15 The Saint in New York

by Leslie Charteris

  The package lay in a patch of moonlight, solitary and for­lorn as a beer bottle on a Boy Scout picnic ground. The Saint's eyes were fixed on it unwinkingly, and his right hand slipped the gun out of his pocket and noiselessly thumbed the safety catch out of gear. A gloved hand moved out of the darkness, reaching for the parcel, and Simon spoke quietly.

  "I don't think I'd touch that, Ferdinand," he said.

  There was a gasp from the darkness. By rights there should have been no answer but a shot, or the sounds of a speedy and determined retreat; but the circumstances were somewhat exceptional.

  The leaves stirred, and a cap appeared above the greenery. The cap was followed by a face, the face by a pair of shoul­ders, the shoulders by a chest and an abdomen. The appear­ance of this human form rising gradually out of the black­ness as if raised on some concealed elevator had an amazingly spooky effect which was marred only by the physiognomy of the spectre and the pattern of its clothes. Simon could not quite accept an astral body with such a flamboyant choice of worsteds, but he gazed at the apparition admiringly enough.

  "Well, well, well!" he remarked. "If it isn't my old college chum, wearing his old school tie. Can you do any more tricks like that, Heimie?—it's fun to be fooled, but it's more fun to know!"

  Heimie Felder goggled at him dumbly. The developments of the past twenty-four hours had been no small strain on his limited intellect, and the stress and surprise of them had robbed him of much of his natural elasticity and joie-de-vivre. Standing waist-high in the moonlight, his face reflected a greenish pallor which was not entirely due to the lunar rays.

  "Migawd," he said, expressing his emotions in the mildest possible terms.

  The Saint smiled.

  "In a year or two you'll be quite used to seeing me around, won't you?" he remarked chattily. "That is, if you live as long as a year or two. The mob you belong to seems to have such suspicious and hasty habits, from what Pappy was telling me. . . . Excuse me if I collect this."

  He stooped swiftly and picked up the brown-paper parcel from its patch of moonlight. Heimie Felder made no attempt to stop him—the power of protest seemed to have deserted him at last, never to return. But his lips shaped a dazed com­ment of one word which groped for the last immutable land­mark of sanity in his staggering universe.

  "Nuts," Heimie said hollowly.

  The Saint was not offended. He tucked the parcel under his arm.

  "I'm afraid I must be going," he murmured. "But I'm sure we shall be getting together again soon. We seem to be des­tined ..."

  His voice dropped to nothing as he caught the sound of a footfall somewhere on his right. Staring into the bulging eyes of the man in front of him, he saw there a sudden flicker of hope; and his teeth showed very white in the moonlight.

  "I think not," he advised softly.

  His gun moved ever so slightly, so that a shaft of moonlight caught the barrel for a moment; and Heimie Felder was silent. The Saint shifted himself quietly in the darkness, so that his automatic half covered the visible target and yet was ready to turn instantly into the obscurity of the road at his side; and another voice spoke out of the gloom.

  "You got it, Heimie?"

  Heimie breathed hard, but did not speak; and the Saint answered for him. His voice floated airily through the night.

  "No, brother," he said smoothly, "Heimie has not got it. I have it—and I also have Heimie. You will advance slowly with your hands well above your head, or else you may get it your­self."

  For the third time that night the moon demonstrated its friendliness. On his right the Saint could make out a dark and shadowy figure, though he could not see the newcomer clearly on account of the trees at the roadside. But a vagrant beam of the moon danced glitteringly on something metallic in the intruder's hand, and the new voice spoke viciously.

  "You rat!"

  The gun banged in his hand, spitting a venomous squirt of orange flame into the blackness, and the bullet whisked through the leaves and thudded into the tree where the Saint stood. Simon's eyes narrowed over the sights, as coldly delib­erate as if he had been firing on a range; his forefinger closed on the trigger, and the metallic object on which the moon­beam danced spun crazily from the man's hand and flew across the road. A roar of pain and an unprintable oath drowned the clatter of metal on the macadam, and the same voice yelled: "Get him, Heimie!"

  In the next second the black bulk of the man was charging down on him. Simon pressed the trigger again coolly; but nothing happened—the hammer fell on a dud cartridge. He dropped the parcel under his arm and snatched at the slid­ing jacket, but the charging weight of the man caught him before the next shell was in the chamber.

  Simon went back against the tree with a force that seemed to bruise his very lungs through the pads of muscle across his back. His breath came with a grunt and he rebounded out again, sluggishly, like a sandbag, and felt his fist smack into a chest like a barrel. Then the man's arms whipped round him and they went down together, rolling heavily over the uneven ground.

  The sky was shot with daubs of vivid colour, while a black­ness deeper than the blackness of night struggled to close over the Saint's brain. His chest was a dull mass of pain from that terrific crash against the tree, and the air had to be forced into it with a mighty effort at each agonizing breath, as if his face were smothered with a heavy cushion. Nothing but a titanic vitality of will kept him conscious and fighting. The man on top of him was thirty pounds heavier than he was; and he knew that if Heimie Felder recovered from the superstitious paralysis which had been gripping him, and located the centre of the fight soon enough, there would be nothing but a slab of carved marble to mark the spot where a presumptuous outlaw had bucked the odds once too often.

  They crashed through a low bush and slithered down a slight gradient, punching and kicking and grappling like a pair of wildcats. The big man broke through Simon's arms and got hold of his head, gouging viciously. The Saint's head bumped twice against the hard turf, and the flashing daubs of colour whirled in giddy gyrations across his vision. Sud­denly his body went limp, and the big man let out an exultant yell.

  "I got him, Heimie! I got him! Where are ya?"

  Simon saw the close-cropped bullet head for one instant clearly, lifted in black silhouette against the swimming stars. He swung up the useless automatic which he was still clutch­ing and smashed it fiercely into the silhouette; and the grip on his head weakened. With a new surge of power the Saint heaved up and rolled them over again, straddling the cursing man with his legs and hammering the butt of his gun again and again into the dark sticky pulpiness from which the curs­ing came. ...

  A rough hand, which did not belong to the man under­neath him, essayed to encircle his throat from the rear; and Simon gathered that the full complement of the opposition was finally gathered on the scene. The cursing had died away, and the heavy figure of his first opponent was soft and motion­less under him and the Saint dropped his gun. His right hand reached over his shoulder and grasped the new assailant by the neck.

  "Excuse me, Heimie," said the Saint, rather breathlessly— "I'm busy."

  He got one knee up and lifted, pulling downwards with his right hand. Heimie Felder was dragged slowly from the ground: his torso came gradually over the Saint's shoulder: and then the Saint turned his wrist and straightened his legs with a quick jerk, and Heimie shot over and downwards and hit the ground with his head. Apart from that solid and soporific thump, he made no sound; and silence settled down once more upon the scene.

  The Saint dusted his clothes and repossessed himself of his automatic. He wiped it carefully on Heimie's silk handker­chief, ejected the dud cartridge which had caused all the trouble, and replenished the magazine. Then he went in search of the parcel which had stimulated so much unfriendly argu­ment, and carried it back to his car without a second glance at the two sleeping warriors by the roadside.

  Chapter 6

  How Simon Templar Interviewed Mr. Inselheim, and Dutch Kuhlma
nn Wept

  It seems scarcely necessary to explain that Mr. Ezekiel Inselheim was a Jew. He was a stoutish man with black hair surrounding a shiny bald pate, pleasant brown eyes, and a rather attractive smile; but his nose would have driven Hitler into frenzies of belligerent Aryanism. Confronted by that shamelessly Semitic proboscis, no well-trained Nazi could ever have been induced to believe that he was a kindly and honest man, shrewd without duplicity, self-made without arrogance, wealthy without offensive ostentation. It has always been dif­ficult for such wild possibilities to percolate into the atro­phied brain cells of second-rate crusaders, and a thousand years of self-styled civilization have made no more improve­ments in the Nordic crank than they have in any other type of malignant half-wit.

  He sat slumping wearily before the table in his library. The white light of his desk lamp made his sallow face appear even paler than it was naturally; his hands were resting on the blotter in front of him, clenched into impotent fists, and he was staring at them, with a dull, almost childish hurt creas­ing deep grooves into the flesh on either side of his mouth.

  Upstairs, his daughter slept peacefully, resting again in her own bed with the careless confidence of childhood; and for that privilege he had been compelled to pay the price. In spite of the fact that that strange Robin Hood of the twentieth century who was called the Saint had brought her back to him without a fee, Inselheim knew that the future safety of the girl still depended solely on his own ability to meet the payments demanded of him. He knew that his daughter had been kid­napped as a warning rather than for actual ransom, knew that there were worse weapons than kidnapping which the Terror would not hesitate to employ at the next sign of rebellion; if he had ever had any doubts on that score, they had been swept away by the cold guttural voice which had spoken to him over the telephone that morning; and it was the knowledge of those things that clenched his unpractised fists at the same time as that dull bitter pain of helplessness darkened his eyes.

  Ezekiel Inselheim was wondering, as others no less rich and famous had wondered before him, why it was that in the most materially civilized country in the world an honoured and peaceful citizen had still to pay toll to a clique of organized bandits, like medieval peasants meeting the extortions of a feudal barony. He was wondering, with a grim intensity of revolt, why the police, who were so impressively adept at handing out summonses for traffic violations, and delivering per­jured testimony against unfortunate women, were so plain­tively incapable of holding the racketeers in check. And he knew the answers only too well.

  He knew, as all America knew, that with upright legisla­tors, with incorruptible police and judiciary, the gangster would long ago have vanished like the Western bad man. He knew that without the passive cooperation of a resigned and leaderless public, without the inbred cowardice of a terrorized population, the racketeers and the grafting political leaders who protected them could have been wiped off the face of the American landscape at a cost of one hundredth part of the tribute which they exacted annually. It was the latter part of that knowledge which carved the stunned, hurt lines deeper into his face and whitened the skin across his fleshy fists. It gave him back none of the money which had been bled out of him, returned him no jot of comfort or security, filled him with nothing but a cancerous ache of degradation which was curdling into a futile trembling agony of hopeless anger. If, at that moment, any of his extortioners had appeared before him, he would have tried to stand up and defy them, knowing that there could be only one outcome to his lonely, pitiful resistance. . . .

  And it was at that instant that some sixth sense made him turn his head, with a gasp of fear wrenched from sheer over­wrought nerves strangling in his throat.

  A languid immaculate figure lolled gracefully on the win­dowsill, one leg flung carelessly into the room, the other re­maining outside in the cool night. A pair of insolent blue eyes were inspecting him curiously, and a smile with a hint of mockery in it moved the gay lips of the stranger. It was a smile with humour in it which was not entirely humorous, blue eyes with an amused twinkle which did not belong to any conventional amusement. The voice, when it spoke, had a banter­ing lilt, but beneath the lilt was something harder and colder than Inselheim had ever heard before—something that re­minded him of chilled steel glinting under a polar moon.

  "Hullo, Zeke," said the Saint.

  At the sound of that voice the pathetic mustering of anger drained out of Inselheim as if a stopcock had been opened, leaving nothing but a horrible blank void. Upstairs was his child—sleeping. . . . And suddenly he was only a frightened old man again, staring with fear-widened eyes at the revival of the menace which was tearing his self-respect into shreds.

  "I've paid up!" he gasped hysterically. "What do you want? I've paid! Why don't you leave me alone——"

  The Saint swung his other leg into the room and hitched himself nonchalantly off the sill.

  "Oh, no, you haven't," he said gravely. "You haven't paid up at all, brother."

  "But I have paid!" The broker's voice was wild, the words tumbling over each other in the ghastly incoherence of panic. "Something must have gone wrong. I paid—I paid tonight, just as you told me to. There must be some mistake. It isn't my fault. I paid ——"

  Simon's hands went to his pockets. From the breast pocket of his coat, the side pockets, the pockets of his trousers, he produced bundle after bundle of neatly stacked fifty-dollar bills, tossing them one by one onto the desk in an apparently inexhaustible succession, like a conjuror producing rabbits out of a hat.

  "There's your money, Zeke," he remarked cheerfully. "Ninety thousand bucks, if you want to count it. I allotted myself a small reward of ten thousand, which I'm sure you'll agree is a very modest commission. So you see you haven't paid up at all."

  Inselheim gaped at the heaps of money on the desk with a thrill of horror. He made no attempt to touch it. Instead, he stared at the Saint, and there was a numbness of stark terror in his eyes.

  "Where—where did you get this?"

  "You dropped it, I think," explained the Saint easily. "For­tunately I was behind you. I picked it up. You mustn't mind my blowing in by the fire escape—I'm just fond of a little variety now and again. Luckily for you," said the Saint vir­tuously, "I am an honest man, and money never tempts me —much. But I'm afraid you must have a lot more dough than is good for you, Zeke, if the only way you can think of to get rid of it is to go chucking scads of it around the scenery like that."

  Inselheim swallowed hard. His face had gone chalk white.

  "You mean you—you picked this up where I dropped it?"

  Simon nodded.

  "That was the impression I meant to convey. Perhaps I didn't make myself very clear. When I saw you heaving buckets of potatoes over the horizon in that absent-minded sort of way——"

  "You fool!" Inselheim said, with quivering lips. "You've killed me—that's what you've done. You've killed my daugh­ter!" His voice rose in a hoarse tightening of dread. "If they don't get this money—they'll kill!"

  Simon raised his eyebrows. He sat on the arm of a chair.

  "Really?" he asked, with faint interest.

  "My God!" groaned the man. "Why did you have to inter­fere? What's this to you, anyway? Who are you?"

  The Saint smiled.

  "I'm the little dicky bird," he said, "who brought your daughter back last time."

  Inselheim sat bolt upright

  "The Saint!"

  Simon bowed his acknowledgment. He stretched out a long arm, pulled open the drawer of the desk in which long ex­perience had taught him that cigars were most often to be found, and helped himself.

  "You hit it, Zeke. The bell rings, and great strength returns the penny. This is quite an occasion, isn't it?" He pierced the rounded end of the cigar with a deftly wielded matchstick, reversed the match, and scraped fire from it with his thumb­nail, ignoring the reactions of his astounded host. "In the cir­cumstances, it may begin to dawn on you presently why I have that eccentr
ic partiality to fire escapes." He blew smoke towards the ceiling and smiled again. "I guess you owe me quite a lot, Zeke; and if you've got a spot of good Bourbon to go with this I wouldn't mind writing it off your account."

  Inselheim stared at him for a long moment in silence. The cumulative shocks which had struck him seemed to have dead­ened and irised down the entrances of his mind, so that the thoughts that seethed in the anterooms of consciousness could only pass through one by one. But one idea came through more strongly and persistently than any other.

  "I know," he said, with a dull effort. "I'm sorry. I—I guess I owe you—plenty. I won't forget it. But—you don't under­stand. If you want to help me, you must get out. I've got to think. You can't stay here. If they found you were here— they'd kill us both."

  "Not both," said the Saint mildly.

  He looked at Inselheim steadily, with a faintly humorous interest, like a hardened dramatic critic watching with ap­proval the presentation of a melodrama, yet realizing with a trace of self-mockery that he had seen it all before. But it was the candid appraisement in his gaze which stabbed mercilessly into some lacerated nerve that was throbbing painfully away down in the depths of the Jew's crushed and battered fibre— a swelling nerve of contempt for his own weakness and in­adequacy, the same nerve whose mute and inarticulate reactions had been clenching his soft hands into those piti­fully helpless fists before the Saint came. The clear blue light of those reckless bantering eyes seemed to illumine the profundi­ties of Inselheim's very soul; but the light was too sudden and strong, and his own vision was still too blurred, for him to be able to see plainly what the light showed.