmic double beat sheared through the silence like a guillotine, cleaving the overstrained chord of the spell with the blade of its familiar commonplaceness; and Nather's effort collapsed as if the same cleavage had snapped the support of his spine. He shuddered once and slouched back limply in his chair, passing a trembling hand across his eyes.
Simon smiled again. His shoe resumed its gentle swinging, and he swept a gay, mocking eye over the desk. There were two telephones on it—one of them clearly a house phone. On a small table to the right of the desk stood a third telephone, obviously a Siamese twin of the second, linked to the same outside wire and intended for His Honour's secretary. The Saint reached out a long arm and brought it over onto his knee.
"Answer the call, brother," he suggested persuasively.
A wave of his automatic added its imponderable weight to the suggestion; but the fight had already been drained out of the judge's veins. With a grey drawn face he dragged one of the telephones towards him; and as he lifted the receiver Simon matched the movement on the extension line and slanted his gun over in a relentless arc to cover the other's heart. Definitely it was not Mr. Wallis Nather's evening, but the Saint could not afford to be sentimental.
"Judge Nather speaking."
The duplicate receiver at the Saint's ear clicked to the vibrations of a clear feminine voice.
"This is Fay." The speech was crisp and incisive, but it had a rich pleasantness of music that very few feminine voices can maintain over the telephone—there was a rare quality in the sound that moved the Saint's blood with a queer, delightful expectation for which he could have given no account. It was just one of those voices. "The Big Fellow says you'd better stay home tonight," stated the voice. "He may want you."
Nather's eyes seemed to glaze over; then they switched to the Saint's face. Simon moved his gun under the desk lamp and edged it a little forward, and his gaze was as steady as the steel. Nather swallowed.
"I—I'll be here," he stammered.
"See that you are," came the terse conclusion, in the same voice of bewitching overtones; and then the wire went dead.
Watching Nather, the Saint knew that at least half the audience had understood that cryptic conversation perfectly. The judge was staring vacantly ahead into space with the lifeless receiver still clapped to his ear and his mouth hung half open.
"Very interesting," said the Saint softly.
Nather's mouth closed jerkily. He replaced the receiver slowly on its hook and looked up.
"A client of mine," he said casually; but he was not casual enough.
"That's interesting, too," said the Saint. "I didn't know judges were supposed to have clients. I thought they were unattached and impartial. . . . And she must be very beautiful, with a voice like that. Can it be, Algernon, that you are hiding something from me?"
Nather glowered up at him.
"How much longer are you going on with this preposterous performance?"
"Until it bores me. I'm easily amused," said the Saint, "and up to now I haven't yawned once. So far as I can see, the interview is progressing from good to better. All kinds of things are bobbing up every minute. This Big Fellow of yours, now: let's hear some more about him. I'm inquisitive."
Nather's eyes flinched wildly.
"I'm damned if I'll talk to you any more!"
"You're damned if you won't."
"You can go to hell."
"And the same applies," said the Saint equably.
He stood up and came round the desk, poising himself on straddled feet a pace in front of the judge, lean and dynamically balanced as a panther.
"You're very dense, Algernon," he remarked calmly. "You don't seem to get the idea at all. Maybe our little int
erlude of song and badinage has led you up the wrong tree. You can make a good guess why I'm here. You know that I didn't drop in just for the pleasure of admiring your classic profile. You know who I am. I don't care what you pick on, but you can tell me something. Any of your maidenly secrets ought to be worth listening to. Come through, Nather—or else . . ."
"Or else what?"
The Saint's gun moved forward until it pressed deep into the judge's flabby navel.
"Or else find out what Ionetzki and Jack Irboll know!"
Nather's heavy, sullen lips twisted back from yellowed teeth. And Simon jabbed the gun a notch further into the judge's stomach.
"And don't lie," said the Saint caressingly; "because I'm friendly to undertakers and that funeral parlour looked as if it could do with some business."
Nather passed a fevered tongue over hot dry lips. He had not lived through thirty years of intermittent contacts with the underworld without learning to recognize that queer bitter fibre in a man that makes him capable of murder. And the terrific inward struggle of that last moment before the telephone bell rang had blunted his vitality. The strength was not in him to screw himself to that desperate pitch again. He knew, beyond all question, that if he refused to talk, if he attempted to lie, that bantering tiger of a man who was squeezing the gun ever deeper into his vitals would destroy him as ruthlessly as he would have crushed an ant. Nather's larynx heaved twice, convulsively; and then, before he could speak, a muffled tread sounded beyond the locked door.
The Saint tautened, listening. From the ponderous, flat-footed measure of the stride he guessed it to belong to the butler. Nather looked up with a sudden gleam of hope; but the steady pressure of the gun muzzle in his yielding flesh did not vary by a milligram. The Saint's light whisper floated to his ears in an airy breath.
"Heroes die young," it murmured pithily.
A knock sounded on the door—a discreet knock that could only have been made by a servant. Nather, with his vengeful eyes frozen on the Saint, lip-read the order rather than heard it. "Ask him what he wants."
"Well?" Nather growled out.
"Inspector Fernack is downstairs, sir. He says it's important."
Nather stared at the Saint And the Saint smiled. Once again his reckless fighting lips shaped an almost inaudible command.
"Tell him to come up," Nather repeated after him, and could not believe that he was obeying an order.
He sat silent and rigid as the butler's footsteps receded and died away; and at last Simon withdrew the gun barrel which had for so long been boring insidiously into the judge's abdomen.
"Better and better," said the Saint amazingly, flipping a cigarette into his lips. "I was wanting to meet Fernack."
Nather gaped at him incredulously. The situation was grotesque, unbelievable; and yet it had occurred. The automatic had been eased out of his belly—it was even then circling around the Saint's forefinger in one of those carelessly confident gyrations—which it certainly would not have been if any of the Saint's instructions had been disobeyed. The thing was beyond Nather's understanding. The glacial recklessness of it was subtly disquieting, in a colder and more deadly way than the menace of the gun had ever been: it argued a self-assurance that was frightening, and with that fear went the crawling question of whether the Saint's mind had leapt to some strategy of lightning cunning that Nather could not see.
"You'll get your chance," said the judge gruffly, searching for comprehension through a kind of fog.
Simon rasped the head of a match with his left thumbnail, applied the spluttering flame to the tip of his cigarette, and inhaled luxuriously. With a drift of smoke trailing back through his lips, he lounged towards a large tapestried Morris chair that stood between the French windows by which he had entered, and swung the chair around with his foot so that its heavily padded side was presented to the door through which the detective would enter.
He came back, overturned the wastebasket with an adroit twist of his toe, and picked up the crumpled scrap of paper and dropped it into his pocket in one smooth swoop that frustrated the judge's flash of fight even before the idea was conceived. He pulled open the drawer to which Nather's hand had jumped at the first sound of his voice, and transferred the revolver from it to his hip. And then, with the scene set to his satisfaction, he walked back to his chosen chair and settled himself comfortably in it with his right leg draped gracefully over the arm.
He flicked a quarter inch of ash from his cigarette onto the expensive carpet.
"When your man announces Fernack," he directed, "open the door and let him in. And come back yourself. Understand?"
Nather did not understand. His brain was still fumbling dazedly for the catch that he could not find. On the face of it, it seemed like the answer to a prayer. With Fernack on the scene, there must be the chance of a way out for him—a way to retrieve that scrap of paper buried in Templar's pocket and to dispose of the Saint himself. But something told him that the calm smiling man in the chair was not legislating foe any such dénouement.
Simon read his thoughts.
"The gun won't be in evidence for a while, Nather. But it'll be handy. And at this range I'm a real sniper. I shouldn't want you to get excited over any notions of ganging up on me with Fernack. Somebody might get hurt."
Nather's gaze rested on him venomously.
"Some day," said the judge slowly, "I hope we shall meet again."
"In Sing Sing," suggested the Saint breezily. "Let's call it a date."
He drew on his cigarette again and listened to the returning footsteps of the butler, accompanied by a heavier, more determined tread. As a matter of fact, he was innocent of all subterfuge. There was nothing more behind his decision than appeared on the face of it. Fernack was there, and the Saint saw no reason why they should not meet. His whole evening had started off in the same spirit of open-minded expectation, and it had turned out very profitably. He waited the addition to his growing circle of acquaintances with no less kindly interest.
The butler's knuckles touched the door again.
"Inspector Fernack, sir."
Simon waved the judge on, and Nather crossed the room slowly. Every foot of the distance he was conscious of the concealed automatic that was aiming into his back. He snapped the key over in the lock and opened the door; and Inspector Fernack shouldered his brawny bulk across the threshold.
* * *
"Why the locked door, Judge?" Fernack inquired sourly. "Getting nervous?"
Nather closed the door without answering, and Simon decided to oblige.
"I did it," he explained. Fernack, who had not noticed him, whirled round in surprise; and Simon went on: "Would you mind locking it again, Judge—just as I told you?"
Nather hesitated for a second and then obeyed. Fernack stared blankly at the figure lounging in the armchair and then turned with puzzled eyes to the judge. He pushed back his battered fedora and pulled reflectively at the lobe of his left ear.
"What the hell is this?" he demanded; and Nather shrugged.
"A nut," he said tersely.
Simon ignored the insult, studying the man who had come in. On the whole, Fernack conformed closely enough to the pattern in his mind of what a New York police inspector was likely to be; but the reality went a little beyond that. Simon liked the belligerent honesty of the frosted grey eyes, the strength and courage of the iron jaw. He realized that, whatever else Fernack might be, a good or bad detective, he fell straight and clean-cut into the narrow outline of that rarest thing in a country of corrupted law—a square dick. There were qualities in that mountain of toughened flesh that Simon Templar could have appreciated at any time; and he smiled at the man with an unaffected friendliness which he never expected to see returned.
"What ho, Inspector," he murmured affably. "You disappoint me. I was hoping to be recognized."
Fernack's eyes hardened in perplexity as he studied the Saint's tanned features. He shook his head.
"I seem to know your face, but I'm damned if I can place you."
"Maybe it was a bad photograph," conceded the Saint regretfully. "Those photographs usually are. All the same, seeing it was only this afternoon that you were handing out copies of it to the reporters ——"
Illumination hit Fernack like a blow.
His eyes flamed wide, and his jaw closed with a snap as he took three long strides across the room.
"By God—it's the Saint!"
"Himself. I didn't know you were a pal of Algernon's, but since you arrived I thought I might as well stay."
Fernack's shoulders were hunched, his pugnacious chin. jutting dangerously. In that instant shock of surprise, he had not paused to wonder why the Saint should be offering himself like an eager victim.
"I want you, young fellow," he grated.
He lunged forward, with his hand diving for his hip.
And then he pulled up short, a yard from the chair. His hand was poised in the air, barely two inches from the butt of his gun, but it made no attempt to travel further. The Saint did not seem to have moved, and his free foot was still swinging gently back and forth; but somehow the blue-black shape of an automatic had come into his right hand, and the round black snout of it was aimed accurately into the detective's breastbone.
"I'm sorry," said the Saint; and he meant it. "I hate being arrested, as you should have gathered from my biography. It's just one of those things that doesn't happen. My dear chap, you didn't really think I stayed on so you could take me home with you as a souvenir!"
Fernack glared at the gun speechlessly for a moment and shifted his gaze back to the Saint For a moment Simon was afraid—with a chin like that, it was an even chance that the detective might not be stopped; and Simon would have hated to shoot. But Fernack was not foolhardy. He had been bred and reared in a world where foolhardiness went down under an elemental law of the survival of the wisest; and Fernack faced facts. At that range the Saint could not miss, and the honour of the New York police would gain a purely temporary glow from the heroic suicide of an inspector.
15 The Saint in New York Page 4
