The Saint In New York (The Saint Series) Page 17

  Simon’s fist snapped over and thudded into the back of the gunman’s neck, accurately at the base of his skull, smacking into the hard flesh and bone in a savage punch that must have almost jarred the bones loose from their sockets. The man grunted stupidly and lurched forward, but the Saint’s left arm lashed round his upper body and held him up as a human shield, while his right hand grabbed at the man’s gun wrist and held it to prevent Joe twisting it up behind his back and firing at point-blank range. He had had no time to wonder what Maxie might be doing during that flurry of hectic action; when the Saint had last observed him he had been three yards away and a trifle to his left, but the first jerk which had hurled Joe across the line of fire had made that position useless. Simon looked for him over Joe’s shoulder and did not see him. He hauled his living shield round in a frantic spin, and then he heard the deafening peal of an automatic exploding somewhere close behind him on his right, and something hit him in the right side of his back below the shoulder with terrific force.

  The Saint stumbled and caught his breath as a red-hot anguish stabbed through him from the point of impact of that fearful blow, and at the same moment Joe’s body kicked convulsively in his grasp and became a dead weight. Simon’s right arm was numb to his finger-tips from the shock. He turned further, dragging Joe with him, and heard a dull bump as the dead man’s automatic slipped from his nerveless fingers and fell to the ground, but he could not reach it. To have tried to do so, with one arm useless, would have meant letting go his only protection, and he knew he would never have had time to cover the distance and locate the fallen weapon in the dark. He looked up and saw Maxie’s pitiless face, a white blotch in the faint light.

  “You got two minutes to say your prayers, Saint,” Maxie grated, with the first trace of vindictiveness that he had shown.

  He tilted his head and spoke louder.

  “Hi, Hunk, you damn fool! Where are ya?”

  Then Simon remembered the driver of the car, and knew that the chance which he thought he had seen was only a chimera, a last sadistic jest on the part of the fortune which had deserted him. Between them, the two men would get him easily. He couldn’t watch both at once, or protect himself from the two of them together. One of them would outflank him, as simply as walking round a table, without risk and without effort, and that would be the finish.

  The Saint did not pray. He had no deities to call on, except the primitive pagan gods of battle and sudden death who had carried him on a flood tide of favour into that blind alley and left him there to pay the last account alone. But he looked up at the dark sky and saw that the clouds had broken, and a star twinkled millions of miles aloft in the blue rift. A light breeze passed across the common, stirring the fresh scents of the night, and he knew that whatever the reckoning might be he would have asked for no other life.

  “Hunk!” Maxie called again, raspingly.

  He dared not turn his head for fear of taking his eyes off the Saint, but the Saint looked beyond him, and saw a strange thing.

  The driver was not probing into the vitals of the car, as he had been. He was not even approaching at a lumbering trot to throw his taciturn weight into the unequal scale. It took the Saint a second or two to discover where he was—a second or two longer to realise that the blurred form extended at full length beside the car was the driver, lying as if in sleep.

  And then he saw something else—a slender graceful figure that was coming up behind Maxie on soundless feet. And as he saw it, she spoke.

  “The Big Fellow says wait a minute, Maxie.”

  2

  Maxie’s eyes went wide in hurt surprise, and his jaw sagged foolishly. Only the aim of his automatic did not waver. It clung to its mark as if his brain stubbornly refused to accept the evidence of his ears, and his astounded gaze did not shift away from the Saint.

  “Wha…whass that?” he got out.

  “This is Fay,” said the girl.

  Simon Templar opened his nostrils to a vast lung-easing breath. The cool sweet air of the unwalled fields went down into his lungs like ethereal nectar, and sent the blood racing again along his stagnant veins. He lifted his head and looked up at the lone twinkling star in that slim gap in the black canopy of cloud, and over the abyss of a thousand million light-years the star seemed to wink at him. He was alive.

  There are no words to describe what he felt at that moment. When a man has been down into the uttermost depths, when the shadow of the dark angel’s wings has blotted out the last light and their cold breath has touched his brow, not in sudden accident or the anaesthetic heat of passion, but with a remorseless deliberation that wrings the last dram of self-control from every second of hopeless knowledge, his return to life is beyond the reach of words. To say that the weight of all mortality is swept from his shoulders, that the snapping of the strain leaves every heroically disciplined nerve loose and inert like a broken thread, that the precious response of every living sense takes away his breath with its intolerably brilliant beauty, is to say nothing. He is like a man who has been blind from birth, to whom the gift of sight has been given in the middle of his life, but he is far more than that. He has been dumb and deaf, without taste or smell or hearing, without mind or movement, and all those things have been given to him at the same time.

  As in a dream, the Saint heard Maxie’s blank bewildered voice again.

  “How did you get here?”

  “I walked,” said the girl coldly. “Did you hear what I told you? The Big Fellow says to lay off him.”

  “But—but—” Maxie was floundering in a bottomless morass of incredulity that had taken the feet from under him. “But he killed Joe,” he managed, in a sudden gasp.

  The girl had advanced coolly until she was at his side. She gazed across at the limp form gripped in the Saint’s left arm.

  “Well?”

  The monosyllable dropped from her lips with a pellucid serenity that was void of the faintest tinge of interest. She did not care what had happened to Joe. She was at a loss to find any connection whatsoever between his death and the object of her arrival. Maxie struggled for speech.

  And the Saint realised that Joe’s automatic was still on the ground close by, where it had fallen.

  His arm was beginning to ache with the dead weight on it, and he heaved the body up and got a fresh grip while his keen eyes probed the darkness. There was a throbbing pain growing up in his wound that turned to a sharp twinge in his chest every time he breathed, but he scarcely noticed the discomfort. Presently he found a dull gleam of metal in the grass somewhere to his left front.

  He edged himself towards it, inch by inch, with infinite patience. Every instinct urged him to drop his encumbering load and make a swift desperate dive for it, but he knew that the gamble would have been hopelessly against him. With every muscle held relentlessly in check he worked himself across the intervening space with movements so smooth and minute that they could never have been noticed. There was only about a yard and a half to go, but it might have been seven miles. And at last Maxie recovered his voice.

  “What does the Big Fellow want us to do?” he demanded harshly. “Kiss him?”

  “The Big Fellow says to let him go.”

  The dull gleam of metal was only six inches away then. Simon extended a cautious toe, touched it here and there, drew it gently towards him. It was the gun he was looking for. His right arm was still useless, but if he could drop Joe and dive for it with his left—the instant Maxie’s attention was distracted, as it must be soon…

  “Let him go?” Maxie’s eyes were wild, his mouth twisted. “Like hell I’ll let him go! You must be nuts. He killed Joe.” Maxie’s forearm stiffened, and the gun in his hand moved slightly. “You’re too late, Fay—we’d done the job before you got here. This is how we let him go, the dirty double-crossing—”

  “Don’t be a fool!”

  In a flash the girl’s hands were on his wrist, dragging his arm down, and in that moment the Saint had his chance. With a swift j
erk of his sound shoulder he flung the body of his shield away, well away to one side, and his hand plunged downwards to the automatic that he was still marking with his toe. His fingers closed on the butt, and he straightened up again with it in his hand.

  “I think that’s pretty good advice, Maxie,” he said gently.

  There was a trace of the old Saintly lilt in his voice, a lilt of triumphant mockery that was born in the surge of new power and confidence which went through him at the feel of gun metal in his hands again. Maxie stared at him frozenly, with his right arm still stretched downwards in the girl’s grasp, and the muzzle of his automatic pointed uselessly into the ground. Simon’s finger itched on the trigger. He had sworn to be without mercy. The indifference of his executioners had hardened the last dregs of pity out of his heart.

  “Wasn’t it two minutes that we had to say our prayers, Maxie?” he whispered.

  The gunman glared at him with dilated eyes. All at once, in a physical quiver of comprehension, he seemed to take in the situation—that the Saint was alive and free, and the tables were turned. With a foul oath, heedless of the menace of the Saint’s automatic, he broke loose from the girl with a savage fling of his arm and brought up his gun.

  Simon’s forefinger tightened on the trigger—once. Maxie’s gun was never fired. His arms flew wide and his head snapped back. For one swaying moment he stared at the Saint with all the furies of hell concentrated in his flaming eyes, and then a dull glaze crept over his eyeballs and the fires died out. His head sagged forward as if he were tired; his knees buckled, and he pitched headlong to the ground.

  Simon gazed down at the two sprawled figures for a second or two in silence, while the jagged ice melted out of his eyes without softening their expression. A faint gesture of repugnance crinkled a thin line into one corner of his mouth, but whether the repugnance was for the two departed killers, or for the manner in which they had been exterminated, he did not know himself. He dismissed the proposition with a shrug, and the careless movement sent a sharp twinge of pain through his injured shoulder to bring him finally back to reality. With an inaudible sigh, he put the gun away in his pocket and turned his eyes back to the girl.

  She had not moved from where he had last seen her. The dead body of Maxie lay at her feet, but she was not looking at it, and she had made no attempt to possess herself of the automatic that was still clutched in his hand. The light was too dim for the Saint to be able to see the expression on her face, but the poise of her body reminded him irresistibly of the night when she had watched him kill Morrie Ualino, and more recently of the time, only an hour or two ago, when he himself had been sent out from the back room of Charley’s Place on the ride which had only just ended. There was the same impregnable aloofness, the same inscrutable carelessness of death, as though in some impossible way she had detached herself from every human emotion and dominated even the last mystery of dissolution. He walked up closer to her, slowly, because it hurt him a little when he breathed, until he could see the brightness of her tawny eyes, but they told him nothing.

  She did not speak, and he hardly knew what to do. The situation was rather beyond him. He saluted her vaguely, with the ghost of a bow, and let his arm fall to his side.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  Her eyes were pools of amber, still and unreadable.

  “Is that all?” she asked in a low voice.

  Again he felt that queer leap of expectation at the husky music which she made of words. He moved his hands in a slight helpless gesture.

  “I suppose so. It’s the second time you’ve helped me—I don’t know why. I haven’t asked. What else is there?”

  “What about this?”

  Suddenly, before he knew what she was doing, her arms were around his neck, her soft slenderness pressed close to him, the satin of her cheek against his. For a moment he was too amazed to move. Hazily, he wondered if the terrible strain he had been through had unhinged some weak link in his imagination. The tenuous perfume of her skin and hair stole in upon his senses, sending a creeping trickle of fire along his veins; her lips found his mouth, and for one mad second he was shaken by the awareness of her passion. He winced imperceptibly, and she drew back.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “You see, you didn’t get here quite soon enough. I stopped one.”

  Instantly she forgot everything else. She drew him over to the car, switched on the headlights, and made him take off his coat. With quick gentle hands she slipped his shirt down over his shoulder; he could feel the warm stickiness of blood on his back. On the ground close by, the chauffeur still lay as if asleep.

  “Better make sure he doesn’t wake up while you’re doing the first aid,” said the Saint, with a rather weary gesture towards the unconscious man.

  “He won’t wake up,” she answered calmly. “I killed him.”

  Then Simon saw that the shadow between the driver’s shoulder-blades was the hilt of a small knife, and a phantom chill went through him. He understood now why Maxie’s call had gone unanswered. The girl’s hands were perfectly steady on his back; he couldn’t see her face because she was behind him, but he knew what he would have found there. It would have been masked with the same cold beauty, the same unearthly contempt of life and death and all their associations, which he had only once seen broken—so strangely, only a few moments before.

  She fastened his handkerchief and her own over the wound, replaced his shirt, and drew his coat loosely over the shoulder. Her hand rested there lightly.

  “You’ll have to see a doctor,” she said. “I know a man in Passaic that we can go to.”

  He nodded, and moved round to the side of the car. Competently, she lowered the bonnet over the engine and forestalled him at the wheel. He didn’t protest.

  It was impossible to turn the car about in the confined space, and she had to back up the lane until they reached the highway. She did it as confidently as he would have expected her to, although he had never met a woman before who had really achieved a complete mastery of the art of backing. Inanimate stones seemed to have become alive, judging by the way they thrust malicious obstacles into the path of the tyres and threatened to pitch the car into the shrubbery, but her small right hand on the wheel performed impossible feats. In a remarkably short time they had broken through the trees and swung around in the main road, and the powerful sedan, responding instantly to the pressure of her foot on the accelerator, whirled away like the wind towards Passaic.

  The Saint saw no other car near the side road, and was compelled to repeat Maxie’s question.

  “How did you get here?”

  “I was in the trunk behind,” she explained. “Hunk was hanging around so long that I thought I’d never be able to get out. That’s why I was late.”

  The strident horn blared a continuous warning to slower cars as the speedometer needle flickered along the dial. She drove fast, flat out, defiantly, yet with a cold machine-tooled precision of hand and eye that took the recklessness out of her contempt for every other driver’s rights to the road. Perhaps, as they scrambled blasphemously out of her path, they caught a glimpse of her fair hair and pale careless face as she flashed by, like a valkyrie riding past on the gales of death.

  Simon lay back in his corner and lighted a cigarette. His shoulder was throbbing more painfully, and he was glad to rest. But the puzzle in his mind went on. It was the second time she had intervened, this time to save his life, and he was still without a reason. Except—the obvious one. There seemed to be no doubt about that; although until that moment she had never spoken a word to him. The Saint had lived his life. He had philandered and roistered with the best, and done it as he did most other things, better than any of them, but in that mad moment when she had kissed him he had felt something which was unlike anything else in his experience, something of which he could almost be afraid…

  He was too tired to go deeper into it then. Consciously, he tried to postpone the accounting which would be forced on him soon enough
, and he was relieved when the lights of Passaic sprang up around them, even though he realised that that only lessened the time in which he must make up his mind.

  The girl stopped the car before a small house on the outskirts of the town and climbed out. Simon hesitated.

  “Hadn’t you better wait here?” he suggested. “If this bird is connected with your mob—”

  “He isn’t. Come on.”

  She was ringing the bell when he reached the door. After a lengthy interval the doctor opened it, sleepy-eyed and dishevelled, in his shirt and trousers. He was a swarthy stocky man with a loose lower lip and rather prominent eyes which shifted salaciously behind thick pebble glasses—Simon would not have cared to take his wife there, but nevertheless the doctor’s handling of the present circumstances was commendable in every way. After one glance at the Saint’s stained shirt and empty sleeve he led the way to his surgery and lighted the gas under a sterilising tray.

  He gave the Saint a long shot of brandy and proceeded to wash his hands methodically in a cracked basin.

  “How’ve you been keeping, Fay?” he asked.

  “Pretty well,” she replied casually. “How about you?”

  He grunted, drying his hands.

  “I’ve been fairly busy. I haven’t taken a vacation since I went to the Chicago Exhibition.”

  The bullet had entered the Saint’s back at an angle, pierced cleanly through the latissimus dorsi, ricocheted off a rib, and lodged a few inches lower down in the chest wall. Simon knew that the lung had not been touched—otherwise he would probably have been dead before that—but he was grateful for knowing the exact extent of the injury. The doctor worked with impersonal efficiency, and the girl took a cigarette and watched, passing him things when he asked for them. Simon looked at her face—it was impassive, untouched by her thoughts.