Authors: Leslie Charteris
Papulos sneered.
“Either you’re a fool, punk, or you’re
nuts! Once more I’m
asking you—decent and civil—where did you get that
twenty
G?”
“I found it,” said the Saint,
“growing on a gooseberry bush.”
“He’s nuts,” decided one of the
guards.
Papulos raised his hand again and then let it
go with a
twisted grin.
“Okay, wise guy. I’ll find out soon
enough. And if you got
it where I think you did, it’s going to be
just too bad.”
He plumped himself on one of the beds and picked up the
telephone. The guards stood by phlegmatically,
waiting for
the connection to go
through. One of them gazed sourly at a
cigar that had gone out, and
picked up a box of matches. The
fizz of a
match splashed through the silence; and then the
Greek was talking.
“Hullo, Judge. This is Papulos. Listen,
I got a monkey down
here
who just flashed a twenty-grand roll in C notes, and a
certain slip of paper… .”
The Saint saw him stiffen and grind the
receiver harder into
his ear. The guard with the relighted cigar
blew out a cloud of
malodorous smoke and drew patterns on the carpet with a
pointed toe. The receiver
clacked and spattered into the still
ness,
and Simon flexed his forearm for the reassuring pressure
of the knife sheathed inside his sleeve.
Papulos dropped the instrument back in its
bracket with an
ominous
click and turned slowly back to the Saint. He got to his feet, with his
flattened face jutting forward on his shoul
ders,
and stared at Simon, with his eyes bright and glistening.
“Mr. Simon, eh?” he rasped.
The Saint smiled engagingly.
“Simon Templar is the full name,”
he said, “but I thought
you might feel I was going upstage on you if I insisted on it
all.”
Papulos nodded.
“So you’re the Saint!” His voice
was venomous, but deeper
still there was a vibration of the hate that
can only be born
of fear. “You’re the rat who plugged Irboll this
afternoon.
You’re the guy who’s going to clean up New York.” He
laughed
abruptly, but there was no humour in the sound.
“Well,
punk—you’re through!”
He turned on his heel and issued a series of
sharp orders to
the two guards.
One word out of the arrangements for his
disposal was
enough for Simon Templar’s ears. His strategy had worked
exactly as he had psychologized it from the beginning. By per
mitting
himself to be trapped by Papulos he had taken one
more step up the
ladder. He was being passed on to the man
higher up for the
final disposition of his fate; and that man
was Morrie Ualino.
And where Ualino was, the Saint felt sure,
there was a good
sporting chance that the heiress of all the
Inselheims might also
be.
“March,” ordered the first guard.
“But what about my twenty grand?”
protested Simon aggrievedly
.
The second guard grinned.
“Where you’re going, buddy, they use
asbestos money,” he
said. “Shove off.”
Papulos unlocked the door. The twenty
thousand dollars
was in the side pocket of his coat, just as he had
stuffed it away
when he rose from the poker table; and Simon Templar
never
took prophecies of his eventual destination too seriously. He
figured
that a nation which had Samuel Insull in its midst
would not be unduly
impoverished by the loss of twenty thou
sand berries; and as he reached the door
he stopped to lay a
hand on the Greek’s
shoulder with a friendliness which he did
not feel.
“Remember, little buttercup,” said
the Saint outrageously,
“whatever you do, we shall always be
sweethearts——
”
Then one of the guards pushed him on; and
Simon stowed twenty thousand dollars unobtrusively away in his pocket as
they went
through the hall.
Simon rode beside the first torpedo, while the other drove
the sedan north and east. If anything, the
pressure of the gun that bored suggestively into his side had the pleasantly
famil
iar touch of an old friend. It was a gentle reminder of danger, a
solid emblem of battle and sudden death; and there were a
few dozen men in hell who would attest to the fact
that he was
a stranger to neither.
They rolled smoothly across the Queensborough Bridge, which spans
the East River at 59th Street, and the car picked up speed as they blared their
way through the semideserted
streets of
Astoria. Then the broad open highways of Long
Island stretched before them; and the Saint lighted a cigarette
and turned his brain into a perfectly functioning
machine
that charted every yard of
the route on a memory like a photographic plate.
The outlying suburbs of New York flashed by
in quick suc
cession—Flushing, Garden City, Hempstead. They had trav
elled some
miles beyond Springdale when the car slowed down
and turned abruptly into a bumpy
unfinished driveway that
terminated a hundred
yards farther on in front of a sombre
and
shuttered two-story house, where another car was already parked.
One of the guards nudged him out, and the
three of them
mounted the short flight of steps to the porch in single
file. The
inevitable face peered through a grille, recognized the
leading
guard, and said, “Hi, Joe.” The bolts were drawn, and they
went in.
The hall was lighted by a single heavily
frosted orange bulb
which did very little more than relieve the blackest
shades of
darkness. On the right, an open door gave a glimpse of a
tiny room containing a small zinc-topped bar; on the left, a larger
room was
framed between dingy hangings. The larger room
had a bare floor with
small booths built around the walls, each
containing a table
covered with a grubby cloth. There was an
electric piano in one
corner, a dingy growth of artificial vines
straggling over the
tops of the booths and tacking themselves along the low ceiling, and a
half-dozen more of the same feeble
orange bulbs shedding their watery
glimmer onto the scene. It
was a typical gangster’s dive, of a pattern
more common in
New Jersey than on Long Island, and the atmosphere was in
tended to
inspire romance and relaxation, but it was one of
the most depressing
places in which Simon Templar had ever
been.
“Upstairs?” queried the gorilla who
had been recognized as
Joe; and the man who had opened the door
nodded.
“Yeah—waitin’ for ya.” He inspected
the Saint curiously.
“Is dis de guy?”
The two guards made simultaneous grunting
noises designed to affirm that dis was de guy, and one of them took the Saint’s
arm and moved him on towards the stairway at the back of
the hall.
They mounted through a curve of darkness and came
up into another dim
glow of light on the floor above. The
stairs turned them into a narrow
corridor that ran the length
of the house; Simon was hurried along past
one door before
which a scrawny-necked individual lounged negligently,
blinking at them, as they went by, with heavy-lidded eyes like an
alligator’s;
they passed another door and stopped before the
third and last. One of
his escorts hammered on it, and it was yanked open. There was a sudden burst of
brighter light from
within; and the Saint went on into the lion’s den with an
easy, unhurried stride.
Simon had seen better dens. Except for the
brighter illu
mination, the room in which he found himself was no
better
than the social quarters on the ground floor. The boards under
foot were
uncarpeted, the once dazzlingly patterned wall
paper was yellowed and
moulting. There was a couch under
the window where two shirt-sleeved
hoodlums sat side-saddle
over a game of pinochle; they glanced up when
the Saint
came in, and returned to their play without comment. In
the centre of the room was a table on which stood the remains of
a meal;
and at the table, facing the door, sat Ualino.
Simon identified him easily from Fernack’s
description. But he saw the man only for one fleeting second; and after that
his
gaze was held
by the girl who also sat at the table.
There was no logical reason why he should have
guessed
that she
was the girl Fay who had spoken to Nather on the
telephone—the Fay Edwards of whom Fernack had begun to
speak. In
a house like that there were likely to be numbers of
girls, coming and going; and there was no evidence that Morrie Ualino
was an ascetic. But there was something to this girl
that might quite naturally have spoken with a
voice like the
one which Simon had heard. In that stark shabby room her
presence was even more incongruous than the
immaculate
Ualino’s. She was slender and fair, with eyes like amber, and
her mouth was a soft curve of amazingly
innocent tempta
tion. Perhaps she was
twenty-three or twenty-four, old enough to have the quiet confidence which
adolescence never has; but
still she
was young in an ageless, enduring way that the years
do not change. And
once again that queer intuitive throb of
expectation
went through the Saint, as it had, done when he
first heard the voice on
Nather’s telephone; the stirring of a
chord
in his mind whose note rang too deep for reason… .
It was to her, rather than to Ualino, that
he spoke.
“Good-evening,” said the Saint.
No one in the room answered. Ualino dipped a
brush into a
tiny bottle and stroked an even film of liquid polish on
the
nail of his little finger. A diamond the size of a bean flashed
from his
ring as he inspected his handiwork under the light.
He corked the bottle
and fluttered his graceful hand back and forth to dry off the polish, and his
tawny eyes returned at lei
sure to the Saint.
“I wanted to have a look at you.”
Simon smiled at him.
“That makes us both happy. I wanted to have a look at you.
I heard you were the Belle of New York, and I
wanted to see
how you did it.”
The ingenuousness of the Saintly smile was
blinding. “You must give me the address of the man who waves
your
hair one day, Morrie—but are you sure they got all the
mud pack off last time your face had a treatment?”
There was a hideous clammy stillness in the room, a still
ness that sprawled out of sheer open-mouthed
incredulity.
Not within the memory of
anyone present had such a thing as
that
happened. In that airlessly expanding quiet, the slightest
touch of fever in the imagination would have made
audible
the thin whisper of eardrums
waving soggily to and fro, like
wet
palm fronds in a breeze, as they tried dazedly to recapture
the unbelievable vibrations that had numbed them.
The faces
of the two pinochle players
revolved slowly, wearing the blank
expressions
of two men who had been unexpectedly slugged
with blunt instruments and who were still wondering what
had hit them.
“What did you say?” asked Ualino
pallidly.
“I was just looking for some beauty
hints,” said the Saint
amiably. “You know, you remind me of
Papulos quite a lot,
only he hasn’t got the trick of those
Dietrich eyebrows like you have.”
Ualino stroked down a thread of hair at one
side of his head.
“Come over here,” he said.
There was no actual question of whether the
Saint would
obey. As if answering an implied command, each of the two
gorillas
on either side of the Saint seized hold of his wrists.
His arms were twisted
up behind his back, and he was dragged
round the table; and
Ualino turned his chair round and
looked up at him.
“Did you ever hear of the hot box?”
Ualino asked gently.
In spite of himself, the Saint felt an
instant’s uncanny chill. For he had heard of the hot box, that last and most
horrible
product of gangland’s warped ingenuity. Al Capone himself
is
credited with the invention of it: it was his answer to the
three
amazing musketeers who pioneered the kidnapping
racket in the days
when other racketeers, who had no come
back in the law, were
practically the only victims; and Red McLaughlin, who led that historic foray
into the heart of Cook
County—who extorted hundreds of thousands of
dollars in
ransom from Capone’s lieutenants and came within an ace of
kidnapping the Scarface himself—died by that terrible death.
A cold
finger seemed to touch the Saint’s spine for one brief
second; and then it
was gone, leaving its icy trace only in the
blue of his eyes.