Authors: Leslie Charteris
The man wiped his cloth slowly across the
bar, drying off
invisible
specks of moisture.
“I don’t know anything. I have to ask the
boss.”
He turned and went through a curtain at the
back of the
bar; and while he was gone Simon finished his drink. The
bluff and
the gamble went on. If anything went wrong at this
stage it would be
highly unfortunate—what might happen
later on was another matter. But the
Saint’s nerves were like
ice. After some minutes the man came back.
“Morrie Ualino don’t play tonight.
Papulos is playing. You
want a game?”
Simon did not move a muscle. Through Papulos
the trail
went to Ualino, and he had never expected to get near
Ualino
in the first jump. But if Ualino were not playing that night—
if he were
engaged elsewhere—it was an added chance that
the radio message
which Fernack had received might supply a
reason. The azure
steel came and went in the Saint’s eyes, but
all the bartender saw
was a disappointed shrug.
“I didn’t come here to cut for pennies.
Who is this guy
Papulos?”
Toni’s soft brown eyes held an imperceptible
glint of con
temptuous humour.
“If you want to play big, I think he
will give you all you
want. Afterwards you can meet Ualino. You want to go?”
“Well, it might give me some practice. I
haven’t anything
else
to do.”
Toni emptied an ashtray and wiped it out. From
a distance of a few yards he would have seemed simply to be filling up
the time
until another customer wanted him, without talking
to anyone at all.
“They’re at the Graylands Hotel—just up
the street on the
other side. Suite 1713. Tell them Charley Quain sent
you.”
“Okay.” Simon stood up, spreading a
bill on the counter.
“And thanks.”
“Good luck,” said Toni and watched
him go with eyes as
gentle
as a deer’s.
The Graylands Hotel lay just off Seventh
Avenue. It was one
of those caravanserais which are always full and yet
always seem to be deserted, with the few guests who were visible
hustling
furtively between the sanctity of their private rooms and the anonymity of the
street. Business executives detained
at the office might well have stayed
there, but none of them
would ever have given it as his address. It
had an air of rather
forlorn splendour, like a blowzy woman in gold brocade, and
in spite of the emptiness of its public rooms
there was a sup
pressed atmosphere of
clandestine and irregular life teeming
in
the uncharted cubicles above.
The gilded elevator, operated by a pimply youth with a
precociously salacious air of being privy to all the irregularities that had
ever ridden in it, whisked Simon to the seven
teenth
floor and decanted him into a dimly lighted corridor.
He found Suite 1713 and knocked. After a brief
pause a key
clicked over and the
portal opened eight inches. A pair of cold
dispassionate eyes surveyed him slowly.
“My name’s Simon,” said the Saint
He began to feel that he was admitting a lot of undesirable people to an easy
familiarity that evening, but the alias seemed as good as any, and certainly
preferable to such a fictitious name as, for instance,
Wigglesnoot. Charley
Quain sent me around.”
The eyes that studied him received the information as en
thusiastically as two glass beads.
“Simon, eh? From Denver?”
“Detroit,” said the Saint.
“They call me Aces.”
The guard’s head dropped through a
passionless half-inch
which might have been taken for a nod. He
allowed the door
to open wider.
“Okay, Aces. We heard you were on your way. If you’re
lookin’ for action I guess you can get it
here.”
The Saint smiled and sauntered through. He found himself
in a rather large foyer, formally furnished. At
the far end, two
rooms gave off it on either side, and from the closed
door on
the right came the mutter of an
occasional curt voice, the crisp clicking of chips, and the insidious rustle
and lisp of cards. It appeared to Simon that he was definitely on his way. Some
where beyond that door Mr. Papulos was in
session, and the
Saint figured it was high time he took a gander at this
Mr.
Papulos.
*
*
*
The guard threw open the second door, and
Simon went on
in.
He saw that the place had originally been intended for a
sitting room; but all the normal furniture had been
pushed
back against the walls,
leaving plenty of space for the large
round
table covered with a green baize cloth which now occu
pied the centre of the floor. Fringing the circle
of men seated
around the board were a
few hard, lean-faced gentry whose air of hawk-eyed detachment immediately
removed any sus
picion that they might
be there to minister to the sick in case
one of the players was taken sick. A single brilliant light fix
ture blazed overhead, flooding a cone of white
luminance over
the ring of players.
As the Saint came in, every face turned
towards him.
“Aces Simon, of Detroit,” announced
the guard. As a cynical
afterthought he added: “He’s lookin’ for
some action, gents.”
The lean-faced watchers in the outer shadows
relaxed and
crossed their legs again; the players acknowledged the
intro
duction with curt nods and returned immediately to their
game.
Simon strolled across to the table and pulled
out a vacant
chair opposite the dealer. One casual glance around the
board was enough to show him that the guard had had reason to be
cynical—the play was
sufficiently high to clean out any small
time
gambler in one deal. He lighted a cigarette and studied
the faces of the players. They were a variegated
crew, ranging
from the elite of the
underworld to the tawdrier satellites of
the upper. On his right was a stout gentleman whose faded eyes
held the unmistakable buccaneering gleam of a
prominent
rotarian from Grand Rapids
out on a tear in the big city.
The stout gentleman leaned over
confidentially, exhaling a
powerful aroma of young Bourbon.
“Lookin’ for action, eh?” he wheezed. “Well, this
is the place
for it Eh? Eh?”
“Eh?” asked the Saint, momentarily
infected by the spirit
of the thing.
“I said, this is the place for action,
isn’t it, eh?” repeated the
devotee of rotation with laborious good will;
and a thin little
smile edged the Saint’s mouth.
“Brother,” he assented with
conviction, “you don’t know the half of it.”
His eyes were fixed on the dealer, who, from
the stacks of
chips and neat wads of bills before him, appeared to be
also
the organizer of the game; and as the seconds went by it be
came
plainer and plainer to the Saint that there was at least one man at that table
who would never be asked to pose for
the central nymph in a picture to be
entitled
Came the Dawn.
The swarthy pockmarked face seemed to have been developed
from the bald side of a roughly cubical head. Two
small black
eyes, affectionately
close together, nested high up under the eaves of a pair of prominent frontal
bones; and the nose be
tween them had
lost any pretensions to classic symmetry which
it might once have had in some ancient argument with a beer
bottle. A thick neck creased with rolls of fat
linked this pel
lucid window of the
soul with a gross bulk of body which ap
parently
completed the wodge of mortal clay known to the
world as Papulos. It was not an aesthetic spectacle by any
standards; but the Saint had come there to take a
gander at
Mr. Papulos, and he was
taking it. And while he looked, the
black
beady eyes switched up to meet his gaze.
“Well, Mr. Simon, how much is it to be?
The whites are Cs,
the reds are finifs, and the blues are G.‘s.”
The voice was harshly nasal, with a habitual
sneer lurking in it. It was the kind of voice which no healthy outlaw could
have
heard without being moved to pleasant thoughts of murder;
but the
Saint smiled and blew a smoke ring.
“I’ll take twenty grand—and you can keep
it in the blues.”
There was a sudden quiet in the room. The
other players hitched up closer in their chairs; and the lean-faced watchers
in the
outer shadows eased their right hips instinctively away from obstructing
objects. Without the twitch of an eyebrow
Papulos counted out two
stacks of chips and spilled them in
the centre of the table.
“Twenty grand,” he said
laconically. “Let’s see your dough.”
His eyes levelled opaquely across the
table. “Or is it on the
cuff?”
“No,” answered the Saint coolly.
“It’s in the pants.”
“Let’s see it.”
The rotarian from Grand Rapids took a gulp at
the drink
beside him and stared owlishly at the table; and the Saint
reached into his trouser pocket. He felt the roll of bills there;
felt
something else—the crumpled slip of paper that had originally accompanied
them. Securing this telltale bit of evidence
with his little
finger, he pulled the bills from his pocket and counted them out onto the
board.
It was an admirable performance, as the
Saint’s little cameos of legerdemain always were. Under the Greek’s watchful
eyes
he was
measuring out twenty thousand dollars, and the scrap
of paper had apparently slipped in somewhere among the
notes.
Halfway through the count it fell out, face upwards.
Simon stopped counting; then he made a very clumsy grab
for it. The grab was so slow and clumsy that it
was easy for
Papulos to catch his
wrist.
“Wait a minute.” The Greek’s voice
was a sudden rasp of
menace in the stillness.
He flicked the scrap of paper towards him with one finger
and stared at it for a moment. Then he shifted
his gaze to the
banknotes. He looked
up slowly, with two spots of colour flam
ing in his swarthy cheeks.
“Where did you get that money?”
He was still holding the Saint’s right wrist,
and his grip had tightened rather than relaxed. Simon glowered at him guiltily.
“What’s the matter with it?” he
flung back. “It ought to be
good—you passed it out yourself.”
“I know,” said Papulos coldly.
“But not to you.”
He made an infinitesimal motion with his head;
and Simon
knew, without looking round, that two of the hard-faced
watch
ers had closed in behind his chair. Nobody else moved; and
the heavy
breathing of the rotarian from Grand Rapids who
was seeing Life was
the loudest sound in the room.
Papulos got to his feet.
“Get up,” he said. “I want to
speak to you in the other
room.”
A hand fastened on Simon’s shoulder and jerked
him up,
but he had no idea of protesting at that stage—quite apart from the fact
that any protest would have been futile. He
turned obediently between
the two guards and followed the
broad back of Papulos out of the room.
They crossed the hall and entered the bedroom
of the suite,
and the door was closed and locked behind them. Simon was
roughly searched and then backed up against a wall. Papulos confronted
him, while the two gorillas ranged themselves on
either side. The Greek’s beady eyes were
narrowed to black pin
points.
“Where did you get that twenty
grand?”
The Saint glared at him sullenly.
“It’s none of your damned business.”
With a movement surprisingly fast and accurate
for one of
his fleshy bulk, Papulos drew back one hand and whipped
hard
knuckles across the Saint’s mouth.
“Where did you get that twenty
grand?”
For an instant the Saint’s muscles leapt as if
a flame had
touched them; but he held himself in check. It was all
part of
the game he was playing, and the score against Papulos could
wait for
some future date. When he lunged back at the Greek’s jaw it was with a wild
amateurish swing that never had a hope
of reaching its mark;
and he came up short with two heavy
automatics grinding into his ribs.