The Saint In New York (The Saint Series) Read online

  “But if you can do your justice on these men who kidnapped and killed my son, I’ll pay you one million dollars. I want to know whether you think it’s worth your while—tonight.”

  And the Saint could feel the twitch of his own smile again, and hear himself saying, “I’d do it for nothing. When do we go?”

  These things came back to him while Valcross’s hands still rested on his shoulders, and it was the first time since that night in Madrid that he had given any thought to the magnitude of the task he had undertaken.

  2

  Simon Templar had been in New York before, but that was in the more spacious and leisurely days when only 8.04 of the gin was amateur bath-tub brew, before the Woolworth Building was ranked as a bungalow, when law-breakers were prosecuted for breaking the law more frequently than for having falsified their income-tax returns. Times Square and Forty-Second Street were running a shabby second to the boardwalk at Coney Island, the smart shops had moved off the Avenue one block east to Park, and the ever-swinging doors of the gilded saloons that had formerly decorated every street corner had gone down before that historic wave of righteousness which dyed the Statue of Liberty its present bilious shade of green.

  But there was one place, one institution, that the Saint could have found in spite of far more sweeping changes in the geography of the city. Lexington Avenue could still be followed south to Forty-Fifth Street, and on Forty-Fifth Street Chris Cellini should still be entertaining his friends unless a tidal wave had removed him catastrophically from the trade he loved. And the Saint had heard no news of any tidal wave of sufficient dimensions for that.

  In the circumstances, he had less than no right to be paying calls at all; in a city even at that moment filled with angry and vigilant men who were still searching for him, he should have stayed hidden and been grateful for having any place to hide, but it would have taken more than the combined dudgeon of a dozen underworlds and police forces to keep him away. He had to eat, and in all the world there are no steaks like the steaks that Chris Cellini broils over an open fire with his own hands. The Saint walked with an easy swinging stride, his hands tucked in his trousers pockets, and the brim of his hat tilted at a reckless angle over his eyes. The lean brown face under the brim of the hat was open for all the world to see; the blue eyes in it were as gay and careless as if he had been a favoured member of the Four Hundred sauntering forth towards an exclusive cocktail party; only the slight tingling in his superb lithe muscles was his reward for that light-hearted defiance of the laws of chance. If he was interfered with on his way—that would be just too bad. The Saint was prepared to raise merry hell that night, and he was sublimely indifferent to the details of where and how the fun broke loose.

  But nobody interfered with him on that passage. He turned in, almost disappointed by the tameness of the evening, before the basement entrance of a three-storey brownstone house, and pressed the bell at the side of the iron-barred door. After a moment the inner door opened, and the silhouette of a stocky shirt-sleeved man came out against the light.

  “Hullo, Chris,” drawled the Saint.

  For a second or two he was not recognised, and then the man within let out an exclamation.

  “Buon Dio! And where have you been for so many years?”

  A bolt was drawn, and the portal was swung inwards. The Saint’s hand was taken in an iron grip; another hand was slapping him on the back; his ears throbbed to a rich jovial laughter.

  “Where have you been, eh? Why do you stay away so long? Why didn’t you tell me you were coming, so I could tell the boys to come along?”

  “They aren’t here tonight?” asked the Saint, spinning his hat dexterously on to a peg.

  Chris shook his head.

  “You ought to of telephoned, Simon.”

  “I’m just as glad they aren’t here,” said the Saint, looking at him, and Chris was serious suddenly.

  “I’m sorry—I forgot…Well, you know you will be all right here.” He smiled, and his rich voice brightened again. “You are always my friend, whatever happens.”

  He led the Saint down the passage towards the kitchen, with a brawny arm around his shoulders. The kitchen was the supplement to the one small dining-room that the place boasted—it was the sanctum sanctorum, a rendezvous that was more like a club than anything else, where those who were privileged to enter found a boisterous hospitality undreamed of in the starched expensive restaurants, where the diners are merely so many intruders, to be fed at a price and bowed stiffly out again. Although there were no familiar faces seated round the big communal table, the Saint felt the reawakening of an old happiness as he stepped into the brightly-lighted room, with the smell of tobacco and wine and steaming vegetables and the clatter of plates and pans. It took him back at one leap to the ambrosial nights of drinking and endless argument, when all philosophies had been probed and all the world’s problems settled, that he had known in that homely place.

  “You’ll have some sherry, eh?”

  Simon nodded.

  “And one of your steaks,” he said.

  He sat back and sipped the drink that Chris brought him, watching the room through half-closed eyes. The flash of jest and repartee, the crescendo of discussion and the ring of laughter, came to his ears like the echo of an unforgettable song. It was the same as it had always been—the same humorous camaraderie presided over and kept vigorously alive by Chris’s own unchanging geniality. Why were there not more places like that in the world, he began to wonder—places where a host was more than a shopkeeper, and men threw off their cares and talked and laughed openly together, without fear or suspicion, expanding cleanly and fruitfully in the glow of wine and fellowship?

  But he could only take that in a passing thought, for he had work to do that night. The steak came—thick, tender, succulent, melting in the mouth like butter—and he devoted himself to it with the whole-hearted concentration which it deserved. Then, with his appetite assuaged, he leaned back with the remains of his wine and a fresh cigarette to ponder the happenings of the day.

  At all events he had made a good beginning. Irboll was very definitely gone, and the Saint inhaled with deep contentment as he recalled the manner of his going. He had no regrets for the foolhardy impulse that had made him attach his own personal signature uncompromisingly to the deed. Some of the terror that had once gone with those grotesque little drawings still clung to them in the memories of men who had feared them in the old days, and with a little adroit manipulation much of that terror could be built up again. It was good criminal psychology, and Simon was a great believer in the science. Curiously enough, that theatrical touch would mean more to a brazen underworld than anyone but an expert would have realised, for it is a fact that the hard-boiled gangster constitutes a large proportion of the dime novelette’s most devoted public.

  At any rate, it was a beginning. The matter of Irboll had been disposed of, but Irboll was quite a minor fish in the aquarium. Valcross had been explicit on that point. The small fry were all right in their appointed place: they could be neatly dismembered, drenched in ketchup and tabasco, exquisitely iced, and served up for a cocktail—on the way. But one million dollars of anybody’s money was the price of the leaders of the shoal, and apart from the simple sport of rod and line, Simon Templar had a nebulous idea that he might be able to use a million dollars. Thinking it over, he had some difficulty in remembering a time when he could not have used a million dollars.

  “If you offered me a glass of brandy,” he murmured, as Chris passed the table, “I could drink a glass of brandy.”

  There was a late edition of the World Telegram abandoned on the chair beside him, and Simon picked it up and cast an eye over the black banner of type spread across the front page. To his mild surprise he found that he was already a celebrity. An enthusiastic feature writer had launched himself on the subject with justifiable zeal, and even the Saint was tempted to blush at the extravagant attributes with which his modest personality had been ad
orned. He read the story through with a quizzical eye and the faintest suspicion of a smile on his lips.

  And then the smile disappeared. It slid away quite quietly, without any fuss. Only the lazy blue gaze that scanned the sheet steadied itself imperceptibly, focusing on a name that had cropped up once too often.

  He had been waiting for that—searching, in a detached and comprehensive way, for an inspiration that would lead him to a renewal of the action—and the lavish detail splurged upon the circumstances of his latest sin by that enthusiastic feature writer had obliged. It was, at least, a suggestion.

  That smile came back as he stood up, draining the glass that had been set in front of him. People who knew him said that the Saint was most dangerous when he smiled. He turned away and clapped Chris on the shoulder.

  “I’m on my way,” he announced, and Chris’s face fell.

  “What, so soon?”

  Simon nodded. He dropped a bill on the sideboard.

  “You still broil the best steaks in the world, Chris,” he said with a smile. “I’ll be back for another.”

  He went down the hall, humming a little tune. On his way he stopped by the telephone and picked up the directory. His finger ran down a long column of “Ns” and came to rest below the name in the newspaper story that had held so much interest for him. He made a mental note of the address, patted the side pocket of his coat for the reassuring bulge of his automatic, and strolled on into the street.

  The clock in the ornate tower of the old Jefferson Market Court was striking nine when his cab deposited him on the corner of Tenth Street and Greenwich. He stood at the kerb and watched the taxi disappear round the next corner, and then he settled his hat and walked a few steps west on Tenth Street to pick up the number of the nearest house.

  His destination was farther on. Still humming the same gentle breath of a tune, he continued his westward stroll with his hands in his pockets and a cigarette slanting up between his lips, with the same lithe easy stride as he had gone down Lexington Avenue to his dinner—and with precisely the same philosophy. Only on this journey his feeling of pleasant exhilaration had quickened itself by the exact voltage of the difference between a gesture of bravado and a definite mission. He had no plan of action, but neither had the Saint any reverence for plans. He went forth, as he had done so often in the past, with nothing but a sublime faith that the gods of all good buccaneers would provide. And there was the loaded automatic in his pocket, and the ivory-hilted throwing-knife strapped to his left forearm under his sleeve, ready to his hand in case the gods should overdo their generosity…

  In a few minutes he had found the number he wanted. The house was of the Dutch colonial type, with its roots planted firmly in the late Victorian age. Its broad flat façade of red brick trimmed in white was unassuming enough, but it had a smug solidity reminiscent of the ancient Dutch burghers who had first shown their business acumen in the New World by purchasing the Island from the Indians for twenty-four dollars and a jug of corn whisky—Simon had sometimes wondered how the local apostles of Temperance had ever brought themselves to inhabit a city that was tainted from its earliest conception with the Devil’s Brew. It was an interesting metaphysical speculation which had nothing whatsoever to do with the point of his presence there, and he abandoned it reluctantly in favour of the appealing potentialities of a narrow alley which he spotted on one side of the building.

  His leisurely stroll past the house had given him plenty of time to assimilate a few other important details. Light showed from the heavily curtained windows on the second floor, and the gloom at the far end of the alley was broken by a haze of diffused light. Knowing something about the particular style of architecture in question, Simon felt reasonably sure that the last-mentioned light came from the library of the house. The illuminations indicated that someone was at home, and from the black sedan parked at the kerb, with a low number on its licence plate and the official city seal affixed above it, the Saint was entitled to deduce that the home-lover was the gentleman with whom he was seeking earnest converse.

  He turned back from the corner and retraced his tracks, and although to a casual eye his gait would have seemed just as lazy and nonchalant as before, there was a more elastic spring to his tread, a fettered swiftness to his movements, a razor-edged awareness in the blue eyes that scanned the sidewalks, which had not been there when he first set out.

  The legend painted in neat white letters at the opening of the alley proclaimed it the Trade Entrance, but Simon felt democratic. He turned into it without hesitation. The passage was barely three feet wide, bounded at one side by the wall of the building and at the other by a high board fence. As the Saint advanced, the light from the rear became brighter. He pressed himself close to the darker shadows along the wall of the house, and went on.

  A blacker oblong of shadow in the wall ahead of him indicated a doorway. He passed it in one long stride, and pulled up short at the end of the alley against an ornamental picket fence. For a moment he paused there, silent and motionless as a statue. His muscles were relaxed and calm, but every nerve was alert, linked up in an uncanny half-animal co-ordination of his senses which seemed to bend every faculty of his being to the aid of the one he was using. To his listening ears came the purling of water, and as a faint breeze stirred the foliage ahead of him it wafted to his arched nostrils the faint delicate odour of lilacs.

  A garden beyond, deduced the Saint. The dim light which he had seen from the street came from directly above him now, shining out of a tier of windows at the rear of the house. He watched the irregular rectangles of light printed on the grass beyond, and saw them move, shifting their pattern with every breath of thin air. “Draperies at open windows,” he added to his deductions, and smiled invisibly in the darkness.

  He swung a long immaculately trousered leg over the picket fence, and a second later planted its mate beside it. His eyes had long since accustomed themselves to the gloom like a cat’s, and the light from the windows above was more than sufficient to give him his bearings. In one swift survey he took in the enclosed garden plot, made out the fountain and arbour at the far end, and saw that the high board fence, after encircling the yard, terminated flush against the far side of the house. The geography couldn’t have suited him better if it had been laid out to his own specifications.

  He listened again, for one brief second, glanced at the casement above him, and padded across the garden to the far fence wall. The top was innocent of broken glass or other similar discouragements for the amateur housebreaker. Flexing the muscles of his thighs, Simon leaped nimbly upwards, and with a masterly blend of the techniques of a second-story man and tight-rope walker gained the top of the fence.

  From this precarious perch he surveyed the situation again, and found no fault with it. Its simplicity was almost puerile. The open windows through which the light shone were long French casements reaching down to within a foot of the fence level, and from where he stood it was an easy step across to the nearest sill. Simon took the step with blithe agility and an unclouded conscience.

  3

  It is possible that even in these disillusioned days there may survive a sprinkling of guileless souls whose visions of the private life of a Tammany judge have not been tainted by the cynicism of their time—a few virginal unsullied minds that would have pictured the dispenser of their justice at this hour poring dutifully over one of the legal tomes that lined the walls of his library, or, possibly, in lighter mood, gambolling affectionately on the floor with his small curly-headed son.

  Simon Templar, it must be confessed, was not one of these. The pristine luminance of his childhood faith had suffered too many shocks since the last day when he believed that the problems of over-population could be solved by a scientific extermination of storks. But it must also be admitted that he had never in his most optimistic hours expected to wedge himself straight into an orchestra stall for a scene of domestic recreation like the one which confronted him.

  B
arely two yards away from him, Judge Wallis Nather, in the by no means meagre flesh, was engaged in thumbing over a voluptuous roll of golden-backed bills whose dimension made even Simon Templar stare.

  The tally evidently proving satisfactory, His Honour placed the pile of bills on the glass-topped desk before him and patted it lovingly into a thick orderly oblong. Then he retrieved a sheet of paper from beneath a jade paper-weight and glanced over the few lines written on it. With an exhalation of breath that could almost be described as a snort, he crumpled the slip of paper into a ball and dropped it into the wastebasket beside him, and then he picked up the pile of bills again and ruffled the edges with his thumb, watching them as if their crisp rustle transmitted itself in his ears into the strains of some supernal symphony.

  Taken by and large, it was a performance to which Simon Templar raised his hat. It had the tremendous simplicity of true greatness. In a deceitful hypocritical world, where all the active population was scrambling frantically for all the dough it could get its hands on, and at the same time smugly proclaiming that money could not buy happiness, it burned like a bright candle of sincerity. Not for Wallis Nather were any of these pettifogging affectations. He had his dough, and if he believed that it could not buy happiness, he faced his melancholy destiny with dauntless courage.

  Simon was almost apologetic about butting in. Nothing but stern necessity could have forced him to intrude the anticlimax of his presence into such a moment. But since he had to intrude, he saw no reason why the conventions should not be observed.

  “Good evening, Judge,” he murmured politely.

  He would always maintain that he did everything in his power to soften the blow—that he could not have introduced himself with any softer sympathy. And he could only sigh when he perceived that all his good intentions had misfired.