The Saint In New York (The Saint Series) Page 7

  Valcross poured the coffee and watched him. There was a dynamic power in that sinewy frame, a sense of magnificent recklessness and vital pride, and it was flamboyantly inspiring.

  “If I were twenty years younger,” Valcross said quietly, “I’d be going with you.”

  Simon laughed.

  “If there were four more of you, it wouldn’t make any difference.” He turned his arm over, displaying the sheathed knife for a moment before he rolled down his sleeve. “Belle and I will do all that has to be done on this journey.”

  In ten minutes more he was in a taxi, riding westwards through the ravines of the city. The vast office buildings of Fifth Avenue, abandoned for the night to cleaners and caretakers, reared their geometrical patterns of lighted windows against the dark sky like huge illuminated honeycombs. The cab crossed Broadway and Seventh Avenue, plunging through the drenched luminance of massed theatre and cinema and cabaret signs like a swimmer diving through a wave, and floated out on the other side in the calmer channel of faintly odorous gloom in which a red neon tube spelt out the legend: “Charley’s Place.”

  The house was an indeterminate, rather dingy structure of the kind that flattens out the skyline westwards of Seventh Avenue, where the orgy of futuristic building which gave birth to Chrysler’s Needle has yet to spread. It shared with its neighbours the depressing suggestion of belonging to a community of nondescript persons who had once resolved to attain some sort of individuality, and who had achieved their ambition by adopting various distinctive ways of being nondescript. The windows on the ground level were covered by greenish curtains which acquired a phosphorescent kind of luminousness from the lights behind them.

  Simon rang the bell, and in a few moments a grille in the heavy oak door opened. It was a situation where nothing could be done without bluff, and the bluff had to be made on a blind chance.

  “My name’s Simon,” said the Saint. “Fay Edwards sent me.”

  The man inside shook his head.

  “Fay ain’t come in yet. Want to wait for her?”

  “Maybe I can get a drink while I’m waiting,” Simon shrugged.

  His manner was without concern or eagerness—it struck exactly the right note of harmless nonchalance. If the Saint had been as innocent as he looked he could have done it no better, and the doorkeeper peered up and down the street and unlatched the door.

  Simon went through and hooked his hat on a peg. Beyond the tiny hall was a spacious bar which seemed to occupy the remainder of the front part of the building. The tables were fairly well filled with young-old men of the smoothly blue-chinned type, tailored into the tight-fitting kind of coat which displays to such advantage the bulges of muscle on the biceps and the upper back. Their faces, as they glanced up in automatic silence at the Saint’s entrance, had a uniform air of frozen impassivity, particularly about the eyes, like fish that have been in cold storage for many years. Scattered among their company was a sprinkling of the amply-curved pudding-faced blondes who may be recognised anywhere as belonging to the genus known as “gangsters’ molls”—it is a curious fact that few of the men who shoot their way through amazing wealth to sophistication in almost all their appetites ever acquire a sophisticated taste in femininity.

  Simon gave the occupants no more than a casual first glance, absorbing the general background in one broad survey. He walked across to the bar and hitched himself on to a high stool. One of the white-coated bartenders set up a glass of ice water and waited.

  “Make it a rye highball,” said the Saint.

  By the time the drink had been prepared the mutter of conversation in the room had resumed its normal pitch. Simon took a sip from his glass and stopped the bartender before he could move away.

  “Just a minute,” said the Saint. “What’s your name?”

  The man had an oval, olive-hued, expressionless face, with beautifully lashed brown eyes and glossily waved black hair that made his age difficult to determine.

  “My name is Toni,” he stated.

  “Congratulations,” said the Saint. “My name is Simon. From Detroit.”

  The man nodded unemotionally, with his soft dark eyes fixed on the Saint’s face.

  “From Detroit,” he repeated, as if memorising a message.

  “They call me Aces Simon,” said the Saint evenly. The bartender’s unwrinkled face responded as much as a wooden image might have done. “I’m told there are some players in this city who know what big money looks like.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I thought I might get a game somewhere.” Simon’s blue gaze held the bartender’s as steadily as the other was watching him. “I want to play with Morrie Ualino.”

  The man wiped his cloth slowly across the bar, drying off invisible specks of moisture.

  “I don’t know anything. I have to ask the boss.”

  He turned and went through a curtain at the back of the bar, and while he was gone Simon finished his drink. The bluff and the gamble went on. If anything went wrong at this stage it would be highly unfortunate—what might happen later on was another matter. But the Saint’s nerves were like ice.

  After some minutes the man came back.

  “Morrie Ualino don’t play tonight. Papulos is playing. You want a game?”

  Simon did not move a muscle. Through Papulos the trail went to Ualino, and he had never expected to get near Ualino in the first jump. But if Ualino were not playing that night—if he were engaged elsewhere—it was an added chance that the radio message which Fernack had received might supply a reason. The azure steel came and went in the Saint’s eyes, but all the bartender saw was a disappointed shrug.

  “I didn’t come here to cut for pennies. Who is this guy Papulos?”

  Toni’s soft brown eyes held an imperceptible glint of contemptuous humour.

  “If you want to play big, I think he give you all you want. Afterwards you can meet Ualino. You want to go?”

  “Well—it might give me some practice. I haven’t anything else to do.”

  Toni emptied an ashtray and wiped it out. From a distance of a few yards he would have seemed simply to be filling up the time until another customer wanted him, without talking to anyone at all.

  “They’re at the Graylands Hotel—just up the street on the other side. Suite 1713. Tell them Charley Quain sent you.”

  “Okay.” Simon stood up, spreading a bill on the counter. “And thanks.”

  “Good luck,” said Toni, and watched him go with eyes as gentle as a deer’s.

  The Graylands Hotel lay just off Seventh Avenue. It was one of those caravanserais which are always full and yet always seem to be deserted, with the few guests who were visible hustling furtively between the sanctity of their private rooms and the anonymity of the street. Business executives detained at the office might well have stayed there, but none of them would ever have given it as his address. It had an air of rather forlorn splendour, like a blowsy woman in gold brocade, and in spite of the emptiness of its public rooms there was a suppressed atmosphere of clandestine and irregular life teeming in the unchartered cubicles above.

  The gilded elevator, operated by a pimply youth with a precociously salacious air of being privy to all the irregularities that had ever ridden in it, whisked Simon to the seventeenth floor and decanted him into a dimly lighted corridor. He found Suite 1713 and knocked. After a brief pause a key clicked over and the portal opened eight inches. A pair of cold dispassionate eyes surveyed him slowly.

  “My name’s Simon,” said the Saint. He began to feel that he was admitting a lot of undesirable people to an easy familiarity that evening, but the alias seemed as good as any, and certainly preferable to such a fictitious name as, for instance, Wigglesnoot. “Charley Quain sent me around.”

  The eyes that studied him received the information as enthusiastically as two glass beads.

  “Simon, eh? From Denver?”

  “Detroit,” said the Saint. “They call me Aces.”

  The guard
’s head dropped through a passionless half-inch which might have been taken for a nod. He allowed the door to open wider.

  “Okay, Aces. We heard you were on your way. If you’re lookin’ for action I guess you can get it here.”

  The Saint smiled, and sauntered through. He found himself in a rather large foyer, formally furnished. At the far end, two rooms gave off it on either side, and from the closed door on the right came the mutter of an occasional curt voice, the crisp clicking of chips, and the insidious rustle and lisp of cards. It appeared to Simon that he was definitely on his way. Somewhere beyond that door Mr Papulos was in session, and the Saint figured it was high time he took a gander at this Mr Papulos.

  2

  The guard threw open the second door, and Simon went on in. He saw that the place had originally been intended for a sitting-room, but all the normal furniture had been pushed back against the walls, leaving plenty of space for the large round table covered with a green baize cloth which now occupied the centre of the floor. Fringing the circle of men seated around the board were a few hard lean-faced gentry whose air of hawk-eyed detachment immediately removed any suspicion that they might be there to minister to the sick in case one of the players was taken sick. A single brilliant light fixture blazed overhead, flooding a cone of white luminance over the ring of players. As the Saint came in every face turned towards him.

  “Aces Simon, of Detroit,” announced the guard. As a cynical afterthought he added, “He’s lookin’ for some action, gents.”

  The lean-faced watchers in the outer shadows relaxed and crossed their legs again; the players acknowledged the introduction with curt nods, and returned immediately to their game.

  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 small-time gambler in one deal. He lighted a cigarette and studied the faces of the players. They were a variegated crew, ranging from the élite 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 goodwill, 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 organiser 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 ‘Gs.’ ”

  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 tell-tale bit of evidence with his little finger, he pulled the bills from his pocket and counted them out on to 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 bank-notes. 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, pu
nk, 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 up-stage 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 plugged 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!”