15 The Saint in New York Read online

  "What did you come here for?" Inselheim asked; and Simon blew one smoke ring and put another through the centre of it.

  "To return your potatoes—as you see. To have a cigar, and that drink which you're so very inhospitably hesitating, to provide. And to see if you might be able to help me."

  "How could I help you? If it's money you want——"

  "I could have helped myself." The Saint glanced at the stacks of money on the desk with one eyebrow cocked and a glimmer of pure enjoyment in his eye. "I seem to be getting a lot of chances like that these days. Thanks all the same, but I've got one millionaire grubstaking me already, and his bank hasn't failed yet. No—what I might be able to use from you, Zeke, is a few heart-to-heart confidences."

  Inselheim shook his head slowly, a movement that seemed to be a more of an automatic than a deliberate refusal.

  "I can't tell you anything."

  Simon glanced at his wrist watch.

  "A rather hasty decision," he murmured. "Not to say flatter­ing. For all you know, I may be ploughing through life in a state of abysmal ignorance. However, you've got plenty of time to change your mind. . . ."

  The Saint rose lazily from his chair and stood looking downwards at his host, without a variation in the genial lei­sureliness of his movements or the cool suaveness of his voice; but it was a lazy leisureliness, a cool geniality, that was more impressive than any noisy dominance.

  "You know, Zeke," he rambled on affably, "to change one's mind is the mark of a liberal man. It indicates that one has assimilated wisdom and experience. It indicates that one is free from stubbornness and pride and pimples and other deadly sins. Even scientists aren't dogmatic any more— they're always ready to admit they were wrong and start all over again. A splendid attitude, Zeke—splendid. . . ."

  He was standing at his full height, carelessly dynamic like a cat stretching itself; but he had made no threatening move­ment, said nothing menacing . . . nothing.

  "I'm sure you see the point, Zeke," he said; and for some reason that had no outward physical manifestation, Inselheim knew that the gangsters whom he feared and hated could never be more ruthless than this mild-mannered young man with the mocking blue eyes who had clambered through his window such a short while ago.

  "What could I tell you?" Inselheim asked tremulously.

  Simon sat on the edge of the desk. There was neither triumph nor self-satisfaction in his air—nothing to indicate that he had ever even contemplated any other ultimate re­sponse. His gentleness was almost that of a psycho-analyst extracting confessions from a nervous patient; and once again Inselheim felt that queer light illuminating hidden cor­ners of himself which he had not asked to see.

  "Tell me all, Zeke," said the Saint

  "What is there you don't know?" Inselheim protested weakly. "They kidnapped Viola because I refused to pay the protection money——"

  "The protection money," Simon repeated idly. "Yes, I knew about that. But at least we've got started. Carry on, Uncle."

  "We've all got to pay for protection. There's no way out. You brought Viola back, but that hasn't saved her. If I don't pay now—they'll kill. You know that. I told you. What else is there——"

  "Who are they?" asked the Saint.

  "I don't know."

  Simon regarded him quizzically.

  "Possibly not." Under the patient survey of those unillu­sioned eyes, the light in Inselheim's subconsciousness was very bright. "But you must have some ideas. At some time or another, there must have been some kind of contact. A voice didn't speak out of the ceiling and tell you to pay. And even a bloke with as many potatoes as you have doesn't go scattering a hundred grand across the countryside just because some maniac he's never heard of calls up on the phone and tells him to. That's only one of the things I'm trying to get at. I take it that you don't want to go on paying out hundreds of thousands of dollars to this unknown voice till the next new moon. I take it that you don't want to spend the rest of your life wondering from day to day what the next demand is going to be—and wondering what they'll do to your daughter to enforce it. I take it that you want a little peace and quiet— and that even beyond that you might like to see some things in this city changed. I take it that you have some manhood that goes deeper than merely wearing trousers, and I'm asking you to give it a chance."

  Inselheim swallowed hard. The light within him was blind­ing, hurting his eyes. It terrified him. He rose as if in sheer nervousness and paced the room.

  Simon watched him curiously. He knew the struggle that went on inside the man, and after a fashion he sympathized. . . . And then, as Inselheim reached the far wall, his hand shot out and pressed a button. He turned and faced the Saint defiantly.

  "Now," he said, with a strange thickness in his voice, "get out! That bell calls one of my guards. I don't wish you any harm—I owe you everything—for a while. But I can't—I can't sign my own death warrant—or Viola's. . . ."

  "No," said the Saint softly. "Of course not."

  He hitched himself unhurriedly off the desk and walked to the window. There, he threw a long leg across the sill; and his unchanged azure eyes turned back to fix themselves on Inselheim.

  "Perhaps," he said quietly, "you'll tell me the rest another day."

  The broker shook his head violently.

  "Never," he gabbled. "Never. I don't want to die. I won't tell anything. You can't make me. You can't!"

  A heavy footstep sounded outside in the hall. Inselheim stood staring, his chest heaving breathlessly, his mouth half open as if aghast at the meaning of his own words, his hands twitching. The light in his mind had suddenly burst. He looked for contempt, braced himself for a retort that would shrivel the last of his pride, and instead saw nothing in the Saint's calm eyes but a sincere and infinite compassion that was worse than the bitterest derision. Inselheim gasped; and his stomach was suddenly empty as he realized that he had thrown everything away.

  But the Saint looked at him and smiled.

  "I'll see you again," he said; and then, as a knock came on the door and the guard's voice demanded an answer, he low­ered himself briskly to the fire-escape landing and went on his way.

  The profit from his visit had been precisely nil—in fact, a mercenary estimate might have assessed it as a dead loss of ninety thousand dollars—but that was his own fault. As he slid nimbly down the iron ladders he cursed himself gently for that moment's unwariness which had permitted Inselheim to put a finger on the bell. And yet, without the shock of seeing that last denial actually accomplished, without that final flurry of insensate panic, the broker's awakening might never have been completed. And Simon had a premonition that if Inselheim's chance came again the result would be a little different.

  Oddly enough, in his preoccupation with that angle on the task in hand, the Saint had forgotten that there were other parties who would be likely to develop an interest in Sutton Place that night. He stepped off the last ladder into the inky blackness of the narrow alley where it let him down without a thought of immediate danger, and heard the slight movement behind him too late. He spun round with his right hand dart­ing to his pocket, but before it bad touched his gun a strong arm was flung round his neck from behind and the steel snout of an automatic jabbed into his back. A voice harsh with exultation snarled in his ear: "Come a little ways with us, will ya . . . pal?"

  * * *

  Not a shadow of uneasiness darkened the Saint's brow as he crossed the threshold of the back room of Charley's Place and stood for a moment regarding the faces before him. Be­hind him he heard the click of the latch as the door was closed; and the men who had risen from their seats in the front bar and followed him as his captors hustled him through ranged themselves along the walls. More than a dozen men were gathered in the room. More than two dozen eyes were riveted on him in the same calculating stares—eyes as hard and un­winking as coloured marbles, barren of all humanity.

  He was unarmed. He had nothing larger than a pin which might have been u
sed as an offensive weapon. His gun had been taken from him; and the knife which he carried in his sleeve, having left men alive and day before to tell the tale of its deadliness, had been removed almost as quickly. The new desperate suspicion of concealed weapons with which his earlier exploits had filled the minds of the mob had prompted a vastly less perfunctory search than the deceased Mr. Papulos had thought necessary—a search which had left no inch of his person untouched, and which had even seized on his penknife and cigarette case as possible sources of danger. The thorough­ness of the examination had afforded the Saint some grim amusement at the time, but not for a moment had he lost sight of what it meant. Yet his poise had never been more easy and debonair, the steel masked down more deceptively in the mocking depths of his eyes, than it was as he stood there smil­ing and nodding to the assembled company like an actor tak­ing a bow.

  "How! my palefaced brothers," he murmured. "The council sits, though the pipe of peace is not in evidence. Well, well, well—every time we get together you think of new games, as the bishop said to the actress. And what do we play tonight?"

  A weird light came into the eyes of Heimie Felder, who sat at the table with a fresh bandage round his head. He leaned across and whispered to Dutch Kuhlmann.

  "Nuts," he said, almost pleadingly. "De guy is nuts. Dijja hear what he says?"

  Kuhlmann's contracted pupils were fixed steadily on the Saint's face. He made no answer. And after that first general survey of the congregation in which he had been included, Simon had not looked at him. For all of the Saint's interest was taken up with the girl who also sat at the table.

  It was strange what a deep impression she had made on him in the places where she had crossed his path. He realized that even now he knew nothing about her. He had heard, or as­sumed that he heard, her voice over the telephone; he had seen, or assumed that he saw, the owner of that disembodied voice in the house on Long Island where Viola Inselheim was held and Morrie Ualino died; and once he had felt her hand in the darkness and she had pressed a gun into his hand. But she had never identified herself to more than one of his senses at the same time; and he knew that his cardinal belief that this slim, fair-haired girl with the inscrutable amber eyes was that mysterious Fay Edwards of whom Fernack had spoken rested on nothing but intuition. And yet, even while the active part of his brain had been most wrapped up in the practical mechanics of his vendetta, her image had never been very far from his mind.

  The sight of her in that room, the one glimpse of colour and beauty in the grim circle of silent men, brought back to the Saint every question that he had asked himself about her. Every question had trailed off into the same nebulous voids of guesswork in which the hope of any absolute answer was more elusive than the end of a rainbow; but to see her again at such a moment gave him a throb of pleasure for which there was no logical accounting. Once when he was in need she had helped him; he might never know why. Now he was again in need, and he wondered what she was thinking and what she would do. Her face told him nothing—only a spark of something to which he could give no name gleamed for an instant in her eyes and was gone.

  Dutch Kuhlmann turned to her.

  "This is der Saint?" he asked.

  She answered without shifting her gaze from Simon: "Yes. That's the man who killed Morrie."

  It was the first tune he had ever seen her and heard her speak at once, the first definite knowledge that his intuition had been right; and a queer thrill leapt through him at the sound of her voice. It was as if he had been fascinated by a picture, and it had suddenly come to life.

  "Good-evening, Fay," he said.

  She looked at him for a moment longer and then took a cigarette from her bag and struck a match. The movement veiled her eyes, and the spark which he thought he had seen there might have existed only in his imagination.

  Kuhlmann nodded to a man who stood by the wall, and another door was unlocked and opened. Through it, after a brief pause, came two other men.

  One of them was a big burly man with grey hair and a florid complexion on which the eyebrows stood out startlingly black and bushy, as if they had been gummed on by an absent-minded make-up artist. The other was a small bald-headed man with a heavy black moustache and gold-rimmed pince-nez, whose peering and fluttering manner reminded the Saint irresistibly of a weasel. Seen together, they looked rather like a vaudeville partnership which, either through mishap or design, had been obliged to share the props originally in­tended for one, and who had squabbled childishly over the division: between them they possessed the material for two normally sized men of normal hairiness, but on account of their disagreement they had both emerged with extravagant inequalities. Simon had an irreverent desire to remove the bushy eyebrows from the large man and glue them where it seemed they would be more appropriate, above the luxuriant moustache of the small one. Their bearing was subtly different from that of the others who were assembled in the room; and the Saint gave play to his flippant imaginings only for a passing second, for he had recognized them as soon as they came in and knew that the conference was almost complete. One of . them was the district attorney, Marcus Yeald; the other was the political boss of New York City himself, Robert Orcread— known by his own wish as "Honest Bob."

  They studied the Saint with open interest while chairs were vacated for them at the table. Yeald did his scrutinizing from a safe distance, peering through his spectacles nervously— Simon barely overcame the temptation to say "Boo!" to him and find out if he would jump as far as he seemed pre­pared to. Orcread, on the other hand, came round the table without sitting down.

  "So you're the guy we've been looking for," he said; and the Saint smiled.

  "I guess you know whom you were looking for, Honest Bob," he said.

  Orcread's face hardened.

  "How did you know my name?"

  "I recognized you from your caricature in the New Yorker last week, brother," Simon explained, and gathered at once that the drawing had not met with the Tammany dictator's approval.

  Orcread chewed on the stump of dead cigar in his mouth and hooked a thumb into his waistcoat. He looked the Saint up and down again with flinty eyes.

  "Better not get too fresh," he advised. "I been wanting a talk with you, but I'll do the wisecracking. You've given us plenty of trouble. I suppose you know you could go to the chair for what you've done."

  "Probably," admitted the Saint. "But that was just ignor­ance. When I first came here, I didn't know that I had to get an official license to kill people."

  "You should have thought of that sooner," Orcread said. His voice had the rich geniality, of the professional orator, but underneath it the Saint's sensitive ears could detect a ragged edge of strain. "It's liable to be tough for a guy who comes here and thinks he can clean up the town by himself. You know what I ought to be doing now?"

  The Saint's smile was very innocent.

  "I can guess that one. You ought to be calling a cop and handing me over to him. But that would be a bit awkward for you—wouldn't it? I mean, people might want to know what you were doing here yourself."

  "You know why I'm not calling a cop?"

  "It must be the spring," Simon hazarded. "Or perhaps to­day was your old grandmother's birthday, and looking into her dear sweet face you felt the hard shell of worldliness that hides your better nature softening like an overripe banana."

  Orcread took the cigar stub from between his teeth and rolled it in his fingers. The leaves crumpled and shredded under the roughness of his hand, but his voice did not rise.

  "I'm trying to do something for you," he said. "You ain't so old, are you? You wouldn't want to get into a lot of trouble. It ain't right to go to the chair at your age. It ain't right to be taken for a ride. And why should you?"

  "Don't ask me," said the Saint. "If I remember rightly, the suggestion was yours."

  "I could do a lot for a guy like you. If you'd come and seen me first, none of this would have happened. But these things you've been doing don't ma
ke it easy for us. I don't say we got a grudge against you. Irboll was just a no-account hoodlum, and Ualino was getting too big for himself anyway—I guess he had it coming to him before long. But you're trying to go too fast, and you make too much noise about it. That sort of thing don't go with the public, and it's my job to stop it. It's Mr. Yeald's job to stop it—ain't it, Mark?"

  "Certainly," said the lawyer's dry voice, like the voice of a parrot repeating a lesson. "These things have got to be stopped. They will be stopped."

  Orcread tapped the Saint on the chest.

  "That's it," he said impressively. "We have given our word to the electors that this sort of thing shall be stamped out, and we gotta keep our promises. But we don't want to be too hard on you. So I says to Mark: 'Look here, this Saint must be a sensible young guy. Let's make him an offer.' "

  Simon nodded thoughtfully, but Orcread's words only touched the fringes of his attention. He had been trying to find a reason why Orcread and Yeald should ever have en­tered the conference at all; and in searching for that reason he had made a remarkable discovery. For about the first time in his career he had grossly underestimated himself. He knew that his spectacular advent upon the New York scene had caused no small stir in certain circles, as indeed it had been designed to do; but he had not realized that his modest efforts could have raised so much dust as Orcread's presence appeared to indicate.

  And then he began to understand what a small disturbance could throw a complicated machine out of gear, when the machine was balanced on an unstable foundation of bluff and apathy and chicane, and the disturbance was of that one peculiar kind. The newspaper headlines, which he had enjoyed egotistically flashed across his mind's eye with a new meaning. He had not thought, until Orcread told him, that the coinci­dence of the right man and the right moment, coupled with the mercurial enthusiasms of the New World, could have flung the figure of the Saint almost overnight onto a pinnacle where the public imagination would see it as a rallying point and the banner of a reformation. He had not thought that his dis­interested attempts to brighten the Manhattan and Long Island entertainments could have started a fresh wave of civic am­bition whose advance ripples had already been felt under the sensitive thrones of the political rulers.