15 The Saint in New York Page 9

  At the end of his meal, he pushed the heap of vociferous newsprint aside and poured himself out a second cup of coffee. If there had ever been any lurking doubts of his authenticity —if any of the perspiring brains at police headquarters down on Centre Street, or any of the sizzling intellects of the underworld, had cherished any shy reluctant dreams that the Saint was merely the product of a sensational journalist's overheated imagination—those doubts and dreams must have suffered a last devastating smack on the schnozzola with the publication of that morning's tabloids. For no sensational journalist's im­agination, overheated to anything below melting point, could ever have created such a story out of unsubstantial air. Simon lighted a cigarette and stared at the ceiling through a haze of smoke with very clear and gay blue eyes, feeling the deep thrill of other and older days in his veins. It was very good that such things could still come to pass in a tamed and supine world, better still that he himself should be their self-appointed spokesman. He saw the kindly grey head of William Valcross nodding at him across the room.

  "Just now you have the advantage," Valcross was saying. "You're mysterious and deadly. How long will it last?"

  "Long enough to cost you a million dollars," said the Saint lightly.

  He went over to the bureau and took out the card on which the main points of his undertaking were written down, and carried it across to the open windows. It was one of those spring mornings on which New York is the most brilliant city in the world, when the air comes off the Atlantic with a heady tang like frosted wine, and the white pinnacles of its towers stand up in a sky from which every particle of impurity seems to have been washed by magic; one of those mornings when all the vitality and impetuous aspiration that is New York in­sinuates itself as the only manner of life. He filled his lungs with the cool, clean alpine air and looked down at the specks of traffic crawling between the mechanical stops on Park Ave­nue; the distant mutter of it came up to him as if from another world into which he could plunge himself at will, like a god going down to earth; and on that morning he understood the cruelty and magnificence of the city, and how a man could sit there in his self-made Olympus and be drunk with faith in his own power. . . . And then the Saint laughed softly at the beauty of the morning and at himself, for instead of being a god enthroned he was a brigand looking down from his eyrie and planning new forays on the plain; and perhaps that was even better.

  "Who's next on the list?" he asked, and looked at the card in his hand.

  Straight away west on 49th Street, beyond Seventh Avenue, the same urgent question was being discussed in the back room of Charley's Place. It was too early in the day for the regular customers, and the bar in the front part of the building had a dingy and forsaken aspect in the dim rays of daylight that struggled through the heavy green curtains at the windows. White-coated, smooth-faced and inscrutable as ever, Toni Ol­linetti dusted the glass-topped tables and paid no attention to the murmur of voices from the back room. He looked neither fresh nor tired, as he looked at any hour out of the twenty-four: no one could have told whether he had just awoken or whether he had not slept for a week.

  The scene in the back room was livelier. The lights were switched on, flooding the session with the peculiarly cold yel­low colour that electricity has in the daytime. There was a bottle of whisky and an array of glasses on the table to stimu­late decision, and the air was full of tobacco smoke of varying antiquities.

  "De guy is nuts," Heimie Felder had proclaimed, more than once.

  His right arm was in a sling, as an advertisement of the Saint's particular brand of nuttiness. He enjoyed the distinc­tion of being one of the few men who had done battle with the Saint and survived to tell of it, and it was a pity that his vo­cabulary was scarcely adequate to deal with the subject. He had given much painful thought to the startling events of the previous night, but he had been unable to make any notable advance on his first judgment.

  "You ought to of seen him," said Heimie. "When we took him in de udder room, over in de hotel, he was just surly an' kep' his mout' shut like he was an ordinary welsher. We asks him, 'Whereja get dat dough?' an' Pappy gives him a poke in de kisser, an' he hauls off an' tries to take a sock at Pappy dat was so slow Pappy could of gone off an' played anudder hand an' come back an' it still wouldn't of reached him. So Pappy rings up Judge Nather, an' Nather says: 'Yeah, de guy holds me up an' takes de dough off of me a coupla hours ago.' So we take him along to Morrie Ualino, out there on Long Island where dey got de kid; an' it seems de Saint knows about dat, too. But nobody ain't worryin' about what he knows any more, becos we're all figurin' dat when he goes out of there he won't be comin' back unless his funeral procession goes past de house. De guy is nuts. He stands there an' starts ribbin' Morrie about him bein' a dude, an' you know how mad dat useta make Morrie. You can see Morrie is gettin' madder 'n' madder every minute, but dis guy just grins an' goes on kid­ding. I tell ya, he's nuts. An' then he's got hold of a knife from somewhere, an' he cuts my wrist open till I has to let go; an' then, zappo, he's got his knife in Morrie's guts an' broke de electric light bulb, an' while we're chasin' him he ducks over de roof somehow an' gets de kid. He's gotten a Betsy from somewhere, an' he shoots up de jernt an' gets away in Morrie's car. De guy is nuts," explained Heimie, clinching the matter.

  Dutch Kuhlmann poured himself out a half-tumbler of whisky and downed it without blinking. He was a huge fleshy man with flaxen hair and pale blue eyes; and he looked ex­actly like an amiable waiter from a Bavarian beer garden. No one, glancing at him in ignorance, would have suspected that before the unhonoured demise of the Eighteenth Amendment he was the man who supplied half the thirsty East with beer, reigning in stolid sovereignty over the greatest czardom of illicit hops in American history. No one would have suspected that the brain which guided the hulking flabby frame had carved out and consolidated and maintained that sovereignty with the ruthlessness of an Attila. His record at police head­quarters was clean: to the opposition, accidents had simply happened, with nothing to connect them with Dutch Kuhl­mann beyond their undoubtedly fortunate coincidence with the route of his ambitions: but those who moved in the queer dark stratum which touches the highest and the lowest points in Manhattan's geology told their stories, and his trucks ran unchallenged from Brooklyn to New Orleans.

  "Dot is a great shame, about Morrie," said Kuhlmann. "Morrie vass a goot boy."

  He took out a large linen handkerchief, dried a tear from the corner of each eye, and blew his nose loudly. The passing of Morrie Ualino left Dutch Kuhlmann the unquestioned cap­tain of the coalition whose destinies were guided by the Big Fellow, but there was no doubt of the genuineness of his grief. After he had given the orders which sent his own cousin and strongest rival in the beer racket on the long, one-way ride, it was said that Kuhlmann had wept all night.

  There was a brief respectful silence in honour of the defunct Morrie—several members of the Ualino mob were present, for without the initiative or personality to take his place they drifted automatically into the cohorts of the nearest leader. And then Kuhlmann pulled his sprawling bulk together.

  "Vot I vant to know," he said with remorseless logic, "is, vot is the Saint gettin' out of this?"

  "He got twenty grand from Nather," said Papulos. "Prob­ably he's collected a reward from Inselheim for bringing the kid back. He's getting plenty!"

  Kuhlmann's pale eyes turned slowly onto the speaker, and under their placid scrutiny Papulos felt something inside him­self turning cold. For, if you liked to look at it in a certain way, Morrie Ualino had died only because Papulos had passed the Saint along to him—with that terrible knife which had somehow escaped their search. And the men around him, Papulos knew, were given to looking at such things in a cer­tain way. The subtleties of motive and accident were too great a strain on their limited mentalities: they regarded only ul­timate results and the baldly stated means by which those re­sults had eventuated. Papulos knew that he walked on the thinnest of ice; and he splashed whisky
into his glass and met Kuhlmann's gaze with a confidence which he did not feel.

  "Yeah, dot is true," Kuhlmann said at length. "He gets plenty money—plenty enough to split t'ree-four ways." There was a superfluous elaboration of the theme in that last phrase which Papulos did not like. "But dot ain't all of it. You hear vot Heimie says. Ven they got him in the house he says to Morrie: 'I came here to kill you.' An' he talks about justice. Vot is dot for?"

  "De guy is nuts" explained Heimie peevishly, as if the con­tinued inability of his audience to accept and be content with that obvious solution were beginning to bother him.

  Kuhlmann glanced at him and shrugged his great shoulders.

  "Der guy is not nuts vot can shoot Irboll right in the court house und get avay," he exploded mightily. "Der guy is not nuts vot can find out in one hour dot Morrie has kidnapped Viola Inselheim, und vot can get some fool to take him straight to the house vhere Morrie has der kid. Der guy is not nuts vot can pull out a knife in dot room und kill Morrie, und vot can pull out a gun from nowhere und shoot Eddie Voelsang and shoot his vay past four-five men out of the house mit the kid!"

  There was a chorus of sycophantic agreement; and Heimie Felder muttered sulkily under his breath. "I heard him talkin'," he protested to his injured soul. "De guy is——"

  "Nuts!" snarled an unsympathetic listener; and Kuhlmann's big fist crashed on the table, making the glasses dance.

  "This is no time for your squabbling!" he roared suddenly. "It is you dot is nuts—all of you! In von day der Saint has killed Irboll and Morrie and Eddie Voelsang und taken twenty t'ousand dollars of our money. Und you sit there, all of you fools, and argue of vether he is nuts, vhen you should be ask­ing who is it dot he kills next?"

  A fresh silence settled on the room as the truth of his words sank home; a silence that prickled with the distorted terrors of the Unknown. And in that silence a knock sounded on the door.

  "Come in!" shouted Kuhlmann and reached again for the bottle.

  The door opened, and the face of the guard whose post was behind the grille of the street door appeared. His features were white and pasty, and the hand which held a scrap of pasteboard at his side trembled.

  "Vot it is?" Kuhlmann demanded irritably.

  The man held out the card.

  "Just now the bell rang," he babbled. "I opened the grille, an' all I can see is a hand, holdin' this. I had to take it, an' while I'm starin' at it the hand disappears. When I saw what it was I got the door open quick, but all I can see outside is the usual sort of people walkin' past. I thought you better see what he gave me, Dutch."

  There was a whine of pleading in the doorkeeper's voice; but Kuhlmann did not answer at once.

  He was staring, with pale blue eyes gone flat and frozen, at the card he had snatched from the man's shaking hand. On it was a childishly sketched figure surmounted by a symbolical halo; and underneath it was written, as if in direct answer to the question he had been asking: "Dutch Kuhlmann is next."

  * * *

  Presently he returned his gaze to the doorkeeper's face and only the keenest study would have discovered any change in its bleak placidity. He threw the card down on the table for the others to crowd over, and hitched a cigar from the row which protruded from his upper vest pocket. He bit the end from the cigar and spat it out, without changing the direction of his eyes.

  "Come here, Joe," he said almost affectionately; and the man took an uneasy step forward. "You vas a goot boy, Joe."

  The doorkeeper licked his lips and grinned sheepishly; and Kuhlmann lighted a match.

  "It vas you dot lets der Saint in here last night, vasn't it?"

  "Well, Dutch, it was like this. This guy rings the bell an' asks for Fay, an' I tells him Fay ain't arrived yet but he can wait for her if he wants to ­——"

  "Und so you lets him in to vait inside, isn't it?"

  "Well, Dutch, it was like this. The guy says maybe he can get a drink while he's waiting, an' he looks okay to me, anyone can see he ain't a dick, an' somehow I ain't thinkin' about the Saint——"

  "So vot are you thinking about, Joe?" asked Kuhlmann gen­ially.

  The doorkeeper shifted his feet.

  "Well, Dutch, I'm thinkin' maybe this guy is some sucker that Fay is stringin' along. Say, all I do is stand at that door an' let people in an' out, an' I don't know everything that goes on. So I figures, well, there's plenty of the boys inside, an' this guy couldn't do nothing even if he does get tough, an' if he is a sucker that they're stringin' along it won't be so good for me if I shut the door an' send him away——"

  "Und so you lets him in, eh?"

  "Yeah, I lets him in. You see——"

  "Und so you lets him in, even after you been told all der time dot nobody don't get let in here vot you don't know, unless he comes mit one or two of the boys. Isn't dot so?"

  "Well, Dutch—-"

  Kuhlmann puffed at his cigar till the tip was a circle of solid red.

  "How much does he give you, Joe?" he asked jovially, as if he were sharing a ripe joke with a bosom friend.

  The man gulped and swallowed. His mouth was half open, and a sudden horrible understanding dilated the pupils of his eyes as he stared at the beaming mountain of fat in the chair.

  "That's a lie!" he screamed suddenly. "You can't frame me like that! He didn't give me anything—I never saw him before——"

  "Come here, Joe," said Kuhlmann soothingly.

  He reached out and grasped the man's wrist, drawing him towards his chair rather like an elderly uncle with a reluctant schoolboy. His right hand moved suddenly; and the door­keeper jerked in his grasp with a choking yell as the red-hot tip of Kuhlmann's cigar ground into his cheek.

  Nobody else moved. Kuhlmann released the man and laughed richly, brushing a few flakes of ash from his knee. He inspected his cigar, struck a match, and relighted it.

  "You're a goot boy, Joe," he said heartily. "Go and vait out­side till I send for you."

  The man backed slowly to the door, one hand pressed to his scorched cheek. There was a wide dumb horror in his eyes, but he said nothing. None of the others looked at him—they might have been a thousand miles away, ignoring his very existence on the same planet as themselves. The door closed after him; and Kuhlmann glanced round the other faces at the table.

  "I'm afraid we are going to lose Joe," he said; and a sudden lump of pure grief caught in his throat as he realized, appar­ently for the first time, what that implied.

  Papulos fingered his glass nervously. His fingers trembled, and a little of the amber fluid spilled over the rim of the glass and ran down over his thumb. He stared straight ahead at Kuhlmann, realizing at that moment what a narrow margin separated him from the same attention as the doorkeeper had received.

  "Wait a minute, Dutch," he said abruptly. Every other eye in the room veered suddenly towards him, and under their cold scrutiny he had to make an effort to steady his voice. He plunged on in a spurt of unaccountable panic. "They's no use rubbin' out a guy for a mistake. If he tried to cross us it'd be a different thing, but we don't know that it wasn't just like he said. What the hell, anyone's liable to slip up——"

  Papulos knew he had made a mistake. Kuhlmann's faded blue gaze turned towards him almost introspectively.

  "What's it matter whether he crossed us or made a mistake?" demanded another member of the conference, somewhere on Papulos's left. "The result's the same. He screwed up the deal. We can't afford to let a guy get away with that. We can't take a chance on him."

  Papulos did not look round. Neither did Kuhlmann; but Kuhlmann nodded slowly, thoughtfully, staring at Papulos all the time. Thoughts that Papulos had frantically tried to turn aside were germinating, growing up, in that slow, methodical Teutonic brain; Papulos could watch them creeping up to the surface of speech, inexorably as a rising flood, and felt a sick emptiness in his stomach. His own words had shifted the focus to himself; but he knew that even without that rash interven­tion he could not have been passed over.


  He picked up his glass, trying to control his hand. A blob of whisky fell from it and formed a shining pool on the table—to his fear-poisoned mind the spilt liquid was suddenly crimson, like a drop of blood from a bullet-torn chest

  "Dot is right," Kuhlmann was saying deliberately. "You're a goot boy too, Pappy. Vhy did you send der Saint straight avay to see Morrie?"

  Papulos caught his breath sharply. With a swift movement he tossed the drink down his throat and heard the other's soft-spoken words hammering into his brain like bullets.

  "Vhy did you send der Saint straight avay to see Morrie, as if he had been searched, und let him take a knife and a gun mit him?"

  "You're crazy!" Papulos blurted harshly. "Of course I sent him to Morrie—I knew Morrie wanted to see him. He didn't have a knife an' a gun when he left me. Heimie'll tell you that. Heimie searched him——"

  Felder started up.

  "Why you——"

  "Sit down!" Papulos snarled. For one wild moment he saw hope opening out before him, and his voice rose: "I'm sayin" nothing about you. I'm sayin' Dutch is crazy. He'll want to put you on the spot next. An' how d'you know he'll stop there? He'll be calling every guy who's ever been near the Saint a double-crosser—he'll be trying to put the finger on the rest of you before he's through——"