Saint in New York (16 page)

“How much does he give you, Joe?”
he asked jovially, as if
he were sharing a ripe joke with a bosom
friend.

The man gulped and swallowed. His mouth was
half open, and a sudden horrible understanding dilated the pupils of his
eyes as he
stared at the beaming mountain of fat in the chair.

“That’s a lie!” he screamed
suddenly. “You can’t frame me
like that! He didn’t give me anything—I
never saw him before——”

“Come here, Joe,” said Kuhlmann
soothingly.

He reached out and grasped the man’s wrist, drawing him towards
his chair rather like an elderly uncle with a reluctant
schoolboy. His right hand moved suddenly; and the doorkeeper jerked in
his grasp with a choking yell as the red-hot ti
p of Kuhlmann’s cigar ground into his cheek.

Nobody else moved. Kuhlmann released the man
and
laughed richly, brushing a few flakes of ash from his knee. He inspected
his cigar, struck a match, and relighted it.

“You’re a goot boy, Joe,” he said
heartily. “Go and vait out
side till I send for you.”

The man backed slowly to the door, one hand
pressed to his scorched cheek. There was a wide dumb horror in his eyes, but
he said
nothing. None of the others looked at him—they might have been a thousand miles
away, ignoring his very existence on the same planet as themselves. The door
closed after him; and Kuhlmann glanced round the other faces at the table.

“I’m afraid we are going to lose
Joe,” he said; and a sudden
lump of pure grief caught in his throat as he realized, appar
ently for the first time, what that implied.

Papulos fingered his glass nervously. His
fingers trembled, and a little of the amber fluid spilled over the rim of the
glass
and ran down
over his thumb. He stared straight ahead at Kuhlmann, realizing at that moment
what a narrow margin separated him from the same attention as the doorkeeper
had
received.

“Wait a minute, Dutch,” he said
abruptly. Every other eye
in the room veered suddenly towards him, and
under their
cold scrutiny he had to make an effort to steady his
voice. He
plunged on in a spurt of unaccountable panic.
“They’s no use rubbin’ out a guy for a mistake. If he tried to cross us
it’d be a
different thing, but we don’t know that it wasn’t just
like he
said. What the hell, anyone’s liable to slip up——
”

Papulos knew he had made a mistake. Kuhlmann’s
faded
blue gaze turned towards him almost introspectively.

“What’s it matter whether he crossed us
or made a mistake?”
demanded another member of the conference,
somewhere on
Papulos’s left. “The result’s the same. He screwed
up the deal.
We
can’t afford to let a guy get away with that. We can’t take
a chance on him.”

Papulos did not look round. Neither did Kuhlmann; but
Kuhlmann nodded slowly, thoughtfully, staring at
Papulos all
the time. Thoughts that
Papulos had frantically tried to turn
aside
were germinating, growing up, in that slow, methodical
Teutonic brain; Papulos could watch them creeping
up to the
surface of speech,
inexorably as a rising flood, and felt a sick
emptiness in his stomach. His own words had shifted the focus
to himself; but he knew that even without that rash
interven
tion he could not have been
passed over.

He picked up his glass, trying to control his
hand. A blob of whisky fell from it and formed a shining pool on the table—to
his fear-poisoned mind the spilt liquid was suddenly crimson, like a drop of
blood from a bullet-torn chest

“Dot is right,” Kuhlmann was saying
deliberately. “You’re a goot boy too, Pappy. Vhy did you send der Saint
straight
avay to
see Morrie?”

Papulos caught his breath sharply. With a
swift movement
he tossed the drink down his throat and heard the other’s
soft-
spoken words hammering into his brain like bullets.

“Vhy did you send der Saint straight avay
to see Morrie, as
if he had been searched, und let him take a knife and a
gun
mit him?”

“You’re crazy!” Papulos blurted
harshly. “Of course I sent
him to Morrie—I knew Morrie wanted to see him.
He didn’t
have a knife an’ a gun when he left me. Heimie’ll tell
you that.
Heimie
searched him——”

Felder started up.

“Why you——”

“Sit down!” Papulos snarled. For
one wild moment he saw hope opening out before him, and his voice rose:
“I’m sayin”
nothing about you. I’m sayin’ Dutch is crazy.
He’ll want to
put you on the spot next. An’ how d’you know he’ll stop
there?
He’ll be calling every guy who’s ever been near the Saint a
double-crosser—he’ll be trying to put the finger on
the rest of you before he’s
through——”

His voice broke off on one high, rasping note;
and he sat
with his mouth half open, saying nothing more.

He looked into the muzzle of Dutch Kuhlmann’s
gun, lev
elled at him across the table; and the warmth of the
whisky he had drunk evaporated on the cold weight in his stomach.

“You talk too much, Pappy,” said
Kuhlmann amiably. “It’s
a goot job you don’t mean everything you
say.”

The other essayed a smile.

“Don’t get me wrong, Dutch,” he
pleaded weakly. “What I mean is, if we got to knock somebody off, why not
knock off
the Saint?”

“Dat’s right,” chimed in Heimie
Felder. “We’ll knock off de
Saint. Why didn’t any of youse mugs t’ink of
dat before? I’ll
knock him off myself, poissonal.”

Dutch Kuhlmann smiled, without moving his gun.

“Dot is right,” he said. “Ve’ll
knock off der Saint, und not
have nobody making any more mistakes. You’re
a goot boy,
Pappy. Go outside and vait for us, Pappy—we have a little
business to
talk about.”

The thumping died down in the Greek’s chest,
and suddenly
he was quite still and strengthless. He sighed wearily,
knowing
all too well the futility of further argument. Too often he had
heard
Kuhlmann pronouncing sentence of death in those very
words, smiling blandly
and genially as he spoke: “You’re a
goot boy. Go outside
and vait for us… .”

He stood up, with a feeble attempt to muster
the stoical
jauntiness that was expected of him.

“Okay, Dutch,” he said. “Be
seein’ ya.”

There was an utter silence while he left the
room; and as he
closed the door behind him his brief display of poise
drained
out of him. Simon Templar would scarcely have recognized
him as the
same sleek, self-possessed bully that he had encoun
tered twelve hours ago.

The doorkeeper sat in a far corner, turning
the pages of a
tabloid. He looked up with a start as Papulos came through
but the Greek ignored him. Under sentence of death himself, probably to
die on the same one-way ride, a crude pride held
him aloof. He walked
up to the bar and rapped on the coun
ter, and Toni came up with his smooth
expressionless face.

“Brandy,” said Papulos.

Toni served him without a word, without even
an inquisi
tive glance. Outside of that back room from which Papulos
had just
emerged, no one knew what had taken place; the
world went on without
a change. No one could have told
what Toni thought or guessed. His
olive-skinned features
seemed to possess no register of emotion. The
finger might be on him, too: he had served the Saint, and directed him to the
Graylands
Hotel, at the beginning of all the trouble—he
might have received
his own sentence in the back room, three
hours ago. But he said
nothing and turned away as Papulos
drank.

There was a swelling emptiness below the
Greek’s breast
bone which two shots of cognac did nothing to fill. Even
while
he drank, he was a dead man, knowing perfectly well that
there was
no Appellate Division in the underworld to find a
reversible error
which might give him a chance for life. He
knew that in a few
useless’ hours death would claim him as
certainly as if it
had been inscribed in the book of Fate ten
thousand years ago.
He knew that there was no one who would
join him in a challenge
to Kuhlmann’s authority—no one who
could help him, no one who could
rescue him from the venge
ance of the gang.
…

And then suddenly the flash of a wild idea
illumined some
dark recess of his memory.

In his mind he saw the face of a man. A
bronzed reckless face with cavalier blue eyes that seemed to hold a light of
mocking
laughter. The lean hard-muscled figure of a man
whose poise held no
fear for the vengeance of all the legions
of the underworld. A
man who was called the Saint… .

And in that instant Papulos realized that
there was one man
who might do what all the police of New York could not
do—
who might stand between him and the crackling death that
waited
for him.

He pushed his glass forward wordlessly,
watched it refilled,
and drained it again. For the first time
that morning his stom
ach felt the warmth of the raw spirit. The doorkeeper knew
nothing; Toni Ollinetti knew nothing—could not
possibly know anything. If Kuhlmann came out and found him gone the mob would
trail him down like bloodhounds and inev
itably find him even though he fled to the uttermost ends of
the continent; but then it might be too late.

Papulos flung a bill on the counter and
turned away with
out waiting for change. His movements were those of an automaton,
divorced from any effort of will or deliberation, im
pelled by nothing but an instinctive
surging rebellion against
the blind march
of death. He waved an abrupt, careless hand. “Be seein’ ya,” he said;
and Toni nodded and smiled, without
expression.
The doomed doorkeeper looked up as he went
by, with a glaze of despair
in his dulled eyes: Papulos could
feel what
was in the man’s mind, the dumb resentful envy of a condemned man seeing his
fellow walking out into the sweet
freedom
of life: but the Greek walked by without a glance at
him.

The bright morning air struck into his senses with its in
tolerable reminder of the brief beauty of life,
quickening his
steps as he came out to the street. His movements had the
desperate power of a drowning man. If an
army had appeared
to bar his way, he
would have drawn his gun and gone down
fighting
to break through them.

His car stood at the curb. He climbed in and
stamped on
the self-starter. Before the engine had settled down to
smooth
running he
was flogging it to drag him down the street, away
from the doom that waited in Charley’s Place. He had no
plan in his mind. He had no idea how he would find
the
Saint, where all the police
organizations of the city had failed.
He
only knew that the Saint was his one hope of reprieve, and that the inaction of
waiting for execution like a bullock in a
slaughter line would have snapped his reason. If he had to
die, he would rather die on the run, struggling
towards life,
than wait for extinction
like a trapped rat. But he looked in
the
driving mirror as he turned into Seventh Avenue, and
saw no one
following him.

But he saw something else.

It was a hand that came up out of the back of
the car—a
lean brown hand that grasped the back of his seat close to
his
shoulder and dragged up a man from the floor. His heart leapt
into his
throat, and the car swerved dizzily under his twitching
hands. Then
he saw the face of the man, and a racing trip
hammer started up
under his ribs.

The man squeezed himself adroitly over into
the vacant
front seat and calmly proceeded to search the dashboard
for a
lighter to kindle his cigarette.

“What ho, Pappy,” said the Saint.

Chapter 5

How Mr. Papulos Was Taken off,
and
Heimie Felder Met with Further
Misfortunes