Saint in New York (20 page)

The Saint smiled.

“In a year or two you’ll be quite used to seeing me around,
won’t you?” he remarked chattily. “That
is, if you live as
long as a year or two. The mob you belong to seems to
have
such suspicious and hasty habits, from
what Pappy was telling
me… .
Excuse me if I collect this.”

He stooped swiftly and picked up the
brown-paper parcel from its patch of moonlight. Heimie Felder made no attempt
to stop
him—the power of protest seemed to have deserted
him at last, never to return. But his lips
shaped a dazed com
ment of one word which
groped for the last immutable land
mark
of sanity in his staggering universe.

“Nuts,” Heimie said hollowly.

The Saint was not offended. He tucked the
parcel under
his arm.

“I’m afraid I must be going,” he
murmured. “But I’m sure
we shall be getting together again soon. We seem to be des
tined
…”

His voice dropped to nothing as he caught the
sound of
a footfall somewhere on his right. Staring into the
bulging
eyes of
the man in front of him, he saw there a sudden flicker
of hope; and his teeth showed very white in the moonlight.

“I think not,” he advised softly.

His gun moved ever so slightly, so that a
shaft of moonlight caught the barrel for a moment; and Heimie Felder was
silent.
The Saint shifted himself quietly in the darkness, so that his
automatic
half covered the visible target and yet was ready to
turn instantly into the obscurity of the
road at his side; and
another voice spoke
out of the gloom.

“You got it, Heimie?”

Heimie breathed hard, but did not speak; and
the Saint
answered
for him. His voice floated airily through the night.

“No, brother,” he said smoothly,
“Heimie has not got it. I
have it—and I also have Heimie. You will
advance slowly with
your hands well above your head, or else you may get it
your
self.”

For the third time that night the moon demonstrated its
friendliness. On his right the Saint could make
out a dark
and shadowy figure, though he could not see the newcomer
clearly on account of the trees at the roadside.
But a vagrant
beam of the moon danced
glitteringly on something metallic
in
the intruder’s hand, and the new voice spoke viciously.

“You rat!”

The gun banged in his hand, spitting a
venomous squirt
of
orange flame into the blackness, and the bullet whisked
through the leaves and thudded into the tree where the Saint
stood. Simon’s eyes narrowed over the sights, as
coldly delib
erate as if he had been
firing on a range; his forefinger closed
on the trigger, and the metallic object on which the moon
beam danced spun crazily from the man’s hand and
flew across the road. A roar of pain and an unprintable oath
drowned the
clatter of metal on the macadam, and the same
voice
yelled: “Get him, Heimie!”

In the next second the black bulk of the man
was charging
down on him. Simon pressed the trigger again coolly; but
nothing happened—the hammer
fell on a dud cartridge. He
dropped the
parcel under his arm and snatched at the slid
ing jacket, but the charging weight of the man caught him
before the next shell was in the chamber.

Simon went back against the tree with a force
that seemed
to bruise his very lungs through the pads of muscle
across his
back. His breath came with a grunt and he rebounded out
again,
sluggishly, like a sandbag, and felt his fist smack into a chest like a
barrel.
Then the man’s arms whipped round him
and they went down together, rolling
heavily over the uneven
ground.

The sky was shot with daubs of vivid colour,
while a blackness deeper than the blackness of night struggled to close over
the
Saint’s brain. His chest was a dull mass of pain from that
terrific crash against the
tree, and the air had to be forced into
it
with a mighty effort at each agonizing breath, as if his face
were smothered with a heavy cushion. Nothing but
a titanic vitality of will kept him conscious and fighting. The man on
top of him was thirty pounds heavier than he was;
and he
knew that if Heimie Felder
recovered from the superstitious paralysis which had been gripping him, and
located the centre
of the fight soon
enough, there would be nothing but a slab of carved marble to mark the spot
where a presumptuous
outlaw had
bucked the odds once too often.

They crashed through a low bush and slithered
down a
slight gradient, punching and kicking and grappling like a
pair of
wildcats. The big man broke through Simon’s arms and
got hold of his head,
gouging viciously. The Saint’s head
bumped twice against the hard turf,
and the flashing daubs
of colour whirled in giddy gyrations across his vision. Sud
denly his body went limp, and the big man let out
an exultant
yell.

“I got him, Heimie! I got him! Where are
ya?”

Simon saw the close-cropped bullet head for
one instant
clearly, lifted in black silhouette against the swimming
stars.
He swung up the useless automatic which he was still clutch
ing and
smashed it fiercely into the silhouette; and the grip
on his head weakened.
With a new surge of power the Saint heaved up and rolled them over again,
straddling the cursing
man with his legs and hammering the butt of
his gun again
and again into the dark sticky pulpiness from which the
curs
ing came.
…

A rough hand, which did not belong to the man
under
neath him, essayed to encircle his throat from the rear; and
Simon
gathered that the full complement of the opposition
was finally gathered
on the scene. The cursing had died away,
and the heavy figure
of his first opponent was soft and motion
less under him and the
Saint dropped his gun. His right hand
reached over his shoulder and grasped
the new assailant by
the neck.

“Excuse me, Heimie,” said the
Saint, rather breathlessly—
“I’m busy.”

He got one knee up and lifted, pulling
downwards with
his right hand. Heimie Felder was dragged slowly from the
ground: his torso came gradually over the Saint’s shoulder:
and then
the Saint turned his wrist and straightened his legs with a quick jerk, and
Heimie shot over and downwards and
hit the ground with his head. Apart
from that solid and
soporific thump, he made no sound; and silence settled
down
once more upon the scene.

The Saint dusted his clothes and repossessed
himself of
his automatic. He wiped it carefully on Heimie’s silk
handker
chief, ejected the dud cartridge which had caused all the
trouble,
and replenished the magazine. Then he went in search of the parcel which had
stimulated so much unfriendly argu
ment, and carried it back to his car
without a second glance
at the two sleeping warriors by the roadside.

Chapter 6

How Simon
Templar Interviewed Mr.
Inselheim, and Dutch Kuhlmann
Wept

It seems scarcely necessary to explain that
Mr. Ezekiel
Inselheim was a Jew. He was a stoutish man with black hair
surrounding a shiny bald pate, pleasant brown eyes, and a
rather
attractive smile; but his nose would have driven Hitler
into
frenzies of belligerent Aryanism. Confronted by that
shamelessly Semitic
proboscis, no well-trained Nazi could ever
have been induced to
believe that he was a kindly and honest man, shrewd without duplicity,
self-made without arrogance,
wealthy without offensive ostentation. It has
always been dif
ficult for such wild possibilities to percolate into the
atro
phied brain cells of second-rate crusaders, and a thousand
years of
self-styled civilization have made no more improve
ments in the Nordic
crank than they have in any other type
of malignant
half-wit.

He sat slumping wearily before the table in
his library.
The white light of his desk lamp made his sallow face
appear
even paler than it was naturally; his hands were resting on
the blotter
in front of him, clenched into impotent fists, and
he was staring at
them, with a dull, almost childish hurt creas
ing deep grooves into
the flesh on either side of his mouth.

Upstairs, his daughter slept peacefully,
resting again in her
own bed with the careless confidence of
childhood; and for that
privilege he had been compelled to pay the
price. In spite
of the fact that that strange Robin Hood of the twentieth
century who was called the Saint had brought her back to him
without a
fee, Inselheim knew that the future safety of the girl
still depended solely
on his own ability to meet the payments
demanded of him. He
knew that his daughter had been kidnapped as a warning rather than for actual
ransom, knew that there were worse weapons than kidnapping which the Terror
would not
hesitate to employ at the next sign of rebellion; if
he had ever had any
doubts on that score, they had been swept
away by the cold
guttural voice which had spoken to him
over the telephone
that morning; and it was the knowledge
of those things that
clenched his unpractised fists at the same time as that dull bitter pain of
helplessness darkened his eyes.

Ezekiel Inselheim was wondering, as others no
less rich and famous had wondered before him, why it was that in the most
materially
civilized country in the world an honoured and
peaceful citizen had
still to pay toll to a clique of organized
bandits, like
medieval peasants meeting the extortions of a feudal barony. He was wondering,
with a grim intensity of
revolt, why the police, who were so impressively adept at hand
ing out summonses for traffic violations, and
delivering per
jured testimony
against unfortunate women, were so plaintively incapable of holding the
racketeers in check. And he
knew the answers only too well.

He knew, as all America knew, that with
upright legisla
tors, with incorruptible police and judiciary, the
gangster
would long ago have vanished like the Western bad man. He
knew that without the passive cooperation of a resigned and leaderless
public, without the inbred cowardice of a terrorized
population, the
racketeers and the grafting political leaders
who protected them
could have been wiped off the face of the
American landscape at
a cost of one hundredth part of the
tribute which they exacted annually. It
was the latter part of
that knowledge which carved the stunned, hurt
lines deeper
into his face and whitened the skin across his fleshy
fists. It
gave him back none of the money which had been bled out of
him, returned him no jot of comfort or security, filled him
with
nothing but a cancerous ache of degradation which was
curdling into a futile
trembling agony of hopeless anger. If,
at that moment, any of
his extortioners had appeared before
him, he would have tried to stand up
and defy them, knowing that there could be only one outcome to his lonely,
pitiful
resistance… .

And it was at that instant that some sixth
sense made him
turn his head, with a gasp of fear wrenched from sheer
overwrought nerves strangling in his throat.

A languid immaculate figure lolled gracefully
on the windowsill, one leg flung carelessly into the room, the other remaining
outside in the cool night. A pair of insolent blue eyes
were
inspecting him curiously, and a smile with a hint of
mockery in it moved
the gay lips of the stranger. It was a smile
with humour in it
which was not entirely humorous, blue
eyes with an amused twinkle which did
not belong to any con
ventional amusement. The voice, when it
spoke, had a banter
ing
lilt, but beneath the lilt was something harder and colder
than Inselheim had ever heard before—something
that re
minded him of chilled steel
glinting under a polar moon.