Catch the Saint (18 page)

Simon Templar did not
believe that his charge had done more than temporarily decommission the night
football player, but he
had to turn and meet a new
problem. There was a glint of bright metal to his right, where the victim of
the beating lay on the
pavement. The man who had
been holding him was a fat seal-
like shape spearheaded
with the long blade of a knife. The Saint
was
poised to receive an attack, but it did not come. The stout
man slid through the shadows like a bloated fish through murky
waters, always keeping the knife-point straight at the Saint. It
became clear
that he was more enthusiastic about getting away
to the far end of the alley, away from the brightly lit street where
Simon’s car was parked, than he was about giving battle.

Simon stalked him, as the
fat man backed steadily away from
the scene of
combat. When the Saint increased his own pace, the
other,
never turning, quickened his, moving with surprising agil
ity for a man so rotund. Still, Simon would have caught him, or
run him down like a lion after a water buffalo, if there
had not
been a sudden scuff of steps behind the Saint’s
back. Before he
could turn, an arm locked round his
throat like a thick noose.
In the same instant,
though, while his attacker was still in mo
tion,
Simon ducked forward and spun to the side, smashing the
man behind him into the wall with an elbow driven back deep
into his belly.

The Saint’s instant reactions weakened the big
man’s hold
enough to allow Simon to slip his
head free. Meanwhile his stout
comrade
seemed to be encumbered by no inner conflicts about teamwork or loyalty. He
took off for the other end of the alley
without ever looking back. The
other, taking advantage of the
fact that
the Saint had dropped to one knee in escaping the arm-
lock on his neck, and having literally lost
stomach for continuing
the battle on his own, likewise turned and
stumbled down the
alley in pursuit of his
portly pal.

Simon decided that Brad
Ryner’s condition was more crucial
than chasing down the men who had been
beating him. He had
a sickening feeling
that he might already have been too late to
save the policeman. The
punishment he had been taking when
the
Saint arrived at the alley had looked more like a sadistic way
of finishing him off permanently than just a rough
lesson in the
wages of spying.

The detective seemed
lifeless when the Saint knelt beside him;
his
face and clothing were sticky with blood. But Simon could
detect breath and a pulse-beat. He would have preferred not to
move the man
alone, risking worse damage, but he could not
leave
him there while he went for help. He picked him up in his
arms as gently as he could and carried him to the
street.

As he came out of the
alley onto the sidewalk, stepping slowly
and
heavily under the weight of his burden, he saw a sight that
even under the circumstances struck him as almost comically
ironic: Parked in front of his own car in the
no-parking zone
was a police patrol car, and a
uniformed officer was standing in the rain, busily writing out a ticket.

Another patrolman, less
engrossed, spotted Simon first,
jumped out of the police
car, and strode towards him.

“Whaddaya think
you’re doing?” he interrogated brilliantly.

Simon, still trudging
forward with his bloodstained load, told
him:
“Carrying coals to Newcastle, maybe. Your department
probably knows about this chap. He’s an under-cover agent from
California named Brad Ryner. He was getting beaten up in
that alley when I came along.”

The policeman looked at
the crimson mess that had been
Ryner’s face.

“God damn!” he
breathed.

“I’m afraid you
wouldn’t recognise him right now even if you
knew
him,” Simon said.

“Who are you?”
the other patrolman asked.

“The good Samaritan.
Don’t you think we’d better get this
man to a hospital
before we fill out a report in triplicate?”

The first policeman
helped Simon deposit Ryner in the patrol
car.
The second pointed: “Is that your car?”

“I confess,”
Simon replied. “When I saw somebody getting
killed
in that alley I didn’t take time to hunt up a parking lot.”

The officer ripped up the
ticket he had been writing and
dropped the fragments in the gutter, under a
lamp-post sign
warning about the penalties
for depositing litter.

“What did you say his
name is?
^!
’

“Ryner.” Simon
spelled it. “Brad Ryner. I knew him slightly
on the Coast, and I
spotted him in Sammy’s boozer more than
an
hour ago.”

“You better come
along with us,” the patrolman said, which
was
no more and no less than the Saint could have expected.

A moment later, siren
howling, they were racing through the
rain-swept streets.

It was eleven o’clock in
the morning before Brad Ryner was
able to talk to
him. Even before Ryner had regained conscious
ness,
just after daybreak, a tired but conscientious detective
lieutenant had been called from his bed to oversee
developments
at the hospital, while a uniformed guard had been assigned
to
the door of Ryner’s room. Simon, meanwhile,
after being thor
oughly identified,
had returned to his hotel at about four in the
morning, on his own condition that he be phoned as soon as
Ryner
could talk. The call came at 10:15, and he was at the
hospital twenty minutes later.

Brad Ryner was propped up in his bed, half
sitting, one eye and half his face covered with bandages, when Simon entered
the room.

“I almost hope you
don’t remember me,” said the Saint grimly.
“I
wish I hadn’t remembered you. Calling your name was the stupidest thing I’ve
done for a hundred years.”

The exposed half of
Ryner’s face was heavily bruised; even so,
the
corner of his broad mouth managed a trace of a smile.

“Just the breaks of
the game,” he said in a voice that sounded as if it came through a wad of
cotton. “Don’t blame yourself,
Simon.”

“I won’t waste time
blaming myself. I’d rather know what I
can
do to make up for it.”

“You already made up
for it,” Ryner said indistinctly. “You
saved
my life. Another minute or two and those bastards would
have killed me.”

“That’s like
thanking a man who’s stabbed you for pulling the knife out,” Simon said
ruefully.

“You’re
exaggerating,” said a new voice, and a tall, slender,
prematurely grey-haired man who had been standing by the
side of the
bed stepped forward to shake Simon’s hand. “I’m
Stacey, detective lieutenant. I was responsible for getting Brad here
for this job in the first place.”

From there Lieutenant
Stacey went on to say how pleased and intrigued he was to meet the famous
Saint.

“Apparently nobody’s
identity is safe round here,” Simon re
sponded.
“But now that you’ve seen an example of my genius in
action you’ll understand how I got to be so notorious. The
only
excuse I can think of for blabbing Brad’s name is
that I was
under the spell of a beautiful young
lady at the time.”

“You’re not
kidding,” said Ryner.

“But just mentioning
his name shouldn’t have blown the
whole thing,” Lieutenant Stacey
said. “Those hoods couldn’t
know that
somebody named Brad Ryner was a police officer out in California, and you
didn’t press the point, did you?”

Simon shook his head.

“I hopped away like
a flea off a hot griddle.”

“So why didn’t they
just accept it as a case of mistaken iden
tity?
You don’t go out and kill one of your pool buddies just be
cause some stranger thinks he’s somebody he used to know by
another name.”

“They might have
been suspicious already,” Simon suggested.

“I don’t know,”
Brad Ryner said. “I didn’t realise it if they
were,
but of course they wouldn’t have told me if they smelled a
rat, since I was the rat.”

“There’s no point
wasting time theorising about that,” Stacey
said.
“What’s done is done. It’s a rotten shame, though, even if
it was nobody’s fault.”

“Yeah,” said
Ryner, shifting painfully in his bed. “I’m on the
sidelines
permanently as far as this game is concerned, and
there’s
nobody else on our side playing.”

“You mean playing
under-cover?” Simon asked.

“Right,” Ryner
croaked. “The lieutenant here already had one
New York man disappear
on this job; that’s why he called me
in.”

“Sounds tough,” Simon said with
growing interest. “What’s
the game
exactly?”

Lieutenant Stacey looked
questioningly at Ryner. Ryner at
tempted a nod of approval.

“Have a chair,”
Stacey said to the Saint, and the two men sat
down
beside the bed.

“It’s tough all
right,” Stacey said. “We’re on the trail of a guy
who’s getting all the organised crime in these parts sewn up.
He makes the Mafia look like the Dead End Kids. When he gets
finished,
the only thing he won’t run in this state will be the
clocks.”

“I suppose it would
be superfluous to ask why you don’t ar
rest
him,” Simon said. “No hard evidence?”

“Not only
that,” Lieutenant Stacey said with a helpless ges
ture,
“we don’t even know who he is.”

“That does make it
difficult.”

“Evidence?”
Ryner put in weakly. “There’s evidence all over the place, but it never
leads to the top.”

“We’ve made
arrests,” Stacey said. “Even got a few convic
tions—which isn’t easy, considering this guy seems to have
half
the judges in his pocket, and the witnesses have a
way of vanish
ing or forgetting everything but
their own names. But even the
thugs who carry out his
orders don’t know who the boss is.
They call him the
Supremo. We’ve found out that much.”

“Big deal,”
Ryner said. “They could call him Sitting Bull, for all the good it does
us.”

“And we know a few
other fairly useless facts,” Stacey went
on. “Such as the
fact that some of the Supremo’s muscle men
hang
out at Sammy’s Booze & Billiards.”

“Is Sammy’s some kind
of a headquarters or communications centre?” Simon asked.

“No,” Ryner
answered. “Strictly for amusement.”

“But there is a club
we think may be an operations centre for
the
organisation …” Stacey hesitated. “Why should I be tak
ing up your time with all this? I’m sure you’ve got plenty
to do on
your visit here without listening to a
cop’s tales of woe.”

Simon smiled.

“What you mean is,
why should you be divulging information to somebody who’s not on your
team?”

“Maybe,” the
lieutenant conceded, “although Brad’s told me
you
can be trusted come hell or high water, and I know enough
about you to realise that you’re your own man. You’d never
work for the Supremo or any other gang boss.”

“I appreciate the
confidence,” Simon said to Brad Ryner. “I
wish
I’d lived up to it better last night. Now I suspect you’re back
to square one.”

“We never got past
square one,” Ryner assured him. “The
most
I ever found out was some information about some little
frogs in a mighty big pond.”

“And now we won’t
even be getting that much,” Lieutenant
Stacey
said morosely. “We’re right where we were six months
ago, and I’d
be willing to bet we’ll be in exactly the same place
a year from now.”

Simon stood up suddenly and paced across the
white anti
septic room.

“Not
necessarily,” he said.

Ryner, who had closed his
one visible eye, opened it again.
Stacey turned in
his chair to peer up into the Saint’s intent face.