15 The Saint in New York Page 15

  "What is that girl Fay?" he asked casually, taking up a natural train of thought from the gunman's penultimate re­mark.

  Maxie tilted back his hat.

  "Whaddaya mean, what is she? She's a doll."

  Simon reviewed the difficulties of reaching Maxie's intellect with the argument that was occupying his own mind. He knew better than anyone else that the glamorous woman of mystery whose feminine charms rule hard-boiled desperadoes as with a rod of iron, and whose brilliant brain outwits criminals and detectives with equal ease, belonged only in the pages of highly spiced fictional romance, and that in the underworld of New York she was the most singular curiosity of all. To the American hoodlum and racketeer the female of the species has only one function, reserved for his hours of relaxation, and requiring neither intelligence nor outstanding personality. When he calls her a "doll," his vocabulary is an accurate psychological revelation. She is a toy for his diversion, on which he can squander his easily won dollars to the advertise­ment of his own wealth, to whom he can boast and in boasting expand his own ego and feel himself a great guy; but she has no place in the machinery of his profession except as a spy, a stringer of suckers, or a dumb instrument for putting a rival on the spot, and she has no place in his councils at all.

  The Saint saw no easy approach to Maxie from that angle; but he said: "She's good to look at, all right, but I can't see anything else she's got that you could use. I wouldn't let any girls sit in on my business—you can never trust 'em."

  Maxie regarded him pityingly.

  "Say, why don't ya get wise? That dame has got it here." He tapped the area where his brain might be presumed to reside. "She's got more of it than you or anybody else like ya."

  Simon shrugged dubiously.

  "You ought to know. But I wouldn't do it. The cleverer a dame is, the more she's dangerous. You can't ever be sure of 'em. They ride along with you for a while, and then the first thing you know they've fallen for some other guy and they're working like hell to double-cross you."

  "What, her?" Maxie's stare deepened with indignation as well as scorn. "I guess Heimie was right—you must be nuts. Who's she going to double-cross? She's the Big Fellow's mouth­piece."

  The Saint's face was expressionless.

  "Mouthpiece?" he repeated slowly.

  "Yeah. She talks for him. If he's got something to say, she says it. If we got anything to say, she takes it back. She's the only one in the mob who knows everything that's going on."

  Simon did not move. He sat perfectly still, watching the lights along the riverside begin to slide across the darkness as the ferry pulled out from the pier. The urgency of his pre­dicament dropped out of his mind as if a trapdoor had fallen open, leaving a sensation of emptiness through which weaved an eerie squirm of excitement Maxie's frank expansiveness fairly took his breath away.

  It was about the last thing he had expected to develop from that ride. And then, in another moment, he realized how it came about. The callous confidence of his executioners was an attitude which worked two ways; the utter, irrevocable finality of it was sufficient to make conversations possible which could never have happened otherwise. In a different setting, threats and torture and even the menace of certain death would have received no response but a stony, iron-jawed silence, according to that stoical gangland code of which the late Mr. Papulos had been such a faithless ex­ponent; but to a condemned prisoner on the road to execution a gunman could legitimately talk, and might even de­rive some pleasure from the dilation of his ego and the proof of his own omniscience and importance in so doing—death loomed so inevitably ahead, and dead men told no tales. It gave the Saint a queer feeling of fatality to realize that he had to come to the end of his usefulness before he could make any headway in his quest, but even if dissolution had been a bare yard away he could never have separated himself from the instinct to learn all that he could while knowledge was being offered. And even at that stage he had not lost hope.

  "I'm sorry I didn't meet this Big Fellow," he remarked, with­out a variation in his even tone of casual conversation. "He must be worth knowing."

  "You got too near as it was," Joe said matter-of-factly. "You shouldn't of tried it, pal."

  "He sounds an exclusive sort of bird," Simon admitted; and Maxie took the cigarette out of his mouth to grin widely.

  "You ain't said nuth'n yet. Exclusive ain't the word for it. Say, you don't know how good we're bein' to ya. You're lucky to of got away from Morrie Ualino—Morrie 'd 've had ya in the hot box for sure."

  As if he felt a glow of conscious pride at this discovery of his own share in such an uncustomary humaneness, he pulled out his crumpled pack of Chesterfields and offered them again. Simon took one and accepted a light, the procedure being governed by exactly the same courtesy and caution as before.

  "Yes," he said thoughtfully, "your Big Fellow must be the wrong kind of bloke to buck."

  "You're learning late," Maxie agreed laconically.

  "All the same," pursued the Saint, with an air of vague puz­zlement, "I can't quite see what makes you and the rest of the mob take your orders from a fellow who isn't in the racket —a bird you haven't ever even seen. I mean, what have you got to gain by it?"

  Maxie hitched himself round and tapped a nicotine-stained forefinger on his brain pan again, in that occult gesture which appeared to be his synonym for a salute to intelligence.

  "Say, that guy has got what it takes. An' if a guy has got what it takes, an' shoots square an' can find the dough, I'll take orders from him. And that goes for Joe an' Heimie an' Dutch and the rest of the mob, too. The dough ain't been so easy since they made liquor legal, see?"

  The Saint frowned with inviting perplexity; and Maxie, not at all reluctant, endeavoured to clarify his point.

  "When we had prohibition, a bootlegger an' his mob were all right, see? They were breaking the law, but it wasn't a law that anybody cared about. Everybody, even respectable citizens, guys on Park Avenue an' everything, useta know bootleggers and ring 'em up and talk to 'em an' be proud to know them. Why, guys would boast about their bootleggers like they would about their doctors or their lawyers, and get into arguments and fights with other guys about whose boot­legger was the best. They paid us our dough an' didn't grum­ble, because they knew we had to take risks to get the stuff they wanted; and the cops was sort of enemies of the public because they tried to stop us getting the stuff—sometimes. Ya couldn't get a guy to testify against a guy that was getting him his liquor, in favour of another guy who was trying to stop the liquor comin' through, see?"

  "Mmm," conceded the Saint doubtfully, more for punctua­tion than anything else.

  "Well, when prohibition went out, that changed every­thing, see? A bootlegger wasn't any guy's friend any more. He was just a racketeer that was trying to stick something on the prices of stuff that any guy could go and buy legitimate, an' the cop was a guy that was trying to put the racketeer out of business an' keep the prices down; and everybody suddenly forgot everything we'd done for 'em in the dry years, an' turned right round on us." Maxie scowled mournfully at the flimsiness of human gratitude. "Well, we hadda do something, hadn't we? A guy's gotta live."

  "I suppose so," said the Saint. "Which guy is this?"

  Maxie wrinkled his nose.

  "A lotta guys got in trouble about that time," he said remi­niscently. "We had a sort of reform drive, an' got hunted about a lot. It got worse all the time. A lotta guys couldn't get it into their coconuts that it wasn't going to be easy money any more, an' it was too bad about them. You had to have it here." He thumbed his forehead again mysteriously. "Business wasn't good, so we hadn't got the money to pay the cops; an' the cops not getting money started going after us again an' makin' things worse." Maxie sighed reminiscently. "But then the Big Fellow came along," he said cheering up, "an' everything was jake again."

  "Why?" Simon asked, with the same ingenuously puzzled air.

  "Well, he put us in the big dough again, see?"


  "With the same old rackets?"

  "Yeah. But he's got brains. An' information. He's got every­thing taped out. When he says: "The layout is like this and that, we gotta fix it this way and that way,' we know it's going to be just like he says. So we don't make no mistakes."

  The lights of the waterside had ceased to move, and there was a general stir of voyagers gathering themselves to con­tinue on their way. The driver climbed back into the car and settled himself, waiting for their turn to pull out in the line of disembarking traffic.

  Keeping their place decorously in the procession, they climbed the winding road that leads upwards from the Jersey shore, and in a short time they were speeding across the Jersey meadows. The drive became a monotonous race through un­familiar country—straight lines of highway which might have been laid across the face of the moon for all the landmarks that Simon could pick out, straggling lights of unidentifiable small towns, blazing headlights of other cars which leapt up out of the blackness and roared by in an instant of noise, to be swallowed up in the gulf of dark behind. The powerful sedan, guided by the expert hands of the silent driver, flashed at a reckless pace through the countryside, slowed smoothly down from time to time to keep well within the prescribed speed limits of a village, then leapt ahead down another long stretch of open road. Despite the speed at which they were travelling, the journey seemed interminable: the sense of utter isolation, of being shut away from the whole world in that mass-produced projectile whirling through the uncharted night, would have had an overwhelmingly soporific effect if it had not been for the doom to which they were driving.

  The Saint had no means of knowing how far ahead that destination lay, and a cold fatalism would not let him ask. He knew that it could not be very far away—knew that his time must be getting short and his need more desperately urgent—but still he had had no opportunity to save himself. The vigilance of his companions had never relaxed, and if he made the slightest threatening move it would hardly incon­venience them at all to shoot him where he sat and fling his body out of the car without slackening speed.

  They could have done that anyhow, might even be prepar­ing to do it. He did not know why he had assumed that he was being taken to a definite place of execution, to be slain there according to a crude gangland ritual; but it was on that ex­pectation that he had based his only hopes of escape.

  He stole a glance at Maxie. The gunman was lounging non­chalantly in his corner, the backward tilt of his hat serving to emphasize the squat impassivity of his features, twirling an unlighted cigar in one side of his thick mouth. To say that he was totally unimpressed by the enormity of the thing he was there to do would convey only the surface of his attitude. He was, if anything, rather bored.

  Simon fought to maintain his outward calm. The length of the journey, the forced inaction under the strain of such a deadly suspense, was slowly wearing down his nerves; but at all costs he had to remain master of himself. His chance would be thin enough even if it ever came, he knew; and the faintest twitch of panic, the very slightest disordering of the swift, cold precision and coordination of brain and arm, would eliminate that chance to vanishing point. And all the time another aloof and wholly dissociated threat in his mind, akin to the phlegmatic detachment of a scientist who notes his own symptoms on his deathbed, was weaving the fact that Maxie might still go on talking to a man whom he be­lieved to be helpless. ...

  The Saint cleared his throat and tried to resume the con­versation in the same tone of innocent puzzlement as before —as if it had never been broken off. He had to go on trying to learn those things which he might never be able to turn to advantage, had to do something to occupy his mind and ease the strain on his aching self-control.

  "How do you mean, the Big Fellow came along?" he said. "If he wasn't even in the racket, if you'd never heard of him before and haven't even seen him yet—how did you know you could trust him? How did you know he'd be any use to you?"

  "How did we know he'd be any use to us? Say, he showed us. Ya can't get around facts. He had it all worked out."

  "Yes, I know; but he must have started somewhere. How did he get in touch with you? What was the first you heard of him?"

  Maxie grunted and peered ahead through the windshield.

  "I guess you'll have to figure that out yourself—you'll have plenty of time," he said; and Simon looked out and saw that the car was slowing down.

  Chapter 7

  How Dutch Kuhlmann Saw a Ghost, and Simon Templar Returned Home

  At first the Saint could see nothing but a stretch of de­serted highway that seemed to reach for endless miles into the distance; and then the driver spun the wheel sharply to the right, and the car bounced off the road into a narrow lane.

  Simon was not surprised that he had failed to spot it. The sweeping branches of trees almost met over the bumpy disused bypath: their foliage scraped the top of the sedan and brushed with a slithering sound against the sides as they went down the side road at a considerably reduced speed. Before they had gone five yards they were effectively screened from the view of any car that might be travelling along the main thoroughfare.

  With both hands clinging to the wheel, which leapt and shuddered in his grasp like a live thing, the driver headed deeper and deeper along the narrow track. If the combined bulks of Joe and Maxie had not formed a system of human wedges pinning him tightly to the cushions, the Saint would have been bumped clear of the seat each time the tires car­omed off the boulders that studded the roadbed.

  Simon Templar was aware of the quickened beating of his heart. There was a dryness in his throat and a vague feeling of constriction about his chest that made him breathe a little deeper than normally; but the breathing was slow, steady, and deliberate, not the quick, shallow gasps of fear. The tension of his nerves had passed the vibrating point—they were strung down to a terrific immobility that was as impermanent as the stillness of a compressed spring. The waiting and suspense was over; now there was nothing but the end of the ride to see, and a chance for life to be taken if fate offered it. And if the chance did not offer, that was the end of adventures.

  The lane was growing even narrower as they went on; the trees and bushes that lined its sides closed in upon them. Plainly it had been derelict for years: the march of macad­amized arteries had swept by and left it for no other service but for such journeys as they were on, and its destination, if it had ever had one, had long since found other and faster com­munications with the outside world. At last, when the stream­lined body of the sedan could make no further headway, the driver jammed on the brakes and brought the car to a lurching halt. Then he snapped off the headlights, -leaving only the bright glow of the parking lights to illuminate the scene.

  A good enough spot for a murder, the Saint was forced to admit; and he wondered how many other men had dared the vengeance of Dutch Kuhlmann and the Big Fellow, only to pay for their temerity in that lonely place. With the switching off of the purring engine all sound seemed to have been blot­ted out of the night, as if the world had been folded under a dense pack of wool; even the distant hum of other cars away back on the highway they had left, if there were any, was in­audible. As far as the Saint could see, there was nothing around them but a wilderness of trees and shrubbery scattered over an undulating stony common; a man could die there with no sound that the world would ever hear, and his body might lie there for weeks before some chance passer-by stumbled on it and sent a new blare of headlines screaming across the front pages. Suddenly the Saint guessed why he had been taken so far, with such precautions, instead of simply being pushed out on any New York street and riddled with bullets as the car drove away. It had been sufficient often enough for other vic­tims; but this case was different. The handling of it linked up with certain things that Orcread and Yeald had discussed. The Saint was not to become a martyr or even a sensation: he was to disappear, as swiftly and unaccountably as he had come, like a comet—all questions could go unanswered perhaps for ever, an
d the fickle public would soon forget. . . .

  Something creaked at the back of the car, breaking the still­ness; and Maxie roused himself. He climbed out unhurriedly and turned round again as soon as he was outside, his auto­matic glinting dully in the subdued light. He jerked it at the Saint expressively.

  "Out, buddy."

  Behind the Saint, Joe's gun added its subtle pressure to the command.

  Simon pulled himself up slowly. Now that the climax of the ride was reached, he had ceased speculating upon the reactions of a doomed man. Every cell in his keen brain, every nerve and fibre of his body, was dynamically alive and watchful. His mind had never worked more clearly and smoothly, his body had never been keyed to a more perfect pitch of physical fit­ness, than they were at that moment in the deepening shadow of death. It was impossible to think that in a few brief mo­ments, with one inconceivably numbing, crashing shock, that vibrant, pulsing life could be stilled, the brilliant mind dulled for ever, the play and delight of sensual experience and the sweet awareness of life swallowed up in a black nothingness from which there was no return.

  He stepped down gradually to the running board. A yard from him, Maxie's automatic was levelled steadily at his chest; behind him, Joe's gun pushed no less steadily into his back. The wild thought crossed his mind that he might launch him­self onto Maxie from the running board in a desperate smoth­ering leap, trusting to the surprise to bowl him over before he could shoot, and to the beneficent darkness to take care of the rest. But in the next instant he knew that there was no hope there. In spite of his outward stolidity, Maxie was watching him like a cat; and he had measured his distance perfectly. To have jumped then would have been to jump squarely into a bullet, and Joe would probably have got him from behind at the same time.