Saint in New York (22 page)

“Perhaps,” he said quietly,
“you’ll tell me the rest another
day.”

The broker shook his head violently.

“Never,” he gabbled. “Never. I
don’t want to die. I won’t
tell anything. You can’t make me. You
can’t!”

A heavy footstep sounded outside in the hall.
Inselheim
stood staring, his chest heaving breathlessly, his mouth
half
open as if aghast at the meaning of his own words, his hands
twitching.
The light in his mind had suddenly burst. He
looked for contempt,
braced himself for a retort that would
shrivel the last of
his pride, and instead saw nothing in the
Saint’s calm eyes but
a sincere and infinite compassion that
was worse than the
bitterest derision. Inselheim gasped; and
his stomach was
suddenly empty as he realized that he had
thrown everything away.

But the Saint looked at him and smiled.

“I’ll see you again,” he said; and
then, as a knock came on
the door and the guard’s voice demanded an answer, he low
ered himself briskly to the fire-escape landing
and went on his
way.

The profit from his visit had been precisely
nil—in fact, a
mercenary
estimate might have assessed it as a dead loss of
ninety thousand dollars—but that was his own fault. As he slid
nimbly down the iron ladders he cursed himself
gently for that
moment’s unwariness
which had permitted Inselheim to put a
finger
on the bell. And yet, without the shock of seeing that
last denial actually accomplished, without that
final flurry of
insensate panic, the
broker’s awakening might never have
been completed. And Simon had a
premonition that if Inselheim’s
chance came
again the result would be a little different.

Oddly enough, in his preoccupation with that angle on the
task in hand, the Saint had forgotten that there
were other
parties who would be likely to develop an interest in Sutton
Place that night. He stepped off the last ladder into the inky
blackness of the narrow alley where it let him
down without a
thought of immediate danger, and heard the slight
movement
behind him too late. He spun round
with his right hand darting to his pocket, but before it bad touched his gun a
strong
arm was flung round his neck
from behind and the steel snout
of an
automatic jabbed into his back. A voice harsh with
exultation snarled in his ear: “Come a little
ways with us,
will ya …
pal?”

*
   
*
   
*

Not a shadow of uneasiness darkened the
Saint’s brow as
he
crossed the threshold of the back room of Charley’s Place and stood for a
moment regarding the faces before him. Be
hind
him he heard the click of the latch as the door was closed;
and the men who had risen from their seats in the
front bar
and followed him as his
captors hustled him through ranged
themselves
along the walls. More than a dozen men were
gathered in the room. More than two dozen eyes were riveted on him in
the same calculating stares—eyes as hard and un
winking as coloured marbles, barren of all humanity.

He was unarmed. He had nothing larger than a pin which
might have been used as an offensive weapon. His
gun had
been taken from him; and the knife which he carried in his
sleeve, having left men alive and day before to tell the tale of
its deadliness, had been removed almost as
quickly. The new
desperate suspicion
of concealed weapons with which his
earlier exploits had filled the
minds of the mob had prompted
a vastly less
perfunctory search than the deceased Mr. Papulos
had thought necessary—a search which had left no inch of his
person untouched, and which had even seized on his
penknife
and cigarette case as
possible sources of danger. The thorough
ness of the examination had afforded the Saint some grim
amusement at the time, but not for a moment had he
lost sight
of what it meant. Yet his
poise had never been more easy and
debonair,
the steel masked down more deceptively in the
mocking depths of his eyes, than it was as he stood there smil
ing and nodding to the assembled company like an
actor tak
ing a bow.

“How! my palefaced brothers,” he
murmured. “The council
sits, though the pipe of peace is not in
evidence. Well, well,
well—every time we get together you think of
new games, as
the bishop said to the actress. And what do we play
tonight?”

A weird light came into the eyes of Heimie
Felder, who sat at the table with a fresh bandage round his head. He leaned
across and
whispered to Dutch Kuhlmann.

“Nuts,” he said, almost pleadingly.
“De guy is nuts. Dijja
hear what he says?”

Kuhlmann’s contracted pupils were fixed
steadily on the
Saint’s face. He made no answer. And after that first
general
survey of the congregation in which he had been included,
Simon had
not looked at him. For all of the Saint’s interest
was taken up with the
girl who also sat at the table.

It was strange what a deep impression she had
made on him
in the places where she had crossed his path. He realized
that
even now he knew nothing about her. He had heard, or as
sumed that
he heard, her voice over the telephone; he had
seen, or assumed that
he saw, the owner of that disembodied
voice in the house on Long Island
where Viola Inselheim was
held and Morrie Ualino died; and once he had
felt her hand
in the darkness and she had pressed a gun into his hand.
But
she had never identified herself to more than one of his senses
at the same
time; and he knew that his cardinal belief that this slim, fair-haired girl
with the inscrutable amber eyes was that
mysterious Fay
Edwards of whom Fernack had spoken rested
on nothing but
intuition. And yet, even while the active part
of his brain had been
most wrapped up in the practical mechanics of his vendetta, her image had never
been very
far from his mind.

The sight of her in that room, the one glimpse
of colour and
beauty in the grim circle of silent men, brought back to
the
Saint every question that he had asked himself about her.
Every
question had trailed off into the same nebulous voids of
guesswork
in which the hope of any absolute answer was more
elusive than the end of a rainbow; but to
see her again at such
a moment gave him a
throb of pleasure for which there was no logical accounting. Once when he was
in need she had
helped him; he might
never know why. Now he was again
in
need, and he wondered what she was thinking and what
she would do. Her face told him nothing—only a
spark of
something to which he could
give no name gleamed for an
instant
in her eyes and was gone.

Dutch Kuhlmann turned to her.

“This is der Saint?” he asked.

She answered without shifting her gaze from
Simon: “Yes.
That’s
the man who killed Morrie.”

It was the first tune he had ever seen her and
heard her
speak at once, the first definite knowledge that his
intuition
had been right; and a queer thrill leapt through him at
the
sound of her
voice. It was as if he had been fascinated by a
picture, and it had suddenly come to life.

“Good-evening, Fay,” he said.

She looked at him for a moment longer and then
took a cigarette from her bag and struck a match. The movement
veiled her eyes, and the spark
which he thought he had seen
there might
have existed only in his imagination.

Kuhlmann nodded to a man who stood by the
wall, and
another door was unlocked and opened. Through it, after a
brief
pause, came two other men.

One of them was a big burly man with grey
hair and a
florid complexion on which the eyebrows stood out
startlingly black and bushy, as if they had been gummed on by an absent-
minded
make-up artist. The other was a small bald-headed
man with a heavy black moustache and
gold-rimmed pince-nez, whose peering and fluttering manner reminded the Saint
irresistibly of a weasel. Seen together, they
looked rather like a
vaudeville
partnership which, either through mishap or
design, had been obliged to share the props originally in
tended
for one, and who had squabbled childishly over the
division: between them they possessed the material for two
normally sized men of normal hairiness, but on
account of
their disagreement they had both emerged with extravagant
inequalities. Simon had an irreverent desire to
remove the
bushy eyebrows from the
large man and glue them where it
seemed they would be more appropriate,
above the luxuriant
moustache of the small
one. Their bearing was subtly different
from that of the others who were
assembled in the room; and
the Saint gave
play to his flippant imaginings only for a passing
second, for he had recognized them as soon as they
came in
and knew that the conference
was almost complete. One of
. them was
the district attorney, Marcus Yeald; the other was the
political boss of New York City himself, Robert
Orcread—
known by his own wish as
“Honest Bob.”

They studied the Saint with open interest
while chairs were
vacated for them at the table. Yeald did his scrutinizing
from a safe distance, peering through his spectacles nervously—
Simon
barely overcame the temptation to say “Boo!” to
him and
find out if he would jump as far as he seemed prepared to. Orcread, on the
other hand, came round the table
without sitting down.

“So you’re the guy we’ve been looking
for,” he said; and the
Saint smiled.

“I guess you know whom you were looking
for, Honest
Bob,” he said.

Orcread’s face hardened.

“How did you know my name?”

“I recognized you from your caricature
in the
New Yorker
last week, brother,” Simon explained, and
gathered at once
that the drawing had not met with the Tammany dictator’s
approval.

Orcread chewed on the stump of dead cigar in
his mouth and hooked a thumb into his waistcoat. He looked the Saint
up and
down again with flinty eyes.

“Better not get too fresh,” he
advised. “I been wanting a
talk with you, but I’ll do the wisecracking.
You’ve given us
plenty of trouble. I suppose you know you could go to the
chair for
what you’ve done.”

“Probably,” admitted the Saint.
“But that was just ignorance. When I first came here, I didn’t know that
I had to get
an
official license to kill people.”

“You should have thought of that
sooner,” Orcread said.
His voice had the rich geniality, of the
professional orator,
but underneath it the Saint’s sensitive ears
could detect a
ragged edge of strain. “It’s liable to be tough for a
guy who
comes here and thinks he can clean up the town by himself.
You know
what I ought to be doing now?”

The Saint’s smile was very innocent.

“I can guess that one. You ought to be
calling a cop and
handing me over to him. But that would be a bit awkward
for
you—wouldn’t it? I mean, people might want to know what
you were doing here
yourself.”

“You know why I’m not calling a
cop?”

“It must be the spring,” Simon
hazarded. “Or perhaps to
day was your old grandmother’s birthday, and
looking into
her dear sweet face you felt the hard shell of
worldliness that
hides your better nature softening like an overripe
banana.”

Orcread took the cigar stub from between his
teeth and
rolled it in his fingers. The leaves crumpled and
shredded
under the roughness of his hand, but his voice did not rise.

“I’m trying to do something for
you,” he said. “You ain’t
so old, are you? You wouldn’t want to
get into a lot of
trouble. It ain’t right to go to the chair at your age.
It ain’t
right to be taken for a ride. And why should you?”