15 The Saint in New York
Page 22
" Mr. Chris Cellini laid a magnificent juicy steak, two inches thick, tenderly on the bars of his grill. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, his strong hands moved with the deft sureness and delight of an artist. The smell of food and wine and tobacco was perfume in his nostrils, the babel of human fellowship was music in his ears. His rich laugh rang jovially through his beloved kitchen. "No, I ain't seen the Saint a long while. Say, he was a wild fellow, that boy. I'll tell you a story about him one day."
Mr. Sebastian Lipski said to an enraptured audience in his favourite restaurant at Columbus Circle: "Say, dijja never hear about de time when me an' de Saint snatched off de Big Fellow? De time when we took de Vandrick National Bank wit' two guns? Chees, youse guys ain't hoid nut'n' yet!"
Mr. Toni Ollinetti wiped invisible stains from the shining mahogany of his bar, mechanically, with a spotless white napkin. His smooth face was expressionless, his brown eyes carried their own thoughts. Whenever anything was ordered, he served it promptly, unobtrusively, and well; his flashing smile acknowledged every word that was addressed to him with the most perfect allotment of politeness, but the smile went no further than the gleam of his white teeth. It was impossible to tell whether he was tired—he might have just come on duty, or he might have had no sleep for a week. The life of Broadway and the bright lights passed before him, new faces appearing, old faces dropping out, the whole endlessly shifting pageant of the half-world. He saw everything, heard everything, and said nothing.
Inspector John Fernack caught a train down from Ossining twenty minutes after the Big Fellow went to the chair. He was a busy man, and he could not afford to linger over ancient cases. In his spare time he was still trying to catch up with Euripides; but he had very little spare time. There had been a change of regime at the last municipal election. Tammany Hall was in the background, organizing its forces for the next move to the polls; Orcread was taking a world cruise for his health, Marcus Yeald was no longer district attorney; but Quistrom was still police commissioner, and a lot of old accounts were being settled. There was the routine copy of a letter on his desk:
METROPOLITAN POLICE, SPECIAL BRANCH,
SCOTLAND HOUSE, LONDON, S.W.I.
Police Commissioner, New York City.
Dear Sir:
RE: SIMON TEMPLAR ("The Saint")
Referring to our previous letter to you on the subject, we have to inform you that this man, to our knowledge, has re turned to England, and therefore that we shall not need to request further assistance from you for the time being.
Faithfully yours,
C. E. Teal, Chief Inspector.
Fernack looked at the calendar on the wall, where he had made marks against certain dates. Teal's letter brought no surprising news to him. In three days, to his knowledge, the Saint had come and gone, having done his work; and the last word on that case which entered Fernack's official horizon had just been said at Ossining. But his hand went round to his hip, where the butt of his pearl-handled revolver lay, and the touch of it brought back memories.
Perhaps that was one reason why, at the close of his talk to the senior students of the Police Academy that night, when the dry, stern, ruthless facts had been dealt with in their textbook order, the stalwart young men who listened to him saw him put away his notes and straighten up to look them over empty-handed—a towering giant whose straight shoulders would have matched those of any man thirty years younger, whose face and hair were marked with the iron and granite of his grim work, whose flinty grey eyes went over them with a strange softening of pride and affection.
"You boys have taken up the finest job in the world," were his last words to them; and the harshness of thirty years dropped out of his great voice for that short time. "I've given my whole life to it, an' I'd do it ten times over again. It ain't an easy job. It ain't easy to stand up an' take a slug in the guts. It ain't easy to see your best friends go out that way—plugged by some lousy rat that happened to be quick with a gun. It ain't easy to remember the oath you take when you go out of here, when you see guys higher up takin' easy money, an' that same money is offered to you just for shuttin' your eyes at the right moment. It's a tough job. You gotta be rough. You're dealin' with rats and killers, guys that would shoot their own mother in the back for five bucks, the whole scum of the earth—an' they don't understand any other language. We here, you an' me, are carryin' on the toughest police job in the world. But"—and at that point they saw John Fernack, Iron John Fernack, square his tremendous shoulders like a man settling an easy load, while a light that was almost beautiful came into his eyes—"don't let it make you too tough. Because some day, out of all the scum; you're gonna meet a guy who's as good a man as you, an' if you don't know when to give him a break you're gonna miss the greatest thing in the world, which is seein' your faith in a guy made good."
And in the garden of an inn beside the Thames, in the cool of the darkness after a summer day, with a new moon turning the stream to a river of silver, Miss Patricia Holm, who had long ago surrendered all her days to the Saint, said: "You've never told me everything that happened to you in New York."
His cigarette glowed steadily, a red spark in the darkness, and his quiet voice answered her gently out of the shadows.
"Maybe I shall never know everything that happened to me there," he said; but his memories were three thousand miles away from the moon on the river and the black sentinels of the trees, and there was the thunder of a city in his ears, and the whisper of a voice that was all music, which said: "Au revoir. . . ."
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