Saint in New York (34 page)

“Au revoir,
Simon,” she
whispered; and he hung up the
receiver and went through into the kitchen to
a new day.

There was the good rich smell of breakfast in
the air. A
pot of coffee bubbled on the table, and Chris was frying
eggs and
bacon at the big range. The door to the backyard
stood open, and
through it floated the crisp invigorating tang
of the Atlantic,
sweeping away the last mustiness of stale smoke
and wine. Simon felt magnificently hungry.

He shaved with Chris’s razor, clumsily
left-handed, and
washed at the sink. The impact of cold water freshened
him,
swept away the trailing cobwebs of fatigue and heaviness.
He wasn’t
dead yet. Inevitably, yet gradually because of the
frightful hammering
it had sustained, his system was working
towards recovery; the
resilience of his superb physique and
dynamic health was turning the slow
balance against misfor
tune. The slight feeling of hollowness in his
head, the conse
quence of over-tiredness and fever, was no more than a
minor discomfort. He ate hugely, thinking over the problem of se
curing the
car which Fay Edwards had asked for; and sud
denly a name and
number flashed up from the dim hinter
lands of reminiscence—the name and
number of the garru
lous taxi driver who had driven him away from the scene
of
Mr. Papulos’s Waterloo. He got up and went to the tele
phone, and
admitted himself lucky to find the man at break
fast

“This is the Saint, Sebastian,” he
said. “Didn’t you say I
could call you if I had any use for you?”

He heard the driver’s gasp of amazement, and
then the
eager response.

“Sure! Anyt’ing ya like, pal. What’s it
woit?”

“Twice as much as you’re asking,”
replied the Saint suc
cinctly. “Meet me on the corner of
Lexington and 44th in
fifteen minutes.”

He hung up and returned to his coffee and a
cigarette. He
knew that he was taking a risk—the possibility of the
chauffeur having had a share in the betrayal of his hide-out at the
Waldorf
Astoria was not completely disposed of, and the pros
pect of a substantial
reward might be a temptation to treach
ery in any case—but it
was the only solution Simon could
think of.

Nevertheless the Saint’s mouth was set in a
grim line when
he said good-bye to Chris and walked along 45th Street to
Lexington Avenue. He walked slowly and kept his left hand
in his
pocket with the fingers fastened round the comforting
butt of Fernack’s
revolver. There was nothing out of the ordi
nary about his
appearance, no reason for anybody to notice
him—-he was still
betting on the inadequacy of newspaper
photographs and the
blindness of the average unobservant
man, the only two advantages which had
been faultlessly loyal
to him from the beginning. And if there was a
hint of fever in
the brightness of the steel-blue eyes that raked the
sidewalks
watchfully as he sauntered down the block to the
rendezvous
at 44th Street, it subtracted nothing from their
unswerving
vigilance.

But he saw nothing that he should not have
seen—no signs
of a collection of large men lounging against lampposts or
kicking their heels in shop doorways, no suspiciously crawling
cars. The
morning life of Lexington Avenue flowed normally on and was not concerned with
him. Thus far the breaks were
with him. Then a familiar voice hailed him,
and he stopped
in
his tracks.

“Hi-yah, pal!”

The Saint looked round and saw the cab he had
ordered
parked at the corner. And in the broad grin of the driver were no grounds
for a solid belief that he was a police stool pigeon
or a scout of the Big Fellow’s.

“Better get inside quick, before anyone
sees ya, pal,” he
advised hoarsely; and the Saint nodded and
stepped in. The chauffeur twisted round to continue the conversation through
the communicating window. “Where ja wanna go dis time?”

“The Vandrick National Bank on Fifth
Avenue,” said the
Saint.

The driver started up his engine and hauled
the cab out
into
the stream of traffic.

“Chees!” he said in some awe, at the
first crosstown traffic light “Ya don’t t’ink we can take dat joint wit’
only two guns?”

“I hadn’t thought about it,” Simon
confessed mildly.

The driver seemed disappointed in spite of
his initial skepti
cism.

“I figgered dat might be okay for a guy
like you, wit’ me
helpin’ ya,” he said. “Still, maybe ya ain’t
feelin’ quite your
self yet. I hoid ja got taken for a ride last night—I was
t’inkin’
I shouldn’t be seein’ ya for a long while.”

“A lot of other people are still
thinking that,” murmured
the Saint sardonically.

They slowed up along Fifth Avenue as they
came within a
block of the Vandrick Bank Building.

“Whadda we do here, pal?” asked the
driver.

“Park as close to the entrance as you can
get,” Simon told him. “I’ll wait in the cab for a bit. If I get out,
stay here and keep your engine running. Be ready for a getaway. We may
have a
passenger—and then I’ll tell you more.”

“Okay,” said the chauffeur
phlegmatically; and then an
idea struck him. He slapped his thigh.
“Chees!” he said. “I
t’ought ya was kiddin’. Dat’s better
‘n hoistin’ de bank!”

“What is?” inquired the Saint, with
slight puzzlement.

“Aw, nuts,” said the driver.
“Ya can’t catch me twice. Why,
puttin’ de arm on Lowell Vandrick
himself, of course. Chees!
I can see de headlines. ‘Sebastian Lipski an’
de Saint Snatches
off de President of de Vandrick National Bank.’ Chees,
pal, ya had me guessin’ at foist!”

Simon grinned silently and resigned himself to
letting Mr.
Lipski enjoy himself with his dreams. To have
disillusioned
the man before it was necessary, he felt, would have been
as
heartless as robbing an orphan of a new toy.

He sat back, mechanically lighting another
cigarette in the
chain that stretched far back into the incalculable past,
and
watched the
imposing neo-Assyrian portals of the bank. A few
belated clerks arrived and scuttled inside, admitted by a
liveried doorkeeper who closed the doors again
after each one.
An early depositor
arrived, saw the closed doors, scowled in
dignantly at the doorkeeper, and drifted aimlessly round the
sidewalk in small circles, chewing the end of a
pencil. The
doorkeeper consulted his
watch with monotonous regularity
every
half-minute. Simon became infected with the habit and
began counting the seconds until the bank would
open, find
ing himself tense with an
indefinable restlessness of expecta
tion.

And then, with an effect that gripped the
Saint into almost
breathless immobility, the first notes of nine o’clock
chimed
out from
somewhere near by.

Stoically the doorkeeper dragged out his watch
again, cor
roborated the announcement of the clock to his own
satisfac
tion, opened the doors, and left them open, taking up his
impressive stance outside. The early investor broke off in the
middle of a
circle and scurried in to do his business. The bank
was open.

Otherwise Fifth Avenue was unchanged. A few
other de
positors arrived, entered the bank, and departed, with the
preoccupied air of men who were carrying the weight of the
nation’s
commerce. A patrolman strolled by, with the pre
occupied air of a
philosopher wondering what to philosophize
about, if anything.
Pedestrians passed up and down on their
own mysterious
errands. And yet Simon Templar felt himself
still clutched in the
grip of that uncanny suspense. He could give no account for it. He could not
even have said why he
should have been so fascinated by the
processes of opening the
bank. For all he knew, it might merely have
been a convenient
landmark for a meeting place, and even if the building
itself
was concerned there were hundreds of other offices on the
upper
floors which might have an equal claim on his attention;
nine
o’clock was the hour, simply an hour for him to be there, without any evidence
that something would explode at that
instant with the precision of a timed
bomb; but he could not
free himself from the almost melodramatic
sense of expectation
that made his left hand close tightly on the
pearl grips of
Fernack’s
gun.

And then, while his eyes were searching the
street restlessly, he suddenly saw Valcross sauntering by, and for the moment
forgot
everything else.

In a flash he was out of the cab, crossing the
pavement—
he did not wish to make himself conspicuous by yelling
from the window of the taxi. He clapped Valcross on the shoulder, and the older
man turned quickly. His eyes widened when he
saw the Saint.

“Why, hullo, Simon. I didn’t know you
were ever up at this
hour.”

“I’m not,” said the Saint.
“Where on earth have you been?”

“Didn’t you find my note? It was on the
mantelpiece.”

Simon shook his head.

“There are reasons why I haven’t had a chance to look for
notes,” he said. “Come into my taxi and
talk—I don’t want to stand around here.”

He seized Valcross by the arm and led him
back to the cab.
Mr. Lipski’s homely features lighted up in applause
mingled with delirious amazement—if that was kidnapping, it was the
slickest
and simplest job that he had ever dreamed of. Regret
fully, Simon told him
to wait where he was, and slammed
the communicating window on him.

“Where have you been, Bill?” he
repeated.

“I had to go to Pittsburgh and see a man
on business. I
heard about it just after you’d gone out, and I didn’t
know
how to get in touch with you. I had supper with him and came
back this
morning—flying both ways. I’ve only just got in.”

“You haven’t been to the Waldorf?”

“No. I was short of cash, and I was
going into the bank
first.”

Simon drew a deep breath.

“It’s the luckiest thing that ever
happened to you that you
had business in Pittsburgh,” he said.
“And the next luckiest
is that you ran short of cash this morning.
Somebody’s snitched
on us, Bill. When I got into the Waldorf in the small
hours of this morning it was full of policemen, and one detachment of ‘em is
still waiting there for you unless it’s starved to death!”

Valcross was staring at him blankly.

“Policemen?” he echoed. “But
how——
”

“I don’t know, and it isn’t much use
asking. The Big Fellow
did it—apparently he said I was treading on
his toes. Since his own mobs hadn’t succeeded in getting rid of me, I sup
pose he
thought the police might have a try. He’s paying their
wages, anyway. That
needn’t bother us. What it means is that
you’ve got to get out
of this state like a bat out of hell.”

“But what about you?”

The Saint smiled a little.

“I’m afraid I shall have to wait for my
million dollars,” he said. “I’ve got five of your men out of six, but
I don’t know
whether I shall be able to get the sixth.”

He told Valcross what had been happening, in
terse,
crackling sentences pared down to the uttermost parched
economy of
words. The other’s eyes were opening wider from
the intervention of
Fay Edwards at the last moment of the
ride—on through the slaying of Dutch
Kuhlmann to the
unpleasantness of Mr. Kestry and the amazing reprieve that
Fernack had offered. The whole staggering course of those
last few
hectic hours was sketched out in clipped impressionistic phrases that punched
their effect through like a rattle of
bullets. And all the while the Saint’s
eyes were scanning the
road and sidewalks, his fingers were curled
round the butt of Fernack’s gun, his nerves were keyed to the last milligram of
vigilance.