"There's a bunch of rats an' killers in this town that stops nowhere, and they play ball with the politicians, and the politicians play ball with them. We've had kidnapping and murder and extortion, and we're goin' to have more. That's the Big Fellow's game, and it's the perfect racket. There's more money in it than there ever was in liquor—and there's less of an answer to it. Look at it yourself. If it was your son, or your wife, or your brother, or your sister, that was bein' held for ransom, and you knew that the rats who were holding 'em were as soft-hearted as a lot of rattlesnakes—wouldn't you pay?"
The Saint nodded silently. Fernack's slow, dispassionate summary added little enough to what he already knew, but it filled in and coloured the picture for him. He had some new names to think about; and that realization brought him back to the question in his mind that he had tactfully postponed.
"Who is Papulos?" he asked; and Fernack grinned wryly.
"You've been getting around. He's pay-off man for Morrie Ualino."
"Pay-off man for Ualino, eh?" Simon might have guessed the answer, but he gave no sign. "And what do you know about Morrie?"
"He's one of the big shots I mentioned just now. One of these black-haired, shiny guys, as good-lookin' as Rudolf Valentino if you happen to like those kind of looks—lives like a swell, acts an' talks like a gent, rides around in an armoured sedan, and has two trigger men always walking in his shadow."
"What's he do for a living?"
"Runs one of the biggest travelling poker games on Broadway. He's slick—and poison. I've taken him to Ossining once, an' Dannemora once, myself, but he never stayed there long enough to wear through a pair of socks." Fernack's cigar spun through the darkness in a glowing parabola and hit the road with a splutter of fire. "Go get him, son, if you want him. I've told you all I can."
"Where do I find him?"
Fernack jerked his head round and stared. The question had been put as casually as if the Saint had been asking for the address of a candy shop; but Simon's face was quite serious.
Fernack turned his eyes back to the road; and after a while he said: "Down on 49th Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, there's a joint called Charley's Place. It might be worth paying a visit—if you can get in. There's a girl called Fay Edwards who might——"
The inspector broke off short. A third voice had cut eerily into the conversation—an impersonal metallic voice that came from the radio under the dashboard:
"Calling all cars. Calling all cars. Viola Inselheim, age six, kidnapped from home in Sutton Place . . ."
Fernack snapped upright, and the lights of a passing car showed his face graven in lines of iron.
"Good God!" he said. "It's happened!"
He was switching on the ignition even while the metallic voice droned on.
". . . Kidnappers escaped in maroon sedan. New York license plate. First three serial numbers 5F 3 or 5 F 8. Inspector Fernack call dispatcher. Inspector Fernack call dispatcher. Calling all cars ..."
The engine surged to life with a staccato roar of power, and Simon abruptly decided to be on his way.
"Hold it!" he called, as the car slipped forward. "That's your party."
Fernack's reply was lost in the song of the motor as it picked up speed. Simon opened the door and climbed out onto the running board. "Thanks for the ride," he said and dropped nimbly to the receding asphalt.
He stood under a tree and listened to the distancing wail of the car's imperative siren, and a slight smile came to his lips. The impulse that had led him back to Fernack had borne fruit beyond his highest hopes.
Beyond Nather was Papulos, beyond Papulos was Morrie Ualino, beyond Ualino was the Big Fellow. And crumpled into the Saint's side pocket, beside his gun, was the slip of paper that had accompanied a gift of twenty thousand dollars which Nather had made such an unsuccessful effort to defend. The inscription on the paper—as Simon had read it while he waited for Fernack under the library window—said, quite simply: "Thanks. Papulos."
It seemed logical to take the rungs of the ladder in their natural sequence. And if Simon remembered that this process should also lead him towards the mysterious Fay Edwards, he was only human.
Chapter 3
How Simon Templar Took a Gander at Mr. Papulos, and Morrie Ualino Took a Sock at the Saint
Valcross was waiting for him when he got back to the Waldorf Astoria, reaching the tower suite by the private elevator as before. The old man stood up with a quick smile.
"I'm glad you're back, Simon," he said. "For a little while I was wondering if even you were finding things too difficult."
The Saint laughed, spiralling his hat dexterously across the room to the chifferobe. He busied himself with a glass, a bottle, some cracked ice, and a siphon.
"I was longer than I expected to be," he explained. "You see, I had to take Inspector Fernack for a ride."
His eyes twinkled at Valcross tantalizingly over the rim of his glass. Valcross waited patiently for the exposition that had to come, humouring the Saint with the air of flabbergasted perplexity that was expected of him. Simon carried his drink to an armchair, relaxed into it, lighted a cigarette, and inhaled luxuriously, all in a theatrical silence.
"Thank God the humble Players' can be bought here for twenty cents," he remarked at length. "Your American concoctions are a sin against nicotine, Bill. I always thought the Spaniards smoked the worst cigarettes in the world; but I had to come here to find out that tobacco could be toasted, boiled, fried, impregnated with menthol, ground into a loose powder, enclosed in a tube of blotting paper, and still unloaded on an unsuspecting public."
Valcross smiled.
"If that's all you mean to tell me, I'll go back to my book," he said; and Simon relented.
"I was thinking it over on my way home," he concluded, at the end of his story, "and I'm coming to the conclusion that there must be something in this riding business. In fact, I'm going to be taken for a ride myself."
Valcross shook his head.
"I shouldn't advise it," he said. "The experience is often fatal."
"Not to me," said the Saint. "I shall tell you more about that presently, Bill—the more I think about it, the more it seems like the most promising avenue at this moment. But while you're pouring me out another drink, I wish you'd think of a reason why anyone should be so heartless as to kidnap a child who was already suffering more than her share of the world's woes with a name like Viola Inselheim."
Valcross picked up a telephone directory and scratched his head over it.
"Sutton Place, you said?" He looked through the book, found a place, and deposited the open volume on Simon's knee. Simon glanced over the Inselheims and located a certain Ezekiel of that tribe whose address was in Sutton Place. "I wondered if that would be the man," Valcross said.
The name meant nothing in Simon Templar's hierarchy.
"Who is he?"
"Zeke Inselheim? He's one of the richest brokers in New York City."
Simon closed the book.
"So that's why Nather is staying home tonight!"
He took the glass that Valcross refilled for him, and smoked in silence. The reason for the all-car call, and Fernack's perturbation, became plainer. And the idea of carrying on the night in the same spirit as he had begun it appealed to him with increasing voluptuousness. Presently he finished his drink and stood up.
"Would you like to order me some coffee? I think I'll be going out again soon."
Valcross looked at him steadily.
"You've done a lot today. Couldn't you take a rest?"
"Would you have taken a rest if you were Zeke Inselheim?" Simon asked. "I'd rather like to be taken for that ride tonight."
He was back in the living room in ten minutes, fresh and spruce from a cold shower, with his dark hair smoothly brushed and his gay blue eyes as bright and clear as a summer morning. His shirt was open at the neck as he had slipped it on when he emerged from the bathroom, and the left sleeve was rolled up t
o the elbow. He was adjusting the straps of a curious kind of sheath that lay snugly along his left forearm: the exquisitely carved ivory hilt of the knife it carried lay close to his wrist, where his sleeve would just cover it when it was rolled down.
Valcross poured the coffee and watched him. There was a dynamic power in that sinewy frame, a sense of magnificent recklessness and vital pride, that was flamboyantly inspiring.
"If I were twenty years younger," Valcross said quietly, "I'd be going with you."
Simon laughed.
"If there were four more of you, it wouldn't make any difference." He turned his arm over, displaying the sheathed knife for a moment before he rolled down his sleeve. "Belle and I will do all that has to be done on this journey."
In ten minutes more he was in a taxi, riding westwards through the ravines of the city. The vast office buildings of Fifth Avenue, abandoned for the night to cleaners and caretakers, reared their geometrical patterns of lighted windows against the dark sky like huge illuminated honeycombs. The cab crossed Broadway and Seventh Avenue, plunging through the drenched luminance of massed theatre and cinema and cabaret signs like a swimmer diving through a wave, and floated out on the other side in the calmer channel of faintly odorous gloom in which a red neon tube spelt out the legend: "Charley's Place."
The house was an indeterminate, rather dingy structure of the kind that flattens out the skyline westwards of Seventh Avenue, where the orgy of futuristic building which gave birth to Chrysler's Needle has yet to spread. It shared with its neighbours the depressing suggestion of belonging to a community of nondescript persons who had once resolved to attain some sort of individuality, and who had achieved their ambition by adopting various distinctive ways of being nondescript. The windows on the ground level were covered by greenish curtains which acquired a phosphorescent kind of luminousness from the lights behind them.
Simon rang the bell, and in a few moments a grille in the heavy oak door opened. It was a situation where nothing could be done without bluff; and the bluff had to be made on a blind chance.
"My name's Simon," said "the Saint. "Fay Edwards sent me."
The man inside shook his head.
"Fay ain't come in yet. Want to wait for her?"
"Maybe I can get a drink while I'm waiting," Simon shrugged.
His manner was without concern or eagerness—it struck exactly the right note of harmless nonchalance. If the Saint had been as innocent as he looked he could have done it no better; and the doorkeeper peered up and down the street and unlatched the door.
Simon went through and hooked his hat on a peg. Beyond the tiny hall was a spacious bar which seemed to occupy the remainder of the front part of the building. The tables were fairly well filled with young-old men of the smoothly blue-chinned type, tailored into the tight-fitting kind of coat which displays to such advantage the bulges of muscle on the biceps and the upper back. Their faces, as they glanced up in automatic silence at the Saint's entrance, had a uniform air of frozen impassivity, particularly about the eyes, like fish that have been in cold storage for many years. Scattered among their company was a sprinkling of the amply curved pudding-faced blondes who may be recognized anywhere as belonging to the genus known as "gangsters' molls"—it is a curious fact that few of the men who shoot their way through amazing wealth to sophistication in almost all their appetites ever acquire a sophisticated taste in femininity.
Simon gave the occupants no more than a casual first glance, absorbing the general background in one broad survey. He walked across to the bar and hitched himself onto a high stool. One of the white-coated bartenders set up a glass of ice water and waited.
"Make it a rye highball," said the Saint
By the time the drink had been prepared the mutter of conversation in the room had resumed its normal pitch. Simon took a sip from his glass and stopped the bartender before he could move away.
"Just a minute," said the Saint. "What's your name?"
The man had an oval, olive-hued, expressionless face, with beautifully lashed brown eyes and glossily waved black hair that made his age difficult to determine.
"My name is Toni," he stated.
"Congratulations," said the Saint. "My name is Simon. From Detroit."
The man nodded unemotionally, with his soft dark eyes fixed on the Saint's face.
"From Detroit," he repeated, as if memorizing a message.
"They call me Aces Simon," said the Saint evenly. The bartender's unwrinkled face responded as much as a wooden image might have done. "I'm told there are some players in this city who know what big money looks like."
"What do you want?"
"I thought I might get a game somewhere." Simon's blue gaze held the bartender's as steadily as the other was watching him. "I want to play with Morrie Ualino."
The man wiped his cloth slowly across the bar, drying off invisible specks of moisture.
"I don't know anything. I have to ask the boss."
He turned and went through a curtain at the back of the bar; and while he was gone Simon finished his drink. The bluff and the gamble went on. If anything went wrong at this stage it would be highly unfortunate—what might happen later on was another matter. But the Saint's nerves were like ice. After some minutes the man came back.
"Morrie Ualino don't play tonight. Papulos is playing. You want a game?"
Simon did not move a muscle. Through Papulos the trail went to Ualino, and he had never expected to get near Ualino in the first jump. But if Ualino were not playing that night— if he were engaged elsewhere—it was an added chance that the radio message which Fernack had received might supply a reason. The azure steel came and went in the Saint's eyes, but all the bartender saw was a disappointed shrug.
"I didn't come here to cut for pennies. Who is this guy Papulos?"
Toni's soft brown eyes held an imperceptible glint of contemptuous humour.
"If you want to play big, I think he will give you all you want. Afterwards you can meet Ualino. You want to go?"
"Well, it might give me some practice. I haven't anything else to do."
Toni emptied an ashtray and wiped it out. From a distance of a few yards he would have seemed simply to be filling up the time until another customer wanted him, without talking to anyone at all.
"They're at the Graylands Hotel—just up the street on the other side. Suite 1713. Tell them Charley Quain sent you."
"Okay." Simon stood up, spreading a bill on the counter. "And thanks."
"Good luck," said Toni and watched him go with eyes as gentle as a deer's.
The Graylands Hotel lay just off Seventh Avenue. It was one of those caravanserais which are always full and yet always seem to be deserted, with the few guests who were visible hustling furtively between the sanctity of their private rooms and the anonymity of the street. Business executives detained at the office might well have stayed there, but none of them would ever have given it as his address. It had an air of rather forlorn splendour, like a blowzy woman in gold brocade, and in spite of the emptiness of its public rooms there was a suppressed atmosphere of clandestine and irregular life teeming in the uncharted cubicles above.
The gilded elevator, operated by a pimply youth with a precociously salacious air of being privy to all the irregularities that had ever ridden in it, whisked Simon to the seventeenth floor and decanted him into a dimly lighted corridor. He found Suite 1713 and knocked. After a brief pause a key clicked over and the portal opened eight inches. A pair of cold dispassionate eyes surveyed him slowly.
"My name's Simon," said the Saint He began to feel that he was admitting a lot of undesirable people to an easy familiarity that evening, but the alias seemed as good as any, and certainly preferable to such a fictitious name as, for instance, Wigglesnoot. Charley Quain sent me around."
The eyes that studied him received the information as enthusiastically as two glass beads.
"Simon, eh? From Denver?"
"Det
roit," said the Saint. "They call me Aces."
The guard's head dropped through a passionless half-inch which might have been taken for a nod. He allowed the door to open wider.
"Okay, Aces. We heard you were on your way. If you're lookin' for action I guess you can get it here."
The Saint smiled and sauntered through. He found himself in a rather large foyer, formally furnished. At the far end, two rooms gave off it on either side, and from the closed door on the right came the mutter of an occasional curt voice, the crisp clicking of chips, and the insidious rustle and lisp of cards. It appeared to Simon that he was definitely on his way. Somewhere beyond that door Mr. Papulos was in session, and the Saint figured it was high time he took a gander at this Mr. Papulos.
* * *
The guard threw open the second door, and Simon went on in. He saw that the place had originally been intended for a sitting room; but all the normal furniture had been pushed back against the walls, leaving plenty of space for the large round table covered with a green baize cloth which now occupied the centre of the floor. Fringing the circle of men seated around the board were a few hard, lean-faced gentry whose air of hawk-eyed detachment immediately removed any suspicion that they might be there to minister to the sick in case one of the players was taken sick. A single brilliant light fixture blazed overhead, flooding a cone of white luminance over the ring of players. As the Saint came in, every face turned towards him.
"Aces Simon, of Detroit," announced the guard. As a cynical afterthought he added: "He's lookin' for some action, gents."
The lean-faced watchers in the outer shadows relaxed and crossed their legs again; the players acknowledged the introduction with curt nods and returned immediately to their game.
15 The Saint in New York Page 6
