Authors: Leslie Charteris
The inspector broke off short. A third voice
had cut eerily
into the conversation—an impersonal metallic voice that
came
from the radio under the dashboard:
“Calling all cars. Calling all cars. Viola Inselheim, age
six,
kidnapped from home in Sutton Place…”
Fernack snapped upright, and the lights of a
passing car
showed
his face graven in lines of iron.
“Good God!” he said. “It’s
happened!”
He was switching on the ignition even while
the metallic
voice
droned on.
“…
Kidnappers escaped in maroon
sedan. New York li
cense plate. First three serial numbers 5F 3
or
5
F 8. Inspector
Fernack call dispatcher. Inspector
Fernack call dispatcher.
Calling all cars
…”
The engine surged to life with a staccato roar
of power, and
Simon abruptly decided to be on his way.
“Hold it!” he called, as the car
slipped forward. “That’s your party.”
Fernack’s reply was lost in the song of the
motor as it picked
up speed. Simon opened the door and climbed out onto the
running
board. “Thanks for the ride,” he said and dropped
nimbly to
the receding asphalt.
He stood under a tree and listened to the
distancing wail of the car’s imperative siren, and a slight smile came to his
lips.
The impulse that had led him back to Fernack had borne
fruit beyond his highest hopes.
Beyond Nather was Papulos, beyond Papulos was
Morrie
Ualino, beyond Ualino was the Big Fellow. And crumpled
into the
Saint’s side pocket, beside his gun, was the slip of
paper that had
accompanied a gift of twenty thousand dollars
which Nather had made
such an unsuccessful effort to defend.
The inscription on
the paper—as Simon had read it while he
waited for Fernack
under the library window—said, quite
simply: “Thanks. Papulos.”
It seemed logical to take the rungs of the
ladder in their nat
ural sequence. And if Simon remembered that this process
should also
lead him towards the mysterious Fay Edwards, he
was only human.
Chapter 3
How Simon Templar Took a Gander
at
Mr. Papulos, and Morrie Ualino
Took
a Sock at the Saint
Valcross was waiting for him when he got back
to the Waldorf Astoria, reaching the tower suite by the private elevator as
before. The old man stood up with a quick smile.
“I’m glad you’re back, Simon,” he
said. “For a little while I
was wondering if even you were finding things too difficult.”
The Saint laughed, spiralling his hat
dexterously across the
room to the chifferobe. He busied himself with a glass, a bottle,
some cracked ice, and a siphon.
“I was longer than I expected to be,”
he explained. “You
see, I had to take Inspector Fernack for a
ride.”
His eyes twinkled at Valcross tantalizingly
over the rim of
his glass. Valcross waited patiently for the exposition
that had to come, humouring the Saint with the air of flabbergasted
perplexity
that was expected of him. Simon carried his drink
to an armchair,
relaxed into it, lighted a cigarette, and inhaled
luxuriously, all in a
theatrical silence.
“Thank God the humble Players’ can be
bought here for
twenty cents,” he remarked at length. “Your
American concoctions are a sin against nicotine, Bill. I always thought the
Spaniards
smoked the worst cigarettes in the world; but I had
to come here to find
out that tobacco could be toasted, boiled, fried, impregnated with menthol,
ground into a loose powder,
enclosed in a tube of blotting paper, and
still unloaded on an
unsuspecting public.”
Valcross smiled.
“If that’s all you mean to tell me, I’ll
go back to my book,”
he said; and Simon relented.
“I was thinking it over on my way
home,” he concluded, at
the end of his story, “and I’m coming to
the conclusion that
there must be something in this riding business. In fact,
I’m
going to be taken for a ride myself.”
Valcross shook his head.
“I shouldn’t advise it,” he said.
“The experience is often
fatal.”
“Not to me,” said the Saint.
“I shall tell you more about
that presently, Bill—the more I think
about it, the more it seems like the most promising avenue at this moment. But
while
you’re pouring me out another drink, I wish you’d think of a reason why anyone
should be so heartless as to kidnap a
child who was already suffering more
than her share of the
world’s woes with a name like Viola Inselheim.”
Valcross picked up a telephone directory and
scratched his
head over it.
“Sutton Place, you said?” He looked
through the book,
found a
place, and deposited the open volume on
Simon’s
knee. Simon glanced over the Inselheims and located a certain Ezekiel of
that tribe whose address was in Sutton Place. “I
wondered if that
would be the man,” Valcross said.
The name meant nothing in Simon Templar’s
hierarchy.
“Who is he?”
“Zeke Inselheim? He’s one of the richest
brokers in New
York City.”
Simon closed the book.
“So that’s why Nather is staying home
tonight!”
He took the glass that Valcross refilled for
him, and smoked
in silence. The reason for the all-car call, and
Fernack’s pertur
bation, became plainer. And the idea of carrying on the
night
in the same spirit as he had begun it appealed to him with increasing
voluptuousness. Presently he finished his drink and
stood up.
“Would you like to order me some coffee?
I think I’ll be
going out again soon.”
Valcross looked at him steadily.
“You’ve done a lot today. Couldn’t you
take a rest?”
“Would you have taken a rest if you were Zeke
Inselheim?”
Simon asked. “I’d
rather like to be taken for that ride tonight.”
He was back in the living room in ten minutes,
fresh and
spruce from a cold shower, with his dark hair smoothly
brushed and
his gay blue eyes as bright and clear as a summer
morning. His shirt
was open at the neck as he had slipped it on when he emerged from the bathroom,
and the left sleeve
was rolled up to the elbow. He was adjusting the straps of
a
curious kind of sheath that lay snugly along his left forearm:
the
exquisitely carved ivory hilt of the knife it carried lay close to his wrist,
where his sleeve would just cover it when it was
rolled down.
Valcross poured the coffee and watched him.
There was a
dynamic power in that sinewy frame, a sense of
magnificent recklessness and vital pride, that was flamboyantly inspiring.
“If I were twenty years younger,”
Valcross said quietly, “I’d
be going with you.”
Simon laughed.
“If there were four more of you, it
wouldn’t make any dif
ference.” He turned his arm over,
displaying the sheathed
knife for a moment before he rolled down his
sleeve. “Belle
and I will do all that has to be done on this
journey.”
In ten minutes more he was in a taxi, riding
westwards
through the ravines of the city. The vast office
buildings of
Fifth Avenue, abandoned for the night to cleaners and
care
takers, reared their geometrical patterns of lighted windows
against the
dark sky like huge illuminated honeycombs. The
cab crossed Broadway
and Seventh Avenue, plunging through
the drenched luminance of massed
theatre and cinema and
cabaret signs like a swimmer diving through a
wave, and
floated out on the other side in the calmer channel of
faintly odorous gloom in which a red neon tube spelt out the legend:
“Charley’s Place.”
The house was an indeterminate, rather dingy
structure of
the kind that flattens out the skyline westwards of
Seventh
Avenue, where the orgy of futuristic building which gave birth to
Chrysler’s Needle has yet to spread. It shared with its neigh
bours the
depressing suggestion of belonging to a community of nondescript persons who
had once resolved to attain some
sort of individuality, and who had achieved
their ambition by adopting various distinctive ways of being nondescript. The
windows on
the ground level were covered by greenish cur
tains which acquired a
phosphorescent kind of luminousness from the lights behind them.
Simon rang the bell, and in a few moments a
grille in the
heavy oak door opened. It was a situation where nothing
could
be done without bluff; and the bluff had to be made on a
blind
chance.
“My name’s Simon,” said “the
Saint. “Fay Edwards sent me.”
The man inside shook his head.
“Fay ain’t come in yet. Want to wait for
her?”
“Maybe I can get a drink while I’m
waiting,” Simon
shrugged.
His manner was without concern or
eagerness—it struck ex
actly the right note of harmless nonchalance.
If the Saint had been as innocent as he looked he could have done it no better;
and the doorkeeper peered up and down the street and un
latched the
door.
Simon went through and hooked his hat on a
peg. Beyond
the tiny hall was a spacious bar which seemed to occupy
the
remainder of the front part of the building. The tables were
fairly well
filled with young-old men of the smoothly blue-
chinned type,
tailored into the tight-fitting kind of coat which
displays to such
advantage the bulges of muscle on the biceps
and the upper back.
Their faces, as they glanced up in auto
matic silence at the
Saint’s entrance, had a uniform air of fro
zen impassivity,
particularly about the eyes, like fish that have
been in cold storage
for many years. Scattered among their company was a sprinkling of the amply
curved pudding-faced
blondes who may be recognized anywhere as
belonging to the
genus known as “gangsters’ molls”—it is a
curious fact that
few of the men who shoot their way through amazing wealth
to
sophistication in almost all their appetites ever acquire a
sophisticated
taste in femininity.
Simon gave the occupants no more than a
casual first glance,
absorbing the general background in one broad
survey. He
walked across to the bar and hitched himself onto a high
stool.
One of the white-coated bartenders set up a glass of ice water and
waited.
“Make it a rye highball,” said the
Saint
By the time the drink had been prepared the
mutter of con
versation in the room had resumed its normal pitch. Simon
took a sip from his glass and stopped the bartender before he
could move
away.
“Just a minute,” said the Saint.
“What’s your name?”
The man had an oval, olive-hued,
expressionless face, with
beautifully lashed brown eyes and glossily
waved black hair
that
made his age difficult to determine.
“My name is Toni,” he stated.
“Congratulations,” said the Saint.
“My name is Simon. From
Detroit.”
The man nodded unemotionally, with his soft
dark eyes
fixed on
the Saint’s face.
“From Detroit,” he repeated, as if memorizing a message.
“They call me Aces Simon,” said the
Saint evenly. The bartender’s unwrinkled face responded as much as a wooden im
age might
have done. “I’m told there are some players in
this city who know
what big money looks like.”
“What do you want?”
“I thought I might get a game
somewhere.” Simon’s blue
gaze held the bartender’s as steadily as the
other was watching
him. “I want to play with Morrie Ualino.”