The Saint In New York (The Saint Series) Page 2

  “There’s some greasy politician bawling out some judge he’s got in his pocket. There’s a lawyer around with habeas corpus—bail—alibis—anything. There’s trials—with a tame judge on the bench, an’ a packed jury, an’ a district attorney who’s taking his cut from the same place as the rest of ’em. There’s transfers and objections and extraditions and adjournments an’ re-trials and appeals. It drags on till nobody can scarcely remember who Ionetzki was, or what happened to him. All they know is they’re tired of talking about Irboll.

  “So maybe they acquit him. And maybe they send him to jail. Well, that suits him. He sits around and smokes cigars and listens to the radio, and after a few months, when the newspapers have got something else to talk about, the governor of the jail slips him a free pardon, or the parole board gets together an’ tells him to run along home and be a good boy or else…An’ presently some other good guy gets a bullet in the guts from a yellow rat—an’ who the hell cares?”

  Quistrom’s gaze turned downwards to the blotter in front of him. The slope of his broad shoulders was an acquiescence, a grim tight-lipped acceptance of a set of facts which it was beyond his power to answer for. And Fernack’s heavy-boned body bent forward, jutting a rock-like jaw that was in strange contrast to the harsh crack in his voice.

  “This guy, the Saint, sends Irboll a letter,” Fernack said. “He says that whether the rap sticks or not, he’s got a justice of his own that’ll work where ours doesn’t. He says that if Jack Irboll walks outa that court again this afternoon, with the other yellow rats crowding round him and slapping him on the back and looking sideways at us an’ laughing out loud for us to hear—it’ll be the last time it happens. That’s all. A slug in the guts for another slug in the guts. An’ maybe he’ll do it. If half of what that letter you’ve got says is true, he will do it. He’ll do just what I’d of done—just what I’d like to do. An’ the papers’ll scream it all over the sky, and make cracks about us being such bum policemen that we have to let some freelance vigilante do a job for us that we haven’t got the brains or the guts to do. An’ then my job’ll be to hunt that Saint guy down—take him into the back room of a station house and sweat a confession outa him with a baseball bat—put him in court an’ work like hell to send him to the chair—the guy who only did what you or me would of done if we weren’t such lousy white-livered four-flushers who think more about holding down a pay check than getting on with the work we’re paid to do!”

  The Commissioner raised his eyes.

  “You’d do your duty, Fernack—that’s all,” he said. “What happens to the case afterwards—that case or any other—isn’t your fault.”

  “Yeah—I’d do my duty,” Fernack jeered bitterly. “I’d do it like I’ve always done it—like we’ve all been doing it for years. I’d sweep the floor clean again, an’ hand the pan right back to the slobs who’re waitin’ to throw all the dirt back again—and some more with it.”

  Quistrom picked up the sheaf of papers and stared at them. There was a silence, in which Fernack’s last words seemed to hum and strain through the room, building themselves up like echo heaped on re-echo, till the air throbbed and thundered with their inaudible power. Fernack pulled out a handkerchief suddenly and wiped his face. He looked out of the window, out at the drab flat façade of the Police Academy and the grey haze that veiled the skyscrapers of upper New York. The pulse of the city beat into the room as he looked out, seeming to add itself to the deadened reverberations of the savage denunciation that had hammered him out of his habitual restraint. The pulse of traffic ticking its way from block to block, the march of twelve million feet, the whirr of wheels and the mighty rhythm of pistons, the titter of lives being made and broken, the struggle and the majesty and the meanness and the splendour and the corruption in which he had his place…

  Quistrom cleared his throat. The sound was slight, muted down to a tone that was neither reproof nor concurrence, but it broke the tension as cleanly as a phrased speech. Quistrom spoke a moment afterwards.

  “You haven’t found Templar yet?”

  “No.” Fernack’s voice was level, rough, prosaic in response as it had been before; only the wintry shift of his eyes recalled the things he had been saying. “Kestry and Bonacci have been lookin’ for him. They tried most of the big hotels yesterday.”

  Quistrom nodded.

  “Come and see me the minute you get any information.”

  Fernack went out, down the long bare stone corridor to his own office. At three thirty that afternoon they fetched him to the court-house to see how Jack Irboll died.

  The Saint had arrived.

  CHAPTER ONE:

  HOW SIMON TEMPLAR CLEANED HIS GUN AND WALLIS NATHER PERSPIRED

  1

  The nun let herself into the tower suite of the Waldorf Astoria with a key which she produced from under the folds of her black robe—which even to the most kindly and broad-minded eye would have seemed somewhat odd. As she closed the door behind her she began to whistle—which even to the most kindly and broad-minded eye would have seemed still odder. And as she went into the sitting-room she caught her toe in a rug, stumbled, and said, “God damn!” in a distinctly masculine baritone, and laughed cheerfully an instant afterwards—which would doubtless have moved even the most kindly and broad-minded eye to blink rapidly and open itself wide.

  But there was no such inquiring and impressionable eye to perform these acrobatics. There was only a square-chinned white-haired man in rimless spectacles, sitting in an easy chair with a book on his lap, who looked up with a nod and a quiet smile as the nun came in.

  He closed his book, marking the place methodically, and stood up—a spare vigorous figure in grey homespun.

  “All right?” he queried.

  “Fine,” said the nun.

  She pushed her veil back from a sleek black head, unbuttoned things and unhitched things, and threw off the long stuffy draperies with a sigh of relief. She was revealed as a tall wide-shouldered man in a blue silk shirt and the trousers of a light fresco suit—a man with gay blue eyes in a brown piratical face, whose smile flashed a row of ivory teeth as he slapped his audience blithely on the back and sprawled into an armchair with a swing of lean athletic limbs.

  “You took a big chance, Simon,” said the older man, looking down at him, and Simon Templar laughed softly.

  “And I had breakfast this morning,” he said. He flipped a cigarette into his mouth, lighted it, and extinguished the match with a gesture of his hand that was an integral part of the smile. “My dear Bill, I’ve given up recording either of those earth-shaking events in my diary. They’re things that we take for granted in this life of sin.”

  The other shook his head.

  “You needn’t have made it more dangerous.”

  “By sending that note?” The Saint grinned. “Bill, that was an act of devotion. A tribute to some great old days. If I hadn’t sent it, I’d have been cheating my reputation. I’d have been letting myself down.”

  The Saint let a streak of smoke drift through his lips, and gazed through the window at a square of blue sky.

  “It goes back to some grand times—of which you’ve heard,” he said quietly. “The Saint was a law of his own in those days, and that little drawing stood for battle and sudden death and all manner of mayhem. Some of us lived for it—worked for it—fought for it; one of us died for it…There was a time when any man who received a note like I sent to Irboll, with that signature, knew that there was nothing more he could do. And since we’re out on this picnic, I’d like things to be the same—even if it’s only for a little while.”

  He laughed again, a gentle lilt of a laugh that floated through the room like sunshine with a flicker of steel.

  “Hence the bravado,” said the Saint. “Of course that note made it more difficult—but that just gave us a chance to demonstrate our surpassing brilliance. And it was so easy. I had the gun under that outfit, and I caught him as he came out. Just once…Then I let out a
thrilling scream and rushed towards him. I was urging him to repent and confess his sins while they were looking for me. There was quite a crowd around, and I think nearly all of them were arrested.”

  He slipped an automatic from his pocket and removed the magazine. His long arm reached out for the cleaning materials on a side table which he had been using before he went out. He slipped a rectangle of flannelette through the loop of a weighted cord and pulled it through the barrel, humming musically to himself.

  The white-haired man paced over to the window and stood there with his hands clasped behind his back.

  “Kestry and Bonacci were here today,” he said.

  The Saint’s humming continued for a couple of bars. He moistened his cleaning rag with three measured drops of oil.

  “Too bad I missed them,” he murmured. “I’ve always wanted to observe a brace of your hard boiled New York cops being tactful with an innocent suspect.”

  “You may get your chance soon enough,” said the other grimly, and Simon chuckled.

  As a matter of fact, it was not surprising that Inspector John Fernack’s team had failed to locate the Saint.

  Kestry and Bonacci had had an interesting time. Passing dutifully from one hostelry to another, they had trampled under their large and useful feet a collection of expensive carpets that would have realised enough for the pair of them to retire on in great comfort. They had scanned registers until their eyes ached, discovering some highly informative traces of a remarkable family of John Smiths who appeared to spend their time leaping from one hotel to another with the agility of influenza germs, but finding no record of the transit of a certain Simon Templar. Before their official eyes, aggravating the aforesaid ache, had passed a procession of smooth and immaculate young gentlemen technically described as clerks but obviously ambassadors in disguise, who had condescendingly surveyed the photograph of their quarry and pityingly disclaimed recognition of any character of such low habits amongst their distinguished clientèle. Bell-boys in caravanserai after caravanserai had gazed knowingly at the large useful feet on which the tour was conducted, and had whispered wisely to one another behind their hands. There had been an atmosphere of commiserating sapience about the audiences of all their interviews which to a couple of seasoned sleuths professedly disguised as ordinary citizens was peculiarly distressing.

  And it was scarcely to be expected that the chauffeur of a certain William K. Valcross, resident of the Waldorf Astoria, would have swum into their questioning ken. They were looking for a tall dark man of about thirty, described as an addict of the most luxurious hotels, and they had looked for him with commendable doggedness, refusing to be lured into any byways of fantasy. Mr Valcross, being indubitably sixty years old and by no stretch of imagination resembling the photograph with which they had been provided, they passed him over without loss of time—and, with him, his maidservant, his manservant, his ox, his ass, and the stranger within his gates.

  “If they do find me,” remarked the Saint reflectively, “there will probably be harsh words.”

  He squinted approvingly down the shining barrel of his gun, secured the safety catch, and patted it affectionately into his pocket. Then he rose and stretched himself, and went over to the window where Valcross was standing.

  Before them was spread out the ragged panorama of south Manhattan, the wonder island of the West. A narrow hump of rock sheltered from the Atlantic by the broad shoulder of Brooklyn, a mere ripple of stone in the ocean’s inroads, on which the indomitable cussedness of Man had elected to build a city—and, not contented with the prodigious feat of overcoming such a dimensional difficulty at all, had made monuments of its defiance. Because the city could not expand laterally, it had expanded upwards, but the upward movement was a leap sculptured in stone, a flight born of necessity that had soared far beyond the standards of necessity, in a magnificent impulse of levitation that obliterated its own source. Molehills had become mountains in an art begotten of pure artifice. In the shadow of those grey and white pinnacles had grown up a modern Baghdad where the ends of the earth came together. A greater Italian city than Rome, a greater Irish city than Dublin, a greater German city than Cologne; a city of dazzling wealth whose towers had once looked like peaks of solid gold to hungry eyes reaching beyond the horizons of the old world; a place that had sprung up from a lonely frontier to a metropolis, a central city, bowing to no other. A place where civilisation and savagery had climbed alternately on each other’s shoulders, and reached their crest together…

  “This has always been my home,” said Valcross, with a queer softness.

  He turned his eyes from east to west in a glance that swept in the whole skyline.

  “I know there are other cities, and they say that New York doesn’t represent anything but itself. But this is where my life has been lived.”

  Simon said nothing. He was three thousand miles from his own home, but as he stood there at the window he saw what the older man was seeing, and he could feel what the other felt. He had been there long enough to sense the spell that New York could lay on a man who looked at it with a mind not too tired for wonder—the pride and amazement at which cynical sophisticates laughed, which could still move the heart of a man who was not ashamed to sink below the surface and touch the common humanity that is the builder of cities. And because Simon could understand, he knew what was in the other’s mind before it was spoken.

  “I have to send for you,” Valcross said, “because there are other people, more powerful than I am, who don’t feel like that. The people to whom it isn’t a home, but a battlefield to be looted. That is why you have to come here, from the other side of the world, to help an old man with a job that’s too big for him.”

  He turned suddenly and looked at the Saint again, taking him in from the sweep of his smoothly-brushed hair to the stance of his tailored shoes—the rakish lines of the dark reckless face, the level mockery of the clear blue eyes, the rounded poise of muscular shoulders and the curve of the chest under the thin jaunty shirt, the steady strength of one brown half-raised hand with the cigarette clipped lightly between the first two fingers, the lean fighter’s hips and the reach of long immaculate legs. No man whom he had ever known could have been so elegantly at ease and at the same time so alert and dangerous—and he had known many men. No other man he had known could ever have measured up in his judgment to the stature of devil-may-care confidence that he had demanded in his own mind and set out to find—and Valcross called himself a judge of men.

  His hands fell on the Saint’s shoulders, and they had to reach up to do it. He felt the slight supple stir of the firm sinews, and smiled.

  “You might do it, son,” he said. “You might clean up this rotten mess of crooks and grafters that’s organising itself to become the biggest thing this city of mine has ever had to fight. If you can’t do it, I’ll let myself be told for the first time that it’s impossible. Just be a little bit careful. Don’t swagger yourself into a jail or a shower of bullets before you’ve had a chance to do any good. I’ve seen those things happen before. Other fellows have tried—bigger men than you, son—stronger men than you, braver men than you, cleverer men than you—”

  The Saint smiled back.

  “Admitting for the moment that they ever lived,” he remarked amiably, “you never saw anyone luckier than me.”

  But his mind went back to the afternoon in Madrid when Valcross had sat next to him in the Plaza de Toros, and had struck up a conversation which had resulted in them spending the evening together. It went back to a moment much later that night, after they had dined together off the indescribable sucking pig at Botins, when they sat over whiskies and sodas in Valcross’s room at the Ritz; when Valcross had admitted that he had spent three weeks chasing him around Europe solely to bring about that casual encounter, and had told him why. He could hear the old man’s quiet voice as it had spoken to him that night.

  “They found him a couple of weeks later—I don’t want to go into de
tails. They aren’t nice to think about, even now…Two or three dozen men were pulled in and questioned. But maybe you don’t know how things are done over there. These men kept their mouths shut. Some of them were let out. Some of them went up for trial. Maybe you think that means something.

  “It doesn’t. This business is giving work to all the gangsters and gunmen it needs—all the rats and killers who found themselves falling out of the big money when there was nothing more to be made out of liquor. It’s tied up by the same leaders, protected by the same crooked politicians—and it pays more. It’s beating the same police system, for the same reason the old order beat it—because it’s hooked up with the same political system that appoints police commissioners to do as they’re told.

  “There wasn’t any doubt that these men they had were guilty. Fernack admitted it himself. He told me their records—everything that was known about them. But he couldn’t do anything. They were bailed out, adjourned, extradited, postponed—all the legal tricks. In the end they were acquitted. I saw them walk out of the court grinning. If I’d had a gun with me I’d have tried to kill them then.

  “But I’m an old man, and I wasn’t trained for that sort of thing. I take it that you were. That’s why I looked for you. I know some of the things you’ve done, and now I’ve met you in the flesh. I think it’s the kind of job you might like. It may be the last job you’ll ever attempt. But it’s a job that only an outlaw can do.

  “I’ve got plenty of money, and I’m expecting to spend it. You can have anything you need to help you that money will buy. The one thing it won’t buy is safety. You may find yourself in prison. You’re even more likely to find yourself dead. I needn’t try to fool you about that.