Saint in New York (18 page)

“You could only tell me one thing that
might be worth a
trade for your unsavoury life, you horrible
specimen,” said
the Saint coldly. “And that is—who is the Big Fellow?”

Papulos turned, white-faced, staring.

“You can’t ask me to tell you that——
”

“Really?”

“It ain’t possible! I’d tell you if I
could—but I can’t. There
ain’t nobody in the mob could tell you that,
except the Big
Fellow himself, Ualino didn’t know. Kuhlmann don’t know.
There’s only one
way we talk to him, an’ that’s by telephone.
An’
only one guy has the number.”

Simon drew the last puff from his cigarette
and pitched it
through the window.

“Then it seems just too bad if you
aren’t the guy, Pappy,”
he said sympathetically; and Papulos shrank
away into the
farthest corner of the seat at the ruthless quietness of
his
voice.

“But I can tell you who it is, Saint!
I’m coming clean. Wait
a minute—you gotta let me talk——
”

His voice rose suddenly into a shrill
scream—a scream whose
sheer crazed terror made the Saint’s head whip round with
narrowed eyes stung to a knife-edged alertness. .

In one split second he saw what Papulos had
seen.

A car had drawn abreast of them on the
outside—a big,
powerful
sedan that had crept up without either of them no
ticing it, that had manoeuvred into position with deadly skill.
There were three men in it. The windows were open,
and
through them protruded the
gleaming black barrels of sub
machine-guns.
Simon grasped the scene in one vivid flash and
flung himself down into the body of the car. In another instant
the
staccato stammer of the guns was rattling in his ears, and
the steel was drumming round him like a storm of
death.

*
   
*
   
*

The window on his right shattered in the blast and spilled
fragments of glass over him; but he was unhurt. He
was aware
that the car was swerving
dizzily; and a moment later there was a terrific crashing impact that flung him
into a bruised
heap under the
dashboard, with his head singing as if a dozen
vicious mosquitoes were imprisoned inside his skull. And after
that there was silence.

Some seconds passed before other sounds
reached him as
if they came out of a fog. He heard the rumble of
invisible
traffic and the screeching of brakes, the shrilling of a
police whistle and the scream of a woman close by. It took another
second or
two for his battered brain to grasp the fundamental
reason for that
strange impression of stillness: the ear-splitting
crackle of the
machine guns had stopped. It was as if a tropical
squall had struck a
small boat, smashed it in one savage in
stant, and whirled on.

The Saint struggled up. The car was listing
over to star
board, and he saw that the front of it was inextricably en
tangled
with a lamppost at the edge of the sidewalk. A crowd
was already beginning
to gather; and the woman who had
screamed before screamed again when she saw
him move.
The car which had attacked them had vanished as suddenly
as it had
appeared.

He looked for Papulos. After that one
abruptly strangled
shriek the man had not made a sound. In another moment
Simon
understood why. The impact had hurled the Greek halfway through the windscreen:
he lay sprawled over the
scuttle with one arm limply spread out, but
it was quite
clear that he had been dead long before that happened. And
the Saint gazed at him for an instant in silence.

“I was wrong, my lad,” he said
softly. “Maybe they were
after you.”

There was scarcely room for any further
apologies to the
deceased. In the far distance Simon could see a blue-clad
figure lumbering towards him, blowing its whistle as it ran; and the
crowd was swelling. They were on 57th Street, near
the corner of Fifth
Avenue, and there was plenty of material
around to develop an
audience far larger than the Saint would have desired. A rapid departure from
those regions struck him
as being one of the most immediate requirements
of the day.

He got the nearest door open and stepped out.
The crowd hesitated: most of them had been reading newspapers long
enough to
gather that standing in the way of escaping gun
men is a pastime that
is severely frowned upon by the major
ity of insurance companies: and the
Saint dropped a hand to
his coat pocket in the hope of reminding them
of the fact. The gesture had its desired effect. The crowd melted away before
him; and he
raced round the corner and sprinted southwards
down Fifth Avenue
without a soul attempting to hinder him.

A cruising taxi went by, and he leapt onto the
running
board and opened the door before the driver could accelerate.
In another
second the partition behind the driver was open,
and the unmistakable
cold circle of a gun-muzzle pressed
gently into the back of the man’s
neck.

“Keep right on your way, Sebastian,”
advised the Saint,
coolly reading the chauffeur’s name off the license card
in
side, “and nothing will happen to you.”

The driver kept right on his way. He had been
driving taxis
in New York for a considerable number of years and had de
veloped a fatalistic
philosophy.

“Where to, buddy?” he inquired
stolidly.

“Grand Central,” ordered Simon.
“And don’t worry about
the lights.”

They cut away to the left on 50th Street
under the very
nose of a speeding limousine; and the chauffeur half
turned
his head.

“You’re de Saint, aintcha, pal?” he
said.

“How did you know?” Simon answered
carefully.

“I t’ought I reckernized ya,” said
the driver, with some satisfaction. “I seen pictures of ya in de
papers.”

Simon steadied his gun.

“So what?” he prompted caressingly.

“So nut’n. I’m pleased ta meetcha, dat’s
all. Say, dat job
ya pulled on Long Island last night was a honey!”

The Saint smiled.

“We ought to have met before,
Sebastian,” he murmured.

The chauffeur nodded.

“Sure, I read aboutcha. I like dat job. I
been waitin’ to see Morrie Ualino get his ever since I had to pay him
protection
t’ree years ago, when he was runnin’ de taxi racket. Say,
dat
was some smash ya had back dere. Some guys tryin’ to knock
ya
off?”

“Trying.”

The driver shook his head.

“I can’t figure what dis city is comin’
to,” he confessed. “Ya
ain’t hoit, though?”

“Not the way I was meant to be,”
said the Saint.

He was watching the traffic behind them now.
The driver
had excelled himself. After the first few hectic blocks
he had
reverted to less conspicuous driving, without surrendering any of the
skill with which he dodged round unexpected
corners and doubled on
his own tracks. Any pursuit which might have got started soon enough to be
useful seemed to have been shaken off: there was not even the distant siren of
a police
car to be heard. The man at the wheel seemed to have
an instinctive flair
for getaways, and he did his job without
once permitting it to
interfere with the smooth flow of his
loquacity.

As they covered the last stretch of Lexington
Avenue, he
said: “Ja rather go in here, or Forty-second
Street?”

“This’ll do,” said the Saint.
“And thanks.”

“Ya welcome,” said the driver
amiably. “Say, I wouldn’t
mind doin’ a job for a guy like you. Any time
you could use
a guy like me, call up Columbus 9-4789. I eat there most
days
around two o’clock.”

Simon opened the door as the cab stopped, and
pushed a
twenty-dollar bill into the driver’s collar.

“Maybe I will, some day,” he said
and plunged into the
station with the driver’s “So long,
pal,” floating after him.

Taking no chances, he dodged through the
subways for a
while, stopped in a washroom to repair some of the slight
damage
which the accident had done to his appearance, and finally let himself out onto
Park Avenue for the shortest ex
posed walk to the Waldorf. Once again he
demonstrated how
much a daring outlaw can get away with in a big city. In
the country he would have been a stranger, to be observed and
discussed
and inquired into; but a big city is full of strangers, and nearly all of them
are busy. None of the men and women
who hurried by, either in cars or on
their own feet, were at all
interested in him; they scurried intently on
towards their own affairs, and the absent-minded old gentleman who
actually
cannoned into him and passed oh with a muttered
apology never knew
that he had touched the man for whom
all the police and the underworld were
searching.

Valcross came in about lunchtime. Simon was
lounging on
the davenport reading an afternoon paper; he looked up at
the older
man and smiled.

“You didn’t expect to see me back so
early—isn’t that what
you were going to say?”

“More or less,” Valcross admitted. “What’s
wrong?”

Simon swung his legs off the sofa and came to
a sitting position.

“Nothing,” he said, lighting a
cigarette, “and at the same
time, everything. A certain Mr. Papulos, whom
you wot of,
has been taken off; but he wasn’t really on our list. Mr.
Kuhlmann
, I’m afraid, is still at large.” He told his story
tersely
but completely. “Altogether, a very unfortunate misunder
standing,”
he concluded. “Not that it seems to make a great
deal of difference,
from what Pappy was saying just before
the ukulele music
broke us up. Pappy was all set to shoot the
works, but the works
we want were not in him. However, in
close cooperation with the bloke who
carries a scythe and has
such an appalling taste in nightshirts, we
may be able to rectify
our omissions.”

Valcross, at the decanter, raised his eyebrows faintly.

“You’re taking a lot of chances, Simon.
Don’t let this—er
—bloke
who carries the scythe swing it the wrong way.”

“If he does,” said the Saint
gravely, “I shall duck. Then, in sober and reasonable argument, I shall
endeavour to prove to
the bloke the error of his ways. Whereupon he
will burst into
tears and beg my forgiveness, and we shall take up the
trail
again together.”

“What trail?”

Simon frowned.

“Why bring that up,” he protested.
“I’m blowed if I know.
But it occurs to me, Bill, that we shall have
to be a bit careful
about the taking off of some of these other birds on our
list— if they all went out like Pappy there wouldn’t be anyone left who could
lead us to the Big Fellow, and he’s a guy I should
very much like to
meet. But if Papulos was talking turkey
there may be a line
to something in the further prospective
tribulations of Zeke
Inselheim; and that’s why I came home.”

Valcross brought a filled glass over to him.

“Does that supply the need?” he
asked humorously.

The Saint smiled.

“It certainly supplies one of them, Bill.
The other is rather
bigger. I think you told me once that the expenses of
this
jaunt were on you.”

The other looked at him for a moment, and then
took out
a checkbook and a fountain pen.

“How much do you want?”

“Not money. I want a car. A nice, dark,
ordinary-looking
car with a bit of speed in hand. A roadster will do, and a
fairly new second-hand one at that. But I’ll let you go out and
buy it,
for the reason you mentioned yourself—things may be
happening pretty fast
around the Ch
â
teau Inselheim, and I’d
rather
like to be there.”