Saint in New York (2 page)

“What’s happening about Irboll?” he
asked.

“He comes up in the General Sessions
Court to get his case adjourned again this afternoon,” said Fernack
disgustedly. He spat, with a twisted mouth, missing the cuspidor. “You
know how it is. I never had much of a head for figgers, but I make it this’ll
be the thirty-first or maybe the thirty-second time he’s been adjourned. Considering
it’s only two years now since he
plugged Ionetzki, we’ve still got a chance to
seeing him on
the
hot seat before we die of old age. One hell of a chance!”

Fernack’s lips thinned into a hard, down-drawn
line. He
leaned forward across the desk, so that his big clenched
fists
crushed
against the mahogany; and his eyes bored into Quistrom’s
with a brightness like the simmer of burning
acid.

“There’s times when I wish I knew a guy
like this Saint
was here in New York—doing things like it says in that
dos
sier,” he said. “There’s times when for two cents I’d resign
from the
force and do ‘em myself. I’d sleep better nights if
I knew there was
things like that going on in this city.

“Ionetzki was my side kick, when I was a lieutenant in the
Fifth Precinct—before they pushed me up here to
headquar
ters. A square copper—and you know what that
means.
You’ve been through the
works. You know what it’s all about.
Harness
bull—gumshoe—precinct captain—you’ve been
through it all, like the rest of us. Which makes you about the
first commissioner that hasn’t had to start
learning what
kinda uniform a cop
wears. Don’t get me wrong, Chief. I’m not handin’ you any oil. But what I mean,
you know how a
guy feels—an’ what it
means to be able to say a guy was a
square
copper.”

Fernack’s iron hands opened and closed again
on the edge
of the desk.

“That’s what Ionetski was,” he said.
“A square copper.
Not very bright; but square. An’ he walks square into a hold
up, where another copper might’ve decided to take
a walk
round the block and not hear
anything. An’ that yellow rat
Irboll
shoots him in the guts.”

Quistrom did not answer; neither did he move.
His tired
eyes rested quietly on the tensed face of the man standing
over him—rested there with a queer sympathy for that un
expected
outburst. But the weariness in the eyes was graven
too deep for anything
to sweep it away.

“So we pull Irboll in,” Fernack
said, “and everybody
knows he did it. And we beat him up. Yeah, we
sweat him all right. But what the hell good does that do? A length of rubber
hose ain’t the same as a bullet in the guts. It doesn’t make you
die
slowly, with your inside burning and your mouth chewed
to rags so you won’t
scream out loud with the agony of it. It doesn’t leave a good woman without her
man, an’ good kids
without a father. But we sweat him. And then what?

“There’s some greasy politician bawling
out some judge
he’s got in his pocket. There’s a lawyer around with
habeas
corpus—bail—alibis—anything. There’s trials—with a tame
judge on
the bench, an’ a packed jury, an’ somebody in the
district attorney’s
office who’s taking his cut from the same
place as the rest of
‘em. There’s transfers and objections and
extraditions and
adjournments an’ retrials and appeals.
It drags on till
nobody can scarcely remember who Ionetzki
was or what happened
to him. All they know is they’re tired
of talking about
Irboll.

“So maybe they acquit him. And maybe
they send him to
jail. Well, that suits him. He sits around and smokes
cigars
and listens to the radio; and after a few months, when the
newspapers
have got something else to talk about, the gover
nor of the jail slips
him a free pardon, or the parole board
gets together an’
tells him to run along home and be a good
boy or else … An’
presently some other good guy gets a
bullet in the guts from a yellow
rat—an’ who the hell cares?”

Quistrom’s gaze turned downwards to the
blotter in front
of him. The slope of bis broad shoulders was an
acquiescence,
a grim, tight-lipped acceptance of a set of facts which it
was beyond his power to answer for. And Fernack’s heavy-boned
body bent
forward, jutting a rocklike jaw that was in strange
contrast to the harsh crack in his voice.

“This guy, the Saint, sends Irboll a
letter,” Fernack said.
“He says that whether the rap sticks or
not, he’s got a justice
of his own that’ll work where ours doesn’t.
He says that if Jack Irboll walks outa that court again this afternoon, with
the other
yellow rats crowding round him and slapping him
on the back and looking
sideways at us an’ laughing out loud
for us to hear—it’ll be the last time
it happens. That’s all. A
slug in the guts for another slug in the guts.
An’ maybe he’ll
do it. If half of what that letter you’ve got says is
true, he
will do it. He’ll do just what I’d of done—just what I’d
like
to do. An’ the papers’ll scream it all over the sky, and make
cracks
about us being such bum policemen that we have to
let some free-lance
vigilante do a job for us that we haven’t
got the brains or the
guts to do. An’ then my job’ll be to
hunt that Saint guy down—take him into
the back room of
a station house and sweat a confession outa him with a
base
ball bat—put him in court an’ work like hell to send him to
the
chair—the guy who only did what you or me would of
done if we weren’t
such lousy, white-livered four-flushers we
think more about
holding down a paycheck than getting on
with the work we’re
paid to do!”

The commissioner raised his eyes.

“You’d do your duty, Fernack—that’s
all,” he said. “What happens to the case afterwards—that case or any
other—isn’t your fault.”

“Yeah—I’d do my duty,” Fernack
jeered bitterly. “I’d do
it like I’ve always done it—like we’ve all
been doing it for
years. I’d sweep the floor clean again, an’ hand the pan
right
back to the slobs who’re waitin’ to throw all the dirt back
again—and
some more with it.”

Quistrom picked up the sheaf of papers and
stared at
them. There was a silence, in which Fernack’s last words
seemed to
hum and strain through the room, building them
selves up like echo
heaped on re-echo, till the air throbbed and thundered with their inaudible
power. Fernack pulled
out a handkerchief suddenly and wiped his
face. He looked
out of the window, out at the drab flat fa
ç
ade of the Police
Academy and the grey
haze that veiled the skyscrapers of
upper New York. The pulse of the city
beat into the room
as he looked out, seeming to add itself to the deadened
re
verberations of the savage denunciation that had hammered him out of his
habitual restraint. The pulse of traffic ticking
its way from block to
block, the march of twelve million feet,
the whirr of wheels
and the mighty rhythm of pistons, the
titter of lives being made and broken,
the struggle and the
majesty and the meanness and the splendour and
the cor
ruption in which he had his place… .

Quistrom cleared his throat. The sound was
slight, muted
down to a tone that was neither reproof nor concurrence;
but
it broke the tension as cleanly as a phrased speech. Quistrom
spoke a
moment afterwards:

“You haven’t found Templar yet?”

“No.” Fernack’s voice was level,
rough, prosaic in re
sponse as it had been before; only the wintry
shift of bis eyes
recalled
the things he had been saying. “Kestry and Bonacci have been lookin’ for
him. They tried most of the big hotels
yesterday.”

Quistrom nodded.

“Come and see me the minute you get any
information.”

Fernack went out, down the long bare stone
corridor to
his own office. At three-thirty that afternoon they
fetched him
to the courthouse to see how Jack Irboll died.

The Saint had arrived.

Chapter 1

How Simon Templar
Cleaned His
Gun, and Wallis Nather
Perspired

The nun let herself into the tower suite of
the Waldorf
Astoria with a key which she produced from under the
folds
of her black robe—which even to the most kindly and broad-minded eye
would have seemed somewhat odd. As she closed
the door behind her
she began to whistle—which even to
the most kindly and broad-minded eye
would have seemed
still odder. And as she went into the sitting room she
caught
her toe in a rug, stumbled, and said “God damn!” in a dis
tinctly
masculine baritone, and laughed cheerfully an instant
afterwards—which
would doubtless have moved even the
most kindly and broad-minded eye to
blink rapidly and open
itself wide.

But there was no such inquiring and
impressionable eye to
perform these acrobatics. There was only a
square-chinned
white-haired man in rimless spectacles, sitting in an
easy
chair with a book on his lap, who looked up with a nod and
a quiet
smile as the nun came in.

He closed his book, marking the place
methodically, and
stood
up—a spare, vigorous figure in grey homespun,

“All right?” he queried.

“Fine,” said the nun.

She pushed her veil back from a sleek black
head, unbut
toned things and unhitched things, and threw off the long,
stuffy draperies with a sigh of relief. She was revealed as a
tall,
wide-shouldered man in a blue silk shirt and the trousers
of a light
fresco suit—a man with gay blue eyes in a brown, piratical face, whose smile
flashed a row of ivory teeth as he
slapped his audience blithely on the
back and sprawled into
an armchair with a swing of lean athletic
limbs.

“You took a big chance, Simon,”
said the older man, look
ing down at him; and Simon Templar laughed
softly.

“And I had breakfast this morning,” he said. He flipped
a
cigarette into his mouth, lighted it, and
extinguished the
match with a gesture
of his hand that was an integral part
of
the smile. “My dear Bill, I’ve given up recording either of
those earth-shaking events in my diary. They’re
things that
we take for granted in
this life of sin.”

The other shook his head.

“You needn’t have made it more
dangerous.”

“By sending that note?” The Saint
grinned. “Bill, that
was an act of devotion. A tribute to some
great old days. If
I hadn’t sent it, I’d have been cheating my reputation.
I’d
have been letting myself down.”

The Saint let a streak of smoke drift through
his lips and
gazed through the window at a square of blue sky.

“It goes back to some grand times—of
which you’ve heard,” he said quietly. “The Saint was a law of his own
in those days,
and that little drawing stood for battle and sudden death
and all manner of mayhem. Some
of us lived for it—worked
for it—fought for
it. One of us died for it.
…
There was a
time when any man who received
a note like I sent to Irboll,
with that
signature, knew that there was nothing more he
could do. And since we’re out on this picnic, I’d like things
to be the same—even if it’s only for a little
while.”