Authors: Leslie Charteris
“Poor kid,” he said. “I’ve come
to take you home.”
There was a surprising tenderness in his
voice, and all at
once the child’s whimpering died down.
“You want to go home, don’t you?”
asked the Saint.
She nodded violently; and with a soft
comforting laugh he
swung her up in the crook of his arm and crossed the
room. The door was locked, as he had expected. Simon held her a
little
tighter.
“We’re going to make some big bangs, Viola,” he said.
“You
aren’t frightened of big bangs, are
you? Big bangs like fire
works? And
every time we make a big bang we’ll kill one of
the wicked men who took
you away.” She shook her head.
“I like big bangs,” she declared;
and the Saint laughed again
and put the muzzle of his gun against the
lock.
The shot rocked the room like thunder, and a
heavy thud
sounded in the corridor. Simon flung open the door. It
was the
scrawny-necked
individual on guard outside who had caused the thud: he was sprawled against
the opposite wall in a gro
tesque huddle, and
nothing was more certain than that he
would
never stand guard anywhere again. Apparently he had
been peering through the keyhole, looking for an
explanation
of the disturbance, when
the Saint shot out the lock; and what
remained of his face was not
pleasant to look at. The child in
Simon’s
arms crowed gleefully.
“Make more bangs,” she commanded;
and the Saint smiled.
“Shall we? I’ll see what can be
done.”
He raced down the passage to the stairs. The
men below
were on their way up but he gained the half-landing before
them with one flying leap. The leading attacker died in his
tracks
and never knew it, and his lifeless body reared over backwards and went bumping
down to the floor below. The others scuttled for cover; and Simon drew a calm
bead on the single frosted bulb in the hall and left only the dim glow from the
bar and the dance room for light.
A tongue of orange fire spat out of the dark,
and the bullet
spilled a shower of plaster from the wall a yard over
the Saint’s head. Simon grinned and swung his legs over the banisters.
Curiously
enough, the average gangster has standards of marks
manship that would
make the old-time bad man weep in his grave: most of his pistol practice is
done from a range of not
more than three feet, and for any greater
distances than that
he gets out his sub-machine-gun and sprays a couple of
thou
sand rounds over the surrounding county on the assumption
that one of them must hit
something. The opposition was dan
gerous, but
it was not certain death. One of the men poked
an eye warily round the door of the bar and leapt back hur
riedly as the Saint’s shot splintered the frame
an inch from his
nose; and the Saint
let go the handrail and dropped down to
the floor like a cat.
The front door was open, as the men had left it when they
rushed back into the house. Simon made a rapid
calculation. There were four men left, so far as he knew; and of their num
ber one was certainly watching the windows at the
back, and
another was probably guarding the parked cars. That left two
to be taken on the way; and the time to take them
was at once,
while their morale was
still shaken by the divers preposterous calamities that they had seen.
He put the girl down and turned her towards the doorway.
She was moaning a little now, but fear would lend
wings to
her feet
“Run!” he shouted suddenly.
“Run for the door!”
Her shrill voice crying out in terror, the
child fled. A man
sprang up from his knees behind the hangings in the
dance-
room entrance; Simon fired once, and he went down with a
yell.
Another bullet from the Saint’s gun went crashing down
a row of bottles in
the bar; then he was outside, hurdling the
porch rail and
landing nimbly on his toes. He could see the girl’s white dress flying through
the darkness in front of him.
A man rose up out of the gloom ahead of her
and lunged, and
she screamed once as his outstretched fingers clawed at
her
frock. Simon’s gun belched flame, and the clutching hand fell
limp as a
soft-nosed slug tore through the fleshy part of the
man’s forearm. The
gorilla spun round and dropped his gun, bellowing like a bull, and Simon
sprinted after the terrified child. An automatic banged twice behind him, but
the shots
went wide. The girl shrieked as he came up with her, but
he
caught her into his left arm and held her close.
“All right, kiddo,” he said gently.
“It’s all over. Now we’re
going home.”
He ducked in between the parked cars. He
already knew
that the one in which he had arrived was locked: if
Ualino’s
car was also locked there would still be difficulties. He
threw
open the door and sighed his relief—the key was in its socket.
What was it
Fernack had said? “He rides around in an ar
moured sedan.”
Morrie Ualino seemed to have been a
thoughtful bird all round, and the
Saint was smiling appre
ciatively as he climbed in.
A scattered fusillade drummed on the coachwork
as he
swung the car through a tight arc in reverse, and the bullet
proof glass
starred but did not break. As the car lurched forward again he actually slowed
up to wind down an inch of
window.
“So long, boys,” he called back.
“Thanks for the ride!” And
then the car was swinging out into the
road, whirling away into the night with a smooth rush of power, with the horn
hooting a
derisively syncopated farewell into the wind,
Simon stopped the car a block from Sutton
Place and
looked
down at the sleepy figure beside him.
“Do you know your way home from here?” he asked her.
She nodded vigorously. Her hysterical sobbing
had stopped
long ago—in a few days she would scarcely remember.
He took a scrap of paper from his pocket and
made a little
drawing on it. It was a skeleton figure adorned with a
large
and rakishly slanted halo.
“Give this to your daddy,” he said,
“and tell him the Saint
brought you home. Do you understand? The
Saint brought you
back.”
She nodded again, and he crumpled the paper
into her tiny
fist and opened the door. The last he saw of her was her
white-
frocked shape trotting round the next corner; and then he let
in the
clutch and drove on. Fifteen minutes later he was back
at the Waldorf
Astoria, and Morrie Ualino’s armour-plated
sedan was abandoned six blocks away.
Valcross in pyjamas and dressing gown, was
dozing in the
living room. He roused to find the Saint smiling down at
him
a little tiredly, but in complete contentment.
“Viola Inselheim is home,” said the
Saint. “I went for a
lovely ride.”
He was wiping the blade of his knife on a silk
handkerchief;
and
Valcross looked at him curiously.
“Did you meet Ualino?” he asked;
and Simon Templar
nodded.
“Tradition would have it that Morrie
sleeps with his fa
thers,” he said, very gently; “but one can’t be
sure that he
knows who they were.”
He opened the bureau and took out a plain
white card. On
it were written six names. One of them—Jack Irboll’s—was
already
scratched out. With his fountain pen he drew a single straight line through the
next two; and then, at the bottom of
the list, he wrote another. It was
The
Big Fellow.
He hesitated for a moment and then wrote an eighth, lower down,
and drew
a
neat
panel round it:
Fay Edwards.
“Who is she?” inquired Valcross,
looking over his shoulder; and the Saint lighted a cigarette and pushed back
his hair.
“That’s what I’d like to know. All I can
tell you is that her
gun saved me a great deal of trouble, and was
a whole lot of
grief to some of the ungodly… . This is a pretty
passable
beginning, Bill—you ought to enjoy the headlines tomorrow
morning.”
His prophecy of the reactions of the press to
his exploits
would have been no great strain on anyone’s clairvoyant
gen
ius. In the morning he had more opportunities to read about
himself than any respectably
self-effacing citizen would have desired.
Modesty was not one of Simon Templar’s
virtues. He sat at
breakfast with a selection of the New York dailies strewn
around him,
and the general tenor of their leading pages was
very satisfactory. It
is true that the
Times
and the
Herald
Tribune,
following
a traditional policy of treating New York’s
annual average of six
hundred homicides as regrettable
faux
pas
which have
no proper place in a sober chronicle of the
passing days,
relegated the Saint to a secondary position; but
any aloofness on their
part was more than compensated by the
enthusiasm of the
Mirror
and
the
News.
SAINT RESCUES
VIOLA, they howled, in black letters two and a
half inches
high. UALINO SLAIN. RACKET ROMEO’S LAST RIDE.
UALINO,
VOELSANG, DIE. SAINT SLAYS TWO,
WOUNDS THREE. LONG ISLAND MASSACRE. SAINT
BATTLES KIDNAPPERS. There were photographs of the
rescued Viola
Inselheim with her stout papa, photographs of
the house where she
had been held, gory photographs of the
dead. There was a
photograph of the Saint himself; and Simon
was pleased to see that it was a good one.
At the end of his meal, he pushed the heap of
vociferous newsprint aside and poured himself out a second cup of coffee.
If there
had ever been any lurking doubts of his authenticity
—if any of the
perspiring brains at police headquarters down
on Centre Street, or
any of the sizzling intellects of the under
world, had cherished
any shy reluctant dreams that the Saint
was merely the product
of a sensational journalist’s overheated
imagination—those
doubts and dreams must have suffered a
last devastating
smack on the schnozzola with the publication
of that morning’s
tabloids. For no sensational journalist’s im
agination, overheated
to anything below melting point, could ever have created such a story out of
unsubstantial air. Simon
lighted a cigarette and stared at the ceiling
through a haze of
smoke with very clear and gay blue eyes, feeling the deep
thrill of other and older days in his veins. It was very good that such
things
could still come to pass in a tamed and supine world,
better still that he
himself should be their self-appointed
spokesman. He saw the
kindly grey head of William Valcross nodding at him across the room.
“Just now you have the advantage,”
Valcross was saying.
“You’re mysterious and deadly. How long
will it last?”
“Long enough to cost you a million
dollars,” said the Saint
lightly.
He went over to the bureau and took out the
card on which
the main points of his undertaking were written down, and
carried it
across to the open windows. It was one of those
spring mornings on
which New York is the most brilliant city
in the world, when the
air comes off the Atlantic with a heady
tang like frosted
wine, and the white pinnacles of its towers
stand up in a sky
from which every particle of impurity seems
to have been washed by
magic; one of those mornings when
all the vitality and impetuous aspiration
that is New York in
sinuates itself as the only manner of life. He filled his
lungs with the cool, clean alpine air and looked down at the specks
of traffic
crawling between the mechanical stops on Park Ave
nue; the distant
mutter of it came up to him as if from another
world into which he
could plunge himself at will, like a god
going down to earth;
and on that morning he understood the
cruelty and magnificence of the city,
and how a man could sit there in his self-made Olympus and be drunk with faith
in his
own power… . And then the Saint laughed softly at the
beauty of
the morning and at himself, for instead of being a
god enthroned he was
a brigand looking down from his eyrie
and planning new forays on the plain;
and perhaps that was
even better.