Thanks to the Saint (The Saint Series) Page 17

  “What we have to hope is that Nat and Herman like it even less,” said the Saint.

  Nat Grendel would have objected venomously to hearing it reported that he blew his top when the first article under Simon Templar’s by-line was shown to him, for he prided himself on having risen above such vulgar displays, but he came frighteningly close to it.

  In the course of a career professedly devoted to improving the status of the working man, Nat Grendel had improved nobody more than himself. Rising from origins as lowly as those of any of the toilers he claimed to represent, he had managed to transform himself into a fair facsimile of their own traditional bogey-man. Always impeccably barbered, groomed, and tailored, he looked as if he had never soiled his manicured fingers on any cruder tool than a fountain pen. Not for him was the rugged, raucous, homespun, back-slapping pose of certain other labor leaders who were always trying to prove that inflated salaries and unlimited expense accounts had not made them feel any less spiritually akin to the common man whose cause they championed. Grendel always spoke softly and moreover had taught himself to do it in the language and even a good imitation of the accents of education and breeding, and he comported himself with a reserved and worldly suavity which often exceeded that of the corporation executives with whom he had to negotiate. Yet by some paradox which a Freudian psychologist would not find totally baffling, he commanded the genuine loyalty of a full fourth of the members of the key union local which he dominated, and the steel talons inside his kid gloves were sharp enough to control the rest. Even some of the more conservative and constitutional modern hierarchy of union bosses secretly envied Grendel’s unchallenged rule over his self-chosen province, and although the supreme councils of organized labor disclaimed and deplored his tactics, he was still far too powerful a figure to be disowned or even seriously disciplined.

  At fifty, he had plenty of wavy hair of a distinguished gray, though his brows and the pencil-line of mustache which he cultivated were still jet-black, and he was quite vain of his somewhat actorish good looks and well-preserved figure. Along with the appearance, he had developed the tastes of a sybarite: he liked to dine in expensive restaurants, accompanied by showy if not scintillating young women, and his terrace apartment overlooking Central Park housed a collection of antiques which few of the tycoons he professionally sneered at would have been ashamed of.

  The concluding paragraph of the Saint’s first essay said:

  Those who still want to know the facts which the late Lester Boyd meant to publish will not be disappointed if they continue to watch this space. But I don’t want to put Nat Grendel out of his misery too quickly. I want him to sweat for a few days and lie awake for a few nights first. And meanwhile I am thinking of a few extra ways to make him unhappy which even Boyd couldn’t have handled.

  Grendel found this partly puzzling, but the text which preceded it was essentially ominous enough to make him acutely uneasy for about twenty hours.

  The second article, however, did nothing but elaborate an assortment of generalities, and he began to feel his confidence rebuilding as he allowed himself to consider the possibility that the whole thing might be a hoax, or at best a very crude and hollow bluff.

  Although when it seemed expedient Nat Grendel had employed enough gunmen, thugs, plug-uglies, pipe-wielders, rock-slingers, and brass-knuckle masseurs to make up a sizeable task force, he had contrived to hold himself so personally aloof from violence that he would have scorned the mere suggestion of maintaining a private bodyguard. And it is an interesting fact that he had never had any occasion to doubt the wisdom of that arrogant economy until the third morning after Simon Templar had finagled himself a short-term mortgage on the Fourth Estate.

  When his Puerto Rican houseboy announced the visitor, Grendel was examining a china lion-dog figurine of the Yin dynasty which had reached him through the mail only that morning. “This is one of a pair my grandfather brought back from Shanghai,” said the letter enclosed in the parcel, from an address in Buffalo. “A dealer has offered $100 for them, and we could use the money, but I don’t know if it is a fair price. I have read where you are a collector yourself and I know you would always help one of your union men not to get gypped whatever the papers say, so please tell me if I should take it.” Grendel was still far from being an expert himself, but he knew that if the figures were fakes no dealer would pay ten dollars for them, but if he would pay one hundred they must be worth many times that amount. Grendel was trying to distract himself from his major anxiety by deliberating whether in the circumstances one hundred twenty-five or one hundred fifty dollars would be the ideal offer for him to make on his own account—the object being to seem magnanimous without encouraging his follower to try for more competitive bids—and his first reaction when he heard the name “Templar” was to be so incensed by the effrontery that he forgot to be afraid.

  “Send him in,” he snapped, and as soon as the Saint entered he went on in the same tone: “You’ve got a nerve thinking you could just drop in and get an interview from me, after the lies you’ve already printed!”

  Simon shook his head gently.

  “I’m not a bit interested in anything you’re likely to tell me. And I’m not here to ask if you’d care to buy me off, as you may have been thinking. I just came to keep the promise I published and bring a little personal woe into your life, in case you hadn’t decided yet whether to take me seriously.”

  By that time the houseboy had withdrawn, closing the door after him, and Grendel’s first physical qualm came a little late.

  The Saint was surveying the decorations and ornaments with elaborate and unblushing curiosity.

  “You’ve come a long way, Nat,” he remarked. “If only you’d picked up some honesty along with the other cultural trimmings, you’d be quite a success story.”

  “Listen to who’s talking,” Grendel jeered.

  For an instant the Saint’s eyes were like sword-points of sapphire.

  “Don’t ever get one thing wrong,” he said. “I never robbed anyone who wasn’t a thief or a blackguard, although they might have been clever enough to stay within the law. I’ve killed people too, but never anyone that the world wasn’t a better place without. Sometimes people seem to forget it, since I got to be too well known and had to give up some of the simple methods I used to get away with when I was more anonymous, but my name used to stand for a kind of justice, and I haven’t changed.”

  “If that’s how you feel, you shouldn’t be picking on me,” Grendel said automatically, and was even angrier to hear how hollow it sounded.

  “You are a parasite and an extortioner, among other things, and you’ve had dozens of men beaten and maimed for obstructing your chosen escalator to a penthouse,” said the Saint dispassionately. “But an ordinary judge and jury might have cut you back to size eventually. Only the man who seemed most likely to help that happen was conveniently blown away, and a friend of mine who knows his onions thinks that, whatever happens now on the other counts, you’re a cinch to literally get away with murder. So for old time’s sake, I decided I should do something about it.”

  He smiled again, with renewed geniality, and sauntered across to a glass cabinet which obviously enshrined some of Grendel’s most fragile treasures. He opened the door calmly, and with unerring instinct lifted out a delicate vase from the central position on an upper shelf.

  “This is a nice piece, isn’t it?” he murmured. “I bet it cost you plenty of skimmings off the union dues.”

  “That’s none of your business. Be careful—”

  “It would be a crime to destroy it, wouldn’t it? But is it quite such a crime as destroying a man, wantonly, for no better reason than that he might have told the truth about you?”

  “Put that down,” Grendel said savagely, starting across the room, “and get out of here—”

  Simon Templar put down the vase, sadly and very seriously, but none the less firmly, as an executioner might have swung down a switch that sent a
lethal voltage into an electric chair, crisply and positively, on the edge of the nearest table, with an unflinching force that shattered it into a shower of fragments.

  In a white paroxysm into which no other goad could have stung him, Grendel sprang forward into a collision course with an orbiting set of knuckles which he intercepted with his right eye.

  He reeled and swung wildly, contacting nothing but thin air, and another wickedly accurate fist jarred his teeth sickeningly and sent him staggering back to collapse ignominiously in an armchair which caught him behind the knees.

  The Saint sat on the edge of a table and lighted a cigarette.

  “You’d better relax, Nat, before something permanent happens to your beauty.”

  Dabbing a silk handkerchief on his bloody lips, Grendel spat out some crude words that he had not used for fifteen years. But pain and shock had already quenched his momentary flare of violence. Outside of that instant of uncontrollable madness he would never have exposed himself to physical conflict at all, for he had neither the muscles nor the spirit for personal combat. Now the awareness of his abject impotence at the hands of the Saint was linked with the bitter memory of other half-buried humiliations suffered in his youth, before he learned more devious ways of fighting, and the mocking eyes of the contemptuous buccaneer gazing speculatively at him seemed to know it.

  “I wonder what you’ll do now, Nat? You could call the police and charge me with assault, or call your lawyer and sue me. But if I said I was only trying to interview you, and you went berserk and knocked that vase out of my hand when you took a poke at me, and I had to smack you a couple of times to cool you down in self-defense—it’d only be your word against mine, and you might have a tough time selling it.”

  “I’ll get you for this, don’t worry!”

  “With one of your goon squads? But you’ll never get the same satisfaction out of hearing what they did to me as I’ve had out of slapping you with my own hands. I suppose if they were good enough to kidnap me they might be able to hold me while you beat me up. But that wouldn’t be so good for you, because you’d be proving in front of your own men that you were a white-livered punk who couldn’t lick anyone that didn’t have his hands tied behind him, and they mightn’t forget it. Besides, beating me up isn’t enough. I’ve got to be killed, or else I give you my word I’m going to send you to jail as surely as Lester Boyd would have. And you wouldn’t have the nerve to kill anyone yourself even if he was trussed up like a mummy.”

  “You’ll find out,” Grendel said.

  Simon contemplated him skeptically.

  “You’ll probably end up just farming the job out as usual,” he said. “The whole trouble is, you’re yellow. Even if the Engineer could set me up with some radio-controlled bomb that you could fire from here without the slightest risk that it could ever be proved you did it, I don’t think you’d have the guts to press the button. You’ve made yourself into a little two-bit czar, but you’ll never find out what it feels like to play God.”

  He stubbed out his cigarette, most deliberately, on the beautifully polished table top, and slid himself lazily off it to straighten up on his feet.

  “I’ll leave you to brood about it,” he said lightly. “But don’t brood too long, because in a day or two I may drop by again and do something else horrible. And I’ve got plenty more printable things to write about you.” He paused at the door. “Any time you’ve got a few husky friends with you and feel brave, you don’t have to waste a lot of time looking for me. I’m staying at the Algonquin.”

  Herman Uberlasch felt phlegmatically confident that he had nothing to apologize for in the bomb that had silenced Lester Boyd—although it was one of his less intricate contraptions, it had been entirely adequate for the job, and the conscientious craftsmanship that went into it was evidenced by the fact that it had admittedly hurt no extraneous characters whose injury might have beclouded the issue and unnecessarily increased the volume of public indignation.

  Therefore he was somewhat puzzled by the curt and rancorous tone of voice in which Grendel phoned him a few days afterward and summoned him to another conference. But he went, because Grendel was an old established client and never haggled over a fee, and when he got there he could see very plainly why his customer was emotionally distraught.

  “Dot iss a beautiful shiner you got, Nat,” he commented tactlessly, in the accent which he had guarded as an artistic flourish rather than from any linguistic disability. “Und der schvelling of der mouth also. I didn’t know it vos so true vot I read in der paper.”

  The Saint’s latest article had begun:

  The reason why Nat Grendel, the tapeworm of organized labor, will be not sampling the caviar in his favorite haunts for a few days is that he is ashamed to show his face in public. Not, I regret to say, on account of the things I’ve been saying about him here, but simply because of some inglorious contusions inflicted on it by the rude hands of an unidentified person who may have felt he was paying an interim dividend on the late Lester Boyd’s account.

  “Never mind about that,” Grendel said coldly. “I want you to do something about Templar.”

  “Chust like Boyd perhaps? A liddle machine dot goes off ven he schvitches on der lights? Dot iss a good, simple, reliable system mit no bugs in it. Or do you vant dis vun to be different?”

  “I’ve got a crazy idea—I’d like to pull the trigger on this myself. Would it be possible to rig something that could be fired by radio, for instance? So I could wait till I got him on the phone and tell him what I was doing, and then press a button and even hear it go off.”

  The Engineer’s torpid face lighted up.

  “You should’ve been a clairvoyant, Nat. You ask for der very latest idea I been working on. Only a few days ago a feller comes in my shop mit a model airplane for me to repair, und it has radio controls so he can fly it he says two miles avay. Now you know how I’m alvays looking for new ideas to improve my service, so of course I see at vunce how dis could be exactly vot I’d need some day to schtart a fire or set off a special bomb, und naturally I find out vhere he gets it und I put it in schtock. Dis vill be so interesting I vould almost do it for nodding—only dot vould be unprofessional,” he added hastily.

  “How long will it take you to get it working?” Grendel asked. “This can’t wait for weeks while you’re experimenting.”

  “Der experimenting iss already done. I vould not be talking about it if I hadn’t proved I could make it vork. Der bomb I can haf ready tomorrow. Vhere iss Templar living?”

  “At the Algonquin.”

  Uberlasch frowned.

  “To plant der bomb may not be easy. It iss a schmall hotel vhere everybody iss known und everybody iss noticed. Und I suppose Templar iss no fool, und he vill be looking out for somebody trying to take care of him like Boyd.”

  “Up to a point, yes. But he’s so damned sure of himself that he doesn’t seriously believe it could happen to him. The more I’ve thought about it, the more I’m convinced that he thinks he can bluff me out of making anything happen to him because it’s too soon after what happened to Boyd. So I’m betting it’ll be easier than you expect.”

  “I alvays giff you top marks for psychology, Nat. Maybe you got der answer right dere.” The Engineer scratched thoughtfully at his benevolent walrus whiskers. “Now perhaps ve cash in on his blind schpot like dis…”

  In a room only a few floors less lofty in an adjacent hotel, where he had registered under a new and utterly implausible name, Simon Templar presently took off the earphones and switched off the sensitive radio receiver which had brought him every word of the conversation.

  Nat Grendel also had his blind spot. Like any other man involved in sometimes highly questionable stratagems, he was acutely sensitive to the risk that someone might try to install an eavesdropping device in his apartment, and his loyal and conscientious servant had standing orders which would have made it virtually impossible for anyone to gain admission and be left alone on any p
retext even for a moment. But it had not occurred to Grendel, who did not have the Engineer’s turn of mind, that a Chinese ornament credibly sent to him by a trustful member of his union could have sealed into it a microphone and miniature radio transmitter capable of broadcasting for a more than sufficient two hundred yards.

  Grendel placed the lion-dog temporarily on top of the cabinet which the Saint had vandalized and wrote a letter to Buffalo which he thought neatly solved his dilemma.

  “I’m not an expert valuer,” he wrote, “but I do know that antique dealers expect to make a profit. Let me see if I can help you to share in it. I’m sending you herewith $100—all that the dealer would have given you—to tide you over your immediate emergency. Send me the other figure, and let me get an offer for the pair. Perhaps I can get a slightly better bid than you could, from some dealer who owes me a favor, and if so I’ll send you the difference.”

  In this way he would have both pieces in his possession, there would be no danger of the owner getting an embarrassingly different valuation, and in a short while an additional check for perhaps fifteen dollars would secure him an even more grateful and devoted disciple.

  For the protective function performed by Grendel’s house-boy, Simon Templar was able to rely to a large extent on the voluntary devotion of a large part of the Algonquin staff, some of whom had known him for so many years that they took an almost proprietary interest in his welfare. When he returned to the hotel the following afternoon from typing and handing in his column at the newspaper syndicate office, a bellboy stepped into the elevator with him, exchanged a polite greeting and some innocuous comments on the weather, got out at the same floor, and trailed him unobtrusively to his suite.

  “There was a man here while you were out, sir, supposed to be from the telephone company,” he said when they were alone. “I got the job of letting him in with the passkey and staying here while he worked, you know, like the hotel always has somebody do. It was some complaint about the phone not always ringing, he said. He fiddled about a bit and fastened something on the wire, under the bed, but he said that was only temporary and he’d take it away when he brought a new bell unit. I thought you’d like to know, sir.”