15 The Saint in New York Page 20

  But the fight was back in him. The hope and courage, the power and tie glory, were creeping back through his veins in a mighty tide that washed defeat and despondency away. The sound of trumpets echoed in his ears, faint and far away—how faint and far, perhaps no one but himself would ever know. But the sound was there. And if it was a deeper note, a little less brazen and flamboyant than it had ever been before, only the Saint knew how much that also meant.

  He stood up and reached for the gun. Even then, he could scarcely believe that it was in his power to touch it—that it wouldn't vanish into thin air as soon as his fingers came within an inch of it, a derisive will-o'-the-wisp created by weariness and despair out of the fumes of unnatural stimulation. At least, there must be a string tied to it—it would be jerked suddenly out of his reach, while the detective jeered at him ghoulishly. . . . But Fernack wasn't even looking at him. He had turned away again and was fumbling with a box of matches as if he had forgotten what he had picked them up for.

  Simon touched the gun. The steel was still warm from Fernack's pocket. His fingers closed round the butt, tightened round its solid contours; it fitted beautifully into his hand. He held it a moment, feeling the supremely balanced weight of it along the muscles of his arm; and then he put it away in his pocket

  "Take care of it," Fernack said, striking his match. "I'm rather fond of that gun."

  "Thanks, Fernack," said the Saint quietly. "I'll report to you by half-past nine—with or without the Big Fellow."

  "You'd better wash and clean up a bit and get your coat on properly before you go," said Fernack casually. "The way you look now, any dumb cop would take you in on sight."

  Ten minutes later Simon Templar left the house. Fernack did not even watch him go.

  * * *

  Chris Cellini himself appeared behind the bars of his base­ment door a few moments after Simon rang the bell. He recog­nized the Saint almost at once and let him in. In spite of the hour, his rich voice had not lost a fraction of its welcoming cordiality.

  "Come in, Simon! I hope you don't want a steak now, but you can have a drink."

  He was leading the way back towards the kitchen, but Simon hesitated in the corridor.

  "Is anyone else here?"

  Chris shook his head.

  "Nobody but ourselves. The boys have only just gone—we had a late night tonight, or else you'd of found me in bed."

  He sat the Saint down at the big centre table, stained with the relics of an evening's conviviality, and brought up a bot­tle and a couple of clean glasses. His alert brown eyes took in the pallor of Simon's face, the marks on his shirt which showed beyond the edge of his coat, and the stiffness of his right arm.

  "You've been in the wars, Simon. Have you seen a doctor? Are you all right?"

  "Yes, I'm all right," said the Saint laconically.

  Chris regarded him anxiously for a moment longer; and then his rich habitual laugh pealed out again—a big, mean­ingless, infectious laugh that was the ultimate expression of his sunny personality. If there was a trace of artificiality about it then, Simon understood the spirit of it.

  "Say, one of these days you'll get into some serious trouble, and I shall have to go to your funeral. The last time I went to a funeral, it was a man who drank himself to death. I remem­ber a couple of years ago ..."

  He talked with genial inconsequence for nearly an hour, and Simon was unspeakably glad to have all effort taken out of his hands. Towards the end of that time Simon was watch­ing the slow crawling of the hands of the clock on the wall till his vision blurred; the sudden jangle of the bell in the passage outside made him start. He downed the rest of his drink quickly.

  "I think that's for me," he said.

  Chris nodded, and the Saint went outside and picked up the receiver.

  "Hullo," said a thick masculine voice. "Is dat Mabel?"

  "No, this is not Mabel," said the Saint viciously. "And I hope she sticks a knife in you when you do find her."

  Over in Brooklyn, a disconsolate Mr. Bungstatter jiggered the hook querulously and then squinted blearily at the danc­ing figures on his telephone dial and stabbed at them dog­gedly again.

  The Saint went back to the kitchen and shrugged heavily in answer to Chris's unspoken question. Chris was silent for a short while and then went on talking again as if nothing had happened. In ten minutes the telephone rang again.

  Simon lighted a fresh cigarette to steady his nerves—he was surprised to find how much they had been shaken. He went out and listened again.

  "Simon? This is Fay."

  The Saint's heart leaped, and his hand tightened on the receiver; he was pressing it hard against his ear as if he were afraid of missing a word. She had no need to tell him who it was—the cadences of her voice would ring in his memory for the rest of his life.

  "Yes," he said. "What's the news?"

  "I haven't been able to get him yet. I've tried all the usual channels. I'm still trying. He doesn't seem to be around. He may get one of my messages at any time, or try to get through to me on his own. I don't know. I'll keep on all night if I have to. Where will you be?"

  "I'll stay here," said the Saint

  "Can't you get some rest?" she asked—and he knew that he would never, never again hear such soft magic in a voice.

  "If we don't find him before morning," he said gently, "I shall have all the time in the world to rest."

  He went back slowly into the kitchen. Chris took one look at his face and stood up.

  "There's a bed upstairs for you, Simon. Why don't you lie down for a bit?"

  Simon spread out his hands.

  "Who'll answer the telephone?"

  "I'll hear it," Chris assured him convincingly. "The least little thing wakes me up. Don't worry. Directly that telephone rings, I'll call you."

  The Saint hesitated. He was terribly tired, and there was no point in squandering his waning reserve of strength. There was nothing that he himself could do until the vital message came through from Fay Edwards. His helplessness, the futile inaction of it, maddened him; but there was no answer to the fact. The rest might clear his mind, restore part of his body, freshen his brain and nerves so that he would not bungle his last chance as he had bungled so much of late. Everything, in the end, would hang on his own quickness and judgment; he knew that if he failed he would have to go back to Fernack, squaring the account by the same code which had given him this one fighting break. ...

  Before he had mustered the unwilling instinct to protest, he had been shepherded upstairs, his coat taken from him, his tie loosened. Once on the bed, sleep came astoundingly. His weariness had reached the point where even the dizzy whirligig of his mind could not stave off the healing fogs of unconsciousness any longer.

  When he woke up there was a brilliant New York morning in the translucent sky, and Chris was standing beside his bed.

  "Your call's just come, Simon."

  The Saint nodded and looked at his watch. It was just before eight o'clock. He rolled out of bed and pushed back his dis­ordered hair, and as he did so felt the burning temperature of his forehead. His shoulder was stiffened and aching. Yet he felt better and stronger than he had been before his sleep.

  "There'll be some coffee and breakfast for you as soon as you're ready," Chris told him.

  Simon smiled and stumbled downstairs to the telephone.

  "I'm glad you've had a rest," said the girl's voice.

  The Saint's heart was beating in a rhythmic palpitation which he could feel against his ribs. His mouth was dry and hot, and the emptiness was trying to struggle back into his stomach.

  "It's done me good," he said. "Give me anything to fight, and I'll lick it. What do you know, Fay?"

  "Can you be at the Vandrick National Bank on Fifth Avenue at nine? I think you'll find what you want."

  His heart seemed to stand still for a second.

  "I'll be there," he said.

  "I had to park the car," she went on. "There were too many cops
looking for it after last night Can you fix something else?"

  "I'll see what I can do."

  "Au revoir, Simon," she whispered; and he hung up the receiver and went through into the kitchen to a new day.

  There was the good rich smell of breakfast in the air. A pot of coffee bubbled on the table, and Chris was frying eggs and bacon at the big range. The door to the backyard stood open, and through it floated the crisp invigorating tang of the Atlantic, sweeping away the last mustiness of stale smoke and wine. Simon felt magnificently hungry.

  He shaved with Chris's razor, clumsily left-handed, and washed at the sink. The impact of cold water freshened him, swept away the trailing cobwebs of fatigue and heaviness. He wasn't dead yet. Inevitably, yet gradually because of the frightful hammering it had sustained, his system was working towards recovery; the resilience of his superb physique and dynamic health was turning the slow balance against misfor­tune. The slight feeling of hollowness in his head, the conse­quence of over-tiredness and fever, was no more than a minor discomfort. He ate hugely, thinking over the problem of se­curing the car which Fay Edwards had asked for; and sud­denly a name and number flashed up from the dim hinter­lands of reminiscence—the name and number of the garru­lous taxi driver who had driven him away from the scene of Mr. Papulos's Waterloo. He got up and went to the tele­phone, and admitted himself lucky to find the man at break­fast

  "This is the Saint, Sebastian," he said. "Didn't you say I could call you if I had any use for you?"

  He heard the driver's gasp of amazement, and then the eager response.

  "Sure! Anyt'ing ya like, pal. What's it woit?"

  "Twice as much as you're asking," replied the Saint suc­cinctly. "Meet me on the corner of Lexington and 44th in fifteen minutes."

  He hung up and returned to his coffee and a cigarette. He knew that he was taking a risk—the possibility of the chauf­feur having had a share in the betrayal of his hide-out at the Waldorf Astoria was not completely disposed of, and the pros­pect of a substantial reward might be a temptation to treach­ery in any case—but it was the only solution Simon could think of.

  Nevertheless the Saint's mouth was set in a grim line when he said good-bye to Chris and walked along 45th Street to Lexington Avenue. He walked slowly and kept his left hand in his pocket with the fingers fastened round the comforting butt of Fernack's revolver. There was nothing out of the ordi­nary about his appearance, no reason for anybody to notice him—-he was still betting on the inadequacy of newspaper photographs and the blindness of the average unobservant man, the only two advantages which had been faultlessly loyal to him from the beginning. And if there was a hint of fever in the brightness of the steel-blue eyes that raked the sidewalks watchfully as he sauntered down the block to the rendezvous at 44th Street, it subtracted nothing from their unswerving vigilance.

  But he saw nothing that he should not have seen—no signs of a collection of large men lounging against lampposts or kicking their heels in shop doorways, no suspiciously crawling cars. The morning life of Lexington Avenue flowed normally on and was not concerned with him. Thus far the breaks were with him. Then a familiar voice hailed him, and he stopped in his tracks.

  "Hi-yah, pal!"

  The Saint looked round and saw the cab he had ordered parked at the corner. And in the broad grin of the driver were no grounds for a solid belief that he was a police stool pigeon or a scout of the Big Fellow's.

  "Better get inside quick, before anyone sees ya, pal," he advised hoarsely; and the Saint nodded and stepped in. The chauffeur twisted round to continue the conversation through the communicating window. "Where ja wanna go dis time?"

  "The Vandrick National Bank on Fifth Avenue," said the Saint.

  The driver started up his engine and hauled the cab out into the stream of traffic.

  "Chees!" he said in some awe, at the first crosstown traffic light "Ya don't t'ink we can take dat joint wit' only two guns?"

  "I hadn't thought about it," Simon confessed mildly.

  The driver seemed disappointed in spite of his initial skepti­cism.

  "I figgered dat might be okay for a guy like you, wit' me helpin' ya," he said. "Still, maybe ya ain't feelin' quite your­self yet. I hoid ja got taken for a ride last night—I was t'inkin' I shouldn't be seein' ya for a long while."

  "A lot of other people are still thinking that," murmured the Saint sardonically.

  They slowed up along Fifth Avenue as they came within a block of the Vandrick Bank Building.

  "Whadda we do here, pal?" asked the driver.

  "Park as close to the entrance as you can get," Simon told him. "I'll wait in the cab for a bit. If I get out, stay here and keep your engine running. Be ready for a getaway. We may have a passenger—and then I'll tell you more."

  "Okay," said the chauffeur phlegmatically; and then an idea struck him. He slapped his thigh. "Chees!" he said. "I t'ought ya was kiddin'. Dat's better 'n hoistin' de bank!"

  "What is?" inquired the Saint, with slight puzzlement.

  "Aw, nuts," said the driver. "Ya can't catch me twice. Why, puttin' de arm on Lowell Vandrick himself, of course. Chees! I can see de headlines. 'Sebastian Lipski an' de Saint Snatches off de President of de Vandrick National Bank.' Chees, pal, ya had me guessin' at foist!"

  Simon grinned silently and resigned himself to letting Mr. Lipski enjoy himself with his dreams. To have disillusioned the man before it was necessary, he felt, would have been as heartless as robbing an orphan of a new toy.

  He sat back, mechanically lighting another cigarette in the chain that stretched far back into the incalculable past, and watched the imposing neo-Assyrian portals of the bank. A few belated clerks arrived and scuttled inside, admitted by a liveried doorkeeper who closed the doors again after each one. An early depositor arrived, saw the closed doors, scowled in­dignantly at the doorkeeper, and drifted aimlessly round the sidewalk in small circles, chewing the end of a pencil. The doorkeeper consulted his watch with monotonous regularity every half-minute. Simon became infected with the habit and began counting the seconds until the bank would open, find­ing himself tense with an indefinable restlessness of expecta­tion.

  And then, with an effect that gripped the Saint into almost breathless immobility, the first notes of nine o'clock chimed out from somewhere near by.

  Stoically the doorkeeper dragged out his watch again, cor­roborated the announcement of the clock to his own satisfac­tion, opened the doors, and left them open, taking up his im­pressive stance outside. The early investor broke off in the middle of a circle and scurried in to do his business. The bank was open.

  Otherwise Fifth Avenue was unchanged. A few other de­positors arrived, entered the bank, and departed, with the preoccupied air of men who were carrying the weight of the nation's commerce. A patrolman strolled by, with the pre­occupied air of a philosopher wondering what to philosophize about, if anything. Pedestrians passed up and down on their own mysterious errands. And yet Simon Templar felt himself still clutched in the grip of that uncanny suspense. He could give no account for it. He could not even have said why he should have been so fascinated by the processes of opening the bank. For all he knew, it might merely have been a convenient landmark for a meeting place, and even if the building itself was concerned there were hundreds of other offices on the upper floors which might have an equal claim on his attention; nine o'clock was the hour, simply an hour for him to be there, without any evidence that something would explode at that instant with the precision of a timed bomb; but he could not free himself from the almost melodramatic sense of expectation that made his left hand close tightly on the pearl grips of Fernack's gun.

  And then, while his eyes were searching the street restlessly, he suddenly saw Valcross sauntering by, and for the moment forgot everything else.

  In a flash he was out of the cab, crossing the pavement— he did not wish to make himself conspicuous by yelling from the window of the taxi. He clapped Valcross on the shoulder, and the old
er man turned quickly. His eyes widened when he saw the Saint.

  "Why, hullo, Simon. I didn't know you were ever up at this hour."

  "I'm not," said the Saint. "Where on earth have you been?"

  "Didn't you find my note? It was on the mantelpiece."

  Simon shook his head.

  "There are reasons why I haven't had a chance to look for notes," he said. "Come into my taxi and talk—I don't want to stand around here."

  He seized Valcross by the arm and led him back to the cab. Mr. Lipski's homely features lighted up in applause mingled with delirious amazement—if that was kidnapping, it was the slickest and simplest job that he had ever dreamed of. Regret­fully, Simon told him to wait where he was, and slammed the communicating window on him.

  "Where have you been, Bill?" he repeated.

  "I had to go to Pittsburgh and see a man on business. I heard about it just after you'd gone out, and I didn't know how to get in touch with you. I had supper with him and came back this morning—flying both ways. I've only just got in."

  "You haven't been to the Waldorf?"

  "No. I was short of cash, and I was going into the bank first."

  Simon drew a deep breath.

  "It's the luckiest thing that ever happened to you that you had business in Pittsburgh," he said. "And the next luckiest is that you ran short of cash this morning. Somebody's snitched on us, Bill. When I got into the Waldorf in the small hours of this morning it was full of policemen, and one detachment of 'em is still waiting there for you unless it's starved to death!"

  Valcross was staring at him blankly.

  "Policemen?" he echoed. "But how——"

  "I don't know, and it isn't much use asking. The Big Fellow did it—apparently he said I was treading on his toes. Since his own mobs hadn't succeeded in getting rid of me, I sup­pose he thought the police might have a try. He's paying their wages, anyway. That needn't bother us. What it means is that you've got to get out of this state like a bat out of hell."

  "But what about you?"

  The Saint smiled a little.

  "I'm afraid I shall have to wait for my million dollars," he said. "I've got five of your men out of six, but I don't know whether I shall be able to get the sixth."