15 The Saint in New York Page 7

  Simon strolled across to the table and pulled out a vacant chair opposite the dealer. One casual glance around the board was enough to show him that the guard had had reason to be cynical—the play was sufficiently high to clean out any small­time gambler in one deal. He lighted a cigarette and studied the faces of the players. They were a variegated crew, ranging from the elite of the underworld to the tawdrier satellites of the upper. On his right was a stout gentleman whose faded eyes held the unmistakable buccaneering gleam of a prominent rotarian from Grand Rapids out on a tear in the big city.

  The stout gentleman leaned over confidentially, exhaling a powerful aroma of young Bourbon.

  "Lookin' for action, eh?" he wheezed. "Well, this is the place for it Eh? Eh?"

  "Eh?" asked the Saint, momentarily infected by the spirit of the thing.

  "I said, this is the place for action, isn't it, eh?" repeated the devotee of rotation with laborious good will; and a thin little smile edged the Saint's mouth.

  "Brother," he assented with conviction, "you don't know the half of it."

  His eyes were fixed on the dealer, who, from the stacks of chips and neat wads of bills before him, appeared to be also the organizer of the game; and as the seconds went by it be­came plainer and plainer to the Saint that there was at least one man at that table who would never be asked to pose for the central nymph in a picture to be entitled Came the Dawn. The swarthy pockmarked face seemed to have been developed from the bald side of a roughly cubical head. Two small black eyes, affectionately close together, nested high up under the eaves of a pair of prominent frontal bones; and the nose be­tween them had lost any pretensions to classic symmetry which it might once have had in some ancient argument with a beer bottle. A thick neck creased with rolls of fat linked this pellucid window of the soul with a gross bulk of body which apparently completed the wodge of mortal clay known to the world as Papulos. It was not an aesthetic spectacle by any standards; but the Saint had come there to take a gander at Mr. Papulos, and he was taking it. And while he looked, the black beady eyes switched up to meet his gaze.

  "Well, Mr. Simon, how much is it to be? The whites are Cs, the reds are finifs, and the blues are G.'s."

  The voice was harshly nasal, with a habitual sneer lurking in it. It was the kind of voice which no healthy outlaw could have heard without being moved to pleasant thoughts of murder; but the Saint smiled and blew a smoke ring.

  "I'll take twenty grand—and you can keep it in the blues."

  There was a sudden quiet in the room. The other players hitched up closer in their chairs; and the lean-faced watchers in the outer shadows eased their right hips instinctively away from obstructing objects. Without the twitch of an eyebrow Papulos counted out two stacks of chips and spilled them in the centre of the table.

  "Twenty grand," he said laconically. "Let's see your dough." His eyes levelled opaquely across the table. "Or is it on the cuff?"

  "No," answered the Saint coolly. "It's in the pants."

  "Let's see it."

  The rotarian from Grand Rapids took a gulp at the drink beside him and stared owlishly at the table; and the Saint reached into his trouser pocket. He felt the roll of bills there; felt something else—the crumpled slip of paper that had orig­inally accompanied them. Securing this telltale bit of evidence with his little finger, he pulled the bills from his pocket and counted them out onto the board.

  It was an admirable performance, as the Saint's little cameos of legerdemain always were. Under the Greek's watchful eyes he was measuring out twenty thousand dollars, and the scrap of paper had apparently slipped in somewhere among the notes. Halfway through the count it fell out, face upwards. Simon stopped counting; then he made a very clumsy grab for it. The grab was so slow and clumsy that it was easy for Papulos to catch his wrist.

  "Wait a minute." The Greek's voice was a sudden rasp of menace in the stillness.

  He flicked the scrap of paper towards him with one finger and stared at it for a moment. Then he shifted his gaze to the banknotes. He looked up slowly, with two spots of colour flam­ing in his swarthy cheeks.

  "Where did you get that money?"

  He was still holding the Saint's right wrist, and his grip had tightened rather than relaxed. Simon glowered at him guiltily.

  "What's the matter with it?" he flung back. "It ought to be good—you passed it out yourself."

  "I know," said Papulos coldly. "But not to you."

  He made an infinitesimal motion with his head; and Simon knew, without looking round, that two of the hard-faced watch­ers had closed in behind his chair. Nobody else moved; and the heavy breathing of the rotarian from Grand Rapids who was seeing Life was the loudest sound in the room.

  Papulos got to his feet.

  "Get up," he said. "I want to speak to you in the other room."

  A hand fastened on Simon's shoulder and jerked him up, but he had no idea of protesting at that stage—quite apart from the fact that any protest would have been futile. He turned obediently between the two guards and followed the broad back of Papulos out of the room.

  They crossed the hall and entered the bedroom of the suite, and the door was closed and locked behind them. Simon was roughly searched and then backed up against a wall. Papulos confronted him, while the two gorillas ranged themselves on either side. The Greek's beady eyes were narrowed to black pin points.

  "Where did you get that twenty grand?"

  The Saint glared at him sullenly.

  "It's none of your damned business."

  With a movement surprisingly fast and accurate for one of his fleshy bulk, Papulos drew back one hand and whipped hard knuckles across the Saint's mouth.

  "Where did you get that twenty grand?"

  For an instant the Saint's muscles leapt as if a flame had touched them; but he held himself in check. It was all part of the game he was playing, and the score against Papulos could wait for some future date. When he lunged back at the Greek's jaw it was with a wild amateurish swing that never had a hope of reaching its mark; and he came up short with two heavy automatics grinding into his ribs.

  Papulos sneered.

  "Either you're a fool, punk, or you're nuts! Once more I'm asking you—decent and civil—where did you get that twenty G?"

  "I found it," said the Saint, "growing on a gooseberry bush."

  "He's nuts," decided one of the guards.

  Papulos raised his hand again and then let it go with a twisted grin.

  "Okay, wise guy. I'll find out soon enough. And if you got it where I think you did, it's going to be just too bad."

  He plumped himself on one of the beds and picked up the telephone. The guards stood by phlegmatically, waiting for the connection to go through. One of them gazed sourly at a cigar that had gone out, and picked up a box of matches. The fizz of a match splashed through the silence; and then the Greek was talking.

  "Hullo, Judge. This is Papulos. Listen, I got a monkey down here who just flashed a twenty-grand roll in C notes, and a certain slip of paper. . . ."

  The Saint saw him stiffen and grind the receiver harder into his ear. The guard with the relighted cigar blew out a cloud of malodorous smoke and drew patterns on the carpet with a pointed toe. The receiver clacked and spattered into the still­ness, and Simon flexed his forearm for the reassuring pressure of the knife sheathed inside his sleeve.

  Papulos dropped the instrument back in its bracket with an ominous click and turned slowly back to the Saint. He got to his feet, with his flattened face jutting forward on his shoul­ders, and stared at Simon, with his eyes bright and glistening.

  "Mr. Simon, eh?" he rasped.

  The Saint smiled engagingly.

  "Simon Templar is the full name," he said, "but I thought you might feel I was going upstage on you if I insisted on it all."

  Papulos nodded.

  "So you're the Saint!" His voice was venomous, but deeper still there was a vibration of the hate that can only be born of fear. "You're the rat who plugge
d Irboll this afternoon. You're the guy who's going to clean up New York." He laughed abruptly, but there was no humour in the sound. "Well, punk—you're through!"

  He turned on his heel and issued a series of sharp orders to the two guards.

  One word out of the arrangements for his disposal was enough for Simon Templar's ears. His strategy had worked ex­actly as he had psychologized it from the beginning. By per­mitting himself to be trapped by Papulos he had taken one more step up the ladder. He was being passed on to the man higher up for the final disposition of his fate; and that man was Morrie Ualino. And where Ualino was, the Saint felt sure, there was a good sporting chance that the heiress of all the Inselheims might also be.

  "March," ordered the first guard.

  "But what about my twenty grand?" protested Simon ag­grievedly.

  The second guard grinned.

  "Where you're going, buddy, they use asbestos money," he said. "Shove off."

  Papulos unlocked the door. The twenty thousand dollars was in the side pocket of his coat, just as he had stuffed it away when he rose from the poker table; and Simon Templar never took prophecies of his eventual destination too seriously. He figured that a nation which had Samuel Insull in its midst would not be unduly impoverished by the loss of twenty thou­sand berries; and as he reached the door he stopped to lay a hand on the Greek's shoulder with a friendliness which he did not feel.

  "Remember, little buttercup," said the Saint outrageously, "whatever you do, we shall always be sweethearts——"

  Then one of the guards pushed him on; and Simon stowed twenty thousand dollars unobtrusively away in his pocket as they went through the hall.

  Simon rode beside the first torpedo, while the other drove the sedan north and east. If anything, the pressure of the gun that bored suggestively into his side had the pleasantly famil­iar touch of an old friend. It was a gentle reminder of danger, a solid emblem of battle and sudden death; and there were a few dozen men in hell who would attest to the fact that he was a stranger to neither.

  They rolled smoothly across the Queensborough Bridge, which spans the East River at 59th Street, and the car picked up speed as they blared their way through the semideserted streets of Astoria. Then the broad open highways of Long Island stretched before them; and the Saint lighted a cigarette and turned his brain into a perfectly functioning machine that charted every yard of the route on a memory like a photo­graphic plate.

  The outlying suburbs of New York flashed by in quick suc­cession—Flushing, Garden City, Hempstead. They had trav­elled some miles beyond Springdale when the car slowed down and turned abruptly into a bumpy unfinished driveway that terminated a hundred yards farther on in front of a sombre and shuttered two-story house, where another car was already parked.

  One of the guards nudged him out, and the three of them mounted the short flight of steps to the porch in single file. The inevitable face peered through a grille, recognized the leading guard, and said, "Hi, Joe." The bolts were drawn, and they went in.

  The hall was lighted by a single heavily frosted orange bulb which did very little more than relieve the blackest shades of darkness. On the right, an open door gave a glimpse of a tiny room containing a small zinc-topped bar; on the left, a larger room was framed between dingy hangings. The larger room had a bare floor with small booths built around the walls, each containing a table covered with a grubby cloth. There was an electric piano in one corner, a dingy growth of artificial vines straggling over the tops of the booths and tacking themselves along the low ceiling, and a half-dozen more of the same feeble orange bulbs shedding their watery glimmer onto the scene. It was a typical gangster's dive, of a pattern more common in New Jersey than on Long Island, and the atmosphere was in­tended to inspire romance and relaxation, but it was one of the most depressing places in which Simon Templar had ever been.

  "Upstairs?" queried the gorilla who had been recognized as Joe; and the man who had opened the door nodded.

  "Yeah—waitin' for ya." He inspected the Saint curiously. "Is dis de guy?"

  The two guards made simultaneous grunting noises designed to affirm that dis was de guy, and one of them took the Saint's arm and moved him on towards the stairway at the back of the hall. They mounted through a curve of darkness and came up into another dim glow of light on the floor above. The stairs turned them into a narrow corridor that ran the length of the house; Simon was hurried along past one door before which a scrawny-necked individual lounged negligently, blink­ing at them, as they went by, with heavy-lidded eyes like an alligator's; they passed another door and stopped before the third and last. One of his escorts hammered on it, and it was yanked open. There was a sudden burst of brighter light from within; and the Saint went on into the lion's den with an easy, unhurried stride.

  Simon had seen better dens. Except for the brighter illu­mination, the room in which he found himself was no better than the social quarters on the ground floor. The boards under­foot were uncarpeted, the once dazzlingly patterned wall­paper was yellowed and moulting. There was a couch under the window where two shirt-sleeved hoodlums sat side-saddle over a game of pinochle; they glanced up when the Saint came in, and returned to their play without comment. In the centre of the room was a table on which stood the remains of a meal; and at the table, facing the door, sat Ualino.

  Simon identified him easily from Fernack's description. But he saw the man only for one fleeting second; and after that his gaze was held by the girl who also sat at the table.

  There was no logical reason why he should have guessed that she was the girl Fay who had spoken to Nather on the telephone—the Fay Edwards of whom Fernack had begun to speak. In a house like that there were likely to be numbers of girls, coming and going; and there was no evidence that Mor­rie Ualino was an ascetic. But there was something to this girl that might quite naturally have spoken with a voice like the one which Simon had heard. In that stark shabby room her presence was even more incongruous than the immaculate Ualino's. She was slender and fair, with eyes like amber, and her mouth was a soft curve of amazingly innocent tempta­tion. Perhaps she was twenty-three or twenty-four, old enough to have the quiet confidence which adolescence never has; but still she was young in an ageless, enduring way that the years do not change. And once again that queer intuitive throb of expectation went through the Saint, as it had, done when he first heard the voice on Nather's telephone; the stirring of a chord in his mind whose note rang too deep for reason. . . .

  It was to her, rather than to Ualino, that he spoke.

  "Good-evening," said the Saint.

  No one in the room answered. Ualino dipped a brush into a tiny bottle and stroked an even film of liquid polish on the nail of his little finger. A diamond the size of a bean flashed from his ring as he inspected his handiwork under the light. He corked the bottle and fluttered his graceful hand back and forth to dry off the polish, and his tawny eyes returned at lei­sure to the Saint.

  "I wanted to have a look at you." Simon smiled at him.

  "That makes us both happy. I wanted to have a look at you. I heard you were the Belle of New York, and I wanted to see how you did it." The ingenuousness of the Saintly smile was blinding. "You must give me the address of the man who waves your hair one day, Morrie—but are you sure they got all the mud pack off last time your face had a treatment?"

  There was a hideous clammy stillness in the room, a still­ness that sprawled out of sheer open-mouthed incredulity. Not within the memory of anyone present had such a thing as that happened. In that airlessly expanding quiet, the slightest touch of fever in the imagination would have made audible the thin whisper of eardrums waving soggily to and fro, like wet palm fronds in a breeze, as they tried dazedly to recapture the unbelievable vibrations that had numbed them. The faces of the two pinochle players revolved slowly, wearing the blank expressions of two men who had been unexpectedly slugged with blunt instruments and who were still wondering what had hit them.

  "What did you say?"
asked Ualino pallidly.

  "I was just looking for some beauty hints," said the Saint amiably. "You know, you remind me of Papulos quite a lot, only he hasn't got the trick of those Dietrich eyebrows like you have."

  Ualino stroked down a thread of hair at one side of his head.

  "Come over here," he said.

  There was no actual question of whether the Saint would obey. As if answering an implied command, each of the two gorillas on either side of the Saint seized hold of his wrists. His arms were twisted up behind his back, and he was dragged round the table; and Ualino turned his chair round and looked up at him.

  "Did you ever hear of the hot box?" Ualino asked gently.

  In spite of himself, the Saint felt an instant's uncanny chill. For he had heard of the hot box, that last and most horrible product of gangland's warped ingenuity. Al Capone himself is credited with the invention of it: it was his answer to the three amazing musketeers who pioneered the kidnapping racket in the days when other racketeers, who had no come­back in the law, were practically the only victims; and Red McLaughlin, who led that historic foray into the heart of Cook County—who extorted hundreds of thousands of dollars in ransom from Capone's lieutenants and came within an ace of kidnapping the Scarface himself—died by that terrible death. A cold finger seemed to touch the Saint's spine for one brief second; and then it was gone, leaving its icy trace only in the blue of his eyes.

  "Yeah," said the Saint. "I've heard of it. Are you getting it ready for Viola Inselheim?"

  Again that appalling silence fell over the room. For a full ten seconds nobody moved except Ualino, whose manicured hand kept up that steady mechanical smoothing of his hair.

  "So you know about that, too," he purred at last.

  The Saint nodded. His face was expressionless; but he had heard the last word of confirmation that he wanted. His in­spiration had been right—his simple stratagem had achieved everything that he had asked of it. By letting himself be taken to Ualino as a helpless prisoner, already doomed, he had been shown a hideout that he could never otherwise have found, for which Fernack and his officers could search for weeks in vain.